Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [69]
Macy and Grandpa raised their glasses, too, and Cicely set aside the biscuit to raise hers. Ian, who didn’t drink, held up his water tumbler. “Happy birthday,” they all said.
“Well, thanks,” Claudia told them.
She thought a moment, and then she said, “Thank you very much,” and smiled around the table and took a sip from her own glass.
The cake was served in the living room, so they could all sing “Happy Birthday” together. But really just the grownups and the little ones sang. The difficult ages seemed to think singing was beneath them, so after the first line Thomas didn’t sing either. Then just as Claudia was blowing out the candles, Mrs. Jordan arrived from across the street along with two of the foreigners. The foreigners brought a third foreigner named Bob who apparently used to live with them. Bob greeted Thomas by name but Thomas didn’t remember him. “You were only so much high,” Bob told him, setting his palm about six inches above the floor. “You wore little, little sneakers and your mother was very nice lady.”
“My mother?” Thomas asked. “Did you know her?”
“Of course I knew her. She was very pretty, very kind lady.”
Thomas was hoping to hear more, but Mrs. Jordan came over then and started filling Bob in on all the neighborhood news: how Mr. Webb had finally gone to be dried out and the newlyweds had had a baby and Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin daughters were making life a living hell for his girlfriend. Thomas wandered off finally.
His grandma was passing the cake around on her big tole tray. She served the grownups first. She said, “Macy, cake? Jim, cake?” She offered some to Ian, too, but of course he said no. (At church they didn’t approve of sugar, as Grandma surely knew by now.) She thinned her lips and passed on. “Jessie? You’ll have cake.”
Ian asked Cicely, “What do you say to a movie after this?”
“Well, I kind of like made plans with some friends from school,” Cicely told him.
“Oh.”
“Melanie and them from school.”
“Okay.”
“I’d ask you along except it’s, you know, like all just college talk about people you never heard of.”
“That’s okay,” Ian said.
Thomas hooked his fingers into one of Ian’s rear pockets. He slid his thumb back and forth across the puckery seam at the top. What did this remind him of? Daphne sucking her thumb, that was it. Curling her index finger across her upper lip. He leaned his head against Ian’s side, and Ian put his arm around him. “I should get to bed early anyhow,” he was telling Cicely. “Rumor has it tomorrow’s another workday.”
Now Grandma was offering her tray to the children. She said, “Thomas? Cake?”
“No, thanks.”
“No birthday cake?” she asked. She put on a look of surprise.
“Sugar is an artificial stimulant,” he reminded her.
He expected her to argue like always, but he didn’t expect she’d get angry. Ian was the one she seemed angry with, though. She turned toward Ian sharply and said, “Really, Ian! He’s just a little boy!”
“Sure. He’s free to make up his own mind,” Ian said.
“Free, indeed! It’s that church of yours again.”
“Excuse me. Mrs. Bedloe?” Cicely said. “Maybe Thomas is just listening to his body. Processed sugar is a poison, after all. No telling what it does to your body chemistry.”
“Well, everybody in this room eats sugar and I don’t exactly notice them keeling over,” Grandma said.
“Me, now,” Cicely said, “I’ve started using non-pasteurized honey whenever possible and I feel like a whole new person.”
“But honey is a stimulant, too,” Thomas told her.
Ian said, “Thomas. Hey, sport. Maybe if we just—”
“Do you hear that?” Grandma asked Ian. “Do you hear how he’s been brainwashed?”
“Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”
“It’s not enough that you should fall for it yourself! That you’d obey their half-wit rules and support their maniac minister and scandalize the whole neighborhood by trying to convert the Cahns.”
“I wasn’t trying to convert them! I was having a theoretical discussion.”
“A theoretical discussion, with people who’ve been Jewish longer than this country’s