Back When We Were Grownups

At 53, Rebecca Davitch is a widow, grandmother, and professional party hostess living in the Open Arms, a crumbling 19th-century Baltimore row house that her late husband's family rents out for celebrations. On a June day in 1999, at a family picnic celebrating the engagement of her youngest stepdaughter, NoNo, to a corporate lawyer named Barry, Rebecca is struck by a quiet revelation: She has turned into the wrong person. Wide, soft, and colorfully dressed, she bears no resemblance to the serene, braided, studious young woman she once was. Her family is large and unwieldy: three stepdaughters from her husband Joe Davitch's first marriage (Biddy, Patch, and NoNo), her own biological daughter Min Foo, Joe's elderly uncle Poppy, Joe's younger brother Zeb, and assorted spouses, partners, and grandchildren. When Rebecca tries to draw Barry's 12-year-old son Peter into the group by the river, he steps backward and falls in. She plunges in and hauls him out. During a toast, she includes Peter in a welcoming rhyme, but he protests that he is not part of their family and runs off. In the stillness that follows, the question surfaces: How did she ever become this person who is not really her?

That night, Rebecca dreams of riding a train beside a teenaged son she has never had, a fair-haired boy who is hopeful, wistful, and a little outside of things. Min Foo suggests the dream represents the life Rebecca would have led if she had chosen a different fork in the road.

Rebecca tells her grandchildren how she met Joe. She was 19, attending a college roommate's engagement party at the Open Arms. Zeb, then a teenager working as DJ, made her laugh, and at that moment a man walked up and said, "I see you're having a wonderful time" (30). That man was Joe. His remark contained the seeds of everything that followed: his permanent belief that she was a natural-born celebrator, when in truth she had been muted, retiring, deeply absorbed in her studies at Macadam College, and informally engaged to her high-school sweetheart, Will Allenby.

In mid-July, Rebecca visits her mother in Church Valley, the small town where she grew up. Her mother insists Will was Rebecca's "true soul's companion" (76), saying Rebecca became a whole different person after jilting him. Rebecca recalls her courtship with Joe: the birthday dinner where the Davitch family embraced her instantly, the pivotal moment when Joe tied the drawstring at her neckline instead of kissing her and made her knees go weak. She remembers the day she told Will goodbye rather than his customary au revoir and walked into Joe Davitch's arms.

Back in Baltimore, Rebecca begins maintaining an imaginary parallel life in which she and Will married and had one son, Tristram, who is solemn, scientifically curious, and socially awkward. Her actual life revolves around NoNo's August wedding. Joe's ex-wife, Tina, arrives from England, and the stepdaughters cluster adoringly around her, making Rebecca feel invisible. Tina provokes Rebecca by implying that Joe's reckless driving was suicidal. Rebecca privately acknowledges that she sometimes sensed desperation beneath Joe's exuberance.

Rebecca contacts the Macadam College Alumni Office and learns that Will is now head of the physics department. After NoNo's wedding, emboldened by champagne, she dials Will's number. He answers with a worn voice, mistaking Rebecca for his ex-wife Laura. When Rebecca identifies herself, he responds flatly, and she panics and hangs up, feeling as if something in her chest has started bleeding.

Will traces her through Caller ID and calls back. They meet for dinner, but the reunion is painful: Will is shockingly aged, and when Rebecca tries to reminisce, he accuses her of breaking his heart without warning. She walks out. He calls to apologize and reveals he is deeply lonely: His divorce was Laura's idea, his 17-year-old daughter Beatrice refuses to see him, and he feels destined to have no one. After several tense exchanges, they agree to start over, and Rebecca invites him to dinner at the Open Arms.

The dinner is interrupted repeatedly by family members. Peter, NoNo's new stepson, shyly asks Rebecca to attend his school's Grandparents' Day and requests permission to call her Gram. After the others leave, Will tells Rebecca he remembers her champagne-colored cloak and crown of braids. He says he is the only person who can see who she really is, and they cling together in a long embrace.

Rebecca and Will begin seeing each other regularly. She subscribes to serious publications and reads biographies of Robert E. Lee, attempting to reclaim the intellectual life she abandoned when she married Joe. At Grandparents' Day, she discovers Peter has built an astonishing machine of colored rods and wheels that sends marbles rolling down a spine, each ringing a different musical note. When Rebecca meets Beatrice, the encounter is hostile. Beatrice reveals that during the divorce, Will stole the family dog, denied it, then released the dog to wander alone. After Beatrice leaves, Will kisses Rebecca intensely, but she feels nothing in response.

Rebecca organizes a formal dinner to introduce Will to her family. The evening goes well until Will questions the family's constant celebrating and criticizes Rebecca's closeness with her mechanic. Rebecca feels the familiar dampening she has always experienced in Will's presence: a sense of being too loud and too brightly colored. Standing at the front door, she tells him she does not think they will be seeing each other again. Alone afterward, she realizes it is she, not Will, who is still in mourning.

Rebecca sinks into depression through autumn, the season when Joe died. She tells Zeb she has finished her life. She remembers Joe's death with painful clarity and recalls grieving like falling in love, poring over his photographs and treasuring random memories of his voice.

At the Labor Day baby-welcoming party for Min Foo's new son, Abdul, Poppy clutches his chest and complains of pain. Rebecca rides with him in the ambulance. The diagnosis is indigestion, and she feels lighter than air with relief. At Thanksgiving, she escapes by taking baby Abdul outside. Alone in the fog, she reflects on what Joe rescued her from: her ingrown, muted, stagnant routine. She recognizes that her joyousness, the quality the Davitches all depend on, was not her natural temperament but something she had labored to acquire. She experiments with a sneaking sense of pride and carries the baby home jauntily.

Poppy's 100th-birthday party takes place on December 11. A converted videotape of old home movies plays, showing flickering images: young Zeb on a tricycle, Joe as a gangly teenager, the stepdaughters as babies, and finally a heavyset young woman in a miniskirt beaming at the camera at a 1966 picnic. It is Rebecca herself. She proposes a rhyming toast, and Patch says audibly, "Oh, Lord, Beck is back to those everlasting rhymes of hers" (267). Rebecca's eyes sting with tears. Poppy delivers a meandering speech describing his birthday in sensory detail: the sunshine on his bedspread, waffles soaking with maple syrup, the warmth of a nap. It becomes a report on what it is like to be alive. Sitting beside Peter, Rebecca thinks he resembles the boy from her train dream. She watches the family around her and feels there are still many happenings yet to be hoped for. On the television, the old tape replays and her face appears, merry and open and sunlit. She sees at last that she really had been having a wonderful time.