Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

Rebecca said, “Oh!” in a voice that was still not quite right.

Mercifully, the woman said, “Wait till I get the directory.” She dropped the receiver with a clatter.

Rebecca cleared her throat and sat up straighter. She noticed that her ceiling fan was trailing wisps of dust as it spun — rags of dust, actual streamers of dust.

“Here it is,” the woman said. “Four hundred Linden Street.”

Rebecca switched the receiver to her left hand and wrote down the address. Her handwriting was as wavery as Poppy’s. She wrote down the telephone numbers for Will’s office and his home — evidently Macadam was still enough of a backwater not to be paranoid about such things — and then she said, “Thanks so much!” in what she hoped was a breezy tone. “Bye!” And she hung up.

Linden Street was where the full professors lived — the settled, tenured professors with good salaries and established families.

Will must have a family.

How could she have supposed he was still alone at that library table, his books still spread around him?

She tore the page off her memo pad and folded it over and over until it was a tiny paper stick. For one irrational moment, she had an urge to chew it up and swallow it, but instead she tucked it out of sight underneath the telephone. Then she rose, smoothing her skirt, and went back downstairs.

* * *

By the afternoon before the wedding, Tina had become just the slightest bit less popular with her daughters. This always happened, Rebecca remembered now. Feelings would get hurt, misunderstandings would arise — the usual untidiness that came from rubbing elbows over a period of days. Patch, for instance, felt that Tina wasn’t being nice enough to Jeep. Not only that; she was being too nice to Barry. It turned out that Patch had entertained high hopes for Tina’s derailing the wedding. In her woman-of-the-world way, she would see Barry for the cad he was and then, by some magic, persuade NoNo not to marry him. Instead, Patch said, Tina had cozied up to him; she had made a fool of herself over him; she had behaved just shockingly, linking elbows with him at every opportunity and laughing her throaty laugh directly into his face, not even acknowledging the chair that Jeep pulled out for her at the table but deliberately choosing another chair, far away from Jeep and next to Barry. “Barry, of all people!” Patch told Rebecca. (She had stopped by for just a moment to drop off her youngest.) “We’re talking about a man who makes calls on his cell phone during dinner. Calls his own answering machine to leave himself a message. ‘Don’t forget my dress shoes in the back closet,’ he says. Right in the middle of a joke Jeep was telling!”

“Oh, honey, Barry didn’t mean… Your mother didn’t mean any harm,” Rebecca said.

Although she couldn’t help feeling guiltily pleased.

Then Tina suggested to Peter that he go along on the honeymoon. “Think about it,” she told him. “They’re planning to leave you in this mausoleum over the weekend with Rebecca. Practically a stranger! I don’t know about you, but I would never stand for such a thing. The three of you are a family now, tell them. You deserve to come too.”

It was unlikely he’d have followed her instructions — he just smiled uncertainly at his shoes and then slid a glance toward his father — but NoNo took offense anyhow. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she told Tina in a low, trembling voice. “Barry and I have three days only, three short days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; that’s all I’m asking, and now you have the nerve to say—”

“All right! All right! Never mind me!” Tina said, holding up both jeweled hands. “I’m just the fly on the wall, here.”

Then she turned back to Peter and gave him a sympathetic, I-tried-my-best shrug.

This scene took place in the family room upstairs, because downstairs they had a paying event. A man had engaged the entire public space — both parlors and the dining room — just so he could propose to the woman he loved. Evidently the Open Arms was where they had first met, at some sort of charity function. The details, he had said, he would leave to Rebecca, but he wanted this to be a grand and formal occasion with a tuxedoed waiter, a four-course dinner, and a strolling violinist. So Rebecca hired Dixon, who looked elegant in his rented tux although, sad to say, he had started growing one of those skinny jawline beards that seemed more trouble than shaving; and she asked Biddy to do the food and Emmy to play the piano, since she didn’t know any violinists. Emmy was diligent if not inspired; she sat at the old upright, wearing a tank top and a miniskirt and approximately fifteen earrings, and plunked out Chopin études while the couple sipped champagne on the front-parlor sofa. The man was gray-haired and portly, his cherubic face shining with sweat even though the air-conditioning was cranked so high that you could hardly hear Emmy’s playing. The woman was gray-haired as well but very pretty in a soft, genteel way, and she wore a trim navy dress and tiny navy pumps with straps across the insteps. Rebecca was able to observe all this because she kept inventing excuses to go down and check how they were doing. First she stepped in to welcome them, and then to say that hors d’oeuvres would be served in the other parlor (since it seemed a shame not to employ all the space they had hired), and then to announce dinner. She had the impression that the woman couldn’t think what to make of the situation. Upon arrival she had asked where the other guests were, and now she kept giving Rebecca anxious, searching smiles as if she were hard of hearing, although plainly she was not.

“This is a huge mistake,” Biddy whispered, slicing hearts of palm in the kitchen. “Such an unprivate proposal. What if she says no? I’ll die. I’ll burst out crying.”

She was serving a meal with a valentine motif: everything pink or heart-shaped or referring to hearts in some way. The main course would be beef heart. Talk about mistake! Rebecca thought. But of course she kept that to herself.

When she returned to the family room, she found NoNo flipping angrily through a magazine while Tina told Barry the story of her own proposal from the Englishman. “We were staying at the country house of friends of his,” she said, “and one evening over drinks our host said, ‘Tina, darling, I wonder if you could fancy linking up with Nelson, here.’ That was Nelson’s notion of a proposal. He was scared to ask me himself, he said later. Wouldn’t you think I’d have been warned off by that! The man had no backbone whatever. I’m surprised he could sit upright in a chair.”

She said nothing about how Joe had proposed, Rebecca noticed.

Peter and Poppy were watching a sitcom on TV. Or Poppy was watching. Peter wore a tense, fixed expression, and a sudden roar of canned laughter didn’t cause even a smile to cross his face. “Want to come downstairs and help with the dinner?” Rebecca asked him.

He rose so dutifully that she hurried to say, “Not that you have to or anything.”

“Go on, son; I’ll be down in a minute,” Barry told him. “We’ve got to be leaving pretty soon anyway. Big day tomorrow, hey, guy?”

Peter gave him a wan smile and trailed Rebecca out of the room.

What on earth would she do with this child for a whole weekend?

In the kitchen, Biddy was moaning over the coeur à la crème she’d just unmolded. “Beautiful!” Rebecca told her, but Biddy wailed, “How can you say that? It’s a fiasco!”

She must be referring to the slight indentation at the center. “Camouflage it,” Rebecca said briskly. “Didn’t I see some strawberries somewhere?”

“This is all NoNo’s fault,” Biddy said. “She’s made me lose my confidence. First she says I can cater the wedding and then she says I can’t, and then she says, oh, if it means so much she’ll let me do it after all; and ever since then, I swear, everything I’ve made has come out wrong in some way. Look at this! It’s an embarrassment!”