Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Although last fall I did attend a color conference in Pittsburgh,” Velma was recalling. “I stayed overnight and left Rosalie with my mother.”

Rosalie, perched behind the other odd plate, raised her enormous, liquid eyes and gave Velma a look that struck Delia as despairing.

“Everybody in our whole entire shop has been trained to do your colors,” Velma went on. Was she speaking to Eleanor, of all people? Eleanor nodded encouragingly, wearing her most gracious expression.

“Some people ought to wear cool colors and some people ought to wear warm,” Velma told her, “and they should never, ever cross over, though you’d be shocked at how many try.”

“Would that be determined by temperament, dear?” Eleanor asked.

“Ma’am?”

But Eleanor was sidetracked just then by the plate that Sam was filling for her. “Oh, mercy, Sam,” she said, “not such a great big helping!”

“I thought you asked for a breast.”

“Well, I did, but just a little one. That one’s way too big for me.”

He forked another and held it up. “This okay?”

“Oh, that’s huge!”

“Well, there’s nothing smaller, Mother.”

“Can’t you just cut it in half? I could never manage to eat all that.”

He put it back on the platter to cut it.

“This one lady,” Velma told the others, “she was wearing pink when she came in and I’m like, ’Lady, you are so, so wrong. You should be all in cools,’ I tell her, ’with the tone of skin you got.’ She says, ’Oh, but that’s why I head for warm.’ Says, ’I go for what’s my opposite.’ I could not believe her. I really could not believe her.”

“Sam, dear, that’s about six times as much asparagus as I can possibly handle,” Eleanor said.

“It’s three spears, Mother. How can I give you a sixth of that?”

“I just want a half a spear, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“You, now,” Velma told Eliza, “you would look stunning in magenta. With your coal-black hair? That tan color doesn’t do a thing for you.”

“However, I’m partial to tan,” Eliza said in her declarative way.

“And Susie, I bet you had your colors done already. Right? That aqua’s real becoming.”

“It was the only thing not in the laundry,” Susie said. But she was fighting down a pleased expression around the mouth.

“I dress Rosalie in nothing but aqua, just about. She turns washed out in any other color.”

“Sam, I hate to be a nuisance,” Eleanor said, “but I’m going to send my plate back to you so you can take a teensy little bit of that potato salad off and give it to someone else.”

“Well, why not just keep it, Mother.”

“But it’s much too large a helping, dear.”

“Then eat what you can and leave the rest, why don’t you.”

“Now, you know how I hate to waste food.”

“Oh, just force yourself to choke the damn stuff down, then, Mother!”

“Goodness,” Eleanor said.

The telephone rang.

Delia said, “Carroll, would you answer that? If it’s a patient, tell them we’re eating.”

Not that she imagined a patient could be so easily dissuaded.

Carroll slouched off to the kitchen, muttering something about the grown-ups’ phone, and Delia took a bite of her drumstick. It was dry and stringy as old bark from being kept warm in the oven too long.

“For you, Mom,” Carroll said, poking his head through the door.

“Well, see who it is and ask if I can call back.”

“He says it’s about a time machine.”

“Oh!”

Sam said, “Time machine?”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Delia said, setting aside her napkin.

“Someone wants to sell you a time machine?” Sam asked her.

“No! Not that I know of. Or, I don’t know…” She sank back in her seat. “Tell him we don’t need a thing,” she told Carroll.

Carroll withdrew his head.

It seemed to Delia that her one bite of chicken was stuck halfway down her throat. She picked up the basket of rolls and said, “Thérèse? Marie-Claire? Take one and pass them on, please.”

When Carroll returned to the table, she didn’t so much as glance at him. She sent the butter plate after the rolls, and only then looked up to face Eliza’s steady gaze.

It was Eliza she had to watch out for. Eliza was uncanny sometimes.

“This china belonged to your great-grandmother,” Linda was telling the twins. “Cynthia Ramsay, her name was. She was a famous Baltimore beauty, and the whole town wondered why she ever said yes to that short, stumpy nobody, Isaiah Felson. But he was a doctor, you see, and he promised that if she married him she would never get TB. See, just about her whole family had died of TB. So sure enough, she married him and moved out to Roland Park and stayed healthy as a horse all her days and bore two healthy children besides, one of them your grandpa. You remember your grandpa.”

“He wouldn’t let us roller-skate in the house.”

“Right. Anyhow, your great-grandmother ordered her wedding china all the way from Europe, these very plates you are eating from tonight.”

“Except for Rosalie,” Marie-Claire said.

“What, sweet?”

“Rosalie’s plate is not wedding china.”

“No, Rosalie’s comes from Kmart,” Linda said, and she passed the butter to Eleanor, not noticing how Rosalie’s eyes started growing even more liquid.

“Heavens, no butter for me, dear,” Eleanor said.

Why had he phoned her? Delia wondered. How unlike him. He must have had something crucial to tell her. She should have taken the call.

She would go to the kitchen for water or something and call him back.

Grabbing the water pitcher, she stood up, and just then the doorbell rang. She froze. Her first, heart-pounding thought was that this was Adrian. He had come to take her away; he would no longer listen to reason. A whole scenario played itself out rapidly in her mind-her family’s bewilderment as she allowed herself to be led from the house, her journey through the night with him (in a horse-drawn carriage, it seemed), and their blissful life together in a sunlit, whitewashed room on some Mediterranean shore. Meanwhile Sam was saying, “I’ve told them and told them…,” and he rose and strode out to the hall, apparently assuming that this was a patient. Well, maybe it was. Delia remained on her feet, straining to hear. One of the twins said, “Rosalie’s napkin is plain old paper,” and Delia had an urge to bat her voice away physically.

It was a woman. An elderly, querulous woman, saying something unintelligible. So. A patient after all. Delia felt more relieved than she would have expected. She said, “Well! Anybody want anything from the kitchen?” But before she could turn to go, Sam was ushering in his visitor.

Easily past seventy, doughy and wrinkled beneath her heap of dyed black curls and her plastering of red rouge and dark-red lipstick, the woman advanced on absurdly small, open-toed shoes that barely poked forth from the hem of her shapeless black dress. She was clutching a drawstring purse in both fat, ringed hands, and diamond teardrops swung from her long earlobes. All of this Delia somehow took in while at the same time registering Sam’s astonished face just beyond the woman’s shoulder. “ Dee?” he said. “This person’s saying-”

The woman asked, “Are you Mrs. Delia Grinstead?”

“Well, yes.”

“I want you to leave my daughter’s husband alone.”

Around the table there was a sort of snapping to attention. Delia sensed it, even though she forced her eyes to remain on the woman. She said, “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”

“You know who I mean! My son-in-law, Adrian Bly-Brice. Or don’t you even keep track? Have you collected so many paramours you can’t tell one from another?”