Read Online Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler - Free Book Online Page B

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
under
weight! Of course,