Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Was there something you wanted?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said, and he moved away, went off to another part of the house. But as soon as she had finished the letter, he was back again. He must have heard her starting supper preparations. He stood in the kitchen doorway, once again jingling his coins. “Saw you on Weber Street today,” he said.

“ Weber Street?”

“Making a phone call.”

“Ah.”

“You know you’re welcome to use the phone here,” he said.

Delia had one of those flashes where she saw herself through someone else’s eyes: huddling over the receiver and shielding her ear with one hand. She almost laughed. The Mystery Woman Strikes Again. She said, “Oh, well, it’s just that I… had to call on the spur of the moment, that was all.”

He waited, as if hoping for more, but she said nothing else.

Sometimes Delia noticed some detail in Joel-the play of muscles under the skin of his forearms, or the casual drape of his suit coat across his back-and she felt a pull so deep that she had to remind herself she hardly knew this man. In fact, they barely talked to each other. Ever since he’d bandaged her ankle they seemed to have grown tongue-tied and shy. And anyhow, they had Noah to think of.

Watchful, mistrustful Noah! Always lurking about, lately, scanning their faces for signs of guilt. One night when Joel and Delia came home from a Volunteer Tutors’ Supper (potluck, each woman meditatively eating just her own dish, for the most part), they found him waiting at the front door with his arms clamped across his chest. “What took you so long?” he demanded. “That supper was supposed to get over at nine. It’s nine forty-three, for gosh sake, and the Brookses’ house is not but five minutes away!”

Well, think about it: in October he would turn thirteen. Not an easy age, as Delia knew far too well. Already there were signs. For instance, he had spurned those clothes she’d bought him this spring. And he wanted her to leave his laundry in the hall outside his room from now on, not bring it in. And one morning after his friends had slept over, he asked her, “Do you have to wear that beachy-looking cover-up at breakfast? Don’t you own a bathrobe like normal people?”

Yes, it was clear where he was headed.

“He’s getting so tall all at once; I went to kiss him the other day and his face was just about even with mine,” Ellie said. (Often, now, the two of them talked on the phone awhile before Delia summoned Noah.) “Every time I see him, he’s changed some way! He’s started listening to this horrible music in the car, these singers who might as well be gossiping amongst themselves except every now and then you manage to overhear a stray word or two.”

“And he says he’s going to start a rock band,” Delia told her. “He and Kenny Moss.”

“But he doesn’t play an instrument!”

“Well, I don’t know. They’ve already got a name picked out: Does Your Mother Have Any Children?”

“That’s a band name?”

“So he tells me.”

“I don’t get it,” Ellie said.

“You’re not supposed to, I guess. And you heard he doesn’t want to go to camp this summer.”

“But he loves camp!”

“He says it’s babyish.”

“What will he do instead, then?”

“Oh, he’s going, willy-nilly,” Delia told her. “Joel says he has to.” She felt odd, mentioning Joel so familiarly to Ellie. She hurried on. “He’s already paid the deposit, he says, and anyhow, I won’t be here to tend him. I’ll be on vacation.”

“You will? Where?”

“ Ocean City, the middle two weeks in July. Belle Flint set it up with this friend of hers who runs a motel.”

“You and I should get together while you’re there,” Ellie told her. “Have dinner one night in my favorite restaurant. I hang out in Ocean City all the time!”

Evidently she no longer thought Delia was Joel’s girlfriend. Delia wondered why. Was it seeing Delia up close that had changed her mind?

Delia felt a little bit disappointed, to be honest.

She dreamed she ran into Sam in front of Senior City. He was standing outside the double doors in his starched white coat, with his hands in his pockets, and she walked directly up to him and said, in her most positive tone, “At the Millers’ I have a full-sized bike I built all by myself out of paper clips.”

He gazed down at her thoughtfully.

“A working bike?” he asked.

“Well, no.”

She woke up still squinting against the sunlight that had flashed off his glasses. He had been wearing a stethoscope, she recalled, looped across the back of his neck like a shaving towel. He hadn’t worn a stethoscope since the first week he came to work for her father. It was a new-young-doctor thing to do, really, and new was what Sam had been then, in spite of his age, because he’d had to spend so long working his way through school. But he never would have given her such a stern and judging look when they were first acquainted.

Or would he?

Maybe he’d been that way from the start. Maybe Adrian had it right: what annoys you most, later on, is the very thing that attracted you to begin with.

For her trip to the beach she bought a suitcase-just a cheap one from the dime store, big enough to hold her straw tote. Belle was driving her over early Saturday morning. Noah was still home when Belle honked out front (he’d be leaving for camp around noon), and Delia gave him a quick goodbye hug, which he put up with. To Joel she said, “Don’t forget to feed Vernon.”

“Who’s Vernon?”

She couldn’t think why he asked, for a moment. Then she said, “Oh! I meant George.” Silly of her: George and Vernon were not at all alike. She said, “George the cat!” as if it were Joel who had been confused. “Well, so long,” she told him, and she rushed out the door, her suitcase knocking against her shins.

Belle wore enormous sunglasses, the upside-down kind with the earpieces hitched at the bottom. “I have the world’s worst hangover,” she told Delia right off. “I never want to see another drop of champagne as long as I live.”

“You had champagne?”

“Did I ever. A whole entire bottle, because last night Horace proposed.”

“Oh, Belle!”

“But he couldn’t drink any himself because he’s allergic,” Belle said. “Just sat there watching me glug it down, following every swallow with those hound-dog eyes of his. Yes, that’s the way we do things, we two. Still, it made a nice gesture. Champagne, a dozen roses, and a diamond ring: the works.” She lifted her left hand from the wheel to display a tiny, winking glint. Then she pulled into the street. “Near as I can recall, I must have accepted. Think of it: Belle Lamb. Sounds like a noise in a comic book: Blam!” She was keeping her face expressionless behind the dark glasses, but there was something complacent and well-fed in the curve of her lips. “I guess now I’ll have to go through with it,” she said.

“Don’t you want to go through with it?”

“Oh, well. Sure.” She turned onto 380. “I do care about him. Or love him, I guess. At least, if he bangs his head climbing into my car I get this sort of clutch to my stomach. You reckon we could call that love?”

Delia was still considering this question as Belle went on. “But I can’t help noticing, Dee: most folks marry just because they decide they’ve reached that stage. I mean, even if they don’t have any particular person picked out yet. Then they pick someone out. It’s like their marriages are arranged, same as in those foreign countries-except that here, the bride and groom are the ones who do the arranging.”

Delia laughed. She said, “Well, now I don’t know what to say. Am I supposed to congratulate you, or not?”