Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

“How ingenious: a pre-cropped photo,” Zeb murmured, and Rebecca laughed till her cheeks ached.

Yes, she had to admit that the wedding went much better than she had expected.

* * *

Alone in her room, with everyone else in the house fast asleep and the champagne giving her courage, she sat on the edge of the bed and dialed Will Allenby’s home number.

The phone at the other end rang twice and then gave a click. “Dr. Allenby,” a man said. A man; not a boy. He had the worn, slightly furry voice of somebody middle-aged. She recognized the Church Valley accent, though, that turned Allenby into Allen-bih .

“Will?” she said.

“Laura?”

“Who?”

There was a sharp silence, during which she longed to hang up. But finally she said, “This is Rebecca Holmes Davitch, Will. Do you remember me?”

“Rebecca?”

She waited.

“Rebecca,” he said dully.

“I hope you weren’t asleep!”

“No…”

“Just tell me if you were! I know it’s late!”

It seemed she could not get rid of this insanely manic tone. She grimaced to herself. “In fact,” she said, “maybe I should call another time. Yes, why don’t I do that? Okay! Bye!”

She hung up and doubled over, burying her face in her lap. It felt to her as if something in her chest had started bleeding.

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.”