Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

“I thought you two were going to a movie,” Rebecca told him.

“We were considering a movie,” Poppy said, “but after the ice-cream fiasco I just didn’t have the heart for it.” He stood poised in the doorway, pivoting his cane with both hands as if he thought he was Fred Astaire.

“What fiasco was that?” Will asked him politely. (Too politely, in Rebecca’s opinion.)

“I told the girl at the counter I’d like a little taste of butterscotch ripple,” Poppy said, “and she gave me one and it was weak, just very frail and weak in flavor. So I said, ‘Well, I believe I’ll sample the coffee nugget next,’ and she said, ‘Sir!’ in this smart-aleck tone — not a respectful ‘sir’ by any manner of means. ‘Sir, if we gave out unlimited samples we wouldn’t have any product left to sell, now, would we.’”

Will clicked his tongue.

“Back in my day, folks were more accommodating,” Poppy said.

“Mine too,” Will told him.

“So we thought we’d come on home and see what you -all’s dessert was.”

“We’re not having any dessert,” Rebecca said. “I didn’t make one.”

“I’ll go look in the freezer, then. Check what flavors of ice cream we’ve got. Want some ice cream… um?” he asked Will.

“That’d be great,” Will said, and he sat down again.

Rebecca slumped in her seat.

Poppy set off for the kitchen, humming something tuneless. He was leaning on his cane hardly at all, for once. He had a jaunty lilt to his walk that struck Rebecca as infuriating.

“So!” Zeb said chummily. He pulled out the chair next to Will. “You knew our Rebecca back when she was in high school, I hear.”

“ Our Rebecca?” she demanded.

“Oh, way before high school,” Will said. “I knew her in nursery school. I knew her when she was too young for any kind of school.”

“I bet she was quite something when she was a little kid.”

“She was cute, all right,” Will said.

Rebecca rolled her eyes.

“Well: cute,” Zeb said. “She was cute even when we met her. Showed up that very first evening in a blue dress and matching blue shoes, carrying a purse that was shaped like a workman’s lunch box.”

Rebecca would not have expected him to remember that. She hoped he wouldn’t mention some other things he might remember — like that twentieth-birthday party, which had taken place when she and Will were supposedly still a couple.

Before Zeb could say any more, though, the front door slammed open again. “Beck?” NoNo called. “Are you home?”

“Out here,” Zeb called, and he cocked his head at Rebecca — trying to imply, no doubt, that now he wasn’t the only one who’d interrupted her evening.

Rebecca just glared at him.

NoNo had Peter with her. She was wearing her work clothes — a green smock with a yellow trowel embroidered on the pocket — and she looked tired and out of sorts. “Where were you?” she asked Rebecca. “I’ve been phoning and phoning all evening, and nobody ever answered and the machine wouldn’t pick up.”

“I was entertaining,” Rebecca said pointedly.

This didn’t faze NoNo for an instant. “Anyway,” she went on, “Peter wants to ask you—”

Rebecca said, “Will, I’d like you to meet my stepdaughter, NoNo Sanborn, and her stepson, Peter. This is Will Allenby.”

“Oh. Hi,” NoNo said. Will had stood up again when she entered, but they were too far apart to shake hands. “Peter wants to ask you something,” she told Rebecca.

“Will was my high-school boyfriend,” Rebecca said.

It seemed important to make this clear, although she wasn’t sure just why.

NoNo gave Will a second glance and said, “Really? Well. Nice to meet you.” Then she turned to Peter. “Tell Beck what you wanted to ask her,” she ordered.

Peter said, “Um, at my school they have this, what-do-you-call…”

He had combed his hair flat with water, or maybe one of those newfangled gels. He had a skinned-back, pale, nervous look, and when he laced his fingers together Rebecca could hear his knuckles crack. “It’s kind of like a, well, maybe, exhibit; an exhibit of these projects we’ve been working on, and the thing of it is…”

He gazed imploringly at NoNo. She smiled at him and nodded several times.

“I don’t know why they do this,” he said, “but they call the exhibit Grandparents’ Day, and they have us invite all our grandparents.”

Rebecca was so anxious for him that she was nodding along with NoNo, willing him to get through this. But Will said, “Isn’t that great!”

Everybody looked at him.

“That he’s inviting you to Grandparents’ Day,” Will explained to Rebecca.

Peter said, “Well, I’m not… I know she’s not really my grandma. I mean, she wouldn’t have to come if she didn’t want to. But since my dad’s parents are dead and all, and we don’t get to see my mom’s parents much; we don’t see them ever, in fact—”

“I would love to come,” Rebecca told him.

“You would?”

“I’d be honored. When is it?”

“It’s not till Friday the twenty-fourth, but we have to get our slips signed by tomorrow so the teachers will know for sure—”

“This school of his is driving me crazy,” NoNo told the room at large. “Last night at a quarter till ten, I swear, some woman telephoned saying I should send four dozen cookies into class with him this morning. And now this grandparent thing — would somebody please clue them in? What about kids like Peter, who don’t happen to have grandparents available at the drop of a hat?”

“Peter has me, though,” Rebecca said, “and I’m looking forward to it enormously.”

He gave her a grateful smile, and his shoulders lost some of their tightness.

Then Poppy was back with the ice cream — a half-gallon drum tucked under his arm, a scoop in his free hand. “Vanilla,” he said bitterly. “You’d think there would be something a little more imaginative. Oh, hello, NoNo. Hello, youngster.” He set the carton and the scoop in front of Zeb. “Good to see you again,” he told Will.

“Well… thanks.”

“Been keeping busy lately? Still enjoying your work?”

Will glanced across at Rebecca. She gave a slight movement of her eyebrows that amounted to a shrug, and he turned back to Poppy and said, “Yes, I enjoy my work very much.”

“Don’t count on that lasting forever,” Poppy told him. “Me, I got burned out in the end. Too many students asking, ‘Will we be tested on this, or not?’ And you knew if you said, ‘Not,’ they’d figure it wasn’t worth writing down, even. No sense of joy in learning for its own sake, is my diagnosis.”

He must have taken Will for one of his old teaching colleagues, but Will couldn’t have known that. He looked again at Rebecca. Perversely, she refused to come to his rescue. “Uh, you’re probably right,” he said finally.

“Too durn much TV, is what I tell folks.”

Why did Poppy insist on speaking in that homespun way? Rebecca wondered for the first time. He was an educated man; he had a college degree. She sent him her narrowest, meanest look, which he ignored.

“Rebecca,” Zeb said, brandishing the scoop, “will you be having ice cream?”

“No, I will not,” she said in a forbidding tone.

“Five servings, then,” he said cheerfully. “Because I know you will, NoNo, and—”

“I’ve put you on the guest list for my birthday party,” Poppy told Will, “but I don’t suppose Beck has sent the invitations yet. I’m turning a hundred years old in December.”

“A hundred!” Will exclaimed.

By now, Rebecca’s annoyance had spread even to Will. She disliked the counterfeit note of admiration in his voice, and the eager way he reached for the bowl Zeb passed him. Zeb himself, she thought, was behaving like a barbarian, licking ice cream off his knuckles before he dug the scoop back into the carton; and NoNo and Peter had pulled out two chairs as if they had every right to horn in whenever they wanted. As for Poppy: he was beyond forgiveness. “It’s my fondest wish,” he was telling Will, “that I’ll be able to say I’ve seen two centuries change over: the nineteenth and the twentieth. Not that I consciously remember when the nineteenth changed, of course, but I was there, I can say! I was there!”