Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

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

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

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

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

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

With his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets.

His beautifully hinged pelvic bones.

His narrow, dark-brown eyes watching only Rebecca.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca said, “Birthday?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, no—”

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