Black and Blue (21 page)

“Here we go,” Cindy said under her breath.

“You’re a nurse or a nurse’s aide or something, aren’t you? You ever dealt with a case of ptomaine?”
Bark, bark
. “There’s Pepto in that bathroom, isn’t there, Craig?”

“Ed, don’t start,” said Helen Manford, turning her sweet potatoes over with her fork as though she expected to find something buried inside them.

“Did she tell you about her first try at home cooking?” Ed Manford added, leaning toward me until his beefy upper arm was against the side of my breast and I was back as far as I could go in my chair. “Barbecued chicken, done to a turn. Brown and crispy, like out of a picture in a cookbook. Just one little thing.” The bark again, this time with more of an edge. “She didn’t defrost it. Red and raw and all bloody inside. Good thing we had some bologna in the icebox.”

“That was twenty years ago, Dad,” Cindy said.

“She made a picnic last year for the soccer tournament,” Mike said. “That was the best fried chicken I ever had. And that chocolate cake you brought. That was great, too.”

“Remember that barbecue they had for the girl’s third birthday, El?” Mr. Manford said, as though Mike had said nothing at all. “I was in the bathroom for the rest of the evening. I never figured whether it was the potato salad or the spareribs.”

“No one else had a problem,” Cindy said, but he didn’t pay any attention. “How’s your ham, Helen?” he asked. “Done enough?”

“It’s perfect,” said Craig Roerbacker. “Everything’s perfect. As usual.”

“Really. Great meal, Cindy. Great meal,” said Mike.

“Not a whole lot of money in teaching, is there?” Mr. Manford said.

“Nope,” Mike said. “You have to love it.” He smiled at me. “And have a sense of humor.”

“Spoon. Spoon. Spoon. Spoon,” shouted Chad from the children’s table set at one end of the room.

“Pipe down, little boy,” said Ed Manford, shoveling in his food.

“Spoon!” Chad yelled again, happily.

“You be a good boy, now,” said Helen.

“Leave him alone, Mama,” said Cindy. “It’s Christmas.” Over at the children’s table Robert was whispering to Craig and feeding him sweet potatoes, teaching him his favorite party trick, being good, being quiet. Teaching him to make himself disappear when the grown-ups started to raise their voices.

We all had coffee afterward in the living room, the fire burning blue in the stone fireplace, Mr. Manford asleep in the recliner chair. Both Cindy and her mother took aspirin after dinner. Chelsea hit Chad with Holiday Barbie because he’d disarranged the doll’s hair; she’d been sent to her room, where she’d fallen asleep sprawled across her bed in a red lace party dress. “You’re not supposed to be mean at Christmas, Mommy,” she sobbed as she went up the stairs, Barbie’s head going
bump-bump-bump
on the treads. Robert read
One Fish, Two Fish
to Chad—I could tell
because from time to time I could hear Chad shout “Fish!” from upstairs.

“I told him if he went to sleep I’d kick the soccer ball with him tomorrow,” Robert said when he finally came downstairs.

“Bless you, sweetie,” Cindy said, her head tilted back in the circle of her husband’s arm. From upstairs we all heard the word faintly: “Ball! Ball!” All of us laughed except for Mr. Manford, who was snoring, and Mrs. Manford, who was cleaning the kitchen, though Cindy had tried three or four times to persuade her not to.

Mike drove us home, of course. Cindy’d asked him before we’d even arrived. The lights of the strip were glowing like decorations in the mist, but for the first time since we’d come to Lake Plata, maybe the only time all year, all the parking lots were empty, as though of one accord we had all decided to take one day off from cheap hamburgers and labor-saving appliances and instead come together in our living rooms. We passed house trailers set back behind the Price Club warehouse and tiny cinder-block houses that couldn’t possibly have more than two rooms, and I was certain that each had some Christmas tradition, and perhaps as much of a divide between what we felt and what we wanted to feel as there’d been at Cindy’s that night. I couldn’t help thinking of how Cindy had once been in love with Jackson Islington, who wanted to settle down on a farm; I couldn’t help thinking of Ed Manford’s stubby hands, a faint tracery of black soil etched in so deep that it would never come out, no matter how much he scrubbed. He’d eaten everything on his plate, then taken seconds.

“How in the world did that hateful man ever produce someone
as sweet as Cindy?” I said in a low voice after looking in back to make sure Robert was occupied with his new video game.

“That’s a good question,” Mike said. “You see it all the time. Some really good kids with terrible parents. And some great parents with tough kids.”

“And then you’ve got Cindy and Craig, who seem so grounded, with Chelsea, who is scared to death of everything. Cindy couldn’t use the electric knife for the ham because it freaks Chelsea out. I’ve never seen the point of an electric knife. It’s just as easy to carve with the old-fashioned kind. Cindy said that as soon as Chelsea hears it humming, she starts to think someone’s going to cut a hand off.”

“I think the fear thing has to have something to do with Cindy’s sister. I imagine that’s why Cindy’s parents are so strange with her, too. They probably look at Cindy and see Cathy. Although you’d think they’d be grateful to have Cindy and be a little nicer to her.”

“Cindy doesn’t have a sister.”

“She did. She didn’t tell you?” He shook his head. “That’s weird. It’s one of those famous stories that every town has. Sooner or later she must have known someone would tell you. Cindy was an identical twin. From what I’ve heard Mrs. Manford really used to do it up the way people used to with twins, twin girls mostly, curls and Mary Janes and matching dresses and all that. The story I heard was that one day their mother sent Cathy out to their cornfield to call Mr. Manford in for dinner. He was on one of those big tractors, those John Deeres with the huge wheels they use around here, where you sit up high off the ground. Apparently he never even saw her. Someone told me he thought he hit a rock.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Yeah. If I’d been the father it would have killed me. But I’d also like to think it would make me treasure the one I had left.”

“I can’t believe Cindy never told me.”

“Maybe it’s too hard for her to talk about it,” he said as he pulled up in front of the house. “Here we are.”

Robert had fallen asleep in the back, his game still buzzing in his hand. Mike Riordan carried him inside, laid him on the couch and turned to go. Our living room had a small tree stuck in a bucket of wet sand, decorated with glass balls and paper apples I’d found at the discount drugstore, and beneath it were a few packages. I handed him one. “Merry Christmas,” I said. “I didn’t bring it tonight because I didn’t know you were going to be there.”

“I didn’t know you were coming, either.”

He lifted the green jacket from its box, held it up in front of him as though he’d never seen a jacket before, had no idea what it was used for or what it might be. Robert stirred on the couch, then sat up. “That’s a good jacket,” Robert said faintly.

“If you’ve already got one—” I said.

“No,” Mike said. “Thank you. I really needed this.” He laughed. “I’ll drop your presents by tomorrow. I didn’t bring them because I didn’t know—you know.”

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Riordan,” said Robert.

“Mr. Riordan was weird about his present,” Robert said later as I tucked him in.

“I think he didn’t like it but he was trying to be polite,” I said.

“I liked everything I got,” Robert said.

“Me too,” I said. “I love you, Ba.” I held him for a moment and realized that he was beginning to feel different in my arms, more
geometric, less soft. The tears slid down my cheeks and onto his face.

“I love you, too, Mom,” he said. “I had a really good Christmas. Don’t be sad.”

“I’m not, hon. I’m not.” In the kitchen I picked up the phone, put it down, picked it up again. I wasn’t even sure who I wanted to call. Or who I could afford to call. Patty Bancroft had called me, three days before, when the phone bills came, to ask icily about the twenty-three-minute call to New York on the evening of November 24. It hadn’t felt like twenty-three minutes, those precious minutes on the phone to Grace. It had felt like no time at all. “You have no idea what can be done with phone records,” Patty Bancroft had said coldly.

“How could anyone see my phone records? I haven’t even seen them. I don’t even know where they’re delivered.”

“Holidays are a difficult time, Elizabeth,” she’d said. “People call home during the holidays, and people who are looking for them know that. And getting a copy of a phone record, for someone who knows how, is nothing. Nothing at all.”

I’d hated the tone of her voice, as though she were talking to a child, a teenage girl who talked too long to her friends, a stupid adolescent with no idea of the results of her actions. But she’d scared me. I picked up the receiver in the kitchen, then put it down, then picked it up again. The dial tone turned into the manic high-pitched beeping of a phone off the hook, and I could hear the singsong murmur of the recorded message: “If you wish to place a call …” Finally I hung up, then picked the phone up once more and dialed the number on an index card tacked to the kitchen doorjamb.

“Hello,” she said, her voice a little hoarse, as though she had not had cause to use it that day.

“Hi, Mrs. Levitt. It’s Beth Crenshaw. I know it’s late, but is it all right if I say Merry Christmas?”

In the background I heard the sound of conversation, even music. “Is this a bad time?” I added.

“Ach, no,” she said. “Irving and I are watching
White Christmas
, aren’t we, Irving. A Christmas movie, what can it hurt? Not like having a tree, right? That Rosemary Clooney, it’s a shame, how heavy she got. She was a nice-looking girl when she was young.”

“She was, wasn’t she?”

“But you can tell, the ones that have to watch it when they get a little older, or next thing you know, a backside out to here. Now she wears nothing but muumuus.”

“But a beautiful voice.”

“Beautiful. Merry Christmas, Mrs. Nurse. I’ll tell you something—Irving likes you. I can tell. This one you like, Irving, I said.”

“I’m glad. Tell him I said thank you.”

“We’ll see you Tuesday, won’t we, Irving? I have a little something for the little boy.”

And then I called Cindy, even though I’d just left her. “I just wanted to say thanks again,” I said. “You saved my life with that dinner, and the presents and everything.” I thought of Cindy’s twin, of the early years, when she’d been able to look at a mirror image without even looking in the mirror, of sitting in the kitchen, or their room, or wherever she was when Cathy went out to call Ed Manford for dinner, of her hearing the shouting, the screams. Or maybe not. Maybe just hearing a silence where a moment
before ordinary life had been. It had been a good story, that story about Jackson Islington. But it hadn’t been the real story. Although I couldn’t complain; it had been a good story I’d told her, the story of the nuns. But it hadn’t been the real story, either.

“I love you, kid,” I said.

“Love you, honey,” she said. “I got to go to bed. I had too much wine.” And in the kitchen I poured myself a glass of water and drank it by the living-room window, looked out over the dark quadrangle hung with motley lights from a gap I made with my two fingers in the blinds. Finally I went to bed, with Nat King Cole playing over and over in my head, with my stomach roiling with wine. I thought of Ed Manford leaning so close to me, of Cindy’s sister disappearing beneath the big ridged wheels of a farm tractor. And I thought of Bobby. The Christmas before he’d given me a half-heart, cut down the center with a jagged line, hanging on a heavy gold chain. The other half he’d hung around his own neck, on the chain where he wore his miraculous medal, the image of the Virgin Mary his father had been given by his own parents when he became a cop, that Ann Benedetto had refused to have buried with her husband, had given to her son instead. I’d left the half-heart in my jewelry box, below the costume things. But I knew Bobby had found it, his heart, jettisoned, left. Maybe that had been enough. Maybe he had let me go. Maybe he was singing Nat King Cole into some other woman’s ear, some woman he’d found to take my place, a woman who didn’t make him angry or mean, who got all the good stuff and none of the bad. As Christmas Day darkened and deepened into the morning of the day after, I fell asleep, wondering.

The next morning Mike Riordan came by with two packages,
beautifully, extravagantly wrapped, the work of a department store gift-wrapping department, all foil stars and glittery ribbon. “I thought you had company today,” I said.

“They’re coming at three,” he said. “I cleaned up by stuffing everything in the closets.”

For Robert he had gotten a Yankees baseball shirt, blue and white pinstripes. For me there was a runner’s rain jacket, lightweight, deep green. It was more or less the same jacket I’d given him, except that his was size large, mine size small. The look on my face must have been funny.

“Don’t tell Cindy,” Mike said, “or she’ll talk about it till next Christmas.”

T
here was something called a Safe-Home party with kids, balloons, hot-dog wagons, and clowns at the school on New Year’s Eve, Mike so busy that I only got to wave at him across a very crowded cafeteria, and then the holidays were over. Soccer ebbed, basketball flowed; Robert had practice three times a week after school, games every weekend, enough homework that he moved straight from his desk to the sink to brush his teeth and wash his face for bed. Jennifer got a new wheelchair and taught me to play a computer game called “Knockout” she always won, the high score table a list of variations on her name and initials. Cindy and I ran a sale of books the library no longer needed, our hands and faces gray with the dust of years. And one day at the end of January, walking home from the Levitts, seeing familiar lights in now-familiar windows, it occurred to me that the tedium of this life had become comforting, that it felt real and lasting in its sheer ordinary drudgery, that in the same way I found it restful to run a route I’d run dozens of times before, so it had become restful to do these small tasks that I knew by heart, that asked no more of me than a kind of rote recitation of the body.