Back When We Were Grownups

Three

As soon as I sort my belongings I’m moving to a retirement home,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I already know which one. It’s just that I need to get my belongings sorted first.”

They were sitting in Rebecca’s mother’s living room — Rebecca in an armchair, her mother on the couch. Her mother wore her usual outfit of pastel polyester top and dark, skinny knit slacks with the creases stitched down the front. She was eighty-seven years old — a little cornhusk doll, straw-colored and drily rustling. Rebecca had outweighed her since late childhood, but she had always considered her to be a sturdy woman. It came as a shock to picture her in a retirement home. “What’s made you think of moving?” she asked. “Are you having any health problems?”

“No, not a one. But Church Valley isn’t like when you lived here, Rebecca. After they built that mall out where the duck farm used to be, why, seems we just got hollow at the center. Downtown isn’t even downtown anymore. So I signed up for a unit at Havenhurst, but I don’t know when I’ll get to go there with all these belongings to sort.”

Rebecca glanced around her. She didn’t see any evidence that her mother had started yet. Not that there was much to do — this was a small house, fastidiously tidy — but every object had the glued-down appearance of something that had stayed in the same position for decades. Two hurricane lamps were spaced symmetrically on the mantel, an Oriental vase was centered in the front window, and the table at Rebecca’s elbow bore a shrinelike arrangement of three gilt-framed photos, a candy dish, and a bowl of faded silk flowers. If she were to pick up, say, her parents’ wedding photo and set it down again, she knew her mother would be over in two seconds to readjust its location by a fraction of an inch.

“Maybe I could help,” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you,” her mother said. “I won’t forget what happened when your Aunt Ida tried to help. It took me days to undo what she’d done! And some things I could never undo. For instance, she threw away an entire sheet of postage stamps; three-cent postage stamps. I wasn’t aware of it at the time because I was out of the room, fixing her a snack. That’s how it is when people try to help: they need snacks and cups of tea, and before you know it you’ve gone to more trouble than if they’d stayed at home. I brought out a plate of those peppermint patties that she’s always been so fond of, and then she told me she was on a diet. I said, ‘What do you mean, a diet? I’ve been nagging you all your life to diet and it didn’t do the least bit of good; so why would you take it into your head now that you’re in your eighties?’ And Ida said—“

“But the stamps…” Rebecca prodded her. Then she wondered why she’d bothered, since even the stamps were not the point of the conversation.

“The thing is, I didn’t know she’d thrown them out. There I was in the kitchen, waiting on her hand and foot, and meanwhile Ida was in the living room merrily discarding my stamps. When I went to look for them later in the week, I couldn’t find them. I phoned her. I said, ‘Ida, what did you do with those stamps?’ ‘What stamps?’ she asked, innocent as an angel. ‘That sheet of stamps in my desk drawer,’ I said. ‘There’s not a thing in that drawer now but dried-up ballpoint pens with advertising on them.’ And Ida said, ‘I hope I didn’t throw them away.’ ‘Throw them away!’ I told her.”

Rebecca said, “Well, luckily they were—”

“I said, ‘Where did you throw them away?’ and she said, ‘Now I’m not saying for certain that I did, you understand.’ ‘Where?’ I said, and she said, ‘The recycling sack under the sink, maybe?’ I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘You didn’t.’ I said, ‘You couldn’t have.’ Because I’d gotten rid of that sack on paper collection day.”

“Luckily,” Rebecca said, “they were only three-cent stamps.”

“A hundred three-cent stamps, might I add. What we’re saying is, my sister threw away three dollars. And I told her as much. ‘Fine, I’ll pay you back,’ she said. ‘Next time I come over to visit, I’ll bring three dollar bills.’ Which is so exactly like her, isn’t it? I said, ‘Now, what on earth will that accomplish? You’d still have wasted three dollars, and all for nothing. We might as well have burned it; that money’s simply gone. Turned to paper soup in the recycling plant.’”

Rebecca started jiggling one foot.

“So I’ll just do my sorting on my own,” her mother told her. “Never let it be said that I’m unable to learn from experience.”

And she tucked her chin in modestly and gazed down at her lap, while Rebecca recrossed her legs and started jiggling the other foot.

* * *

It had taken her more than a month to find the time for this trip, and now they were in the full bloom of summer — a Thursday in mid-July. When they set out on a walk to Ida’s after lunch, the town appeared to be liquefied by the heat, all wavery and smeared like something behind antique window glass. The clay path leading down to the river was baked as hard as linoleum, and the footbridge’s black metal railing burned Rebecca’s hand. The river itself — wide but shallow, pebble-bottomed — seemed sluggish and exhausted, its sound less a rush than a series of slow glugs. Rebecca paused halfway across to study it. “The funniest thing,” she told her mother. “Lately, I’ve started loving rivers.”

“Loving them!”

“I’ve always liked them, of course; but I look at a river now and it just satisfies my eyes, you know? It seems to me so… old-fashioned.”

“Maybe you should move back here, then.”

“Well…”

“Why not? The girls are grown; you’ve got no responsibilities.”

“Only the Open Arms,” Rebecca said.

“The what? Oh, the Open Arms. Well, that’s the Davitches’ business; not yours.”

“No, actually, it’s mine,” Rebecca said. This was a startling thought, for some reason. She said, “It’s how I make my money, what little of it there is. How would I make any money in Church Valley?”

“I’m sure you’d find something or other,” her mother said.

“Besides, I’ve got Poppy to think of.”

“Poppy! Is that old man still alive?”

“Of course he’s still alive. Next December he’ll be a hundred. I’m planning a gigantic hundredth-birthday party for him,” Rebecca said. Then she stopped to reflect upon the oddly boastful note that seemed to have crept into her voice.

“What I’d do,” her mother said, as if Rebecca hadn’t spoken, “is put my house in your name instead of selling it. Let you move right in. Leave you most of the furnishings, even.”

Rebecca said, “Oh, I suspect you’ll need to sell your house in order to afford the retirement home.”

“I’m not getting but a little studio unit. The least expensive model. I can pay for it out of my pension.”

She had worked for nearly thirty years in the basement of the county courthouse, keeping track of old documents. Rebecca didn’t suppose that her pension was very large. She said gently, “Thanks anyhow, Mother.”

But as they climbed the steep path on the other side of the river, approaching her aunt’s part of town, she briefly entertained a fantasy of returning here to live. She imagined her routine: each day crossing the river for her meager supply of groceries, stopping first at the library the way she used to as a child. She had been the kind of child a librarian would love, she saw now, so pale and polite and considerate, careful to check that her hands were spotless before reverently selecting yet another Louisa May Alcott book. This was in the late fifties, when other children were turning to TV, but Rebecca — pudgy even then and stodgily dressed, her father dead and her mother several years older than any of her classmates’ mothers — was not in step with most other children. She had always been the town’s Bright Girl. (“Brain” was the term they used.) She tended to stay on the fringe of things, observing from a distance, and she had noticed that what she observed was often outside the normal frame of vision. It was as if she didn’t have a frame of vision, so that during the Christmas pageant her attention might be caught by some small personal drama in the audience while everybody else was watching the stage. But she was not unhappy. She had had several friends, and in high school she’d had a boyfriend. And she was good at amusing herself when she was alone. In fact she’d been very content with things just the way they were; her set-apart position had felt comfortable, and restful.

When she grew up and left for college, the librarian gave her a going-away gift: a leather-bound blank book entitled A Reader’s Life List. But Rebecca used only the first few pages, because college was when everything changed.

College was when she met Joe.

She said, “I don’t suppose Miss Bolt still works at the library, does she?”

“Good heavens,” her mother said, “I haven’t thought of Miss Bolt in ages. I’m sure she must have passed on. Anyway, now they use volunteers, and the library isn’t open but three half-days a week.”

It was ludicrous to imagine moving back here. Rebecca didn’t know a soul.

But when she pointed that out—“See there? To me Church Valley’s all strangers”—her mother said, “Oh, piffle. You know Aunt Ida. You know the Finches. And Abbie Field and Sherry and the Nolan twins.”

“Do you still see all of them?”

“Well, of course! This town is very close-knit.”

She must mean the older people in town, though, for it was clear that she didn’t recognize the various teenagers and young mothers they met walking along Grove Street. She threaded her way between them without so much as a glance; and for all the attention they paid her, she might have been invisible.

Aunt Ida lived above Gates Drugstore. Arnold Gates, the pharmacist, had been her husband, and after his death she’d sold the drugstore but arranged to continue living in the four little rooms upstairs. Nobody would have guessed she was Rebecca’s mother’s sister. She tended to put on weight, and she dyed her hair a metallic red, and she wore frilly, too-young dresses and bright makeup. Today she was all in pink — pink strappy sandals and pink toenails, even — with some kind of gauzy pink ruching knotted around her throat. And her apartment was as cluttered as her clothing. “Now, let me clear you a path,” she said as they entered. “Oh, my, what is this doing here?”—referring to a Raggedy Ann doll grinning from the carpet. A reasonable question, since Ida had no children or grandchildren. (The great tragedy of her life, she always said.) But then, she was forever opening her doors to other people’s offspring.

When Rebecca was a very small girl, she had nourished a secret daydream that her parents would painlessly die and she could go live with her aunt. Ida was so welcoming and easygoing; her household seemed capable of limitless expansion, and almost any time Rebecca dropped in she found somebody staying a week or two — a toddler whose mother was sick, or Arnold Gates’s ne’er-do-well nephew, or, on one memorable occasion, three members of a Polish wrestling team visiting Church Valley High on some kind of sports exchange program. When Rebecca’s father actually did die (felled by a stroke just after her ninth birthday), she had felt so guilty that she’d avoided her aunt for months. And besides, her mother needed her at home.

“Well, come on in where I can look at you,” Ida was saying. “Oh, my! I would never have the courage to wear plaid with paisley, but on you it’s so artistic.”

Rebecca’s mother, moving an armload of magazines so she could settle in a rocker, said, “You didn’t tell me they were painting the hardware store, Ida. We passed it and it just about hit me in the face. Oxblood, I would call it; or, no, more like magenta. I said to Rebecca, I said, ‘What a pushy color!’ And then of course the Woolworth’s; Rebecca’s not been here since they closed the Woolworth’s, and I can’t even remember the store that used to be next to it, can you? I was trying to think. Not the jeweler’s; that was across the street. Not the pet supply. Well, I know it will come to me eventually. Wait! No, not the shoe repair…”

“Sit right here; move the cat,” Ida told Rebecca. “Look at what I’ve made you! Froot Loop Bark Candy, it’s called. I got the recipe out of the paper. Isn’t it pretty? The bright spots come from the Froot Loops and the lighter spots are colored-marshmallow bits. I tried them out first on the neighbors’ little boy; he was staying here a while because, oh, it’s such a sad story…”

“A fingernail place!” Rebecca’s mother said. “That’s what it was! Can you imagine a place devoted to nothing but fingernails? No wonder it closed!”

Rebecca took a bite from her piece of candy, which looked more like some kind of novelty toilet soap. As soon as she could get her teeth unstuck, she asked her aunt, “Is that Percival?”

She meant the cat — a fat gray tabby. “Why, no, dear,” Ida said, “that’s Daisy. Percival died last Christmastime.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Yes, I had to have him put to sleep on account of kidney trouble. I wanted Dr. More to do it before he retired; you know he’d tended Percival ever since kittenhood.”

“I myself,” Rebecca’s mother said, “have never had a professional manicure in my life and I don’t believe my nails are any the worse for it. Who knows what you could pick up in such a place? Sharing instruments with strangers — files and clippers and scissors and such.”

“Dr. More retired at the end of the year when he turned sixty-five,” Ida told Rebecca. “He said he was moving to Florida.”

“Well, he should know,” Rebecca’s mother said smartly.

There was a sudden silence, as if the sisters had surprised themselves with this momentary convergence in their conversation. Then Ida sat forward, clasping her plump, ringed hands, and said, “How long will you be with us, Rebecca?”

“Just until tomorrow. I’ve left Poppy with Zeb overnight, but I should be back in time to give him lunch.”

“And tell us about NoNo! I’m so thrilled that she’s engaged.”

This was what Rebecca loved about her aunt. Her mother had not inquired after NoNo, or Patch or Biddy either; they weren’t blood relations. Her only question had concerned her “real” granddaughter, Min Foo — how her pregnancy was proceeding — and she had worn a pinched and remote expression as she asked, because she had disapproved of Min Foo ever since her second marriage, the one to LaVon. But Ida seemed equally attached to all four girls, and still sent each of them a dollar bill in a Hallmark card for their birthdays. “Your mother says NoNo isn’t planning much of a wedding,” she said now, “but I hope she’ll change her mind. Is she thinking she’s too old? She’s not too old! Nowadays lots of people don’t get married till their forties. And she’s waited so long for Mr. Right; all the more reason to celebrate.”

“Oh, she’s celebrating, for sure,” Rebecca said. “Along with you two, I trust,” she added, sending them each a glance. Ida beamed and nodded. Rebecca’s mother gazed thoughtfully at a rainbow afghan on the floor. “What she means is, she doesn’t want anything formal. And that’s partly because of her age but more, I think, because Barry’s been married before.”

“Well, what has that got to do with the price of eggs in China?” Ida asked.

“Tea,” Rebecca’s mother said.

“What?”

“Tea in China.”

“The bride is the one who counts,” Ida said. “You tell her so, Rebecca. Tell her to have a long white dress, a veil — the works. Flower girls, attendants… Tell her Barry should have a best man. Maybe his son, if he’s old enough. Is he old enough?”

“He’s twelve.”

“That’s plenty old enough!”

“Well, maybe,” Rebecca said. “He’s kind of a young twelve, though.”

“How does he get along with NoNo?”

“All right, I guess. It’s hard to say. He’s very quiet. At our Fourth of July barbeque, he just sat in a corner and read a book.”

“Well, he’s going to love you-all once he gets to know you,” Ida said.

She passed the candy again, but this time Rebecca and her mother both refused. Ida herself was the only one who took a second piece. “Law,” she said, licking each finger daintily, “it seems like yesterday we three were planning your wedding! You made the prettiest bride.”

“Well, I certainly had a pretty dress,” Rebecca said, because the dress had been sewn by her mother and Ida, working almost around the clock. (She’d given them two weeks’ notice.)

“We took down all your measurements and then you lost eight pounds, remember? We got to Baltimore the day of the wedding and found you just a shadow of your former self. Right up till time for the ceremony we had to baste and pin and tuck… You’d turned into a skeleton! I guess it was bridal jitters.”

Rebecca had been nowhere near a skeleton; just slightly less fat than usual. And that was due to pure happiness, not to jitters. She had been so extravagantly happy! She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep. She had walked around in a trance.

Yet that wedding had made a great many people unhappy. The boyfriend whom she’d jilted, needless to say; but also her mother and Ida, who had never so much as heard Joe’s name before she stunned them with her news on an unannounced trip home. “Wait: I thought you were marrying Will,” her mother had said. And, “You’ve known this person how long? He makes his living doing what?” And finally, “I just have to point out, Rebecca, that this is mighty convenient for him. A case where a man is so needful, where a wife would be so useful. Three little girls to take care of! And their mother nowhere in sight! I guess he would want to marry!”

Rebecca had accused her mother of doubting that anyone could love her. She had left the house in tears, slamming the door behind her, vowing not to return. “I never said…!” her mother called, trailing her down the driveway. “I only meant… Couldn’t you first have a long engagement? What’s your hurry?”

A question asked as well by people at Macadam — her faculty advisor and her history professor. Why sacrifice a college degree, they said, to marry a near-stranger thirteen years her senior? Why not wait till she graduated?

And on Joe’s side, there were his daughters. Oh, his mother was ecstatic; you’d think the whole romance was her idea. And the other adults seemed delighted. But his daughters were stony-faced and resistant. They left Rebecca’s chirpy remarks hanging foolishly in midair, and they found a million reasons to mention “our mama” in her presence. More than once, in those two weeks before the wedding, they had made Rebecca cry.

So many tears, now that she looked back! It hadn’t been pure happiness after all. Part of that time, she’d been miserable.

But always there was Joe.

He drew her close and she pressed her face against his ropy brown throat. He called her his corn-fed girl, his creamy one, his beautiful blond milkmaid. (All those dairy-type references.) He wiped her eyes with his handkerchief that carried his smell of warm toast.

So was it the happiness or the misery that had made her lose those eight pounds?

Which, anyway, she had regained soon enough after the wedding.

Her mother and Aunt Ida were on the next subject by now — or the next two subjects. Her mother was saying that lately it seemed any chair she sat in was a struggle to get out of, and Ida was saying simultaneously that it wasn’t only her vet who had retired but her doctor as well, and also her podiatrist, both of them replaced by mere whippersnapper youngsters. There was a pause, and then Ida said, “Old again”—announcing yet another convergence of topics. And they sighed and started off their next two conversational paths.

* * *

For supper her mother served chicken salad and peas. She spent a long time on her preparations, because she believed in taking no shortcuts. First she had to disjoint a hen and poach it, then make her own mayonnaise with a little hand-cranked eggbeater. Rebecca was not allowed to help because, her mother said, she tended to be too slapdash. “You can set the table, though,” she said, as if offering a gift, but then she did it over again after Rebecca had finished — squaring the place mats and straightening the silver. Rebecca gave up and sat down to watch while her mother ran water into a pitcher and emptied it three times before finally letting it fill.

“I was wondering,” Rebecca said. “Instead of moving to Havenhurst, why not invite Aunt Ida to live here with you? She’s alone and you’re alone. Wouldn’t it make sense?”

“Goodness, no, she talks too much,” her mother said. “Besides, it’s not that I want to live with somebody. I just don’t want to live by myself.”

Rebecca laughed, but she understood what her mother meant.

“Also, Ida’s so messy,” her mother said. “And more difficult to get along with than you might suppose. Did you try her Froot Loop candy? It was sweet enough to give me an earache! Yet she turned down those peppermint patties at my house. Well, I know why she turned them down. She wasn’t on any diet; no, sir. She just prides herself on being the generous one. She doesn’t like to switch roles. It interferes with her theory of the universe, that I should be the one to bring her a plate of goodies.”

Meanwhile, she was putting away the napkins that Rebecca had set out and bringing forth others — neither better nor worse, just different. Rebecca smiled to herself.

After they had finished their meal (which was, as always, bland and pallid-tasting, so underseasoned that no amount of salt seemed able to set things right), they watched the news on the huge old black-and-white TV in the living room. “Oh, honestly,” her mother kept telling the announcer. “Oh, for gracious sake.” She plucked irritably at the crease in her slacks. “Look at that,” she said when a group of congressmen appeared on the screen. “Children are running the country now. Every one of those men is younger than I am.”

“Well, but…” Rebecca said. She hesitated. She said, “Everyone just about everywhere’s younger than you are, by now.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that, thank you,” her mother said. “But it’s more noticeable, somehow, when they’re the government. You know? If I thought about it long enough — the whole U.S. in these people’s hands — I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

“For me,” Rebecca said, “it’s just the opposite. Those men are younger than I am, too; at least a lot of them are. But I look at their gray hair and I think, ‘Old guys,’ as if I didn’t realize that I’m getting old myself.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” her mother said. “Fifty-three! A mere child.”

The congressmen faded away and a throng of soldiers appeared, wearing antique uniforms but sauntering across a field in a distinctly modern, offhand manner. They were reenacting one of the major battles of the Civil War, a reporter explained. Every attempt had been made to ensure that their equipment was authentic, although of course they were not using live ammunition.

“Men,” Rebecca’s mother said. “If they can’t find any good reason to fight, they have to make one up.”

The clock on the mantel struck the quarter hour, playing part of a hymn in golden-throated notes. One of the men fell down on a hillock of grass.

“Do you remember your paper on Robert E. Lee?” her mother asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“You invented this whole new theory about why he chose to side with the South. Remember? Your professor was thrilled.”

“Professor Lundgren,” Rebecca recalled. She hadn’t thought of him in years — his high, veined forehead and translucent hair.

“Come see him in his office, he said. He had such big plans for you! That’s when you decided to change your major to history.”

Rebecca said, “Oh, well.” She was afraid they might be working around to how she’d dropped out of college. “No great loss, really,” she said. “I don’t think it was history that interested me so much as… tracking down the clues, you know? Like a kind of detective story. Coming across that book no one else had bothered to read; it was the first time I’d seen the fun of independent research.”

“He wanted you to expand your paper into an honors project. But before you even got started, bang! Joe Davitch hove into view.”

“Oh, well.”

“And poor Will Allenby; poor Will,” her mother said, making a sudden right-angle turn. “He never even knew what hit him! One day you two were as good as engaged, and the next day you’d married a man nobody knew from Adam.”

“It wasn’t the next day,” Rebecca said. “It wasn’t quite as sudden as that.”

“It was as far as anybody hereabouts could tell.”

Fair enough, Rebecca supposed. It was true that she had kept Joe a secret. But at the start it had seemed so innocent — just a casual visit when he happened to be passing through Macadam. (Though if it had really been that casual, why had she not mentioned it to Will?) He had taken her for a sandwich at a diner just off campus, entertained her with a couple of funny stories about his work. The party the evening before, he said, had been a wedding reception where the bridal couple’s mothers had nearly come to blows. “We all know perfectly well,” the groom’s mother had shouted, “why your daughter is getting married in a dress with an umpire waistline!” Rebecca had laughed, and Joe had sat back and watched her with a fond, considering smile that made her wonder, suddenly, whether they already knew each other from some earlier time in her life that she had simply forgotten. But no, she surely would have remembered this larger-than-life man with the complicated upper lip that reminded her of a cursive letter M. “You were laughing the first night I saw you, too,” he told her. “You were enjoying the party more than anyone else in the room.”

She didn’t contradict him.

Everything might have turned out differently if she had.

He said he had started the Open Arms in 1951, when he’d left college for financial reasons after his father — an ironically uninsured insurance agent — had died without warning. “So is that… what you do?” Rebecca asked him. “I mean, is that your whole profession?”

“Yes, there you have it,” he said. “Nothing in my life but parties, parties, parties.”

She glanced at him, thinking she had detected a certain edge in his voice. But then he went on to give a very amusing account of a christening celebration where a child had dropped the baby into the punch bowl, and she decided she’d been imagining things.

She did tell him about Will Allenby. Or she alluded to him, at least: she said, “my date and I,” when discussing a movie she’d seen. Granted, she didn’t use the term boyfriend. But that would have been sort of tactless, wouldn’t it? Sort of bragging and inconsiderate.

Will Allenby was long-boned and slender and self-contained, with a cloud of yellow curls and an expression of luminous sweetness. He attended Macadam too — certainly not by coincidence — and they were planning to marry as soon as they graduated. This was in the 1960s, when half their classmates seemed to be sleeping with the other half, but they themselves were waiting till after their wedding. At the end of every evening, they kissed and kissed and kissed, clinging to each other, trembling, but then they parted company — Will to go off to his dorm, Rebecca to hers. “Au revoir,” Will always said, because using the word goodbye, he claimed, would make him too sad. Rebecca found this incredibly romantic, especially when he remembered to gargle that first r the way the French did.

None of this came up in her conversation with Joe at the diner, however, or in any of their other conversations. For there were other conversations. He telephoned two days later to solicit her advice about a Sweet Sixteen party. Rebecca had never been Sweet Sixteen herself (she’d been sixteen-going-on-forty, she felt), but nobody would have guessed it from her flood of helpful suggestions. And when he dropped by the following week on his way to a linen outlet, although Macadam wasn’t really on his way at all, wouldn’t her friends have been surprised to see how readily she slid into his car to accompany him, and how authoritatively she coached him on his selection of cocktail napkins, embroidered guest towels, and stenciled table runners!

“I find myself in Macadam” became his regular excuse, although Macadam was nearly an hour’s drive from Baltimore, over near D.C. “I find myself in Macadam and I wondered if you’d like to…” Grab a cup of coffee. Hunt a book in the college bookstore. Help select new stemware. In the course of three weeks he visited seven times, and after every visit, her first act was to return to her room and check her own face in the mirror. Her pink cheeks and her shining eyes, still a bit damp from laughter, and her heavy crown of braids. Was this how Joe Davitch saw her?

She spent an hour, once, doodling what looked like birds in flight — those shorthand double tildes that children fill the skies of their drawings with — before she admitted to herself that she was trying to capture the shape of his upper lip.

It was inevitable that Will should find out. His roommate reported seeing her with “some man” in downtown Macadam. Rebecca said, “Oh, for goodness sake. That was only Joe Davitch! He’s thirty-three years old. He’s nothing but a friend.”

Noticing, meanwhile, how she treasured the excuse to utter his name.

Although she believed that she meant what she said: she wasn’t in love with Joe. It was more that she was swept along by him, was how she put it to herself. She fell into this giddy mood whenever she was with him — laughing so uncontrollably, acting so lighthearted. Acting lighthearted. It wasn’t her true nature.

Once when they were taking a drive she developed such a case of the giggles that she popped a button on the waistband of her skirt. (They were listening to a ball game and he began impersonating one of those chatty sports commentators — inventing human-interest stories about the players because, he said, baseball was so slow-moving that they’d both die of boredom otherwise. “How’s that pitcher coming along with potty-training his kid, do you know?” he asked his imaginary colleague.) And once he brought his three daughters with him, and Rebecca, as easily as breathing, rallied them around and raced them to the little pond behind the gym, ducking into the cafeteria for stale rolls as they passed. “Look!” she called when they reached the pond. “Fish! Who wants to feed them?” The children stared at her silently — stolid Biddy, who seemed to have no recollection of meeting her before, and belligerent Patch and wary little NoNo. Eventually, though, they accepted the rolls and tossed them into the water. Rebecca said, “Wonderful!” and clapped her hands together. Joe stood slightly apart, smiling his fond smile at her.

With his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets.

His beautifully hinged pelvic bones.

His narrow, dark-brown eyes watching only Rebecca.

* * *

He telephoned one Wednesday afternoon and invited her to supper at his house the following evening. “My mother wants to make it up to you,” he said. “She’s ashamed of falling apart the night you first came here.”

Rebecca hesitated. She felt imposed upon, for some reason. She almost wished she hadn’t answered the phone.

“Please say yes,” he told her. “Mom’s worried you’ll think she always drops hams on her guests’ shoes.”

So she laughed and said, “Well, all right.”

She was sorry, though, the minute she hung up. What did she imagine she was doing?

And she didn’t have an inkling what to wear. First she put on something that would have been suitable for church — a beige shirtwaist, conservative — but at the last minute she switched to an embroidered peasant dress with a drawstring neckline because Joe had once asked admiringly if she were of Swedish descent. (She wasn’t.) The skirt was very full and she realized, too late to change yet again, that it made her hips look even wider than they were. “She has such a pretty face,” she imagined Mrs. Davitch saying behind her back, with the rest of the remark understood: It’s a pity she’s so heavy.

The car she drove was her roommate’s — a Volkswagen Beetle. She had told her roommate she was going to dinner with the family of a friend. “Family friends,” it might have sounded like. (None of her girlfriends knew about Joe. She had not confided in anyone; she didn’t want to give him, oh, meaning. Importance.) She propped the directions on the passenger seat, although she felt fairly confident about finding the Open Arms a second time, and she drove with the radio off, both hands clasping the wheel, her expression calm and impassive. It was all right to be doing this. She was completely blameless. The Davitches honestly, truly were just the family of a friend.

Joe was the one who answered the doorbell, but his mother was right behind him. “Welcome, honey!” she cried, and she pressed her soft cheek to Rebecca’s. Her hair was set in finger waves so crisp they made a sizzling sound. “And happy birthday!” she added.

Rebecca said, “Birthday?”

“Oh, I know it’s not till Saturday, but we’re generally booked on Saturdays so Thursdays are when we always have our family celebrations.”

Rebecca looked at Joe, who was grinning. “I peeked at your driver’s license,” he said. “The seventh of May. You’ll be twenty.”

Had he also seen what she weighed? was her immediate thought.

“When I turned twenty I already had a two-year-old,” Mrs. Davitch said. “But I don’t know; young women nowadays are more focused on careers, I’m afraid.”

This time the Open Arms seemed less grand, perhaps because there was no crush of guests to hide the flaws. The floorboards creaked under Rebecca’s feet, and the couch in the front parlor had a slumped and burdened look, and the crystal chandeliers were dull with dust. Draped across the mantel was a pale-blue satin swag reading BIRTHDAY GREETINGS in silver spangles, some of which had flaked off to glitter on the hearth below. Rebecca said, “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” but Mrs. Davitch said, “Anything for you, dear one!”

Rebecca had the same eerie feeling that Joe’s fond smile often gave her. Did this woman know her from somewhere?

Then here came the kid brother, bounding into the room like a puppy. Zeb? Yes, that was his name. Wearing a suit too short in the sleeves and a clumsily knotted tie. Before he could shake her hand — while he was stumbling over the rug on his way to greet her — the front door flew open with a slamming sound. “It’s only us!” a woman trilled. A heavily rouged, brassy blonde in a fluid black jersey dress, and a gray-haired man with a handlebar mustache. The man was unexpectedly familiar. He had passed the hors d’oeuvres at Amy’s party, Rebecca realized; only then he’d been wearing a waiter’s white coat and now he was in a maroon smoking jacket with quilted lapels. “Meet Aunt Joyce,” Joe told Rebecca, “and Poppy, my uncle. Folks, this is Rebecca.”

“Look at you!” Aunt Joyce said, hugging her tightly. “You’re every bit as pretty as Joe told us!” She stepped back to pat her husband’s shoulder. “Poppy here is Joe’s father’s brother; I don’t know if you know. He and Joe’s father were identical twins, so if you want to see what Joe’s father looked like—”

“Well, I’m planning to show her the album after dinner,” Mrs. Davitch said. “Would you believe I’ve finally brought that album up to date? I spent half this afternoon pasting pictures in, just so Beck could get to know the family.”

Rebecca (who had never been called Beck in her life, or any other nickname) felt a combination of pleasure and panic. This situation seemed to be rushing on without her — Zeb saying, “Geez, Mom, you’re not going to show her those old photos! They’re so embarrassing!” while Poppy told Aunt Joyce, “Number one, we were not identical twins; we were fraternal. And number two, we looked nothing alike. Nothing whatsoever.”

“Oh, lovey, you just don’t want to admit you aren’t unique,” Aunt Joyce said. “Get used to it! How about you?” she asked Rebecca. “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“Well, no—”

“Isn’t that a coincidence!” Mrs. Davitch broke in. “Joe was very nearly an only child too. I couldn’t get pregnant again for ages no matter how hard I tried, which explains why I have one son thirty-three and another just barely sixteen.”

“Great, Mom,” Zeb groaned. “Let her know how old I am, why don’t you.”

“Well, it’s not a state secret, Zeb. Poppy, could you pass the dip around? I’m going to check on dinner.”

“Why doesn’t Zeb pass the dip?” Aunt Joyce asked Mrs. Davitch. “Poppy’s not on duty tonight.”

“I didn’t say he was, did I? I only asked if he’d help.”

“Be glad to,” Poppy told her, bending for the tray on the coffee table. But Aunt Joyce seized his arm and then wheeled on Mrs. Davitch to say, “Just because he fills in sometimes in a pinch doesn’t mean he has to spend a family night waiting tables, Liddy Davitch.”

“Now, Joycie,” Poppy began, while Mrs. Davitch’s chin started wobbling and she said, “Oh, that’s so unfair of you!”

“Would you ask your doctor to check your appendix if you met him socially?”

“That is so uncalled for!”

“I’ll just pass it myself, why don’t I?” Rebecca suggested, and she stepped between the two women to lift the tray. (Celery sticks and carrot sticks that had been sliced too far ahead of time, from the looks of them, with a bowl of sour-cream-and-onion-soup-mix dip at the center.) “Have some,” she told Zeb, who happened to be standing practically on top of her. Zeb seized a carrot stick, dropped it, and stooped to retrieve it. “Joe?” she said. “Celery? Carrots?”

“Thanks,” he told her, but he stood smiling down at her without taking a thing. Rebecca flushed and moved on, finally.

Mrs. Davitch said, “Well, aren’t you nice.” She dabbed beneath her eyes with her index fingers and gave Rebecca a watery smile. Then Poppy asked, “Drinks, everybody?” and went over to the cocktail cart. This time, Aunt Joyce raised no objection.

Within the next half hour, several more people arrived — two male cousins, another uncle, and a middle-aged woman named Iris, her relationship to the others never specified. Each of them walked in without knocking, slamming the front door into the closet door, and each seemed to know all about Rebecca. “Did you find a summer job yet?” one of the cousins asked, and Iris said, “I majored in history, too; I expect Joe will have mentioned.” They filled the rear parlor, the women perching on the very edge of the couch with their knees set all at the same angle like a chorus line; and they talked about people Rebecca didn’t know, but they kept sending her complicitous smiles so that she felt included.

Dinner, when it was finally served (much too late, after some apparent crisis in the kitchen) was roast beef and mashed potatoes and salad. The roast was dry, the potatoes lumpy, the salad leaves transparent with store-bought dressing. Mrs. Davitch acknowledged all this with a moaning sort of laugh, but her guests said everything was fine. They spent most of the meal arguing about another cousin — an absent cousin — who either had or had not said something rude to Mrs. Davitch about her husband’s death. Mrs. Davitch was of the opinion that his remark had been very hurtful, but Aunt Joyce pointed out that suicide was suicide and she might as well face up to the fact. Mrs. Davitch set her fork down and covered her eyes with one hand.

Rebecca hadn’t known that Joe’s father was a suicide. She looked across the table at Joe, but he appeared to be concentrating on his meal.

Dessert was a chocolate layer cake blazing with twenty candles, the top layer slightly askew and held in place with toothpicks. For that, the little girls were summoned from upstairs — all three in pajamas and squinting crossly from an evening of watching TV in the dark. “Give Beck a birthday kiss, now,” Aunt Joyce ordered, and they hung back at first but eventually obeyed, each leaving a tiny star of dampness on Rebecca’s cheek. Then everybody sang “Happy Birthday,” while Rebecca gazed around the table and pretended that she belonged here — that she was the much-loved member of a large and boisterous family, just as she had yearned to be when she was a child.

Later all the adults settled once more in the parlor, and Mrs. Davitch laid the photo album across Rebecca’s knees so that everyone could explain just who was who. Here was Mrs. Davitch herself, unrecognizably girlish in flared khaki shorts from the forties. Here was Mr. Davitch, with Joe’s broad smile but, yes, perhaps a slightly shadowed look around the eyes. Here was baby Zeb chewing on a teething ring, and here a teenaged Joe — nudge, nudge — in a very loud houndstooth sports coat with shoulders sharp as wings. No attempt had been made at chronological order: the present-day Aunt Joyce, overblown and dumpy, was followed by Aunt Joyce in a willowy, wasp-waisted bridal gown. And there wasn’t a sign of Joe’s ex-wife, although several shots of his children had had someone scissored out of them.

Rebecca sat very straight-backed, and she refrained from touching a picture even when asking a question about it. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was presuming. She knew she was a guest here, she meant. She knew these colorful relatives weren’t hers.

But when Joe walked her out to the car at the end of the evening, he said, “Everybody felt you were like a member of the family. You fit right in, they told me.”

“Well, they were very hospitable,” she said.

“They think I ought to marry you.”

“What?”

“I’d told them ahead that I wanted to.”

She stopped at the curb and turned to him. “Joe—” she said.

“I know,” he said.

All at once she grew conscious of the stillness of the evening, the absence of any traffic, the hushing sound of new leaves on the little tree beside them. When he took a step toward her, she thought he meant to kiss her, and she knew she would kiss him back. Instead, though, he slowly, solemnly, carefully tied the drawstring at her neckline.

Why did that make her knees go limp?

She gave a shaky laugh and turned to get into her car. “Well,” she said, “thanks for dinner. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” he said.

He closed her door so gently behind her that she thought at first it wasn’t latched. But it was.

* * *

Friday, there was no word of him. Well, thank goodness. Friday evening she and Will went to the movies. Saturday they shared a pizza for her birthday, and Will gave her a locket with his photograph inside. She kept thinking Joe would pop up somewhere. She walked self-consciously, keeping her head high. But he never appeared.

Sunday, Will’s mother and Rebecca’s met them for brunch at Myrtle’s Family Restaurant. It was a tradition, once a month or so, since Macadam was an easy drive from Church Valley. At the end of the meal, Rebecca’s mother said it was her turn to pay. The bill was not very large, but Rebecca felt a pang when her mother pulled her worn cloth coin purse from her pocketbook. Later, as they were walking back to campus, Rebecca asked Will, “Why don’t we ever pay for brunch?”

“Oh, well, you know how our moms like to give us a little treat,” he said.

It was the word moms that got her — that weak and childish word falling from his lips. “Oh,” she said, “I’m so sick of this eternal… studentness! Each thing in its own time, every stage of our lives waiting for the proper, reasonable moment!”

Will said, “Pardon?”

Didn’t he seem so young, all at once! So loosely constructed, and narrow through the jaw! So half-baked, really.

“Rebecca?” he asked. “Is something the matter?”

“No,” she said. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

It occurred to her that she led an absolutely motionless existence. There was nothing to look forward to in it. Nothing whatsoever.

* * *

Monday evening, as usual, they met in the library to study. Rebecca arrived first, and a few minutes later Will sat down at her table and opened his leather briefcase. Shuffle, shuffle, his notes emerged, and two textbooks arrived with a thud, followed by a loose-leaf binder, followed by a great array of pens and pencils. His red ballpoint for editing, black fountain pen for composing, lead pencil for notes in borrowed books, and blue ballpoint for the books that he owned. Each one he aligned precisely with the others at the head of his place. Watching made Rebecca feel itchy.

He opened his loose-leaf binder and smoothed a page that was already smooth.

On April 19, 1861, Rebecca forced herself to read, troops were ordered transferred from…

Something made her glance toward the library door — a flash of movement. She looked through the center windowpane and found Joe Davitch’s laughing eyes. She scraped her chair back. Will set an index finger on his page and raised his head. “Goodbye, Will,” she told him.

“Huh?” he asked. “You’re leaving? So soon? I still have work to do!”

“That’s all right; stay where you are.”

“Oh. Well. Okay. So, um… au revoir, I guess.”

“No,” she said. “Goodbye.”

And then she walked out the door and into Joe Davitch’s arms.

* * *

Or that was how she described it to her grandchildren, years later.

Gliding over the complications: the second, third, and fourth goodbye scenes that Will thickheadedly seemed to require; the loose ends left behind at school with exams not taken, spring semester incomplete; the general dismay when she moved, bag and baggage, to the Open Arms’ third floor two weeks before the wedding. “Oh, I know this person must be very attractive,” her mother said on the phone. “Very handsome and good-looking; I can just imagine. Probably has no end of charm. But I have to ask you this, Rebecca: do you realize what you’re getting into? We’re talking about the man who’ll be holding your hand when you die. Or you’ll be holding his hand when he dies. Is that something you have considered?”

“Die?” Rebecca said.

“No, I thought not,” her mother said grimly.

Then at another point — at several other points: “And what about poor Will? What about his mother? How on earth will I ever face Maud Allenby again?”

She probably hadn’t faced Maud Allenby again, Rebecca thought now. She probably crossed the street to avoid her, even after all these years. She turned from an aspirin commercial to ask, “Do you ever see Mrs. Allenby?”

“She passed away,” her mother said, not taking her eyes from the screen. “I thought I told you.”

Rebecca said, “Oh!” She did seem to recollect that she had heard that.

“But we’d stopped keeping company long before,” her mother said. “It just never was the same after you jilted Will.”

“Well, I’m sure he managed to survive it,” Rebecca told her.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I wouldn’t have any idea. I don’t know where he settled, what he’s doing, whether he ever remarried…”

Rebecca waited for her mother to correct herself, but she didn’t; so finally she said, “He couldn’t remarry; he wasn’t married in the first place.”

“The fact of the matter is,” her mother said, “Will Allenby was your true soul’s companion. I still believe that. The two of you had so much in common; you were so much in love; you understood each other so well. Maud and I talked about it often. ‘Aren’t they compatible?’ I used to say. ‘It’s just as if they knew each other from some previous incarnation. They’re both such old, wise souls,’ I said. ‘They belong together, those two.’”

Rebecca turned to look at her.

“You became a whole different person after you jilted Will,” her mother said.

* * *

Rebecca’s girlhood room still had the same furniture — a twin bed with a white-and-gilt “French provincial” headboard, a low bureau with an attached oval mirror, and a nightstand topped with a doily. But all personal traces of her had vanished long ago, and when she walked in with her overnight bag she could just as well have been entering a hotel room. It didn’t even smell like her anymore. Not that she was certain what her own smell was; but this smell was her mother’s, clean but musty, unused.

What kept her mother going, these days? Her life seemed so stagnant: the tea-and-toast breakfast, the few dishes washed and dried afterward, the bedclothes pulled up, the carpet sweeper rolled across an already immaculate carpet…

Well, what kept anyone going? Who was Rebecca to talk?

The telephone rang — the turquoise Princess phone with a rotary dial that still sat on the nightstand — and a moment later she heard a tapping on her door. “Rebecca?” her mother called. “It’s Joe’s brother.”

“Oh, thanks,” she said, and she picked up the receiver.

She assumed it was something routine until she heard the thin blade of distress in his voice. “I’m sorry as hell to bother you—” he started right in.

“What’s the matter?”

“The basement: it’s filling with water. But there hasn’t been a drop of rain; I don’t know what—”

“Which part of the basement?”

“The part over by the window.”

“Darn,” she said. “It’s the main drain again.”

“What does that mean? What should I do?”

“Are you upstairs?” she asked him.

“Yes, I’m in the family room. I don’t know what happened! I went down to put my laundry in the dryer; I’d done a little wash earlier. And all at once I was walking in water. There was this horrible sloshing sound! It was like something in a nightmare!”

Rebecca tried not to let her amusement show in her voice. “Now, Zeb,” she said, “this is not all that much of a problem. It’s the tree next door’s roots clogging up the drain line, that’s all. Mr. Burdick will have it fixed in no time.”

“This late at night?”

“No, we’ll have to wait till morning. But you should call him now to let him know we need him. Go over to my desk, get my little leather address book—”

“What if the water keeps rising?”

“It won’t. Just don’t turn on any more faucets than you can help, and try not to flush any toilets. I’ll start out extra early tomorrow so I can be there when Mr. Burdick arrives.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Rebecca. I wanted you to have a worry-free visit.”

“I am worry-free,” she said. “And you should be, too. This is not a serious problem. Just call Mr. Burdick — John Burdick & Sons.”

“Well,” Zeb said. “All right.”

She could tell he was reassured. His voice had returned to its usual level rumble.

“How’s Poppy doing?” she asked him.

“He’s okay. He’s gone to bed. He asked me twice what time you were coming home.”

“Tell him, oh, say, nine a.m. And tell Mr. Burdick, too. I don’t want him getting there before me.”

“Okay, Rebecca. Thanks.”

“Good night, Zeb.”

She hung up and reached for the alarm clock, an old Baby Ben that had been allowed to run down. First she wound it, and then she set the alarm for 6:00.

Any time now, she was convinced, that house was going to end up a heap of rubble. Only she knew all its hidden ailments. She remembered the day she’d moved in — the shock of the upstairs with its fake-wood-grain metal bedsteads and rickety pressboard bookshelves. The casual guest would never suspect how the windows stuck, and the faucets dripped, and the walls appeared to be suffering from some sort of skin disease. From a distance, the place looked so imposing.

If her very first meeting with Joe had foretold her role in his life forever after, she thought as she undressed, hadn’t it also foretold her role in the Open Arms? For it seemed the place was always beset by disasters, both physical and social, and Rebecca was always, by default, coming to the rescue. Not that she’d had any aptitude for it. She wasn’t much of a cook; she couldn’t hammer a nail straight; she’d been a wallflower from birth. But gradually, she had learned. She’d become more take-charge, almost bossy. “Have you grown taller?” her mother asked on one of her rare visits. “There’s something different.” Rebecca hadn’t grown an inch, but she agreed there was something different. She felt she took up more space. Her voice sounded louder now, even to her, and her laugh had acquired a ha-ha sound while before, it had been mere breath.

Standing naked in this room where she had spent her childhood, slipping her nightgown over her head and letting it fall to her ankles, she thought how her past self would have gasped at the sight of her. The old Rebecca would never have known the woman she saw in the mirror, with the hair like a heap of cornflakes and the ramshackle face. She would have been put off by the slipshod, heedless way this woman strode toward her bed.

She folded the spread back and whacked it flat.

Surprisingly, she had no trouble getting to sleep. She turned once, tossed aside her blanket, turned again, and Poppy was celebrating his birthday. The Open Arms was packed with guests, all the women in hoopskirts and the men in Confederate gray. But Rebecca had on the chambray smock spotted with bleach that she wore for heavy cleaning. She glanced down at herself and, “Oh, fiddle!” she said, in a flirty Southern voice like Scarlett O’Hara’s. Then she saw that one of the guests was Will Allenby. He walked over to her, smiling, holding his hat in his hand. He wasn’t one day older than the very last time she had seen him: twenty. His chest was paved with medals and his riding pants stretched taut over his long thighs.

She opened her eyes in the dark and felt a deep ache of regret.