Now Barry started singing “Happy Birthday,” swooping his arms above his head like an orchestra conductor. It was good to have somebody else, for a change, play the part of cruise-ship director. Rebecca chimed in on the second note, and the others joined by twos and threes as the song continued. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . .”
At the end, as always, a couple of the children went on singing. “How o-old are you, how o-old are you . . .” Their voices were so frail that Rebecca could hear, besides, Haydn on the stereo and “Heart and Soul” on the piano and “Stardust” on the VCR, which somebody must have started running all over again. The Military Symphony—at least this second section of it, whatever it was called—didn’t sound military at all; it sounded delicate and sad. And “Heart and Soul” had always struck her as so haunting, such an oddly haunting melody in view of the fact that it was literally child’s play. And anyone would agree that “Stardust” was a melancholy song. So that was probably why, in the middle of “How Old Are You?” she felt an ache of homesickness, right there in her own house.
But she brushed it aside, and, “Make a wish! Make a wish!” she chanted, until the others took it up. Poppy braced himself, sucked in a huge breath, and blew out every last candle.
Well, he did have help. Danny and Peter, whom he must have enlisted earlier, leaned forward at either side of him and blew when he did, which made everybody laugh. “It still counts, though!” Poppy said. “I still get my wish. Don’t I?”
“Of course you do,” Rebecca told him.
She stepped forward to take his arm, planning to settle him in a chair, but he resisted. Instead he stood for a long, silent moment watching Biddy pluck the candles from the cake. “Boy, that is kind of pitiful,” he said finally. “A groom without his bride like that.”
He was right, Rebecca realized. They should have thought how it would look: the poor little man all dressed up, all alone on his expanse of deforested icing. Well, too late now, for Poppy had already been reminded of his poem. “You’re given a special welcome when you get to heaven late . . .”
Min Foo blamed Hakim. That blasted videotape, she said in a piercing whisper, with Aunt Joyce in every frame, just about, reminding Poppy all over again that she was dead.
Hakim said, “So? He would otherwise forget?”
Lateesha asked if she could lick the frosting off the candles. Mr. Hardesty’s walker made a sound like inch, inch as he hobbled toward a chair. “The journey may be lonely, but the end is worth the wait,” Poppy finished. “The sight of your beloved, smiling at the gate.”
And then, without missing a beat, “Why! That wouldn’t be fondant icing, would it?”
“It would indeed,” Biddy told him.
“Fondant icing! My favorite! Oh, my.”
What Peter had said was right, Rebecca thought. You could still enjoy a party even if you didn’t remember it later.
* * *
The champagne was a top brand; Rebecca had made sure of that. Ordinarily they’d have drunk something cheaper—just sparkling wine, to be honest—but not today. Barry gave a whistle when she handed him a bottle to open. “Pretty classy,” he told her, and she said, “Well, we don’t observe a hundredth birthday every day of the week.” Even the little ones got the real thing. She poured a drop for each of them herself, over Biddy’s protests that they would never know the difference.
“A toast!” she said when everyone had a glass. She raised her own glass. She was standing in the center of the front parlor, surrounded by so many people that some were all the way back in the dining room, and at the moment she wasn’t even sure where Poppy was located. But she said, “To Poppy!” She cleared her throat.
“He’s beginning to seem perennial;
We’re observing his centennial.
So shout it from the chandeliers:
We wish him another hundred years!”
“To Poppy,” they all murmured. And then, in the silence when the others were drinking, Patch said clearly, “Oh, Lord, Beck is back to those everlasting rhymes of hers.”
Rebecca’s eyes stung. She swallowed her sip of champagne and blinked to clear her vision.
From over near the fireplace, Poppy said, “Thank you, all.”
He was standing next to Mr. Hardesty and grasping one side of the walker, so that at first glance it seemed the two men were holding hands. When he had everybody’s attention, he said, “Well. This has been just what I dreamed of, I tell you. From the very start of the day, it’s been perfect. Sunshine on my bedspread when I opened my eyes; radiators coming on all dusty-smelling and cozy. Waffles for breakfast, that puffy kind that are light inside but crispy outside, and one-hundred-percent maple syrup heated first in the microwave and then poured over in a pool and left a moment to soak, so the waffles swell and turn spongy and every crumb of them is sopping with that toasty, nutty flavor . . .”
Well, this would take a while. Rebecca downed the rest of her champagne and looked for a place to set her glass. Then she felt someone’s hand on the small of her back. When she turned, she found Zeb just behind her. He said, “That was just Patch being Patch. She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Oh,” she said, “what do I care?”
But to her distress, the tears welled up again.
“The fact is,” she told Zeb, “I’m a superficial woman.”
She had meant to say “superfluous” (she was thinking again of the movie credits—how she might as well not have been present), but she didn’t correct herself; so Zeb, misunderstanding, said, “They can’t expect a Shakespearean sonnet, for heaven’s sake.”
“And another thing,” she said, regardless of who overheard her. “How come everyone calls me Beck? Beck is not my name! I’m Rebecca! How did I get to be Beck, all at once?”
“I don’t call you Beck,” Zeb pointed out.
This was true, she realized. But she went on. “’Beck’s unrelenting jollity’—that’s what Biddy told Troy this morning. I heard her, out in the kitchen. ‘This party will be a breeze,’ I heard her say. ‘We’ve got Poppy’s truckload of desserts, and enough champagne to float a ship, and Beck’s unrelenting jollity . . .’”
“Why don’t we find you a seat,” Zeb said, and he increased the pressure on the small of her back and steered her through the crowd. “Excuse us, please. Excuse us.”
People gave way, not noticing, still listening to Poppy’s speech. He had traveled past the waffles now and arrived at his morning shave. “. . . anything nicer than soft, rich lather and a plenitude of hot water? The bathroom’s warm and soapy-smelling; the mirror’s a steamy blur. You draw the razor down your cheek and leave this smooth swath of skin . . .”
No chairs were free, but Zeb guided Rebecca toward the piano, where Emmy and Joey were sitting, and asked if they’d mind moving. “Your grandma’s tired,” he told them. They jumped up, and Rebecca dropped heavily onto the bench. She was tired, come to think of it. She buried her nose in her empty glass and remembered, unexpectedly, a long-ago childhood crying fit that had ended when her father brought her a tumbler of ginger ale. (The same spicy, tingly smell, the same saltiness in her nostrils.) Then Zeb’s fingers closed around the stem of her glass, and she let him take it away to where Barry was pouring refills.
“The best thing about solitaire is, it’s so solitary,” Poppy was saying. “You’re allowed to think these aimless thoughts and nobody asks what you’re up to. You lay out the cards, slip slip slip—a peaceful sound—and then you sit a while and think, and the mantel clock is tick-tocking and the smell of fresh hot coffee is coming up from downstairs . . .”
People seemed to have reached the conclusion that Poppy’s speech was background music. They were discreet; they kept their voices low, but they were going about their own affairs now. Lateesha was drawing a face on a balloon with a squeaky felt-tip marker. NoNo and Min Foo had the giggles. Mr. Ames had waylaid Zeb to tell him something medical—displaying a gnarled wrist and flexing it this way
and that while Zeb bent his head politely.
J.J. sat down on the bench beside Rebecca and confided that he wasn’t entirely at ease about his wife. “What seems to be the trouble?” Rebecca whispered, and he said, “I believe her pastor paid that visit because she asked him to. I believe she’s starting to wonder why she married me.”
“Oh, J.J., don’t you think you’re just anxious because of what happened with Denise?” Rebecca asked. “You’ve been a wonderful husband! You took her on that anniversary trip to Ocean City—”
“Yes, but I believe the more niggling things—the, like, wearing my socks to bed, which she hates . . .”
Lunch, Poppy was saying, had been precisely what he’d requested: a peanut-butter-jelly sandwich on whole wheat. “Oh, I know it’s not foie gras,” he said, “but there’s something so satisfactory about a p.b.j. done right. And this was done exactly right: the grape jelly smeared so thick that it had started soaking through, making these oozy purple stains like bruises on the bread . . .”
Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida tiptoed across the room with their purses tucked under their arms. They picked their way around a game of jacks on the rug and trilled their fingers toward Rebecca. “Don’t get up!” Aunt Ida mouthed, but of course Rebecca did get up. She followed them out to the foyer, where they could speak in normal tones.
“I won’t urge you to stay,” she said as she helped them into their things. “I know you want to be home before dark.” Already the light outside was dimming, she noticed. Both women placed soft, dry kisses on her cheek, and Aunt Ida said, “Thanks for a lovely party, darlin’.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“But I didn’t quite understand about the guest list,” her mother said.
“Sorry?”
“Who were some of those people? They seemed . . . beside the point.”
Ordinarily Rebecca would have been annoyed, but something about her mother’s wording struck her as comical, and so she merely laughed and said, “Drive safely.”
“We don’t want that Martin Luther King Boulevard,” she heard her mother tell her aunt as they walked toward the street. “Don’t want to get onto that ramp where the highways loop off like spaghetti . . .”
Other guests were stirring now. They were looking at their watches, sending meaningful glances toward the people they had come with. Oh, it always made Rebecca feel so bereft when a party hit that winding-down stage! The front parlor had a ragged look, with its empty chairs here and there and its scattered gift wrap. Instead of returning to her bench, she took a seat on the couch next to Peter. “Where’s he got to?” she whispered—meaning Poppy.
“Nap time,” he whispered back.
Nap time, and cool white sheets that warmed as they grew used to you. “It’s like you’ve made yourself a nest the exact same shape as your body,” Poppy was saying. “It’s this body-shape of warmth, and if you find you’re a little too warm, you just move your feet the least little bit and there’s this fresh new coolness.”
The person who kept replaying the videotape was Merrie; or at least Merrie was the person in front of the VCR at the moment, sitting tailor-fashion on the floor as close as she could get and studying one of the Christmases. Well, she was at that age, of course: seven. Still young enough to be interested in what kind of child her mother had been. In fact, Patch had been a downright homely child, as Rebecca recollected now that she watched her roller-skate across the screen. A spiky, knobby, wiry child, quarrelsome and thorny, not nurturing like Biddy or winsome like NoNo. But Patch was the first stepdaughter Rebecca had loved—or the first she’d become aware of loving. The night Patch’s appendix burst she had been so ill, in such visible pain, lying there so white-faced and enormous-eyed with every freckle standing out; and Rebecca had been struck by fear as physical as a kick in the stomach. In some ways, she had never recovered.
Not that this lessened her irritation in the slightest when Patch said, far too loudly, “What’s Poppy trying to do: set a world record?”
“Ssh,” Rebecca told her.
He must be nearing the finish line now; he was dressing for the party. (“. . . that crackly feel of starched shirtsleeves when you slither your arms inside them . . .”) And anyhow, Rebecca was enjoying this. It was sort of like a report on what it was like to be alive, she decided. Let’s say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn’t it sound like Poppy’s speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup . . .
Why, her own report might take even longer.
Zeb was wending his way toward her with that glass of champagne, finally. The jacks players were on their eightsies.
Peter was telling J.J.J. about scientists who made discoveries in their dreams. “And if you consider how many hours we spend dreaming,” he said, “figuring, say, two hours a night, which is the national average; and say we live eighty years, and . . . let’s see, two from ten, borrow the one . . . That would give me almost seven years of dreaming.”
Maybe it was his mention of dreams, or maybe the way he was sitting—next to her but turned slightly away, so that all she saw was his profile—but Rebecca just then had the strangest thought. She thought Peter was the boy she’d been traveling with on the train. She smiled at him, even though he wasn’t looking.
Poppy was describing the candles on his cake—”a wall of flame,” he called it—and the wish he’d made before he blew them out. “I wished for an even bigger party next year,” he said, “to celebrate my hundred and first. My palindromic birthday.”
Several people sent Rebecca looks of sympathy.
The jacks players had reached their ninesies. Zeb placed the glass of champagne in her hands and planted a kiss on the top of her head.
There were still so many happenings yet to be hoped for in her life.
“. . . and the icing was my favorite: fondant,” Poppy was saying. “It melted in my mouth. I held a bite in my mouth and it sat for just a second and then trickled, trickled down my throat, all that melting sweetness.”
On the screen, Rebecca’s face appeared, merry and open and sunlit, and she saw that she really had been having a wonderful time.
A Note About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University, and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s fifteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Also by Anne Tyler
If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgan’s Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2001 by Anne Tyler
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LCCN: 2001088107
eISBN: 978-0-375-41349-0
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Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups
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