Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Well, not right handy,” Delia said. “But I’ll be glad to do what I can.”

“Great,” Belle said. She toed the cat aside-he had followed Delia downstairs-and opened the front door. They stepped out into a chilly, tin-colored day. “This fella’s name is Henry McIlwain, did I mention that?” she asked. “We’ve been dating several weeks now and I’d like to start getting more purposeful. I don’t want him thinking I’m just a goodtime gal! Maybe you could drop a few remarks in front of him. Something like, ‘Gosh, Belle, I hope you made your famous brussels-sprout dish.’”

“You’re serving him brussels sprouts?”

“I don’t have any choice. It’s the only green vegetable Copp Catering offers that will fit in my toaster oven.”

Delia said, “How did you manage the meals when you were living with Norton?”

“We ate out. But this time I want to do things differently. Maybe while Henry’s listening you could ask me for one of my recipes.”

“I can hardly wait to hear how you’ll answer,” Delia said.

“Dinner’s at one, but could you come down a bit early to help set up? And wear your gray pinstripe. Your gray pinstripe is so… gray; know what I mean?”

On Thanksgiving Day Delia slept late, and she idled the morning away drinking tea and reading in bed, with the cat curled up beside her. Across the hall, in Mr. Lamb’s room, an announcer’s voice droned steadily. This was a TV announcer, Delia had figured out; not radio. Now that she kept her door cracked open, she could hear how the music swelled and diminished without apparent reason, responding to some visual cue; and today she caught distinct phrases each time she emerged for more tea water. “The mother bear leads her cubs…,” she heard, and, “The female spider injects her victims…” Evidently Mr. Lamb was watching nature shows.

Shortly after noon, she rose and started dressing. It was a pity she didn’t have a string of pearls to add a festive note, she thought. Or at least a scarf. Didn’t she own a paisley scarf with gray commas around the edges? Yes, she did-back in Baltimore. She could see it lying folded in her grandmother’s lacquer glove box.

She applied an extra-bright coat of lipstick, and then she leaned toward the mirror to smooth her hair. It was longer now, which made her curls look flatter and somehow calmer-very suitable for Miss Grinstead. Although when she stepped back to gauge the total effect, the person who came to mind was not Miss Grinstead at all. It was Rosemary Bly-Brice.

She turned sharply from the mirror and picked up the vase of autumn flowers she had bought the day before.

The cat came along when she left. He scampered after her down the stairs, and he tumbled around her ankles while she knocked at the living-room door. When nobody answered she tried the other door, the one to the right, and finally she turned the knob and poked her head into the dining room. “Anybody home?” she asked.

Goodness, Belle did need her services. The table-one of those long, narrow, wood-grain affairs you see at PTA bazaars-was not even spread with a cloth yet. Delia put her flowers down and walked on into the kitchen. “Belle?” she said.

Belle was leaning against the sink. Her arms were clamped across the bosom of a violently frilled white apron, and tears were streaming down her face.

“Belle? What’s happened?” Delia asked.

“He’s not coming,” Belle said thickly.

“Your date?”

“He’s back with his wife.”

“I didn’t know he had a wife.”

“Well, he does.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

In fact, she was shocked, but she tried not to show it. No wonder Belle had been so eager to look respectable! Delia gave her a tentative pat, just in case she wanted consoling. She did, it turned out. She fell into Delia’s arms, sobbing hotly against her neck.

“He was perfect for me!” she wailed. “He was exactly what I wanted! And then this morning he calls up and-oh, I should have known from how low he was speaking, mumbly low secretive voice like he was scared somebody might hear him-”

She drew back from Delia’s embrace to snap a paper towel off the roll above the sink. Blotting first one eye and then the other, she said, “‘Belle,’ he tells me, ‘about today. Something’s come up,’ he tells me. ‘Oh?’ I ask. ‘What’s that?’ Thinking maybe he couldn’t start the car, or wanted to bring a friend. ‘Well, it’s like this,’ he tells me. ‘Seems like Pansy and I have gotten back together.’”

“Pansy would be his wife,” Delia guessed.

“Yes, and the baby’s name is Daffodil, can you believe it?”

“There’s a baby?”

“And it wasn’t even a springtime baby! It was born in October!”

“You’re talking about… this past October?”

Belle nodded, loudly blowing her nose.

“So the baby is, what, a month old?”

“Six weeks.”

“Ah.”

Belle’s apron was so new that the pinholes still showed from the packaging. Her hairdo was even larger than usual, and she wore the first actual dress Delia had ever seen her in-or presumably it was a dress, for her legs were visible beneath the apron, encased in nylon stockings with a frosty white sheen like the bloom on plums. But her face was a disaster-blurred lipstick and blackened eyes and gray dribbles of tears. “You’ll have to get in touch with the others,” she was saying as she dabbed the tears. “I can’t possibly go through with dinner.”

“But everything’s all ready,” Delia said. She was taking stock of the foil-wrapped, disposable pans covering one counter, and the plates and silver heaped on the kitchen table, and the empty serving dishes waiting to be filled. Through the oven’s lighted window she could make out a brown turkey, although she wasn’t able to smell it, for some reason. “That turkey looks about done,” she told Belle.

“It arrived done. I’m just reheating it. I had to keep it in the fridge overnight.”

“So, why not go ahead with your party? Maybe it’ll cheer you up.”

“Nothing could cheer me up,” Belle said.

“Oh, now, you sit here and I’ll see to things.”

“I wish I was dead and buried,” Belle said, pulling out one of the kitchen chairs. She sank into it and picked up the cat. “I’m getting too old to be jilted! I’m thirty-eight years old. It’s tiring to keep going on first dates.”

Delia didn’t answer, because she was hunting a tablecloth. No telling where Belle kept her linens. This was one of those fifties kitchens with shiny bare walls and enormous white appliances and rust-specked white metal cabinets and drawers. She slid open every drawer with a clanking sound. Most were empty. Eventually she located a jumble of fabrics in the space below the sink. “Aha!” she said, shaking out a wrinkled damask cloth. She carried it into the dining room and spread it over the table, resettling her flowers in the center. “I know you must have candlesticks,” she called.

“We met last spring,” Belle said. “I was the one who sold off their house. They were moving to a bigger place on account of the baby coming. And wouldn’t you know it took me six months, with the market the way it’s been.”

Delia opened all the drawers of the apple-green bureau that served as a dining room buffet. She found two brass candlesticks lying in a nest of extension cords, and she placed them on either side of the flowers. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Belle had sold the house just as Daffodil arrived. “Settlement date was two days before due date,” she said. “Kid was born three days later. So naturally I stopped by the hospital with a giftie; these things are tax-deductible. And there was Henry all proud and fatherly, took me down the hall to that baby window they have and showed me how smart and cute and blah-blah-blah. Well, he just got to me, you know? I stood there not hearing a word he said, watching how his mouth moved, and all at once I thought, Suppose I was to step forward and kiss him, what do you guess he’d do?”