Peter said, “Well, I’m not… I know she’s not really my grandma. I mean, she wouldn’t have to come if she didn’t want to. But since my dad’s parents are dead and all, and we don’t get to see my mom’s parents much; we don’t see them ever, in fact—”
“I would love to come,” Rebecca told him.
“You would?”
“I’d be honored. When is it?”
“It’s not till Friday the twenty-fourth, but we have to get our slips signed by tomorrow so the teachers will know for sure—”
“This school of his is driving me crazy,” NoNo told the room at large. “Last night at a quarter till ten, I swear, some woman telephoned saying I should send four dozen cookies into class with him this morning. And now this grandparent thing — would somebody please clue them in? What about kids like Peter, who don’t happen to have grandparents available at the drop of a hat?”
“Peter has me, though,” Rebecca said, “and I’m looking forward to it enormously.”
He gave her a grateful smile, and his shoulders lost some of their tightness.
Then Poppy was back with the ice cream — a half-gallon drum tucked under his arm, a scoop in his free hand. “Vanilla,” he said bitterly. “You’d think there would be something a little more imaginative. Oh, hello, NoNo. Hello, youngster.” He set the carton and the scoop in front of Zeb. “Good to see you again,” he told Will.
“Well… thanks.”
“Been keeping busy lately? Still enjoying your work?”
Will glanced across at Rebecca. She gave a slight movement of her eyebrows that amounted to a shrug, and he turned back to Poppy and said, “Yes, I enjoy my work very much.”
“Don’t count on that lasting forever,” Poppy told him. “Me, I got burned out in the end. Too many students asking, ‘Will we be tested on this, or not?’ And you knew if you said, ‘Not,’ they’d figure it wasn’t worth writing down, even. No sense of joy in learning for its own sake, is my diagnosis.”
He must have taken Will for one of his old teaching colleagues, but Will couldn’t have known that. He looked again at Rebecca. Perversely, she refused to come to his rescue. “Uh, you’re probably right,” he said finally.
“Too durn much TV, is what I tell folks.”
Why did Poppy insist on speaking in that homespun way? Rebecca wondered for the first time. He was an educated man; he had a college degree. She sent him her narrowest, meanest look, which he ignored.
“Rebecca,” Zeb said, brandishing the scoop, “will you be having ice cream?”
“No, I will not,” she said in a forbidding tone.
“Five servings, then,” he said cheerfully. “Because I know you will, NoNo, and—”
“I’ve put you on the guest list for my birthday party,” Poppy told Will, “but I don’t suppose Beck has sent the invitations yet. I’m turning a hundred years old in December.”
“A hundred!” Will exclaimed.
By now, Rebecca’s annoyance had spread even to Will. She disliked the counterfeit note of admiration in his voice, and the eager way he reached for the bowl Zeb passed him. Zeb himself, she thought, was behaving like a barbarian, licking ice cream off his knuckles before he dug the scoop back into the carton; and NoNo and Peter had pulled out two chairs as if they had every right to horn in whenever they wanted. As for Poppy: he was beyond forgiveness. “It’s my fondest wish,” he was telling Will, “that I’ll be able to say I’ve seen two centuries change over: the nineteenth and the twentieth. Not that I consciously remember when the nineteenth changed, of course, but I was there, I can say! I was there!”
“That’s amazing,” Will said.
And as he lifted his spoon he opened his mouth to expose his large, square, wolfish teeth, unattractively yellowed now with age.
* * *
By the time they’d finished their ice cream, Rebecca had revised all her expectations of the evening. This was just another family melee with an extra person added, and she heartily wished it were over. She was tired of acting nicer than her true self. Wouldn’t it come as a relief to be alone, finally! To be upstairs in the family room, playing a game of solitaire! She longed to kick her shoes off, and let her stomach stick out, and allow her face to go slack.
None of the others, though, seemed in any hurry to go. Zeb was telling Will about his work; Poppy was repeating the ice-cream incident to Peter; NoNo was asking Rebecca what kind of plant that was in the foyer. “It’s not an anthurium, although it’s certainly grotesque enough; too big to be a pilea, in spite of those warty leaves…”
“Ask Will. He’s the one who brought it.”
“… surely can’t be a dracaena, though it does have that mottled, diseased look of the Dracaena godseffiana …”
When NoNo and Peter finally rose to leave, Rebecca stood up too and said, “Yes, it is late, isn’t it. I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
Even Will couldn’t miss that. He untangled himself from his chair and said, “Ah. All right. So, I guess…”
Everybody waited, but he just stood there. It was Zeb who completed his sentence for him. “I guess we should all be going,” he said helpfully.
Then they headed in a group toward the door, leaving Poppy alone at the table scraping out the ice-cream carton.
Outside, Rebecca folded her arms across her bosom and watched as Zeb climbed into his car (a Volvo so old it had the humpbacked shape of the earliest models) and NoNo and Peter walked on down the street to NoNo’s minivan. “Good night,” NoNo called back, her voice floating across the twilight, and “Good night,” Zeb called.
But Will stayed next to Rebecca, and so she was forced to say, finally, “Well, I should be going in now.”
“You used to have this long cloak,” he told her. “Do you remember that?”
“Cloak,” she repeated.
“It was a color called champagne. Your mom and your aunt sewed it for you the year we started college. I can see you in that cloak to this day. It matched your hair exactly. You wore your hair coiled in a braid on top of your head. You wore that cloak and these soft brown boots that crumpled around your ankles. You looked like somebody out of King Arthur’s time, I often thought; or Robin Hood’s. Very self-possessed and calm.”
Rebecca still faced the street, but she was listening.
“I guess this sounds presumptuous,” he said, “but I can’t help feeling that that woman in the cloak is who you really are, and I’m the only person who knows it. I feel that I can see you, in a way other people can’t. I don’t mean to sound presumptuous.”
She turned to look at him. With the streetlight shining behind him, she couldn’t tell what his expression was. She had to rely more on feeling than on sight — feeling the steady focus of his regard, and then his dear, familiar warmth as he stepped forward to hug her. They clung together for maybe a minute, like people consoling each other for some loss. Then he pulled away and said, “I’ll call you! I’ll call tomorrow! Thanks for supper!”
He plunged off down the street, clanging against a garbage can as he hurtled around the corner and disappeared.
Rebecca stood there for some time after he had gone. She was shivering slightly, even on this hot summer night, and she felt happy but also dismayed, and bashful, and confused.
At that moment, it seemed she actually had managed to become her girlhood self again.
Eight
You wouldn’t call it a courtship. What would you call it? Just say they, oh, started arranging to get together now and then. Go shopping for a book Will had heard of. Grill steaks in Rebecca’s backyard. (But with Poppy there too, of course, wanting a steak of his own, and Biddy happening by later as they were sitting around the table.) These certainly weren’t anyone’s notion of romantic assignations.