Back When We Were Grownups

by Anne Tyler

  Rebecca was so anxious for him that she was nodding along with NoNo, willing him to get through this. But Will said, “Isn’t that great!”

  Everybody looked at him.

  “That he’s inviting you to Grandparents’ Day,” Will explained to Rebecca.

  Peter said, “Well, I’m not . . . I know she’s not really my grandma. I mean, she wouldn’t have to come if she didn’t want to. But since my dad’s parents are dead and all, and we don’t get to see my mom’s parents much; we don’t see them ever, in fact—”

  “I would love to come,” Rebecca told him.

  “You would?”

  “I’d be honored. When is it?”

  “It’s not till Friday the twenty-fourth, but we have to get our slips signed by tomorrow so the teachers will know for sure—”

  “This school of his is driving me crazy,” NoNo told the room at large. “Last night at a quarter till ten, I swear, some woman telephoned saying I should send four dozen cookies into class with him this morning. And now this grandparent thing—would somebody please clue them in? What about kids like Peter, who don’t happen to have grandparents available at the drop of a hat?”

  “Peter has me, though,” Rebecca said, “and I’m looking forward to it enormously.”

  He gave her a grateful smile, and his shoulders lost some of their tightness.

  Then Poppy was back with the ice cream—a half-gallon drum tucked under his arm, a scoop in his free hand. “Vanilla,” he said bitterly. “You’d think there would be something a little more imaginative. Oh, hello, NoNo. Hello, youngster.” He set the carton and the scoop in front of Zeb. “Good to see you again,” he told Will.

  “Well . . . thanks.”

  “Been keeping busy lately? Still enjoying your work?”

  Will glanced across at Rebecca. She gave a slight movement of her eyebrows that amounted to a shrug, and he turned back to Poppy and said, “Yes, I enjoy my work very much.”

  “Don’t count on that lasting forever,” Poppy told him. “Me, I got burned out in the end. Too many students asking, ‘Will we be tested on this, or not?’ And you knew if you said, ‘Not,’ they’d figure it wasn’t worth writing down, even. No sense of joy in learning for its own sake, is my diagnosis.”

  He must have taken Will for one of his old teaching colleagues, but Will couldn’t have known that. He looked again at Rebecca. Perversely, she refused to come to his rescue. “Uh, you’re probably right,” he said finally.

  “Too durn much TV, is what I tell folks.”

  Why did Poppy insist on speaking in that homespun way? Rebecca wondered for the first time. He was an educated man; he had a college degree. She sent him her narrowest, meanest look, which he ignored.

  “Rebecca,” Zeb said, brandishing the scoop, “will you be having ice cream?”

  “No, I will not,” she said in a forbidding tone.

  “Five servings, then,” he said cheerfully. “Because I know you will, NoNo, and—”

  “I’ve put you on the guest list for my birthday party,” Poppy told Will, “but I don’t suppose Beck has sent the invitations yet. I’m turning a hundred years old in December.”

  “A hundred!” Will exclaimed.

  By now, Rebecca’s annoyance had spread even to Will. She disliked the counterfeit note of admiration in his voice, and the eager way he reached for the bowl Zeb passed him. Zeb himself, she thought, was behaving like a barbarian, licking ice cream off his knuckles before he dug the scoop back into the carton; and NoNo and Peter had pulled out two chairs as if they had every right to horn in whenever they wanted. As for Poppy: he was beyond forgiveness. “It’s my fondest wish,” he was telling Will, “that I’ll be able to say I’ve seen two centuries change over: the nineteenth and the twentieth. Not that I consciously remember when the nineteenth changed, of course, but I was there, I can say! I was there!”

  “That’s amazing,” Will said.

  And as he lifted his spoon he opened his mouth to expose his large, square, wolfish teeth, unattractively yellowed now with age.

  * * *

  By the time they’d finished their ice cream, Rebecca had revised all her expectations of the evening. This was just another family melee with an extra person added, and she heartily wished it were over. She was tired of acting nicer than her true self. Wouldn’t it come as a relief to be alone, finally! To be upstairs in the family room, playing a game of solitaire! She longed to kick her shoes off, and let her stomach stick out, and allow her face to go slack.

  None of the others, though, seemed in any hurry to go. Zeb was telling Will about his work; Poppy was repeating the ice-cream incident to Peter; NoNo was asking Rebecca what kind of plant that was in the foyer. “It’s not an anthurium, although it’s certainly grotesque enough; too big to be a pilea, in spite of those warty leaves . . .”

  “Ask Will. He’s the one who brought it.”

  “. . . surely can’t be a dracaena, though it does have that mottled, diseased look of the Dracaena godseffiana . . .”

  When NoNo and Peter finally rose to leave, Rebecca stood up too and said, “Yes, it is late, isn’t it. I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

  Even Will couldn’t miss that. He untangled himself from his chair and said, “Ah. All right. So, I guess . . .”

  Everybody waited, but he just stood there. It was Zeb who completed his sentence for him. “I guess we should all be going,” he said helpfully.

  Then they headed in a group toward the door, leaving Poppy alone at the table scraping out the ice-cream carton.

  Outside, Rebecca folded her arms across her bosom and watched as Zeb climbed into his car (a Volvo so old it had the humpbacked shape of the earliest models) and NoNo and Peter walked on down the street to NoNo’s minivan. “Good night,” NoNo called back, her voice floating across the twilight, and “Good night,” Zeb called.

  But Will stayed next to Rebecca, and so she was forced to say, finally, “Well, I should be going in now.”

  “You used to have this long cloak,” he told her. “Do you remember that?”

  “Cloak,” she repeated.

  “It was a color called champagne. Your mom and your aunt sewed it for you the year we started college. I can see you in that cloak to this day. It matched your hair exactly. You wore your hair coiled in a braid on top of your head. You wore that cloak and these soft brown boots that crumpled around your ankles. You looked like somebody out of King Arthur’s time, I often thought; or Robin Hood’s. Very self-possessed and calm.”

  Rebecca still faced the street, but she was listening.

  “I guess this sounds presumptuous,” he said, “but I can’t help feeling that that woman in the cloak is who you really are, and I’m the only person who knows it. I feel that I can see you, in a way other people can’t. I don’t mean to sound presumptuous.”

  She turned to look at him. With the streetlight shining behind him, she couldn’t tell what his expression was. She had to rely more on feeling than on sight—feeling the steady focus of his regard, and then his dear, familiar warmth as he stepped forward to hug her. They clung together for maybe a minute, like people consoling each other for some loss. Then he pulled away and said, “I’ll call you! I’ll call tomorrow! Thanks for supper!”

  He plunged off down the street, clanging against a garbage can as he hurtled around the corner and disappeared.

  Rebecca stood there for some time after he had gone. She was shivering slightly, even on this hot summer night, and she felt happy but also dismayed, and bashful, and confused.

  At that moment, it seemed she actually had managed to become her girlhood self again.

  Eight

  You wouldn’t call it a courtship. What would you call it? Just say they, oh, started arranging to get together now and then. Go shopping for a book Will had heard of. Grill steaks in Rebecca’s backyard. (But with Poppy there too, of course, wanting a steak of his own, and Biddy happening by later as they were sitting around the table.) These certain
ly weren’t anyone’s notion of romantic assignations.

  Still, Rebecca let herself think sometimes: might it be possible, after all, to return to that place where her life had forked and choose the other branch now? Even this late in the journey? Even after she had used up the branch she had first chosen?

  It seemed like cheating. Like having her cake and eating it too.

  She remembered things he did not; he remembered things she did not. Their past was a bolt of fabric they had scissored up and divided between them. He had no recollection, for instance, of the World’s Fastest Typist. “Why would they have wasted our time with a typist, for heaven’s sake?” he asked, and she told him, triumphantly, “That’s exactly what you said when you were seventeen!”

  He remembered that she used to recite poetry on their dates, although she couldn’t believe she would ever have been so mawkish. That she’d kept a scrapbook of thought-provoking quotations from her reading; that she’d worshiped Joan Baez’s singing; that she’d very nearly committed to heart The Feminine Mystique. All of which sounded to her like some completely unrelated person—she, rather than I.

  And did he recall, she wondered, a night when they’d been studying late at his house, and his mother had gone to bed, and they had decided to take a catnap on the sofa? It was the first time they had lain down together. The length of his body pressed against hers had felt so good and so needed; his quick, hot breaths had sent a sort of ruffle up her spine. Now she couldn’t say who had finally brought things to a halt. Both of them, perhaps.

  But this was not one of the memories she mentioned to Will. No, they weren’t yet familiar enough for that. At the moment they were still very restrained with each other, very circumspect and proper. When they met, he would kiss her lightly on the lips (his mouth not one she recognized), and when they sat in her family room, he would let one arm rest along the back of the couch behind her. Both of them were well aware that somebody might walk in on them at any moment. Comfortably aware, Rebecca might have said. Secure in the knowledge. Poppy would call, “Beck?” or the telephone would ring, or the front door would slam open, and the two of them would separate slightly, looking elsewhere, clearing their throats. At the end of a visit they hugged goodbye. Rebecca looked forward to those hugs. It seemed that her skin felt thirsty for them.

  Her family—the few family members who’d met him—appeared to believe that Will was just another of her strays, like that electrician whose marriage had been breaking up the whole time he was wiring the house for air-conditioning. “Oh, hi,” they would say offhandedly, and then they would rattle on about whatever had brought them here. Rebecca found this slightly insulting. Did they feel she wasn’t capable of romance? All they seemed to notice was that she had grown less available to them. The Friday after she went with Will to a lecture at Johns Hopkins: “Where were you?” they demanded. “We came to dinner last night and Poppy was all by himself. It was Thursday! You weren’t here!”

  “There’s no law that says I have to stay home every Thursday of my life,” she told them. Although, as a matter of fact, she had simply forgotten what day of the week it was. Oh, she was very absentminded lately, very muzzy and distracted. She lost her place in conversations, failed to answer when people asked her questions. Everybody who wasn’t Will struck her as irrelevant. “Really,” she would murmur, and, “Isn’t that interesting,” but inwardly she was saying, Get on with it! and, What difference does it make?

  While the rest of her world blurred and swam, Will grew steadily more distinct. Parts of him flashed across her vision at inappropriate moments: the authoritative curl of his fingers around his car keys, the stirringly beautiful drape of his sports coat across the back of his shoulders. His most casual remarks came back to her unbidden, weighted with significance. She replayed her own remarks and longed to change them—to make them more intelligent, more original, more alluring.

  When he asked her, for instance, why she had never remarried, she had answered fliply, “Nobody ever proposed.” Which happened to be true, but there was more to it than that. A few men had made tentative moves in her direction, she should have told him, but she had felt oddly indifferent; she had felt a kind of fatigue. It had all seemed like so much trouble. (And the men, to be perfectly honest, had not persisted unduly.) Now Will would suppose that no one had found her attractive. She tried to bring it up again, hoping for a second chance. “Have you ever noticed,” she asked him, “how what you look for in a person changes as you get older? When I was young, I wanted somebody other—the most wildly other type possible. I guess that’s what drew me to Joe. But then as I got older, why, it began to seem so wearying to go out with somebody different. Maybe that’s why parents are always telling their daughters to date that nice boy from their church, while the daughters are pining for motorcyclists that later on they wouldn’t glance at.”

  “Motorcyclists?” Will asked. This was over the telephone, but she could almost see the bafflement crossing his forehead.

  “I mean, after a while that kind of . . . bridging just seems like so much work. I gave up wanting to bother with it.”

  “But, Rebecca,” Will said. “What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me something? Because look at you and me: we’re totally different.”

  “We are?” she asked. And then she said, “Oh, well, maybe now it might seem we are. I can see why you might think that. But don’t forget, I used to be much more introspective. I don’t know what became of that! Sometimes I hear you talk about the old days, about the way we lived our lives then and the subjects that used to interest us, and I think, Oh, yes, that was back when we were grownups. Well, you still are a grownup; even more so. But me: it seems to me that I’ve been traveling in reverse. I know less now than I did when I was in high school. I’m trying to remedy that. I hope it’s not too late.”

  “I just meant that you’re more outgoing,” Will told her.

  “I’m not outgoing! It’s only how I act on the surface, because of the Open Arms.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  But she could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

  It was easier to talk on the telephone than face to face, she noticed. On the telephone they might say almost anything, but when they met they grew self-conscious. Also, his physical reality often came as a surprise. Who was this craggy, white-haired man? He was very appealing to look at, but who was he? Over the course of the evening she would adjust to this new version of him, but the next time they spoke on the telephone, she seemed to have conjured up the original Will all over again. “Hello, Rebecca,” he would say, and back came his lopsided boyhood smile, a cloud-gray sweater he had worn in junior high, and his springy corkscrew curls the color of wild honey.

  * * *

  She took out subscriptions to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. (“Just what city do you imagine we’re living in?” Poppy asked when he heard.) She walked to the Enoch Pratt Library to request a copy of the memoir that she had written about in college. It turned out to be something they had to send away for through Interlibrary Loan, but she did have a long, absorbing talk with the reference librarian—a woman who seemed a real kindred spirit. Then she went home and finished reading her first Lee biography, after which she launched immediately into the second.

  It emerged that Lee had felt emancipation would come about on its own, in the natural course of events. He wrote this in a letter to his wife. “Well, I never,” Rebecca told Poppy. “I had no idea Lee was such a rationalizer.”

  “Lee who?” Poppy asked.

  “General Lee. Robert E. When I was a girl, I thought I was going to rewrite his chapter in history. I could not believe he would have chosen which side to fight on purely out of personal loyalty.”

  “Well?” Poppy said. “What better reason?”

  “How about principle? Even a wrongheaded, evil principle?”

  “Robert E. Lee was one of your Virginia types,” Poppy said. “All the principle he cared
for was his own little bit of acreage.”

  “Not according to this memoir I came across in college,” she told him.

  “Oh, well, college,” Poppy said. Then, as if he’d proved his point, he returned to his own reading—a multicolored magazine, surely not the New York Review. He was making notes on a memo pad with a promotional ballpoint pen from Ridgepole Roofers. The article he was consulting, she saw, was called “Ten Ways to Shake Up a Party.” She sighed and looked down at her book again. Lee’s wife gazed mournfully from the left page, Lee himself from the right. Rebecca caught herself wondering what kind of sex life they’d had.

  * * *

  Rebecca’s mother telephoned. She had been much more attentive lately—all sly questions and perky alertness, like a girlfriend hoping for confidences. “You’re home!” she said. “I thought you’d be out.”

  She didn’t say why, in that case, she had bothered to call.

  Rebecca said, “How are you, Mother?”

  “I’m fine. How about you? No date tonight?”

  “No date.”

  “What did you do last night?”

  “Sat home with Poppy,” Rebecca said perversely. In fact, she’d seen Will in the afternoon, but her mother hadn’t asked about the afternoon.

  “Well, I just wanted to tell you that Sherry Hardy knows all about Will’s ex-wife.”

  “Have you been talking to Sherry Hardy about my private business?” Rebecca demanded.

  “Just who you’re going out with, is all. I really don’t remember how the subject chanced to come up.”

  Rebecca groaned.

  Her mother said, “Sherry’s second cousin went to Will’s wedding. She told Sherry that his wife seemed way too young for him.”

  “Well, she was a former student of his. You knew that.”

  “She was pretty but unlikable, according to the cousin. A discontented type. You could see it in the corners of her mouth. All during the reception, she poked fun at how stodgy Will was. At one point he made some comment that was the least little bit professor-sounding, and the bride told everybody, ‘Will is my first husband, needless to say.’ Only joking, of course, but when you consider how things turned out . . .”