Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Oh, yes,” Delia said. “Or rather…”

She wasn’t sure whether traveling alone to Bay Borough qualified as a vacation or not. (And if it did, when had her vacation ended and her real life begun?) She met Ellie’s eyes, which were fixed on her expectantly.

“Doesn’t it feel funny going swimming on your own?” Ellie asked.

“Funny? No.”

“And what about eating? Have you been eating in your room all this time?”

“Goodness, no! I ate out.”

“I hate to eat out alone,” Ellie said. “You don’t know how I admire you for that.”

They had to stop talking to give their orders-crab imperial for Delia, large green salad hold the dressing for Ellie-but as soon as the waiter moved away, Ellie said, “Did you practice beforehand? Before you left your, ah, previous place of residence?”

“Practice?”

“Did you use to eat out alone?”

Delia began to see what Ellie was up to here: she was hoping to gather some tips on how to manage single life. For next she said, “I never did, myself. I never even walked down a street alone, hardly! Always had some escort at my elbow. I was awfully popular as a girl. Now I wish I’d been a little less popular. You know how long ago I first thought of leaving Joel? Three months after we were married.”

“Three months!”

“But I kept thinking, What would I do on my own, though? Everyone would stare at me, wonder what was wrong with me.”

She leaned even closer to Delia. Lowered her voice. “ Dee,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Did you have to leave?”

Delia drew back slightly.

“Like, were you in just… an impossible position? Had to get out? Couldn’t have survived another minute?”

“Well, no,” Delia said.

“I don’t want to pry! I’m not asking for secrets. All I want to know is, how desperate does a person need to get before she’s certain she should go?”

“Desperate? Oh, well, I wouldn’t say… well, I’m still not certain, really.”

“You’re not?”

“I mean, it wasn’t an actual decision,” Delia told her.

“Take me, let’s say,” Ellie said. “Do you think I made a mistake? There you are in that house with my husband; do you think I was overreacting to leave him?”

“I’m not married to him, though. There’s a difference.”

“But you must know what he’s like, by now. You know how persnickety he is and how… right all the time and always criticizing.”

“Joel, criticizing?” Delia asked. “Belle Flint says he worships you! He’s trying to keep the house exactly like you left it-hasn’t anyone told you?”

“Oh, yes, after I left it,” Ellie said. “But while I was there it was, ‘Why can’t you do it this way, Ellie?’ and, ‘Why can’t you do it that way, Ellie?’ and these big cold silent glowers if I didn’t.”

“Is that so,” Delia said.

And just then she saw Sam standing in front of the fridge, delivering one of his lectures on the proper approach to uncooked poultry. Sam was so phobic about food poisoning you’d think they lived in some banana republic, while Joel never mentioned it. No, Joel’s concerns were more endearing, she thought-his household maps and his chore charts. They so plainly arose from a need for some sense of stability. All he was really after was sureness.

Or could the same be said for Sam?

Their food arrived, and the waiter flourished a pepper mill as big as a newel post. He asked, “Would either of you like-?”

“No, no, go away,” Ellie said, waving a hand. As soon as they were alone again, she turned back to Delia. “Three months after our wedding,” she said, “Joel went to a conference in Richmond. I said to myself, ‘Free!’ I felt like dancing through the house. I almost flew through the house. I played this kind of game with myself, went through all his drawers and packed his clothes in boxes. Packed what hung in his closet too. Pretended I lived by myself, with no one peering over my shoulder. He wasn’t due home till Wednesday, and I planned to put everything back Tuesday night so he’d never guess what I’d done. Except he came home early. Tuesday noon. ‘Ellie?’ he said. ‘What is this?’ ‘Oh,’ I told him, ‘it’s just I wanted to picture what it would feel like to have more drawer space.’ That’s how women get their reputations for ditsiness. The real reason wasn’t ditsy in the least, but who’s going to tell him the real reason?”

She hadn’t touched her salad. Delia plucked a piece of crab cartilage from her tongue and set it on the side of her plate.

“In a way, the whole marriage was kind of like the stages of mourning,” Ellie said. “Denial, anger… well, it was mourning. I’d go to parties and look around; I’d wonder, did all the other women feel the same as me? If not, how did they avoid it? And if so, then maybe I was just a crybaby. Maybe it was some usual state of affairs that everybody else gracefully put up with.”

Finally she speared a lettuce leaf. She nibbled it off her fork with just her front teeth, rabbitlike, all the while fixing Delia with her hopeful blue gaze.

“That reminds me of Melinda Hawser,” Delia told her. “This woman I met at Belle’s last Thanksgiving. The way she talked, I figured she’d be divorced by Christmas! But I run into her uptown from time to time and she’s still as married as ever. Looks perfectly fine.”

“Exactly,” Ellie said. “So you can’t help thinking, Wouldn’t I have been fine too? Shouldn’t I have stuck it out? And you get to remembering the good things. The way he loved to watch me put on my face for a party so I always felt I was doing something bewitching; or after the baby was born, when we weren’t allowed to have sex for six weeks and so we just kissed, the most wonderful kisses…” Now the blue eyes were swimming with tears. “Oh, Delia,” she said. “I did make a mistake. Didn’t I?”

Delia looked tactfully toward a brass lamp. She said, “It’s not as if you couldn’t unmake it. Jump in the car and drive back home.”

“Never,” Ellie said, and she dabbed beneath each eye with her napkin. “I would never give him the satisfaction,” she said.

And what would have become of Delia if Ellie had answered otherwise?

Belle told Delia she hadn’t missed a thing in Bay Borough, not a blessed thing. “Dead as a tomb,” she said, driving languidly, one-handed. “Little fracas in town council-Zeke Pomfret wants to drop the baseball game from Bay Day this year, switch to horseshoes or something, and Bill Frick wants to keep it. But no surprises there, right? And Vanessa swears she’s known about me and Horace all along, but I don’t believe her. And we’ve set the wedding date: December eighteenth.”

“Oh, Christmastime!” Delia said.

“I wanted an excuse to wear red velvet,” Belle told her.

They left the glitter of the beaches behind and rode through plainer, simpler terrain. Delia watched shabby cottages slide by, then staid old farmhouses, then an abandoned produce stand that was hardly more than a heap of rotting gray lumber. She would never have guessed, the first time she traveled this road, that she could find such scenery appealing.

At the Millers’ house, the front lawn was mowed too short and crisply edged, and each shrub stood in a circle of fresh hardwood chips. Evidently Joel had found himself with an abundance of spare time. Inside, the cat cold-shouldered her and then trailed her footsteps in a guilt-provoking way as Delia walked through the empty rooms. The house was tidy but somehow desolate, with subtle signs of bachelorhood like a huge wet dish towel instead of a proper washrag hanging over the kitchen faucet, and a thin film of grease coating the stove knobs and cupboard handles (those out-of-the-way places men never think to clean). On her bureau, a note read: Delia-I’ve gone to pick up Noah. Don’t fix supper; we’ll all grab a bite out someplace. J. Also, she had mail: a handwritten invitation on stiff cream paper. Driscoll Spence Avery and Susan Felson Grinstead request your presence at their wedding, 11 a.m. Monday, September 27, in the Grinstead living room. R.S.V.P.