Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

All the guests were invited to Nat’s apartment afterward-anybody who wanted to come. There was a great press of frail bodies milling out of the chapel. Delia offered support to arms as withered and soft as day-old balloons. She packed mothball-smelling woolens into elevators, and then, upstairs, she settled more women than she would have thought possible onto the swampy cushions of Nat’s couch. They were all looking forward to Binky’s cake. It seemed they preferred homemade, and were glad she hadn’t had time to order the towering pagoda she had dreamed of. “We get store-bought in the cafeteria all the time,” one woman told Delia. “Sent over from Brinhart’s Bakery. Tastes like Band-Aids.”

Delia looked for Ellie but didn’t see her, or Dudi either. Although in this crush, people were easily missed.

She threaded her way toward Binky, who was cutting squares of sheet cake, with her train looped over her arm. “Do you think it went all right?” Binky asked. Her headpiece of pink roses slanted toward one ear like a rakish halo.

“It went perfectly,” Delia said. She started distributing the cake. Nat, meanwhile, was pouring champagne, which he sent around with Binky’s two sons and her nieces. They ran out of stemware and had to open a pack of disposable tumblers.

When everyone was served, Nat proposed a toast. “To my beautiful, beautiful bride,” he said, and he made a little speech about how life was not a straight line-either downward or upward, either one-but something more irregular, a zigzag or a corkscrew or sometimes a scribble. “And sometimes,” he said, “you get to what you thought was the end and you find it’s a whole new beginning.” He raised his glass toward Binky, and his eyes were suspiciously shiny.

One of the women on the couch said Binky must have grated her own lemon zest. “I can always tell fresh-grated zest,” she said. “It’s no use trying to substitute that brown dust that comes in bottles.” She licked crumbs off her fork in a contemplative way. Her face had gone past merely old to that stage where it seemed formed of disintegrating particles, without a single clear demarcation. Did there come a point, Delia wondered, after you’d outlived every one of your friends, when you began to believe you might be the first to escape death altogether?

She relieved Binky of her cake knife and cut more slices, which she carried around on a platter in case people wanted seconds. In the bedroom, a young woman in a nurse’s white pantsuit was holding forth on various hospitals, referring familiarly to “Saint Joe” and “Holy Trin” while a circle of residents listened spellbound. Two men were playing chess in a corner; one of them asked Delia if he could take an extra piece of cake for his wife on Floor Four. Aileen, Delia’s former seatmate, was nodding and smiling as a fur-stoled woman described other weddings she’d been to. “And then Lois: she was a lucky one! Married a man with all his major appliances, including convection oven.”

Noah walked in with a glass of champagne, which he tried to hide when he saw Delia. “Give me that,” she ordered.

“Aw, Delia.”

She took it from him and set it on a passing tray. “By the way,” she said, “where’s your mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t come upstairs?”

He shrugged. “I guess she must have had other stuff to do,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and left the room before she could comment-not that she would have been so tactless.

Binky’s sister, the bearer of the tray, tut-tutted. “I saw her walk out directly after the vows,” she said. “Her and her sister both. Doodoo, is that what they call her?”

“Dudi.”

“All this brouhaha about his family’s reaction! How about ours? We could have said plenty, trust me: marrying a man old enough to be her father.”

“Well,” Delia said, “I’m just glad she and Nat found each other.”

“Yes, I suppose,” the sister said, sighing.

Then Nat popped up at Delia’s elbow. “Have you met my sister-in-law?” he asked her. “Bernice, my new sister-in-law. Can you imagine someone my age getting a brand-new sister-in-law?” He was exultant, his voice unsteady, his face so firm-skinned and glowing that he looked like a pretend old man made up for a high-school play. If he’d noticed his daughters’ disappearance, it hadn’t dampened his happiness.

During the drive home, Delia told Noah she thought his mother was very pretty. In fact, this was not strictly true. She had decided Ellie had a garish quality; the high contrast of her coloring went over better on TV than in person. But she wanted an excuse to mention her. All Noah said in response was, “Yeah,” and he drummed his fingers and looked out the side window.

“And you looked mighty handsome up there, too,” she said.

“Oh, sure.”

“You don’t believe me? Just watch,” she teased him. “The next wedding you’re in might very well be your own.”

But he didn’t so much as smile. “Fat chance,” he said.

“What-you’re not getting married?”

“Me and Dad have blown it with women,” he said glumly. “There must be something about them we don’t understand.”

In other circumstances, she might have been amused, but now she felt touched. She glanced at him. He went on staring out the window. Finally she reached over and gave him a pat on the knee, and they rode the rest of the way without speaking.

“If x is the age Jenny is now, and y is the age she was when she went to California…,” Delia said.

T. J. Renfro put his head on the kitchen table.

“Now, T.J., this is not so hard! See, we know that she was three years older than the girlfriend she was visiting in California, and we know that when her girlfriend was-”

“This is not going to do me one bit of good in real life,” T.J. informed her in a smothered voice.

He had the kind of haircut that seemed half finished-medium length on top but trailing long black oily strands in back. Both of his upper arms were braceleted with barbed-wire tattoos, and his black leather vest bore more zippers than you’d find in most people’s entire wardrobes. Unlike Delia’s other pupils, who met with her in the counseling room over at the high school, T.J. came to the house. He had been suspended till May 1 and was not allowed to set foot on school property; showed up instead at the Millers’ back door every Thursday afternoon at three o’clock. Delia didn’t want to know what he’d been suspended for.

She told him, “Real life is full of problems like this! Finding the unknown quantity: there’s lots of times you’ll need to do that.”

“Like I’m really going to walk up to some chick and ask how old she is,” T.J. said, raising his head, “and she’s going to say, ‘Well, ten years ago I was twice the age my third cousin was when…’”

“Oh, now, you’re missing the point,” Delia said.

“And how come this Jenny would visit someone three years younger anyway? That don’t make sense.”

The phone rang, and Delia rose to answer it.

“She probably just claimed she was visiting, and then hid out in some motel with her boyfriend,” T.J. said.

Delia lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello!”

Whoever it was hung up. “That’s happened a lot lately,” Delia said, hanging up herself. She returned to her chair.

“It’s electrical backwash,” T.J. told her.

“Backwash?”

“If you don’t use your line awhile, it, like, develops all this pent-up power that spills out in this kind of like overflow and sets your phone to ringing.”

Delia cocked her head.

“Happens at my mom’s house once or twice a week,” T.J. told her.