Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Wait for us, Aunt Liza!”

When they ran after her, they looked as skittery and high-bottomed as two little hermit crabs.

Eleanora was beginning to notice that Kendall was not the monster she had imagined. He brought trays of food to her locked tower room and let it be known he had cooked all the dishes himself. Eleanora pretended to be unimpressed, but later, after he left, she reflected on the incongruity of someone so brawny and virile stirring pots at a stove.

“Whew!” Sam said. He was back. Sweat trickled down the ridged bones of his chest, and he had the drawn, strained, gasping look that always distressed Delia after his runs. “Sam,” she said, setting aside her book, “you’re going to kill yourself! Sit here and rest.”

“No, I have to wind down gradually,” he told her. He started walking in circles around the blanket, stopping every now and then to bend over and grip his kneecaps. Drops of sweat fell from his forehead to the sand. “What have we got to drink?” he asked her.

“Lemonade, Pepsi, iced tea-”

“Iced tea sounds good.”

She stood to fill a paper cup and hand it to him. He was no longer breathing so hard, at least. He drained the cup in a single draft and set it on the lid of the cooler. “Your nose is burning,” he told her.

“I want to get a little tan.”

“Melanoma is what you’re going to get.”

“Well, maybe after lunch I’ll put on some-”

But he had already picked up Linda’s bottle of sunblock. “Hold still,” he said, unscrewing the cap. He started smoothing lotion across her face. It smelled like bruised peaches, an artificial, trashy smell that made her wrinkle her nose. “Turn around and I’ll do your back,” he told her.

Obediently, she turned. She faced inland now, where the roofs of cottages hulked beyond the sand fence. A flock of tiny dark birds crossed the blue sky in the distance, keeping a perfectly triangular formation so that they seemed connected by invisible wires. They swung around and caught the sun, and suddenly they were white, in fact almost silver, like a veil of sequins; and then they swung again, and once more they were plain black specks. Sam smoothed lotion over Delia’s shoulders. It went on warm but cooled in the breeze, tingling slightly.

“Delia,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“I was wondering about the old woman who came by the house Saturday night.”

She grew still beneath his palm, but she felt that every one of her nerves was thrumming like a twanged string.

“I know she was, maybe, peculiar,” he said. “But she had an actual photograph, and she seemed to think it really did show you and that who’s-it, that what’s-his-name…”

She had already turned toward him to deny it when he said, “That Adrian Fried Rice.”

“Bly-Brice,” she said.

For he had twisted the name on purpose. He always did that. The maid of honor at their wedding, Missy Pringle, he had kept referring to as Prissy Mingle. It was just like him to be so belittling! So contemptuous of her friends, with that ironic glint to his voice! Her entire marriage unrolled itself before her: ancient hurts and humiliations and resentments, theoretically forgotten but just waiting to revive at moments such as this.

“His name is Adrian, Bly, Brice,” she told him.

“I see,” Sam said. His face had a sheeted look.

“But that woman got it all wrong. He’s nothing but an acquaintance.”

“I see.”

In silence, he replaced the bottle of sunblock.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I never said that.”

“No, but you implied it.”

“I surely can’t be blamed for what you imagine I might have implied,” Sam said. “Of course he’s just an acquaintance. You’re not exactly the type to have an affair. But I’m wondering how it seems to outsiders, Dee. You know?”

“No, I don’t know,” she said, between set teeth. “And my name is not Dee.”

“All right,” he said. “Delia. Now, why don’t you just calm down.”

And he leveled the air between them with both palms, in that patronizing gesture she always found so infuriating, and turned away from her and walked toward the water.

Every quarrel they had ever had, he had walked off before it was resolved. He would get her all riled up and then loftily remove himself, giving the impression that he, at least, could behave like an adult. Adult? Old man was more the case. Who else would wade into the surf in his sneakers? Who else would pat water so fastidiously on his chest and upper arms before ducking under? And check his watch, for Lord’s sake, when he rose? To Delia it seemed he was timing the waves, engaging in some precise and picky ritual that filled her with irritation.

She snatched her tote bag from the blanket, spun on one bare heel, and stamped off down the beach.

More people had arrived without her noticing. Only a slender path wound among the umbrellas and canvas chairs and mesh playpens, and so after a few yards she changed course till she was marching alongside the ocean, on wet, packed sand that cooled the soles of her feet.

This part of the beach belonged to the walkers. They walked in twos, mostly: young couples, old couples, almost always holding hands or at least matching their strides. From time to time small children cut in front of them. Delia pictured a map of the entire East Coast from Nova Scotia to Florida -an irregular strip of beige sand dotted with tiny humans, a wash of blue Atlantic next to it even more sparsely dotted. She herself was a dot in motion, heading south. She would keep going till she fell off the bottom of the continent, she decided. By and by Sam would think to ask, “Have you seen Delia?” “Why, no, where could she have got to?” the others would say, but she would keep on the move, like someone running between raindrops, and they would never, ever find her.

Already, though, something was slowing her down. The first of the Sea Colony condominiums towered ahead-ugly Sea Colony with its impassive monochrome high-rises, like a settlement from an alien galaxy. She could have made her way past, but that mysterious, Star Wars hum that the buildings always emitted chilled her so that she stopped short. In her childhood, this had been grassy marshland, with a few plain-faced cottages scattered about. In her childhood, she was almost certain, she and her father had flown homemade kites right where that complex of orange plastic pyramids now shaded a modernistic sundeck. For an instant she could feel her father’s blunt fingers closing over hers on the kite string. She brushed a hand across her eyes. Then she turned and started walking back.

A lifeguard slouched on his chair, surveying the bathers inscrutably from behind his dark glasses. A lardy young boy on a raft landed in the foam at Delia’s feet. She stepped around him and, looking ahead, spotted her family’s green-and-white umbrella and her children on their blanket just beyond. They were sitting up now, and Sam stood some distance away, still shiny after his swim. From here it didn’t seem that anyone was speaking, for the children faced the horizon and Sam was studying his watch.

Just that abruptly, Delia veered inland. She left the ocean behind and picked her way around sand tunnels and forts and collections of toys. When she had traversed the wooden walkway to the road, she stopped to dust her feet off and dig her espadrilles from her tote. Sam’s beach robe lay beneath them-a wad of navy broadcloth-and after a moment’s consideration, she shook it out and put it on. Her shoulders were so burned by now that they seemed to give off heat.

If she had thought to get the car keys from Ramsay, she could have driven. She wasn’t looking forward to that trek to the cottage. In fact, she could return for the keys right now. But then some of the others might want to come with her, and so she decided against it.