Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Delia placed the cat on the floor and sat down next to Donald. A family holiday, she thought, and I’m eating a store-cooked turkey with strangers. She felt madcap and adventurous.

“‘Here I am with my mom when I ought to be with my husband,’ she said, and she packed her suitcase then and there and went back to him, but he couldn’t let you know till noon because what was he going to do-excuse himself and run phone you the minute she walked in?”

“Donald has an expert opinion to offer on every subject,” his wife announced with a brittle laugh.

She was sitting very tensely, her spine not touching the chair. Her hair was scrolled upward at the ends like the sound holes in a violin.

“Yes; you might call it a gift,” Donald agreed, unruffled. “I’m able to envision. See, first there’s the business of settling her into the house. Don’t forget she has that baby with her, and a diaper bag no doubt and one of those infant car seats-”

“But he could have just turned her away!” Belle exploded. “He doesn’t even love her! He told me he didn’t!”

“Well, of course that’s what he would claim,” Donald said, leaning back expansively.

By now Vanessa was carving the turkey. Delia began passing around the other foods. The brussels sprouts were barely warm, she discovered. The sweet potatoes were refrigerator cold, but everybody took some anyhow.

“You’re right,” Belle said. “Oh, when will I learn? Seems this happens to me about every other week. Norton Grove was the only one who actually divorced his wife for me, and look how that ended up!”

“How did it end up?” Delia asked.

“He fell in love with a lady plumber who came to unstop our sink.”

Donald nodded, implying he could have predicted as much.

“It’s just the way Ann Landers keeps saying in her column,” Belle told them. “She says a man who would leave his wife will most likely leave you, too, by and by.”

“Maybe you ought to look for someone who doesn’t have a wife,” Vanessa suggested, handing her son a turkey wing.

“Yes, but it’s kind of like I lack imagination. I mean, I can’t seem to picture marrying a man till I see him married to someone else. Then I say, ‘Why! He’d make a good husband for me!’”

The hallway door opened and Mr. Lamb stood on the threshold, wearing a shiny black suit that turned his skin to ashes. “Oh, God, you have guests,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Lamb, and you’re one of them,” Belle said. “Donald Hawser, Melinda Hawser… Vanessa and Greggie you’ve seen around, I bet. This is Horace Lamb,’ she told the others. She waved carelessly toward the one empty chair. “Have a seat.”

“Well, I can’t stay long.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Lamb.”

He entered the room with a skimming sound that made Delia glance downward. On his feet he wore the kind of backless paper slippers given out free in hospitals. “This afternoon will be sports, sports, sports,” he said as he fell into his chair. “All regular programs are preempted. I’m reduced to the educational channels.”

“Say!” Donald cried. “Who you going to root for?”

“Pardon? Weekday afternoons, I like to watch the soaps. Oh, I confess. I admit it. I make a point of stopping for All My Children every blessed day I’m on the road.”

“What’s your line of business, Horace? Okay if I call you Horace?”

“I sell storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told him. He accepted the container of sweet potatoes and peered down into it. “This looks exceedingly rich,” he said. His long front teeth were so prominent that his lips had to labor to stretch across them. His whole face seemed stretched, and too intricately hinged at the jawbone. He raised his deep-set eyes to Belle and said, “Regrettably, I’m afflicted with a touchy stomach.”

“Oh, eat up, it’ll do you good,” Belle snapped. “We were discussing married men.”

“Pardon?”

“Another problem I have is, I look at a married man and I can’t believe he won’t find me irresistible.”

“Irresistible?”

“I’m speaking to the table at large, Mr. Lamb. Eat your dinner. I see a man with his wife, mousy boring wife who isn’t even attempting to keep herself up, and I think, Why wouldn’t he prefer me instead? I’m a hell of a lot more fun, and better-looking to boot. But it’s like there’s some-I don’t know-some hold wives have, and I can’t seem to break it. Is it a secret? Is it some secret you-all pass around among yourselves?”

She was asking Melinda Hawser, but Melinda just gave another shattered laugh and started crumbling bits of biscuit onto her plate. “Is it?” Belle asked Delia.

“Oh, no,” Delia told her. “It’s more like just… what’s the word? The word from science class. Momentum?”

“Inertia,” Mr. Lamb supplied.

“Right.” She glanced over at him. “It’s just a matter of people staying where they are.”

“Well, if that’s all it is,” Belle said, “how come Katie O’Connell got to waltz off to Hawaii with Larry Watts? She must have found out the secret. Why, when Larry Watts was boarding here, he never even gave me a look! He almost seemed to be avoiding me. He acted like I was some floozy the one time I asked him downstairs for a friendly little drink!”

Her mouth collapsed, and she covered her eyes with one hand. Donald said, “Oh, now! Hey!” and Vanessa said, “Aw, Belle, don’t cry,” while Mr. Lamb started tugging ferociously at his nose.

“To be honest,” Melinda said in a crystal voice, “I can’t think what you want with a husband anyhow.”

There was a pause, a kind of reconsidering among the other diners.

“Who first thought marriage up, do you suppose?” Melinda asked Greggie. He goggled at her from behind a greasy fistful of turkey wing. “Everyone pushes it so, especially the women. Your mother and your aunts and your girlfriends. Then after you’re married you see how he’s always so full of himself and always going on about something, always got these theories and pronouncements, always crowing over these triumphs at his business. ‘I told them this,’ and ‘I told them that,’ and you ask, ‘What did they say back?’ and he says, ‘Oh, you know, but then I told them such and such, and I let them have it outright, I put it to them straight, I said…’ And if you mention this to your mother and your aunts and so forth, ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘marriage is a pain, all right.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ you want to ask them, ‘why didn’t you speak up before? Where were you when I was announcing my engagement?’”

“Ha. Yes,” her husband said. He glanced around the table. “They’re going to think you mean our marriage. Dear.”

Everybody waited, but Melinda just speared a brussels sprout.

“Oh,” Belle assured him, “we would never think that.” She was sitting erect now, her tears already drying on her cheeks. “A gorgeous man like you? Of course we wouldn’t.” She told the others, “Donald and Melinda are customers of mine. They bought the old Meers place-lovely place. Donald’s an important executive at the furniture plant.”

Melinda was chewing her brussels sprout very noisily, or maybe it only seemed that way because the room was so quiet.

“Mrs. Meers had gone into the nursing home,” Belle said, “but Mr. Meers was still living there. Took us through the house himself; taught us how to work the trash compactor. Told us, ‘Here in the freezer are one hundred forty-four egg whites, no charge.’”

“Folks who made their own mayonnaise,” Mr. Lamb surmised.

Belle was about to go on speaking, but she stopped and looked at him.

“I don’t guess you’d be in the market for storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told Donald.