Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Well, here it’s been happening more on the order of once or twice a day,” Delia said.

The phone rang again. She said, “See?”

“Just don’t answer.”

“It kills me not to answer.”

He tipped back in his chair and studied her. The phone gave a third ring, a fourth. Then the outside door burst open and Noah tumbled in, bringing along a gust of fresh air. “Hey, T.J.,” he said. He shed his school knapsack and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

In the pause that followed, T.J. and Delia watched him closely.

“Naw, I don’t guess I can,” Noah said. He turned away from them. “I just can’t, that’s all.” Another pause. “It’s nothing like that, honest! Just I got all this homework and stuff. Well, I better go now. Bye.” He hung up.

“Who was that?” Delia asked.

“Nobody.”

He slung his knapsack over one shoulder and walked off toward his room.

T.J. and Delia looked at each other.

The next afternoon, a cool, sunny Friday, Delia went with Vanessa to a knitwear sale at Young Mister. Spring would be arriving any minute now, and Noah had outgrown all last spring’s clothes. It was an excruciatingly slow trip, because Greggie was in the midst of his terrible twos and refused to ride in his stroller. He had to walk every inch of the way. Delia felt she had never seen Bay Borough in such detail-every plastic cup lid wheeling along the sidewalk, every sparrow pecking tinfoil in the gutter. They didn’t start heading back until nearly three o’clock. “Oh-oh,” Delia said, “look at the time. Noah will be home before I am.”

“Isn’t he going to his mother’s?” Vanessa asked.

“Not this week.”

“I thought he went every Friday.”

“Well, I guess something must have come up.”

They had reached the corner where they separated, and Delia said, “Bye, Greggie. Bye, Vanessa.”

“So long, Dee,” Vanessa said. “Let’s ask Belle if she wants to get together over the weekend.”

“Fine with me.”

Belle was saving all her weekends for Mr. Lamb these days, but Delia had been ordered to keep that a secret.

At the grade school, children were already pouring onto the playground. Delia didn’t try to find Noah, though. She knew he’d want to walk home with his friends. She sidestepped a runaway skateboard, smiled at a little girl collecting scattered papers, and politely ignored a mother and son quarreling next to their car.

But wait. The son was Noah. The mother was Ellie.

Wearing her cream-colored coat from the wedding but looking frazzled and disordered, Ellie was trying to wrestle Noah into the passenger seat. And Noah was pulling away from her, his jacket wrenched halfway off his arms. “Mom,” he kept saying. “Mom. Stop.”

Delia said, “Noah?”

They threw her an identical distracted stare and went on with their tussle. Ellie started mashing Noah’s head down the way policemen did on TV, guiding their handcuffed suspects into squad cars.

“What’s happening here?” Delia asked. She made a grab for Ellie’s wrist. “Let go of him!”

Ellie flung her off so violently that she knocked Delia in the face; her sharp-stoned ring grazed Delia’s forehead. Noah, meanwhile, managed to yank himself free. He stumbled several steps backward and adjusted his jacket. His knapsack was gaping open and spilling papers. (Those were the papers the little girl was collecting!) He wiped his fist across his nose and said, “Gee, Mom.”

Ellie stood straighter, breathing harshly, glaring at him.

Reverently, the little girl presented Noah with his papers. He took them without looking at them. Now Delia saw that two of his friends were loitering nearby-Kenny Moss and a second boy, whose name she couldn’t remember. They were watching but pretending not to, kicking the sidewalk. The other children, passing in groups, seemed unaware that anything was wrong.

“I just wanted you to come visit! Like always! Just a normal Friday visit!” Ellie cried. “Is that too much to ask?” She turned to Delia. “Is that so-?”

Something stopped her. Her mouth fell open.

Noah said, “Gosh!” He was staring at Delia’s forehead. “Delia! Golly! You’re all bloody!”

Delia raised her fingers to her forehead. They came away bright red. But she didn’t feel much pain-only the least little sting at that spot in her temple where the pulse beat. She said, “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll just go home and-”

But Noah’s eyes were huge, and Kenny Moss said, “Holy moley!” and gripped the other boy’s sleeve, and the little girl said, in an informative tone, “I pass out if I see blood.”

She did seem about to pass out-her lips had an ashy pallor-and so Delia, attending to first things first, said crisply, “Don’t look, then.” She herself wasn’t dizzy in the slightest. This was plainly one of those wounds that appear much worse than they are. However, she was concerned about her clothes. “Somewhere here…,” she said, hunting through her purse for a tissue. Her Young Mister bag hindered her, and she passed it to Noah, leaving sticky red fingerprints across the scrunched top. “I know I must have a-”

Soft, blossomy mounds of tissue were thrust under her chin-an offering from Ellie. “I am so, so sorry,” she was saying. “It was an accident! Believe me, Delia, I never meant to harm you.”

“Well, I know that,” Delia said, accepting the tissues. She found it oddly flattering that Ellie called her by name. She pressed the tissues to her temple, and her pulse began to throb.

“Oh, God, we have to get you to a doctor,” Ellie said.

“I don’t need a doctor; goodness.”

“You’re no judge of that! You’re not in your right mind,” Ellie said. Although it was Ellie who seemed unhinged, thrusting more handfuls of tissues at her (did she carry them loose in her pockets, or what?) and shrilly ordering the others about. “Move! Give us room. Noah, you ride in back; we’ll put Delia up in front.”

“Isn’t there a school nurse or something? Why don’t we look for the nurse?” Delia asked.

But Ellie said, “You don’t want to end up with a scar, do you? An ugly, disfiguring scar?”

Which was something to consider; so Delia allowed herself to be shepherded toward the front seat. Noah, who had folded the seat forward so he could climb into the rear, straightened it for Delia. When she was settled, he leaned over her shoulder to offer her a gray sweatshirt from his knapsack. “Here,” he said. “You’re going through those hankies like a spigot.”

She would have argued (blood was so hard to launder), but it was true she had used up the tissues. She pressed the sweatshirt to her forehead and breathed in its smell of clean sweat and gym shoes. Meanwhile Ellie slid behind the wheel and started the engine. “You’ll probably need stitches,” she said, pulling into traffic. “Oh, lately it seems everything I touch goes galloping off in every direction! Leaves me staring after it amazed!”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Delia told her. She took a peek from under the sweatshirt. Up close, Ellie seemed more likable. Her lipstick was worn to a tired outline, and her eyes sagged slightly at the outer corners.

“I’m not myself these days,” Ellie said. “You hear people say that all the time, but up till now I’d assumed it was a figure of speech. Now I stand off to one side looking at myself like a whole other person, and I ask, ‘What could she be thinking of?’”

They turned left, onto Weber Street. Delia folded the sweatshirt to a new section. She was beginning to understand why you often saw red roses planted near gray stone walls. The bloodstains looked so vivid against the sweatshirt fabric, she would have liked to show the others. But Ellie was still talking away. “I admit it was me who walked out on the marriage,” she said. (Delia replayed the last few sentences, wondering if she had missed some key transition.) “You don’t have to remind me! I started picturing how I’d get to heaven and God would say, ‘Such a waste; I sent you into the world and you didn’t even make use of it, just sat there in one spot complaining you were bored.’ So I walked out. But when I saw you at the wedding, when I saw how-well, I guess I thought you’d be older and fatter and wearing a zip-front dress or something. I know I made a scene, phoning Joel like I did…”