Black and Blue (3 page)

“Metroliner!” called a uniformed man at the head of the stairs, and the woman picked up her coffee and wheeled her suitcase to the stairway without looking back. I sat down heavily on the bench and opened the envelope.

“God!” groaned Robert, hunched back over his game.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said.

Inside the envelope were two tickets to Baltimore on the 4:00
PM
Metroliner. I looked at the big digital clock and the wall timetable. 3:12, and the next Metroliner was ON TIME. There were other things in the envelope, too: bus tickets, a driver’s license,
Social Security cards. For a moment I was blind with confusion, and then I found the names: Crenshaw, Elizabeth. Crenshaw, Robert.

I had not liked it when Patty Bancroft gave me orders on the phone, but now I felt a powerful sense of gratitude. She had let me have my way in at least one thing: Robert had gotten to keep his own first name.

And I was to be Elizabeth. Liz. Beth. Libby. Elizabeth Crenshaw. Seeing myself reflected in the glass of the coffee kiosk, I could almost believe it. There she was, Elizabeth Crenshaw. She had short blond hair, a pixie crop that I’d created with kitchen scissors and hair dye in the bathroom just before sun-up, just after I heard the door shut behind Bobby as he left for work. She wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses bought from a rack at the pharmacy, clear glass with the kind of cheap sheen to the lenses that turned the eyes behind them into twin slicks of impenetrable glare. Elizabeth Crenshaw was thin, all long bones and taut muscles, because Fran Benedetto had been running for more than a decade and because terror had made it hard for her, these last few years, to eat without feeling the food rise back up into her gorge at a word, a sound, a look. “Skin and bones,” Bobby said sometimes when I was naked, reaching for me.

It had taken me a while, that morning, to decide what to wear, but I was accustomed to being concerned with my own clothes, even though I didn’t care about them much, not like Bobby’s mother, who was forever seeking discount silk and cashmere, trousers cut perfectly to her tiny frame, jackets and skirts with good linings and labels. Much of the time I wore my nurse’s uniform, the white washing out my thin freckled skin and making a
garish orange of my hair. But let me change into anything snug, or short, or low, and I would see Bobby’s eyes go narrow and bright. Although it was always hard to tell exactly what would offend until the moment when he put his head to one side and looked me up and down until my pale skin flushed. “Jesus Christ,” he’d say in that voice. “You wearing that?” And I would feel like a whore, me, plain Frannie Benedetto, who had been up half the night with her little boy who had a stomach bug, who had been on her feet all day carrying syringes and gauze pads and clipboards and pills, calming down the drunks and hysterics, stopping to talk to the children, placating the doctors. Fran Benedetto, who had never been with a man other than her husband. But let her wear a blouse whose fabric suggested the faintest hint of slip strap, and all of a sudden she was a slut. Slip strap over bra strap, of course, for if I wore a skirt and didn’t wear a full slip, the way Bobby’s mother always had, there was no telling what Bobby might do. It was funny, after a while: I could tell you what Bobby liked and didn’t like, what might set him off and how much. But I couldn’t have told you as much about myself. I was mostly reaction to Bobby’s actions, at least by the end. My clothes, my makeup: they were more or less his choice. I bought them, of course, but bought them with one eye always on Bobby’s face. And his hands.

But Beth Crenshaw I would create myself, without reference to Bobby. I started to create her even before I found out her name in the waiting room at Thirtieth Street Station. Beth Crenshaw wore a loose, long flowered dress I’d found in the back of my closet from two summers before, the sort of dress that Bobby always said made women look like grandmothers. Bobby’s own
grandmother, his father’s mother, always wore black, even to picnics and street fairs. “C’mere, Fran,” she’d yell across her daughter-in-law’s white-on-white living room, where she sat like a big blot of ink on the couch. She’d fold herself around me and cover me in black, make me feel small and safe. “Aw, God bless you, you’re too thin,” she’d say. “She’s too thin, Bob. You need to make her eat.” She’d died just before Robert was born, Bobby’s Nana. I missed her. Maybe it would have happened anyhow, but I think Bobby got harder after that. Harsher, too.

“The reason you hooked up with me,” I said to Bobby once, when we were young, “is because my red hair and white skin look good next to your black hair and your tan.”

“That was part of it,” he said. That was a good day, that day. We played miniature golf at a course owned by a retired narcotics guy in Westchester, had dinner at that Italian place in Pelham, made out in the car at a rest stop on the Saw Mill River Parkway. Both of us living with our parents, he in the Police Academy, me in nursing school: we had no place else to go. The first time we had sex it was in a cabana at that skanky beach club his mother liked; a friend of his from high school who vacuumed the pool let us stay after closing. It didn’t hurt, I didn’t bleed. I loved it. I loved how helpless it made him, big bad tanned muscled Bobby Benedetto, his mouth open, the whites of his eyes showing. It made me want to sit on his lap the rest of my life.

He talked about getting a tattoo on his shoulder, a rose and the word
Frances
. I said I’d get
Yosemite Sam
on my upper thigh. “The hell you will,” he said. It turned out I didn’t need it; Bobby tattooed me himself, with his hands.

“Red hair is too conspicuous,” Patty Bancroft had said on the
phone. It had been the only conspicuous thing about me, all these years. Smart, but not too. Enterprising, but not too. Friendly, but not too. The kind of girl who becomes a nurse, not a doctor. The kind of nurse who becomes assistant head, but not head nurse. The kind of wife—well, no one knew about that.

“There’s still some good years left on her,” Bobby would say when his friends came over, and they’d laugh. It was the way they all talked about their wives, and I wondered, looking at their flushed and friendly faces, if they were thinking of bones that had not yet been broken, areas that had not yet blossomed with bruises.

And they looked at me and saw a happy wife and mother like so many others, a working woman like so many others. Fran Flynn—you know, the skinny redhead who works in the ER at South Bay. Frannie Benedetto, the cop’s wife on Beach Twelfth Street, the one with the little boy with the bowlegs. Gone down the drain that morning. Transformed, perhaps forever, by Loving Care No. 27, California Blonde. Hidden behind the glasses. Disguised by the flapping folds of the long dress. California blonde Elizabeth Crenshaw, with nothing but thin milky skin and faint constellations of freckles on chest and cheeks to connect her to Frances Ann Flynn Benedetto. A bruise on my right cheek, faded to yellow, and a bump on the bridge of my nose. And Robert, of course, the only thing I’d had worth taking with me from that tidy house, where Bobby liked to walk on the carpeting barefoot and I cleaned up the blood with club soda and Clorox before the stain set. Beth. I liked Beth. I was leaving, I was starting over again, I was saving my life, I was sick of the fear and the fists. And I was keeping my son safe, too, not because his father had ever hit
him—he never ever had—but because the secret inside our house, the secret about what happened at night, when Daddy was drunk and disgusted with himself and everything around him, was eating the life out of Robert. When he was little he would touch a bruise softly, say, “You boo-boo, Mama?” When he got a little older he sometimes said, narrowing his big black eyes, “Mommy, how did you hurt yourself?”

But now he only looked, as though he knew to be quiet, as though he thought this was the way life was. My little boy, who had always had something of the little old man about him, was becoming a dead man, too, with a dead man’s eyes. There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around. I’d learned that from watching my father, and my husband, too. I wasn’t going to let it happen to my son.

Frances couldn’t. Beth wouldn’t. That’s who I was now. Frances Ann Flynn Benedetto was always watching and waiting, scared of her husband, scared he would turn on her, hit her, finally knock her out for good. Scared to leave her son with no mother to raise him, only a father whose idea of love was bringing you soup after he’d broken your collarbone. Frannie Flynn was gone. I’d killed her myself. I was Beth Crenshaw now.

Beneath the rippling skirt I could feel my legs trembling as an announcer with a sonorous voice called out the trains. But I could feel my legs, too, feel them free. No slip. I’d left that goddamn slip behind.

Frannie Flynn—that’s how I’d thought of myself again, even though my last name was legally Benedetto. The name on my checks, on my license, on the embossed plastic name tag I wore on the breast of my nurse’s uniform. Frances F. Benedetto. But in
my mind I’d gone back to being Frannie Flynn. Maybe Bobby knew that. Maybe he could read my mind. Maybe that was part of the problem, that he could read my mind and I never had a clue what was going on in his.

Frannie, Frannie, Fran. I heard his voice saying my name, like the ringing in my ears when he brought his open hand hard against the side of my head in a dark corner of the club foyer, that time I argued with him in front of his friends about whether we were staying for another round of beers at a retirement party. Fran. I can hear his voice in the sound of the train moving south down the tracks. I’m coming, Frannie. You can’t get away. You’re mine, Fran. Both of you.

I
still can’t figure out why everyone in New York talks about Florida as if it’s a cross between Paris and Lourdes. The pilgrimages to Disney World, the fabled retirement condos in Lauderdale. “Moira Doherty, now she’s got a life,” one of the cop wives said at a barbecue. “Kevin put in his time and now there they are, not even fifty yet, in Boca, both of them working parttime. She gave me her rabbit jacket. I won’t be needing it, hon, she said. Nice and warm down here, even in January. What a racket.”

Maybe Moira’s lying on a lounge chair watching the sun on the water, but Robert and I wound up in a garden apartment court in a dusty town called Lake Plata, almost an hour’s drive to the ocean. Or that’s what I’m told; I don’t have a car, so I wouldn’t know. There’s an irony for you: I went from Brooklyn to Florida and wound up trading down, exchanging a house with the Atlantic at the end of the block, shimmering between two rows of attached imitation brickfronts like a mirage, for a square of gravel studded with gnarled bushes, no water in sight except for the pools that sit outside the motels on the highway. There’s a flatness to Florida, or at least this part of it. It makes me feel like I’m in one of those rooms in a horror film, where the ceiling lowers and lowers and the floor rises, trapping you, squishing you flat. Although, come to think of it, that’s the way I’d felt in my own living
room for a long time, whenever I heard the sound of Bobby’s Trans Am pulling into the garage beneath the couch and the carpeted floor.

When we got to Florida and Robert and I stepped inside the apartment Patty Bancroft’s people had arranged for us, I’d realized it reminded me of the apartments I’d lived in when I was a kid. I could almost smell the bland steam that was the smell of cooking in my parents’ house. I could almost hear the soft
woosh
of my father sucking oxygen hungrily through the heavy black rubber mask. And I could almost see the notes my mother left for me next to the stove in her angular handwriting and then in Gregg shorthand once she’d made me take the secretarial course at Queen of Peace: white wash, ham butt, drugstore. Frannie’s “To Do” list. My mother had needed to work for as long as I could remember. And so, as a result, had I.

Robert had known the worst as soon as we stepped inside the place, as soon as he looked around at the dim
L
-shaped living room with a wood-grain dinette in the short arm of the
L
, seen the nubby tweed couch, the kind that’s supposed to be stain-resistant but couldn’t possibly look any worse with a stain or two. He tried to pull up the blinds until I told him sharply to get away from the window. “Are we going to Disney World?” he’d asked, back when we were taking the IRT from Brooklyn to Manhattan and then again as we drove from Manhattan south to Philadelphia in the old Volare, its driver wordless behind the wheel. Now he knew the answer.

On the train from Philadelphia to Baltimore he’d fallen asleep open-mouthed, his face mirrored in the window, and he’d slept on
the bus we took from Baltimore to Atlanta. The bus tickets had been tucked into the envelope behind the Metroliner tickets.

“Mom, where are we?” Robert had said when we got off the bus in Atlanta, his eyes dim with sleep and fatigue.

“You must be the Crenshaws,” said a short woman whose car was parked at the curb, a minivan full of children’s car seats. “Yes,” I said, and Robert had looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Where are we going?” he’d said again, more insistently. The woman ignored him, glided over his words with her own as though she was used to doing it. “I’ve got a nice snack for you in the back,” she said cheerily.

She was kind, that woman, although she talked for three hours straight about her show dogs, corgis, just like the ones the queen of England had. She was nervous, but she’d brought some juice, some crackers, and an apple for Robert, and a blessed thermos of coffee for me. Robert got carsick twice, throwing up on the shoulder of the highway while I rubbed the sweet spot between his shoulder blades and the dog breeder called, “Hurry up, hurry up!”

“How did you get into this work?” I’d asked after Robert had fallen asleep again, after the woman had finished feeding me the false biography to go with my new name, finished filling me in on the made-up life in Wilmington, Delaware, and Robert Crenshaw, Sr., the estranged husband who was an accountant. “How do you know Mrs. Bancroft?”

She’d turned on the radio. “Didn’t they tell you not to talk about any of that?” she said.