Back When We Were Grownups

Five

The house had a post-wedding atmosphere: crumbs ground into the carpet, paper napkins splotching the grass, soiled white satin ribbons drooping listlessly from the mantel. Peter returned to his room after breakfast and shut the door and remained there. Tina left for the airport with a skeleton crew of luggage bearers, her hair a sickly pink in the morning light. Alice Farmer washed stemware so silently and morosely that she might have been hung over, except that she didn’t drink.

The telephone kept ringing in a jarring way, and each time Rebecca answered, the cold, smooth weight of the receiver brought back last night’s call to Will. She felt battered and damaged and mortified. It was all that she could do not to hang up in mid-conversation.

“… only thinking of the baby,” Patch was saying at the other end of the line. “It’s not my fault Min Foo’s so sensitive. I just mentioned it for the baby’s sake.”

Mentioned what? Rebecca had lost track.

“Face it: Fatima’s a terrible name! And has anybody considered what they’d be bound to call her for short?”

Rebecca caught sight of what seemed to be a wine stain on the Redial button. Focusing her eyes required a great amount of effort, she noticed.

“Beck? Are you there? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, well… maybe it will be a boy,” Rebecca said.

“NoNo has decided it’s a girl,” Patch told her. “Min Foo’s not even considering boys’ names anymore, which is very shortsighted in my opinion because NoNo isn’t half as clairvoyant as she thinks she is.”

Rebecca started kneading her forehead.

“Otherwise, why would she marry a man like Barry Sanborn?”

“This all seems so pointless,” Rebecca said after a pause.

“Well, pardon me,” Patch snapped, and she slammed down the receiver.

Rebecca wondered where Patch found the energy for so much indignation.

At noon she set out leftovers and called Poppy and Peter to lunch. It wasn’t a sociable meal. Poppy kept stealing glances at a magazine lying open beside his plate. Peter concentrated on his food, peeling every last strip of fat from his ham and separating the carrot shreds from his salad before he ate it.

Then Poppy went off for his nap, but when Peter started toward the stairs Rebecca slung an arm around his shoulders, even though it meant she practically had to body-block him first. “How about you and me going out for ice cream?” she asked. “Get ourselves a little fresh air.”

“No, thanks,” he said, standing limp within her embrace.

“Want me to phone Patch? See if she can bring Danny over?”

“No, thanks.”

“Or a game, then. Some kind of board game.”

She saw him prepare to say no again, but she pressed on. “Monopoly? Checkers? Clue? We don’t want to tell your dad you didn’t do one thing all the while he was gone, do we?”

Peter said, “I don’t care.”

“He would blame me. He’d think I wasn’t a good—” She started to say “baby-sitter” but changed it at the last minute. “Wasn’t a good hostess! I kept you locked in your room on bread and water his whole entire honeymoon!”

A faint smile thinned Peter’s lips, but he said nothing.

Oh, Lord, she thought, life was so wearing. Still, she forced herself to persist. “Scrabble? Parcheesi?” she asked, giving his shoulders a squeeze. “We’ve got them all!”

“Well, Scrabble, maybe,” he said finally.

“Scrabble. Oh, you’ll regret this, young man. It so happens I’m the world champion of Scrabble.”

So they went upstairs to the family room, Rebecca chortling and rubbing her hands together and making a general fool of herself, and settled on the couch with the Scrabble board between them. Peter remained fairly quiet, but he did seem interested once things got under way. He turned out to be the type who took the game very seriously — less from any competitive spirit, she surmised, than because he was a perfectionist. He would peer at the board for minutes on end, reach toward his tiles but draw back, frown and say, “Hmm,” consult the dictionary and shake his head and return to his study of the board. This suited Rebecca just fine. She could brood to her heart’s content.

Who was this Laura person? What was she to Will?

“Guess this is about as much as I can do,” Peter said. He set an oxy in front of moron, which earned him sixty points because of a triple-word square.

Rebecca said, “Heavens.” Even allowing for his looking it up in the dictionary, she was impressed. Peter just shrugged and reached for the scorepad. He was wearing a polo shirt — long-sleeved! in this heat! — tucked conscientiously into his shorts, which looked like two bunchy skirts above his skinny legs. The poor child was such a waif, Rebecca thought. She sent him a sudden smile, one that she really meant, and he surprised her by smiling back before he wrote his score down.

While she was debating her own choice of words — none of them half as clever as Peter’s — Poppy wandered in from his nap. He still had his magazine, which he dangled at his side with one finger marking a page. “You remember NoNo’s wedding cake,” he said, standing over the Scrabble board.

“I remember,” Rebecca said.

“You know how it kind of tilted.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t feel that cakes are Biddy’s strong point.”

“No, I guess they’re not,” Rebecca said.

“So do you think it would hurt her feelings if somebody else made my birthday cake?”

“Not in the least, I’m sure,” she said, although in fact she wasn’t sure at all.

He wandered out again with his magazine—Hospitality Monthly, she saw. She sighed and set down an N and an O to spell nor. “Sorry, it’s all I could come up with,” she told Peter. “I wish I hadn’t promised Poppy this party. He’ll forget it before the balloons have shriveled; maybe the instant it’s over.”

She watched Peter total her score. His nails were so deeply bitten that the fingertips gripping the pen resembled little pink erasers.

“Last Monday,” she said, “he nagged me all afternoon to take him to see his friend Mr. Ames, and I kept saying, ‘I took you this morning, Poppy, remember? You’ve been, already; you brought him a scratch-off lottery ticket. You and he sat on his porch while I went grocery-shopping.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, yes, my mistake,’ but then not ten minutes later he’d start nagging me again.”

Peter set the scorepad aside. “He could enjoy the party while it was happening, though,” he said. “Even if he did forget it later.”

“Yes, well…” She thought that over. “I guess I want points,” she told him. And then, when she saw his puzzled glance toward the game board: “Points for giving the party, I mean. I want him to credit me afterwards for doing it.”

He said, “Oh,” and went back to his rack of tiles.

“As for the cake,” she said, “I think botched cakes are a Davitch tradition. You should have seen my wedding cake! Mother Davitch didn’t bake it long enough and it was all soupy in the middle. The bride figurine on top fell into this sort of sinkhole, waist deep.”

Peter moved a letter from the middle of his rack to the end. A Z, she couldn’t help seeing. The lucky devil.

The bride had been ivory plastic, she recalled, with a pinpoint-sized dot of red lipstick and two little beady brown eyes. A matte black, scallop-edged hairdo had been painted onto her head. And the groom had been blue-eyed and blond — nothing at all like Joe.

The telephone rang. She reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

“Ah, may I speak to Rebecca, please.”

She grew extremely still.

The furred voice, the Church Valley accent. The leisurely, drawn-out vowels, with I sounding not much different from Ah.

“This is Rebecca,” she said.

“Um, Rebecca, this is Will Allenby.”

“Will! How did you find out my number?”

“I looked at my Caller ID.”

That Will had Caller ID was a shock. It seemed she had been picturing him still living in the sixties.

“You hung up on me so fast,” he was saying. “Thank goodness for modern inventions, I guess.”

What did he want, anyhow? Why had he called her back?

It made things all the eerier that he said, at that very moment, “So. What did you call me for?”

“Oh, I…” She smoothed her skirt across her lap with her free hand. “I happened to be at home,” she said, “home in Church Valley, I mean, and Mother and I got to talking about old times and I don’t know, I just all at once thought, I wonder where Will ever got to!”

“Not so very far, as you can see,” he said. He gave a short laugh. “I’m right here where you left me.” Then he hastened to say, “Where we went to college, that is. Well, I haven’t been here the whole time. I did go away for my doctorate. But now I teach at Macadam.”

“That’s wonderful, Will.”

“In fact, I’m head of my department.”

“Congratulations.”

“Yes, I can’t complain. Can’t complain at all. Really I’ve done very well. Been very fortunate.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

“Last year they nearly made me a dean, except they decided in the end that they ought to bring in an outsider.”

“Isn’t that nice,” she said. “And are you… do you… I mean, I suppose you must be married, and all.”

“Well, I used to be.”

“Oh.”

“I married an ex-student of mine. An English major; beautiful girl. She was once even offered a modeling job, although of course she didn’t accept it.”

“I see.”

“But we’re, um, divorced, at present.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling a quick surge of pleasure.

“Don’t be sorry! Really! I’m doing just fine. Getting along just dandy.”

Had he always phrased things so stuffily? She couldn’t tell if it was his age or his natural manner; she had forgotten now how he had spoken when he was young.

“And what about you?” he was asking. “I know you’re married, right?”

“I’m a widow.”

“A widow,” he said slowly.

He seemed so unfamiliar with the word, she wondered for an instant whether she had made it up. It did sound peculiar, suddenly — almost African. (Or was that just because it reminded her of that song, “Wimoweh,” that the Weavers used to sing?)

“Well, please allow me to offer my condolences,” he was saying.

“Thank you.”

“Was this… ah, something recent?”

“No, my husband died a long time ago,” she told him.

The phrase “my husband” struck her all at once as tactless. She rushed on, so as to make it less noticeable. “I’d only been married six years,” she said. “I was left with four little girls — his three and one of my own.”

Peter glanced up from the board, just then, where he was laying out something that seemed to interconnect with almost every existing word. He gave her an oddly searching look, as if what she had said was new to him.

“That must have been hard,” Will was saying on the phone.

She gripped the receiver more tightly and asked, “Would you like to get together, ever?”

Oops. Too sudden. Too direct, too pushy; she could tell by his hesitation.

“Or else not,” she said. “I mean, I realize you must lead a very busy life.”

“Well, not inordinately busy…”

“So, then, maybe we should get together and catch up! I’m just over in Baltimore, you know.”

He said nothing. She plowed on. “Would you like to, say, meet someplace? Meet for a drink?”

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a drinker,” he said.

He didn’t drink at all, was what he meant. Church Valley people didn’t, by and large. She gave it one last try. She said, “Or maybe a bite to eat; how about it?”

“A bite to eat,” he said thoughtfully.

“I could come to Macadam, if you like.”

“Well, that’s a possibility.”

Something about the lingering way he said it — his ostentatious reluctance — made her more confident. She saw now that as the injured party, he required wooing. And sure enough, his next words were, “I do happen to be free this evening.”

“This evening? Oh, I’m sorry; this evening I have an… event.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow I have a tea-dance,” she told him. “And something Sunday, too, I’m afraid, but Monday’s good! Monday would be perfect!”

He waited a beat before he said, “All right, then. Monday.”

Maybe if she phoned right now, she could get a hair appointment Monday morning. Maybe she could buy a new dress; maybe even lose a little weight. She said, “What’s a good place? Do you still like Myrtle’s?”

“Myrtle’s?”

“Myrtle’s Family Restaurant?”

“Oh, Myrtle’s is long gone. I’d forgotten about Myrtle’s,” he said. “But I believe there’s something catty-corner from where Myrtle’s used to be. The Oak Tree, the Elm Tree — some such name. I don’t know how good it is, though. I’ve never eaten there.”

“Well, at least I’ll be able to find it,” she told him. “Shall we say seven o’clock?”

“Seven o’clock. All right.”

She said, “I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Well, fine,” he said.

He didn’t say that he was looking forward to it.

When she had hung up, she let out a long breath. “That was my very first boyfriend,” she told Peter.

He raised his eyes again from the Scrabble board.

“My only boyfriend, not counting Joe Davitch,” she said.

Then she plopped down two tiles to make another three-point word, and she didn’t even apologize.

* * *

Saturday morning she dropped Peter off at Patch’s house, after which she drove to a giant shopping mall. She forged grimly through each clothing store fingering fabrics, holding dresses under her chin in front of mirrors, and twice even trying things on. It appeared that without her noticing, the fashion world had been edging back toward the skimpy styles of the seventies. All she found were off-the-shoulder necklines, tight cap sleeves, and skirts that showed her underwear seams. In the mirrors she looked sweaty and unhappy. By noon she was still empty-handed, and she couldn’t spend any more time because the dining-room ceiling at home had dropped another chunk of plaster and Rick Saccone had agreed to come fix it before the tea-dance.

“Peter’s just finishing lunch,” Patch said when Rebecca arrived to pick him up. Then she lowered her voice. “This was not a big success. The kids tried to get him involved, but all he wanted to do was read his book. It wasn’t their fault, I swear.”

“Never mind,” Rebecca told her. “He read all through breakfast, too.” She was navigating Patch’s foyer, which was the usual jumble of sports equipment — gloves, bats, lacrosse sticks, and every conceivable size of ball. “Peter?” she called. “Ready to go?”

“Stay and have a sandwich with us,” Patch said.

“I can’t; Rick’s coming.”

“Not again!”

Anyway, Rebecca planned to skip lunch. The memory was still vivid of how she had looked in those dresses she’d tried on: the material strained taut across the broad mound of her stomach.

Peter emerged from the kitchen reading his book as he walked — some old science fiction paperback he’d found in the guest room — and during the drive home he continued reading, in spite of her attempts to start a conversation. “How was lunch?” she asked him.

“It was okay,” he said, with his eyes still on the page.

“How’d you get along with Danny?”

“We got along okay.”

But then on Eutaw Street he looked over at her to ask, “If you were offered a trip on a time machine, would you take it?”

“Well, certainly!” she said. “I’d have to be crazy not to!”

“Would you go to the past?” he asked. “Or the future?”

“Oh, the future, of course! I’d like to know what’s going to happen.”

“Yeah, me too,” he said.

“My grandchildren, for instance. How will they turn out? What’s that funny Lateesha going to do with her life? She’s such a little character. And Dixon: I just have this feeling Dixon’s going to amount to something.”

“I’d also like to know if scientists ever discover the Universal Theory,” Peter said.

Rebecca laughed.

He said, “What’s funny?”

She said, “Oh, nothing,” and he went back to his book.

* * *

As soon as they reached home, she went upstairs to her closet and took out all her dresses and piled them on the bed. One by one she tried them on, standing sideways to the mirror and surveying herself critically.

She had never aimed for the emaciated look; it wasn’t that. In fact, some part of her had always wanted softness and abundance — the Aunt Ida look. (Which may have been why she had slipped off every diet she’d ever attempted: the first pounds she lost invariably seemed to come from her cheeks, and her face would turn prim and prunish like her mother’s.) The problem was, soft and abundant women were seen to their best advantage when naked. It wasn’t her fault clothes had belts to bulge over, and buttonholes that stretched and gaped!

When Rick showed up to fix the ceiling, she met him at the door in an eggplant-colored gauze caftan that wafted unrestricted from neck to ankle. But she could tell from the way his eyebrows rose that it was a little too noticeable. “I’m having dinner with my high-school sweetheart Monday,” she explained, “and I’m nervous as a cat. I guess this won’t do, huh?”

“Well,” he said cautiously, “the color’s nice…”

“Oh.”

He said, “What about those harem pants you had on that time I was patching the bathroom?”

“I can’t wear pants to a restaurant!”

“Why not?” he asked. He heaved his ladder over the doorjamb. “Now, me: I have dinner with my high-school sweetheart every evening.”

“You do?”

“I’m married to her.”

“Deena was your high-school sweetheart? I didn’t know that!”

“I thought I’d told you.”

“I’d have remembered if you had,” she said.

After she saw him into the dining room she went upstairs again, this time to the hall cedar closet where she stored items she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away. There she found what she was hunting: the powder-blue dress she had worn the night she met Joe. So she must have worn it with Will, too, on some occasion or other. (It wasn’t as if she had owned that many clothes.) But it would barely cover her crotch; she could tell by holding it up against her. “Would you believe it?” she asked Peter. He was heading into the family room with his book. “I actually used to go out in public in this! It reminds me of that Mother Goose rhyme where the old woman wakes from a nap and discovers her skirts were cut off.”

“Is that what you’re wearing to the tea-dance?” he asked her.

“No, honey, I don’t suppose I’ll ever again wear it in all my life,” she said. “I just hang on to it because it’s what I met your grandpa in; stepgrandpa.”

“Well, the color’s nice.”

She laughed and turned back to the closet.

It was silly to worry about her appearance. This wasn’t a date, for heaven’s sake! This was two middle-aged ex-classmates catching up with each other. Having a bite to eat and then, no doubt, parting for good, because the chances were they had nothing at all to talk about anymore.

When she hung the blue dress in its place, a wistful, sweet, lilac scent drifted from its folds. But she supposed it was just the smell of aged fabric. It couldn’t be Amy’s engagement party, after all these years.

* * *

On Sunday afternoon, NoNo and Barry came back from their honeymoon. NoNo had a toasted look while Barry, who was fairer-skinned, had turned a ruddy pink with a brighter patch across his nose. (They’d borrowed a friend’s beach cottage in Ocean City.)

NoNo made a big fuss over Peter, kissing him hello and asking about his weekend, offering him his choice of restaurants for tonight’s first meal as a family. Peter dug a toe into the carpet and mumbled that it would be nice to eat at home. NoNo said, “Oh. At home,” her forehead cross-hatched with worry because she had never had the slightest talent as a cook. But Barry said, “Great. I’ll grill some steaks.” Then he and Peter went upstairs for Peter’s belongings.

As soon as they were gone, Rebecca said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, NoNo. Do you still go to that book club of yours?”

“Mm-hmm,” NoNo said. “Why?”

“I was thinking how wonderful that must be, having people to talk with seriously. I wish I belonged to something like that. It seems I never get involved in any intellectual conversations anymore.”

NoNo was examining her wedding ring, turning her left hand gracefully this way and that.

“So,” Rebecca said. “Do you think maybe I could join?”

“Join?” NoNo said. She let her hand drop. “Join my book club? But… this is a group of all women. You know?”

“Well, I’m a woman,” Rebecca said with a feathery laugh.

“I mean, it’s like a, practically group therapy. You wouldn’t believe the subjects we get onto, sometimes! Emotional issues, and relationships and such. I just think it would feel awfully funny to have a relative there. I mean any relative; my sisters, too, I mean. I’m not trying to be—”

“No, of course not. I wasn’t using my head,” Rebecca said. “Goodness! That would be awkward!”

Then Barry and Peter came clattering down the stairs, and she looked up at them with a big, false smile and asked if they had everything.

It probably wouldn’t have been the right kind of book club, anyway. She could talk about emotional issues any old time; it seemed she was always doing that, with every passing repairman.

* * *

Monday afternoon at two — the first available appointment — she got her hair washed and set at Martelle’s Maison of Beauty, but she came home and shampooed thoroughly under a beating shower because Martelle had been having an off day and gave her a headful of frizz. So she ended up with her usual look: the two beige fans at her temples. She put on a long blue flowered skirt, a lighter-blue tunic from Pakistan dotted around the neckline with tiny mirrors, and dark-blue panty hose to make her ankles look thinner. After checking her reflection she wound a red-and-white paisley scarf several times around her throat, although the temperature was in the eighties. Then she stepped into a pair of red pumps. (She had heard somewhere that men found red shoes provocative.)

Last of all, she blotted her face with powder, brushed her eyelashes with mascara, and applied a coat of lipstick the same shade of red as her shoes. But she wiped most of the lipstick off again, because she decided it made her look garish.

After that she sat down in the rear parlor, since it was only four-thirty and she didn’t have to leave until six. She folded her hands in her lap and did nothing, gazing straight ahead and trying to remember not to touch her eyes so that she wouldn’t end up looking like a raccoon. From time to time Poppy poked his head in and stared at her, but mercifully, he asked no questions. She had set out a cold supper earlier and told him to eat when he liked. Around five-thirty she heard a chair scrape across the kitchen linoleum, followed by the clinking of cutlery against china, and she thought of going out to keep him company but instead she continued sitting there. For one thing, she felt the need to hang on to her composure. For another, talking to Poppy would wear away what was left of her lipstick.

At ten till six she made one last trip to the bathroom, and then she gave Poppy a wave from the kitchen doorway. “Night-night,” she said, taking care to use no words that required pressing her lips together. By now it was 5:55. Recalling her grandchildren’s superstition about clocks, she made a wish. She wished for dignity, was all. Just let her get through this evening without appearing foolish. She took her purse from the hall radiator and walked out the front door.

It was a muggy, heavy evening, cloudy but without a hope of rain to cool things off. When she got into her car, a blast of stored-up heat instantly dampened her powder. She started the engine and switched on the air-conditioning, which made her hair fly every which way. All her primping had been for nothing. She gave a despairing glance toward the rearview mirror before she pulled into the street.

Her car was an ’84 Chevy, rust-speckled and noisy and given to swaying dizzily on sharp curves. (She was always threatening to turn it into a planter.) It was littered front and back with her grandchildren’s odds and ends — their fast-food bags, soft-drink cans, old comic books, and crumpled, graying gym socks. Now she wished she had thought to clean it. She felt a brief flash of resentment: she used to keep her things so nice, before she met up with the Davitches.

At first, the drive was no different from one she might take any day. She passed the same tall, stern old houses, most of them transformed into offices or shops or cheap apartments. She veered south into a stretch of Laundromats, Chinese restaurants, liquor stores, boarded-up grocery stores. Rush hour was practically over, and she slid easily through a series of intersections. She stopped at a red light where a boy was peddling cellophane tubes of single, imprisoned-looking roses. At the next light a cadaverous man in a winter jacket held up a placard saying he was hungry, sick, tired, and sad. A child approached with a dirty rag and a bottle of Windex, but Rebecca shook her head.

Then she was driving through the frayed hem of the city, through a wasteland of broken-paned factories and tarp-covered mountains of tires. No doubt there was some high-speed, multi-lane road to Macadam these days, but she turned onto the old one. The scenery grew more spacious — weedy and brambly and shrubby. She was sorry to find, though, that the rolling pastures of her girlhood had been replaced by housing developments. The developments had an established, dowdy look to them; she could tell they weren’t brand-new. Above-ground pools crowded nearly every backyard. A bridge was spray-painted with valentines and Trust Jesus and, in childishly crooked letters, I Still Like Larry. A long, low, brick elementary school sent a Dreamsicle-colored sunset glaring back from its picture windows.

Just beyond the railroad crossing she turned right, and several miles later she came upon a tasteful black-and-brass sign reading Macadam. (In her day there’d been a huge billboard: ENTERING MACADAM, HOME OF MACADAM COLLEGE AND LYON INDUSTRIES, INC. “You Can Rely on Lyon for All Your Janitorial Supplies.”) She passed the eastern edge of the campus — Federal-style brick buildings under large old craggy trees, just as she remembered. The town itself, though, had changed, and not for the better. It seemed scrappier, more chopped up, a hodgepodge of hastily constructed fast-food joints and tattoo parlors and taverns. And Myrtle’s (when she found it, after two wrong turns) had become a CD store. Posters for various rock groups filled the window, although the white stucco above it still bore the ghost of the old name where the letters had been pried off.

It felt to her as if a bowling ball had come to rest in the pit of her stomach. Her heartbeat lurched and stammered.

Catty-corner from the CD store was the Maple Tree (neither Oak nor Elm), looking out of place with its richly varnished door and forest-green awning. She parked almost squarely in front of it. First she craned toward the rearview mirror and patted her hair down, checked her lipstick, and arranged her features into more lilting, upward angles. Then she picked up her purse and got out, plucking at the back of her skirt where it seemed glued to her thighs. Her watch read ten minutes till seven; so probably Will wasn’t here yet. Still, just in case, she made sure to step light-footedly as she approached the entrance.

Inside, the semi-darkness and the smell of musty carpet combined to make her feel that she had walked into a closet of stored woolens. A girl with long blond hair stood waiting with an armful of menus. “Good evening!” she trilled.

Rebecca said, “I’m meeting someone, but I don’t suppose he’s—”

“Would that be him?”

She followed the girl’s eyes. In the dimness she could barely make out the dozen or so tables, but she saw that two of them were occupied — one by a dressed-up young couple, the other by a skinny old man. “No,” she said.

And then she said, “Oh.”

He was sitting by the window, his beaky profile silhouetted against the dark curtain and his hair a radiant cloud of wild white corkscrews. When she started walking toward him (leading the hostess, now, instead of following), he sent her a glance, and she could tell that he was equally uncertain. He hesitated, then half stood, then hesitated again before rising to his full height. “Rebecca?” he said.

She said, “Hello, Will.”

She held out her hand, and he took it. (This must surely be the first time they had shaken each other’s hand.) His fingers were as knuckly and wiry as ever, but there was a difference in the texture of his skin, a kind of graininess that she saw in his face, too, now that she was close enough — a sandy look to his cheeks, a trio of fine lines straining across his forehead. His lips, which had once been very full and sculptured, were thinner and more sharply defined. He was wearing a wilted suit jacket over an open-necked white shirt — elderly clothes, sagging off his bony frame in a slack and elderly way.

She settled in the chair opposite him, and he sat back down. “What happened to your long golden braid?” he asked her.

She raised a hand to her head. “My…?” she said. “Oh. I cut it off. It was too much trouble to take care of.”

A menu arrived on her plate, and another on Will’s. The hostess said, “May I tell Marvin what you’re having to drink?”

“Who’s Marvin?” Will asked.

“Iced tea for me,” Rebecca said, although she could have used something stronger.

Will said, “Just water, please.”

“Sparkling, or still?”

“Pardon?”

“Tap,” Rebecca volunteered. (That much she felt sure of, although the question would not even have been thought of in their dating days.)

As soon as the hostess had left, Will turned back to Rebecca, plainly expecting her to begin the conversation. Instead, she spent some time placing her purse just so on her left, then unfolding her napkin in slow motion and smoothing it across her lap.

Why was she acting so gracious, she wondered — so matronly, so controlled?

It was the way she behaved with strangers. Really, he was a stranger.

But she said, “It’s wonderful to see you, Will!”

He blinked. (She may have been a bit loud.) He said, “Yes, me too. For me to see you, I mean.”

There was a pause.

“And all except for the braid, you look exactly the same,” he added.

“Yes, fat as ever!” she said, laughing brightly.

He cleared his throat. She rearranged her napkin.

“I took the Poe Highway over here,” she said. “Goodness, things have changed! So many new housing developments, or new to me, at least, and Macadam looks very different. I doubt I’d even—”

A young man dressed in black set their drinks in front of them. “So,” he said, whipping out a pad and pen. “Decided what you’re having?”

Rebecca said, “Not quite yet, thanks,” but Will said, “Oh, sorry, wait a minute, let’s see, what am I—”

He took a pair of rimless glasses from his breast pocket and hooked them over his ears. (Now he seemed downright ancient. She could draw back from him and imagine that she had never seen him before.) “You go first,” he told Rebecca.

She said, “Well, I… The salmon, I guess.” It was the first thing her eyes landed on.

Will was peering at his menu. “Salmon, veal, rib roast…” he said, his index finger traveling down the page. “Ah, maybe the rib roast.”

“And how would you like that cooked, sir?” the waiter asked.

“Medium, please. No, better make it well done.”

“Well done it is,” the waiter said, writing on his pad.

“On second thought,” Will told him, “I believe I’ll have the Award-Winning Swordfish.”

“Swordfish,” the waiter said. He scratched out what he’d written.

“But without the Caramelized Onion Sauce,” Will said. “Unless…” he said. He beetled his snarly white eyebrows. “Would it still be the actual Award-Winning Swordfish if it didn’t have the sauce?”

“It wouldn’t be the actual Award-Winning Swordfish in any case, sir,” the waiter said, “because that one was eaten by the judges.”

Rebecca laughed, but Will just said, “All right, then, no sauce. And no dressing on the salad.” He looked across at her. “I’m trying to watch my cholesterol.”

This surprised her at least as much as his having Caller ID. Mentally, she supposed, she had sealed him in amber — imagined him still a college boy wolfing down milk shakes and burgers.

“I’m not used to eating out much,” Will told her once the waiter was gone. “Generally I cook at home. I make my famous chili. You remember my chili.”

“Oh! Your chili,” she said. She did remember, she realized. Or at least she remembered Will chopping onions into tiny, uniform squares, and Mrs. Allenby tut-tutting at the red spatters across her clean stovetop.

“My particular recipe constitutes a completely balanced meal,” Will was saying. “I mix up a double batch every Sunday afternoon, and I divide it into seven containers and that’s what I eat all week.”

“All week?”

“Now I’ll have an extra container on hand because of this evening. I’m not sure yet how I’ll deal with that.”

“But don’t you get awfully bored, eating the same meal every night?”

“Not a bit,” he said. “Or if I do, what of it? I’ve never understood this country’s phobia about boredom. Why should we be constantly diverted and entertained? I prefer to sink into my life, even into the tedious parts. Sometimes I like to sit and just stare into space. I don’t require newness just for newness’ sake.”

“Well… you’re right, I guess,” Rebecca said. “Goodness! I don’t know why we mind boredom so much.”

“I have my lunches in the college cafeteria. Spinach salad and yogurt.”

“That sounds extremely healthful,” she told him.

The waiter set a basket of breads between them, and Rebecca selected a roll and put it on her bread plate. Then she reached for the butter. The silence was that obvious kind where every gesture becomes important. The slightest turn of her wrist seemed almost to make a noise.

“So,” she said finally, “I gather you’ve adjusted to living on your own, then.”

“Yes, I can’t complain. I rent a very nice apartment over on Linden Street.”

“An apartment,” she repeated. (Cancel that image of the tenured-professor’s house.)

“In the home of Mrs. Flick. You remember Dr. Flick of the English department, don’t you? She started renting out her top floor after he died. I have a good-sized living room, dining room, kitchenette, bedroom, and study. The study can double as a guest room if my daughter ever wants to stay over.”

“Oh, Will, you have a daughter?”

“Seventeen years old — a senior in high school. Beatrice, her name is.”

Beatrice! Rebecca was struck dumb with admiration. Beatrice would be a female version of Tristram. Rebecca pictured her in a modest muslin dress from the nineteenth century, although she knew that was unlikely. She pictured Beatrice and her father joined in some scholarly endeavor — Beatrice reading aloud while Will nodded soberly in his rocking chair by the fire.

“But that’s nothing compared to you,” Will was saying.

“Me?”

“You have four daughters, you mentioned.”

“Oh, yes, I’m way ahead of you!” She took a gulp of iced tea — too big a gulp; she nearly choked. “I’ve got grandchildren, even! Six. I mean seven. Because my husband’s three girls were older, you know; his girls from his previous marriage.”

“And how did he happen to pass away? If you don’t mind my asking.”

His delicate wording, along with the clumsy look of his mouth as he spoke — a sort of crumpled look, as if he had too many teeth — made her feel the need to set him at ease. “He died in a car wreck,” she said forthrightly. “It was very sudden. Well, a car wreck is always sudden, of course. But I was so unprepared! And so young! I was twenty-six years old. And his girls had just barely gotten to where they admitted I existed.”

“Couldn’t you have sent them to their relatives? They must have had some, someplace.”

“Well, only their mother.”

“Their mother!” Will said.

“But she’d remarried; she lived in England. Sending the children to her would… In fact, the subject never came up.”

Will shook his head. “Personally,” he said, “I would find that situation intolerable.”

This hurt her feelings, for some reason. She knew he meant to sympathize, but she couldn’t help imagining a note of judgment in his voice. She said, “Everything ended up fine, though! Just fine! I’ve managed very well. I run a little business out of my home, hosting parties. Joe started that — my husband. And the girls are all grown up now. You should meet them! It’s this huge, big, jumbled family; nothing like what you and I were used to when we were children. Oh, isn’t it amazing, how life turns out? Could you have imagined we’d be sitting here, waiting for swordfish and salmon, back when we were eating pancakes at Myrtle’s Family Restaurant?”

On cue, the waiter set their plates in front of them — Will’s swordfish starkly naked, Rebecca’s salmon buried beneath a conglomeration of capers, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, black and green olives, and pine nuts. Two salads arrived, Rebecca’s smothered in blue cheese dressing. “Fresh-ground pepper?” the waiter asked, brandishing what looked like a mammoth chess piece. Will shook his head. To make up for him, Rebecca said, “Yes, please!” even though she was longing for the two of them to be left alone. One twist of the grinder and she said, “Okay! Thanks!” Finally, the waiter walked off.

“Where was I? Myrtle’s Family Restaurant,” Rebecca said. She speared an olive. “Oh, doesn’t it seem long ago? But of course, it was long ago. And yet, in another way… I can remember just like yesterday that time in ninth grade when we went to the drive-in movie. I had such a crush on you, and you thought we were just friends. You thought I was only this kid you’d gone to nursery school with.”

The olive had a pit, she discovered as she bit down. She removed it with a thumb and forefinger and hid it under her roll. Luckily, Will’s eyes were on his plate and he didn’t seem to notice.

“A bunch of us went to the movies,” she said, “in Ben Biddix’s older brother’s pickup truck. Remember? Ben paid his brother five dollars to take us since none of us could drive yet. And we all sat out on that grassy spot down in front of the screen — do you remember this?”

Will shook his head.

“It was you and me and the Nolan twins and Ben and his brother and Nita Soames, who was going out with Ben’s brother at the time. In fact I think she eventually married him. The night was really clear and warm with a balmy breeze, a kind of promising breeze, you know that kind? You were sitting next to me and I put my hand down flat in the grass, hoping to seem nonchalant, and then I inched it a little closer to your hand and waited, and then a little closer; so finally just the sides of our hands were barely touching, or maybe not even touching but warming each other, sort of—”

“You broke my heart,” Will said.

All this time he’d gone on gazing at his plate, keeping his face so impassive that she wasn’t sure he was listening. And she wasn’t sure even now, because there she was, magically transported to that starlit evening in 1960 when everything was poised to begin, and meanwhile he had leapt forward to the very end of the story. She set down her fork. The olive was sitting high in her throat like a thick, heavy stone.

“You never gave me the slightest warning,” Will said. He took hold of both sides of the table. “I thought everything was fine. I trusted you. Then one day you said goodbye and walked out, not a word about why. Got married two weeks later. I had to hear it from my mother. ‘Did you know about this person?’ she asked me. ‘He must have been in the picture for quite some time,’ she told me. ‘Rebecca can’t have been dating him only two weeks, I shouldn’t think.’”

As he spoke, he leaned toward her until he was hugging the table between his sprawling arms. It made Rebecca see, at long last, that this really was Will Allenby — a lanky, big-eared giraffe of a boy who never had quite learned how to manage his own limbs. Those were his startling eyes, whose clear blue light she only now detected underneath the shelter of his thatched brows. And his wide, sharp shoulders, and his boxy Adam’s apple bobbing in his neck. Looking at him was like looking at changeable taffeta — back and forth between the generic old man and the specific young Will. Which made it all the worse that he sounded so bitter.

She said, “Will. I’m sorry. I know I didn’t treat you well. But it wasn’t anything I planned! I was just… overwhelmed! Swept off my feet by a fully grown man, someone who already had his life in order, was already living his life, while you and I were still… but I never meant to hurt you. I hope you can believe that.”

The waiter said, “Is everything to your liking, folks?”

“Yes, delicious,” Rebecca said. “Then afterwards,” she told Will, “after I was married and settled, I know I should have written or something. Offered more of an explanation. But everything started moving so fast! Everything was so chaotic! I had the three little girls to take care of and more and more of the business falling on my shoulders; I was living in that crowded house with my ailing mother-in-law and an uncle-in-law in mourning and a very adolescent brother-in-law; and then my own baby came along. There wasn’t a moment to think, even, let alone write you a letter! It seemed I got onto a whole different path, got farther and farther away from my original self. But just this summer I sort of… woke up. I looked around me; I said, Who have I turned into? What’s become of me? Why am I behaving like this? I’m an impostor in my own life! Or another way I could put it is, it’s not my own life. It’s somebody else’s. And that’s the reason I phoned you.”

Will straightened slowly in his seat until he was upright again. He said, “I guess you thought you could waltz on back as if you’d never left.”

“I didn’t think that!”

“You thought I’d say, ‘Oh, sure, Rebecca, I forgive you. I’ve forgotten all about what you did. Let’s go back to the old days.’”

“I never thought any such thing,” she said.

But she had, in fact. Secretly, she had fantasized that he might say he’d never stopped loving her. Now that seemed conceited, and self-deluding, and shameful.

She slid back her chair and stood up in a rush, bruising both of her thighs against the underside of the table. “Sorry,” she told him. “I can see this has been a mistake.”

She collected her purse and walked out. He didn’t try to stop her.

* * *

All the way home she talked to herself, and shook her head, and blinked back angry tears. “How could I have been so stupid?” she asked. “So outspoken? So forward?” She turned the air-conditioning higher. Her face was filmed with a layer of sweat as slick and tight as shrink-wrap. “But why did he say he’d meet me, if that was the way he felt? Why did he phone me back, even? Oh,” she wailed, “and I should have paid half of the dinner check!” She risked a glance toward the rearview mirror. She decided that her two fans of hair made her look like a Texas longhorn.

Baltimore was solid and familiar and reassuring, its buildings twinkling with safety lights. She rolled her window down and breathed in the sooty petroleum smell, which struck her as refreshing. And the windows of the Open Arms, when she pulled up, glowed so kindly. She parked and unfolded herself from the car. Her skirt was as wrinkled as wastepaper. The colors of her outfit — red, white, and blue, for Lord’s sake! — reminded her of that cheap disposable picnic ware intended for the Fourth of July.

She climbed the front steps and unlocked the door. “I’m home!” she called.

“Hah?” Poppy said from upstairs. She heard laughter on the TV — a sound that ordinarily grated against her nerves, but tonight she found it cozy.

She went straight to the kitchen and set down her purse and looked for something to eat. Standing in front of the open fridge, she devoured two chicken legs, the last of a pasta salad, and several cherry tomatoes. She polished off a container of coleslaw and half a jar of crab-apple rings left over from Thanksgiving. She was so hungry she felt hollow. It seemed no amount of food could ever fill her.