“Three is fine,” Rebecca said smoothly. “I’ll make sure to be here. See you this evening, Mrs. Border.”
“Well . . . so . . . well, yes, I suppose,” Mrs. Border said.
Rebecca hung up and sank into a chair.
“Way to go, Beck,” Poppy said, setting aside the jam jar.
“I’m exhausted,” she told him.
And also . . . what was it she felt? Compromised. She was a fraud.
Yet when Poppy asked, “Isn’t it time for my nap?” she found herself once again putting on her hostess act. “You are absolutely right!” she told him, all zip and vigor. “Look at that clock! Let me help you to your room.” And she rose to slide his chair back.
He was light as milkweed, these days. He tilted against her and breathed rapidly and shallowly, clutching his cane in his free hand but relying on her for support. “There’s also the question of aches,” he announced when they reached the stairs. His breath smelled like strawberries. “Take inventory at any given moment and you have to say your back aches, your shoulders ache, your knees are stiff, your neck has a crick—”
“The moral of the story is, stop taking inventory,” Rebecca told him. “Don’t think about it. Put your mind on something else.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re still in your forties.”
“My forties! I’m fifty-three,” she said.
“You are?”
She helped him up another step.
“How did that happen so fast?” he asked.
Rebecca laughed.
After she had deposited him in his room, she crossed the hall to the family room. Superman had grown tired of pausing and the screen had reverted to a television commercial—a woman asking why her hardwood floors were so dull. Rebecca switched it off and sat down at the little spinet desk to write checks. The window washers, the gas and electric, the man who had patched the front stoop . . .
Gradually, her pen grew slower. She took longer and longer to reach for each new bill, until finally she came to a halt and just sat staring into space.
* * *
“I see you’re having a wonderful time,” Joe Davitch had said.
His very first remark to her.
Wasn’t it strange how certain moments, now and then—certain turning points in a life—contained the curled and waiting seeds of everything that would follow? I see you’re having a wonderful time: Joe’s view of her forever after, his unwavering belief that she was a natural-born celebrator. And look at her answer: “Yes!” she’d said. “Thanks!” Or something of the sort. In a loud and energetic tone so as to be heard above the stereo. And from that day forth she seemed to have confirmed his view, although really she had been the very opposite sort of person, muted and retiring, deeply absorbed in her studies, the only child of a widow in little Church Valley, Virginia, and engaged-to-be-engaged to her high-school sweetheart.
She had swerved onto a whole different fork in the road. (As Min Foo would put it.)
For one brief, wistful moment, Rebecca entertained the notion of turning back, retracing her steps to where the fork had first branched. Church Valley still existed, after all. Her mother was still alive. Although the high-school sweetheart, no doubt, had found somebody else to marry by now. She pictured herself returning in the dress that she had worn to that party—powder blue, scoop-necked, short-sleeved—and the powder-blue pumps still faintly splotched with ham glaze. Carrying the witty (as she’d thought then) patent leather pocketbook shaped to resemble a workman’s lunch box, although it, too, was powder blue.
In those days, everything had matched. There had not been any surprises.
* * *
“Hello-o-o!” Biddy called, and the clatter of catering trays followed the slam of the door. Then Binstock arrived with the flowers, and a woman phoned to arrange an office cocktail party, and the plasterer showed up to mend the hole in the dining-room ceiling.
Life went on, in other words.
Rebecca spread a bright cloth across the dining-room table and set one of Binstock’s arrangements in the center. “Pretty,” the plasterer said, peering down from his ladder. He had promised, cross his heart, not to create any mess, but already Rebecca could see several white flecks on the carpet. “Rick—” she said, and he said, “I know! I know! It’ll all be vacuumed up again; trust me.”
Sad when your plasterer’s such a fixture that he knows what you’re going to say before you say it.
Biddy was trying to fit her trays into the refrigerator. “What is all this?” she asked Rebecca. “It looks like you’re planning to feed the Red Army.”
“Those are leftovers from the picnic.”
For cooking, Biddy always wore surgical scrubs—a full tunic and baggy green pants that hid her skinny figure. She had her ponytail balled hygienically into a hairnet. She said, “Could you fetch me the cake stand? The glass one, with the pedestal.”
“Oh, I hope you haven’t put any writing on the cake.”
“Just Congratulations, Katie.”
“Well, Katie flunked her chemistry course.”
Biddy shut the fridge door and gave Rebecca a look.
“Could we peel off the Congratulations?” Rebecca asked. “Just leave Katie?”
“Not without any traces, we couldn’t.”
“At least they didn’t cancel,” Rebecca said, lifting down the cake stand from an overhead shelf. “I had to talk mighty fast, as you can imagine. Where’s the cake?”
“In that tin by the stove.”
The tin was a rusty white metal box that had belonged to Mother Davitch. Rebecca took the lid off and peered inside. “Maybe we could cover it with another layer of chocolate,” she said.
“I don’t have any chocolate. Do you?”
“I have peanut butter.”
But all she got for that was another look.
Sometimes Rebecca wondered what Biddy really thought of her. What any of her stepdaughters thought of her, in fact. Of course there’d been a few of those you’re-not-my-mother scenes at the start. (“You cow!” Patch had shouted once. “You big old frumpy fat cow; just wait till my mama gets back!”) By now, though, all three seemed cordial and even affectionate, in an offhand sort of way. When Biddy went through that terrible time at age twenty—losing her fiancé to an asthma attack and discovering she was pregnant just two days later—she had come straightaway to Rebecca; not to her mother. She had told Rebecca the whole situation and asked for her advice. But then she had ignored it. Not only had she made up her mind to keep the baby; but the following week she’d returned to debate moving in with her fiancé’s homosexual brother and then she had ignored that advice as well. “Do what?” Rebecca had said. “Um, Biddy, it’s awfully nice of Troy to make the offer, but please, think about this. It’s not fair to either one of you. You’ll want to meet a new man someday, whether or not you can picture that now, and it won’t be all that easy if you’re installed in another man’s house. And you know that Troy will eventually find someone of his own. This is a mistake, believe me!”
Biddy had not believed her. She’d promptly moved in with Troy.
Well, okay: Rebecca had no idea how they’d worked things out between them, but she had to admit they appeared to be a very contented couple. And Dixon could not have asked for a better father.
Still, wouldn’t you think that Biddy could have considered Rebecca’s words? Or pretended to, at least, for half a minute?
The doorbell rang, and Rebecca went to answer it. A stylish, small-boned woman in her forties stood on the stoop, dressed in a tailored beige pantsuit and tiny boots. “Mrs. Davitch?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Susan Arnette. Here to talk to your food person?”
“Oh. Right,” Rebecca said. She’d forgotten she’d set up the meeting. “Come on in, won’t you?”
She was conscious, all at once, of her own outfit. It was too loose and too wrinkled and cluttered, she realized.
On their way to the rear parlor,
Mrs. Arnette hung back to ooh and ah. “Those cornices!” she said. “Look at that fretwork!”
“Yes, actually the place dates from . . . originally belonged to . . .” Rebecca recited for the thousandth time.
Just once she’d like to counter with, “Those rattly panes! Look at that dry rot!”
She seated Mrs. Arnette on the couch and went to call Biddy, who was bringing in the cake to set on the dining-room table. (“Yum,” Rick volunteered.) Biddy followed her to the parlor, wiping her palms on the seat of her scrubs. “This is Mrs. Arnette,” Rebecca told her. “She wants to discuss the food for her parents’ fiftieth anniversary. Mrs. Arnette, Biddy Davitch.”
Then she tactfully withdrew—returned to the dining room. “How’s it coming along?” she asked Rick, using her loudest, liveliest voice so that she wouldn’t seem to be eavesdropping. Although she was, of course. (Mrs. Arnette had mentioned that she might have her maid do the food, instead; so Biddy would need to scramble.) Rick said, “Oh, just finishing up.” Rebecca pulled out a chair and sat down to watch him work. There was something satisfying about the sweep of his trowel across the ceiling. All that was left of the hole was a patch of shinier white. White dust littered his hair, which was as woolly and thick as a Persian-lamb hat; but he had managed to confine most of his mess to his drop cloth. “See there?” he said. “Mr. Neatness.”
“Good for you, Rick.”
Mrs. Arnette seemed to be telling Biddy about her parents’ troubled marriage. “In fact it’s kind of a miracle that they are still together,” she said. “Twice that I can recollect, Mom has packed her belongings and gone off to live with her sister.”
“Do they have any allergies or aversions?” Biddy asked.
“What? Aversions?”
“Lots of times my older clients take against hot spices, for instance.”
Mrs. Arnette said, “No, not as far as I . . . Why, once Mom stayed away two years, back when I was in college. Which might mean this is not their fiftieth anniversary after all, come to think of it. Would you say it still counts as fifty years?”
“The baby artichokes, for example,” Biddy said. “I serve them with a very spicy curry sauce.”
Oh, Biddy just hid behind food. It was exasperating. Rick, however, was a whole different story: a shameless gossip, as so many workmen seemed to be. “Of course it counts,” he told Rebecca, wiping his trowel on a cloth. “Remember when me and Deena split for six months and got back together? We still considered that year a full year of marriage, though.” He shouted toward the parlor, “You would only subtract those two years if the separation was court-decreed!”
A slight pause followed, and then Mrs. Arnette lowered her voice and asked about prices.
* * *
Rebecca phoned the roofer; then the appliance man; then the exterminator. (This house would be the death of her.) Then a woman called to complain about the food at her husband’s business party. It had all been so foreign, she said. Rebecca said, “Foreign?”
“It was almost . . . vegetarian!”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Rebecca told her, “but my stepdaughter does attempt to keep up with the latest trends in . . .”
She didn’t have to think, even, as she spoke. She’d been fielding calls like this from the early days of her marriage, because the Davitches were notoriously mistrustful of the telephone. (Even Joe, to her amazement—Joe who had phoned so persistently while they were courting.) Whenever the phone rang, they spent an inordinate time debating: “Who can it be?” “It’s not for me.” “Well, I’m not expecting anyone.” “You get it.” “No, it’s your turn.” Often, the caller hung up before they got around to answering. They dreaded placing calls, as well, and would put them off for days. Monday, Phone liquor store, the kitchen calendar read; Tuesday, Phone liquor store; Wednesday, Phone liquor store; till on Thursday, maybe, or Friday Rebecca would step in—inexperienced though she was, a young and tentative bride with no management skills whatsoever—and phone the liquor store herself. She became, by default, the telephone person. By now it was automatic: “Needless to say, we are very concerned that our guests feel satisfied with our . . .”
She hung up just as Poppy was starting down the stairs from his nap. She heard the tap of his cane and went to help him. “Here,” he said when he saw her, and he paused to search his pockets. “Wait, now; wait, now, I know I put it . . .” He pulled out another folded square of paper. “Room rates,” he said.
Rebecca thought at first he’d said “roommates.” “For me?” she asked, puzzled.
“So you can send a list of hotels with the invitations.”
“Um . . .”
“The invitations to my birthday party, Beck! Where is your mind, these days?”
“Oh. Your birthday party.”
“You know my second cousins will want to come, Lucy out in Chicago and Keith in Detroit. And other people; there must be other out-of-towners, as soon as I think of their names. You’d never have the space for everybody to stay at the house.”
“You telephoned all these hotels yourself?” Rebecca asked. She had unfolded the square of paper and was studying the list—a column of names and numbers printed laboriously with a skippy ballpoint pen. “When did you do this?” she asked.
“After I woke up from my nap. Can we go on our walk now?”
“Yes, of course.” And she refolded the paper and tucked it into her pocket, where it rustled against the list he’d given her earlier.
This spring had been so unseasonably cool that Poppy, from habit, wore his gray V-necked cardigan; but Rebecca didn’t bother with a sweater herself. She had let in enough of the outside world today to know that the weather had turned warm. When they stepped through the door, she told Poppy, “Feel that!” and he tipped his head back and closed his eyes and said, “Ah.” Buttery June sunshine lit his face. The saplings lining the street were a vivid new green, and even above the traffic Rebecca could hear a few birds.
Funny how walking slowly could tire your muscles more quickly than walking fast. She resisted the impulse to point that out to Poppy, though; he would take it for a complaint. Instead she commented on the scenery, which presented itself inch by inch as they proceeded. “Oh, what a pity, they’ve boarded up the blue-gable house.”
“Pretty soon the Open Arms will be the only place not boarded up,” Poppy said.
It was true: this peaceful old street, once the height of elegance, was taking on a sort of toothless look. The house next door had turned into a meditation center, with a banner bearing a mandala flying above the front stoop. Around the corner, dignified mansions sported signs for bail bondsmen, palmists, and cut-rate car insurance. A place with an imposing columned porch was undergoing some kind of remodeling, and when they stopped to investigate they found a placard in the window announcing the arrival of a body-piercing parlor.
“It never reverses, you notice,” Poppy said.
“Pardon?”
“Never changes back into something better.”
“No.”
“Of course when Joe first started the Open Arms, people were none too happy. They claimed he was bringing the neighborhood down.”
“Well, he didn’t have a choice!” Rebecca said. “His father died! How else could he support the family?”
“What he originally set out to do,” Poppy said, “he wanted to make it a tourist home. You remember tourist homes. Now they’re called bed-and-breakfasts and they’re considered very tony, but back then, oh, his mother had a fit. She said, ‘I can’t be changing strangers’ bedsheets! Letting all and sundry spend the night under my roof. Whatever would the neighbors say?’ As I recall, Joe had gone and bought an old sign from some kind of salvage place. HOTEL NO VACANCY, it said. With the NO removable, for whenever they had a room free. But, ‘Over my dead body!’ his mother said. It was Zeb who thought up giving parties instead. Even that kind of went against Liddy’s grain. Better than the Hotel No Vacancy, though, she had to admit.”
; Rebecca smiled. “This is the first I’ve heard of that,” she said.
“Oh, you don’t know everything, Miss Beck.”
She took his arm, and they resumed walking. They were overtaken by others, more able-bodied: a boy on Rollerblades, two girls leading a little dust mop of a dog, a middle-aged couple carrying plastic bags of groceries. The couple stayed just slightly ahead; they weren’t talking, but there was something sympathetic and companionable about the way they kept in step with each other, their shoulders gently touching.
Sometimes Rebecca had to fight down the feeling that life had treated her unfairly.
As if he had read her mind, Poppy asked, “Do you ever think of Joe anymore?”
“Naturally I think of him!” she said, almost offended.
“But can you hear his voice in your head still? Or get a flash of how he looked at some certain, particular moment, as if he were still here?”
She tightened her hold on his arm. She said, “Yes, I’ve had that happen.”
“Joycie used to say to me, ‘Oh, hell’s bells!’ Remember how she’d say that? I hear it sometimes just when I’m about to fall asleep. ‘Oh, hell’s bells!’ in that kind of squawking way she had, just as clear! Just as real! Like she’s there in the bedroom. My heart will start pounding.”
“Yes, I know,” Rebecca said.
With her, it was the pressure of Joe’s hand on the small of her back, guiding her across a street.
“Then I say, ‘Joycie, if you’re going to appear from beyond and give me a message, couldn’t it be something more useful than “Hell’s bells?”’”
Rebecca laughed, and they turned at the end of the block and started back toward home.
* * *
Patch dropped by with her youngest—Meredith, aged seven—and asked if she could leave her while she and Jeep went to a ball game. “Certainly,” Rebecca said. “She can help with the party.” She had to shout, because the disk jockey had arrived and was testing his equipment. Deep, throbbing bass notes shook the floorboards. Patch said, “She hasn’t . . . !” something, something, and Rebecca shouted, “What? Hasn’t what?”