Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Already the ocean seemed far away and long ago, a mere whisper on this sunny paved road with its silent cottages and empty, baking automobiles and motionless rows of swimsuits on clotheslines. She cut through someone’s backyard-mostly sand-and circled an enclosure of garbage cans that smelled of crab and buzzed with glittery blue flies. Then she was facing Highway 1. Traffic whizzed by so fast that she had to wait several minutes before she could cross.

On the other side of the highway, her footsteps were the loudest sound around-her stiff straw soles clopping out a rhythm. Perhaps because she’d been thinking of her father, the rhythm seemed to keep time with the song he used to sing when she was small. She stalked past screened porches, with her shoes beating out “Delia’s Gone”-asking where she’d been so long, saying her lover couldn’t sleep, saying all around his bed at night he kept hearing little Delia’s bare feet. She especially liked that last line; she always had. Except, wasn’t the other Delia dead? Yes, obviously: there was mention in the very first verse of little Delia dead and gone. But she preferred to believe the woman had simply walked out. It was more satisfying that way.

Her face felt sticky, and her shoulder hurt where the handles of her tote bag chafed her sunburn. She switched the tote to her other side. She was almost there now, anyhow. She was planning on a tall iced tea as soon as she stepped through the door, and after that a cool bath and a little private visit with her cat. It was time to lure Vernon from under her bed, where he had taken up residence at some point during the night. In fact, maybe she ought to do that first.

She smiled at a woman carrying a suitcase out of the cottage next to theirs. “Lovely beach weather!” the woman called. “Hate to leave it!”

“It’s perfect,” Delia said, and she rounded a van parked in the driveway and climbed her own steps.

Inside, the dimness turned her momentarily blind. She peered up the stairwell and called, “ Vernon?”

“What.”

She gasped.

“Somebody page me?” a man’s voice asked.

He lumbered down the stairs-a chubby young man with a clipboard, dressed in jeans and a red plaid shirt. His moon-shaped face, with its round pink cheeks and nubbin nose and buttonhole mouth, reassured her somewhat, but even so she could barely draw breath to ask, “Who…?”

“I’m Vernon, didn’t you holler my name? I’m here about the roof.”

“Oh,” she said. She gave a shaky laugh and clutched her tote bag to her chest. “I was just calling my cat,” she told him.

“Well, I haven’t seen no cat about. Sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me!”

He squinted at her doubtfully. The satiny skin beneath his eyes glistened with sweat, which made him look earnest and boyish. “Anyhow,” he said. “Seems I’ll need to replace that flashing up top round the chimney. I won’t be doing it today, though; I got to get on back. So if those folks at the realtor’s phone, tell them I’ll be in touch, okay?”

“Okay,” Delia said.

He waved his clipboard amiably and headed past her out the door. On the steps, he turned and asked, “How you like my vehicle?”

“Vehicle?”

“Ain’t it something?”

It was, in fact. She wondered how she could have missed it. Big as a house trailer, painted a metallic bronze with a desert landscape lighting up one side, it occupied the whole driveway. “Got a microwave,” Vernon was saying, “got a dinky little ’frigerator-”

“You mean it’s for living in?”

“Sure, what else?”

“I thought vans would just have rows and rows of seats.”

“Ain’t you ever been inside a RV before? Shoot, come on and I’ll show you.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I-”

“Come on! This’ll knock your socks off.”

“Well, maybe I will take a peek,” Delia said, and she followed him, still hugging her tote bag. One section of the desert scene proved to be a sliding panel. Vernon slid it open and stood back to let her see inside. When she poked her head in she found gold shag carpeting halfway up the walls, and built-in cabinets, and a platform bed at the rear with storage drawers underneath. Two high-backed seats faced the windshield-the only sign that this was, after all, a means of transportation.

“Gosh,” Delia said.

“Climb in. Get a load of my entertainment center.”

“You have an entertainment center?”

“State of the art,” he told her. He climbed in himself, causing the van to tilt beneath his weight, and then turned to offer a hand as big as a baseball glove. She accepted it and clambered inside. The oily, exciting smell of new carpet reminded her of airports and travel.

“Ta-daah!” Vernon said. He flung open a cabinet. “What it is,” he said, “in the bottom of this here TV is a slot for a videotape, see? Integrated VCR. Evenings, I just swivel it out and watch the latest hit movies from the bed.”

“You stay here all the time?”

“Just about,” he said. “Well, more or less. Well, for now I do.” Then he sent her a look, with his head ducked. “I’ll tell you the honest truth,” he said. “This van belongs to my brother.”

He seemed to think the news would disappoint her deeply. He fixed her with a worried blue gaze and waited, scarcely breathing, until she said, “Oh, really?”

“I guess I kind of gave the impression it was mine,” he said. “But see, my brother’s off on this fishing trip, him and his wife. Left his van at our mom’s house in Nanticoke Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody drive it. Me is who he meant. But he’s due back this afternoon and so yesterday I got to thinking. ‘Well, durn,’ I got to thinking. ‘Here’s this fully equipped RV, been setting in Mom’s yard all week and I have not so much as tried that little microwave.’ So last night I stayed in it, and this morning I took it out to make my estimates. Mom said she don’t even want to know about it. Said not to drag her into it. But what can he do to me, right? What’s he going to do to me-haul me off to jail?”

“Maybe he won’t find out,” Delia said.

“Oh, he’ll find out, all right. Be just like him to have wrote down the mileage before he left,” Vernon told her gloomily.

“You could always say you thought the battery needed charging.”

“ Battery. Sure.”

“Does he live here? In the van, I mean?”

“Naw.”

“Well, I would,” Delia said. She bent to raise the seat of an upholstered bench. Just as she had expected, there was storage space underneath. She glimpsed woolens of some kind-blankets or jackets. “I would make it my year-round home,” she said. “Really! Who needs a big old house and all those extra rooms?”

“Yeah, but my brother’s got three kids,” Vernon said.

“Have you ever seen those under-cabinet coffeemakers?” Delia asked him.

“Huh?”

She was inspecting the kitchen area now. It was a model of miniaturization, with a sink the size of a salad bowl and a two-burner stovetop. A dented metal percolator stood on one of the burners. “They have these coffeepots,” she told Vernon, “that you permanently install beneath the overhang of a cabinet. So you don’t waste any space.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Actually, there’s a whole line of under-cabinet equipment. Toaster ovens, can openers… electric can opener you install beneath the-”

“I believe my brother just uses the hand-cranked kind,” Vernon said.

“Well, if this were mine, I’d have everything under-cabinet.”

“Hand-cranked don’t take no space at all, to speak of.”

“I’d have nothing rattling around,” Delia said, “nothing interfering, so at a moment’s notice I could hop behind the wheel and go. Travel with my house on my back, like a snail. Stop when I got tired. Park in whatever campground caught my fancy.”