Black and Blue (11 page)

“He was a good worker,” Mrs. Levitt said as I irrigated and then reconnected Irving’s catheter, both of us looking dispassionately at her husband’s slack penis. “He made a good living. Sales. He sold automobile parts. I never even learned to drive. Too busy to teach me, right, Irving?” She smiled. “Something like that,” she said. “You want tuna on toast for lunch?”

“You don’t have to go to any trouble for me,” I said.

“It’s no trouble. I made lunch for the last girl, and she was colored. Not that I minded, but I think Irving wasn’t so happy about it.” She opened the refrigerator and took out a loaf of wheat
bread. “Were you, Irving?” she called into the other room, and put the bread in the toaster. “But I have to say, she wasn’t rude. We had one before her, she handled Irving like a sack of potatoes. I called the agency, I said she had to go. I think they sent me the colored girl for spite. Not that we minded, right, Irving?”

“Do you need anything?” I said as I was leaving each day, and Mrs. Levitt said no until I’d been there two weeks. I suppose by then she’d decided she could trust me. She put her head to one side, a girlish gesture, put one finger beneath her chin. Then she reached for her purse, a black tote bag with big white polka dots. “I’ll give you the money, you’ll bring
People
magazine,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” I said. “Don’t worry about the money.”

“And some other time you’ll bring a Big Mac,” she said. “Big Mac is Irving’s favorite fast food. Big Mac and senior coffee. A large coffee and only a quarter if you’re over sixty-five. Which we are, right, Irving?” She straightened his covers, tucked him in as though he was a child. No children, Mrs. Levitt had told me, making a vague motion toward her midsection and moving on to some movie star’s marriage. Just her and Irving, forty-eight years and counting.

T
he supermarket on the strip up the street from our apartment was as big as a football field, so brightly lit that it bleached out the skin of even the tannest women pushing their kids around the aisles in carts. Jets of water sprayed the peppers and plums so they seemed irresistible, more like art objects than produce. In one corner was a pharmacy, in another a bank, in a third a bakery section that gave off the smell of cinnamon unexpectedly as you came upon it, like one of those perfume inserts in a magazine. It was as though they’d put an entire American small town in an airplane hangar and then arranged and lit it to best advantage. It made me think of how I’d imagined heaven when I was a kid, white light and something for everybody. People were always hollering to their kids to find a second cart, as though they had been seduced into soup and cheese and instant pudding without meaning to be.

Robert and I could only buy as much as we could carry, but for the two of us that was usually plenty, and I was careful about how I spent my money. We’d been in the apartment for almost three months and I still hadn’t paid any rent, didn’t even know how much it was. It was another one of Patty Bancroft’s mysteries; “We’ll take care of that end of things” she’d said when I asked how long the rent would be taken care of. So I opened a credit union account with the home-care company, putting away some
money every week just in case. I wore my uniform and my hand-me-downs; mainly I spent money on treats for Robert, trips to the arcades with Bennie, weekend fast-food lunches, sometimes a shirt or a comic book. I didn’t want him to feel deprived, to feel poor as well as rootless. Twice he’d had nightmares and I’d sat with him until he fell back suddenly into sleep; he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say much about the dreams, just that there were bad guys, that he was running, that there was darkness, falling, fear. Twice he’d asked to stay home from school with a stomach ache. Once beneath his bed I found a piece of looseleaf paper: “Dear Dad” in his scratchy, back-slanting penmanship, “I bet you are very surprised to—” Then, nothing. Perhaps I’d told him dinner was ready, knocked at his door. Perhaps he’d heard Bennie calling from downstairs. I threw the paper away.

“You hungry?” I said as I found a cart whose wheels worked. Robert shrugged. He shrugged a lot, too, these day. Are you tired? Shrug. Do you want to watch a movie? Shrug. How could he care about anything at all, when in an instant it might disappear, when the outlines of our life were as faint and transparent as the picture on the old television in the living room. It was like that Etch-a-Sketch he’d gotten from Santa, year before last. You drew the picture and then turned the toy over, and the image was gone, nothing but gray, waiting for the next one, just as fleeting.

I didn’t know how much I’d be able to buy him for Christmas this year, or how in hell I’d ever get through it, get through the tree and the meal and the goddamned carols. I pushed the cart and stopped thinking. I’d gotten good at that, at just cutting thoughts off, as though I was changing channels. From Christmas to chicken cacciatore.

The one thing I wouldn’t scrimp on was food. Once the heat began to wane a bit in what, up north, passed for the beginning of winter, once I began to feel the least bit at home in the windowless kitchen in the apartment, I’d begun to cook the Italian food that Ann Benedetto had taught me to make years before. I figured it would make Robert feel more at home, the way it had made me feel as if I was making one, really making one, all those years ago.

“My mother needs a daughter,” Bobby had said, “and you need to learn to cook a decent meal.” Every Sunday he dropped me off, when we were first married, at his mother’s house, in his mother’s kitchen so clean that a spot of red sauce looked like blood. I took a shower before I went, did my makeup, but sometimes I thought she could smell it on me, what we’d been doing before, while Ann was at nine o’clock mass.

Her cooking was a list of don’ts: don’t buy cheap cheese, don’t put the sauce on too high, don’t use garlic salt instead of real garlic, don’t layer the lasagna more than three times no matter how deep the pan. A list of don’ts, a list of Bobby doesn’ts: Bobby doesn’t like the hot sausage, Bobby doesn’t like the thin spaghetti, Bobby doesn’t like the bread from Emilio’s bakery, only from Marie’s. Most Sundays she had a new shirt for him, a soft, fine double knit with a collar in a dark color. “I was at the outlets,” she always said. Later she bought things for Robert, polo shirts and oxford button-downs. “Rags,” she called T-shirts and blue jeans. “Garbage,” she called frozen food.

“She came from nothing,” Bobby’s grandmother hissed when Ann went to the bathroom. “You just remember that. Don’t take any crap from her. She’s half Polish, for Christ’s sake. My son, God love him—she gave him such a time.” Bobby’s grandmother
always liked me, until the day she died. She gave me her cameos, that I’d had to leave behind in the rosewood jewelry box on my bureau. God, I’d thought to myself, Bobby’ll really kill me if I take Mama’s brooches. Mama, we always called his grandmother. Ann, I called my mother-in-law. She never asked me to call her anything else.

But she made me a cook, and so I could make Robert meatballs and braciola, pasta e fagioli and lasagna, little pieces of home at this flimsy table 2,000 miles away. He invited Bennie for dinner, and the two of them hunched over their plates without speaking until finally their mouths were shiny with tomato sauce and grease. Bennie’s mother did the same for Robert: beans and rice, chicken with a sauce of tomatoes and onions. Bless our boys, talking with their mouths full.

“You want chicken cacciatore?” I said as Robert and I traipsed down the endless meat aisles in the supermarket, and he nodded, bent over another video game, which he’d traded his old one for to some boy at school. This one was soldiers and kick boxing. It made little grunting noises when one man hit another with his booted foot.
Unh. Unh. Unh
. We went past pork and beef to poultry. At the front of the store a bulletin board held flyers with pictures of missing children. The faces changed twice a month. I knew because I always looked at them while I was pretending to get a cart with wheels that really worked. All the kids looked happy in the pictures, as though they didn’t care that they were missing.

“Don’t put mushrooms in it,” Robert said.

“You don’t have to eat the mushrooms.”

“Can I go look at the comics?” he said without raising his head from his game.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. They’re over there. I’ll find them.”

“I’d rather you stayed with me.”

“Mom, I’m not a baby. I’m all right. Just let me go.”

“You come back to me in ten minutes,” I said as he trotted away. I still hated to let him out of my sight. Each afternoon when I heard the school bus pull up I stood behind the screen, a peeping Tom of a parent, making sure he got off the bus and in the house safe and sound. Sometimes I wanted to hold Bennie and say, thank you, thank you, over and over again, thank you for being an ordinary boy, for making my boy seem ordinary, too, for going everywhere he goes.

“Where’s your father?” I heard Bennie ask Robert one day, but nicely, softly. There had been a long silence from the bedroom, or maybe it just seemed long because I was holding my breath. Then Robert’s voice came, low: “He and my mom are split up.”

“Jonathan’s mom and dad split up last year,” Bennie said. “Allyson lives with her mom. I don’t know where her father is. Sean, too. His parents got divorced when he was real little. He stays with his dad every weekend in East Preston.” It was as though he would go on and on with his litany of fractured families, of kids walking on the broken glass of their parents’ lives. “Your mom cooks good,” Bennie had said after a moment.

“I know,” said Robert. “She cooks really good at Christmas.” I held the back of my hand against my mouth and a little saliva ran over my fingers with my tears. Everything we’d lost, everything
I’d forced him to leave, seemed somehow to be in that simple sentence. She cooks really good at Christmas. In that moment I thought of going back, of walking in through that familiar door just so I could see the look on Robert’s face. All my life I’d tried to make my boy happy, and now to keep him safe I had to make him sad. And angry, too. I could see that in the set of his mouth, sometimes. I’m not sure he knew who he was angry at. One night, doing his homework, he’d thrown his math book onto the floor and hit the wall with his pencil and I’d stood up from the couch, but stopped, so still, because the jerky choreography of violence and rage was so familiar to me that I couldn’t come any closer, even when the object was long division.

“This is so stupid,” he’d shouted. “This is all different than what we learned last year, and besides, it doesn’t make any sense, the way they want us to carry things. And she makes us show all our work, and there’s not even enough space on the page.”

“What about using another piece of paper?” I said quietly.

“We’re not allowed, Mom,” he screamed, and tears were beginning to run down his face. “You don’t understand. We’re not allowed. We have to do it on this sheet or we get points off. This is so stupid.” And he pushed over the chair, ran upstairs, slammed his door so hard that I swear I felt an answering vibration in the living-room floor, like the aftershock from an earthquake.

“You want to talk about things?” I said that night as I sat on the edge of his bed.

“Nah,” he said.

“It might make you feel better.”

“I feel okay.”

“You didn’t seem okay when you were doing your math homework.”

“It’s really stupid, the way they do it here,” he’d said.

I watched him walk away in the supermarket, his head still bent over the video game, skirting the carts intuitively, the way I imagine a blind man negotiates his living room. The long bones in his legs had begun to grow, so that he had that Tinkertoy look a boy has as he becomes a young man, sticks and knobs precariously held together. He would be taller than his father, and better looking, too. He had my nose, not the hawk beak that made Bobby look so terrifying sometimes, his black eyes predatory above it. What else was it that boy, Tyrone Biggs, had said from the witness stand? “That cop, man, he scared me.”

“Did he threaten you?” his stupid defense attorney had thundered, breaking the rules, asking a question he didn’t know the answer to.

“No, man. He just looked at me. Looked at me real cold.”

The way some mothers look at their kid for birth defects when they’re babies, try to suss out signs of stupidity as they learn to walk and talk, so I watched and waited to see that dark, lowering look on my boy’s face, the look the sky has before the rain comes down in gray sheets. Three months I’d watched him for signs of colic, finally relaxed into motherhood when the danger period passed. It’d take longer this time, looking not for gas but for the early signs of rage. It was why I tried to draw him out, so that he could vent that way instead of the other. “Use your words,” I used to say when he was little, and most of the time he did. But once, walking away from St. Stannie’s in the morning, I’d heard a group
of boys calling him Robert the Hobbit, of all things, no more than a silly singsong following him down the street, Robert the Hobbit, Robert the Hobbit, as he trudged along the pavement with his head down. And then, almost without breaking stride, he’d turned and hurled himself at them, his arms pinwheeling, his eyes big. “Shut up!” he shrieked as he hit and hit and hit, the other boys stunned, backing away, putting their hands up palms out. “Shut up!” until I pulled him away, screaming myself, “For God’s sake, Robert, stop. Stop it!”

“Daddy said you have to fight back,” he’d said as I hectored him on the way home. And when I complained, Bobby just waved his hand and shrugged. “The trouble is, Fran, that you don’t know about boys,” he’d said.

Moving away from me down the long market aisle, Robert looked just as Bobby might have as a boy, except that there was something defenseless in the way he held himself, a kind of roundness to back and shoulder. And I wondered whether Bobby had ever been like that, defenseless, before biceps and bravado and badge. Before me. Or whether Robert had learned to walk like that from me, from all the years that I’d made myself small, trying not to attract notice, give offense. Suddenly, as though he’d felt my eyes on his back, Robert looked over his shoulder and smiled, a smile that on that dark pinched face was more than a smile, was a hand, a hug, a kiss. That was the smile Bobby had had, too, when he saw me when we were both young, that made my spirit levitate, warm from the inside out.