No point sending one last look backward. She knew every detail of that room by heart-every nail hole, every seam in the wallpaper, and the way the paw-footed radiator, in the furry half-light of this overcast Saturday morning, resembled some skeletal animal sitting on its haunches.
At the bottom of the stairs, she set down her load and put her coat on. She could hear Belle talking to George in the kitchen. He was staying here another week or two, just till Delia was settled. It was Delia’s belief that she had to let her own smell permeate the new place first; otherwise he’d keep running back to the old place.
Mr. Miller had told her George was more than welcome. He’d been meaning to buy a cat anyhow, he said. (But notice how he’d used the word “buy,” apparently unaware that true animal lovers would not be caught dead in a pet shop.)
Still buttoning her coat, she walked through the dining room to knock on the kitchen door. “Coming,” Belle called. Delia returned to the hall. Upstairs, Mr. Lamb was creaking the floorboards, and his TV had started its level, fluent murmur. She wondered when he would get around to noticing she was gone. Maybe never, she thought.
It was still not too late to change her mind.
“I gave George a can of tuna,” Belle said when she emerged. “That ought to keep him occupied.”
“Oh, Belle, you’ll spoil him.”
“Nothing’s too good for my whiskums! I’m hoping he’ll refuse to leave me when it’s time. ‘No, no, Mommy!’” she squeaked. “‘I want to stay here with Aunt Belle!’”
Meanwhile she was flouncing into her winged coat, fluffing her curls, jingling her car keys. “All set?” she asked.
“All set.”
They walked out to her enormous old Ford. Delia fitted her carton among a tangle of real estate signs in the trunk, and then the two of them got in the car and Belle started the engine. With the seat-belt alarm insistently dinging, they pulled away from the curb.
It was months since Delia had ridden in a car. The scenery glided past so quickly, and so smoothly! She gripped her door handle as they swung around the corner, and then zip! zip! zip! went the dentist, the dime store, the Potpourri Palace. In no time, they were turning onto Pendle Street and parking in the Millers’ gravel driveway-a trip that had taken her at least ten minutes, walking.
“My parents live in a house like this,” Belle said. She was peering through the windshield at the cut-out designs of covered wagons on the shutters. “In a suburb of York, P.A. Dee, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Oh, yes,” Delia said weakly.
“You’ll be nothing but a servant!”
“It’s better than being a typewriter,” Delia told her.
“Well, if you’re going to put it that way.”
Delia climbed out of the car, and Belle came around to help her maneuver her box from the trunk. “Thanks,” Delia said. “You have my phone number.”
“I have it.”
“I’ll let you know when’s a good time to bring the cat.”
“Or before then,” Belle said. “Or supposing you want to move back! I’ll wait a few days before I try renting your room.”
They might have gone on this way forever, but at that moment Noah burst out the front door. “Delia! Hi!” he called.
“Ms. Grinstead to you,” Belle muttered under her breath. She told Delia, “Don’t you let them treat you like a peon.”
Delia just hugged her and turned toward the house. How the Millers treated her was the least of her concerns, she thought. The question was how to treat them-what distance to maintain from this mop-headed, blue-jeaned boy. It was so easy to fall back into being someone’s mother! She smiled at him as he lifted the carton from her arms. “I can manage that,” she said.
“I’m supposed to carry your luggage. Dad told me. Don’t you have anything more?” he asked. Belle was already backing the car out of the driveway.
“This is it,” Delia said.
“Dad’s over at the school, so I’m supposed to show you where everything is. We’ve got your room all made up for you. We changed the bedsheets even though they were clean.”
“Oh, then why did you change them?”
“Dad said if they didn’t still have their laundry smell you might think someone else had slept in them.”
“I wouldn’t think that,” she assured him.
They walked through the living room, where the cushions lined the couch in last week’s exact formation and the magazines had not varied their positions by an inch. The carpet in the hall was freshly vacuumed, though. She could see the roller marks in the nap. And when they entered the guest room, Noah placed her box on a folding luggage stand that had definitely not been there earlier. “It’s new,” he said, noticing her glance. “We bought it at Home ‘n’ Hearth.”
“It’s very nice.”
“And lookit here,” he said. On the bureau sat a tiny television set. “Color TV! From Lawson Appliance. Dad says a live-in woman always has her own TV.”
“Oh, I don’t need a-”
“Clock radio,” Noah said, “decorator box of Kleenex…”
What touched her most, though, was how they’d turned the bedcovers down-that effortful white triangle. She said, “You shouldn’t have.” And she meant it, for the sight made her feel indebted, somehow.
She followed Noah to the closet, where he was displaying the hangers. “Three dozen matching hangers, solid plastic, pink. Not a wire one in the bunch. We had our choice between pink or white or brown.”
“Pink is perfect,” she told him.
Three dozen! It would disappoint them to find out how few clothes she owned.
“Now I’m supposed to leave you in private,” Noah said. “But I’ll be in my room if there’s anything you need.”
“Thank you, Noah.”
“You know where my room is?”
“I can find it.”
“And you’re supposed to unpack and put your stuff in drawers and all.”
“I’ll do that,” she promised.
As he left he glanced back at her doubtfully, as if he worried she wouldn’t follow instructions.
Her carton looked so shabby, resting on the needlepoint webbing of the luggage stand. She walked over to it and lifted the flaps, and out floated the lonesome, stale, hornet’s-nest smell of the room on George Street. Well. She took off her coat, hung it on one of the hangers. Draped her purse strap over a hook. Drew the goosenecked lamp from the box but then had nowhere to put it, for the room already contained two lamps, shaded in rigid white satin. Still holding the goosenecked lamp (with its helmet of army-green metal and the dent at its base from when the cat had knocked it over one night), she sat down limply on the edge of the bed. She had to brace her feet so as not to slide off the slick coverlet. It was one of those hotel-type beds that seem at once too springy and too hard, and she couldn’t imagine getting used to it.
Elsewhere in the house she heard a door open, a set of heavy footsteps, a man’s voice calling and Noah answering. She would have to rearrange her face and go join them. Any minute now, she would. But for a while she went on sitting there, clutching her homely little lamp and gathering courage.
At the rear of the house, divided from the kitchen by only a counter, lay what the Millers called the family room. Here the stuffy decorating style relaxed into something more casual. A long, low couch faced a TV, an office desk stood against one wall, and three armchairs were grouped in a corner. It was this room that became, within the next few days, Delia’s territory. (She had always wanted a more modern house, without cubbies or nooks or crannies.) In the mornings, when she was through cleaning, she sat at the desk to write her grocery list. She went out for several hours then-usually on foot, even though she had a car at her disposal-but afternoons would find her puttering between family room and kitchen while Noah did his homework on the couch. Evenings, she read in one of the armchairs while Noah watched TV. Sometimes Mr. Miller watched too-or Joel, as she had to remind herself to call him-in which case she retired early with her book. She was a little shy with Mr. Miller: Joel. This was such an awkward situation, businesslike and yet at the same time necessarily intimate. But usually he had meetings to go to, or he spent the evening at his workbench in the garage. She suspected he felt the awkwardness too. He couldn’t possibly have stayed away so much before she came here.