Free Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler Page A

said.
    She shouldn’t have told him. Adrian would look at her and think, Yes, she is rather homely, and her elbows are chapped besides.
    But he smiled and said, “If it were me, I’d have married you for your freckles.”
    She went over to Rosemary’s side of the bed. She knew it was Rosemary’s because a blown-glass perfume bottle sat next to the lamp. First she laid Dr. Adwater’s article on the nightstand, and then, as if it were the logical next step, she opened the little drawer underneath. She gazed into a clutter of manicure scissors, emery boards, and nail polish bottles.
    How fitting, the name Rosemary! Rosemary was such a sophisticated herb, so sharp-tasting, almost chemical. Put too much in a recipe, and you’d swear you were eating a petroleum product. There was nothing plain about it, nothing mild or dull. Nothing freckled.
    Adrian came up behind her. He turned her to face him and wrapped his arms around her, and this time she didn’t move away but set her hands at his waist and strained upward to meet his kisses. He kissed her mouth, her eyelids, her mouth once more. He whispered, “Lie down with me, Delia.”
    Then the phone rang.
    He didn’t seem to hear it; he never heard it. And he never answered it. He said it was his mother-in-law, who liked him better than she liked her own daughter and was always trying to get them back together. “How do you know it’s not Rosemary?” Delia once asked, and Adrian, shrugging, said, “The telephone isn’t Rosemary’s instrument of choice.” Now he didn’t flinch, didn’t even tense. Delia would have felt it if he had. He kissed the curve where her neck met her shoulder, and she began to notice the bed pressing the backs of her knees. But the phone continued to ring. Ten rings, eleven. Subconsciously, she must be counting. The realization enabled her, somehow, to pull away, although she felt that she was dragging her limbs through water. “Oh, my,” she said, out of breath, and she made a great business of tucking her blouse more securely into her skirt. “I really should be … did I leave my purse downstairs?”
    He was out of breath too. He didn’t speak. She said, “Yes, I remember! On the chair. I have to hurry; Sam’s mother is coming to dinner.”
    Meanwhile she was clattering down the stairs. The extension phone in the living room was on its fourteenth ring. Its fifteenth. She reached the front hall and seized her purse and turned at the door to say, “You know we’re leaving tomorrow for—”
    “You never stay,” he said. “You’re always rushing off as soon as you get here.”
    “Oh, well, I—”
    “What are you afraid of?”
    I’m afraid of getting undressed in front of someone thirty-two years old , she did not say. She smiled up at him, falsely. She said, “I’ll see you after the beach, I guess.”
    “Can’t you ever manage a solid block of time? A whole night? Can’t you tell them you’re visiting one of your girlfriends?”
    “I don’t have a girlfriend,” she said.
    She really didn’t, come to think of it. When she married Sam she had switched generations and left everyone behind, all her old high-school classmates. “Although it’s true there’s Bootsy Fisher,” she said. (Whom Sam called Bootsy Officious: the thought rose out of nowhere.) “Her kids and mine used to carpool.”
    “Can’t you say you’re at Bootsy’s?”
    “Oh, no, I don’t see how I—”
    And then, because she guessed from the way his mouth seemed to soften that he was about to kiss her again, she gave him a fluttery wave and hurried out the door, nearly tripping over Butch on the mat.
    Funny, she thought, as she settled herself in her car, how often lately her high-school days came to mind. It must be this dizzy, damp, rumpled feeling as she rushed home from secret meetings; her telltale flushed cheeks, the used and smushed look of her lips when she risked a glance in the rearview mirror. At a stop sign she made sure that all her