Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Sorry to barge in,” Eleanor said, “but nobody answered the door.” She advanced to kiss the air near Delia’s ear. She smelled of soap; she was an unperfumed, unfrilled woman, sensibly clad in a drip-dry shirt-dress and Nikes, with a handsome face and clipped white monkish hair. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation.”

“No, I was just winding it up,” Delia told her.

“It appears that someone has left some articles on your front porch.”

“Articles?”

Delia had a fleeting vision of Dr. Adwater’s article on charisma.

“Badminton sets and rafts and such, scattered all about where anyone might stumble on them.”

Eleanor was the kind of guest who felt it her duty to point out alarming flaws in the household. How long had their toilet been making that noise? Did they know they had a tree limb about to come down? Delia always countered by pretending that she was a guest herself. “Imagine that!” she said. “Let me take you to Sam. He’s out by the grill.”

“Now, I thought you weren’t going to any fuss,” Eleanor told her, leading the way from the study. Instead of a purse, she had one of those belt packs, glow-in-the-dark chartreuse nylon, riding in front of her stomach like some sort of add-on pregnancy. It caused her to walk slightly swaybacked, although ordinarily her posture was perfect.

“I’m only serving grilled chicken,” Delia said as they crossed the hall. “Nothing complicated.”

“Tinned soup would have been plenty,” Eleanor said. She eyed a browning apple core centered on the newel post. “Particularly in view of all you need to do for your beach trip.”

Did she mean this as a reproach? Every year, Sam suggested inviting his mother along to the beach, and every year Delia talked him out of it, which was why they always held this placatory family dinner the night before they left. It wasn’t that Delia disliked his mother. She knew that Eleanor was admirable. She knew that she herself would never have coped so magnificently in Eleanor’s circumstances-widowed early, forced to take a secretarial job to support herself and her young son. (And to hear Sam tell it, his father had not been much use anyhow-a weak and ineffectual, watery sort of man.) The trouble was, in Eleanor’s presence Delia felt so inadequate. She felt so frivolous and spendthrift and disorganized. Their vacation was the one time she could hope to shake off that feeling.

Besides, she couldn’t imagine the Iron Mama lolling on a beach towel.

“Did Linda get here?” Eleanor was asking as they entered the kitchen. “Are the twins just huge? Where are they all?”

It was Eliza, standing at the sink, who answered. “The twins are at the pool,” she said. “Linda just left with Susie to fetch them home. How’re you doing, Eleanor?”

“Oh, couldn’t be better. Is that asparagus I see? Delia, my word, do you know what asparagus costs?”

“I found some on sale,” Delia lied. “I’m going to roast it in the oven in this new way, really simple. No fuss,” she added craftily.

“Well, if your idea of simple is asparagus and roast squab!”

“Chicken, actually.”

“Just an old withered carrot would have been good enough for me,” Eleanor said.

She headed for the back door, with Delia meekly shadowing her.

In the side yard, Sam was tinkering with the grill knobs. “Looks about the right temperature,” he told Delia. “Hello, Mother. Good to see you.”

“What’s going on with the shrubbery, son?” Eleanor asked, looking past him.

“We’re having it taken out,” he said. “Putting in a whole new bunch of plantings.”

“Why, that must cost a fortune! Couldn’t you just work with what you had, for gracious sake?”

“We wanted totally new,” Sam told her. (We? Delia thought.) “We’re tired of working with what we had. Dee, believe I’m ready to start cooking.”

As Delia walked toward the house, she heard Eleanor say, “Well, I don’t know, son. This life of yours seems mighty rich for my blood, what with asparagus for dinner and grilled pheasant.”

“Chicken!” Delia called back.

Eliza must have heard too, for she was grinning to herself when Delia opened the screen door. “You bring it to him,” Delia told her. “I can’t stand another minute.”

“Oh, now, you take her too much to heart,” Eliza said as she went over to the refrigerator. Eliza seemed to find Eleanor merely amusing. But then, Eliza wasn’t Eleanor’s daughter-in-law. She didn’t have Eleanor held up before her daily as a paragon of thrift, with her professional-quality tool chest and her twelve-column budget book and her thrice-used, washed-and-dried sandwich bags.

Did it ever occur to Sam that Delia and his father might well have been kindred spirits?

She gathered up the silverware, ten of everything, and went into the dining room. Here the sounds from the yard were muted, and she could let her mind return to Adrian. She traveled around the table, doling out knives and forks and remembering the rustle of Adrian ’s fingers on her collar, his warm breath when he kissed her. But she could no longer truly feel the kiss, she discovered. Eleanor’s interruption must have startled all feeling out of her, as in the old days when the telephone rang while she and Sam were making love and she had lost her place, so to speak, and not been able to fall back into it afterward.

She returned to the kitchen and found Eliza pondering in front of the glassware cupboard. “Which do we want?” Eliza asked her. “Iced tea or wine?”

“Wine,” Delia answered promptly.

From the side yard, Eleanor’s confident voice came sailing: “Have you checked the price of asparagus lately?”

“Pretty steep, is it,” Sam said equably.

“Sky-high,” Eleanor told him. “But that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight: asparagus and grilled peacock.”

Eliza was the only one who laughed.

Supper was late, for one reason or another. First Linda and Susie took forever bringing the twins from the pool, and then Ramsay didn’t appear till seven although he’d promised faithfully to be home by six, and when he did show up he had his girlfriend in tow and her wan and silent six-year-old daughter. This enthralled the twins, of course, but Delia was furious. It had been understood that tonight would be strictly family. However, she didn’t have quite what it took to face Ramsay down in public. Seething inwardly, she scrunched two extra, mismatched place settings in among the others before she called everyone to the table.

Velma, the girlfriend, was a tiny, elfin woman with a cap of glassy hair and a pert little figure set off by trim white shorts. Delia could see what her appeal was, sort of. For one thing, when she entered the dining room she went straight to one of the orphan place settings, as if she were accustomed to existing on the edges of events. And for another, she was so inexhaustibly vivacious that even Carroll-surly Carroll-brightened in her presence, and Sam made a point of giving her the largest piece of chicken. (“Got to put some meat on your bones,” he said-not his type of remark at all.) Then she endeared herself to Linda by marveling at the twins’ names. “I’m crazy about things that sound French-I guess you can tell from me naming my daughter Rosalie,” she said. “Shoot, I’d like to go to France. The furtherest I’ve been is Hagerstown a few times for hair shows.”

Velma was a beautician. She worked in one of those unisex places, which was how she and Ramsay had met. He had come in for a haircut and invited her on the spot to a tea at the house of his freshman adviser. Now he sat proudly next to her, one arm resting on the back of her chair, and beamed around the table at his family. Short though he was (he took after Delia’s father), he seemed manly and imposing alongside Velma.