Back When We Were Grownups

Eight

You wouldn’t call it a courtship. What would you call it? Just say they, oh, started arranging to get together now and then. Go shopping for a book Will had heard of. Grill steaks in Rebecca’s backyard. (But with Poppy there too, of course, wanting a steak of his own, and Biddy happening by later as they were sitting around the table.) These certainly weren’t anyone’s notion of romantic assignations.

Still, Rebecca let herself think sometimes: might it be possible, after all, to return to that place where her life had forked and choose the other branch now? Even this late in the journey? Even after she had used up the branch she had first chosen?

It seemed like cheating. Like having her cake and eating it too.

She remembered things he did not; he remembered things she did not. Their past was a bolt of fabric they had scissored up and divided between them. He had no recollection, for instance, of the World’s Fastest Typist. “Why would they have wasted our time with a typist, for heaven’s sake?” he asked, and she told him, triumphantly, “That’s exactly what you said when you were seventeen!”

He remembered that she used to recite poetry on their dates, although she couldn’t believe she would ever have been so mawkish. That she’d kept a scrapbook of thought-provoking quotations from her reading; that she’d worshiped Joan Baez’s singing; that she’d very nearly committed to heart The Feminine Mystique. All of which sounded to her like some completely unrelated person—she, rather than I.

And did he recall, she wondered, a night when they’d been studying late at his house, and his mother had gone to bed, and they had decided to take a catnap on the sofa? It was the first time they had lain down together. The length of his body pressed against hers had felt so good and so needed; his quick, hot breaths had sent a sort of ruffle up her spine. Now she couldn’t say who had finally brought things to a halt. Both of them, perhaps.

But this was not one of the memories she mentioned to Will. No, they weren’t yet familiar enough for that. At the moment they were still very restrained with each other, very circumspect and proper. When they met, he would kiss her lightly on the lips (his mouth not one she recognized), and when they sat in her family room, he would let one arm rest along the back of the couch behind her. Both of them were well aware that somebody might walk in on them at any moment. Comfortably aware, Rebecca might have said. Secure in the knowledge. Poppy would call, “Beck?” or the telephone would ring, or the front door would slam open, and the two of them would separate slightly, looking elsewhere, clearing their throats. At the end of a visit they hugged goodbye. Rebecca looked forward to those hugs. It seemed that her skin felt thirsty for them.

Her family — the few family members who’d met him — appeared to believe that Will was just another of her strays, like that electrician whose marriage had been breaking up the whole time he was wiring the house for air-conditioning. “Oh, hi,” they would say offhandedly, and then they would rattle on about whatever had brought them here. Rebecca found this slightly insulting. Did they feel she wasn’t capable of romance? All they seemed to notice was that she had grown less available to them. The Friday after she went with Will to a lecture at Johns Hopkins: “Where were you?” they demanded. “We came to dinner last night and Poppy was all by himself. It was Thursday! You weren’t here!”

“There’s no law that says I have to stay home every Thursday of my life,” she told them. Although, as a matter of fact, she had simply forgotten what day of the week it was. Oh, she was very absentminded lately, very muzzy and distracted. She lost her place in conversations, failed to answer when people asked her questions. Everybody who wasn’t Will struck her as irrelevant. “Really,” she would murmur, and, “Isn’t that interesting,” but inwardly she was saying, Get on with it! and, What difference does it make?

While the rest of her world blurred and swam, Will grew steadily more distinct. Parts of him flashed across her vision at inappropriate moments: the authoritative curl of his fingers around his car keys, the stirringly beautiful drape of his sports coat across the back of his shoulders. His most casual remarks came back to her unbidden, weighted with significance. She replayed her own remarks and longed to change them — to make them more intelligent, more original, more alluring.

When he asked her, for instance, why she had never remarried, she had answered fliply, “Nobody ever proposed.” Which happened to be true, but there was more to it than that. A few men had made tentative moves in her direction, she should have told him, but she had felt oddly indifferent; she had felt a kind of fatigue. It had all seemed like so much trouble. (And the men, to be perfectly honest, had not persisted unduly.) Now Will would suppose that no one had found her attractive. She tried to bring it up again, hoping for a second chance. “Have you ever noticed,” she asked him, “how what you look for in a person changes as you get older? When I was young, I wanted somebody other—the most wildly other type possible. I guess that’s what drew me to Joe. But then as I got older, why, it began to seem so wearying to go out with somebody different. Maybe that’s why parents are always telling their daughters to date that nice boy from their church, while the daughters are pining for motorcyclists that later on they wouldn’t glance at.”

“Motorcyclists?” Will asked. This was over the telephone, but she could almost see the bafflement crossing his forehead.

“I mean, after a while that kind of… bridging just seems like so much work. I gave up wanting to bother with it.”

“But, Rebecca,” Will said. “What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me something? Because look at you and me: we’re totally different.”

“We are?” she asked. And then she said, “Oh, well, maybe now it might seem we are. I can see why you might think that. But don’t forget, I used to be much more introspective. I don’t know what became of that! Sometimes I hear you talk about the old days, about the way we lived our lives then and the subjects that used to interest us, and I think, Oh, yes, that was back when we were grownups. Well, you still are a grownup; even more so. But me: it seems to me that I’ve been traveling in reverse. I know less now than I did when I was in high school. I’m trying to remedy that. I hope it’s not too late.”

“I just meant that you’re more outgoing,” Will told her.

“I’m not outgoing! It’s only how I act on the surface, because of the Open Arms.”

“Ah,” he said.

But she could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

It was easier to talk on the telephone than face to face, she noticed. On the telephone they might say almost anything, but when they met they grew self-conscious. Also, his physical reality often came as a surprise. Who was this craggy, white-haired man? He was very appealing to look at, but who was he? Over the course of the evening she would adjust to this new version of him, but the next time they spoke on the telephone, she seemed to have conjured up the original Will all over again. “Hello, Rebecca,” he would say, and back came his lopsided boyhood smile, a cloud-gray sweater he had worn in junior high, and his springy corkscrew curls the color of wild honey.

* * *

She took out subscriptions to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. (“Just what city do you imagine we’re living in?” Poppy asked when he heard.) She walked to the Enoch Pratt Library to request a copy of the memoir that she had written about in college. It turned out to be something they had to send away for through Interlibrary Loan, but she did have a long, absorbing talk with the reference librarian — a woman who seemed a real kindred spirit. Then she went home and finished reading her first Lee biography, after which she launched immediately into the second.

It emerged that Lee had felt emancipation would come about on its own, in the natural course of events. He wrote this in a letter to his wife. “Well, I never,” Rebecca told Poppy. “I had no idea Lee was such a rationalizer.”

“Lee who?” Poppy asked.

“General Lee. Robert E. When I was a girl, I thought I was going to rewrite his chapter in history. I could not believe he would have chosen which side to fight on purely out of personal loyalty.”

“Well?” Poppy said. “What better reason?”

“How about principle? Even a wrongheaded, evil principle?”

“Robert E. Lee was one of your Virginia types,” Poppy said. “All the principle he cared for was his own little bit of acreage.”

“Not according to this memoir I came across in college,” she told him.

“Oh, well, college,” Poppy said. Then, as if he’d proved his point, he returned to his own reading — a multicolored magazine, surely not the New York Review. He was making notes on a memo pad with a promotional ballpoint pen from Ridgepole Roofers. The article he was consulting, she saw, was called “Ten Ways to Shake Up a Party.” She sighed and looked down at her book again. Lee’s wife gazed mournfully from the left page, Lee himself from the right. Rebecca caught herself wondering what kind of sex life they’d had.

* * *

Rebecca’s mother telephoned. She had been much more attentive lately — all sly questions and perky alertness, like a girlfriend hoping for confidences. “You’re home!” she said. “I thought you’d be out.”

She didn’t say why, in that case, she had bothered to call.

Rebecca said, “How are you, Mother?”

“I’m fine. How about you? No date tonight?”

“No date.”

“What did you do last night?”

“Sat home with Poppy,” Rebecca said perversely. In fact, she’d seen Will in the afternoon, but her mother hadn’t asked about the afternoon.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you that Sherry Hardy knows all about Will’s ex-wife.”

“Have you been talking to Sherry Hardy about my private business?” Rebecca demanded.

“Just who you’re going out with, is all. I really don’t remember how the subject chanced to come up.”

Rebecca groaned.

Her mother said, “Sherry’s second cousin went to Will’s wedding. She told Sherry that his wife seemed way too young for him.”

“Well, she was a former student of his. You knew that.”

“She was pretty but unlikable, according to the cousin. A discontented type. You could see it in the corners of her mouth. All during the reception, she poked fun at how stodgy Will was. At one point he made some comment that was the least little bit professor-sounding, and the bride told everybody, ‘Will is my first husband, needless to say.’ Only joking, of course, but when you consider how things turned out…”

Rebecca, who had been listening more closely than she would admit, felt a stab of pity. Will could never have held his own against that kind of woman! But she just said, “Well, that’s all water over the bridge now.”

“Dam,” her mother said.

“Pardon?”

“Water over the dam.”

“Whatever.”

“The ceremony was Catholic, or maybe just High Episcopal. This cousin wasn’t quite sure. She said there was a lot of kneeling going on. When Will was defining what a homophone was, he used feted and fetid as his examples.”

Rebecca said, “He used what?”

“F-E-T-E-D and F-E-T-I-D. That was the comment that struck his ex-wife-to-be as professor-sounding.”

“Why was he defining a homophone at his wedding?” Rebecca asked.

“Oh, you know how these subjects come up… I really couldn’t say.”

“Well, anyhow—”

“Also liken and lichen.”

“Excuse me?”

“L–I-K-E-N and L–I-C-H-E-N.”

“What on earth?”

But then her mother asked when Rebecca planned to bring Will for a visit — a prospect that seemed filled with possibilities for disaster — and Rebecca shifted her focus to inventing reasons not to.

After she had hung up, though, she started picturing Will at his wedding. She saw his fine-boned, serious face surrounded by laughing young guests, and she felt such a deep sense of injury on his behalf that it was almost physical.

Yesterday afternoon, he had come over to watch a movie with her — something subtitled, black-and-white, very difficult to follow, that she had driven all the way to Video Americain to rent. And Zeb had stopped by, as often happened on Sundays, and he and Poppy got to reminiscing about old times at the Open Arms. Zeb, in particular, could pull out any number of horror tales. The wedding ceremony where Mother Davitch started sobbing and couldn’t stop, the Easter morning when Joe hid six dozen raw eggs that he thought were cooked, the after-prom breakfast they forgot to put on the calendar…

“Can you imagine where we’d be if Rebecca hadn’t shown up?” Zeb asked Will. “We all thanked our lucky stars. She turned out to be awfully good for the business.”

Will had pulled his gaze from the screen. “Rebecca, good at business?” he’d said.

“Good for business, actually. If not for her, we’d have long ago gone under.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Rebecca had said. “Why are you talking this way? The first time I helped with a party, I let fly a champagne cork straight into some woman’s bosom.”

“Right! I’d forgotten. Most comical picture,” Zeb had told Will. “Rebecca pops off the cork and crumples to the floor in mortification, so it looked as if she were the one who’d been hit. Meanwhile the woman with the bosom goes on talking, completely unaware. Falsies, was my considered opinion. I was very observant about such things in those days.”

“We never let on to my mother-in-law,” Rebecca said. “When she saw me on the floor she said, ‘Dearie? Are you all right?’ and I just said, ‘Yes, fine,’ and got up and poured the champagne.”

She and Zeb had started laughing, while Will looked from one to the other with a tentative smile that seemed prepared to broaden as soon as he got the joke. “So,” he’d said finally, “I gather you were still living at home then, Zeb.”

“Lord, yes,” Zeb had said, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Yes, I was still a kid when Joe and Rebecca married. The whole experience scarred me for life: seeing Rebecca walk out of their bedroom every morning all rosy and contented.”

Rebecca had instantly sobered. She’d said, “Stop talking rubbish, Zeb.”

It wasn’t like him to be cruel. She had glanced toward Will to see how he was taking it, but his gaze was fixed on the movie again. His head was craned forward earnestly and his long, articulated fingers were cupping his bony knees.

Stodgy, she thought now. Wasn’t that the word the wedding guest had used? Well, Rebecca knew he was stodgy! She knew his literal cast of mind, his reliance on routine, his almost laughable pompousness. (That “Dr. Allenby speaking” when he answered the phone.) The thing was, to her those traits were endearing. More than that: she felt partly responsible for them. Any time she saw him looking lost and ill at ease, she was reminded all over again that she had once abandoned him.

Which was why, yesterday afternoon, she had openly, pointedly, brazenly reached for his nearest hand and clasped it in her own.

* * *

She completely forgot about Grandparents’ Day. What was the matter with her? She made plans to go to D.C. with Will and visit a museum; Fridays he had no classes. When Peter called to remind her, she went into a secret flurry. “Oh!” she said. “Right. Tomorrow morning at… what time did you say? I’ve got it on my calendar.”

So she had to phone Will and cancel, because she couldn’t break her promise to a child — especially Peter. (Not that she wasn’t tempted.) Will was very understanding about it. Still, she felt regretful and, to be honest, more than a little put upon. When NoNo said, the next morning, “You’re awfully nice to do this,” Rebecca wanted to tell her, “You don’t know the half of it!” But she didn’t, of course. What she said was, “Oh, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks now!”

They were standing on NoNo’s front porch, waiting for Peter to run back upstairs for his knapsack. “He’s so disorganized,” NoNo said. She was dressed in her florist’s smock, her purse already slung over her shoulder. “I tell you, mornings in this house are chaos. Find it?” she asked Peter. “All right, have a good day; I’ll pick you up this afternoon.”

She kissed the top of his head, which meant she had to rise on tiptoe because (Rebecca realized) Peter had recently undergone one of those dramatic growth spurts that seemed to strike boys overnight. His trousers were so short that they showed two inches of ankle, and his blazer sleeves exposed his wrist bones, which looked like small ivory cabinet knobs. “You’re getting to be taller than I am!” Rebecca told him as they walked toward her car.

He smiled faintly, hitching his knapsack higher on his back and sending her a sidelong glance from under his long lashes. “Next month I’m turning thirteen,” he said, and she fancied she could detect a new croakiness to his voice.

His school was on the other side of the city. No wonder NoNo complained about the drive, Rebecca thought as she maneuvered through the rush-hour traffic, the crossing guards and gaggles of children on every corner, the sullen-looking workers waiting in clumps at bus stops. This was not a time of day when Rebecca was ordinarily out in the world. “How about your car pool?” she asked Peter. “Am I supposed to pick up anybody else?”

“They’re all riding with their grandparents,” he said.

“Oh, yes.”

“This one guy? T. R. Murphy? He’s got a matched set.”

“Matched set of what?” Rebecca asked.

“Grandparents. Mother’s mother, mother’s father. Father’s mother, father’s father.”

“Lucky!” she said.

“Dick Abrams is coming with eight grandparents, but they don’t really count because a lot of them are steps.”

“I see.”

“I don’t mean stepgrandparents aren’t okay,” he said, shooting a worried look at her.

“No, I know you don’t.”

“They’re going to have to ride in three cars to get there. Really they could fit in two, but one set isn’t speaking to one of the other sets.”

“This is fascinating,” Rebecca said.

“Oh, and, um…” he said.

He drummed his fingers on his knees for a moment and stared out the side window. Rebecca waited.

“Um, would it be all right if I called you Gram?” he asked. “Just for today?”

“Why, sweetie, you can call me that every day!”

“Okay,” he said. And then, “So! Do you think that during our lifetime, people will start traveling by dematerialization and rematerialization?”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind trying it this morning,” she told him.

This was intended as a joke, but when he didn’t laugh, she said, “I suppose they might, in theory. With all that could go wrong, though, imagine the lawsuits they could end up with.”

“Lawsuits! Right!” he said. “Gosh!”

She reflected that Peter was something like a yo-yo — popping up unexpectedly in sudden bursts of enthusiasm, subsiding and then popping up again with no warning. She smiled at him, but he was watching the street and he didn’t notice.

In the entrance hall of his school — a stone building covered with ivy that looked arranged, rather than free-growing — they were met by a young woman passing out self-stick labels and felt-tip pens. Hi! the labels read. My grandson is __________. Rebecca wrote Peter Sanborn and returned the pen to the woman. The instant she had affixed the label to the front of her blouse, a small, bald man in a suit stepped up to her. “Peter Sanborn!” he cried.

“Yes?”

She was expecting him to offer some compliment on Peter’s project, but instead he seized her hand and said, “I want you to know that we have taken his stepmother’s complaint very, very seriously and we do understand her concerns.”

“Her concerns?”

“Naturally it’s an issue, at this time when families are so often fragmented. With all the working mothers, though, grandparents seemed the logical solution. It never occurred to us that… But now that Mrs. Sanborn’s alerted us, we have fully prepared ourselves for every possible contingency. In a case where a child lacks grandparents, we offer one on loan.”

Rebecca gave a startled guffaw. The man peered solemnly into her face. “Students have been encouraged to apply at the office,” he told her. “Strictest confidence is guaranteed.”

“That should reassure my daughter no end,” Rebecca told him.

“My own mother is one of the names on file,” he said.

“And then there’s always Dick Abrams,” she couldn’t resist adding.

“Abrams?”

“He has eight grandparents. Surely he should be asked to share the wealth.”

“Oh, ah, I don’t feel we could—”

“Just something to consider,” she told him, and she withdrew her hand.

“What’s gotten into NoNo?” she asked Peter as they moved through the crowd. “Patch, I might expect it of, but NoNo, acting so contentious all of a sudden!”

“That was our principal,” Peter said. “NoNo telephoned him last week.”

“Well, isn’t that always the way! No sooner do you get your children nicely pigeonholed than they turn around and surprise you.”

They were walking down a wide corridor, traveling in a swarm of gray-haired women, a sprinkling of gray-haired men, and an underlayer of boys in navy blazers. Two boys near Rebecca were trying to step on each other’s shoes. They elbowed and wrestled and stumbled into passersby while the middle-aged woman accompanying them sailed on serenely. One of them fell into Peter, but Peter just moved aside and the boy didn’t apologize. Rebecca had the impression that Peter didn’t know all that many of his schoolmates. She felt a familiar clenching of her shoulders, a sort of mother-bear response; she wanted to hug him close and snarl at the other children. But Peter showed no sign of discomfort. He seemed intent on maneuvering them toward the double doors ahead, which opened into a gigantic, echoing gymnasium filled with felt-draped tables and fabric screens.

Rebecca had not thought to ask what type of exhibit this would be. She had expected science projects, since she’d spent a number of long, dull hours at science fairs in the past. But this appeared more art-related. Paintings were tacked to the screens; sculptures and clumsy ceramic vases and abstract wire constructions stood on the tables. Each had a name next to it, lettered in grade-school print on a rectangle of white poster board, and already some of the grandparents were saying, “Did you do this?” and, “Oh, my, isn’t this something!”

“Which is yours?” Rebecca asked Peter.

Instead of answering, he turned sideways to slip through a cluster of women. He rounded the first aisle and stopped short at the head of the second.

There, in a glass box the size of a large aquarium, a sort of oil derrick made of brightly colored rods and sockets and toothed wheels pivoted up and down, allowing a series of blue marbles to roll the length of its spine and land in a metal saucer. Each marble was a slightly different size and rang out a different note on the scale: do, re, mi… From the saucer the marbles traveled through a convoluted tube and returned to their starting point, where they rolled down to land once again—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, DO! over and over, delicate musical plinks! that could be heard, she belatedly realized, throughout the gym. What caused the marbles’ return, she couldn’t imagine. She was mystified, and awestruck, and captivated. She could have stood there forever, rapt, and other people must have felt the same because quite a crowd had gathered, none of them in any hurry to move on.

“Peter!” she said. “This is wonderful!”

Peter tilted his head and studied the contraption critically, his hands deep in his pockets, his back angled forward beneath the weight of his knapsack.

“This is… I don’t know how you did it! It’s amazing! What do your teachers say?” she asked him.

“I think they kind of liked it.”

“Is there a motor, or what?”

“That’s a secret.”

“Oh, don’t tell me, then. I’ll just view it as a miracle.”

“But I will give you a hint,” he said. “Think about those toy birds that bob into a drinking glass.”

“Ah,” she said, none the wiser.

He said, “Would you like to see the other projects?”

“No,” she said, “I believe I’ll just stay here and admire this one.”

He grimaced and looked at the ceiling, implying, Grandmothers! What can you do? But she could tell he was pleased.

* * *

She phoned Will as soon as she got home; she felt stretched like a band of elastic until she heard his voice at the other end of the line. “I’m back,” she told him. “Did you go to D.C. without me?”

“Oh, no, I would never do that.”

“You should have,” she said. Although she was happy he hadn’t.

“How was your grandson’s exhibit?”

“It was marvelous! I wish you could have seen it.”

“I wish I could have too,” he said.

She let herself picture that, for a moment: Will at her side on Grandparents’ Day. Finally, finally, she would not have to show up everywhere alone. But he was asking her something. Asking her to dinner.

She said, “Dinner? At your place?”

“I thought maybe you might like to meet my daughter.”

“I would love to meet your daughter,” she said.

Already her mind was racing through possible outfits, possible topics of conversation — choosing who to be, really, for this very important encounter.

He said, “How about tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow? Saturday? Oh.”

She didn’t have to explain. He sighed and said, “I know. A party.”

“But I could do it Sunday,” she told him.

“All right: Sunday. I’m assuming she’ll be free then. Let’s make it early. Six o’clock, since it’s a school night.”

“Can I bring a dish?”

“No, just yourself,” Will said in a memorized way.

She refrained from asking him which self.

Later, talking on the phone to NoNo, she happened to let slip that she would be meeting Will’s daughter. “You’d think it would be no big deal,” she said, “after meeting you three girls. But I can’t help feeling nervous, a little.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” NoNo said absently. “Whose daughter is this, again?”

“Will Allenby. He was with me a couple of weeks ago when you and Peter stopped by after dinner.”

“Oh, yes,” NoNo said.

“But I was forgetting! Peter! Peter’s the reason I called! NoNo, that boy is a genius.”

“Yes, everyone tells me he’s bright,” NoNo said. “I only wish he could drive.”

“Did you see his project?”

“Are you kidding? I watched him construct it, every wheel and gear of it.”

“I’m not sure whether it’s art, or science, or music,” Rebecca said. “Maybe all three. It’s astounding!”

“I was the one who had to ferry him to the back of beyond for his supplies,” NoNo told her. “Barry was away attending a conference, wouldn’t you know.”

“Oh, honey,” Rebecca said, “I realize it must be hard, but I wish you could enjoy this boy. He’s going to be grown and gone in a flash! And then you’ll discover you miss him.”

“Easy for you to say,” NoNo told her bitterly. “You don’t have the least idea what it’s like, being saddled with somebody else’s kid when you’re basically still on your honeymoon.”

Rebecca said, “Is that so.”

It was one of those moments when she really did, literally, have to bite her tongue in order not to say more.

* * *

Sunday morning, she called Will twice to ask what she should wear. The first time, he said, “Anything. Or maybe — but no, just anything.” Which was why she called the second time: that little hitch in his voice. She called back a minute later and said, “Will. You can tell me. Was there something special that you thought I ought to be wearing?”

“Oh, no.”

“Something I ought not to be wearing?”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe just… something not too hippie,” he said.

“Hippie,” she said.

For a second, she felt hurt. She thought he was referring to the size of her hips. But he went on to say, “It’s only that a few of your clothes tend to be sort of… striking, and I would like Beatrice to focus on you more as a person.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, sure. In that case.”

So she wore her flight-attendant outfit — tailored white blouse and navy skirt. Actual stockings. Actual leather pumps. And she battened down the wings of her hair with two plain silver barrettes that one or another granddaughter had left in the third-floor bathroom.

This time the drive to Macadam was more familiar, and therefore it seemed shorter. The swimming pools’ vivid turquoise color reminded her of a type of hard candy she used to favor. Trust Jesus, she read. I Still Like Larry. The stop sign on the corner of Will’s street had a sticker that said EATING ANIMALS plastered underneath.

The house he lived in — the late Professor Flick’s house — was a white clapboard Colonial gone yellow around the edges. Hurricane Floyd had swept the state the week before, and evidently no one had bothered cleaning the front yard since. Rebecca had to thread her way through small branches and broken twigs and clumps of wet leaves on the walk. One branch was such a booby trap, lying in wait at ankle height, that she felt compelled to pick it up and heave it into the grass. So she arrived with damp, dirty hands, which she tried to scrub with a screw of tissue from her purse before she pressed the doorbell.

Once she had been buzzed in, she crossed a foyer crammed with antiques and climbed a carpeted staircase, rising into a steadily intensifying smell of lamb stew. It must have drifted up from Mrs. Flick’s kitchen, though, because when Will opened his door, just off the second-floor landing, nothing but the cold gray scent of newspapers floated out to her. Gazing past him, she saw newspapers everywhere — stacks of them on the chairs, the tables, the windowsills, the floor. “Come in! Come in! Have a seat,” Will said, but there was nowhere to sit. He said, “Oh,” as if he’d just realized. “Here, I’ll…” He tore around the room, scooping up armloads of papers and piling them in a corner. “I keep thinking I should hire a cleaning service,” he said. Rebecca didn’t tell him that a cleaning service wouldn’t have helped. She sat down and looked around her.

The walls were bare, marked with crumbling nail holes and the ghosts of old picture frames. The windows were curtainless, tall and narrow, letting in a bleached white light. She was sitting in one of those canvas butterfly slings from the sixties, and she would bet that the other pieces came from that era too. Will must have raided his garage or attic before he moved here, unearthing remnants of his student days — a cheap blond coffee table, a matted orange shag rug, a wheeled, adjustable chair meant for an office desk.

“Maybe you could give me some decorating tips,” he said, and he smiled at her hopefully, showing all his teeth.

Rebecca smiled back. “Is Beatrice not here yet?” she asked.

“No, but I expect her any — oh, I’m sorry! What can I bring you to drink?”

“What do you have?” she asked.

“Water, milk…”

“Water, please.”

He left the room. He was wearing slippers, she saw, folded down in back beneath his heels, although otherwise he was neatly dressed in khakis and a white shirt. She could glimpse no more than a sliver of the room adjoining this one — wallpapered with dark, ugly flowers — but she gathered it was a dining room. She heard a faucet running, and then he returned, holding a pink aluminum tumbler. “Here,” he said, giving it to her. When their hands accidentally touched, she was reminded that he hadn’t kissed her hello. He must be anxious. He started raking his fingers through his hair in that agitated way he had, and instead of sitting down himself, he remained standing in front of her. She took a swallow of water. It was room temperature, tasting of chlorine and something sharp, like mildew. She set the tumbler on the floor beside her chair and rose and wrapped her arms around his neck. “What—?” he said, stepping back, looking toward the door even though it was closed.

She didn’t let him go. She tightened her hold and said, “Don’t worry; everything will be fine. You’ll see.”

“Oh, you don’t know Beatrice,” he said, still eyeing the door.

“We’re going to have such fun!”

“I’m serving this nutritious grain dish because she’s vegetarian, and I think I might not have cooked it enough.”

The buzzer rang, making him start. Rebecca dropped her arms, and he went to press a button next to the light switch. “Oh, God,” he said. He raked his fingers through his hair some more. He turned back to her and said, “Also, I used chicken broth. Don’t tell Beatrice.”

“My lips are sealed,” Rebecca said.

“It was what the recipe called for, and I wasn’t sure I could omit it.”

“Next time, I’ll give you the name of a powder you can substitute,” she told him.

She felt peculiarly unconcerned, as if she were playing a part in a play — the part of somebody knowledgeable and efficient. While Will tucked his shirt more securely into his khakis, she just stood waiting, not so much as glancing down at her own clothes. (At least she knew she couldn’t be taken for a hippie.)

Slow footsteps climbed toward them. Will flung open the door. “Hi, there, Beatrice!” he said, in a sprightly voice that Rebecca had never heard him use before.

The person who walked in was small and tidily constructed, of no determinate gender, dressed entirely in black leather although it was a warm evening. Her skin was a stark, chalky white and her barbs of black hair had a dead look, as if they’d been dyed. She endured a brief clasp from Will — less a hug than a momentary spasm of his arm around her shoulders — and then she turned and surveyed Rebecca coolly. She had a gold stud in her nose and a thin gold ring in one eyebrow — the kind of thing that always made Rebecca feel she should diplomatically avert her gaze. Not one feature in this girl’s face brought Will to mind.

Rebecca said, “Hello, Beatrice. I’m Rebecca.”

Beatrice turned back to Will. “You told me to be here at six,” she said, “so here I am.”

“Well, thank you, Bee. I’m awfully glad you came.”

“Are we eating supper, or not? Because I have things to do.”

Will looked over at Rebecca. She smiled at him encouragingly. He looked at Beatrice. “Wouldn’t you like to sit around a while first?” he asked. “Have a little talk?”

“Talk? Talk about what? Is there something you want to tell me?”

“No, just—”

“Who is this lady, anyhow? I don’t get it.”

Will tugged violently at a handful of his hair. Rebecca was the one who answered. “I’m an old, old friend of your father’s,” she said. “He and I grew up together.”

This earned her another cool stare, from head to foot. All at once, Rebecca was less confident of her outfit.

“So,” Beatrice said, “I guess you’re going to tell me next you’ve fallen madly in love or something.”

Will said, “Beatrice!” in an explosion of pent-up breath.

“Well, it’s true we’ve… fallen in fond, I guess,” Rebecca said. “But really I just came here tonight to meet you.”

“Okay: we’ve met,” Beatrice said. “Can I go now?” she asked her father.

“Go?” he said. “But you haven’t eaten!”

“All right. If you insist, let’s eat,” she said.

Will sent Rebecca another look. She said, “Yes! Why don’t we.”

Anyhow, there weren’t enough cleared chairs for the three of them to sit in the living room.

They went out to the dining room, Will leading the way. The table was incongruously elegant — a dark, varnished oval on a pedestal of lion paws — but the chairs were the folding metal kind you’d see in church fellowship halls, and a dozen cardboard boxes partially blocked the window. Will said, “You two sit down and I’ll bring the food.” Then he disappeared behind a swinging door.

“Well!” Rebecca said. “Where’s your usual seat?” Because she wasn’t about to make the mistake of displacing Beatrice.

But Beatrice said, “I don’t have one,” and pulled out the chair at the head of the table.

Rebecca chose the chair to Beatrice’s right. She took some time settling herself, unfolding her napkin (paper) and spreading it in her lap. Three green glass plates had been laid directly on the table, each with a rust-specked knife and fork to its left. Reflexively, Rebecca started to switch her knife to the other side. Then she thought better of it and left it where it was.

“When your dad was your age,” she told Beatrice, “his entire aim in life was to get his driver’s license.” This was one of her preplanned topics — something to break the ice. “He was the only boy in our class who wasn’t driving yet. He kept failing the road test. Has he told you that?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Beatrice said. She seemed more affable now. She had picked up her plate and was holding it in front of her face, either checking her reflection or peering through it. “He’s such a klutz,” she said, setting the plate back down. “Every time he goes anywhere, just about, he comes back with a dented fender or something.”

“Well, he’s thinking,” Rebecca defended him. “He’s got his mind on more intellectual matters.”

Beatrice merely raised her eyebrows. Rebecca wondered if that was painful, considering the gold ring.

Something clanged on the kitchen floor, and Will said, “Drat!” Rebecca smiled conspiratorially at Beatrice. Beatrice remained stony-faced.

“Do you know how I imagined you?” Rebecca asked. “I thought you’d be the scholarly type. I don’t know why, but I used to picture that Will would have a son who was very studious and scientific. Tristram, I decided his name was. And then when he said he had a daughter instead, I sort of turned you into a female Tristram. I imagined you’d wear a long muslin dress and this meek, old-fashioned hair style.”

She attempted a light laugh that came out sounding tinny. Beatrice didn’t laugh herself, but she seemed to be listening. Her eyes, for the first time, rested on Rebecca’s eyes, and she stopped fiddling with her fork.

“I had this vision of you reading aloud to him in front of the fire,” Rebecca told her. “I thought you’d have these serious philosophical discussions.”

“Well, we don’t,” Beatrice said flatly.

“No, I can see that.”

“End of the day? We’re not speaking.”

Rebecca misunderstood her, at first. Accustomed though she was to young people’s turns of phrase, she thought that Beatrice meant they didn’t say good night to each other. Then she said, “Oh. You don’t speak ever?”

“This supper’s an exception. But I’m not here because I want to be.”

“Well… still, it was nice of you to come.”

“I’m here because he promised me my own e-mail account if I came.”

Rebecca said, “Oh.”

Will barged through the swinging door, carrying a Pyrex casserole in both hands. “Ta-da!” he said. He set it on the table. Rebecca sprang to pick it up — she expected it to be hot, although he’d carried it in bare-handed — but she discovered it was lukewarm, nowhere near a temperature that would damage the varnish. She sank back down, feeling silly.

“This is a complete-in-one-dish, whole-grain meal,” Will told Beatrice. “Entirely vegetarian.”

“Actually, I eat meat now,” she said.

“You do?”

His shoulders drooped. He looked over at Rebecca.

“We could all stand to eat more grains from time to time,” she assured him.

“Okay, well… I’m not serving anything else because this is complete in one dish. Oh. I already said that.”

“Have a seat,” she told him.

He sat down across from her and stared glumly at the casserole. It was Rebecca, finally, who lifted the lid. Chunks of broccoli and cauliflower dotted what looked like oatmeal. A serving spoon was submerged almost the length of its handle. Rebecca plucked the spoon out with the tips of her fingers. “Beatrice?” she said. “Care to pass me your plate?”

Beatrice rolled her eyes, but she obeyed.

“Will? Some for you?”

He held out his plate. A fleck of something green clung to his lower lip. Rebecca resisted the urge to brush it off.

She served herself last, and then wiped her fingers and picked up her fork. “Mm!” she said once she’d taken a bite. The other two were already eating, chewing crunchily and steadily, and she couldn’t think how because the dish was downright disgusting. The vegetables tasted raw and rooty, and the grain was so undercooked that she imagined it swelling up in her stomach and exploding. She looked around for water. There was none. Amazingly, Beatrice lifted another forkful to her mouth.

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a chef,” Will said.

“I just think you’re wonderful to make the effort,” Rebecca told him. “There are lots of men who would serve TV dinners, in your situation.”

He ducked his head shyly and said, “It’s not as if it’s all that complicated a recipe.”

Beatrice said, “So, do many men have you to supper, Rebecca?”

“Um…”

“Do you do a good bit of dating?”

Will glanced over at Beatrice, looking alarmed. Rebecca said, “Well, no, I—”

“Because you actually seem pretty normal, on the surface. And I’m just wondering if you realize what kind of a guy you’re eating with, here.”

“A very nice guy,” Rebecca said firmly. “I’ve known him since he was a toddler.”

“This is the guy who kidnapped our dog when Mom asked him for a divorce,” Beatrice told her.

“Your dog?”

“Our little dog Flopsy Doodle.”

Rebecca looked at Will. He swallowed. “I didn’t kidnap her,” he said. “I only… borrowed her. I happened to be upset.”

“He stole her when we were out and didn’t even leave us a note,” Beatrice said. She spoke pleasantly, almost perkily; she was the cheeriest Rebecca had yet seen her. “We came home and called, ‘Flopsy?’ No Flopsy. So my mom phoned my dad; we knew it had to be him. She told him she was calling the police, and do you know what he did? He lied and said he hadn’t the least idea what she was talking about. Then he opened his door and let Flopsy run off on her own, when everybody knows she’s got a terrible sense of direction. It’s lucky she wasn’t killed.”

“I was sad, all right?” Will said. “I was having a difficult time.”

“Like it wasn’t difficult for Mom and me.”

“Look: it was a momentary lapse. I already said I was sorry. How many times can I apologize? I went looking for her myself, in the middle of a rainstorm; I was out half the night hunting her; I brought her back in my new car even though she was covered with mud—”

“Well, just so you realize,” Beatrice told Rebecca. Then she rose and slid her chair neatly against the table. She gave her father a scornful stare down the length of her studded nose. “You can call me tomorrow about the e-mail account,” she said.

She walked out, clicking briskly in her hard-soled black leather boots.

After they heard the front door shut, Will and Rebecca looked across the table at each other. “I guess that wasn’t very successful,” Will said.

“Nonsense; it went fine.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Will said, shaking his head.

“Girls that age are impossible,” she told him. “My daughter? When she was your daughter’s age? Her most cherished dream was to grow up to be a bartender.”

Will didn’t seem impressed. Rebecca went further; she said, “And she always fell for the scariest boys. Boys you wouldn’t trust in your house, even! I worried what would become of her. But then she married the nicest man possible. Several nice men, in fact.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Will went on saying.

“Will. Believe me. She’s going to be fine.”

He glanced up, then, from under his white eyebrows. “About the dog,” he said. “I’m sorry to say she was right: I behaved very badly there, for a while.”

“Well, no wonder! You were distraught.”

“What Laura said first was, she just needed a little space. To do some thinking, she said. I accommodated her in every way; moved out immediately. I was so agreeable! Then she called me on the phone and announced she was making it permanent. It kind of… floored me. I went over to talk about it, and when I found they weren’t at home, why, I must have gone a little nuts. But it was only that one occasion.”

“And you did bring the dog back,” she said.

“Yes, you should have seen the state of my car seats!” He grabbed another handful of his hair. “Well, enough of this. Can I offer you more to eat?”

“No, thanks. I’m stuffed,” she said.

“Let’s go into the living room, then.”

“Can’t I help with the dishes?”

“Absolutely not,” he said.

She didn’t argue. The undercooked grain was making her feel sort of logy; she envisioned dragging her stomach like a watermelon from table to sink.

He rose and came over behind her and slid her chair back. When she was standing, he took her gently by the shoulders and turned her to face him. Then he kissed her. This was not the light kiss they normally exchanged. It was more pressing and intense, more insistent, and she didn’t know why she felt no response. Mainly, she felt embarrassed. She drew away. She reached up to touch one of her barrettes. “Well!” she said. “Gracious!”

“Rebecca,” he said, still holding on to her shoulders.

But she said, “I should be going, I guess. It’s getting late.”

“Oh. Right,” he said, and he released her.

In fact it was not yet seven o’clock, but he didn’t point that out.

They walked through the living room, skirting newspapers. At the front door, Rebecca turned and gave him a brilliant smile. “Thanks so much for dinner,” she said.

“It wasn’t very good, I’m afraid.”

“It was delicious. Really.”

“If I’d only known Beatrice had gone back to eating meat,” he said, “I could have served my chili. I have several extra containers now from the times when I’ve eaten at your house. I could have used them tonight and had the week’s supply come out even again.”

She laughed as she stepped onto the landing. But later, driving home, she was grim-faced and preoccupied, and when she parked and got out of her car, her body felt so heavy — so unspeakably burdensome — that she knew she couldn’t blame it solely on the casserole.