Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“I was singing my doll a lullaby,” she had told him in a confiding tone.

She had always been such a false child, so eager to conform to the grown-ups’ views of her.

Moon Above Wyndham Moor was a disappointment. It just didn’t seem very believable, somehow. Delia kept lowering it to stare blankly at the dim, far corners of the room. She checked to see how many pages remained. She cocked her head toward the sound of Mr. Lamb’s radio. He had been playing it all weekend, though never so loudly that she could decipher the announcer’s words. On the porch overhang outside, raindrops were falling one by one. She missed the noises of the family across the street. They must have closed their windows against the weather.

Is he not going to come at all, then?

On Monday morning Mr. Pomfret let her know, in a roundabout way, that he had learned the truth. “I see you have a new dress, Mrs. Grinstead,” he said, eyeing her significantly. But she pretended not to understand, and by noon he had drifted back to “Miss.” Not that she much cared. She felt oddly lackluster today. The rain didn’t help. She had been forced to buy an umbrella at the pharmacy, and during lunch hour she went to the dime store and purchased an inexpensive gray cardigan made of something synthetic. Miss Grinstead’s standards were slipping, it appeared. She poked her hands dispiritedly through the clingy, tubelike sleeves.

Because of the rain, she couldn’t picnic on her usual park bench, and she wasn’t up to the social demands of Rick-Rack’s or the Bay Arms; so she took her cup of yogurt back to her room. She opened the front door, stepping over the mail, and started up the stairs. Then she halted and turned to look back at one of the envelopes on the floor.

A cream-colored envelope-or more like custard-colored, really. She knew that shade well. And she knew the name embossed in brown on the upper-left-hand corner: SAMUEL A. GRINSTEAD, M.D.

He would settle for just writing her a letter?

She stooped to pick it up. Mrs. Delia Grinstead, the address read (Miss Manners would be appalled). George Street, house w/ low front porch next door to Gobble-Up Grocery. Bay Borough, Maryland.

She took it to her room before she opened it. Delia, he wrote. No Dear. Delia, it is my understanding from Eliza that…

He had used the office typewriter, the one with the tipsy e, and he hadn’t bothered to change the margins from when she’d done the bills. The body of the letter was scarcely four inches wide.

Delia, it is my understanding from Eliza that you have requested some time on your own due to various stresses including your father’s recent death, etc.

Naturally, I would much rather you had forewarned us. You cannot have been unaware of the anxiety you would cause, simply strolling off down the beach like that and disappearing. Do you have any idea how it feels to

Nor am I entirely clear on what “stresses” you are referring to. Of course I realize you and your father were close. But his death after all occurred four and a half months ago. and frankly I feel Perhaps you view me as one of the stresses. If so this is regrettable but I have always tried to be a satisfactory husb vowed while I was growing up that I would be a rock for my wife and children and to the best of my belief I have fulfilled that vow and I don’t understand what but if you have any complaints against me I am certainly willing to hear what they are.

In the meantime you may rest assured that I will not invade your privacy. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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Sam

He had made his first four corrections with the hyphen key-easy for Delia to read through-but the fifth was so thoroughly x-ed over that she couldn’t figure it out even when she held the letter up to the light. Well, no doubt that was for the best. It was probably something even more obtuse than his other remarks, and Lord knows those were obtuse enough.

Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten or dropped penny!

She might have known, she reflected. All this proved was how right she had been to leave.

Her teeth were chattering, and her new sweater was no help. Instead of eating her lunch, she slipped off her shoes and climbed into bed. She lay shivering beneath the one blanket, with her jaw set against the cold and her arms wrapped around her ribs, hugging her own self tightly.

No wonder she’d been unable to picture winter in Bay Borough! Underneath, she realized now, she had expected Sam to come fetch her long before then. She resembled those runaway children who never, no matter how far they travel, truly mean to leave home.

So anyhow. Here she was. And the entire rest of her life was stretching out empty before her.

She took to sitting on her bed in the evenings and staring into space. It was too much to say that she was thinking. She certainly had no conscious thoughts, or at any rate, none that mattered. Most often she was, oh, just watching the air, as she used to do when she was small. She used to gaze for hours at those multicolored specks that swarm in a room’s atmosphere. Then Linda had informed her they were dust motes. That took the pleasure out of it, somehow. Who cares about mere dust? But now she thought Linda was wrong. It was air she watched, an infinity of air endlessly rearranging itself, and the longer she watched the more soothed she felt, the more mesmerized, the more peaceful.

She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell-in which case, who was “she”? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.

Often she didn’t begin the night’s reading till nine or nine-thirty, which meant she could no longer finish a novel in one sitting; so she switched to short stories instead. She would read a story, watch the air awhile, and read another. She would mark her page with a library slip and listen to the sounds from outdoors-the swish of cars, the chirring of insects, the voices of the children in the house across the street. On hot nights the older children slept on a second-floor porch, and they always talked among themselves until their parents intervened. “Am I going to have to come upstairs?” was their father’s direst threat. That would quiet them, but only for a minute.

Delia wondered if Sam knew that Carroll was scheduled for tennis lessons the middle two weeks in July. You couldn’t depend on Carroll to remember on his own. And did anyone recall that this was dentist month? Well, probably Eliza did. Without Eliza, Delia could never have left her family so easily.

She wasn’t sure if that was something to be thankful for.

The fact was, Delia was expendable. She was an extra. She had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there’d been a grown-up standing ready to take over-her sister or her husband or her father.

Logically, she should have found that a comfort. (She used to be so afraid of dying while her children were small.) But instead, she had suffered pangs of jealousy. Why was it Sam, for instance, that everybody turned to in times of crisis? He always got to be the reasonable one, the steady and reliable one; she was purely decorative. But how had that come about? Where had she been looking while that state of affairs developed?

She read another story, which contained several lengthy nature descriptions. She enjoyed nature as much as the next person, but you could carry it too far, she felt.

And was anybody keeping an eye on Sam’s health? He had that tendency, lately, to overdo the exercise. But, It’s none of my concern, Delia reminded herself. His letter had freed her. No more need to count cholesterol grams; pointless to note that the Gobble-Up carried fat-free mayonnaise.