Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Grime and sweat and sunblock streamed off her, uncovering a whole new layer of skin. The soles of her feet, which felt ironed flat from all that walking, seemed to be drinking up water. She lifted her face to the spray and let her hair get wet. Finally, regretfully, she shut off the faucets and stepped out to towel herself dry. The new nightgown drifted airily over her scorched shoulders.

She chose not to leave her toothbrush in the holder above the sink. Instead, she returned it to her cosmetic kit and carried everything back to her room. Her wrung-out underclothes she draped on one of the hangers in the closet. This meant she would have to keep the closet door open during the night-a blot on the room’s sterility. Better that, though, than letting her laundry clutter the bathroom. She approved of Belle’s house rules; she did not intend to “spill over.”

She turned the bedcovers back and lay down, drawing up just the top sheet. The breeze from the window chilled her damp head, but not so much that she needed a blanket.

Outside, children were playing. It wasn’t even completely dark yet. She lay on her back with her eyes open, keeping her mind as blank as the ceiling above her. Once, though, perhaps hours later, a single thought did present itself. Oh, God, she thought, how am I going to get out of this? But immediately afterward she closed her eyes, and that was how she fell asleep.

Baltimore Woman Disappears, Delia read, and she felt a sudden thud in her stomach, as if she’d been punched. Baltimore Woman Disappears During Family Vacation.

She had been checking the Baltimore newspapers daily, morning and evening. There was nothing in either paper Tuesday, nothing Wednesday, nothing Thursday morning. But the Thursday evening edition, which arrived in the vending box near the square in time for Delia’s lunch hour, carried a notice in the Metro section. Delaware State Police announced early today…

She folded the paper open to the article, glancing around as she did so. On the park bench opposite hers, a young woman was handing her toddler bits of something to feed the pigeons, piece by piece. On the bench to her right, a very old man was leafing through a magazine. No one seemed aware of Delia’s presence.

Mrs. Grinstead was last seen around noon this past Monday, walking south along the stretch of sand between…

Probably the police had some rule that people were not considered missing till a certain amount of time had passed. That must be why there’d been no announcement earlier. (Searching each paper before this, Delia had felt relieved and wounded, both. Did no one realize she was gone? Or maybe she wasn’t gone; this whole experience had been so dreamlike. Maybe she was still moving through her previous life the same as always, and the Delia here in Bay Borough had somehow just split off from the original.)

It hurt to read her physical description: fair or light-brown hair… eyes are blue or gray or perhaps green… For heaven’s sake, hadn’t anyone in her family ever looked at her? And how could Sam have made her clothing sound so silly? Kind of baby-doll, indeed! She refolded the paper with a snap and then darted another glance around her. The toddler was throwing a tantrum now, a silent little stomping dance, because he’d run out of pigeon food. The old man was licking a finger to turn a page. Delia hated when he did that. Every lunch hour he came here with a magazine and licked his way clear through it, and Delia could only hope that no one else was planning to read it after him.

Like a commuter who always chooses the same seat on the train, like a guest who always settles in the same chair in the living room, Delia had managed in just three days to establish a routine for herself. Breakfast at Rick-Rack’s, over the morning paper. Lunch in the square-yogurt and fresh fruit purchased earlier from the Gobble-Up Grocery. Always on the southeast park bench, always with the evening paper. Then some kind of shopping task to fill the hour: Tuesday, a pair of low-heeled black shoes because her espadrilles were blistering her heels. Wednesday, a goosenecked reading lamp. Today she had planned to look for one of those immersion coils so she could brew herself a cup of tea first thing every morning. But now, with this newspaper item, she didn’t know. She felt so exposed, all at once. She just wanted to scuttle back to the office.

She dropped her lunch leavings into a wire trash basket and buried the newspaper underneath them. As a rule she left the paper on the bench for others, but not today.

The mother was trying to stuff the toddler into his stroller. The toddler was resisting, refusing to bend in the middle. The old man had finished his magazine and was fussily fitting his glasses into their case. None of the three looked at Delia when she walked past them. Or maybe they were pretending, even the toddler; maybe they’d been instructed not to alarm her. No. She gave her shoulders a shake. Get ahold of yourself. It wasn’t as if she’d committed any crime. She decided to go on with her routine-drop by the dime store as she’d planned.

Funny how life contrived to build up layers of things around a person. Already she had that goosenecked lamp, because the overhead bulb had proved inadequate for reading in bed; and she kept a stack of paper cups and a box of tea bags on her closet shelf, making do till now with hot water from the bathroom faucet; and it was becoming clear she needed a second dress. Last night, the first really warm night of summer, she had thought, I should buy a fan. Then she had told herself, Stop. Stop while you’re ahead.

She walked into the dime store and paused. Housewares, maybe? The old woman presiding over the cookie sheets and saucepans stood idle, twiddling her beads; so Delia approached her. “Would you have one of those immersion coils?” she asked. “Those things you put in a cup to heat up water?”

“Well, I know what you mean,” the old woman said. “I can see it just as plain as the nose on your face. Electric, right?”

“Right,” Delia said.

“My grandson took one to college with him, but would you believe it? He didn’t read the directions. Tried to heat a bowl of soup when the directions said only water. Stink? He said you couldn’t imagine the stink! But I don’t have any here. Maybe try the hardware department.”

“Thanks,” Delia said crisply, and she moved away.

Sure enough, she found it in Hardware, hanging on a rack among the extension cords and three-prong adapters. She paid in exact change. The clerk-a gray-haired man in a bow tie-winked when he handed her the bag. “Have a nice day, young lady,” he said. He probably thought he was flattering her. Delia didn’t bother smiling.

She had noticed that Miss Grinstead was not a very friendly person. The people involved in her daily routine remained two-dimensional to her, like the drawings in those children’s books about the different occupations. She hadn’t developed the easy, bantering relationships Delia was accustomed to.

Leaving the dime store, she crossed Bay Street and passed the row of little shops. The clock in the optician’s window said 1:45. She always tried her best to fill her whole lunch hour, one o’clock to two o’clock, but so far had not succeeded.

And what would she do in wintertime, when it grew too cold to eat in the square? For she was looking that far ahead now, it seemed-this Miss Grinstead with her endless, unmarked, unchanging string of days.

But in Bay Borough it was always summer. That was the only season she could picture here.

She opened Mr. Pomfret’s outside door, then the pebble-paned inner door. He was already back from his own lunch, talking on his office phone as usual. Wurlitzer, wurlitzer, it sounded like from here. Delia shut her handbag in the bottom desk drawer, smoothed her skirt beneath her, and seated herself in the swivel chair. She had left a letter half finished, and now she resumed typing, keeping her back very straight and her hands almost level as she had been taught in high school.