Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

In romance novels, this realization would have made her turn thankfully to the man who had been waiting in the wings all along. But in real life, when she heard Sam’s step on the stairs she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She felt him standing over her, and then he slipped her book from her hands and switched off the lamp and left the room.

By morning the rain had stopped and the sun was out, shining all the brighter in the washed-clean air. The whole family set off for the ocean shortly before noon-the grown-ups in Sam’s Buick, the younger ones in the Plymouth with Ramsay at the wheel. Scattered puddles hissed beneath their tires as they drove across Highway 1 and threaded past the higher-priced cottages, closer to the water. When the road dead-ended, they parked and fed two meters with quarters and unloaded the day’s supplies-the thermos jugs and blankets, towels, Styrofoam coolers, rafts, and beach bags. Delia carried a stack of towels, along with her straw tote stuffed so full of emergency provisions that the handles dug a furrow in her bare shoulder. She was wearing her pink gingham swimsuit with the eyelet-edged skirt, and navy canvas espadrilles, but no robe or cover-up, because she didn’t care what Sam said, she wanted to get at least a hint of a tan.

“Watch it, girls,” Linda told the twins as they lugged a cooler between them up the wooden walkway. “You’re letting the bottom drag.”

“It’s Thérèse’s fault-she’s making me do all the work!”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“Didn’t I tell you to take something lighter?” Linda asked them. “Didn’t I offer you the blankets, or the-”

But then they crested the low, sandy rise, and there was the ocean, reminding them what they had come all this way for. Oh, every year it seemed Delia forgot. That vast, slaty, limitless sweep, that fertile, rotting, dog’s-breath smell, that continual to-and-fro shushing that had been going on forever while she’d been elsewhere, stewing over trivia! She paused, letting her eyes take rest in the dapples of yellow sunlight that skated the water, and then Carroll’s armload of rafts crashed into her from behind, and he said, “Geez, Mom.”

“Oh, excuse me,” she said. She started down the wooden steps to the beach.

There were advantages to coming so early in the season. True, the water had not had time to warm up yet, but also the beach was less crowded. Blankets were spread at civilized intervals, with space between. Only a few children splashed at the edge of the breakers, and Delia could easily count the heads that bobbed farther out.

She and Eliza unfolded a blanket and arranged themselves on it, while Sam worked an umbrella pole into the sand. Susie and the boys, however, walked a good twenty feet beyond before stopping to set up their own station. They had been keeping apart for several years now; it no longer hurt Delia’s feelings. But she did always notice.

“Now, you two are not stirring from here,” Linda told the twins, “until I get every inch of you covered with sunblock.” She held them close, one after the other, and slathered lotion on their skinny arms and legs. As soon as she let go of them, off they raced to the young people’s blanket.

Susie’s radio was playing “Under the Boardwalk,” which had always seemed to Delia a very lonesome song. In fact, “Under the Boardwalk” was rising from other radios as well, on other blankets, so that the Atlantic Ocean seemed to have acquired its own melancholy background music.

“Believe I’ll go for a jog,” Sam told Delia.

“Oh, Sam. You’re on vacation!”

“So?”

He shucked off his beach robe and adjusted the leather band of his watch. (The watch was evidently part of his new exercise routine; in just what way, Delia wasn’t sure.) Then he walked down to the surf, turned, and started loping northward, a lanky figure in beige trunks and gigantic white sneakers.

“At least here they have all these lifeguards who’ve been trained in CPR,” Delia told her sisters. She folded Sam’s robe and packed it away in her tote.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Eliza said. “The doctors told him to jog.”

“Not to overdo, though!”

“To me he looks just the same as always,” Linda said. “If you consider that a good thing.” She was shading her forehead to gaze after him. “I never would have known he’d had a heart attack.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack! It was chest pains.”

“Whatever,” Linda said carelessly.

She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit held up by a center cord that encircled her neck. It made her breasts appear to droop at either side like a pair of weary eyes. Eliza, who scorned the notion of a whole separate outfit for one week of swimming per year, wore denim shorts and a black knit tank top rolled up beneath her bra.

Delia took off her shoes and dropped them into her tote. Then she lay down flat on her back, with the sun’s mild warmth soaking into her skin. Gradually sounds grew fainter, like remembered sounds-the voices of other sunbathers nearby, the high, sad cries of the seagulls, the music from the radios (Paul McCartney now, singing “Uncle Albert”), and under everything, so she almost stopped hearing it, the ocean’s rush, as constant and unvaried as the ocean inside a seashell.

She and Sam had come to this beach on their honeymoon. They had stayed at an inn downtown that no longer existed, and every morning, lying out here side by side with their bare, fuzzed arms just touching, they had reached such a state that, eventually, they had to rise and rush back to their room. Once even that had seemed too far, and they’d plunged into the ocean instead, out past the breakers, and she could still remember the layers of contrast-his warm, bony legs brushing hers beneath the cool, silky water-and the fishy scent of his wet face when they kissed. But the summer after that they had the baby with them (little Susie, two months old and fussy, fussy, fussy) and in later years the boys, and they had seldom managed even to stretch out on their blanket together, let alone steal back to their cottage. Eliza started coming too, and Linda before she married, and their father because he never could have kept house on his own; and Delia spent her days ankle-deep in the surf tending children, making sure they didn’t drown, admiring each new skill they mastered. “Watch this, Mom.” “No, watch this!” They used to think she was so important in their lives.

Someone’s feet passed in the sand with a sound like rubbing velvet, and she opened her eyes and sat up. For a moment she felt light-headed. “Your face is burning,” Eliza told her. “Better put some lotion on.” She herself was sitting sensibly in the shade of the umbrella. Linda was down in the surf, braced for an incoming wave with both plump arms outflung and her hands posed as liltingly as bird wings, and the twins had returned from the other blanket and were filling buckets near Delia. Damp sand caked Marie-Claire’s knees and made two circles on the empty-looking seat of Thérèse’s swimsuit.

“Did Sam get back from jogging?” Delia asked Eliza.

“Not yet. Want to go for a dip?”

Delia didn’t dignify that with an answer. (As everyone in her family well knew, the temperature had to be blistering, the ocean flat as glass, and not a sea nettle sighted all day before she would venture in.) Instead, she reached for her tote bag. Delving past espadrilles, Sam’s robe, and her billfold, she came up with Captive of Clarion Castle. Eliza humphed when she saw the cover. “Guess I’ll leave you to your literature,” she told Delia. She got to her feet and set off, dusting the back of her shorts in a businesslike manner.

“Aunt Eliza, can we come too?” Marie-Claire shrilled.