Anne Tyler - Back When We Were Grownups

Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida had accepted, much to Rebecca’s surprise, with the understanding that they would leave the party early on account of the long drive home. Also they would arrive early, they announced, in order to help out. Privately, Rebecca began thinking up tasks that would keep them harmlessly occupied. Sorting through the napkins, inspecting the stemware for water spots…

Because it was December, the decorating scheme would be Christmassy. Already a slender tree stood in the front-parlor window, diminutive white lights twinkling tastefully from each branch. Now Rebecca set up another tree in the dining room, chunkier and messier, smothered in decades’ worth of construction-paper chains and Polaroid photos of the children pasted on paper-doily snowflakes. Some of the photos were faded past recognition. Many were interchangeable, since Davitch babies tended to look fairly much alike below a certain age. (All those little clock faces, wisps of dark hair, squinty mistrustful eyes.) On top she put a gold foil star with seven different-sized, unevenly spaced points, brought home from kindergarten long ago by one or another of the girls; no one knew which anymore. She draped a huge banner across the rear-parlor mantel reading HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY POOPY —a mistake she hadn’t noticed until she got it home — and she lugged the TV and the VCR down from the family room and plugged them into an outlet in the front parlor, because Hakim (in love with Western technology, like every immigrant Rebecca had ever known) was bringing as his present a professionally produced videotape assembled from the family’s home movies. This was supposed to be a secret, although Poppy had to have suspected something. On the morning of the party, when he went in to watch cartoons, all he found was a rectangle of dust on the TV stand. He didn’t say a word about it, though; just grunted and laid out a game of solitaire instead.

The day was bright and unusually cold, which meant Rebecca could wear her Bedouin costume. Although of course she didn’t put it on first thing. No, first she put on baggy pants and one of Joe’s old flannel shirts, and she raced around the house picking up and vacuuming and cooking Poppy a special breakfast. Nothing but sweets — waffles and cocoa. (The man would contract diabetes before the end of the day.) A little blue birthday candle flickered on the topmost waffle. “ Happy birthday to you… ” she sang, all by herself, standing over the table with her hands clasped together in front of her.

Poppy said, “Why, thank you, Beck,” and calmly blew out the candle. It amused and touched and exasperated her, all at the same time, how he accepted this fuss and bother as only his due.

“Just think,” she told him. “One hundred years ago today, you were just the tiniest bundle nestled in a cradle. Or maybe in your mother’s bed. Were you born at home? Did your mother have a doctor?”

“She had a midwife,” he said, cutting into his waffles. “Mrs. Bentham: she came to the house. We lived on North Avenue then. She was just starting out in her practice, and we were her first set of twins.”

“Oh, yes, twins,” Rebecca said. “I’d forgotten that.” Briefly, she laid a hand on his arm. “It must make you sad, celebrating your birthday without your brother here to share it.”

“No, not really,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve had a lot of years to get used to it.”

He took a much too large mouthful of waffles, dotting his mustache with beads of syrup. He was wearing his red plaid bathrobe over striped pajamas. Bristly whiskers silvered his face, and his white hair stood on end, unbrushed, raying out like sunbeams.

“Eighteen ninety-nine,” Rebecca said. “I don’t even know who was President then!”

“Beats me.”

“Your family wouldn’t have had a car, I suppose, or a telephone…”

But he was pursuing another train of thought. He said, “I’ve wondered, from time to time, if I’ve had added onto my life all those years my brother didn’t get to use.”

He spoke as if his brother had had no choice — as if it hadn’t been his own decision not to use those years. Rebecca said, “Well, I imagine he would have been glad to see you enjoying them.”

“Not necessarily,” Poppy told her. “He always did believe I got the best of the deal.”

“How was that?”

“Oh, you know… he wasn’t a naturally happy person. Some people, they just have a harder time being happy.”

“Would you say Joe was naturally happy?”

Poppy took another bite of waffles, either considering her question or stalling.

“When I met him, he was laughing,” she prompted him. Then she recalled that in fact, she was the one who’d been laughing. But she continued. “He said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ His very first words to me. Because Zeb was clowning around; you know how he does, and so I started… And when I decided to marry him, then he was laughing, for sure! I saw him laughing in the library window and I decided at that moment.”

Poppy said, “Hmm,” and blotted his mustache on his napkin.

“And don’t forget,” Rebecca said, “by profession, he was a party-giver.”

“But he never felt party-giving was really his true life,” Poppy reminded her.

“Well, no.”

“And that’s where he and I differed,” Poppy said. “Because I was always telling him, ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Face it,’ I said. ‘There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got,’ I said.”

“But he had a fine life!” Rebecca said.

“He certainly did.”

Poppy folded his napkin and laid it beside his plate. “So what I tell myself,” he said, “is I’m observing our birthday for both of us. That’s how I like to view it.”

Evidently, he had swerved back onto the subject of his twin brother. Rebecca took a second to realize it, though. That was what happened when you lived with someone confused: you became confused yourself, and one thing developed the oddest way of blurring into other things.

* * *

Her mother and her aunt arrived shortly before noon. Her mother wore her dressiest pants set and a fluffy mohair jacket that made her look smaller than ever. Her hair had been crimped into ridges as evenly spaced as the rows of tufts on a bedspread. Aunt Ida was all ruffles and froth — a pink rosebud print, despite the season — and she must have gone to the same hairdresser, although her curls were already beginning to wander out of formation. Between them they carried a large, flat package, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. “It’s a portrait of William McKinley,” Aunt Ida confided in a whisper.

“McKinley,” Rebecca said.

“He was who was President in 1899.”

“Oh, we were just discussing that at breakfast,” Rebecca said. “McKinley! Is that who it was!”

“We thought it would remind Mr. Davitch of his youth.”

“I’m sure he’ll love it,” Rebecca said. “Have you two had lunch yet?”

“Oh, we don’t want to be any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I’ve got some cold cuts set out.”

She placed their gift on the chest of drawers in the front parlor, and then she led them back to the kitchen. “Poppy’s upstairs napping,” she said. “He had a sandwich ahead of time and now he’s trying to rest before the party.”

“Law, he must be so excited,” Aunt Ida said, but Rebecca’s mother said, “I never did understand the notion of adults having birthday parties.”

“Well, it’s kind of our tradition,” Rebecca told her. “And besides, this is his hundredth! He could have had his name read out on TV, if we had asked.”