Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Somebody snickered. Ramsay. Delia felt slightly affronted by this, but she made herself focus on the issue at hand. She said, “Mrs., um, really I…”

She hated how little-girlish her voice came out.

“That is a happy marriage you’re destroying,” the old woman told her. She was stationed now at the far end of the table, just behind Sam’s empty chair. She glared at Delia from underneath lashes so thickly beaded with mascara that they shaded her face like awnings. “They may have their ups and downs, like any other young couple,” she said, “but they’re trying to work things out, I tell you! They’re dating again, has he mentioned that? Twice they’ve gone to dinner at the restaurant where they got engaged. They’re thinking it might help if they started a baby. But every time I look out of my house, what do I find? Your car, parked across the street. You at his front door kissing him, all over him, can’t get enough of him, going up the stairs with him to paw him at his bedroom window for all the neighbors to gawk at.”

Adrian ’s mother-in-law lived across the street from him?

Delia felt burning hot. She sensed the others’ thunderstruck expressions.

Sam said, quietly, “Delia, do you know anything about this?”

“No! Nothing!” she cried. “She’s making it up! She’s confused me with somebody else!”

“Then what’s this?” the old woman asked, and she started tweaking at her purse. The drawstring was held tight by some sort of sliding clasp, and it took her whole minutes, it seemed, to work it loose, while everybody watched in riveted silence. Delia realized she had not released a breath in some time. She was prepared for absolutely anything to emerge from that purse-something steamy and lurid and reeking of sex, although what would that be, precisely? But all the old woman brought forth in the end was a photograph. “See? See?” she demanded, and she held it up and swung slowly from left to right.

It was a Polaroid snapshot, so underexposed that it amounted to no more than a square of mangled darkness. But not till Ramsay snickered once again did Delia understand that she was safe.

“Now, there,” Sam was saying, “don’t you worry, I’m sure your daughter is very happily married…” In the most chivalrous fashion, he was turning the old woman toward the door. “May I see you to your car?” he asked.

“Oh. Well… yes, maybe… yes, maybe so,” she said. She was still fumbling with her purse, but she let him guide her out. She walked beneath the shelter of his arm in a dazed, uncertain manner that filled Delia with sudden pity.

“Who was that?” Marie-Claire asked distinctly.

Ramsay said, “Oh, just somebody for your aunt Delia; you know what a siren she is,” and everybody stirred and chuckled.

It was perverse of her, she knew, but for one split second Delia actually considered confessing, just to show them. She didn’t, of course. She smiled around the table and sat back down and placed the water pitcher on her left. “Who’s for more chicken?” she asked, and she looked brazenly into Eliza’s measuring eyes.

It was Susie’s night to do the dishes, and Eleanor said she would help. She wouldn’t think of letting Delia lift a finger, she said, after that extravagant meal. So Delia backed out of the kitchen, pretending reluctance, but instead of heading toward the porch with the others, she sped up the stairs and into her bedroom. She shut the door behind her, sat on the edge of the bed, and picked up the phone.

He answered almost instantly. She had braced herself to go through that whole two-ring rigmarole, but right away he said, “Hello?”

“ Adrian?”

“Oh, God, Delia, did she come?”

“She came.”

“I tried to warn you. I called your house, and even after your husband answered I went ahead and-”

“My husband answered? When?”

“Wasn’t that your husband?”

“Oh, Carroll. My son. At suppertime, you mean.”

“Yes, and I was hoping you would… That was your son?”

“Yes, my younger son. Carroll.”

“But he was so old.”

“Old? He’s not old!”

“He sounded like a grown man.”

“Well, he isn’t,” Delia said curtly. “ Adrian, why did you stand there kissing me in doors and windows when you knew your mother-in-law lived across the street?”

“So she did what she said she would, did she?”

“She came and told my family I had a ’paramour,’ if that’s what you mean.”

“Lord, Delia, what did they say?”

“I think they just thought she was crazy or something, but… Adrian. She claimed you were happily married.”

“Of course she did. You know she would want to believe that.”

“She claimed you and Rosemary have started dating; you’ve gone out together twice to the restaurant where you got engaged.”

“Well, that much is true.”

“It is?”

“Just to talk things over; sure. We do have a lot in common, after all. A lot of shared history.”

“I see.”

“But it wasn’t how you imagine. We met for dinner! Just to eat dinner!”

“And you’re thinking of starting a baby.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, naturally it came up.”

“Naturally?” Delia cried.

“I mean, Rosemary isn’t getting any younger.”

“No, that’s right, she must be all of thirty,” Delia said with some bitterness. She twined the telephone cord between her fingers. The connection was the kind with a rushing sound in the background, like long distance.

“Well, probably she’s not the maternal type, though, anyhow,” Adrian said cheerfully. “Weird, isn’t it? The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off. When Rosemary and I first met, she was so… cool, I guess you’d say, so cool-mannered I was bewitched, but now I see she might be too cool to be a good mother.”

“How about me?” Delia asked him.

“You?”

“What is it about me that attracts you but puts you off?”

“Oh, why, nothing, Delia. Why do you ask?”

“Nothing attracts you?”

“Oh! Well, maybe… well, when we met, you acted so fresh and sweet and childish, I mean childlike, you know? But then when we reached the point where most people would, for example, um, get more involved, you were still so damn sweet and childlike. Turning all flustered, saying you should leave: you’d think we were teenagers or something.”

“I see,” Delia said.

Adrian said, “Delia. Just how old is your son, anyway?”

“Ancient,” she told him. But it was herself she was referring to.

She hung up and walked out of the room.

Downstairs, she heard water running in the kitchen, and dishes clattering, and Eleanor saying, “Susie, dear, you’re not planning to discard that, surely.” Delia crossed the hall to stand at the screen door, gazing out toward the porch. She saw no sign of the boys, who had not stayed to talk after dinner in years; no sign of Velma or Rosalie. But Sam and Linda sat sniping at each other in the swing. “Some of those azaleas were planted by our grandfather,” Linda said, “not that that would be any concern of yours,” and Sam said, “Or yours either, unless you plan to start sharing a little of the burden here,” and Eliza, rocking in the cane rocker, said, “Oh, just quit it, both of you.” The twins were twirling on the front walk beneath the pole lamp, with grass blades stuck to their skin and white moths flickering above them. They had reached that high-pitched, overwrought state that seizes children outdoors on summer evenings, and they were chanting at breakneck speed:

“What’s life?”

“Fifteen cents a copy.”

“But I only have a dime.”

“Well, that’s life.”