She loved these children, every last one of them. They had added more to her life than she could have imagined. But sometimes it was very tiring to have to speak in her grandma voice.
She set plates and silver on a tray, poured three glasses of milk, and piled some fruit in a bowl, meanwhile listening to Merrie’s Washington saga. In the back of her mind, though, her son continued traveling. He gazed out at the scenery while Rebecca studied his hands — those oddly familiar hands with the squared-off thumb joints, a pink Band-Aid wrapping one finger.
Upstairs in the family room, Poppy sat in semi-dark watching a game show. (He had a thing about turning lights on needlessly.) “The answer is Napoleon, you fool!” he was muttering as Rebecca entered. “Don’t they educate people anymore?” Still focusing on the screen, he lowered the foot of his recliner so Rebecca could unfold a snack table in front of him. “There,” he said. “Look at that. Now that woman is six points ahead and he stands to lose it all.”
The woman he was referring to was jumping up and down and clapping her hands and squealing. Game shows selected their guests on the basis of their pep, Rebecca had heard. Like cheerleaders — the same criterion. This woman had a cheerleader ponytail, even, which flew up with a kind of geyser effect each time she bounced to earth.
Poppy said, “You ought to go on this show, Beck.”
“Me?”
“You’d be a natural for it.”
Rebecca turned to stare at him, but he was watching the screen and he didn’t notice.
* * *
Katie Border — Katie the non-graduate — wore white eyelet and a wreath of daisies, just as if she had graduated after all. “My, don’t you look lovely!” Rebecca shouted above the music, but Katie just said, “Um…” Rebecca followed her eyes and saw, of course, Dixon.
Girls’ eyes were always on Dixon. He was eighteen years old and six feet tall, black-haired and brown-eyed and coolly, casually elegant even in his white waiter’s coat. But he seemed indifferent to his conquests — had, in fact, a long-term sweetheart, disappointingly plain-faced — and never responded to the girls who fluttered around him at parties. Now he was lowering a tray of stuffed mushrooms onto Merrie’s outstretched palms. While Katie, as if pulled by strings, started drifting toward him, he tracked Merrie’s progress through the crowd. Merrie seemed awfully unsteady on her feet, Rebecca noticed. Why, she was wearing high-heeled shoes. What on earth…? Also a great long string of colored wooden beads, Rebecca’s beads, actually, which were dangling in the mushrooms. Rebecca stifled a laugh and turned to catch the last of something Mr. Border was saying. “The what?” she asked. “Oh, the cornices, yes…”
Merrie tottered past an elderly couple sitting on a love seat, past a woman in a brocade dress with an armored-looking bosom, past two business-suited men, and she didn’t offer food to any of them, although one of the men seemed about to make a grab. She reached her goal — four teenaged girls, all in white — and gazed up raptly, adoringly, with the tray held out in front of her. Then Dixon approached, and the girls turned in unison and melted in his direction. Merrie asked, “Stuffed mushrooms?”
“Now, Harold here makes a wonderful martini,” Rebecca told Mr. Border. “Or if you’d prefer something nonalcoholic… Oh, you’re right, this is definitely an occasion for strong drink! Let’s ask him to fix you one, shall we?”
A light touch on Mr. Border’s elbow, a quick, bright smile toward Harold. A tilt of the head for Dixon: Could you pry Merrie away from those girls and start her circulating, please?
At a perfect party, Rebecca would be unnecessary. The drinks would flow, the trays would magically stay full, the guests would mingle freely, nobody would be standing forlornly in a corner. Then Rebecca could retreat to the kitchen, or maybe steal upstairs a while to rest her feet. But there were no perfect parties. That was something a social misfit like Rebecca knew instinctively; while the Davitches, bless their hearts, hadn’t had an inkling. Not even Joe. (Looming up beside her to announce, so mistakenly, “I see you’re having a wonderful time.”)
In the Davitches’ view, the Open Arms existed simply to provide a physical space, sometimes with food and drink as well if the customer was misguided enough not to hire an outside caterer. What they hadn’t understood was that almost more important was an invisible oiling of the gears, so to speak: pointing one person toward the liquor and another person away from it, finding a chair for an elderly aunt or loading her plate or fetching her sweater, calming an overexcited child, signaling to the DJ to lower the volume, hushing the crowd for the toasts, stepping in to fill an awkward silence. Yes, a large part of Rebecca’s job had to do with noise, really. You shouldn’t have too much noise, but neither should you have too little, and she often felt that her main function was keeping a party’s sound level at a certain larky, lilting babble, even if it meant that she was forced to babble herself.
Won’t you have a petit four? Oh, how can you say such a thing? If anything, you’re underweight! Of course, let me show you the way. The light switch is on your right, just inside the… Why don’t I freshen that drink for you? All right, everybody, gather round! I’ve been told we have a real musician with us tonight! Diet tonic water? Why, certainly! I’ll run get some from the… Whose little girl are you? And isn’t that a pretty dress! Welcome! Many happy returns! Congratulations! Best wishes!
I see you’re having a wonderful time.
* * *
“I’m thinking of taking a trip,” she told Zeb on the phone.
Often, after she was in bed, the two of them would go over their respective days together — their minor triumphs and their petty irritations. She knew that was pathetic. Most people had husbands or wives whom they could bore with such things. All Rebecca had was her kid brother-in-law — although “kid” was probably not the right term for a middle-aged bachelor doctor.
Tonight’s party had been such a success that she hadn’t had the heart to break it up at the designated hour. Now she worried she was calling Zeb too late, but he said no, he was reading. He said, “A trip would do you good. A real rest. Maybe a cruise.”
“I don’t mean that kind of trip,” she said. “I thought I might go see my mother. Just an overnight stay. Would you be willing to come to the house and spend the night with Poppy sometime?”
“Well, sure, whenever you like. Is your mother okay?”
“She’s fine,” Rebecca said. “But I was thinking I’d like to go home and sort of… reconnoiter. Check out my roots.” She gave a light laugh.
“Zeb,” she said, “do you ever get the feeling you’ve changed into a whole different person?”
Probably he didn’t (he was living in the city where he’d been born, doing what he had planned to do since childhood), but he seemed to give her question serious thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Well…”
“I mean, look at me!” she told him. “I’m a professional party-giver! I never read anymore, or discuss important issues, or go to cultural events. I don’t even have any friends.”
“You’ve got friends,” Zeb said. “You’ve got me; you’ve got the girls—”
“Those are relatives. And everyone else I know is some kind of repairman.”
“You can have friends who are relatives. You can have repairman friends.”
“But what happened to the people I knew in college? Or in high school? Amy Darrow — the girl who had her engagement party the night I met Joe, remember? Whatever happened to Amy? I didn’t even go to her wedding! By then I was married myself and all three girls had chicken pox.”
“I’m sure you could track her down if you tried.”