Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

He scrawled a note for his secretary before he showed her out, and clapped Noah on the shoulder, and said, “Ellie, always good to see your clothes hanging so well on you.”

“Oh, stop,” Ellie said. She told Delia, “Everybody pokes fun at this remark I made in Boardwalk Bulletin.”

Delia’s only response was, “Oh?” because she didn’t want to let on she’d read it.

“But I was misquoted!” Ellie said. “Or at least, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was, I dress economically.”

She was still going on about that-telling Noah that this skirt, for instance, had cost thirteen ninety-five at Teenage World-when they reached the reception desk, which left Delia to pay the bill. She did think Ellie might have offered. But she had planned to decline anyhow, and so she held her tongue.

Out on the porch, she folded the sweatshirt and stuffed it in her bag. Then she followed Ellie and Noah down the steps. Ellie was discussing the clothing budget of someone named Doris. Doris? Oh, yes, the anchorwoman at WKMD. “What she spends on headbands alone,” Ellie said, “to say nothing of those scarves she wears to hide her scraggy neck…”

Delia was reflecting that she should have accepted that prescription after all, not for her forehead but for her ankle. She had completely neglected to mention twisting her ankle. She limped painfully to the car and fell with a thud into the passenger seat.

“So I guess you want to go home now,” Ellie said.

“Yes, please,” Delia told her.

But Ellie had been speaking to Noah. “Honey?” she said, watching his face in the rearview mirror.

“I guess,” he said.

“Don’t want to change your mind and visit me?”

“I’ve got this history test to study for.”

Ellie’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t point out that he could do that anytime over the weekend.

They cruised down Weber Street, passing Copp Catering where Belle had bought Thanksgiving dinner, and the Sub Tub, where all the Underwood students headed for snacks after school. In Ellie’s company, Delia felt that Bay Borough took on a different shading. It didn’t look as happy as it usually did. The women walking home with their grocery bags seemed unknowingly ironic, like those plastic-faced, smiling housewives in kitchen-appliance ads from the fifties. Delia shook off the thought and turned to Ellie. “Well!” she said. “Maybe I’ll run into you at your father’s sometime.”

“If I ever go back there,” Ellie said gloomily.

“Oh, you have to go back! Why wouldn’t you? He’s such a pleasure to talk to.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Ellie said. “You’re not his daughter.”

She turned onto Pendle Street, braked for a jaywalking collie, and pulled into the Millers’ driveway. (The glance she shot toward the front windows could have meant nothing at all.) “Bye, No-No,” she said, blowing her son a kiss. “Delia, sorry again about the whatever.”

“That’s all right,” Delia said.

Limping after Noah up the sidewalk, she remembered where she’d heard that phrase of Ellie’s before. “Easy for you,” Delia’s sisters used to tell her. They said, “Naturally you get along with Dad. You arrived so late, is why. You don’t have so much to hold against him.”

But they never specified just what they held against him themselves. They hadn’t been able to name it even when she asked, and she would be willing to bet that Ellie couldn’t either.

When Delia changed into the shoes she wore around the house, she found that the strap of her pump had left a groove across her right instep. Her foot was so swollen, in fact, that she seemed to be wearing a ghost pump, pressing into her flesh. And her anklebone had become a mere dent. She doubted anything was broken, though. She could still wriggle her toes.

She drew a dishpan of cold water, added a few ice cubes, and sat down on a kitchen chair to let the ankle soak. And what else should she do for it? All those times she’d heard Sam advising his patients; you’d think she would remember. There was a mnemonic: R.I.C.E., he always told them. She tried it aloud. “Rest, ice…” But what was the C for? Caution? Coddling? She tried again. “Rest, ice…”

“Rest, ice, compression, elevation,” Joel told her, setting his briefcase on the counter. “What happened to you? You look like a war orphan.”

“Oh,” Delia said, “you know that sharp corner they have on car doors…” Then she realized that this in no way explained her ankle. “It’s just been one of those days,” she finished vaguely.

He didn’t pursue it. He opened an overhead cabinet and felt for something on the top shelf. “I know we have a first-aid kit,” he said. “I had to take a course in-Here we go.” He pulled out a gray metal tackle box. “When you’re through soaking, I’ll tape it.”

“Oh, I’m through,” Delia said. She should probably allow more time, but the ice was making her shiver. She lifted her foot and patted it dry with a dish towel. Joel bent over it. He whistled.

“Maybe you ought to get that x-rayed,” he said. “Are you sure it’s not broken?”

“Pretty sure. Everything works,” Delia told him.

Moving aside the dishpan, he knelt and started unrolling a strip of flesh-colored elastic. Delia felt self-conscious about the puffiness of her ankle and the dead blue of her skin, but he showed no reaction. He began wrapping her foot, crisscrossing her instep, working his way upward in a series of perfectly symmetrical V’s. “Oh, how neat! Tidy, I mean,” Delia said. “You’re very good at this.”

“Part of a principal’s education,” Joel said. He wound the last of the bandage around her shin. Then he secured it with two metal clips the same shape as the butterfly closure on her temple. “How’s that?” he asked. He took hold of her foot, as if weighing it. “Tight enough?”

“Oh, yes, it feels…”

It felt wonderful. Not just the bandage-although the support was a great relief-but the hand clasping her foot, the large palm warming her arch through the elastic. She wished she could push even harder against his grip. She was thirsty, it seemed, for that firmness. Till now she had never realized that the instep could be an erogenous zone.

As if he guessed, he went on kneeling there, looking into her face.

“Delia?” Noah said. “Can I invite-?”

Both of them jumped. Joel dropped her foot and stood up. He said, “Noah! I thought you were off at your mother’s.”

Noah stood in the doorway, frowning.

“We were just, ah, taping Delia’s ankle,” Joel told him. “It seems she must have sprained it.”

Delia said, “Rest, ice, compression, elevation! That’s the menon… menonom…” She laughed, short of breath. “Oh, Lord, I never can pronounce it.”

Noah just watched her. Finally he said, “Can I invite Jack for supper?”

“Oh, of course!” she said. “Yes! Good idea!”

He looked at her a moment longer, looked at his father, then turned and walked out.

Joel wouldn’t let her cook that night. He settled her on the family-room couch with her feet up and the cat in her lap, and he went off to order a pizza. Meanwhile Noah and Jack sprawled on the floor in front of the TV. Some kind of thriller was playing. During the more suspenseful scenes a piano tinkled hypnotically. Delia loosened her hold on George and leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Behind her lids, she saw the gritty surface of Highway 50 rushing toward her. She saw the Plymouth darting across a stream of traffic, miraculously avoiding collision like a blip in a video game. She jerked awake, eyes wide and staring, shaken all over again by the narrowness of her escape.