Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

“Peter’s just finishing lunch,” Patch said when Rebecca arrived to pick him up. Then she lowered her voice. “This was not a big success. The kids tried to get him involved, but all he wanted to do was read his book. It wasn’t their fault, I swear.”

“Never mind,” Rebecca told her. “He read all through breakfast, too.” She was navigating Patch’s foyer, which was the usual jumble of sports equipment — gloves, bats, lacrosse sticks, and every conceivable size of ball. “Peter?” she called. “Ready to go?”

“Stay and have a sandwich with us,” Patch said.

“I can’t; Rick’s coming.”

“Not again!”

Anyway, Rebecca planned to skip lunch. The memory was still vivid of how she had looked in those dresses she’d tried on: the material strained taut across the broad mound of her stomach.

Peter emerged from the kitchen reading his book as he walked — some old science fiction paperback he’d found in the guest room — and during the drive home he continued reading, in spite of her attempts to start a conversation. “How was lunch?” she asked him.

“It was okay,” he said, with his eyes still on the page.

“How’d you get along with Danny?”

“We got along okay.”

But then on Eutaw Street he looked over at her to ask, “If you were offered a trip on a time machine, would you take it?”

“Well, certainly!” she said. “I’d have to be crazy not to!”

“Would you go to the past?” he asked. “Or the future?”

“Oh, the future, of course! I’d like to know what’s going to happen.”

“Yeah, me too,” he said.

“My grandchildren, for instance. How will they turn out? What’s that funny Lateesha going to do with her life? She’s such a little character. And Dixon: I just have this feeling Dixon’s going to amount to something.”

“I’d also like to know if scientists ever discover the Universal Theory,” Peter said.

Rebecca laughed.

He said, “What’s funny?”

She said, “Oh, nothing,” and he went back to his book.

* * *

As soon as they reached home, she went upstairs to her closet and took out all her dresses and piled them on the bed. One by one she tried them on, standing sideways to the mirror and surveying herself critically.

She had never aimed for the emaciated look; it wasn’t that. In fact, some part of her had always wanted softness and abundance — the Aunt Ida look. (Which may have been why she had slipped off every diet she’d ever attempted: the first pounds she lost invariably seemed to come from her cheeks, and her face would turn prim and prunish like her mother’s.) The problem was, soft and abundant women were seen to their best advantage when naked. It wasn’t her fault clothes had belts to bulge over, and buttonholes that stretched and gaped!

When Rick showed up to fix the ceiling, she met him at the door in an eggplant-colored gauze caftan that wafted unrestricted from neck to ankle. But she could tell from the way his eyebrows rose that it was a little too noticeable. “I’m having dinner with my high-school sweetheart Monday,” she explained, “and I’m nervous as a cat. I guess this won’t do, huh?”

“Well,” he said cautiously, “the color’s nice…”

“Oh.”

He said, “What about those harem pants you had on that time I was patching the bathroom?”

“I can’t wear pants to a restaurant!”

“Why not?” he asked. He heaved his ladder over the doorjamb. “Now, me: I have dinner with my high-school sweetheart every evening.”

“You do?”

“I’m married to her.”

“Deena was your high-school sweetheart? I didn’t know that!”

“I thought I’d told you.”

“I’d have remembered if you had,” she said.

After she saw him into the dining room she went upstairs again, this time to the hall cedar closet where she stored items she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away. There she found what she was hunting: the powder-blue dress she had worn the night she met Joe. So she must have worn it with Will, too, on some occasion or other. (It wasn’t as if she had owned that many clothes.) But it would barely cover her crotch; she could tell by holding it up against her. “Would you believe it?” she asked Peter. He was heading into the family room with his book. “I actually used to go out in public in this! It reminds me of that Mother Goose rhyme where the old woman wakes from a nap and discovers her skirts were cut off.”

“Is that what you’re wearing to the tea-dance?” he asked her.

“No, honey, I don’t suppose I’ll ever again wear it in all my life,” she said. “I just hang on to it because it’s what I met your grandpa in; stepgrandpa.”

“Well, the color’s nice.”

She laughed and turned back to the closet.

It was silly to worry about her appearance. This wasn’t a date, for heaven’s sake! This was two middle-aged ex-classmates catching up with each other. Having a bite to eat and then, no doubt, parting for good, because the chances were they had nothing at all to talk about anymore.

When she hung the blue dress in its place, a wistful, sweet, lilac scent drifted from its folds. But she supposed it was just the smell of aged fabric. It couldn’t be Amy’s engagement party, after all these years.

* * *

On Sunday afternoon, NoNo and Barry came back from their honeymoon. NoNo had a toasted look while Barry, who was fairer-skinned, had turned a ruddy pink with a brighter patch across his nose. (They’d borrowed a friend’s beach cottage in Ocean City.)

NoNo made a big fuss over Peter, kissing him hello and asking about his weekend, offering him his choice of restaurants for tonight’s first meal as a family. Peter dug a toe into the carpet and mumbled that it would be nice to eat at home. NoNo said, “Oh. At home,” her forehead cross-hatched with worry because she had never had the slightest talent as a cook. But Barry said, “Great. I’ll grill some steaks.” Then he and Peter went upstairs for Peter’s belongings.

As soon as they were gone, Rebecca said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, NoNo. Do you still go to that book club of yours?”

“Mm-hmm,” NoNo said. “Why?”

“I was thinking how wonderful that must be, having people to talk with seriously. I wish I belonged to something like that. It seems I never get involved in any intellectual conversations anymore.”

NoNo was examining her wedding ring, turning her left hand gracefully this way and that.

“So,” Rebecca said. “Do you think maybe I could join?”

“Join?” NoNo said. She let her hand drop. “Join my book club? But… this is a group of all women. You know?”

“Well, I’m a woman,” Rebecca said with a feathery laugh.

“I mean, it’s like a, practically group therapy. You wouldn’t believe the subjects we get onto, sometimes! Emotional issues, and relationships and such. I just think it would feel awfully funny to have a relative there. I mean any relative; my sisters, too, I mean. I’m not trying to be—”

“No, of course not. I wasn’t using my head,” Rebecca said. “Goodness! That would be awkward!”

Then Barry and Peter came clattering down the stairs, and she looked up at them with a big, false smile and asked if they had everything.

It probably wouldn’t have been the right kind of book club, anyway. She could talk about emotional issues any old time; it seemed she was always doing that, with every passing repairman.

* * *

Monday afternoon at two — the first available appointment — she got her hair washed and set at Martelle’s Maison of Beauty, but she came home and shampooed thoroughly under a beating shower because Martelle had been having an off day and gave her a headful of frizz. So she ended up with her usual look: the two beige fans at her temples. She put on a long blue flowered skirt, a lighter-blue tunic from Pakistan dotted around the neckline with tiny mirrors, and dark-blue panty hose to make her ankles look thinner. After checking her reflection she wound a red-and-white paisley scarf several times around her throat, although the temperature was in the eighties. Then she stepped into a pair of red pumps. (She had heard somewhere that men found red shoes provocative.)