Black and Blue (29 page)

“It is hard, for the children,” she added quietly, licking a vanilla mustache from her upper lip. “Life is not easy.”

“I feel foolish complaining, to you of all people.”

“Why?”

“Your life.”

Mrs. Levitt shrugged. “You shouldn’t have told me it was yogurt,” she said, looking at her cone. “I would have thought it was ice cream.” She licked, then said, “The big things, eh. It’s all the
other things. Like now, whether to keep the cable, to move, what to do between breakfast and lunch.”

“You’re lonely,” I said.

“No, no,” Mrs. Levitt said. “Filling the hours when you’re an old lady—it’s not a feeling, just a job. Sometimes now I still talk to Irving. I’m entitled.”

“I still shouldn’t complain.”

“You call that complaining? You don’t know complaining. Anyway, other people’s troubles don’t take away yours. But don’t be foolish and think somebody else is having everything fine.”

Of course that was exactly what I had always thought, as a child walking home in my school uniform past the homes where it seemed reading lights shone yellow from the window to illuminate the evening hours of handsome and lively fathers, warm and sympathetic mothers, children who were tucked in tight beneath their blankets each night in rooms bright with wallpaper. There were even times, as an adult, when I had thought it of myself, of Bobby and Robert and me, eating beneath the brass chandelier in the small dining room, the dishes and glasses shining as though they’d been given to us as prizes, the flowered plates plaques to commemorate our love for one another. If it would all stay like this moment, I would think to myself. And then, as we cleared the table, stacked the dishes, darkened the house for the night, the feeling would be gone, as bright and ephemeral as the lamplight.

“Things will happen to a boy that you cannot help,” Mrs. Levitt added.

“You sound like a fortune-teller.”

“Just so. They always say these things that you can say about
anyone. Life will be good and bad. You will meet people who can help you. Someone you love will die. Big deal.”

“Did you take your calcium?”

She held out her cone. “Better than pills,” she said. “Even better if it was chocolate. They make chocolate yogurt?”

Cindy eats frozen yogurt now, drinks milk, stops at the farm stand every day for fresh vegetables. I remember doing the same not long ago. A year ago. Only a year. A year ago I had a secret inside me, and, just like Cindy, I kept it a secret. Even Bobby didn’t know I was pregnant. Even Grace. A good nurse would have known. Winnie had cocked her head on the side one afternoon when we were slow in the emergency room, put her hands on her big hips, screwed up a corner of her mouth. “How are you feeling?” she said. The way a woman walks, flat-footed, her toes turned out a little, her pelvis thrust forward as though her body’s proud of itself—a good nurse knows.

I knew everything when I went to the clinic two days after Bobby broke my nose that last time. I lay on the table with the sheet over my knees and saw the bottle and the hose in the corner, and knew exactly how they would use it.

They were kind at the clinic.

“Let me tell you about the procedure,” said the counselor, who kept looking at my battered face, at the bandages and the telltale perimeter of black and blue and red.

“I’m a nurse,” I said. “I know.”

When I’d assisted at abortions myself I’d told the patient there would be some cramping. Now I know that wasn’t exactly true. It hurt. I was glad it hurt. The more it hurt the more I knew I had the guts to get up from the table and leave Bobby Benedetto. I
wanted to know whether it was a boy or a girl, but I didn’t ask, and it wouldn’t really have made a difference. A boy to learn that a man can keep a woman in line with the flat of his hand; a girl to learn that men love you and hurt you in equal measure. None of the above, I kept thinking, none of the above, one of those pieces of nonsense that gets stuck somewhere between your mind and your mouth when you’re having a hard time. The machine made a noise like the window air conditioner in our bedroom. I stared at the ceiling, my eyes dry and gritty. They gave us Lorna Doones and apple juice in the recovery room. “You’ll get your girl,” Bobby had said after my miscarriages. But he was wrong.

“We’re done here,” the doctor said.

Maybe that’s what I felt when Mike Riordan came inside me, not Bobby, but the doctor, the speculum. I’d lain on the table and fiddled with the adhesive tape that pulled when I moved my mouth.

“What happened to your face?” the doctor said.

“I was in a car accident,” I said.

I don’t think about it very much anymore, what it felt like on the subway as I went from the clinic on the east side of Manhattan home to Brooklyn to make Robert a snack after school. That night I fell asleep planning my escape, and had a dream. I was running on the Coney Island boardwalk and I saw a little girl in a lime-green, ruffled bathing suit struggling in the waves. I ran to the edge of the ocean but two police officers were already there. “We’ll handle this, ma’am,” one of them said, and smiled at me. I turned around and started running again without looking back. It was quiet in my dream; there was no sound of the child, or the policemen splashing through the water.

She’d be six months old now. She’d be sitting up and babbling and laughing at her big brother’s funny faces. I can’t think about that too much. It’s the worst thing that Bobby did to me, or that I did to myself because of him. But I can think about it more now than I could before, when I just let my mind drop a curtain over it. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it in the car on the way to Cindy’s baby shower. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day long. I thought about it as Mike and I brought the food in through the cellar door, Craig meeting us, Chelsea behind him hauling Chad around like a sack of grain, limp and pale. “Let me down!” he shouted, but Chelsea paid him no mind.

“I put so much soda on ice I had to use a second tub for it,” Craig said. “The cake came and I put it in the fridge but it takes up all the room in there.”

“It has a sugar umbrella on it,” Chelsea said. “Can I have it after?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Where’s Robert?”

“He went on a camping trip with Mr. Castro and Bennie. Down to the Hidden Forest Game Preserve. Bennie’s dad said they might see alligators.”

“I don’t like alligators,” said Chelsea.

“Me neither.”

“Hi, Mr. Riordan,” Chelsea added.

I let Chelsea have what she wanted that day. The umbrella made her sick, what with the ribs and three cans of Coke, but I let her have it anyhow, even though it was pure spun sugar. We ate nearly all the food I’d made, the PTA mothers, two high school friends from Lakota, Mrs. Manford and two of her sisters, Cindy’s
aunts. Cindy had been out shopping with her mother and when she came in and saw the pile of boxes and the white lace umbrella hanging over the recliner in her den—I knew she’d kill me if we used the living room and spilled anything on the taupe carpet—she’d screamed and covered her face.

“I’m going to kill you for this, Beth, I swear I am,” she said. But I just smiled, and smiled some more seeing her round and flushed, with the big hard swell of her belly beneath her flared white blouse, the maternity clothes a big improvement from the time when I was pregnant with Robert almost thirteen years before, when everything had had lace and ribbons and flowers, as though to have a baby you had to look like one. Five months gone she was, but she looked more, because she was carrying twins. The sonogram said it was a boy and a girl, and she’d kept her pregnancy a secret for almost three months because the doctor wasn’t sure if they were going to make it.

“I could have lost them both,” she told me finally, and I thought of my lost child and then put the thought aside in the face of her happiness. She loved things to be special, Cindy, and twins are special. The boxes spilled forth duplicate treasures, two pairs of tiny denim overalls, two receiving blankets in soft flannel, two embroidered samplers, one pink, one blue. Two teddy bears, one in a bow tie and top hat, the other in a dress. “Oh, I love these,” Chelsea moaned, as Chad wadded up the wrapping paper and applauded every new gift.

I went into Cindy’s kitchen to refill the serving dishes she’d gotten as wedding presents, probably at a shower much like this one. I remembered going to Bermuda for a week with Buddy and Marie not long after I was married, and standing in the airport
looking at the cities on the departure board, and thinking that I could take the traveler’s checks and just go anywhere, Seattle, Cincinnati, Paris, Grand Rapids, Montego Bay, and start a whole new life. I don’t know why I thought it at that moment; Bobby and I were still in love then. Maybe everybody thinks it at some time or another, just thinks about becoming another person, giving up the law for a life as a golf pro, trading teaching for wait-ressing and life in the scorching Caribbean sun. I remember Bobby telling me about two cops he knew in missing persons, and how they’d gone looking for an English teacher from Queens, happy family man with a new car and a nice lawn, who just went missing one day. Two years later they found him in Australia, teaching English: he had a nice lawn and a new car and a wife named Shelley, which had been the name of the wife he’d had before.

It had seemed just a funny story then, but now I knew it was the essential truth about human nature. We’d traveled across the country, Robert and I, and in some way wound up where we’d been before. I looked at Robin Pearson, who was the secretary of the PTA, talking to Meghan Dickson’s mother, whose name I couldn’t ever remember. They might as well have been Marie and Terri. The thing you took into a new life with you was yourself, and so you made it so much like it had been before, used and, yes, even comfortable. When I looked across at Cindy, pulling silver wrapping from a big box, I felt a spasm of pain and grief for Grace.

“Oh, look,” Cindy said, unfolding a crib quilt, a pattern of hearts done in cross-stitch. She rummaged through the tissue for
a card, and finally Mrs. Manford, in a tight light voice, said, “That one’s from me, honey.”

It made me remember Ann Benedetto then, too, remember how she had once proposed a toast at Christmas to “her boys,” how she would give Bobby a cashmere sweater and a pair of outdoor boots, a book on baseball and a duffel bag, and hand me a bottle of perfume from the drugstore, even once a single pair of pantyhose in a size too big for me. I couldn’t help it; my face would flush at the baldness of the insult, just as Cindy’s face was flushing now, looking from the quilt to her mother and back again.

“It’s beautiful, Mom,” she said, but you could tell she was thinking what all the rest of us were thinking, that one blanket was an odd sort of gift for a woman expecting two babies. Especially for a woman who had once had two babies of her own. I looked at the aunts, Mrs. Manford’s sisters, but they were talking about the high school bond issue.

“Charlie and Cathy,” Cindy told me she was going to name them. She’d never told me the story about her sister, the one that had surely given an entire dusty farming town a way of describing her: “Cindy Manford, poor thing, you remember, the child whose twin sister—yes, identicals too—their poor mother …” Mrs. Manford was reapplying her lipstick. “I find the quilting really takes my mind off things,” she said.

There was a familiarity to it all, sharper, keener than anything that could be called déjà vu. It was just the way life is. Chad dirtied his diaper. Mrs. Manford asked Cindy why he wasn’t potty-trained. Robin Pearson said she hadn’t been able to potty-train
her son until he was four. One of Cindy’s high school friends said the preschool in Lakota, the good one at the Methodist Church, wouldn’t take them if they weren’t potty-trained. Chelsea said she was going to give the babies their baths. Mrs. Manford said she was too young. I said I’d help her. Cindy said she had to pee so often she might as well just stay in the bathroom. Her mother said she couldn’t sell Avon if she had to keep using the bathroom. It had been nine days since Robert had called his father, dialing the number we had made him memorize when he was six, in case of kidnappers. It was not that the fear I’d felt that night, as I heard that voice come out of the receiver, so smooth, so shocking, had gone away exactly. It just seemed so much less real than what was going on around me, the way Mrs. Levitt’s years in the camps seemed so much less real than the cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli on her shelves. Patty Bancroft had called me back, offered again to move us somewhere else, somewhere where we would be safe. But I’d realized, finally, that there was no safe place. “I’ll take my chances,” I’d said. I was on my own. This was my life.

“Look at all this loot,” said Craig slowly, hands on hips, as he helped stack the pile of boxes after all the guests were gone.

“Bless you, hon,” Cindy said, patting my shoulder. “I love you to pieces. Where’s Robert?”

“Camping with the Castros.”

“You got plans for tonight?”

“I’m going to bed early. This whole thing wore me out.”

“I got a better idea, but I better not tell you,” she said, looking into the kitchen, where Mike was eating leftover potato salad with his fingers.

“I appreciate your restraint.”

“Yeah, whatever. I got to pee.” She rubbed the small of her back, hunched over the pale-pink tablecloth I’d used for the dining-room table. “I’m going to need to get some stain remover on this right away,” she said. “Chad, baby, are these your barbecue fingerprints here? There better not be any on the back of my couch.”

“Happy birthday!” Chad shouted, spinning and falling onto his hands and knees, chortling.

“Did he drink Janice Dickson’s wine?” Cindy said.

“That’s her name!”

“Doesn’t she have diarrhea of the mouth? Goodness, that’s a terrible expression. I picked it up from Daddy.”

Mike drove me home. In the late afternoon’s faded light, he looked older somehow. “I’m going to have to get out to the course more if I want to get any good at golfing,” he said.

“Craig’s a nice man, isn’t he?”

“Really a good guy. He likes you, too.”