Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

“At any rate,” she said, “doesn’t it seem to you, really, that all of us love people at least partly for their usefulness?”

“No, it does not,” NoNo said. “I would never do such a thing! Never! I fell in love with Barry because he was so gallant and romantic, and he had that kind of eyebrows I like that crinkle up all perplexed.”

“Well, I don’t mean—”

“Forget it,” NoNo told her. “I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it. So! Shall I take these bottles out? Will two be enough, do you think?”

“Oh. Maybe not,” Rebecca said, and she went over to the refrigerator. “What I meant was—” she said, but when she turned around, a third bottle in her hand, she found that NoNo had already left the room with the first two. Her purse remained on the table, with the list beside it. Rebecca picked up the list and studied it again.

“Min Foo says to remind you she’s having club soda,” Biddy said, walking in. “Shall I pour it? Is there any in the fridge?”

“Yes, there should be,” Rebecca told her absently.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“Oh, nothing.”

Biddy peered over her shoulder. “Barry’s list,” she said.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Everybody’s seen it. But it was tactless of her to trouble you with that, just now.”

“Tactless? Why?”

“Oh, no reason,” Biddy said hastily. “Never mind me; I’m just babbling.”

“I don’t know why people in this family are so unhappy,” Rebecca told her. “Look at Min Foo! I’m worried to death she’s going to get another divorce.”

Biddy merely shook her head and removed the ice bin from the freezer.

“Last week,” Rebecca said, “she told me this long-winded tale about something unforgivable that Hakim was supposed to have done. You’d think he’d committed ax murder! And all it was, was they were driving someplace together and Hakim took the wrong road and insisted on staying on it.”

“He didn’t like the inefficiency of a U-turn,” Biddy said. “That’s what she said he called it: the inefficiency.”

“Oh, she told you this, too?”

“He wanted to keep on the way they were headed and just sort of meander in the right direction at some point in the future.”

“But that’s the way men are,” Rebecca said. “It’s nothing to get divorced about.”

“I said the same thing, exactly.” Biddy dropped ice cubes into a glass. “I said, ‘Min Foo, you two should go for some help. Ask Patch for the name of her marriage counselor,’ I told her.”

“Patch has a marriage counselor?”

“I thought you knew.”

“All these problems !” Rebecca said. “Thank goodness for you and Troy, at least.”

Biddy stiffened. “Just because Troy is gay doesn’t mean we don’t quarrel like other couples,” she told Rebecca.

“How reassuring to hear that,” Rebecca said.

She’d intended to sound witty, but her words fell dully, and Biddy didn’t smile.

They left the kitchen — Biddy with Min Foo’s club soda, Rebecca with the champagne. In the dining room they passed Peter and Joey, who were seated at one end of the table. Peter was demonstrating some kind of game. “First you take a ballpoint pen and lay it flat,” he said, “with the little air hole facing up. See the little air hole? Then you hold another pen exactly a foot above it, and you aim at the air hole and stab. Like this.” He jabbed the second pen downward, rattling all the place settings. “The winner is whoever’s the first to break the pen on the table. Your turn.”

Rebecca felt slightly cheered by this scene. (Joey, four years Peter’s junior, was hanging worshipfully on Peter’s every word.) She dropped back to watch for a second, putting off joining the others.

When she arrived in the parlor, NoNo was setting out glasses while Zeb poured the champagne. Biddy was discussing her book. “Recipes for old people can be difficult,” she was saying, “because they tend not to eat much. Also they’re often arthritic, which makes peeling and chopping and stirring just about impossible. Not to mention they’ve lost all sense of taste.”

“Oh, what’s the point, then?” Rebecca burst out.

Biddy stopped speaking and looked at her.

“I mean… it must present quite a challenge,” Rebecca said after a moment.

“Exactly,” Biddy told her. “So what I’ve tried to do…” And on she went, while Barry circled the room handing each person a drink.

Poppy had the couch to himself, having stretched his cane the length of it to keep everyone else away. “Psst!” he said to Rebecca. “Come here; I saved you a seat.” He waggled his cane invitingly.

She sat down without removing the cane, perching on just the front of the cushion.

“I was thinking people might like to hear my poem,” he told her.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Shall I recite it?”

“Why not,” she said.

He hesitated.

“I can’t seem to think of the words,” he said. “Let me have a minute, will you?”

Someone pushed a glass of champagne into Rebecca’s hands. Lateesha, helping out. “Thank you, dear,” Rebecca said.

“I just need to get some kind of running start,” Poppy was saying. “Otherwise, it won’t come to me. How does it begin, again?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

She really didn’t, she realized.

She was conscious of a lull in the conversation, and she looked up to find everybody turned in her direction, each person holding a glass, waiting for her to propose the toast. She assembled herself. She got to her feet and raised her own glass. “To Biddy,” she said, “and The White Gourmet. ”

“Gray! Gray!” they corrected her. Someone gave a quick bark of a laugh.

“Sorry,” she said. She sat down.

There was a brief silence. Then everybody drank.

* * *

Not counting the baby, there were thirteen at the table. This was one more person than could comfortably be seated, but a separate children’s table with only three children — or four, if Dixon was exiled as well — would have seemed too puny. So Rebecca had everyone scrunch together, and she put Poppy next to her at the head although there wasn’t room. He was still trying to remember the words of his poem. He said, “This has never happened before.”

Rebecca patted his hand, which was practically in her plate. “Could you scoot about two inches the other way?” she asked him.

“Then I wouldn’t even be sitting at the table anymore, Beck.”

“Oh, all right.”

Biddy seemed to have taken over the serving duties. Actually, Rebecca might have let things lapse a little, there. Biddy kept coming out of the kitchen to ask things like, “Don’t you have any more butter?”

“Try the door shelf in the fridge,” Rebecca said.

“I already did. You don’t have anything! I can’t find more salt for the salt cellars, either. You don’t have any backups in the pantry!”

Barry was carving the turkey, Rebecca was glad to see. Zeb always made a mess of it. NoNo and Min Foo were passing plates around, and Hakim was jiggling a squirmy, whimpery Abdul on his shoulder. “I think this little man has gas,” he announced, and Lateesha said, “Ooh! Gross!” and crumpled into a cascade of giggles behind her fingers.

Biddy asked, “Where’s the sauerkraut? Did you not remember the sauerkraut this year?”

“Back in 1923,” Poppy began, “when folks still thought that squirrel meat was good for chronic invalids…”

Joey was eyeing Peter across the table, trying to get his attention, and Troy was discussing music with Zeb — or singing notes to him, at any rate. “Dah, dee dah-dah,” he sang, holding up one index finger instructively.