Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

The cut on Delia’s forehead healed quickly, leaving just the faintest white fishhook of a scar. The sprain, though, took longer. She favored her right ankle for weeks. “This is not my actual walk,” she wanted to tell passersby, for she felt, somehow, at a disadvantage-second rate, inferior. She wondered how people endured it when they knew they’d be disabled forever, like some of the residents in Senior City.

Senior City was the one place where her limp attracted no attention. She could proceed unhurriedly toward a waiting elevator, trusting the other passengers to hold it for her. When she finally stepped inside, she would find them conversing among themselves without a sign of impatience, one of them leaning absently on the Open button till Delia reminded her to release it. No longer did their own infirmities seem so apparent, either, or their wrinkles or white hair. Delia had adjusted her slant of vision over the past months.

And what a contrast Binky made! For anyone could see now that she was pregnant. By May she was in maternity clothes. By early June she was cupping her belly like an apronful of fruit as she rose from a chair. “Seems like things are more so, with this one,” she told Delia. “When I had the boys I hardly showed till the end. I used to wear unzipped jeans and one of my husband’s long-tailed shirts. But now I have to squeeze through car doors sideways and I’ve still got three months to go.”

There was no question that this baby was unplanned. Binky said she’d been twelve weeks along before she suspected a thing-had continued proclaiming her June wedding date to all and sundry. “Then I said, ‘What is this?’ and I went to see my doctor. When he told me I was pregnant I just looked at him. He said, ‘But nowadays, thirty-eight is nothing. Lots of women give birth at thirty-eight.’ I said, ‘How about sixty-seven?’ He said, ‘Sixty-seven?’ I said, ‘That’s the age of the father.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ Said, ‘I see.’ Said, ‘Hmm.’”

“I view it this way,” Nat told Delia. “What better place for childbirth than a retirement community? Here we have all these doctors and nurses, just standing by twiddling their thumbs on Floor Four.”

Delia was horrified. She said, “You would go to Floor Four for this?”

“He’s teasing,” Binky told her.

“We’ll turn the cardiac unit into a labor room,” Nat went on impishly. “Use one of those railed hospital beds for a crib. And Lord knows these folks have got enough diapers around. Right, Noah?”

Noah grinned, but only at his teacup. He had reached that age where any talk of bodily functions was a monumental embarrassment.

“The best part is,” Nat said, “whoever drew up the bylaws for Senior City never dreamed of this eventuality. All our contract says is, ‘Applicants must be sixty-five before entering,’ but this baby isn’t an applicant. However, we did lose the Floor Two dispute. You heard we asked permission to move down to Floor Two? Now that I have Binky to look after me, I said… but the board said no. Said it wasn’t the way the place worked. Progression was supposed to be up, they said; not down.”

“Well, perhaps it’s for the best,” Binky told him. “Our neighbors on Three would be heartbroken to lose us, now the baby’s coming.”

“Yes, she certainly won’t lack for sitters,” Nat said dryly.

He kept insisting that the baby was a girl, even though they had chosen not to learn the sex. Girls were the only babies he’d had experience of, he said. He tried to convince Noah that all babies were girls but metamorphosed, some of them, into boys at about the same time their eyes darkened.

“You wouldn’t believe how many old ladies are working on booties right now,” he told Delia. “Little knitted slippers, socks, embroidered Mary Janes… Kid is going to be the Imelda Marcos of the nursery set.”

Still, both Nat and Binky must have misgivings, Delia thought. How could they not? She was awed by their determined good cheer-by Binky’s habit of telling people, “We couldn’t be more pleased,” as if prompting them; and by Nat’s solicitude, even as he hobbled around as fragile and easily overturned as something constructed of Tinkertoys.

“When my first wife was dying,” he told Delia one afternoon, “I used to sit by her bed and I thought, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she’d been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she’d been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can’t tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people I saw on the street looked so… temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn’t they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems. All those years when I was a child, longing for it to be ‘my turn,’ it hadn’t ever occurred to me that my turn would be over, by and by. Then Binky came along. Is it any wonder I feel I’ve been born again?”

Binky was present when he said this, and she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Me too, sweetheart,” she told him.

Delia grew suddenly conscious of her own separateness-of her upright posture, her elbows pressed primly against her sides in an armchair all to herself.

Then it was summer, warm and green and buzzing with cicadas after a long, cool spring. School came to an end, and Noah started sleeping late and hanging around the house with his friends and complaining of boredom. Joel switched to vacation hours and was home by midafternoon. In the maple tree out back, a woodpecker couple built themselves a nest. Delia could hear their cries from time to time-high-pitched, excited squawks that reminded her of girls’-school girls attending their first mixed party. And on Highway 50, more and more cars sped toward the beach, their rooftops spinning with bicycle wheels, their back seats stuffed with children, their rear window ledges a coagulation of sand shovels, rubber flippers, and Utz potato chip cartons.

Would Delia’s family be going to the beach themselves? she wondered. It was June, after all. It was a year since she had left them, although it seemed much longer. She had, by now, done everything at least once-observed a birthday alone as well as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Paid her income taxes (married filing separately). Registered to vote. Taken the cat to the vet. She was a bona fide citizen of Bay Borough.

Then a letter arrived from Susie.

The envelope bore the correct address, which meant that Susie must have consulted Eliza or Eleanor. The handwriting was so rounded that Borough resembled a row of balloons anchored by a single string. Delia lifted the flap almost stealthily, unsealing it rather than tearing it, as if this would soften the impact of whatever waited inside.

Hi Mom!

Just a quick note to fill you in! How you doing? Thanx for the graduation card! Commencement was kind of a drag but Tucky Pearson gave the most awesome party afterwards at her family’s horse farm!

Nothing special to report except Dad is being so-o-o-o difficult right now! I know you’ll see my side of things so could you maybe phone him and have a talk? Don’t tell him I asked you to call-just say you got a letter from me and thought you should discuss my plans. You wouldn’t believe how mean he’s being! Or maybe you would! Honestly Mom sometimes I don’t even blame you for going! See ya!

Luv, Susie

Delia had a sudden sense of exhaustion. She refolded the letter and put it back in the envelope.

Well.

She couldn’t phone from the house. She didn’t want the call appearing on Joel’s bill. Nor did she want to reverse the charges, which would give an impression of needfulness. So first she had to scrounge through her handbag and various pockets for change, and then she had to walk to the pay phone at Bay and Weber Streets, a block and a half away. She walked as fast as her ankle allowed, because if she made her call between eleven-thirty and twelve, she had a better chance of reaching Sam directly. He always broke for lunch then. Unless, in her absence, things had altered more than she had predicted.