Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

“Oh, Mrs. Davitch, I can’t imagine—”

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

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

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

“Well…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca hung up and sank into a chair.

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

“I’m exhausted,” she told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are?”

She helped him up another step.

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

Rebecca laughed.

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

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

* * *

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

His very first remark to her.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Life went on, in other words.

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

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

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

“Those are leftovers from the picnic.”

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

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

“Just Congratulations, Katie .”