“Well. Sorry, Grandma,” the girl said meekly.
The woman sniffed and replaced the book on the shelf.
Rebecca was impressed. Imagine having such authority! She herself might have drifted into a string of likes and totallys right along with the granddaughter, hardly noticing what she was doing. She had no sense of definition, was the problem. No wonder she’d ended up a whole different person!
She bought not only the Lee paperback but the two hardbacks as well, although she couldn’t afford them. When she set them on the counter, the salesclerk asked, “Will that be all?” and Rebecca said, “Yes. It will,” in a firm, declarative manner that (she realized too late) exactly duplicated the white-haired woman’s.
* * *
Some days were telephone days and other days were not. Did it work that way for everyone? Some days Rebecca’s phone rang nonstop, one caller tumbling over the heels of another, and other days you wouldn’t know she owned a phone.
On this particular afternoon the painter called; then the dentist’s office; then the man who inspected the furnace. Poppy’s physical therapist wanted to reschedule. Patch wanted to complain about Jeep. Min Foo wanted to list possible dates for the baby-welcoming.
A Mrs. Allen called to arrange for her husband’s fiftieth-birthday party. “This would be, oh, maybe sixty guests,” she said. “Or sixty-five. Let’s play it safe and say seventy.”
Rebecca wondered why people couldn’t figure these things out before they got on the line. But she said, “Seventy. All right.”
“It’s going to be a surprise.”
“Really,” Rebecca said.
She should have let that go, but in all good conscience, she couldn’t. “If you want my honest opinion,” she said, “surprise parties are guaranteed disasters. Is what I would call them.”
This made the plumber, flat on his back beneath the kitchen sink, snort and mutter, “Amen to that!” But Mrs. Allen was undeterred. “I’m thinking just drinks and canapés,” she went on blithely. “Sit-down dinners are so stuffy, don’t you agree?”
The Open Arms could not have managed a sit-down dinner for seventy; so Rebecca certainly did agree. They settled on the date and the deposit fee, after which she prepared to say goodbye, but Mrs. Allen moved on next to the subject of her husband’s midlife crisis. (His decision to try a hair transplant, his drastic weight-loss diet, his purchase of a sixteen-hundred-dollar set of golf clubs although that was cheaper, she supposed, than taking up with some dolly half his age.) Rebecca tiptoed across the kitchen, stretching the telephone cord to its limit, and turned the timer dial on the stove till it started dinging. “Oops! Gotta go!” she cried, and she hung up. “Some people think the phone is some kind of… hobby,” she told the plumber.
He said, “You ought to check out my house. You know my daughter? Felicia?” Then the phone rang again.
Rebecca sighed and reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said.
Will Allenby said, “Rebecca?”
She said, “Oh.”
“Don’t hang up!”
“I wasn’t going to hang up,” she told him.
Although a part of her would have liked to. It was only curiosity that stopped her.
He said, “I just wanted to apologize for the other evening.”
“That’s quite all right,” she said stiffly.
“I never meant for the conversation to go that way, believe me. I don’t know how it happened.”
The odd thing was, the apology made her feel humiliated all over again. But she said, “Really, don’t give it a thought. I’ve forgotten it completely. Thanks for calling, though.”
“Wait!”
She waited.
“Please,” he said. “Could we just talk a little bit? Could you just listen?”
“Well,” she said, “all right. I guess so.”
“I seem to be in… something of a sorry state, Rebecca. Lately it’s been all I can do just to get up in the morning. I get up; I look in the mirror; I think, Oh, God, it’s the same old, same old me, and I want to crawl back into bed and stay there forever.”
Rebecca held very still, as if he could observe how attentively she was listening.
He said, “The fact of the matter is, the divorce was my wife’s idea, not mine. I’m not even sure what went wrong there! One day she just announced that she wanted me to move out. And of course she kept our daughter with her. I can understand that; what do I know about teenaged girls? But we both agreed that I’d still have lots of contact. I would see my daughter regularly, any day I liked, back and forth between our two places. Now whenever I phone, though, Beatrice is busy. I ask her to come for supper and she says she’s got a friend over, or she’s made other plans. She never has any time to get together.”
“Well, she’s seventeen!” Rebecca said. “Of course she doesn’t have time.”
“I tell her to bring the friend along and she says her friend wouldn’t feel comfortable in my apartment.”
“You know how teenagers are. They’re constitutionally ashamed of their parents. It isn’t personal.”
“No,” Will said, “there’s more to it than that. I can’t explain it. It seems I’m just… destined not to have anyone in my life. Here I am, all alone in this old lady’s dead-quiet house, and it feels so natural; that’s the worst of it. It feels like my natural state. What did you expect? I ask myself. Did you imagine someone would actually want to stay with you forever? You should thank your lucky stars you ever got married at all. It’s as if I’m lacking some talent that everyone else takes for granted.”
“Now, Will, you’re just plain wrong about that,” Rebecca said.
“Okay,” he said. “Then tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me why you broke up with me.”
“We’ve been through that! When Joe Davitch came along—”
“No, I want the real reason. I want you to be honest.”
“I am being honest!” she said.
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Rebecca.”
She felt stung. She said, “I can see this is going nowhere; so I’m going to hang up now. Goodbye.”
And without waiting for his answer, she put the receiver back on the hook.
The plumber was packing his tools away more noisily than seemed necessary, with lots of clanks and rattles and many exaggerated grunts as he reached for various wrenches. She suspected he felt embarrassed for her. “What a nuisance!” she said gaily. “These people who stay on the phone forever; I just never know how to get off, do you?”
The plumber said, “Sort of persistent type, was he?”
Then he cocked his head at her and waited, looking expectant, but Rebecca just said, “Right,” and asked if he’d fixed the leak.
She wished she hadn’t ended the call so abruptly. She was beginning to get that awful torn feeling she always had after saying something hurtful to somebody.
For the rest of the afternoon the telephone was silent, but at suppertime, there was the usual flurry of telemarketers. Also another call from the Second Eden man. “Those azaleas I told you we had, they’re a teensy bit off from the color I said. They’re more like a, what would you say, not a pink, not a red, not orange—”
“I couldn’t care less what color they are. Any color. Fine,” she said, and she hung up and returned to the table. “If I could undo one modern invention,” she told Poppy, “I believe it would be the telephone.”
“Why, I would choose the zipper,” he said.
Rebecca stared at him a moment, but before she could pursue the subject, the telephone rang again. Mrs. Allen had forgotten to mention that her husband didn’t eat red meat. Then a moment later, she called back: he didn’t eat chicken, either.