Back When We Were Grownups

Ten

A woman named Mrs. Mink called to organize a baby shower. “My friend Paulina Garrett recommended you,” she said. “I told her I wanted someplace elegant. Someplace like a mansion.”

Rebecca said, “Well, the Open Arms is just a row house.”

“It doesn’t have to be really a mansion, but it should have that atmosphere. That upper-class, elegant atmosphere. And then I’ll want it decorated in baby blue and white, with a cloudlike effect in the dining room.”

“Cloudlike?”

“Yes, ethereal; know what I mean?”

“We can decorate however you like,” Rebecca said, “but our dining room is papered in a maroon-and-gold stripe and the furniture is some dark kind of wood; walnut, I believe. So I’m not sure—”

“Oh, you can do it! I know you can! Paulina Garrett told me their party last spring was wonderful. Everything so joyous, she said; you made it such an occasion that nobody wanted to leave.”

Rebecca remembered the Garrett party all too well. A torrential thunderstorm had sprung up and somehow, by some process that she still didn’t quite understand, caused the front-parlor chandelier to start raining on the guests. Nice to hear that the Garretts didn’t hold it against her.

“The reason I want blue and white,” Mrs. Mink was saying, “is we know this will be a boy. They’ve had that special test. And we know he’s not going to live very long.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s got some kind of disease they can diagnose in the womb.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” Rebecca said.

“So I want this party to be perfect, don’t you see? Every last detail. I want his life to be perfect. Because he gets to experience it for such a little while.”

“Well, of course,” Rebecca said.

But while she was discussing the fine points — the folding paper parasol, the white-clouded blue cotton tablecloth she’d seen advertised at Lust for Linens — she was reflecting that really, this baby’s story was just a shortened version of everybody’s story. Get born; die. Nothing more to it than that.

“And flowers?” Mrs. Mink was asking. “Paulina tells me you can recommend a florist.”

“Yes, NoNo,” Rebecca said.

“Pardon?”

“My stepdaughter, NoNo Sanborn. She could set out white asters and those pale-blue flowers, those what-do-you-call-them…”

In fact, Rebecca couldn’t think offhand of any flowers that were blue, except for those chicory blossoms that grew wild along the highways and closed up in tight little winces if you picked them. She said, “I can’t remember. I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.”

“Well, that’s all right, we’ll just ask your—”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll have to call you back,” Rebecca said, and she replaced the receiver, which all of a sudden weighed too much to hold on to any longer.

* * *

Lately, she’d been feeling so… What was the word? Blank. Low in spirit, flat as a desert; and now she grew more so every day. Getting up in the morning was like hauling a dead body. Food lost its flavor. Conversation required calling upon every muscle, summoning her last particle of strength. She kept noticing how very little there was in this world to talk about. It was turning into a beautiful fall — clear and mild, the leaves staying on the trees much later than usual — but the brilliant colors hurt her eyes, and the meditation center’s banner flapping in the breeze made a sinister, leathery sound, like bat wings.

Not a person in the family asked where Will had disappeared to. Well, except for her mother. (“Oh, Rebecca,” she said sadly, once she’d heard the facts, “you were a fool thirty-three years ago and you’re a fool today.”) But the girls behaved as if he had never existed. She suspected they were trying to spare her feelings — taking it for granted, no doubt, that she had been jilted.

One night when she had nothing to do she got in her car and drove to Macadam. She parked in front of Mrs. Flick’s house and gazed up at the second-floor windows. All of them were dark, though. Which was lucky, she supposed, because really it was the romance she missed; not Will himself. Still, she sat there a long, long time before she started her engine and drove home again.

She told Zeb, in one of their bedtime phone talks, that she thought the human life span was too long. “Really, I’ve finished my life,” she said. “I finished it when the girls got grown. But here I am, just hanging around, marking time, waiting for things to wind down.”

Zeb said, “Rebecca? Are you all right?”

“Define ‘all right,’” she told him.

“Where is your man friend?” he asked.

“He’s gone.”

“You ditched him?”

“Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is, I’ve outlived myself.”

“Well,” he told her, “remember what George Eliot said.”

“What did George Eliot say?”

“Or maybe it wasn’t George Eliot. At any rate: ‘It’s never too late to do what you want to do.’ Remember that.”

“What?” Rebecca said. “Well, of all the — Why, that’s just plain wrong! Suppose I wanted to… I don’t know; suppose I wanted to get pregnant! That’s just plain ridiculous!”

She was so outraged that she hung up, not knowing she was planning to. Then she regretted it. When the phone rang a few seconds later, she lifted the receiver and said, “Sorry.”

“I just remembered,” Zeb said. “It wasn’t ‘do what you want to do.’ It was ‘be what you want to be.’ I think.”

“I’m just feeling a little tired,” Rebecca told him.

“And I don’t even know for sure that it was George Eliot.”

She said, “Thanks for trying, Zeb.”

* * *

She might have thrown herself into work, but business was very slow these days. Three different people had called to ask if the Open Arms was in a safe neighborhood, and although she had assured them it was — with reasonable precautions, she said; using normal common sense — they told her they would have to think it over and get back to her.

Besides, how often could a person celebrate? How many weddings, christenings, birthdays could she applaud, for heaven’s sake? What was the purpose of it all?

Her New York Times collected in stacks and gradually turned yellow, untouched. Her New Yorkers drifted to Poppy’s room and she never asked for them back. She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.

One morning the library phoned to say that her interlibrary loan was in, and she made herself walk over to collect it. But it turned out the book was so rare — a crumbly brown leather volume edged in flaking gold — that she was not allowed to take it home with her. She had to read it there in the reading room, the librarian told her. (This was the same librarian who’d arranged the loan in the first place, but she issued her edict in such a disapproving voice, with such a humorless, raisin face, that Rebecca couldn’t imagine why she’d once seemed a kindred spirit.)

She did try. She did settle at a table and pluck the cover open with the very tips of her fingers and leaf obediently through the brittle ivory pages. A Baltimorean’s Experience of the War for Southern Independence, the book was called. The author was a lawyer named Nathaniel Q. Furlong, Esq., who claimed to have known Robert E. Lee when Lee was still a private citizen. Years before the War, Mr. Furlong maintained, Lee had confided to him that he could never support a cause that would allow the slaves — the “heathen Africans,” in his words — to return to their native land and forfeit their one chance for Christian salvation. But when Rebecca managed to locate this passage (which was, she saw for the first time, of dubious credibility, written by a man whose boastful, unreliable nature revealed itself in every line), she wondered why she had found it so momentous back in college. She had just wanted to believe, she supposed, that there were grander motivations in history than mere family and friends, mere domestic happenstance.

She returned the book to the librarian, and she brushed the crumbs of leather off her hands and left the building.

* * *

Everything struck her as unutterably sad — even the squirrel with half a tail she saw bustling cheerfully down the sidewalk. Even Poppy’s daily routine: his ritual round of activities, straightening his room and brushing his hat and tuning in his TV shows, all intended to keep himself from sinking into hopelessness.

She knew her mood had something to do with the season. Autumn was when Joe had died. She couldn’t look at the poplar outside her bedroom window — the leaves so yellow that she would think she had left a light on, some cloudy days in mid- or late October — without recalling that shattered morning when she had emerged from the hospital in a stupor and taken forever finding her car and then driven bleakly, numbly down streets lined with radiant trees in every shade of red and gold and orange.

As a girl she had often said, about some potential disaster, “Oh, that can’t happen; it’s too bad to happen.” But Joe’s death had been too bad to happen, and it had happened even so. She had felt stunned by that all through his funeral — through the thready whine of the organ and the uncertain, off-key hymns and the peculiar poem Zeb had read called “Not Waving but Drowning.” She had sat through that funeral white-faced with shock. It appeared that nothing was too bad to happen. How had she ever thought otherwise?

Grieving had turned out to be not unlike falling in love. She had pored over Joe’s photographs, searched for the innermost meanings of his calendar notations, traced his dear signature on canceled checks. She had found any excuse to mention his name: “Joe always felt…” and, “Joe used to say…” It had troubled her that she could summon up no specific, start-to-finish memory of their lovemaking; only generalities. (He was a morning man. He liked to kiss her eyelids. He had a way of almost purring when she touched him.) She prayed for random moments to resurface. Once, driving along in her car, she was thrilled to recollect that he used to talk to the mirror while he was shaving. (“Ah, there you are, Joe. Ready for another glorious day of helping strangers get drunk together.”) She received this image like a gift, and clung to it, and waited greedily for more.

Her life, as she saw it back then, had begun on an April evening when she had stood on the sidewalk peering at the sign overhead: The Open Arms, Est. 1951. And now her life was finished, but here she was, still circulating among the guests, a solitary splinter of a woman in the crowd.

“Well, you know what they say,” Zeb had told her. (Zeb at twenty-two, full of callow assurance.) “God never gives you more than you can handle.”

“Who says that? Who?” she had asked in a fury. “Who would dare to say that?”

“I don’t know,” he had said, taken aback. “God, maybe?”

Causing her to start laughing, even while the tears were streaming down her face.

Joe’s November dental appointment, noted in his own jaunty hand with his stubby-nibbed fountain pen, came and went without him. His battery-run watch went on ticking in his drawer.

The worst days had been the ones where she had time enough to think. She thought, What am I going to do with all the years ahead of me? The easier days were the chaotic ones, where she proceeded from minute to minute just dealing with demands. Soothing the children, cooking their meals, helping with their homework. Standing stolid and expressionless when NoNo pushed her away and ran sobbing to her room, or when Patch asked, “Why couldn’t you have died, and Daddy gone on living?”

Some people, she often noticed, had experiences in their pasts that defined them forever after, that they felt compelled to divulge to any casual acquaintance at the outset. The loss of a child, for example: almost anyone who had been through that had to mention it first thing; and no wonder. With Rebecca, it was the fact of her instant motherhood. That had been the most profound change in her life; it had made her understand that this was her life, for real, and not some story floating past. Which may have been the true reason that she still used the term stepdaughter long after the girls themselves, come to think of it, might have allowed her to drop it. And when she had become their one and only parent (for no one seemed to count Tina), she was all the more aware of the unpredictable, unimaginable shape her life had taken.

Once, introducing “my stepdaughters,” she had happened to include Min Foo with a thoughtless wave of her hand. Min Foo had never let her forget it. “I’m sorry! It was an accident!” Rebecca told her, but privately, she had suspected that it revealed something significant. Min Foo was just as much her own separate self, just as different from Rebecca, as the other three were. And in some ways, she was less of a comfort, because she was the youngest and her memories of Joe were fewer. As the years went by, the older girls would reminisce with Rebecca—“Do you remember the time we all got on the train to D.C. and just as we were pulling out, we saw Dad standing there on the platform with the pretzels he’d gone to buy?” Rebecca would nod and laugh, and Min Foo would look from one face to another like someone seeking admission. “Did he ever sing to me?” she asked once. “I think he did. I seem to remember him singing to me while I was lying in bed.”

“I don’t believe so,” Rebecca said, “but I know he read to you.”

“What did he read?”

“Oh, just the usual. Winnie-the-Pooh …”

But you couldn’t reconstruct a person from bald facts. Min Foo would never experience the details of him — the fine-grained skin on the backs of his hands and the curly corners of his eyes when he smiled. (One time a man invited Rebecca out, a year or two after Joe’s death, and she accepted but then was filled with despair at the sight of the wiry red hairs on his forearms. He wasn’t Joe, was the problem. He was a perfectly nice man, but he wasn’t Joe.) And to the grandchildren, Joe was no more distinct than those names you see on nineteenth-century headstones. Joseph Aaron Davitch. He used to exist, was all. And now did not.

Oh, he would have made a fine old man. A fine old man. Sixty-six this past September; imagine. Rebecca was older now than he had even been, although she continued, to this day, to think of him as her senior. And he would have loved having grandchildren.

She used to assume that the bereaved were actually mourning for themselves, and of course that was partly true. But what she hadn’t expected was the sorrow she felt on behalf of Joe. She ached to think of all that he was missing — the various landmarks in the girls’ lives and the daily pleasures and the minor family triumphs.

At first she had thought, I wish I could tell him such-and-such, and, He would have enjoyed so-and-so. Then the years began to telescope, so that if he came back today and asked, “What’s happened since I’ve been gone?” she would say, “Oh, well, I don’t know. This and that, I guess.” Like someone long dead herself, she would see that none of her little world’s events had really been that important.

“How come the front parlor’s cream now?” he would ask. “Where did you put my tennis racquet? What became of that big old oak that used to stand on the corner?” And she would say, “Oh! You’re right: the parlor used to be gray. Your racquet? You played tennis? I’d forgotten there was an oak. I think it was struck by lightning.” She would feel unaccountably guilty; you would think it was Joe she’d forgotten. Although it wasn’t, of course.

Now she braced herself against autumn as if it were a buffeting wind that she had to endure with her eyes tight shut and her jaw clenched, holding on to the nearest support for all she was worth. October, heartlessly dazzling. November, dropping leaves like a puddle of gold beneath the poplar. Sometimes, when nobody was around, she spent half the afternoon gazing blindly out the window. Or she let the telephone ring and ring while she sat listening. The sound was a satisfaction. It was an even greater satisfaction when the ringing finally stopped.

* * *

“I suppose you’re going to insist on some kind of brouhaha for Thanksgiving,” Min Foo told her.

Thanksgiving?

Well, yes: November. She couldn’t think how it had slipped her mind.

Thanksgiving was the one holiday when Rebecca did all the cooking. This had developed after a famous Thanksgiving when Biddy served braised pheasant and steamed quinoa in white truffle oil. There had been a sort of revolution, and Biddy had stalked out in a huff and Rebecca was put in charge forever after. Which was fine with her. She didn’t mind the hard work; she welcomed it, in fact. But she dreaded the socializing. All that merriment! She would have to be so cheery! She wondered what would happen if she simply didn’t bother. If the girls started one of their quarrels and she just let it happen. If the moment for the toast came and went and she just slugged her drink down in silence.

Still, she made out her grocery list. Went to the store. Baked the cornbread ahead for the stuffing. Had Alice Farmer come in to give both parlors a good going-over.

Alice Farmer planned to celebrate Thanksgiving at her sister’s. “You know my sister Eunice, the one who’s blessed with the gift of healing,” she said. Rebecca folded her hands across her stomach and looked down at them. More veins crisscrossed them than she had ever noticed, knotted and blue and gnarly. Alice Farmer stopped dust-mopping and said, “Miz Davitch?”

“I’m sorry; what?” Rebecca asked.

“Maybe you ought to take this remedy that my Aunt Ruth takes,” Alice Farmer told her. “It’s real good for your nerves, but you can only buy it in Georgia.”

“Okay,” Rebecca said after a pause.

“Okay what? You want her to get you some?”

“No, that’s okay,” Rebecca said.

She thought that if she were shown a photograph of these hands, she might not even know they were hers.

* * *

Everybody attended except for Patch and her family; they were spending the holiday with Jeep’s parents. And everybody, of course, was late, which caused no particular problem because Rebecca had counted on that when she put the turkey in. Zeb showed up first, then Min Foo and her brood, then NoNo with Barry and Peter. It had been sprinkling all morning, and most of them wore raincoats that dripped across the foyer. Underneath, though, they had on their best clothes. They always dressed up for Thanksgiving — much more than for Christmas, to which the youngest children wore pajamas. Rebecca, though, was not dressed up. She had sort of forgotten. She was wearing the sweatshirt and flounced denim skirt that she had put on when she got out of bed. “Shall I watch things in the kitchen while you run change?” Min Foo asked her.

Rebecca said, “Oh, thanks,” but then the door slammed open again, letting in Biddy’s contingent, and Rebecca stayed where she was.

Biddy had good news: her book for senior citizens, The Gray Gourmet, had been accepted by a small press. She announced this even before she took her raincoat off, with Troy and Dixon beaming on either side of her. The first to offer congratulations was Barry. “That’s great!” he said. “I’ve got an author for a sister-in-law!” Then Zeb asked what the publication date was. She didn’t know yet, Biddy said. Then everybody looked at Rebecca.

Min Foo said, finally, “Maybe we should break out some champagne.”

Rebecca said, “Oh. I’ll go get it.”

In the kitchen, she took two bottles of champagne from the refrigerator. Then she peeked in the oven to check on the turkey, and she lowered the flame beneath the potatoes, and after that she fell into a little trance at the window. The fog outside was made denser by the foggy panes, which were clouded with steam from the stove. Raindrops marbled the glass.

NoNo walked in and said, “Beck, I wanted to — Oh!”

She was looking at Will’s plant, which had migrated to the kitchen and grown another six inches. “Good heavens, it’s a tree!” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’m thinking of moving it out to the yard,” Rebecca told her.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that in November. The first frost would probably kill it.”

“What happens happens, is my philosophy,” Rebecca said.

She expected NoNo to argue, but NoNo was busy going through her purse — a shiny little red-and-black box that matched her red-and-black dress. “I wanted to show you something,” she said, and she pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

Rebecca opened it and found a list, computer-printed.

Dry cleaner

Make dental appointment for Peter

Find someone to clean gutters

Buy my bro. a birthday present

Till the mention of a brother, she had assumed the list was NoNo’s. She looked up questioningly.

“Barry wrote that,” NoNo told her.

“So…”

“He wrote that for me. These are the things that I was supposed to do last week.”

“I see,” Rebecca said.

“Beck. When you and Dad got married, did you ever… Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you ever wonder if he’d married you just so he would have help with us kids?”

Rebecca opened her mouth to answer, but NoNo rushed on. “I’m trying not to think that of Barry, but look at this list! And he’s always saying, ‘Boy, married life is great.’ He says, ‘Things are so much easier now. I don’t know what we did before you came along,’ and while naturally I’m flattered, still it does cross my mind that—”

“Are you saying you don’t think he loves you?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, I know he says he does, but… these lists! And the car pool, and the PTA meetings! Everything falls to me, which of course makes sense in a way because he does work longer hours, but… it’s like he’s saying, ‘Oh, good, now that I have a wife I don’t have to bother with any of that busywork anymore.’ It’s like I’m so useful.”

“But, sweetie,” Rebecca said, “isn’t he useful, too? Before, you were all alone in the world. I remember once I asked you why you never took a vacation, and you said if you had a man in your life, someone to travel with, you said—”

“Beck, you know how I get these pictures sometimes,” NoNo said. “Pictures behind my eyelids about the future. Well, the morning after my wedding, I was starting to wake up but my eyes weren’t open yet and I got the most distinct, most detailed, most realistic picture. I saw myself walking up Charles Street, that part where it splits for the monument. I was wheeling a baby carriage and I was wearing a maid’s uniform. Gray dress, white apron, white shoes, those white, nurse kind of stockings that always make women’s legs look fat—”

Rebecca laughed.

“I’m glad you find it amusing,” NoNo said bitterly.

“Maybe the point was the baby carriage. Did you think of that?”

“The point,” NoNo said, “was that I was wearing servant clothes.”

“Well, maybe the picture was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time! After all, you predicted Min Foo would have a girl, didn’t you? And then something else, what was it, some other mistake—”

Too late, she realized that she was thinking of what Patch had said: that NoNo couldn’t be very clairvoyant if she’d chosen to marry Barry.

“At any rate,” she said, “doesn’t it seem to you, really, that all of us love people at least partly for their usefulness?”

“No, it does not,” NoNo said. “I would never do such a thing! Never! I fell in love with Barry because he was so gallant and romantic, and he had that kind of eyebrows I like that crinkle up all perplexed.”

“Well, I don’t mean—”

“Forget it,” NoNo told her. “I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it. So! Shall I take these bottles out? Will two be enough, do you think?”

“Oh. Maybe not,” Rebecca said, and she went over to the refrigerator. “What I meant was—” she said, but when she turned around, a third bottle in her hand, she found that NoNo had already left the room with the first two. Her purse remained on the table, with the list beside it. Rebecca picked up the list and studied it again.

“Min Foo says to remind you she’s having club soda,” Biddy said, walking in. “Shall I pour it? Is there any in the fridge?”

“Yes, there should be,” Rebecca told her absently.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“Oh, nothing.”

Biddy peered over her shoulder. “Barry’s list,” she said.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Everybody’s seen it. But it was tactless of her to trouble you with that, just now.”

“Tactless? Why?”

“Oh, no reason,” Biddy said hastily. “Never mind me; I’m just babbling.”

“I don’t know why people in this family are so unhappy,” Rebecca told her. “Look at Min Foo! I’m worried to death she’s going to get another divorce.”

Biddy merely shook her head and removed the ice bin from the freezer.

“Last week,” Rebecca said, “she told me this long-winded tale about something unforgivable that Hakim was supposed to have done. You’d think he’d committed ax murder! And all it was, was they were driving someplace together and Hakim took the wrong road and insisted on staying on it.”

“He didn’t like the inefficiency of a U-turn,” Biddy said. “That’s what she said he called it: the inefficiency.”

“Oh, she told you this, too?”

“He wanted to keep on the way they were headed and just sort of meander in the right direction at some point in the future.”

“But that’s the way men are,” Rebecca said. “It’s nothing to get divorced about.”

“I said the same thing, exactly.” Biddy dropped ice cubes into a glass. “I said, ‘Min Foo, you two should go for some help. Ask Patch for the name of her marriage counselor,’ I told her.”

“Patch has a marriage counselor?”

“I thought you knew.”

“All these problems!” Rebecca said. “Thank goodness for you and Troy, at least.”

Biddy stiffened. “Just because Troy is gay doesn’t mean we don’t quarrel like other couples,” she told Rebecca.

“How reassuring to hear that,” Rebecca said.

She’d intended to sound witty, but her words fell dully, and Biddy didn’t smile.

They left the kitchen — Biddy with Min Foo’s club soda, Rebecca with the champagne. In the dining room they passed Peter and Joey, who were seated at one end of the table. Peter was demonstrating some kind of game. “First you take a ballpoint pen and lay it flat,” he said, “with the little air hole facing up. See the little air hole? Then you hold another pen exactly a foot above it, and you aim at the air hole and stab. Like this.” He jabbed the second pen downward, rattling all the place settings. “The winner is whoever’s the first to break the pen on the table. Your turn.”

Rebecca felt slightly cheered by this scene. (Joey, four years Peter’s junior, was hanging worshipfully on Peter’s every word.) She dropped back to watch for a second, putting off joining the others.

When she arrived in the parlor, NoNo was setting out glasses while Zeb poured the champagne. Biddy was discussing her book. “Recipes for old people can be difficult,” she was saying, “because they tend not to eat much. Also they’re often arthritic, which makes peeling and chopping and stirring just about impossible. Not to mention they’ve lost all sense of taste.”

“Oh, what’s the point, then?” Rebecca burst out.

Biddy stopped speaking and looked at her.

“I mean… it must present quite a challenge,” Rebecca said after a moment.

“Exactly,” Biddy told her. “So what I’ve tried to do…” And on she went, while Barry circled the room handing each person a drink.

Poppy had the couch to himself, having stretched his cane the length of it to keep everyone else away. “Psst!” he said to Rebecca. “Come here; I saved you a seat.” He waggled his cane invitingly.

She sat down without removing the cane, perching on just the front of the cushion.

“I was thinking people might like to hear my poem,” he told her.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Shall I recite it?”

“Why not,” she said.

He hesitated.

“I can’t seem to think of the words,” he said. “Let me have a minute, will you?”

Someone pushed a glass of champagne into Rebecca’s hands. Lateesha, helping out. “Thank you, dear,” Rebecca said.

“I just need to get some kind of running start,” Poppy was saying. “Otherwise, it won’t come to me. How does it begin, again?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

She really didn’t, she realized.

She was conscious of a lull in the conversation, and she looked up to find everybody turned in her direction, each person holding a glass, waiting for her to propose the toast. She assembled herself. She got to her feet and raised her own glass. “To Biddy,” she said, “and The White Gourmet.”

“Gray! Gray!” they corrected her. Someone gave a quick bark of a laugh.

“Sorry,” she said. She sat down.

There was a brief silence. Then everybody drank.

* * *

Not counting the baby, there were thirteen at the table. This was one more person than could comfortably be seated, but a separate children’s table with only three children — or four, if Dixon was exiled as well — would have seemed too puny. So Rebecca had everyone scrunch together, and she put Poppy next to her at the head although there wasn’t room. He was still trying to remember the words of his poem. He said, “This has never happened before.”

Rebecca patted his hand, which was practically in her plate. “Could you scoot about two inches the other way?” she asked him.

“Then I wouldn’t even be sitting at the table anymore, Beck.”

“Oh, all right.”

Biddy seemed to have taken over the serving duties. Actually, Rebecca might have let things lapse a little, there. Biddy kept coming out of the kitchen to ask things like, “Don’t you have any more butter?”

“Try the door shelf in the fridge,” Rebecca said.

“I already did. You don’t have anything! I can’t find more salt for the salt cellars, either. You don’t have any backups in the pantry!”

Barry was carving the turkey, Rebecca was glad to see. Zeb always made a mess of it. NoNo and Min Foo were passing plates around, and Hakim was jiggling a squirmy, whimpery Abdul on his shoulder. “I think this little man has gas,” he announced, and Lateesha said, “Ooh! Gross!” and crumpled into a cascade of giggles behind her fingers.

Biddy asked, “Where’s the sauerkraut? Did you not remember the sauerkraut this year?”

“Back in 1923,” Poppy began, “when folks still thought that squirrel meat was good for chronic invalids…”

Joey was eyeing Peter across the table, trying to get his attention, and Troy was discussing music with Zeb — or singing notes to him, at any rate. “Dah, dee dah-dah,” he sang, holding up one index finger instructively.

Barry said, “Oh, no!” He stopped carving, his knife halfway through a thigh joint. “I didn’t wait for the blessing!” he told Rebecca.

“Never mind,” she said.

“I just started right in on the carving! I wasn’t thinking!”

“Um, actually, we don’t normally have a blessing.”

“You don’t?”

He got that rumple-browed look that NoNo seemed to find so fetching.

“Not even a moment of silence?” he asked.

“Well, I suppose—”

“Or, I know what!” He brightened. “We could do what my college girlfriend’s family used to do. They went around the table and people each said one thing apiece that they were thankful for.”

This struck Rebecca as a terrible idea. She was relieved when Zeb gave a groan.

But Barry didn’t seem to hear him. “What do you say, you guys?” he asked. And then, when no one spoke up, “Well, I’m not shy. I’ll go first. I’m thankful as all get-out to have my beautiful NoNo.”

NoNo looked at him. She lowered the basket of rolls that she’d been about to pass to Dixon, although Dixon was still reaching for it, and, “Why, Barry,” she said softly. “I’m thankful to have you, too.”

Joey made a gagging sound, but Min Foo frowned him into silence. It was clear, from the way people started stirring in their seats and clearing their throats, that they were bracing themselves to go through with this.

Rebecca looked beseechingly at Zeb. He grinned. All very well for him; she supposed he would say he was thankful for some kind of Child Welfare Act or something. And here was Hakim, plainly intrigued by this unfamiliar American custom but putting his own stamp on it; for he rose to his feet, still jiggling Abdul, as if he were preparing to deliver a formal speech. “I personally,” he said, “am thankful for my wife, Min Foo, and for my son, Abdul. And also for my other son, Joey, and my daughter, Lateesha. In addition, I would like to take this moment to—”

“Enough!” Min Foo said. She was laughing. “Time’s up, Hakim!”

Which, for some reason, set the baby off. He let out a sudden wail, and although he might have settled down again, Rebecca recognized an opportunity when it came along. She stood up and reached for him. “I’ll take him,” she said. And the instant she had him, she made away with him, out of the dining room completely.

Out of the dining room and through the parlors, toward the stairs. But in the foyer, she paused. She hoisted the baby higher on her shoulder and opened the front door. It wasn’t raining anymore, although a thick mist still hung like veils. The air was soft and mild, a kind of non-temperature against her skin. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her.

The baby, who had been uttering chirps of protest, abruptly stopped and raised his head from her shoulder to look around.

She walked down the front walk and turned right, passing the meditation center and the blue-gable house. The mist was so dense that the baby started making small gulping sounds, as if he thought he was underwater. She figured he must be warm enough, though, because he was swaddled in a receiving blanket. His little body felt compact and solid, much heavier than the last time she had carried him, and he held himself in a more organized, more collected sort of way.

She crossed the street toward a maple sapling that still had a few of its leaves, red as lipstick. “See?” she told the baby. “Red! Isn’t it pretty?” She turned him slightly so that he was facing the sapling. He blinked and let his gaze travel across it, his head bobbling slightly with the effort of concentration. He no longer had that squinchy newborn look; he was wide-eyed and alert. His cheek, when she set hers against it, was so silky that she almost couldn’t feel it.

They had so far had the street to themselves — they’d had the whole world to themselves — but now a bus loomed out of the fog and stopped beside them. The doors opened with a wheeze, letting off two dark-eyed young women, one of them obviously pregnant. They were followed by a tall young man in glasses, and the three of them stood at the bus stop a moment laughing and interrupting each other, riding over each other’s words, talking about a party they had been to the night before. Then they moved off down the street, and as their voices faded, Rebecca noticed the quiet surrounding her and the baby. It was that cottony, thick, enclosing quiet that often descends with a fog, and it made her long, all at once, for the clamor of her family.

Anyhow, Abdul must be getting hungry. He was nosing hopefully into the crook of her neck. She turned and started home.

The mist was settling on her hair. She could see the glints in the strands that fell over her eyes. The hem of her skirt was growing heavy with moisture. The baby’s mouth against her skin felt like a cool little guppy mouth.

Had it ever crossed her mind that Joe had married her for her usefulness? Yes, it had crossed her mind. And never more so than after he died; just up and willfully died and left her to cope on her own.

Now, though, she saw what he had rescued her from: that ingrown, muted, stagnant, engaged-to-be-engaged routine that had started to chafe her so. Oh, he had been just as useful to her; no doubt about it. What she’d told NoNo was true.

And while she had once believed that she’d been useful only in practical matters (tending the little girls, waiting on Mother Davitch), now she saw that her most valuable contribution had been her joyousness — a quality the Davitches sorely lacked. Not that she herself was joyous to begin with. No, she had had to labor at it. She had struggled to acquire it.

Timidly, she experimented with a sneaking sense of achievement. Pride, even. Why not? It didn’t seem all that misplaced.

She carried the baby home jauntily, striding straight through the puddles, wearing jewels of mist in her hair and holding her head high.