Back When We Were Grownups

Two

That night, she dreamed she was traveling on a train with her teenaged son.

Never mind that she had no son. Never mind that if she had, he would have been a grown man by now. In her dream, she took it for granted that this tall, quiet, gawky young boy belonged to her without question. His hair was the same fair color as hers, except that it hung in a shock to one side. He was thinner than Rebecca had ever been, but he had her gray eyes and sharp nose. And most familiar of all was some quality in his expression, something hopeful and wistful, some sense he felt a little bit outside of things. Didn’t she know that feeling! She recognized immediately the shy, uncertain edginess at the corners of his mouth.

He had the window seat; she had the aisle. He was gazing out at the scenery and so was she, supposedly, but really she was seizing the chance to dwell on his dear profile. She felt a wash of love for him — the deep, pervasive, abiding love you feel for one of your own.

When she woke up she was sorry, and she tried to go back to her dream again but she couldn’t.

* * *

She lay awake in the bed that she had come to as a bride, in the room that she had slept in for over thirty years. For the majority of her life, in fact; so why did she still think of this house as somebody else’s? The Davitches’ house, not hers. The Davitches’ ornate but crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, with its two high-ceilinged parlors, front and rear, its antiquated backyard kitchen connected to the dining room by an afterthought of a passageway, its elaborate carved moldings and butterfly-parquet floors and seven sculptured marble mantelpieces overhanging seven fireplaces, five of them defunct.

The ground level provided the family’s subsistence; they rented it out for parties. Christenings, graduation teas, wedding receptions, retirement dinners… All of Life’s Occasions from the Cradle to the Grave, as their ad in the Yellow Pages put it. For Your Next Important Social Event, “Experience the Charms of the Open Arms.”

Funny name for such a narrow, shutter-faced house, she’d always thought.

She’d thought it the first time she came here, nineteen years old and dressed head to toe in blue, a heavyset, timid young woman standing out on the sidewalk peering up at the shield-shaped sign. The Open Arms, Est. 1951. Nothing open about it at all, not that she could see. Although possibly she’d been influenced by the fact that parties of any kind whatsoever were her idea of torture.

Oh, life worked out so surprisingly, didn’t it?

The flannel darkness high above her turned white and then transparent, and the birds began to sing in the poplar tree next door, and the grandfather clock downstairs gave off six mournful dongs. Rebecca finally got out of bed and shook her nightgown around her ankles and went over to raise the window shade. It was going to be another sunny day. Chips of blue sky showed behind the rooftops. She watched a traffic helicopter cross the space between two faraway buildings, its propeller a brisk, busy blur above its head.

This was not the master bedroom. (That had somehow gone to Poppy, after her mother-in-law died.) It was her husband’s boyhood room, and traces of his boyhood enthusiasms could still be found here and there — in the half-dozen odd-colored rocks arranged on top of the bookcase, the framed display of wheat-sheaf pennies hanging on one wall, the Baltimore Colts decal plastered irremovably inside the closet door. Joe Davitch had been full of enthusiasms, even as a grown man. He’d been large in spirit and in frame, exuberant and outgoing, booming-voiced, quick to laugh, given to flinging out both hands in a gesture of wholehearted welcome.

Really it was Joe who had had the open arms.

She turned from the window and collected her clothes: an Indian blouse embroidered with peacocks, a flounced calico skirt, and the white cotton, old-lady underwear she had come to favor now that there was no one else to see it. She clutched all this to her chest and crossed the hall to the bathroom, which gave off the comforting smell of aged enamel paint and Ivory soap. The radiator was as filigreed and scrolled as a silver tea urn. The claw-footed bathtub was big enough to sleep in.

Then halfway through her shower: bam-bam! Poppy, knocking on the bathroom door. She squinched her face against the spray and started humming, because she wanted to go on musing about the boy in her dream. His stubby blond eyelashes. (Her lashes, which didn’t even show unless she remembered, as she rarely did, to brush them with mascara.) His long-fingered, angular hands. (The hands were not hers, but whose, then? Whom did they remind her of?)

At some point Poppy gave up and went away, but she couldn’t have said just when.

* * *

“I had the oddest dream,” she told Poppy over breakfast.

“Were there any numbers in it?”

She was startled, not so much by the question as by the fact that he had heard her. Nowadays, he seemed to be absent so often. She looked at him over her coffee cup and realized, much later than she should have, that he was dressed wrong. He was wearing a pair of brown suit pants and a sleeveless undershirt but no shirt, so that his suspenders cut directly across his whiskery bare shoulders. After breakfast she would have to talk him into something more appropriate.

“If you can recall any numbers,” he told her, “my friend Alex — remember Alex Ames from my teaching days? — he is always after me for numbers to play the lottery with. He wants the numbers from my dreams, but I don’t have any dreams anymore.”

“Sorry, no,” she told him. “This was about a boy. He seemed to be my son.”

“Which one?”

“Pardon?”

“Which of your sons was it?”

“Poppy,” she said. “I don’t have any sons.”

“Then what’d you go and dream about them for?”

She sighed and took another sip of coffee.

This was a man unrelated to her — an uncle only by marriage. The brother of her late father-in-law. Yet here they were, living out their lives together like some cranky old married couple. Her mother-in-law and Joe had invited Poppy to stay for a while after his wife died, when it seemed he was about to turn into a telephone drunk. (Calling up at all hours: “Can I honestly be expected to go on without my Joycie?”) Then her mother-in-law died; then Joe himself died — killed in a car wreck just six years after their wedding — and somehow, Poppy had never left. Rebecca had spent more years now with Poppy than with anyone she’d ever known; and she didn’t even especially like the man, which was not to say she actively disliked him. She just thought of him as a kind of fellow boarder. It was a matter of pure happenstance that she was the one who had to listen to the state of his bowels every morning, and accompany him on his exercise walk, and ferry him to the doctor and the dentist and the physical therapist.

But he was someone to talk to, at least; so she tried again. “In my dream I was on a train,” she told him, “and this boy was sitting next to me. He was, I don’t know, in his early teens — that awkward, beanpole stage just after they get their growth spurt — and it seemed to be understood that he was my son.”

“Do you recall what number train it was?”

“No, and I don’t know where we were going, either. Just that he and I were traveling.”

And that she loved him, she wanted to say. But that would sound so theatrical, in this normal, workaday kitchen with the linoleum worn black and the chimney bricks all pocked, the checked plastic tablecloth sandy with toast crumbs, the glass-paned cupboard doors reflecting squares of yellow sunshine.

“Well,” Poppy said, “I would call that a dream that was lacking in plot. In fact it’s sort of uninteresting; so I’d like to switch the subject to my birthday.”

“Your birthday!” She felt disoriented. “The birthday you just had?”

“The birthday coming up.”

“But that’s not till December!”

“Yes, December eleventh. I’m going to be one hundred.”

“Well, I know that, Poppy,” she said.

He didn’t look it. He had hit a kind of wall in the aging process; he seemed old but not astronomically old, just slightly more shrunken than when she’d first met him. His white mustache was still bushy, and his face (unshaven, till after breakfast) bore only a few deep crevices rather than the netting of wrinkles you would expect.

“I suppose,” he said, suddenly absorbed in pressing an index finger to the toast crumbs, “you’re planning some big wingding for me. I mean bigger than your usual.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, certainly I am!” she said. It was his averted gaze that let her know he wanted a wingding; that he wasn’t bringing it up just to discourage the notion. “December’s still pretty far away,” she told him, “but when we get a bit closer, oh, I’m going to need your advice about all kinds of things!”

“I do happen to have a guest list,” he said.

“Wonderful, Poppy.”

She thought he meant he had a guest list somewhere, but he started fumbling through his trousers and finally came up with a small, fat square of folded paper. As he passed it across the table to her, the telephone rang. She rose to answer, but not before she had tucked the list in her skirt pocket and patted the pocket several times in a reassuring way.

It was NoNo on the phone. “I called to say thanks for the picnic,” she said. “Barry says thanks, too. He’s going to write you a note.”

“Oh, honey, he doesn’t have to do that,” Rebecca said. She was watching Poppy, who had started eating marmalade straight from the jar. “I’m just glad you both enjoyed it.”

“He really liked our family,” NoNo said.

Her words hung in the air, waiting; so Rebecca said, “And we liked him! All of us just loved him.”

Poppy raised his eyebrows at her. She turned away from him and cupped the receiver. “How’s his little boy?” she asked. “He didn’t catch cold, I hope.”

“He’s fine, I assume, but I haven’t called them yet today because Barry’s mornings are so frantic. If you could see how the two of them live! He has Peter wear tomorrow’s clothes to bed on school nights, just to save time.”

“Goodness,” Rebecca said. “Now, where is Peter’s mother, exactly?”

“Who knows! She went off with a bunch of Buddhists or something; lives in some kind of commune somewhere.”

This was not so very different from NoNo’s mother, who had abandoned her three children for a career as a New York nightclub singer. (Or would-be singer.) But Rebecca thought it wisest not to point that out. She said, “You’re going to be a real help, once the two of you are married.”

“Yes, I thought I would start closing my shop a little earlier, so that Peter won’t be alone so many hours after school.”

“What does he do now that it’s summer?” Rebecca asked.

“Oh, eventually there’s day camp. Till that begins, he just stays in the house. He’s pretty used to fending for himself.”

“Maybe he’ll get to be friends with Danny. They’re almost the same age, after all.”

“Well…” NoNo said, in a doubtful tone.

Rebecca couldn’t much blame her. Danny was such an athlete, with an athlete’s easy confidence in his own body. The two boys seemed two different species, almost. So she didn’t push it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Poppy leaving the kitchen with the marmalade jar tucked under his arm, and she said, “I’d better go. Have a good day, sweetie!”

“Thanks, Beck,” NoNo said. “And thanks again for the picnic.”

Rebecca hung up and went chasing after Poppy, who could make remarkable speed for an old man with a cane.

* * *

Her dream was the kind that lingered, coloring the whole morning. Bits of it rose like dust from her pillows when she plumped them — a sense of travel, a sense of longing. When she heard the harmonica sound of a train whistle from Penn Station, she felt a little pinch of loneliness deep in her chest.

The plasterer called; then Biddy called; then a woman called about a bridal shower. (Rebecca’s life was ruled by the telephone, she always said.) Each time she collected her thoughts to answer, she got that cotton-headed, almost nauseated feeling that comes from surfacing too abruptly from too heavy a sleep. More than one caller had to say, “Hello? Are you still there?”

When she opened Poppy’s closet to find him a shirt, the sweetish smell of worn clothing brought back the scent of her son. When she settled on the couch to pair socks, the feel of the fuzzy upholstery reminded her of the train seat — which, she recollected, had been covered in wine-colored plush of a sort she had not seen on trains in forty years.

* * *

Her daughter dropped by to leave her two children while she went to the obstetrician. “Anyone home?” she called, and the front door banged, as it always did, against the door of the closet. (Closet, ladies’ powder room, men’s — all these had been crammed into one side of the foyer, not very adeptly, when the Open Arms first went into business.) Rebecca invited her in, half hoping she would refuse because the morning was getting away from her, here. But Min Foo said, “Maybe for a minute,” and sent the children upstairs with their stack of videotapes. “Two whole months to go,” she said, leading the way to the kitchen, “or three if this is another ten-month pregnancy, and already I’ve gained twenty-one pounds. I look like a cow.”

Actually she looked more like a plum, or some other ripe, luscious fruit. She wore a black silk maternity dress and loops of golden chains strung with golden disks, and she walked with a slow, sultry, swaying motion that Rebecca found hypnotic. In the kitchen she sank onto a chair, her jewelry tinkling exotically. Rebecca said, “Would you like some coffee?”

“Mom! No way can I have coffee!”

“Oh, yes,” Rebecca said. Such silly rules they had, nowadays. “Well, I believe there’s some orange juice somewhere.”

She started hunting through the refrigerator, which was filled with picnic leftovers. “I dreamed the strangest dream last night,” she said over her shoulder. She shifted a plate hooded in foil. “I dreamed I had a son.”

“Maybe that’s a sign my baby will be a boy,” Min Foo said.

This struck Rebecca as the slightest bit self-centered. “No,” she said, “you weren’t anywhere to be seen. And besides, he didn’t have your coloring. He was a blond.”

Min Foo, like her three half-sisters, was a brunette, and she had Joe’s burnished olive skin and his narrow, sleepy eyes — almost Asian eyes, in her case, which was how she’d earned her nickname. Her real name was Minerva (Rebecca’s choice, for this child who would be hers, she’d imagined — the same calm, quiet, bookish type she herself had once been), but Joe had taken one look at the baby in her hospital cot, at her paintbrush hair and her eyes no wider than slits, and, “Hey there, little Min Foo,” he had said. She had never been anything but, from then on. So much for Minerva.

And forget about calm! Or quiet! Here she was now, all spiky and indignant: “I could have a blond baby! Certainly I could. Half my genes are yours, remember.”

“Well, maybe with Lawrence you could have,” Rebecca said. “But I seriously doubt you can hope for any blond genes from Hakim.”

Min Foo said, “Oh.”

Rebecca gave up on the orange juice and shut the fridge door as unnoticeably as possible. “Min Foo,” she said. “Sweetheart. Um, once this baby is born, you won’t send Hakim packing, will you?”

“Send him packing?”

“The way you did the others.”

Min Foo gave her a blank, astonished stare.

“I just couldn’t help but notice,” Rebecca told her, “that you always divorce your husbands after you have their babies.”

“Always!” Min Foo repeated. “You talk as if I’d had fifty husbands!”

“Well, but… three is not a negligible number, you have to admit.”

“It’s no fault of mine that I happened to hit a teensy little run of bad luck,” Min Foo said. “Honestly! You make such a big deal about that. Every time I turn around, some jibing, jabbing remark. ‘You’re not booked this weekend, are you? Getting married or anything.’ And, ‘Oh, that was a gift from what’s-his-name, one of Min Foo’s husbands.’”

Rebecca laughed, impressed by her own wittiness, but Min Foo stayed serious. “Everything’s just a joke to you,” she said bitterly. “Even at our wedding reception: someone says how nice it is and you say, ‘Well, it ought to be nice, as much practice as Min Foo’s given me.’” She gathered the folds of her dress and stood up. “Don’t bother seeing me out,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

“Sweetheart!”

“I’m late for my appointment, anyhow.”

“Oh, all right,” Rebecca said sadly, and she trailed her to the front of the house, trying to think of some parting comment that would smooth things over. But none came to her.

Her brother-in-law had a theory that Min Foo’s many marriages were her way of trying on other lives. The first husband had been a professor in his sixties, and Min Foo (age twenty-one) had instantly turned into a settled faculty matron. But with the second husband, who was black and eight years her junior (two differences, Zeb pointed out; very efficient of her), she’d become a young slip of a girl and taken to wearing a head-wrap. Hakim, now, had her spangled with Muslim holy medals. Rebecca liked Hakim, but she was careful not to get overly invested in him. That was why she kept up the pretense that she didn’t know where he was from. Of course she knew where he was from; she wasn’t senile. But, “Oh, he’s something, ah, Middle Eastern, I believe,” she would say when asked.

Oops. Just the sort of remark that Min Foo had been objecting to.

* * *

The children were upstairs in the ex-nursery that served as the family room, watching a videotaped cartoon. You had only to look at them to guess Min Foo’s whole history — Joey a freckled eight-year-old with straight black hair and blue eyes, Lateesha four years younger and decked out in tiny beaded braids, her skin the warm, soft brown of a baked potato.

“Hey, kids,” Rebecca said, “who wants to help me decorate for a party?”

They didn’t take their eyes from the screen, but Joey said, “What kind of party?”

“Graduation; high-school graduation. Teenagers galore! I’ll need to consult with you two so I don’t do anything uncool.”

That got their attention, all right. Joey asked, “Are they having a DJ?”

“Certainly a DJ! He’s bringing his own sound system, later this afternoon.”

Joey punched the remote control and a Superman-type figure halted in mid-screen, trembling slightly. Then the two children slid off the couch and followed Rebecca downstairs. Lateesha’s beads sounded like an abacus clicking. (What a jewelry-laden family Min Foo’s was! Especially if you counted Joey’s watch, a black rubber, digital, multi-function affair whose face was about twice the width of his wrist.)

“Biddy is doing the food,” Rebecca said, “and I tried to persuade them to hire NoNo for the flowers, but they said they always use Binstock.”

“Rich people,” Joey said.

“Well, yes, I guess they must be.”

They were in the kitchen now. Rebecca started pulling boxes from the cupboard beside the sink. “Look at the decorations I bought,” she told the children. “Little rolled diplomas. Aren’t they cute?”

But Lateesha was more attracted to a string of ancient, yellowing electric lights shaped like tiny wedding bells. “I want these,” she said firmly, and Rebecca said, “Well, but…” and then, “Oh, well, why not? We’ll pretend they’re school bells.” She held them up by the cord, which was the old striped, cloth-covered kind that was probably not all that safe. “These were strung across the mantel the first time I ever came here,” she said.

“No, I want them high in the air.”

“Well, we can do that.”

They carried the boxes to the front parlor, and then Rebecca went back for a stepladder. When she returned, Joey was banging out the Jaws theme on the piano. “Here,” she told him, opening the ladder. “You climb up and hang the bells on those hooks along the moldings.” Then she gave Lateesha the little diplomas to set around, and she unfolded a crocheted cloth and spread it over the piano to hide all the stains and water rings.

“The first time I ever walked into this room,” she told the children, “the bells were strung across the mantel and there was a kind of pagoda effect, a cupola effect, to the ceiling, from the twists of white crepe paper tied to the chandelier. It was my ex-roommate Amy’s engagement party and her family was making a huge, huge fuss. And I had come alone — I did have a boyfriend, but he was busy that night — and I walked in and I just about walked out again. Well, you know how fancy this place can look when the bald spots are covered up. There were flowers everywhere, white and purple lilacs, so many that the house was kind of shimmering with that heavy, mothball perfume lilacs give off. I was bowled over! And I didn’t know a soul; just Amy. She had transferred to Goucher, you see, after our freshman year at Macadam, and she had this whole set of Goucher girlfriends I had never met. So I was standing there with my mouth open, and Amy didn’t notice me because she was carrying on about her engagement ring — how she had wanted platinum but her fiancé wanted gold because his mother’s ring had been… and all at once I realized that the stereo was playing ‘Band of Gold.’ I thought, How appropriate! and I looked over at the DJ, who happened to be Zeb, only of course I didn’t know that. He was just this teenaged kid sitting behind a stereo, grinning straight into my face as if we shared a secret. He’d chosen that song on purpose! It made me laugh. And right at that moment, right while I was laughing, this man came up beside me and said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ And that was your grandpa.”

It felt peculiar to refer to Joe as a grandpa. He had died before he turned forty. In Rebecca’s mind he was forever young and handsome, and when she tried to imagine how he would have aged she had to guess from how Zeb had aged: those wide, spare, scarecrow shoulders grown stooped, the tangle of longish black hair threaded with thick strands of gray. Although Zeb lacked Joe’s expansive manner and his grace. He had always been more… shambling, you might say.

She lifted the lid of the piano bench and sorted through the sheet music stored inside. Even at these teenaged affairs, some relative just about always ended up playing tunes for the others to sing along with. Songs from the 1950s, swing… She propped a folk-song collection on the music rack. She had observed that the sixties were back in favor right now.

“I bet neither one of you have ever heard ‘Band of Gold,’” she told the children.

Joey, perched on the ladder, shook his head. Lateesha just set another diploma on the coffee table. “Well, it’s not as if you’ve missed anything,” Rebecca said. “A simple-minded song; it was out of date even then. With this silly chorus behind it, baba, bababa … So there I was, laughing away, and your grandpa said, ‘My name’s Joe Davitch; my family owns this house, and that character flirting with you so outrageously is my kid brother, Zeb.’ Which meant I had to tell him my name — meanwhile wondering, you know, why he was just standing there and not circulating among the other guests, because at the time I had no idea the Davitches would normally let a party sink or swim on its own. He said, ‘Can I get you some champagne?’ and I said, ‘No, thanks, I don’t drink’—I really didn’t, in those days — and he said, ‘We’ll have to find you a ginger ale, then. Come with me,’ and he took my arm and led me off to the dining room. And just as we arrived, this woman came rushing out of the kitchen passageway. Mother Davitch, that would be. Your… great-grandmother; goodness! She was carrying a ham on a platter and I guess we took her by surprise, because when she saw us she said, ‘Oh!’ and stopped short, and the ham continued on without her. Slid clear off the platter and landed at my feet. You never saw such a mess!”

This appeared to interest the children far more than their grandparents’ meeting had. Both stopped what they were doing to focus on Rebecca.

“The poor woman burst into tears,” she said, exaggerating slightly in order to keep their attention. (Actually, what Mother Davitch had done was more in her usual style of just, oh, dribbling into tears; trembling and dissolving.) “Well, I didn’t know what to do. I was just a big, dumb college girl! And I was worried to death about my shoes: powder-blue pumps dyed to match my dress. There was this icky pink glaze all over them. I said, ‘Do you think I might have a damp cloth, please?’ Mother Davitch misunderstood; she perked right up and, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘never mind; Joe can see to that. But I will let you help with the other dishes.’ And that wasn’t the only misunderstanding, because while she was taking me to the kitchen she started going on and on about how she wished she’d known beforehand I was coming; how supper that night was just pickups on account of the party but I was more than welcome anyway; it worried her to death that Joe never brought any girlfriends home. I said, ‘Oh, um, I’m not…’ but it didn’t make the least bit of difference; she’d already got this notion in her head. Imagine what I felt! And then we came to the kitchen and there was Biddy, standing on a step stool trying to toss a salad. About five, she must have been. Yes, five: too young to do a very good job. There was more salad on the floor than in the bowl. Mother Davitch said, ‘You’ve met Joe’s oldest, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Oldest? His oldest… child?’ Because underneath, I guess, I was already feeling attracted to him. Oh, I thought, he’s married. Except that Mother Davitch cleared that up in no time. Told me how Joe’s wife had absconded to seek her fortune and left all three of her children on Mother Davitch’s hands. Dumped them on her, was how she put it. Right in front of Biddy. ‘Dumped the whole crew on me and escaped to New York City.’ But you know Biddy. Biddy spoke up cool as cream; ‘Mommy’s going to be a famous nightclub singer,’ she said. And Mother Davitch said, ‘Well, so some would have us believe,’ and gave me this pointed look, but Biddy said, ‘She’s got this beautiful dress where the straps are made of diamonds.’ ‘Rhinestones,’ Mother Davitch said, but Biddy told her, ‘Diamonds.’”

Lateesha stopping prinking a diploma bow to ask Rebecca, “Real diamonds?”

“Well, according to Biddy they were.”

Lateesha (who was not so much younger than Biddy had been, come to think of it) gave a sigh of satisfaction.

“Meanwhile,” Rebecca said, “your grandpa was going back and forth with hot water and cloths, cleaning up the dining room. And finally he squatted down on the floor and started wiping my shoes off, right while I was standing there helping Biddy toss the salad.”

The most memorable of the five senses, she often felt, was the sense of touch. After all these years she could still feel the heat of that damp cloth soaking through to her toes, and Joe’s strong, sure dabbing motion that had reminded her of a mother cat industriously bathing her kittens. And she remembered how, once he’d finished, he rose and clasped her arm to lead her away, his warm fingers firmly pressing the bare skin above her elbow. “Where are you taking her?” Mother Davitch had cried in alarm. (For the kitchen was a disaster and that ham had so far been the only dish that had made it to the dining room.) But Joe called over his shoulder, “Don’t worry; we’ll be seeing her again.” Even while Rebecca was wondering at this, she had felt a surge of pleasure.

“We will be seeing you, won’t we?” he asked as they entered the rear parlor. “Are you in the Baltimore phone book?”

“Oh, I don’t live in Baltimore; I live in Macadam,” she told him. “I go to Macadam College.”

While she spoke she had looked elsewhere, trying to give the impression that she was offering this information with no particular purpose in mind. She watched the other guests from what felt like a great distance, noticing how flighty Amy seemed and how immature and tittering the girlfriends. (Joe Davitch, Rebecca surmised, was at least in his early thirties.) The fiancé—a loud-voiced, fraternity type — was expounding on possible stag-party sites. Paul Anka was singing “Diana” on the stereo, and the DJ sent Rebecca a grin and cocked his head significantly, although she didn’t know why.

“I get out toward Macadam fairly often,” Joe told her. “Maybe I could look you up.”

She let her eyes drift over to meet his.

He said, “Well, enjoy the party. Goodbye, Rebecca.”

Then he turned and went back to the kitchen.

Rebecca just stood there for a minute, alone as when she’d first come but with a huge difference. She felt that her crown of gold braids, her blue dress, even her splotched shoes were compellingly attractive. She observed the other guests from a position of… power, she would almost say.

“In a way, it was love at first sight,” she told the children.

Joey just said, “Huh,” but Lateesha got all wide-eyed and intense. “I’m going to have love at first sight, too,” she told Rebecca.

Rebecca said, “Well, I hope you do, dear heart.”

* * *

Min Foo was so late getting back from the doctor’s that Rebecca gave the children lunch — strawberry-jam-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. Poppy came downstairs and ate with them, although he spent most of the meal warning the children what to expect when they got old. “Step out of bed in the morning and your ankles refuse to bend,” he said. “Know what that feels like? Try it sometime. Try walking not bending your ankles. I clomp to the bathroom like Frankenstein’s monster. And then can’t pee. A simple thing like peeing that you would take for granted. Drip, drip, drip, it finally comes—”

“Ooh, gross!” Lateesha said, screwing up her face.

Poppy ignored her. “Then getting dressed,” he said. “Socks! Shoes! I have to have a special technique just for putting on my shoes. And Beck here has to tie them. It’s just like being a two-year-old. ‘Mom, will you tie my shoes, please?’”

The front door slammed against the closet, and Min Foo said, “Hello?”

“We’re in the kitchen,” Rebecca called.

Min Foo came down the passageway, rustling and jingling. “Hi, everybody,” she said. “Oh, you’re eating.” She gave off the clinical smell of vinyl-upholstered waiting rooms and isopropyl alcohol.

“How was your checkup?” Rebecca asked.

“Dr. Fielding says I’m too fat.”

“I’m sure he didn’t put it that way,” Rebecca said. “Won’t you have a sandwich?”

“Mom! I say I’m too fat and you offer me something to eat. Finish up, kids; we’re late for your play date.”

“Can I pour you some milk? Skim, I mean,” Rebecca said.

“No, thanks. We’d better hit the road.”

“Try driving a car when your ankles don’t bend,” Poppy piped up.

“What, Poppy?” Min Foo turned to Rebecca. “I was thinking about your dream,” she said.

“My dream,” Rebecca echoed. In the flurry of lunch, she had started to forget her dream. Now it came back to her, but with the boy more distant now, more of an other. “What about it?” she asked Min Foo.

“If you dreamed you had a son, not daughters, and if the son was blond, not dark…” Min Foo was shepherding the children toward the front of the house, so that Rebecca had to follow her. “Well, it seems to me,” she said, “that you were dreaming how things would be if you’d chosen a different fork in the road. You know what I mean? If you’d decided on some different kind of life than you have now.”

This struck Rebecca as so apt, and so immediately obvious where it hadn’t been before, that she stopped short. Oh, her girls could surprise her so, every now and then!

“Anyway,” Min Foo was saying, “thanks for keeping the children. Kids, tell Gram goodbye.”

Rebecca said, “Wait!” But then the telephone rang, and she had to turn back to the kitchen.

Poppy, who never answered the phone even when he was sitting right next to it, looked up at her from a spoonful of strawberry jam. Rebecca glared at him and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

“Mrs. Davitch?”

“Yes.”

“This is Katie Border’s mother. The graduation party?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, here’s the problem: our daughter didn’t graduate.”

“Didn’t graduate!”

“Can you believe it? The little minx: she never said a word. And whatever notification the school might have sent us, I guess she intercepted. So this morning I was hanging out her dress — the ceremony was set for three, her dad had arranged to come home early, both sets of grandparents had flown in over the weekend — when ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘did I mention? I flunked chemistry.’ Well, at first I didn’t catch on. I mean, I failed to understand that flunking chemistry would keep her from graduating. ‘Great, Katie,’ I told her. ‘What if you need to know chemistry later in life? If you’re, I don’t know, shopping for rose food or something?’ And she says, bold as you please…”

Rebecca started silently calculating her losses. The planning, the decorations, the deposits made to the disk jockey and the bartender. Alice Farmer, the cleanup maid, would demand to be paid in full regardless, although the waiter (Biddy’s son Dixon) might be more forgiving. The Borders would have to forfeit their own deposit, of course, but that didn’t cover everything. And Biddy would throw a fit. Most of her dishes were perishable and not the kind you could freeze. To say nothing of all her work, and the thought she’d given the menu.

“Well, isn’t it fortunate,” Rebecca told Mrs. Border, “that you’d already set up this party. It sends a message, don’t you think?”

“’Mom,’ she said to me… Message?”

“When your daughter must be feeling so disheartened, so discouraged with herself. But here’s this wonderful party to show her how much you love her.”

“Oh, Mrs. Davitch, I can’t imagine—”

“And a message to your friends, as well. A sort of statement.”

“My friends! I don’t know how I’ll face them. They’re all going to feel so sorry for me. Behind my back they’ll be telling each other—”

“Mrs. Border, have you ever stopped to consider what a marvelous purpose a party serves? Think about it! At a moment when you and your daughter would normally not be speaking, when you know she must feel ashamed in front of the world at large and the world is surely wondering what to say to you, why, everyone’s thrown together in a gigantic celebration. Everyone’s forced to hug, and kiss, and toast the other graduates, and announce to everyone else that what matters is you all love each other. It’s like that scientific discovery they made a few years back; remember? They discovered that if you fake a smile, your smile muscles somehow trigger some reaction in the brain and you’ll start feeling the way you pretended to feel, happy and relaxed. Remember?”

“Well…”

“Imagine if you hadn’t had the foresight to schedule this party! Because we’ve been booked for months and months ahead, this time of year. You’d call and say, ‘Do you have an evening this week when we could throw a little fete for our daughter? She’s experiencing such, um… low self-esteem’—yes, that’s the term: ‘self-esteem’—‘and we want to show her we love her.’ I would have to say, ‘Sorry, Mrs. Border—‘”

“And it’s true it’s going to be hard to cancel our guests,” Mrs. Border said. “If I had any hope of reaching just their answering machines I’d start telephoning this instant, but you know how people tend to pick up the receiver precisely when you don’t want to talk. I’d be forced to make all these complicated excuses.”

“Oh! It would be so difficult!” Rebecca told her.

“I did consider tacking a note to your front door, saying the party had been postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. Cowardly, I admit, but—”

“And also wasteful!” Rebecca said. “Wasting that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a memory that will last long, long after your daughter’s made up her chemistry credits and graduated and gone on to college and you’ve forgotten all about her momentary little setback.”

She stopped for air, and Mrs. Border said, “I guess we do have to remember what’s important here.”

“Absolutely,” Rebecca said. She squared her shoulders. “Oh, one thing I’d meant to call you about: when shall I expect Binstock to bring the flowers?”

“Well, they promised them for three o’clock, but now I don’t know if—”

“Three is fine,” Rebecca said smoothly. “I’ll make sure to be here. See you this evening, Mrs. Border.”

“Well… so… well, yes, I suppose,” Mrs. Border said.

Rebecca hung up and sank into a chair.

“Way to go, Beck,” Poppy said, setting aside the jam jar.

“I’m exhausted,” she told him.

And also… what was it she felt? Compromised. She was a fraud.

Yet when Poppy asked, “Isn’t it time for my nap?” she found herself once again putting on her hostess act. “You are absolutely right!” she told him, all zip and vigor. “Look at that clock! Let me help you to your room.” And she rose to slide his chair back.

He was light as milkweed, these days. He tilted against her and breathed rapidly and shallowly, clutching his cane in his free hand but relying on her for support. “There’s also the question of aches,” he announced when they reached the stairs. His breath smelled like strawberries. “Take inventory at any given moment and you have to say your back aches, your shoulders ache, your knees are stiff, your neck has a crick—”

“The moral of the story is, stop taking inventory,” Rebecca told him. “Don’t think about it. Put your mind on something else.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re still in your forties.”

“My forties! I’m fifty-three,” she said.

“You are?”

She helped him up another step.

“How did that happen so fast?” he asked.

Rebecca laughed.

After she had deposited him in his room, she crossed the hall to the family room. Superman had grown tired of pausing and the screen had reverted to a television commercial — a woman asking why her hardwood floors were so dull. Rebecca switched it off and sat down at the little spinet desk to write checks. The window washers, the gas and electric, the man who had patched the front stoop…

Gradually, her pen grew slower. She took longer and longer to reach for each new bill, until finally she came to a halt and just sat staring into space.

* * *

“I see you’re having a wonderful time,” Joe Davitch had said.

His very first remark to her.

Wasn’t it strange how certain moments, now and then — certain turning points in a life — contained the curled and waiting seeds of everything that would follow? I see you’re having a wonderful time: Joe’s view of her forever after, his unwavering belief that she was a natural-born celebrator. And look at her answer: “Yes!” she’d said. “Thanks!” Or something of the sort. In a loud and energetic tone so as to be heard above the stereo. And from that day forth she seemed to have confirmed his view, although really she had been the very opposite sort of person, muted and retiring, deeply absorbed in her studies, the only child of a widow in little Church Valley, Virginia, and engaged-to-be-engaged to her high-school sweetheart.

She had swerved onto a whole different fork in the road. (As Min Foo would put it.)

For one brief, wistful moment, Rebecca entertained the notion of turning back, retracing her steps to where the fork had first branched. Church Valley still existed, after all. Her mother was still alive. Although the high-school sweetheart, no doubt, had found somebody else to marry by now. She pictured herself returning in the dress that she had worn to that party — powder blue, scoop-necked, short-sleeved — and the powder-blue pumps still faintly splotched with ham glaze. Carrying the witty (as she’d thought then) patent leather pocketbook shaped to resemble a workman’s lunch box, although it, too, was powder blue.

In those days, everything had matched. There had not been any surprises.

* * *

“Hello-o-o!” Biddy called, and the clatter of catering trays followed the slam of the door. Then Binstock arrived with the flowers, and a woman phoned to arrange an office cocktail party, and the plasterer showed up to mend the hole in the dining-room ceiling.

Life went on, in other words.

Rebecca spread a bright cloth across the dining-room table and set one of Binstock’s arrangements in the center. “Pretty,” the plasterer said, peering down from his ladder. He had promised, cross his heart, not to create any mess, but already Rebecca could see several white flecks on the carpet. “Rick—” she said, and he said, “I know! I know! It’ll all be vacuumed up again; trust me.”

Sad when your plasterer’s such a fixture that he knows what you’re going to say before you say it.

Biddy was trying to fit her trays into the refrigerator. “What is all this?” she asked Rebecca. “It looks like you’re planning to feed the Red Army.”

“Those are leftovers from the picnic.”

For cooking, Biddy always wore surgical scrubs — a full tunic and baggy green pants that hid her skinny figure. She had her ponytail balled hygienically into a hairnet. She said, “Could you fetch me the cake stand? The glass one, with the pedestal.”

“Oh, I hope you haven’t put any writing on the cake.”

“Just Congratulations, Katie.”

“Well, Katie flunked her chemistry course.”

Biddy shut the fridge door and gave Rebecca a look.

“Could we peel off the Congratulations?” Rebecca asked. “Just leave Katie?”

“Not without any traces, we couldn’t.”

“At least they didn’t cancel,” Rebecca said, lifting down the cake stand from an overhead shelf. “I had to talk mighty fast, as you can imagine. Where’s the cake?”

“In that tin by the stove.”

The tin was a rusty white metal box that had belonged to Mother Davitch. Rebecca took the lid off and peered inside. “Maybe we could cover it with another layer of chocolate,” she said.

“I don’t have any chocolate. Do you?”

“I have peanut butter.”

But all she got for that was another look.

Sometimes Rebecca wondered what Biddy really thought of her. What any of her stepdaughters thought of her, in fact. Of course there’d been a few of those you’re-not-my-mother scenes at the start. (“You cow!” Patch had shouted once. “You big old frumpy fat cow; just wait till my mama gets back!”) By now, though, all three seemed cordial and even affectionate, in an offhand sort of way. When Biddy went through that terrible time at age twenty — losing her fiancé to an asthma attack and discovering she was pregnant just two days later — she had come straightaway to Rebecca; not to her mother. She had told Rebecca the whole situation and asked for her advice. But then she had ignored it. Not only had she made up her mind to keep the baby; but the following week she’d returned to debate moving in with her fiancé’s homosexual brother and then she had ignored that advice as well. “Do what?” Rebecca had said. “Um, Biddy, it’s awfully nice of Troy to make the offer, but please, think about this. It’s not fair to either one of you. You’ll want to meet a new man someday, whether or not you can picture that now, and it won’t be all that easy if you’re installed in another man’s house. And you know that Troy will eventually find someone of his own. This is a mistake, believe me!”

Biddy had not believed her. She’d promptly moved in with Troy.

Well, okay: Rebecca had no idea how they’d worked things out between them, but she had to admit they appeared to be a very contented couple. And Dixon could not have asked for a better father.

Still, wouldn’t you think that Biddy could have considered Rebecca’s words? Or pretended to, at least, for half a minute?

The doorbell rang, and Rebecca went to answer it. A stylish, small-boned woman in her forties stood on the stoop, dressed in a tailored beige pantsuit and tiny boots. “Mrs. Davitch?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Susan Arnette. Here to talk to your food person?”

“Oh. Right,” Rebecca said. She’d forgotten she’d set up the meeting. “Come on in, won’t you?”

She was conscious, all at once, of her own outfit. It was too loose and too wrinkled and cluttered, she realized.

On their way to the rear parlor, Mrs. Arnette hung back to ooh and ah. “Those cornices!” she said. “Look at that fretwork!”

“Yes, actually the place dates from… originally belonged to…” Rebecca recited for the thousandth time.

Just once she’d like to counter with, “Those rattly panes! Look at that dry rot!”

She seated Mrs. Arnette on the couch and went to call Biddy, who was bringing in the cake to set on the dining-room table. (“Yum,” Rick volunteered.) Biddy followed her to the parlor, wiping her palms on the seat of her scrubs. “This is Mrs. Arnette,” Rebecca told her. “She wants to discuss the food for her parents’ fiftieth anniversary. Mrs. Arnette, Biddy Davitch.”

Then she tactfully withdrew — returned to the dining room. “How’s it coming along?” she asked Rick, using her loudest, liveliest voice so that she wouldn’t seem to be eavesdropping. Although she was, of course. (Mrs. Arnette had mentioned that she might have her maid do the food, instead; so Biddy would need to scramble.) Rick said, “Oh, just finishing up.” Rebecca pulled out a chair and sat down to watch him work. There was something satisfying about the sweep of his trowel across the ceiling. All that was left of the hole was a patch of shinier white. White dust littered his hair, which was as woolly and thick as a Persian-lamb hat; but he had managed to confine most of his mess to his drop cloth. “See there?” he said. “Mr. Neatness.”

“Good for you, Rick.”

Mrs. Arnette seemed to be telling Biddy about her parents’ troubled marriage. “In fact it’s kind of a miracle that they are still together,” she said. “Twice that I can recollect, Mom has packed her belongings and gone off to live with her sister.”

“Do they have any allergies or aversions?” Biddy asked.

“What? Aversions?”

“Lots of times my older clients take against hot spices, for instance.”

Mrs. Arnette said, “No, not as far as I… Why, once Mom stayed away two years, back when I was in college. Which might mean this is not their fiftieth anniversary after all, come to think of it. Would you say it still counts as fifty years?”

“The baby artichokes, for example,” Biddy said. “I serve them with a very spicy curry sauce.”

Oh, Biddy just hid behind food. It was exasperating. Rick, however, was a whole different story: a shameless gossip, as so many workmen seemed to be. “Of course it counts,” he told Rebecca, wiping his trowel on a cloth. “Remember when me and Deena split for six months and got back together? We still considered that year a full year of marriage, though.” He shouted toward the parlor, “You would only subtract those two years if the separation was court-decreed!”

A slight pause followed, and then Mrs. Arnette lowered her voice and asked about prices.

* * *

Rebecca phoned the roofer; then the appliance man; then the exterminator. (This house would be the death of her.) Then a woman called to complain about the food at her husband’s business party. It had all been so foreign, she said. Rebecca said, “Foreign?”

“It was almost… vegetarian!”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Rebecca told her, “but my stepdaughter does attempt to keep up with the latest trends in…”

She didn’t have to think, even, as she spoke. She’d been fielding calls like this from the early days of her marriage, because the Davitches were notoriously mistrustful of the telephone. (Even Joe, to her amazement — Joe who had phoned so persistently while they were courting.) Whenever the phone rang, they spent an inordinate time debating: “Who can it be?” “It’s not for me.” “Well, I’m not expecting anyone.” “You get it.” “No, it’s your turn.” Often, the caller hung up before they got around to answering. They dreaded placing calls, as well, and would put them off for days. Monday, Phone liquor store, the kitchen calendar read; Tuesday, Phone liquor store; Wednesday, Phone liquor store; till on Thursday, maybe, or Friday Rebecca would step in — inexperienced though she was, a young and tentative bride with no management skills whatsoever — and phone the liquor store herself. She became, by default, the telephone person. By now it was automatic: “Needless to say, we are very concerned that our guests feel satisfied with our…”

She hung up just as Poppy was starting down the stairs from his nap. She heard the tap of his cane and went to help him. “Here,” he said when he saw her, and he paused to search his pockets. “Wait, now; wait, now, I know I put it…” He pulled out another folded square of paper. “Room rates,” he said.

Rebecca thought at first he’d said “roommates.” “For me?” she asked, puzzled.

“So you can send a list of hotels with the invitations.”

“Um…”

“The invitations to my birthday party, Beck! Where is your mind, these days?”

“Oh. Your birthday party.”

“You know my second cousins will want to come, Lucy out in Chicago and Keith in Detroit. And other people; there must be other out-of-towners, as soon as I think of their names. You’d never have the space for everybody to stay at the house.”

“You telephoned all these hotels yourself?” Rebecca asked. She had unfolded the square of paper and was studying the list — a column of names and numbers printed laboriously with a skippy ballpoint pen. “When did you do this?” she asked.

“After I woke up from my nap. Can we go on our walk now?”

“Yes, of course.” And she refolded the paper and tucked it into her pocket, where it rustled against the list he’d given her earlier.

This spring had been so unseasonably cool that Poppy, from habit, wore his gray V-necked cardigan; but Rebecca didn’t bother with a sweater herself. She had let in enough of the outside world today to know that the weather had turned warm. When they stepped through the door, she told Poppy, “Feel that!” and he tipped his head back and closed his eyes and said, “Ah.” Buttery June sunshine lit his face. The saplings lining the street were a vivid new green, and even above the traffic Rebecca could hear a few birds.

Funny how walking slowly could tire your muscles more quickly than walking fast. She resisted the impulse to point that out to Poppy, though; he would take it for a complaint. Instead she commented on the scenery, which presented itself inch by inch as they proceeded. “Oh, what a pity, they’ve boarded up the blue-gable house.”

“Pretty soon the Open Arms will be the only place not boarded up,” Poppy said.

It was true: this peaceful old street, once the height of elegance, was taking on a sort of toothless look. The house next door had turned into a meditation center, with a banner bearing a mandala flying above the front stoop. Around the corner, dignified mansions sported signs for bail bondsmen, palmists, and cut-rate car insurance. A place with an imposing columned porch was undergoing some kind of remodeling, and when they stopped to investigate they found a placard in the window announcing the arrival of a body-piercing parlor.

“It never reverses, you notice,” Poppy said.

“Pardon?”

“Never changes back into something better.”

“No.”

“Of course when Joe first started the Open Arms, people were none too happy. They claimed he was bringing the neighborhood down.”

“Well, he didn’t have a choice!” Rebecca said. “His father died! How else could he support the family?”

“What he originally set out to do,” Poppy said, “he wanted to make it a tourist home. You remember tourist homes. Now they’re called bed-and-breakfasts and they’re considered very tony, but back then, oh, his mother had a fit. She said, ‘I can’t be changing strangers’ bedsheets! Letting all and sundry spend the night under my roof. Whatever would the neighbors say?’ As I recall, Joe had gone and bought an old sign from some kind of salvage place. HOTEL NO VACANCY, it said. With the NO removable, for whenever they had a room free. But, ‘Over my dead body!’ his mother said. It was Zeb who thought up giving parties instead. Even that kind of went against Liddy’s grain. Better than the Hotel No Vacancy, though, she had to admit.”

Rebecca smiled. “This is the first I’ve heard of that,” she said.

“Oh, you don’t know everything, Miss Beck.”

She took his arm, and they resumed walking. They were overtaken by others, more able-bodied: a boy on Rollerblades, two girls leading a little dust mop of a dog, a middle-aged couple carrying plastic bags of groceries. The couple stayed just slightly ahead; they weren’t talking, but there was something sympathetic and companionable about the way they kept in step with each other, their shoulders gently touching.

Sometimes Rebecca had to fight down the feeling that life had treated her unfairly.

As if he had read her mind, Poppy asked, “Do you ever think of Joe anymore?”

“Naturally I think of him!” she said, almost offended.

“But can you hear his voice in your head still? Or get a flash of how he looked at some certain, particular moment, as if he were still here?”

She tightened her hold on his arm. She said, “Yes, I’ve had that happen.”

“Joycie used to say to me, ‘Oh, hell’s bells!’ Remember how she’d say that? I hear it sometimes just when I’m about to fall asleep. ‘Oh, hell’s bells!’ in that kind of squawking way she had, just as clear! Just as real! Like she’s there in the bedroom. My heart will start pounding.”

“Yes, I know,” Rebecca said.

With her, it was the pressure of Joe’s hand on the small of her back, guiding her across a street.

“Then I say, ‘Joycie, if you’re going to appear from beyond and give me a message, couldn’t it be something more useful than “Hell’s bells?”’”

Rebecca laughed, and they turned at the end of the block and started back toward home.

* * *

Patch dropped by with her youngest — Meredith, aged seven — and asked if she could leave her while she and Jeep went to a ball game. “Certainly,” Rebecca said. “She can help with the party.” She had to shout, because the disk jockey had arrived and was testing his equipment. Deep, throbbing bass notes shook the floorboards. Patch said, “She hasn’t…!” something, something, and Rebecca shouted, “What? Hasn’t what?”

“Hasn’t eaten yet!” Patch said too loudly, speaking into a sudden lull. “Time just got away from us, somehow.”

“That’s okay; we haven’t either,” Rebecca told her. “I’ll give her supper.”

Then the music took over again; so Patch waved instead of saying goodbye.

Back in the kitchen, Rebecca put Merrie to work peeling hard-cooked eggs. “We’re eating upstairs in the family room,” she said. “The party tonight’s extra early.” Deftly, she removed the plastic wrap from one of the catering trays and stole three miniature sandwiches. Then she rearranged the others to cover the gaps. Merrie, meanwhile, picked off tiny fragments of eggshell, catching her lower lip between her teeth. She was standing on the step stool, which made Rebecca think of Biddy tossing the salad so many years ago. Although Merrie looked nothing like Biddy. (She was a carbon copy of Patch, all muscle and bone in sausage-skin bicycling shorts.) But everything else was the same: the ivory metal stool with its corrugated rubber treads, and the chipped and stained sink, and the cupboards so layered with paint that their doors could never quite close.

“I had this really weird dream last night,” Rebecca told Merrie. (And why was it she just then thought of it?) “I dreamed I was on a train with my teenaged son.”

All Merrie said to this was, “We went on a train. Me and Emmy and Mama. We went on a train to Washington last week. But Danny stayed at home because it was only us girls.”

So Rebecca changed to her grandma voice and said, “Oh, what fun! What did you see? Tell me all about it!”

She loved these children, every last one of them. They had added more to her life than she could have imagined. But sometimes it was very tiring to have to speak in her grandma voice.

She set plates and silver on a tray, poured three glasses of milk, and piled some fruit in a bowl, meanwhile listening to Merrie’s Washington saga. In the back of her mind, though, her son continued traveling. He gazed out at the scenery while Rebecca studied his hands — those oddly familiar hands with the squared-off thumb joints, a pink Band-Aid wrapping one finger.

Upstairs in the family room, Poppy sat in semi-dark watching a game show. (He had a thing about turning lights on needlessly.) “The answer is Napoleon, you fool!” he was muttering as Rebecca entered. “Don’t they educate people anymore?” Still focusing on the screen, he lowered the foot of his recliner so Rebecca could unfold a snack table in front of him. “There,” he said. “Look at that. Now that woman is six points ahead and he stands to lose it all.”

The woman he was referring to was jumping up and down and clapping her hands and squealing. Game shows selected their guests on the basis of their pep, Rebecca had heard. Like cheerleaders — the same criterion. This woman had a cheerleader ponytail, even, which flew up with a kind of geyser effect each time she bounced to earth.

Poppy said, “You ought to go on this show, Beck.”

“Me?”

“You’d be a natural for it.”

Rebecca turned to stare at him, but he was watching the screen and he didn’t notice.

* * *

Katie Border — Katie the non-graduate — wore white eyelet and a wreath of daisies, just as if she had graduated after all. “My, don’t you look lovely!” Rebecca shouted above the music, but Katie just said, “Um…” Rebecca followed her eyes and saw, of course, Dixon.

Girls’ eyes were always on Dixon. He was eighteen years old and six feet tall, black-haired and brown-eyed and coolly, casually elegant even in his white waiter’s coat. But he seemed indifferent to his conquests — had, in fact, a long-term sweetheart, disappointingly plain-faced — and never responded to the girls who fluttered around him at parties. Now he was lowering a tray of stuffed mushrooms onto Merrie’s outstretched palms. While Katie, as if pulled by strings, started drifting toward him, he tracked Merrie’s progress through the crowd. Merrie seemed awfully unsteady on her feet, Rebecca noticed. Why, she was wearing high-heeled shoes. What on earth…? Also a great long string of colored wooden beads, Rebecca’s beads, actually, which were dangling in the mushrooms. Rebecca stifled a laugh and turned to catch the last of something Mr. Border was saying. “The what?” she asked. “Oh, the cornices, yes…”

Merrie tottered past an elderly couple sitting on a love seat, past a woman in a brocade dress with an armored-looking bosom, past two business-suited men, and she didn’t offer food to any of them, although one of the men seemed about to make a grab. She reached her goal — four teenaged girls, all in white — and gazed up raptly, adoringly, with the tray held out in front of her. Then Dixon approached, and the girls turned in unison and melted in his direction. Merrie asked, “Stuffed mushrooms?”

“Now, Harold here makes a wonderful martini,” Rebecca told Mr. Border. “Or if you’d prefer something nonalcoholic… Oh, you’re right, this is definitely an occasion for strong drink! Let’s ask him to fix you one, shall we?”

A light touch on Mr. Border’s elbow, a quick, bright smile toward Harold. A tilt of the head for Dixon: Could you pry Merrie away from those girls and start her circulating, please?

At a perfect party, Rebecca would be unnecessary. The drinks would flow, the trays would magically stay full, the guests would mingle freely, nobody would be standing forlornly in a corner. Then Rebecca could retreat to the kitchen, or maybe steal upstairs a while to rest her feet. But there were no perfect parties. That was something a social misfit like Rebecca knew instinctively; while the Davitches, bless their hearts, hadn’t had an inkling. Not even Joe. (Looming up beside her to announce, so mistakenly, “I see you’re having a wonderful time.”)

In the Davitches’ view, the Open Arms existed simply to provide a physical space, sometimes with food and drink as well if the customer was misguided enough not to hire an outside caterer. What they hadn’t understood was that almost more important was an invisible oiling of the gears, so to speak: pointing one person toward the liquor and another person away from it, finding a chair for an elderly aunt or loading her plate or fetching her sweater, calming an overexcited child, signaling to the DJ to lower the volume, hushing the crowd for the toasts, stepping in to fill an awkward silence. Yes, a large part of Rebecca’s job had to do with noise, really. You shouldn’t have too much noise, but neither should you have too little, and she often felt that her main function was keeping a party’s sound level at a certain larky, lilting babble, even if it meant that she was forced to babble herself.

Won’t you have a petit four? Oh, how can you say such a thing? If anything, you’re underweight! Of course, let me show you the way. The light switch is on your right, just inside the… Why don’t I freshen that drink for you? All right, everybody, gather round! I’ve been told we have a real musician with us tonight! Diet tonic water? Why, certainly! I’ll run get some from the… Whose little girl are you? And isn’t that a pretty dress! Welcome! Many happy returns! Congratulations! Best wishes!

I see you’re having a wonderful time.

* * *

“I’m thinking of taking a trip,” she told Zeb on the phone.

Often, after she was in bed, the two of them would go over their respective days together — their minor triumphs and their petty irritations. She knew that was pathetic. Most people had husbands or wives whom they could bore with such things. All Rebecca had was her kid brother-in-law — although “kid” was probably not the right term for a middle-aged bachelor doctor.

Tonight’s party had been such a success that she hadn’t had the heart to break it up at the designated hour. Now she worried she was calling Zeb too late, but he said no, he was reading. He said, “A trip would do you good. A real rest. Maybe a cruise.”

“I don’t mean that kind of trip,” she said. “I thought I might go see my mother. Just an overnight stay. Would you be willing to come to the house and spend the night with Poppy sometime?”

“Well, sure, whenever you like. Is your mother okay?”

“She’s fine,” Rebecca said. “But I was thinking I’d like to go home and sort of… reconnoiter. Check out my roots.” She gave a light laugh.

“Zeb,” she said, “do you ever get the feeling you’ve changed into a whole different person?”

Probably he didn’t (he was living in the city where he’d been born, doing what he had planned to do since childhood), but he seemed to give her question serious thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Well…”

“I mean, look at me!” she told him. “I’m a professional party-giver! I never read anymore, or discuss important issues, or go to cultural events. I don’t even have any friends.”

“You’ve got friends,” Zeb said. “You’ve got me; you’ve got the girls—”

“Those are relatives. And everyone else I know is some kind of repairman.”

“You can have friends who are relatives. You can have repairman friends.”

“But what happened to the people I knew in college? Or in high school? Amy Darrow — the girl who had her engagement party the night I met Joe, remember? Whatever happened to Amy? I didn’t even go to her wedding! By then I was married myself and all three girls had chicken pox.”

“I’m sure you could track her down if you tried.”

“I should get myself a dog,” Rebecca said.

Zeb snorted.

She said, “If I had a dog to walk, it would be easier to meet people.”

“You don’t want a dog,” Zeb told her.

“Well, it’s true they’re a lot of trouble,” she said. She traced the stitching across her top sheet. “They need to be fed and watered and taken to the vet and such.”

“They’re as demanding as toddlers,” Zeb said.

“Besides, I don’t even like dogs.”

“Then you certainly don’t want one.”

“They bark at night, and chew things.”

“Rebecca. Forget the dog.”

“But how will I make friends, then?” she asked him. She knew she was being ridiculous, but she couldn’t seem to drop the subject once she’d gotten hold of it. “I’m not good at starting conversations with some stranger on the street.”

“You could just walk around with a leash and an empty collar.”

“What? How would that help?”

“You’d see someone and she’d ask, ‘Excuse me, where’s your dog?’ And you’d say, ‘Oh, no! My dog! I must have lost him! Could you please help me look for him?’”

“Then the two of us could go on walking, getting to know each other—”

“You’d have to be careful, though, not to let that person catch you doing the same thing to someone else the next day. She’d spot you up ahead of her, you’d be dragging your empty collar, you’d be saying to someone new, ‘Oh, no! My dog! I must have lost him!’”

By now Rebecca had the giggles, and Zeb was laughing too.

Eventually, though, she said, “Well.” She sighed. “I should let you sleep. I’ll check with you again as soon as I figure out when I can leave.”

“Any time,” Zeb told her.

Then they said good night, and she hung up and lay back on her pillow.

The best way to travel to Church Valley was by car. Although it was possible, too, to take a bus. She could do that if she didn’t mind a transfer. What was not possible was a train, but somehow, even so, she pictured going by train. She pictured sitting in an aisle seat, next to the son who would have been hers if only she had continued with the life she had begun.