Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

“No, no. Just keep me company,” she said.

The phone shut up, finally. Rebecca led the way through the rear parlor and the dining room, where Will began to lag behind. She turned to find him studying another portrait — the one that hung over the sideboard. “Was this your husband?” he asked her.

“Why, no,” she said. Was he joking? The man in the portrait wore a frock coat and fitted trousers, and he carried a shiny top hat in one gloved hand. “I’ll show you what my husband looked like,” she said. “I’ve got an old snapshot on the fridge.” And they continued down the passageway to the kitchen.

What she hadn’t realized was that the snapshot she had in mind — Joe on some long-ago beach trip, holding up a fresh-caught crab and laughing in the sunlight — had gradually become buried beneath a shingling of later snapshots. Photos tended to live in the imagination, she thought; she hadn’t actually looked at this one for years, although she could still visualize every detail. She had to weasel it out from under the others, and once Will had seen it (“Ah, yes,” was all he said), he went on to peer at the rest. “That’s Dixon in the cap and gown,” she explained. “My grandson, at his high-school graduation party. And this…” She pointed toward a picture partly obscured by a magnet shaped like a bagel. “This is NoNo, my youngest stepdaughter, at her wedding. Doesn’t she look beautiful? Biddy is the oldest; that’s her standing next to LaVon, my former son-in-law. They were celebrating Lateesha’s baby-welcoming, I think. And then Patch, she’s our athlete. A gym teacher; can you imagine? I believe this must have been taken when her girls’ lacrosse team won the — well, listen to me, rattling on! And I bet you must be starving to death.”

She spun away to unwrap the platter of cold chicken on the counter. Will followed at her heels, his hands jammed awkwardly in his rear pockets. He said, “It’s true you always wanted ten children.”

“Who, me?”

“You said that being an only child was so, what did you say, so pitiful. You wanted a big, jolly crew of children.”

“I did?”

She stopped to stare at him, with a serving fork poised over the chicken.

“And you would have all these traditions, you said — all these family rituals, those big Christmases and Thanksgivings that other families had.”

She said, “I don’t remember that.”

“Well, it seems you ended up with it, anyhow.”

“I don’t remember a bit of that,” she told him. “Could you bring in the bread basket, please?”

He picked the basket up and followed her back to the dining room. “Pretty,” he said of the table.

She flushed. She thought now she might have overdone things. “Oh,” she said, setting down the platter, “it’s no big deal. You can sit facing the window. I’ll go get the salad.”

But when she returned, he was still standing. He waited till she had lit the candles, and then he pulled out her chair for her. His hand on her chair was so close that she could feel its warmth through the fabric of her blouse. In a sudden fit of daring, she leaned back imperceptibly until her shoulder was pressing against his fingers. But he drew away as if he hadn’t noticed and went around to his side of the table.

Or maybe he had noticed, and was deliberately rebuffing her.

“What’s happening in your backyard?” he asked as he sat down.

“My…?” She twisted around to look through the open window behind her. “Oh, those are the nurserymen. They’re putting in some azaleas.”

He said, “This is like running a plantation or something. Do you employ a large staff?”

“No, just… well, a woman who helps with the cleanup, sometimes, if it’s a big party.” She passed him the chicken.

“And what is your role at these parties? You provide the entertainment? Magicians for children’s birthdays and such?”

“No, it’s really just the physical space. Although we do offer catering, if the customer wants it.”

She hated how chatty and informative she sounded, like someone delivering an advertising spiel. Was this all they could find to talk about? They seemed to do much better on the telephone than in person.

She forked a drumstick onto her plate. “I was wondering,” she said. (Preplanned topic number two.) “Is your daughter like you were at her age?”

“No,” Will said. “She’s bewildering.”

Rebecca laughed, but he gazed back at her glumly. He said, “I never have understood the first thing about her. I didn’t understand her when she was a baby and I understand her even less now that she’s an adolescent.”

“Oh, well, adolescents,” Rebecca said, waving a hand. “Who does understand them?” She helped herself to a roll.

“Laura seems to. Her mother.”

“Really?”

She waited to hear more, but the person who spoke next was one of the workers in the backyard. “Now, this here is my advice,” he said. His words were punctuated by the chuffing sound of a pickax. “Never, ever agree to stay overnight at a woman’s place. No matter how she begs and pleads, you have her stay at your place, or else a motel or a buddy’s place. Because you really got no way of knowing when her boyfriend might get out of jail. This one gal, she says her boyfriend couldn’t never in a million years get out, and like a fool I believe her. I say okay, I’ll sleep over, and what do you think happens? Next morning there’s a knock on the door. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Who can that be?’ Steps up naked as a jaybird to look through the little peephole and then comes squawking back to me, ‘Lord Almighty, it’s him!’ I says, ‘Woman?’ I says, ‘Woman, didn’t you swear and declare that he was locked up good?’”

Will said, “Of course, Laura’s considerably younger than I am. I suppose it’s only natural she would have a better understanding of adolescents.”

Rebecca refocused her thoughts. “How much younger?” she asked.

“She’s thirty-eight; I’m fifty-three.”

“So, let’s see… fifteen years. Well, with Joe and me it was almost that much: thirteen and a half.”

Outside the window, the nurseryman was saying, “I walk past him in the hall; say, ‘How you doing,’ and keep on going. ‘How you doing,’ he says back, and I walk on down the stairs just easy-like and careless-like, but all the time the back of my neck is tingling; know how it will do? Waiting for that knife between the shoulder blades.”

“Man, you was lucky, ” another voice said. “How come you to put any stock in what a woman tells you?”

“This chicken is delicious,” Will said.

Rebecca said, “Thank you. Won’t you have some salad?”

“Thanks.”

“The thing about women is, they want what they want when they wants it,” the first man said. “They don’t mind what they might have to do to get it. They’ll do anything. They won’t be stopped. They call you on the phone, and they come by your place of work, and they look you up at the house and try to mess with you. You tell them, ‘Gal, hey, cut me some slack,’ but they just, man, they just steamroll on and can’t nothing turn them aside.”

“But you were so mature for your age,” Will was saying.

Rebecca said, “Excuse me?”

“You were so serious. So involved in your studies. Laura, on the other hand…” He shrugged. He was stirring his salad around rather than eating it, she saw. (This was a recipe of Biddy’s, involving charred yellow beets. It might have been too gourmet.) “Well, I should have known,” he said. “The way we met: she enrolled in my introductory physics class but decided it wasn’t relevant to her life. She came to get permission to drop the course and I persuaded her not to. That was our first conversation.”