Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Now she had her underclothes but no place to get into them, for she didn’t see a rest room in the dime store. She went back outside, tucking her parcel into her tote, and looked up the street. Next door was Debbi’s Dress Shoppe. Nineteen-forties mannequins with painted-on hair sported the latest fashions-broad-shouldered business suits or linen sheaths shaped like upside-down triangles. Not Delia’s style at all, but at least she would find a changing booth here. She breezed in, trying to look purposeful, and snatched the nearest dress off a rack and hurried toward a row of compartments at the rear. “May I help you?” a woman called after her, but Delia said, “Oh, thanks, I’m only…” and disappeared behind a curtain.

The underwear fit, thank heaven. (She did her best to silence the rustling of the bag.) It was a relief to feel contained again. She folded her swimsuit into her tote. Then she reached for Sam’s robe, but the sight of it gave her pause. It seemed so obviously a beach robe, all at once. She looked toward the dress she’d snatched up-a gray knit of some sort. Way too long, she could tell at a glance, but still she slipped it off its hanger and drew it over her head. The acrid smell of new fabric engulfed her. She smoothed down the skirt, zipped the side zipper, and turned to confront her reflection.

She had assumed she would resemble a child playing dress-up, for the hem nearly brushed her ankles. What she found, though, was someone entirely unexpected: a somber, serious-minded woman in a slender column of pearl gray. She might be a librarian or a secretary, one of those managerial executive secretaries who actually run the whole office from behind the scenes. “You’ll find it in the Jones file, Mr. Smith,” she imagined herself saying curtly. “And don’t forget you’re lunching with the mayor today; you’ll want to take along the materials on the-”

“How’re we doing in there?” the saleswoman called.

“Oh, fine.”

“Can I bring you anything else to try?”

“No,” Delia said. “This is perfect.”

She stuffed Sam’s robe into her tote and emerged from the booth to ask, “Could you just take the tags off, please? I think I’ll wear it home.”

The saleswoman-an overtanned blond in a geometric black-and-white print-directed a dubious frown toward the hemline. “We do offer alterations,” she said. “Would you like that shortened a bit?”

“No, thanks,” Delia told her in a starchy, secretarial voice.

The saleswoman adjusted seamlessly. “Well, it certainly becomes you,” she said.

Delia raised her left arm, and the woman reached for her scissors and snipped off the tags that dangled from the zipper pull.

Seventy-nine ninety-five, the dress cost, not including tax. But Delia paid without a moment’s hesitation and strode out of the shop.

The momentum of her exit carried her some distance, past the dime store again and across an intersection to a row of smaller shops-a copy center, a travel agent, a florist. She noticed she walked differently now, not with her usual bouncy gait but more levelly, because of her slim skirt. Here is the secretary, Miss X, speeding back to her office after lunch. Preparing to type up her notes for the board of directors.

Just as a game, she started choosing her office, the same way she used to choose her house when riding through a posh neighborhood. NICHOLS & TRIMBLE FAMILY DENTISTS. But there she might have to clean teeth or something. VALUE VISION OPTICIANS. But did opticians use secretaries? EZEKIEL POMFRET, ATTORNEY. Possibly defunct, from the expressionless look of the lowered window shade. And none of these places bore a HELP WANTED sign. Not that that made any practical difference.

At the next intersection, she took a left. She passed a pet supply and an antique store, so called (its window full of Fiesta ware and aqua plastic ashtrays shaped like boomerangs). A pharmacy. Two frame houses. A mom-and-pop grocery. Then another frame house, set so close to the street that its porch floor seemed an extension of the sidewalk. Propped in the dusty front window stood a cardboard notice, ROOM FOR RENT, bracketed by limp gauze curtains.

Room for rent.

This would be, of course, a “boardinghouse.” The word summoned a picture of the secretary tidying the covers on her spinsterly white bed; her fellow boarders shuffling down the hall in their carpet slippers; her ancient landlady, dressed in black, setting the dining-room table-the “board”-for tomorrow’s breakfast. In the time it took Delia to cross the porch and ring the bell, she became so well entrenched that she hardly felt the need to introduce herself to the woman who appeared at the door. “Well, hi!” the woman said. “Can I help you?”

She didn’t fit Delia’s vision of a landlady. She was plump and fortyish, heavily rouged, wearing a towering dessert tray of lavish golden curls and a hot-pink pantsuit. Still, she seemed to be the one in charge, so Delia said, “I’m inquiring about the room.”

“Room?”

“The room for rent,” Delia reminded her.

“Oh, the room,” the woman said. “Well. I was hoping to rent to a man.”

Was that even legal, nowadays? Delia didn’t know what to say next.

“Up to last April,” the woman told her, opening the baggy screen door, “I just always had men. It just always seemed to work that way. I only rent out two rooms, you know, and so I had these two men, Mr. Lamb who travels weekdays and Larry Watts who was separated. But when Larry got back with his wife last April, why, I rented his room to a woman. And did I ever regret it!”

She turned, leaving the door to Delia, and started up a flight of stairs. Uncertainly, Delia followed. She had an impression of a house that had long ago been abandoned. Ovals of lighter wallpaper showed where pictures must once have hung, and the floorboards of the upstairs hall revealed the ghost of a rug.

“Katie O’Connell, her name was,” the woman said. Even so short a climb had winded her. She patted her wide pink bosom with little spanking sounds. “A Delaware girl, I believe. She came to town to work for Zeke Pomfret-Zeke had just had his dear old Miss Percy die on him-and so Katie needed a place to stay and I said, ‘Fine,’ not having the slightest inkling: ‘Fine,’ I told her, thinking this would be no different from renting to a man. But, oh, it was, ‘Where’s this, where’s that, where’s my fresh towels daily, where’s my little bar of soap…?’ I am not a bed-and-breakfast, mind you. I hope you don’t think I’m a bed-and-breakfast.”

“Of course not,” Delia said.

“I’m only renting out rooms, you know? I bought this place three years ago. Fixer-upper, they called it. I bought it after I passed my real estate exam, thought I’d fix it up and sell it, but the way the market’s been doing I just never have found the money for that, and so I’m living here myself and renting out two of the rooms. But there’s no meals involved; I hope you’re not looking for meals. This Katie, she was, ‘Oh, let me just keep this quart of milk in your fridge,’ and not two shakes later she was cooking in my kitchen. Why, I don’t even cook in my kitchen! This is a bare-bones operation.”

Proving it, she opened the door to the right of the stairs. Delia followed her into a long, narrow room, its outside wall slanting inward under the eaves, a window at each end. A metal cot extended from beneath the front window, and a low, orange-brown bureau sat against the inside wall. There was a smell like a hornet’s nest-a dry, sharp, moldering smell that came, perhaps, from the brittle-looking tan wallpaper traced with mottled roses.

“Now, Katie had drapes on these windows,” the woman said, “but she took them when she left. Left last Thursday with Larry Watts; we think they went to Hawaii.”