Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

Author:Anne Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375413490
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Six

Early on the last Wednesday morning in August, Joey and Lateesha rang Rebecca’s doorbell. Lateesha was carrying the pink crib pillow she never slept without, and both children wore knapsacks. Behind them stood Hakim—a considerable distance behind, all the way out on the curb, almost back in his car already. “I take Min Foo to the hospital!” he shouted. “The pains are five minutes apart!”

“All right! Good luck!” Rebecca said, and she blew a kiss to Min Foo. “Just remind yourself, sweetheart, you’re going to get a baby out of this!”

Min Foo said, “What? Well, yes. The kids haven’t had breakfast yet, Mom.”

“I’ll see to it,” Rebecca promised, laying an arm around each child.

As soon as the car had driven off, she led the children upstairs to the third-floor guest room. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked as she helped Lateesha shuck her knapsack. “By lunchtime, I bet, you’ll have a brand-new brother or sister!”

They didn’t seem all that thrilled. They had the bleary, befuddled look of sleepers awakened too suddenly, and they followed her back down to the kitchen in a shuffling silence. When she set out toast and jam, Lateesha’s eyes filled with tears. “The jam’s got dots!” she said. “It’s got dots that will stick in my teeth!”

“Those are raspberry seeds, dummy,” Joey said.

“Joey called me a dummy!”

“Now, now,” Rebecca said. “Never mind; I’ll find you some nice grape jelly.”

Then Poppy came down wanting his breakfast, and he needed the situation explained to him several times. “Min Foo’s having a baby? I thought she was divorced,” he said.

“She was, Poppy, but then she married Hakim, remember?”

“Hakim! Good glory, not another black man!”

“No, Poppy, he’s Arab. What a way to talk,” Rebecca said, sending a glance toward Lateesha. But Lateesha was absorbed in spreading grape jelly precisely to the edges of her toast, and she seemed oblivious.

After breakfast, Rebecca made up the two beds in the guest room and propped Lateesha’s pink pillow against one headboard. This had probably once been a servant’s room. It was small and stuffy, with an oppressively low ceiling and a single narrow window. In one corner stood a dark wooden bookcase crammed with curling paperbacks, faded textbooks from the girls’ school days, and the histories and biographies that Rebecca used to read in college. She used to get crushes, almost, on people like Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. She would study them in depth, try to learn every detail of their lives in much the same way that her roommate studied the lives of movie stars.

And she had once been so political! She had picketed the Macadam cafeteria on behalf of its underpaid workers; she had marched against the war in Vietnam; she had plastered the door of her dorm room with anti-nuclear stickers. Now she could barely bring herself to vote. All she read in the newspaper was Ann Landers and her horoscope. Her eyes slid over Kosovo and Rwanda and hurried on.

It occurred to her that so far, the only step

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