“. . . only thinking of the baby,” Patch was saying at the other end of the line. “It’s not my fault Min Foo’s so sensitive. I just mentioned it for the baby’s sake.”
Mentioned what? Rebecca had lost track.
“Face it: Fatima’s a terrible name! And has anybody considered what they’d be bound to call her for short?”
Rebecca caught sight of what seemed to be a wine stain on the Redial button. Focusing her eyes required a great amount of effort, she noticed.
“Beck? Are you there? Did you hear me?”
“Yes, well . . . maybe it will be a boy,” Rebecca said.
“NoNo has decided it’s a girl,” Patch told her. “Min Foo’s not even considering boys’ names anymore, which is very shortsighted in my opinion because NoNo isn’t half as clairvoyant as she thinks she is.”
Rebecca started kneading her forehead.
“Otherwise, why would she marry a man like Barry Sanborn?”
“This all seems so pointless,” Rebecca said after a pause.
“Well, pardon me,” Patch snapped, and she slammed down the receiver.
Rebecca wondered where Patch found the energy for so much indignation.
At noon she set out leftovers and called Poppy and Peter to lunch. It wasn’t a sociable meal. Poppy kept stealing glances at a magazine lying open beside his plate. Peter concentrated on his food, peeling every last strip of fat from his ham and separating the carrot shreds from his salad before he ate it.
Then Poppy went off for his nap, but when Peter started toward the stairs Rebecca slung an arm around his shoulders, even though it meant she practically had to body-block him first. “How about you and me going out for ice cream?” she asked. “Get ourselves a little fresh air.”
“No, thanks,” he said, standing limp within her embrace.
“Want me to phone Patch? See if she can bring Danny over?”
“No, thanks.”
“Or a game, then. Some kind of board game.”
She saw him prepare to say no again, but she pressed on. “Monopoly? Checkers? Clue? We don’t want to tell your dad you didn’t do one thing all the while he was gone, do we?”
Peter said, “I don’t care.”
“He would blame me. He’d think I wasn’t a good—” She started to say “baby-sitter” but changed it at the last minute. “Wasn’t a good hostess! I kept you locked in your room on bread and water his whole entire honeymoon!”
A faint smile thinned Peter’s lips, but he said nothing.
Oh, Lord, she thought, life was so wearing. Still, she forced herself to persist. “Scrabble? Parcheesi?” she asked, giving his shoulders a squeeze. “We’ve got them all!”
“Well, Scrabble, maybe,” he said finally.
“Scrabble. Oh, you’ll regret this, young man. It so happens I’m the world champion of Scrabble.”
So they went upstairs to the family room, Rebecca chortling and rubbing her hands together and making a general fool of herself, and settled on the couch with the Scrabble board between them. Peter remained fairly quiet, but he did seem interested once things got under way. He turned out to be the type who took the game very seriously—less from any competitive spirit, she surmised, than because he was a perfectionist. He would peer at the board for minutes on end, reach toward his tiles but draw back, frown and say, “Hmm,” consult the dictionary and shake his head and return to his study of the board. This suited Rebecca just fine. She could brood to her heart’s content.
Who was this Laura person? What was she to Will?
“Guess this is about as much as I can do,” Peter said. He set an oxy in front of moron, which earned him sixty points because of a triple-word square.
Rebecca said, “Heavens.” Even allowing for his looking it up in the dictionary, she was impressed. Peter just shrugged and reached for the scorepad. He was wearing a polo shirt—long-sleeved! in this heat!—tucked conscientiously into his shorts, which looked like two bunchy skirts above his skinny legs. The poor child was such a waif, Rebecca thought. She sent him a sudden smile, one that she really meant, and he surprised her by smiling back before he wrote his score down.
While she was debating her own choice of words—none of them half as clever as Peter’s—Poppy wandered in from his nap. He still had his magazine, which he dangled at his side with one finger marking a page. “You remember NoNo’s wedding cake,” he said, standing over the Scrabble board.
“I remember,” Rebecca said.
“You know how it kind of tilted.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t feel that cakes are Biddy’s strong point.”
“No, I guess they’re not,” Rebecca said.
“So do you think it would hurt her feelings if somebody else made my birthday cake?”
“Not in the least, I’m sure,” she said, although in fact she wasn’t sure at all.
He wandered out again with his magazine—Hospitality Monthly, she saw. She sighed and set down an N and an O to spell nor. “Sorry, it’s all I could come up with,” she told Peter. “I wish I hadn’t promised Poppy this party. He’ll forget it before the balloons have shriveled; maybe the instant it’s over.”
She watched Peter total her score. His nails were so deeply bitten that the fingertips gripping the pen resembled little pink erasers.
“Last Monday,” she said, “he nagged me all afternoon to take him to see his friend Mr. Ames, and I kept saying, ‘I took you this morning, Poppy, remember? You’ve been, already; you brought him a scratch-off lottery ticket. You and he sat on his porch while I went grocery-shopping.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, yes, my mistake,’ but then not ten minutes later he’d start nagging me again.”
Peter set the scorepad aside. “He could enjoy the party while it was happening, though,” he said. “Even if he did forget it later.”
“Yes, well . . .” She thought that over. “I guess I want points,” she told him. And then, when she saw his puzzled glance toward the game board: “Points for giving the party, I mean. I want him to credit me afterwards for doing it.”
He said, “Oh,” and went back to his rack of tiles.
“As for the cake,” she said, “I think botched cakes are a Davitch tradition. You should have seen my wedding cake! Mother Davitch didn’t bake it long enough and it was all soupy in the middle. The bride figurine on top fell into this sort of sinkhole, waist deep.”
Peter moved a letter from the middle of his rack to the end. A Z, she couldn’t help seeing. The lucky devil.
The bride had been ivory plastic, she recalled, with a pinpoint-sized dot of red lipstick and two little beady brown eyes. A matte black, scallop-edged hairdo had been painted onto her head. And the groom had been blue-eyed and blond—nothing at all like Joe.
The telephone rang. She reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said.
“Ah, may I speak to Rebecca, please.”
She grew extremely still.
The furred voice, the Church Valley accent. The leisurely, drawn-out vowels, with I sounding not much different from Ah.
“This is Rebecca,” she said.
“Um, Rebecca, this is Will Allenby.”
“Will! How did you find out my number?”
“I looked at my Caller ID.”
That Will had Caller ID was a shock. It seemed she had been picturing him still living in the sixties.
“You hung up on me so fast,” he was saying. “Thank goodness for modern inventions, I guess.”
What did he want, anyhow? Why had he called her back?
It made things all the eerier that he said, at that very moment, “So. What did you call me for?”
“Oh, I . . .” She smoothed her skirt across her lap with her free hand. “I happened to be at home,” she said, “home in Church Valley, I mean, and Mother and I got to talking about old times and I don’t know, I just all at once thought, I wonder where Will ever got to!”
“Not so very far, as you can see,” he said. He gave a short laugh
. “I’m right here where you left me.” Then he hastened to say, “Where we went to college, that is. Well, I haven’t been here the whole time. I did go away for my doctorate. But now I teach at Macadam.”
“That’s wonderful, Will.”
“In fact, I’m head of my department.”
“Congratulations.”
“Yes, I can’t complain. Can’t complain at all. Really I’ve done very well. Been very fortunate.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.
“Last year they nearly made me a dean, except they decided in the end that they ought to bring in an outsider.”
“Isn’t that nice,” she said. “And are you . . . do you . . . I mean, I suppose you must be married, and all.”
“Well, I used to be.”
“Oh.”
“I married an ex-student of mine. An English major; beautiful girl. She was once even offered a modeling job, although of course she didn’t accept it.”
“I see.”
“But we’re, um, divorced, at present.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling a quick surge of pleasure.
“Don’t be sorry! Really! I’m doing just fine. Getting along just dandy.”
Had he always phrased things so stuffily? She couldn’t tell if it was his age or his natural manner; she had forgotten now how he had spoken when he was young.
“And what about you?” he was asking. “I know you’re married, right?”
“I’m a widow.”
“A widow,” he said slowly.
He seemed so unfamiliar with the word, she wondered for an instant whether she had made it up. It did sound peculiar, suddenly—almost African. (Or was that just because it reminded her of that song, “Wimoweh,” that the Weavers used to sing?)
“Well, please allow me to offer my condolences,” he was saying.
“Thank you.”
“Was this . . . ah, something recent?”
“No, my husband died a long time ago,” she told him.
The phrase “my husband” struck her all at once as tactless. She rushed on, so as to make it less noticeable. “I’d only been married six years,” she said. “I was left with four little girls—his three and one of my own.”
Peter glanced up from the board, just then, where he was laying out something that seemed to interconnect with almost every existing word. He gave her an oddly searching look, as if what she had said was new to him.
“That must have been hard,” Will was saying on the phone.
She gripped the receiver more tightly and asked, “Would you like to get together, ever?”
Oops. Too sudden. Too direct, too pushy; she could tell by his hesitation.
“Or else not,” she said. “I mean, I realize you must lead a very busy life.”
“Well, not inordinately busy . . .”
“So, then, maybe we should get together and catch up! I’m just over in Baltimore, you know.”
He said nothing. She plowed on. “Would you like to, say, meet someplace? Meet for a drink?”
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a drinker,” he said.
He didn’t drink at all, was what he meant. Church Valley people didn’t, by and large. She gave it one last try. She said, “Or maybe a bite to eat; how about it?”
“A bite to eat,” he said thoughtfully.
“I could come to Macadam, if you like.”
“Well, that’s a possibility.”
Something about the lingering way he said it—his ostentatious reluctance—made her more confident. She saw now that as the injured party, he required wooing. And sure enough, his next words were, “I do happen to be free this evening.”
“This evening? Oh, I’m sorry; this evening I have an . . . event.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow I have a tea-dance,” she told him. “And something Sunday, too, I’m afraid, but Monday’s good! Monday would be perfect!”
He waited a beat before he said, “All right, then. Monday.”
Maybe if she phoned right now, she could get a hair appointment Monday morning. Maybe she could buy a new dress; maybe even lose a little weight. She said, “What’s a good place? Do you still like Myrtle’s?”
“Myrtle’s?”
“Myrtle’s Family Restaurant?”
“Oh, Myrtle’s is long gone. I’d forgotten about Myrtle’s,” he said. “But I believe there’s something catty-corner from where Myrtle’s used to be. The Oak Tree, the Elm Tree—some such name. I don’t know how good it is, though. I’ve never eaten there.”
“Well, at least I’ll be able to find it,” she told him. “Shall we say seven o’clock?”
“Seven o’clock. All right.”
She said, “I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Well, fine,” he said.
He didn’t say that he was looking forward to it.
When she had hung up, she let out a long breath. “That was my very first boyfriend,” she told Peter.
He raised his eyes again from the Scrabble board.
“My only boyfriend, not counting Joe Davitch,” she said.
Then she plopped down two tiles to make another three-point word, and she didn’t even apologize.
* * *
Saturday morning she dropped Peter off at Patch’s house, after which she drove to a giant shopping mall. She forged grimly through each clothing store fingering fabrics, holding dresses under her chin in front of mirrors, and twice even trying things on. It appeared that without her noticing, the fashion world had been edging back toward the skimpy styles of the seventies. All she found were off-the-shoulder necklines, tight cap sleeves, and skirts that showed her underwear seams. In the mirrors she looked sweaty and unhappy. By noon she was still empty-handed, and she couldn’t spend any more time because the dining-room ceiling at home had dropped another chunk of plaster and Rick Saccone had agreed to come fix it before the tea-dance.
“Peter’s just finishing lunch,” Patch said when Rebecca arrived to pick him up. Then she lowered her voice. “This was not a big success. The kids tried to get him involved, but all he wanted to do was read his book. It wasn’t their fault, I swear.”
“Never mind,” Rebecca told her. “He read all through breakfast, too.” She was navigating Patch’s foyer, which was the usual jumble of sports equipment—gloves, bats, lacrosse sticks, and every conceivable size of ball. “Peter?” she called. “Ready to go?”
“Stay and have a sandwich with us,” Patch said.
“I can’t; Rick’s coming.”
“Not again!”
Anyway, Rebecca planned to skip lunch. The memory was still vivid of how she had looked in those dresses she’d tried on: the material strained taut across the broad mound of her stomach.
Peter emerged from the kitchen reading his book as he walked—some old science fiction paperback he’d found in the guest room—and during the drive home he continued reading, in spite of her attempts to start a conversation. “How was lunch?” she asked him.
“It was okay,” he said, with his eyes still on the page.
“How’d you get along with Danny?”
“We got along okay.”
But then on Eutaw Street he looked over at her to ask, “If you were offered a trip on a time machine, would you take it?”
“Well, certainly!” she said. “I’d have to be crazy not to!”
“Would you go to the past?” he asked. “Or the future?”
“Oh, the future, of course! I’d like to know what’s going to happen.”
“Yeah, me too,” he said.
“My grandchildren, for instance. How will they turn out? What’s that funny Lateesha going to do with her life? She’s such a little character. And Dixon: I just have this feeling Dixon’s going to amount to something.”
“I’d also like to know if scientists ever discover the Universal Theory,” Peter said.
Rebecca laughed.
He said, “What’s funny?”
/> She said, “Oh, nothing,” and he went back to his book.
* * *
As soon as they reached home, she went upstairs to her closet and took out all her dresses and piled them on the bed. One by one she tried them on, standing sideways to the mirror and surveying herself critically.
She had never aimed for the emaciated look; it wasn’t that. In fact, some part of her had always wanted softness and abundance—the Aunt Ida look. (Which may have been why she had slipped off every diet she’d ever attempted: the first pounds she lost invariably seemed to come from her cheeks, and her face would turn prim and prunish like her mother’s.) The problem was, soft and abundant women were seen to their best advantage when naked. It wasn’t her fault clothes had belts to bulge over, and buttonholes that stretched and gaped!
When Rick showed up to fix the ceiling, she met him at the door in an eggplant-colored gauze caftan that wafted unrestricted from neck to ankle. But she could tell from the way his eyebrows rose that it was a little too noticeable. “I’m having dinner with my high-school sweetheart Monday,” she explained, “and I’m nervous as a cat. I guess this won’t do, huh?”
“Well,” he said cautiously, “the color’s nice . . .”
“Oh.”
He said, “What about those harem pants you had on that time I was patching the bathroom?”
“I can’t wear pants to a restaurant!”
“Why not?” he asked. He heaved his ladder over the doorjamb. “Now, me: I have dinner with my high-school sweetheart every evening.”
“You do?”
“I’m married to her.”
“Deena was your high-school sweetheart? I didn’t know that!”
“I thought I’d told you.”
“I’d have remembered if you had,” she said.
After she saw him into the dining room she went upstairs again, this time to the hall cedar closet where she stored items she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away. There she found what she was hunting: the powder-blue dress she had worn the night she met Joe. So she must have worn it with Will, too, on some occasion or other. (It wasn’t as if she had owned that many clothes.) But it would barely cover her crotch; she could tell by holding it up against her. “Would you believe it?” she asked Peter. He was heading into the family room with his book. “I actually used to go out in public in this! It reminds me of that Mother Goose rhyme where the old woman wakes from a nap and discovers her skirts were cut off.”