Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

One tire scraped the curb. “Besides which there’s my nutso sister losing her marbles over Dad’s marriage,” she said, “and this leak in my apartment ceiling nobody knows where from, and not to mention Dad himself. What business does he have, starting all over at his age? He’s sixty-seven years old and in constant pain to boot, were you aware of that? Why do you suppose he keeps Noah’s visits so short? His favorite grandchild, but any more than an hour and Dad’s exhausted!”

“Oh, the poor man,” Delia said. She opened the door and got out, still holding the sweatshirt to her head. Somehow the urgency of their errand had receded, she noticed. She flipped the seat forward for Noah, and he piled out after her.

“When I think how hard I worked moving him into that place!” Ellie told her, slamming her own door. “All those boxes I packed! I felt like I was sending him off to camp or something. ‘Do you have the right kind of clothes for this? What will the other kids be wearing?’ And now they’re threatening to evict him.”

“Evict him!” Delia said.

They were climbing the steps of a large frame house with a wraparound porch. Noah led the way. Delia trailed behind because her ankle was slowing her down. She called, “I thought they said he could stay on after he married.”

“That was before they found out his wife was expecting,” Ellie said.

Delia halted on the top porch step and stared at her. Even Noah stared. “Expecting what?” Delia asked foolishly.

“Use your head, Delia! Why do you suppose they moved the wedding up to March?”

“Well, because… did they tell you this? Or are you just surmising?”

“Darn right they told me,” Ellie said. “Made a big announcement of it, just last week. Dad asks Binky, ‘Angel? Are you going to break the news, or am I?’ and Binky says, ‘Oh, you do it, honeybunch.’ Don’t you want to just gag? That kind of talk seems so, I don’t know, fake, when it’s a second marriage. So Dad clears his throat and says, ‘Ellie,’ he says; says, ‘you’re going to have a sister.’ Well, I was kind of slow on the uptake. I said, ‘I already have a sister. Several.’ He said, ‘I mean another sister. We’re pregnant.’ That’s an exact quote. ‘We,’ he said. You can bet he didn’t word it that way the first four times around.”

“But… when is this going to happen?” Delia asked.

“September.”

“September!”

Majestically, Ellie sailed through the front door. Delia stood on the porch with her mouth open. Binky had always been a rotund little person, rotund in the stomach as well, but… She looked over at Noah. “Did you know about this?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Well,” she said. “So you’ll have a… baby aunt! Imagine!”

As she limped through the door, she heard Ellie’s humorless snicker.

This was the first time Delia had been to Dr. Norman’s office, although his telephone number was posted next to the Millers’ kitchen phone. The instant she smelled that mixture of floor wax and isopropyl alcohol, she was overcome by a settling-in sensation-a feeling that she had returned to her rightful place; that all other places were counterfeit, temporary, foreign to her true nature. She stopped short in the foyer (stringy Oriental rug, ginger-jar lamp on a table), until Ellie took her arm and steered her toward the waiting room. “Is he in?” she asked the woman at the desk. The woman was much older than Delia and fifty pounds heavier, but still somebody Delia could identify with, seeing her fingers poised on the chrome-rimmed keys of an ancient typewriter. “We’ve got an emergency here!” Ellie told her.

Oh, yes, the emergency. Delia had almost forgotten. While Ellie explained the circumstances (“sharp metal corner on the… nothing I could do… tried to warn her but…”), Delia unstuck the sweatshirt from her forehead and discovered she was no longer bleeding. The bloodstains on the shirt had dried to a dull, blackish color. She glanced toward the other patients. Two women and a small girl sat watching her with interest, and she hastily clapped the sweatshirt back on her temple.

Dr. Norman was just hanging up the phone when the secretary led them in. He was a dumpy man with a flounce of white curls above his ears. “What have we here?” he asked, and he rose and came around the desk to peel away the sweatshirt with practiced fingers. His breath smelled of pipe tobacco. Delia would have liked to take hold of his hand and cradle it against her cheek. “Hmm,” he said, peering. “Well, nothing you’ll die of.”

“Will it leave a scar?” Delia asked him.

“It shouldn’t. Hard to tell for sure till I get it cleaned up.”

“Of course I did everything humanly possible,” Ellie said. “Warned her over and over again. ‘Watch yourself getting in, Dee,’ I told her; if I told her once, I told her half a dozen times-”

Dr. Norman said, with a touch of impatience, “Yes, fine, Ellie, I understand,” and Ellie shut up. “Come next door,” he told Delia. He ushered her into an adjoining room. Ellie and Noah followed, which may not have been what he had intended.

This second room held an examining table upholstered in cracked black leather. Delia boosted herself nimbly onto the end of it and settled her handbag in her lap. While Dr. Norman rummaged in a metal drawer the color of condensed milk, he asked Ellie about the weather; he asked Noah about his softball team; he told Delia he had heard she was a ba-a-ad tutor.

“Bad!” Delia said.

“Good, that means.” He looked up from the rubber gloves he was slipping on. “In T. J. Renfro’s language, ‘bad’ is good, and so is ‘wicked.’ You teach a wicked equation, he says.”

“Oh,” Delia said, relieved.

Ellie, who had been studying a poster on the Heimlich maneuver, looked over at her. “You tutor at Underwood?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She sniffed. “Joel must be in heaven,” she said. “He was always after me to volunteer.”

Dr. Norman sent Ellie a quick glance that she probably didn’t notice. Then he told Noah, “Excuse me, son,” and stepped around him to peer again at Delia’s forehead. She stilled her swinging feet as he came close. “This’ll smart some,” he said, tearing open an antiseptic wipe. The keen, authoritative smell filled her with longing. I’m really not just a mere patient, she could have told him. I know this office top to bottom! I know you’ll sit down to supper tonight and tell your family that that Ellie Miller sure acts mighty possessive of Joel, considering they’re separated. I know you’ll say you finally got to meet that live-in woman of his, and depending on how discreet you are, you might even voice some suspicion as to exactly how I was injured. Don’t think I’m one of those outsiders who can’t see beyond the white coat!

But of course she said nothing, and Dr. Norman swabbed her wound and then laid dots of rubbery warmth on either side of it as he tested it with his fingertips. “What you’ve got,” he said, “is a superficial scratch across the forehead, but a fairly deep gash at the temple. No need for stitches, though, and I doubt there’ll be a scar if we keep the edges together while it heals.” He turned back to the cabinet. “We’ll just apply a butterfly closure. This nifty type of bandage that…”

Yes, Delia knew what a butterfly was-had plastered more than a few onto her own children’s injuries. She shut her eyes as he set it in place. Next to her she heard Noah breathing; he was leaning in close to watch. “Cool!” he said.

“Now, if you want I could prescribe a pain medication,” Dr. Norman said, “but I don’t believe-”

“It hardly hurts at all,” Delia told him, opening her eyes. “I won’t need anything.”