Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

potty-training his kid, do you know?” he asked his imaginary colleague.) And once he brought his three daughters with him, and Rebecca, as easily as breathing, rallied them around and raced them to the little pond behind the gym, ducking into the cafeteria for stale rolls as they passed. “Look!” she called when they reached the pond. “Fish! Who wants to feed them?” The children stared at her silently—stolid Biddy, who seemed to have no recollection of meeting her before, and belligerent Patch and wary little NoNo. Eventually, though, they accepted the rolls and tossed them into the water. Rebecca said, “Wonderful!” and clapped her hands together. Joe stood slightly apart, smiling his fond smile at her.
    With his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets.
    His beautifully hinged pelvic bones.
    His narrow, dark-brown eyes watching only Rebecca.
    *  *  *
    He telephoned one Wednesday afternoon and invited her to supper at his house the following evening. “My mother wants to make it up to you,” he said. “She’s ashamed of falling apart the night you first came here.”
    Rebecca hesitated. She felt imposed upon, for some reason. She almost wished she hadn’t answered the phone.
    “Please say yes,” he told her. “Mom’s worried you’ll think she
always
drops hams on her guests’ shoes.”
    So she laughed and said, “Well, all right.”
    She was sorry, though, the minute she hung up. What did she imagine she was
doing
?
    And she didn’t have an inkling what to wear. First she put on something that would have been suitable for church—a beige shirtwaist, conservative—but at the last minute she switched to an embroidered peasant dress with a drawstring neckline because Joe had once asked admiringly if she were of Swedish descent. (She wasn’t.) The skirt was very full and she realized, too late to change yet again, that it made her hips look even wider than they were. “She has such a pretty face,” she imagined Mrs. Davitch saying behind her back, with the rest of the remark understood:
It’s a pity she’s so heavy.
    The car she drove was her roommate’s—a Volkswagen Beetle. She had told her roommate she was going to dinner with the family of a friend. “Family friends,” it might have sounded like. (None of her girlfriends knew about Joe. She had not confided in anyone; she didn’t want to give him, oh,
meaning.
Importance.) She propped the directions on the passenger seat, although she felt fairly confident about finding the Open Arms a second time, and she drove with the radio off, both hands clasping the wheel, her expression calm and impassive. It was all right to be doing this. She was completely blameless. The Davitches honestly, truly were just the family of a friend.
    Joe was the one who answered the doorbell, but his mother was right behind him. “Welcome, honey!” she cried, and she pressed her soft cheek to Rebecca’s. Her hair was set in finger waves so crisp they made a sizzling sound. “And happy birthday!” she added.
    Rebecca said, “Birthday?”
    “Oh, I know it’s not till Saturday, but we’re generally booked on Saturdays so Thursdays are when we always have our family celebrations.”
    Rebecca looked at Joe, who was grinning. “I peeked at your driver’s license,” he said. “The seventh of May. You’ll be twenty.”
    Had he also seen what she weighed? was her immediate thought.
    “When
I
turned twenty I already had a two-year-old,” Mrs. Davitch said. “But I don’t know; young women nowadays are more focused on careers, I’m afraid.”
    This time the Open Arms seemed less grand, perhaps because there was no crush of guests to hide the flaws. The floorboards creaked under Rebecca’s feet, and the couch in the front parlor had a slumped and burdened look, and the crystal chandeliers were dull with dust. Draped across the mantel was a pale-blue satin swag reading
BIRTHDAY GREETINGS
in silver spangles, some of which had flaked off to glitter on the