Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

Now she braced herself against autumn as if it were a buffeting wind that she had to endure with her eyes tight shut and her jaw clenched, holding on to the nearest support for all she was worth. October, heartlessly dazzling. November, dropping leaves like a puddle of gold beneath the poplar. Sometimes, when nobody was around, she spent half the afternoon gazing blindly out the window. Or she let the telephone ring and ring while she sat listening. The sound was a satisfaction. It was an even greater satisfaction when the ringing finally stopped.

* * *

“I suppose you’re going to insist on some kind of brouhaha for Thanksgiving,” Min Foo told her.

Thanksgiving?

Well, yes: November. She couldn’t think how it had slipped her mind.

Thanksgiving was the one holiday when Rebecca did all the cooking. This had developed after a famous Thanksgiving when Biddy served braised pheasant and steamed quinoa in white truffle oil. There had been a sort of revolution, and Biddy had stalked out in a huff and Rebecca was put in charge forever after. Which was fine with her. She didn’t mind the hard work; she welcomed it, in fact. But she dreaded the socializing. All that merriment! She would have to be so cheery! She wondered what would happen if she simply didn’t bother. If the girls started one of their quarrels and she just let it happen. If the moment for the toast came and went and she just slugged her drink down in silence.

Still, she made out her grocery list. Went to the store. Baked the cornbread ahead for the stuffing. Had Alice Farmer come in to give both parlors a good going-over.

Alice Farmer planned to celebrate Thanksgiving at her sister’s. “You know my sister Eunice, the one who’s blessed with the gift of healing,” she said. Rebecca folded her hands across her stomach and looked down at them. More veins crisscrossed them than she had ever noticed, knotted and blue and gnarly. Alice Farmer stopped dust-mopping and said, “Miz Davitch?”

“I’m sorry; what?” Rebecca asked.

“Maybe you ought to take this remedy that my Aunt Ruth takes,” Alice Farmer told her. “It’s real good for your nerves, but you can only buy it in Georgia.”

“Okay,” Rebecca said after a pause.

“Okay what ? You want her to get you some?”

“No, that’s okay,” Rebecca said.

She thought that if she were shown a photograph of these hands, she might not even know they were hers.

* * *

Everybody attended except for Patch and her family; they were spending the holiday with Jeep’s parents. And everybody, of course, was late, which caused no particular problem because Rebecca had counted on that when she put the turkey in. Zeb showed up first, then Min Foo and her brood, then NoNo with Barry and Peter. It had been sprinkling all morning, and most of them wore raincoats that dripped across the foyer. Underneath, though, they had on their best clothes. They always dressed up for Thanksgiving — much more than for Christmas, to which the youngest children wore pajamas. Rebecca, though, was not dressed up. She had sort of forgotten. She was wearing the sweatshirt and flounced denim skirt that she had put on when she got out of bed. “Shall I watch things in the kitchen while you run change?” Min Foo asked her.

Rebecca said, “Oh, thanks,” but then the door slammed open again, letting in Biddy’s contingent, and Rebecca stayed where she was.

Biddy had good news: her book for senior citizens, The Gray Gourmet, had been accepted by a small press. She announced this even before she took her raincoat off, with Troy and Dixon beaming on either side of her. The first to offer congratulations was Barry. “That’s great!” he said. “I’ve got an author for a sister-in-law!” Then Zeb asked what the publication date was. She didn’t know yet, Biddy said. Then everybody looked at Rebecca.

Min Foo said, finally, “Maybe we should break out some champagne.”

Rebecca said, “Oh. I’ll go get it.”

In the kitchen, she took two bottles of champagne from the refrigerator. Then she peeked in the oven to check on the turkey, and she lowered the flame beneath the potatoes, and after that she fell into a little trance at the window. The fog outside was made denser by the foggy panes, which were clouded with steam from the stove. Raindrops marbled the glass.

NoNo walked in and said, “Beck, I wanted to — Oh!”

She was looking at Will’s plant, which had migrated to the kitchen and grown another six inches. “Good heavens, it’s a tree!” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’m thinking of moving it out to the yard,” Rebecca told her.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that in November. The first frost would probably kill it.”

“What happens happens, is my philosophy,” Rebecca said.

She expected NoNo to argue, but NoNo was busy going through her purse — a shiny little red-and-black box that matched her red-and-black dress. “I wanted to show you something,” she said, and she pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

Rebecca opened it and found a list, computer-printed.

Dry cleaner

Make dental appointment for Peter

Find someone to clean gutters

Buy my bro. a birthday present

Till the mention of a brother, she had assumed the list was NoNo’s. She looked up questioningly.

“Barry wrote that,” NoNo told her.

“So…”

“He wrote that for me. These are the things that I was supposed to do last week.”

“I see,” Rebecca said.

“Beck. When you and Dad got married, did you ever… Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you ever wonder if he’d married you just so he would have help with us kids?”

Rebecca opened her mouth to answer, but NoNo rushed on. “I’m trying not to think that of Barry, but look at this list! And he’s always saying, ‘Boy, married life is great.’ He says, ‘Things are so much easier now. I don’t know what we did before you came along,’ and while naturally I’m flattered, still it does cross my mind that—”

“Are you saying you don’t think he loves you?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, I know he says he does, but… these lists! And the car pool, and the PTA meetings! Everything falls to me, which of course makes sense in a way because he does work longer hours, but… it’s like he’s saying, ‘Oh, good, now that I have a wife I don’t have to bother with any of that busywork anymore.’ It’s like I’m so useful.”

“But, sweetie,” Rebecca said, “isn’t he useful, too? Before, you were all alone in the world. I remember once I asked you why you never took a vacation, and you said if you had a man in your life, someone to travel with, you said—”

“Beck, you know how I get these pictures sometimes,” NoNo said. “Pictures behind my eyelids about the future. Well, the morning after my wedding, I was starting to wake up but my eyes weren’t open yet and I got the most distinct, most detailed, most realistic picture. I saw myself walking up Charles Street, that part where it splits for the monument. I was wheeling a baby carriage and I was wearing a maid’s uniform. Gray dress, white apron, white shoes, those white, nurse kind of stockings that always make women’s legs look fat—”

Rebecca laughed.

“I’m glad you find it amusing,” NoNo said bitterly.

“Maybe the point was the baby carriage. Did you think of that?”

“The point,” NoNo said, “was that I was wearing servant clothes.”

“Well, maybe the picture was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time! After all, you predicted Min Foo would have a girl, didn’t you? And then something else, what was it, some other mistake—”

Too late, she realized that she was thinking of what Patch had said: that NoNo couldn’t be very clairvoyant if she’d chosen to marry Barry.