“Ssh,” Rebecca told her.
He must be nearing the finish line now; he was dressing for the party. (“… that crackly feel of starched shirtsleeves when you slither your arms inside them…”) And anyhow, Rebecca was enjoying this. It was sort of like a report on what it was like to be alive, she decided. Let’s say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn’t it sound like Poppy’s speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup…
Why, her own report might take even longer.
Zeb was wending his way toward her with that glass of champagne, finally. The jacks players were on their eightsies.
Peter was telling J.J.J. about scientists who made discoveries in their dreams. “And if you consider how many hours we spend dreaming,” he said, “figuring, say, two hours a night, which is the national average; and say we live eighty years, and… let’s see, two from ten, borrow the one… That would give me almost seven years of dreaming.”
Maybe it was his mention of dreams, or maybe the way he was sitting — next to her but turned slightly away, so that all she saw was his profile — but Rebecca just then had the strangest thought. She thought Peter was the boy she’d been traveling with on the train. She smiled at him, even though he wasn’t looking.
Poppy was describing the candles on his cake—”a wall of flame,” he called it — and the wish he’d made before he blew them out. “I wished for an even bigger party next year,” he said, “to celebrate my hundred and first. My palindromic birthday.”
Several people sent Rebecca looks of sympathy.
The jacks players had reached their ninesies. Zeb placed the glass of champagne in her hands and planted a kiss on the top of her head.
There were still so many happenings yet to be hoped for in her life.
“… and the icing was my favorite: fondant,” Poppy was saying. “It melted in my mouth. I held a bite in my mouth and it sat for just a second and then trickled, trickled down my throat, all that melting sweetness.”
On the screen, Rebecca’s face appeared, merry and open and sunlit, and she saw that she really had been having a wonderful time.
A Note About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University, and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s fifteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.