Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler Page B

don’t know what all.”
    “Oh, well, that’s—”
    “I suppose it’s what Sam Grinstead has been waiting for,” Linda said. “He’s finally got the house in his clutches.”
    Delia didn’t argue. Linda sent her a quizzical glance before crossing to their father’s bureau. Leaning into the mirror above it, she raked her fingers through her short brown pageboy. Then she removed her pocketbook, which she wore bandolier style, with the strap slanted over her chest—just one more of her European ways. You would never take her for American. (You would never guess she lived in Michigan, divorced from the French-literature professor who had not, after all, swooped her off to his native Paris as she’d hoped.) Her full, soft face was powdered white, her only other makeup a bloom of sticky scarlet on her lips, and although her clothes were unexceptional, she wore them with authority—those dowdy brown medium-heeled pumps, for instance, defiantly teamed with a navy suit. “But why are we standing around? No telling what Marie-Claire and Thérèse have got into,” she said, and the r’s in her children’s names were very nearly gargled. When she whisked past Delia toward the stairs, she smelled of airplane.
    In the kitchen, they found Eliza making lemonade for the twins. This fall the twins would be nine years old—a long-limbed, sproutlike stage—and although they had their mother’s blocky brown haircut, they resembled the professor in every other way. Their eyes were almost black, mournfully downturned; their mouths were the color of plums. They were assisting each other up a bank of glass-fronted cabinets, the first pulling the second after her once she’d reached the counter, and for mobility’s sake they had tucked their old-fashioned, European-schoolgirl dresses into their underpants, which made them look all the leggier.
    “As soon as your cousin Susie shows up, she’ll take you to the pool,” Eliza was saying. She stood at the drainboard, reaming lemons. “She promised she’d do it first thing, but I guess she must be off someplace with her boyfriend.”
    The mention of a boyfriend diverted them for a second. “Driscoll?” Marie-Claire asked, pausing in her climb. “Does Susie still date Driscoll?”
    “She does indeed.”
    “Do they go to dances together? Do they kiss good night?”
    “Now, that I wouldn’t know,” Eliza said tartly, and she bent to take a pitcher from a cupboard.
    The twins had reached their goal: a jar of peppermints on the top shelf. Inch by inch, Thérèse maneuvered it through the partially opened door. (Thérèse was the uneven-featured twin, her face less balanced, less symmetrical, which made her appear slightly anxious. There was one in every set, Delia had noticed.) For a moment the jar seemed suspended, but then it arrived safely in Marie-Claire’s outstretched hands. “Do Ramsay and Carroll have sweethearts too?” she asked.
    “Well, Ramsay does, I’m sorry to say.”
    “How come you’re sorry?” Thérèse asked, and Marie-Claire said, “What’s wrong with her?”—the two of them so alert for scandal that Delia laughed aloud. Thérèse wheeled and said, “Are you sorry too, Aunt Delia? Do you forbid her to darken your door? Is she coming to the beach with us?”
    “No, she’s not,” Delia said, answering only the easiest question. “The beach is just a family trip.”
    They were leaving for a week at the beach early the following morning, a Sunday. It had come to be an annual event. In mid-June, as soon as the schools closed, Linda arrived from Michigan and they all took off for a cottage they rented on the Delaware shore. Already the front porch was heaped with rubber rafts and badminton rackets; the freezer was stuffed with casseroles; and Sam’s patients were thronging in for lastminute consultations in hopes of avoiding any contact with his backup.
    “Delia, could you get the sugar?” Eliza asked. She was running water into the pitcher.