Standing naked in this room where she had spent her childhood, slipping her nightgown over her head and letting it fall to her ankles, she thought how her past self would have gasped at the sight of her. The old Rebecca would never have known the woman she saw in the mirror, with the hair like a heap of cornflakes and the ramshackle face. She would have been put off by the slipshod, heedless way this woman strode toward her bed.
She folded the spread back and whacked it flat.
Surprisingly, she had no trouble getting to sleep. She turned once, tossed aside her blanket, turned again, and Poppy was celebrating his birthday. The Open Arms was packed with guests, all the women in hoopskirts and the men in Confederate gray. But Rebecca had on the chambray smock spotted with bleach that she wore for heavy cleaning. She glanced down at herself and, “Oh, fiddle!” she said, in a flirty Southern voice like Scarlett O’Hara’s. Then she saw that one of the guests was Will Allenby. He walked over to her, smiling, holding his hat in his hand. He wasn’t one day older than the very last time she had seen him: twenty. His chest was paved with medals and his riding pants stretched taut over his long thighs.
She opened her eyes in the dark and felt a deep ache of regret.
Four
Now she began to lead a whole other life — an imaginary, might-have-been life flowing almost constantly underneath the surface of her day-to-day existence.
If she had not attended Amy’s engagement party that long-ago evening, if Zeb had not made her laugh so that she seemed, for one brief moment, to be a joyous and outgoing person, if Joe Davitch had not walked up to her and said, “I see you’re having a wonderful time,” why, no doubt she would have stayed on in college.
Graduated with honors.
Married Will Allenby.
Dear Will Allenby, with his airy yellow curls and serene, contemplative smile, his nearly transparent eyes that seemed lit from within. She was startled to discover him complete and detailed in her mind, as if all these years he had been poised to step forward the very first instant she recollected his existence. He used to have a habit of raking his fingers through his hair whenever he was caught up in some intellectual discussion, and now she could see so clearly those agile, knuckly fingers (like the fingers of the son in her dream!) and the electric look of his hair. She recalled how he had loved listening to Bach, hated girls who giggled, and claimed an almost physical allergy to the color red.
Peculiar memories popped up out of nowhere: a high-school assembly, for instance, where the World’s Fastest Typist had given a demonstration. Plump and bald and expressionless, he had sat behind a tiny metal stenographic desk, facing his audience but gazing over their heads while his typewriter, seemingly of its own accord, chattered away without pause and spat sheets of paper onto the floor. Will had muttered under his breath during the whole performance. What did this prove? he kept asking Rebecca. The man’s assistant — a leggy blonde dressed in what appeared to be a carhop’s uniform — scooped up each page and proclaimed it to be perfect, one hundred percent accurate, x many words per minute; but why should they believe her? From this distance, the pages could be blank. Rebecca had tried to hush him, but Will had persisted. “This is outrageous!” he had said in a piercing whisper. “They’re wasting our valuable learning time!” She had grown annoyed with him; she had moved her arm away from where it was touching his. Now she liked remembering that. Cataloguing his flaws brought him back to her more convincingly. She dwelt upon his overlarge teeth, which she used to feel pressing knobbily behind his lips when they kissed; the puppy-dog clumsiness of his hugs; and the affectation (as she saw it now) of his “Au revoir” at the end of every evening.
It was true they had never slept together, but they’d talked about it endlessly. Why it was better to wait; how maybe it was silly to wait; what were the pros and cons. Will had a book called Married Love that he’d ordered from the back of a magazine. He had perused it from cover to cover and studied all the diagrams — the fallopian tubes like orchid stems and the Missionary Position. He read aloud from it to Rebecca and she listened with what she hoped was an expression of mild interest, her head slightly tilted and her eyes on a point in midair. (Although inwardly, of course, she was riveted by every word, and found it almost beyond belief that the married couples of her acquaintance could spend hours together engaged in any other activity.) Oh, she and Joe had had a very happy sex life, but now she was sorry she had missed the experience of figuring it all out with someone equally unskilled. Will would have been so scientific about it! So focused, so comically intense!
She used to write Will Allenby on her notebooks, and W.A.+ R.H. And, in very small, secretive letters, Rebecca Allenby. It had bothered her that a voice break was required between those two adjacent a’s. Rebecca Holmes Allenby, she had amended. Mrs. Willard Allenby.
She supposed that they would have married immediately after college. That was one of the steps in their life plan. They would have moved to some larger and more prestigious university where the two of them could pursue their Ph.D.’s — Will’s in physics, Rebecca’s in American history. She could visualize their apartment as concretely as if that, too, were a memory: a comfortably shabby flat in some faculty widow’s house just off campus, with brick-and-board bookcases, Chianti-bottle candlesticks, and a batik bedspread. Their meals would be very simple — bread and soup, say, on a cleared space among the books on the kitchen table. And every night after supper they would take a walk, just the two of them, hand in hand, learnedly discussing their respective research projects. The town they walked through seemed to be Baltimore and yet not Baltimore, the way places are in dreams. It was cleaner and more organized, and it smelled of fresh-grated nutmeg as Baltimore used to do before the spice factory moved to the suburbs. Also, there was no traffic. The only sound was the tapping of their shoes on the empty sidewalk.
Her true real life, was how she thought of this scenario. As opposed to her fake real life, with its tumult of drop-in relatives and party guests and repairmen. Gradually, she sank so deeply into her true real life that she grew remote and strange, and it took her minutes, sometimes, to pull herself together when she was asked a question. But nobody seemed to notice.
* * *
At the moment, her fake real life revolved around NoNo’s wedding. This was set for the twelfth of August — a Thursday, so as not to interfere with any paying events. NoNo kept insisting that it shouldn’t be a big deal, but even so there was the guest list to be seen to, the arrangements to be made for Barry’s family, the food to be discussed with Biddy. If Rebecca had had her way they would have scheduled a rehearsal, too, but so far the couple hadn’t even found a minister. (Neither of them belonged to any kind of church.) “Never mind,” NoNo kept saying, “I’m sure it will all work out”—an assumption that seemed foolhardy when you considered she had grown up in the Open Arms. And then she announced, out of the blue, that all she really cared about was the garden. “The what?” Rebecca asked.