She completely forgot about Grandparents’ Day. What was the matter with her? She made plans to go to D.C. with Will and visit a museum; Fridays he had no classes. When Peter called to remind her, she went into a secret flurry. “Oh!” she said. “Right. Tomorrow morning at… what time did you say? I’ve got it on my calendar.”
So she had to phone Will and cancel, because she couldn’t break her promise to a child — especially Peter. (Not that she wasn’t tempted.) Will was very understanding about it. Still, she felt regretful and, to be honest, more than a little put upon. When NoNo said, the next morning, “You’re awfully nice to do this,” Rebecca wanted to tell her, “You don’t know the half of it!” But she didn’t, of course. What she said was, “Oh, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks now!”
They were standing on NoNo’s front porch, waiting for Peter to run back upstairs for his knapsack. “He’s so disorganized,” NoNo said. She was dressed in her florist’s smock, her purse already slung over her shoulder. “I tell you, mornings in this house are chaos. Find it?” she asked Peter. “All right, have a good day; I’ll pick you up this afternoon.”
She kissed the top of his head, which meant she had to rise on tiptoe because (Rebecca realized) Peter had recently undergone one of those dramatic growth spurts that seemed to strike boys overnight. His trousers were so short that they showed two inches of ankle, and his blazer sleeves exposed his wrist bones, which looked like small ivory cabinet knobs. “You’re getting to be taller than I am!” Rebecca told him as they walked toward her car.
He smiled faintly, hitching his knapsack higher on his back and sending her a sidelong glance from under his long lashes. “Next month I’m turning thirteen,” he said, and she fancied she could detect a new croakiness to his voice.
His school was on the other side of the city. No wonder NoNo complained about the drive, Rebecca thought as she maneuvered through the rush-hour traffic, the crossing guards and gaggles of children on every corner, the sullen-looking workers waiting in clumps at bus stops. This was not a time of day when Rebecca was ordinarily out in the world. “How about your car pool?” she asked Peter. “Am I supposed to pick up anybody else?”
“They’re all riding with their grandparents,” he said.
“Oh, yes.”
“This one guy? T. R. Murphy? He’s got a matched set.”
“Matched set of what?” Rebecca asked.
“Grandparents. Mother’s mother, mother’s father. Father’s mother, father’s father.”
“Lucky!” she said.
“Dick Abrams is coming with eight grandparents, but they don’t really count because a lot of them are steps.”
“I see.”
“I don’t mean stepgrandparents aren’t okay,” he said, shooting a worried look at her.
“No, I know you don’t.”
“They’re going to have to ride in three cars to get there. Really they could fit in two, but one set isn’t speaking to one of the other sets.”
“This is fascinating,” Rebecca said.
“Oh, and, um…” he said.
He drummed his fingers on his knees for a moment and stared out the side window. Rebecca waited.
“Um, would it be all right if I called you Gram?” he asked. “Just for today?”
“Why, sweetie, you can call me that every day!”
“Okay,” he said. And then, “So! Do you think that during our lifetime, people will start traveling by dematerialization and rematerialization?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind trying it this morning,” she told him.
This was intended as a joke, but when he didn’t laugh, she said, “I suppose they might, in theory. With all that could go wrong, though, imagine the lawsuits they could end up with.”
“Lawsuits! Right!” he said. “Gosh!”
She reflected that Peter was something like a yo-yo — popping up unexpectedly in sudden bursts of enthusiasm, subsiding and then popping up again with no warning. She smiled at him, but he was watching the street and he didn’t notice.
In the entrance hall of his school — a stone building covered with ivy that looked arranged, rather than free-growing — they were met by a young woman passing out self-stick labels and felt-tip pens. Hi! the labels read. My grandson is __________. Rebecca wrote Peter Sanborn and returned the pen to the woman. The instant she had affixed the label to the front of her blouse, a small, bald man in a suit stepped up to her. “Peter Sanborn!” he cried.
“Yes?”
She was expecting him to offer some compliment on Peter’s project, but instead he seized her hand and said, “I want you to know that we have taken his stepmother’s complaint very, very seriously and we do understand her concerns.”
“Her concerns?”
“Naturally it’s an issue, at this time when families are so often fragmented. With all the working mothers, though, grandparents seemed the logical solution. It never occurred to us that… But now that Mrs. Sanborn’s alerted us, we have fully prepared ourselves for every possible contingency. In a case where a child lacks grandparents, we offer one on loan.”
Rebecca gave a startled guffaw. The man peered solemnly into her face. “Students have been encouraged to apply at the office,” he told her. “Strictest confidence is guaranteed.”
“That should reassure my daughter no end,” Rebecca told him.
“My own mother is one of the names on file,” he said.
“And then there’s always Dick Abrams,” she couldn’t resist adding.
“Abrams?”
“He has eight grandparents. Surely he should be asked to share the wealth.”
“Oh, ah, I don’t feel we could—”
“Just something to consider,” she told him, and she withdrew her hand.
“What’s gotten into NoNo?” she asked Peter as they moved through the crowd. “Patch, I might expect it of, but NoNo, acting so contentious all of a sudden!”
“That was our principal,” Peter said. “NoNo telephoned him last week.”
“Well, isn’t that always the way! No sooner do you get your children nicely pigeonholed than they turn around and surprise you.”
They were walking down a wide corridor, traveling in a swarm of gray-haired women, a sprinkling of gray-haired men, and an underlayer of boys in navy blazers. Two boys near Rebecca were trying to step on each other’s shoes. They elbowed and wrestled and stumbled into passersby while the middle-aged woman accompanying them sailed on serenely. One of them fell into Peter, but Peter just moved aside and the boy didn’t apologize. Rebecca had the impression that Peter didn’t know all that many of his schoolmates. She felt a familiar clenching of her shoulders, a sort of mother-bear response; she wanted to hug him close and snarl at the other children. But Peter showed no sign of discomfort. He seemed intent on maneuvering them toward the double doors ahead, which opened into a gigantic, echoing gymnasium filled with felt-draped tables and fabric screens.
Rebecca had not thought to ask what type of exhibit this would be. She had expected science projects, since she’d spent a number of long, dull hours at science fairs in the past. But this appeared more art-related. Paintings were tacked to the screens; sculptures and clumsy ceramic vases and abstract wire constructions stood on the tables. Each had a name next to it, lettered in grade-school print on a rectangle of white poster board, and already some of the grandparents were saying, “Did you do this?” and, “Oh, my, isn’t this something!”
“Which is yours?” Rebecca asked Peter.
Instead of answering, he turned sideways to slip through a cluster of women. He rounded the first aisle and stopped short at the head of the second.
There, in a glass box the size of a large aquarium, a sort of oil derrick made of brightly colored rods and sockets and toothed wheels pivoted up and down, allowing a series of blue marbles to roll the length of its spine and land in a metal saucer. Each marble was a slightly different size and rang out a different note on the scale: do, re, mi… From the saucer the marbles traveled through a convoluted tube and returned to their starting point, where they rolled down to land once again—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, DO! over and over, delicate musical plinks! that could be heard, she belatedly realized, throughout the gym. What caused the marbles’ return, she couldn’t imagine. She was mystified, and awestruck, and captivated. She could have stood there forever, rapt, and other people must have felt the same because quite a crowd had gathered, none of them in any hurry to move on.