by Anne Tyler
As soon as he was dressed, he bounded back downstairs to use the phone. But on the next-to-last step he heard somebody crossing the dining room. Beastie, following close on his heels, uttered a low growl. Then Lucy appeared in the doorway. “Ian?” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
She wore a big white shirt of Danny’s and a pair of red pedal pushers, and her hair was tied back in a red bandanna. She looked about twelve years old. “Have you talked with your mom yet?” she asked him.
“No, but she left a note. What’s the matter with Claudia?”
“Oh, nothing all that serious. Just, you know, a little bleeding …”
Ian began studying an area slightly above her head.
“So anyway,” she said, “I thought I’d fix you some supper. Ordinarily I’d invite you to our place, but we’re going out so I brought something over. There’s potato salad, and ham, and I’ve put some peas on the stove to warm up.”
He didn’t tell her he usually ate at Cicely’s. All summer the family had tactfully left her and Danny alone, allowing them to get past the honeymoon stage, so they met only on special occasions like Bee’s birthday and the Fourth of July. Lucy must not have any notion about their day-to-day lives.
He followed her through the dining room to the kitchen, where he found Thomas and Agatha sitting in two straight-backed chairs. There was something eerie about children who kept so quiet you didn’t realize they were in the house. Thomas held a large, naked doll with a matted wig. Agatha’s hands were folded tidily on the table in front of her. They looked at Ian with no more expression than the doll wore. Ian said, “Well, hi, gang,” but neither of them answered.
He leaned against the sink and watched Lucy flitting around the kitchen. Her hair billowed halfway down her back, longer than he would have expected. She wore white sandals and her toenails were painted fire-engine red. None of the girls at school painted their nails anymore. Everyone was striving for the natural look, which all at once struck Ian as homely.
He realized she must have spoken to him. She was facing him with her head cocked. “Pardon?” he asked.
“Do you want your ham cold, or heated up?”
“Oh, um, cold is fine.”
“It won’t be real fancy,” she said, opening the refrigerator. “Tomorrow if your mom’s still busy we’ll ask you to dinner. Why, you haven’t been over since I painted the living room!”
“No, I guess not,” Ian said.
She and Danny were renting a one-story house just north of Cold Spring Lane. So far they had hardly any furniture, but everything they did have was modern, modern, modern—black plastic and aluminum and glass. Bee claimed it would take some getting used to, but Ian loved it.
“Next week I start on the children’s room,” Lucy said. “I found this magazine with the best ideas! Sit down, why don’t you.”
He pulled out a chair and sat across from the children. A place had already been laid for him with the company silver and his mother’s best china. Two candlesticks from the dining room flanked a bowl of pansies. He began to feel ridiculous, like one of those rich people in cartoons who banquet all alone while a butler stands at the ready. He asked Thomas and Agatha, “Am I the only one eating?”
They gazed at him. Their eyes were a mournful shade of brown.
“How about you?” he asked Thomas’s doll. “Won’t you join me in a little collation?”
He caught Thomas’s lips twitching—a victory. A chink of a giggle escaped him. But Agatha remained unamused. “Her name is Dulcimer,” she said reprovingly.
“Dulcimer?”
“Ian doesn’t care about all that,” Lucy told them.
“She used to have clothes,” Agatha said, “but Thomas went and ruined them.”
“I did not!” Thomas shouted.
Lucy said, “Ssh,” and lit the candles.
“She used to have a dress with two pockets, but he put it in the washer and it came out bits and pieces.”
“That was the washer did that, not me!”
“Now she has to go bare, because his other dolls’ clothes are too little.”
Ian forked up a slice of ham and looked again at Dulcimer. Her body was cloth, soiled to dark gray. Her head was pink vinyl and so were her arms and her legs, which had a wide-set, spraddled appearance. “Maybe she could wear real baby clothes,” he suggested.
“Mama won’t—”
“That’s what I say, too!” Thomas burst out.
“Mama won’t let her,” Agatha continued stubbornly. There was something unswerving about her. She reminded Ian of certain grade-school teachers he had known. “Mama’s got all these baby clothes she buys at Hochschild’s, nightgowns and diapers and stuff Dulcimer would love, but Mama won’t lend them out.”
“Have some peas,” Lucy told Ian.
“Oh, thanks, I’ll just—”
“Today she bought a teeny-weeny baby hat with blue ribbons but she says if Thomas plays with it he’ll get it dirty,” Agatha said.
Ian looked over at Lucy, and Lucy looked back at him ruefully. She said, “Don’t tell the others, will you?”
“Okay.”
“I want to wait till Claudia gets out of the hospital.”
“My lips are sealed,” he said.
It was a pleasurable moment, sharing a secret with Lucy. The secret itself, though, he wasn’t so sure of. He thought of Danny circling her waist with his hands, his fingertips nearly meeting. Couldn’t he have let her stay as she was? Did everything have to keep marching forward all the time?
She said, “We ought to get going, kids.”
“Well, thanks for the food,” Ian told her.
“You’re very welcome.”
After they left he could have stopped eating—he was already late for supper at Cicely’s—but he worried Lucy would find out somehow and feel hurt. So he made his way through everything, sweating in the candlelight, which was, to tell the truth, sort of uncomfortable for August. She had laid out the ham slices in a careful, scalloped design that reminded him of the patterns etched alongside the ocean. And although it would have saddened him to let the ham go to waste, it saddened him too to finish it and end up with just the empty plate.
Claudia did manage to keep her baby. In fact, she went way past her due date. Her doctor had predicted the first week in December, but things dragged on so long that Ian started betting the baby would arrive on his birthday, January 2. “Oh, please,” Claudia said. “Let’s hope to God you’re wrong.” She was big as a house and her ankles were swollen and she’d had to have her rings cut off with a hacksaw. At Christmas she was still lumbering around, and Christmas dinner was a spectacle, with Claudia and Lucy sitting elbow to elbow in their ballooning maternity smocks. Lucy turned out to be the type who carried her baby a great distance in front of her (something to do with her small frame, perhaps), so that even though she had two months to go, she looked nearly as pregnant as Claudia. She was officially a member of the family now—the honeymoon joyfully over and done with, in the Bedloes’ eyes, the moment she announced her good news. Now they felt free to stop by her house more often and to invite her and Danny for potluck. Ian had almost reached the point where he could take her for granted. Although still when she turned her silvery gaze upon him he had an arrested feeling, a sense of a skipped beat in the atmosphere of the room.
One of the Bedloe traditions was that important dinners, on holidays and such, were not the usual boring assortment of meats and vegetables. Instead, Bee served their favorite course: hors d’oeuvres. Oh, there’d be a turkey at Thanksgiving, cakes for birthdays, but those were just a nod to convention. What mattered were the stuffed mushrooms, the runny cheeses, the spreads and dips and pâtés and shrimps on toothpicks. The family was secretly proud of this practice; they enjoyed watching guests’ reactions. Nothing humdrum about the Bedloes! That Christmas they had oysters on the half shell, and the look of horror on Lucy’s children’s faces made everybody laugh. “Never mind,” Danny told
them. “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to.”
Danny was exuberant these days. He had researched pregnancy and childbirth as if he expected to deliver the baby himself, and he kept a long scroll of possible names scrunched in his pocket. For some strange reason, he seemed very fond of Thomas and Agatha. Well, Thomas was all right, Ian supposed. He looked kind of cute in his dapper little sailor outfit. But Agatha! Really there was only so much you could do with such a child. Her frilly pink dress made her face appear all the more wooden, and her hair stood out at her jaw in a monolithic wedge. Sometimes Ian caught her giving him one of her flat stares, reminding him of that doll that Thomas was so attached to. Dulcimer. Same numb, blank face, same unseeing eyes.
They moved to the living room and settled themselves, groaning. The cat threw up an oyster behind the couch. Barney fed cracker crumbs to the goldfish, Abbie played “The First Noel” on the piano with a rhythm as ponderous as army boots, and Doug brought out his Polaroid Land camera and took pictures of them all—each photo after the first one showing somebody holding a previous photo, admiring it or grimacing or industriously coating it with fixative. Then little Cindy, who had fallen asleep in front of the fire, woke up cranky, and the dog accidentally stepped on her and made her cry. Claudia said, “That’s our cue! Time to go!” and she heaved herself to her feet. They all departed at once—Claudia’s family and Danny’s—leaving behind a litter of torn gift wrap and mismatched mittens and oyster shells. “This was our best Christmas ever, wasn’t it?” Bee asked Doug. But she always said that.
Claudia’s baby came two days later—a girl. Frances, they named her. Ian said, “Well, I was almost right. It’s almost my birthday.”
“Cheer up,” Bee told him. “There’s always the next one.”
“Next one! Good grief.”
The next one of Claudia’s, they both meant. It never occurred to them that Lucy’s baby might arrive on his birthday. But that was what happened.
He had spent the evening at Cicely’s, where she and his friends threw him a party. When he got home he found his mother waiting up for him. “Guess what!” she said. “Lucy had her baby.”
“What, so soon?”
“A little girl: Daphne. She’s small but healthy, breathing on her own … Danny called about an hour ago and he was so excited he could hardly talk.”
“After this he won’t be fit to live with,” Ian said gloomily.
“And Lucy’s doing fine. Oh, won’t the neighbors tease us? They’ll be counting on their fingers, except in this case it’s obvious that … you want to go with me to the hospital tomorrow?”
“I have school tomorrow,” Ian said.
Besides, he had never been much interested in infants.
He didn’t see the new baby for a week, in fact, what with one thing and another. Neither did Claudia, who was stuck at home with her own baby. So on Sunday, when everyone gathered at the Bedloes’ for dinner, Danny made a big production of introducing his daughter. “Ta-da!” he trumpeted, and he entered the house bearing her high in both hands—a tiny cluster of crochet work. “Here she is, folks! Miss Daphne Bedloe.” Lucy looked paler than usual, but she laughed as she bent to unbutton Thomas’s jacket.
“Let’s see her,” Claudia commanded from the couch. She had constructed a kind of nest there and was nursing Franny. Ian had retreated to the other side of the room as soon as he saw Claudia fumbling under her blouse, and he made no move now to come closer. All newborns looked more or less alike, he figured. And this one might still be sort of … fetus-shaped. He hung back and dug his hands in his pockets and traced an arc in the rug with one sneaker.
But Danny said, “Don’t you want to see too, Ian?” and he sounded so hurt that Ian had to say, “Huh? Oh. Sure.” He took his hands from his pockets and approached.
Danny set her on the couch next to Claudia and started peeling off layers. First the crocheted blanket, then an inner blanket, then a bonnet. His fingers seemed too thick for the task, but finally he said, “There!” and straightened up, grinning.
What was that fairy tale? “Sleeping Beauty,” maybe, or “Snow White.” Skin as white as snow and hair as black as coal and lips as red as roses. So she was prettier than most other babies, yes, but still not all that interesting. Until she opened her eyes.
She opened her eyes and fixed Ian with a thoughtful, considering stare, and Ian felt a sudden loosening in his chest. It seemed she had reached out and pulled a string from somewhere deep inside him. It seemed she knew him. He blinked.
“Your birthday-mate,” Danny was saying. “Or birthmate, or whatever they call it. Isn’t she something?”
To regain his distance, Ian let his eyes slide over to Claudia. He found her looking directly into his face, meaningfully, narrowly. He couldn’t think what she wanted to convey; he didn’t understand her intensity. Then it came to him, as clearly as if she had spoken.
This is not a premature baby.
He was so astonished that he let his eyes slide back again, forgetting why he had glanced away in the first place. And it was true: she might be small but her cheeks were round, and her little fists were dimpled. She looked nothing like those “Life Before Birth” photos in Life magazine.
“Isn’t she a love?” Bee asked. “Two loves,” she added, blowing a kiss toward Franny. And Claudia said, “She’s a beauty, Lucy.”
Ian turned to study Claudia. She was smiling now. Her face—a younger, smoother version of Bee’s—seemed relaxed and peaceful. The hitch had been smoothed over. Not a trace of it remained. Here was their newest member, born early but in perfect health, thank God, and everything in the Bedloe family was as wonderful as always.
Well, hold on (Ian told himself). Don’t be too hasty. Daphne was no longer brand-new, after all. She’d had six whole days to catch up before he laid eyes on her. Best to put the subject right out of his mind.
But over the next few weeks it kept sidling back, somehow.
If Danny and Lucy had been going together forever, why, a seven-months baby (quote, unquote) would have been something to wink at. But they hadn’t been going together forever. Nine months ago they hadn’t even known each other. Lucy had not yet walked into the post office to plunk her famous package on Danny’s counter. She might have been dating someone else entirely.
In school last year a senior had had to get married to a girl he swore he hardly knew. Or rather, he swore everybody knew her. It was Ian’s first intimation of the fix a man could find himself in. Women were the ones who held the reins, it emerged. Women were up close to things. Men stood off at one remove and were forced to accept women’s reading of whatever happened. Probably this was what Ian’s father had been trying to tell him in that talk they’d had a few years ago, but Ian hadn’t fully understood it at the time.
One night he asked Cicely, “What do you think of Lucy?”
“Oh, I just love her,” Cicely said.
“Yes, but—”
“She’s always so easy to talk to; she always asks me these questions that show she’s been listening. Real questions, I mean. Not those who-cares questions most other grownups ask.”
“Yes …” Ian said, because he had noticed the same thing himself. Lucy had a grave, focused manner of looking at him. He could imagine she had been reflecting upon him seriously ever since their last meeting.
“I just think Danny is lucky to have her,” Cicely said, and Ian said, “Well, yes, he is. Yes, he is lucky.”
Ian had quit his job with Sid ’n’ Ed’s when school reopened; his mother made him. This was his senior year and she wanted him to concentrate on getting into a halfway decent college. The last thing he needed was to waste his time hauling other people’s mattresses, she said.
But what she didn’t seem to realize was that a person his age had to have a social life, and a social life took money. By February, he was broke. So when Lucy called and asked if he would baby-sit—a job he hated, and one he was ill equipped for besides, as youngest
in his family—he didn’t immediately refuse. “Well,” he said, stalling, “but I don’t even know how to change a diaper.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Lucy told him. “I would change her just before I left. And most likely she’d be sleeping; this would be afternoons.”
“Oh. Afternoons.”
“Just a couple of hours after school now and then. Please, Ian? I’m about to lose my mind cooped up all day. And I can’t keep imposing on your mother, and Mrs. Myrdal won’t come anymore and Cicely’s got cheerleading practice. I just want to get out on my own a while—go shopping or take a walk with nobody hanging onto me. I’d pay you a dollar an hour.”
“You would?” he said.
On the rare occasions Claudia had talked him into sitting, the pay had been fifty cents.
“And Thomas and Agatha have taken such a shine to you. They’re the ones who suggested you.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” Ian said. “If it’s a matter of popular demand …”
So he started walking over from school one or two afternoons a week and staying till dusk. It wasn’t a job that required much work, but somehow he found it far more tiring than Sid ’n’ Ed’s. No wonder Lucy wanted a break! This was the coldest, grayest time of year, and the stark modern furniture that had seemed so elegant in the summer had a bleak feel in the winter. Toys and picture books covered the white vinyl couch. Sheaves of Agatha’s pulpy first-grade papers lay scattered across the rug. Thomas and Agatha had the used, slightly tarnished look that even the best-tended children take on late in the day, and they pressed in upon him too closely, drilling him with questions. Was Ian ever going to play in the World Series? Did he know how to drive a car? A motorcycle? An airplane? Did he and Cicely go to many balls? (This last from Agatha, who had a big crush on Cicely.) Gradually he forgot that they had once been tongue-tied in his presence.