Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Delia clucked. The nerve of the man! Some people wanted the moon. She rattled the paper impatiently and refolded it. You can’t expect a mere hireling to serve as a genuine mother, which was really what he was asking.

She rose and placed the Bugle in the trash basket. So much for that.

Crossing West Street, she glanced toward the shops-Debbi’s and the dime store and the florist. How about a job in sales? No, she was too quiet-natured. As for waitressing, she used to forget her own family’s dessert orders in the time it took to walk to the kitchen. And she knew from her talks with Mrs. Lincoln at the library that the town was having to struggle to support even one librarian.

Actually, she reflected, passing the sterile white blinds of the Fingernail Clinic, a hireling would in some ways be better than a mother-less emotionally ensnarled, less likely to cause damage. Certainly less likely to suffer damage herself. When the employer’s child was unhappy, it would never occur to the live-in woman to feel personally responsible.

She turned into Value Vision and took another Bugle from the stack just inside the door.

“I wouldn’t like for my son to think people are checking him over,” Mr. Miller said. “Filing through to see if he’s up to standard. That’s why I asked you to come while he was out. Then if you find you’re interested, you could stay on and meet him. He’s eating supper at a friend’s, but he’ll be home in half an hour or so.”

He sat across from her in a chintz armchair that he seemed to dwarf, as he dwarfed the whole overstuffed, overdecorated living room of this little ranch house on the edge of town. To Delia’s surprise, he’d turned out to be someone she recognized. Joel Miller: he had consulted Mr. Pomfret several months ago on a visitation matter. She remembered admiring his undisguised baldness. Men who scorned the subterfuge of artfully draped strands of hair, she felt, conveyed an attractive air of masculine assurance; and Mr. Miller, with his large, regular features and his olive skin and loose gray suit, seemed positively serene. Underneath, though, she detected some tension. He had told her three times-contradicting the entire gist of his ad-that his son would be at school for the vast majority of every day, in essence all day, and that even when he was home he required not much more than a token adult in the wings. Delia had the feeling that no one else had applied for this position.

“He eats at friends’ houses often, in fact,” Mr. Miller was saying. “And in summer-I don’t think I mentioned this-he spends two weeks at sleep-away camp. Besides which there’s computer day camp, soccer clinic-”

“Summer!” Delia said. She rocked back in her chintz-padded rocking chair. Summer, with its soft, lazy afternoons, tinkling glasses of lemonade, children’s peach-colored bodies in swimsuits! “Oh, Mr. Miller,” she said. “The truth is, I seem to be in a changeable stage of life right now. I’m not sure I could get that… invested.”

“And in summer I’m around more myself,” Mr. Miller went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Not the whole day, exactly-a principal doesn’t have quite the same leeway his teachers do-but quite a lot.”

“I probably shouldn’t have come,” Delia said. “A child your son’s age needs continuity.”

Then why did you come? he might reasonably have asked, but instead, poor man, he seized on her last sentence. “You sound experienced,” he said. “Do you have children of your own, Miss Grinstead? Oh.” The corners of his mouth jerked briefly downward. “I’m sorry. Of course not.”

“Yes, I do,” she told him.

“So it’s Mrs. Grinstead?”

“I prefer ‘Miss.’”

“I see.”

He thought this over.

“But, so, you are experienced,” he said finally. “That’s excellent! And do you come from this area?”

Evidently he didn’t keep up with Bay Borough gossip. “No, I don’t,” she told him.

“You don’t.”

She could see him reconsidering. Desperate he might be, but not foolhardy. He wouldn’t want to hire an ax murderer.

“I’m from Baltimore,” she volunteered at last. “I’m perfectly respectable, I promise, but I’ve put that part of my life behind me.”

“Ah.”

Oh, Lord, now he was envisioning some drama. He surveyed her with interest, his head slightly tilted.

“But!” she exclaimed. “As far as the job goes-”

“I know: you don’t waht it,” he said sadly.

“It’s nothing to do with the job itself. I’m sure your son is a very nice boy.”

“Oh, he’s more than nice,” Mr. Miller said. “He’s really, he’s such a good kid, Miss Grinstead. He’s wonderful! But I guess I overestimated how well we could do on our own. I thought as long as we knew how to work the washing machine… But things have gotten away from me.”

He waved a hand toward the room in general, which puzzled Delia, because it seemed painfully neat. Fat little cushions with buttons in their middles filled the skirted couch, each one propped at a careful angle. Glossy fashion magazines lapped at mathematical intervals across the coffee table. But Mr. Miller, following her glance, said, “Oh, the surface I can handle. I’ve posted a chart in the kitchen. Each day has its special job. This afternoon we vacuumed, yesterday we dusted. But it seems there are other issues. Last weekend, for example, he asked if we could have penny soup. ‘Penny soup!’ I said. Sounded kind of weird to me. He said his mother used to serve it for lunch when he was little. I asked him what was in it, and it turns out he meant plain old vegetable soup. I guess they call it penny soup because it’s cheap. So I said, ‘Well, I can make that.’ I heat up a tin of Campbell ’s, he takes one look, and what does he do? Starts crying. Twelve years old and he falls apart, kid who didn’t so much as whimper the time he broke his arm. I said, ‘Well, what? What did I do wrong?’ He said it had to be homemade. I said, ‘God Almighty, Noah.’ Still, I’m not stupid. I knew this soup had some meaning for him. So I haul out a cookbook and set to work making homemade. But when he saw what I was doing, he told me to forget it. ‘Just forget the whole thing,’ he told me. ‘I’m not hungry anyhow.’ And off he went to his room, leaving me with a pile of diced carrots.”

“Sliced,” Delia told him.

He raised his straight black eyebrows.

“You should have sliced the carrots,” she told him, “and also zucchini, yellow squash, new potatoes-everything coin-shaped. That’s why they call it penny soup. It’s nothing to do with the cost. I doubt you’d find it in cookbooks, because it’s more a… mother’s recipe, you know?”

“Miss Grinstead,” Mr. Miller said, “let me show you where you’d stay if you took the job.”

“No, really, I-”

“Just to look at! It’s the guest room. Has its own private bath.”

She rose when he did, but only because she wanted to make her escape. What had she been thinking of, coming here? It seemed she could feel within the curl of her fingers the urge to slice those vegetables as they ought to be sliced, to set the soup in front of the boy and turn away briskly (twelve was too old to cuddle) and pretend she hadn’t noticed his tears. “I’m sure it’s a lovely room,” she said. “Somebody’s going to love it! Somebody young, maybe, who still has enough…”

She was trailing Mr. Miller down a short, carpeted hall lined with open doors. At the last door, Mr. Miller stood back to let her see in. It was the sort of room where people were expected to spend no more than a night or two. The high double bed allowed barely a yard of space on either side. The nightstand bore a thoughtful supply of guest-type reading (more magazines, two books that looked like anthologies). The framed sampler on the wall read WELCOME in six languages.