Black and Blue (8 page)

“We’ve arranged a job for you, Elizabeth,” Patty Bancroft said, as someone called a flight in the background.

“Beth,” I replied.

“Pardon?” said Patty Bancroft.

“Beth. Beth Crenshaw.”

A silence. “All right, then,” she said. “We’ve arranged a job for you, Beth. As a home health-care aide. Unfortunately you can’t work as a nurse without a nursing license, and that was difficult to arrange. This was as close as we could get. The wages aren’t bad. No benefits, sorry to say, but it’s the best we could do. They’ll call tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I wondered. I’m going a little crazy here, with nothing to do.”

“You must be patient,” she said. “We know how to do this.”

“I don’t even know my own phone number,” I added.

“Well, that was an oversight.” She read the numbers to me slowly. “Don’t give it to more people than you must,” she added.

Secrecy, Patty Bancroft had said when she came to speak at the hospital, was the hallmark of her organization. No stray piece of paper, no phone number, no newspaper clipping, could give her volunteers away as they spirited women out of their own homes and into the anonymous America where Robert and I were now living. Along the main stretch of highway in Lake Plata, or what I’ve seen of it without a car, is a Burger King, a storage place, a drive-through bank, a Taco Bell, a House of Pancakes, an enormous supermarket with a salad bar just inside the automatic
doors, a Toys ‘R’ Us, a Kmart, and a Home Depot. The only way I’m certain we’re in Florida is the license plates on the cars; otherwise it might be September in Colorado or California or either of the Carolinas. Generic America, 97° and sunny. “Thank you for stopping at Burger King,” says an older man with a Spanish accent when I take Robert out for lunch every Saturday, hoping that the sameness of the bun, the burger, the decor, the logo, the greeting, will make this strange and unfamiliar life feel less strange, more familiar.

“Is there anybody who lives in Florida who’s really from Florida?” I said to Cindy as we sipped at decaf.

“Well, me, actually,” she said apologetically, as though it was a character defect.

Secrecy, Patty Bancroft had told us at the hospital, is the secret of her success. I know all about keeping secrets. There is no one in the world who knows the topography of my injuries, who knows all the secrets of my body. There is no one in the world who knows that my husband twisted my wrists, pushed me down the stairs, broke my collarbone, and, finally, my nose. Not my mother, who seemed to lose interest in me after I married, as though I was her responsibility only until I could be handed on to someone else. Not my sister, who saw me only when I could arrange it, which is to say when I could lift a sandwich without wincing. Not my friend Winnie, although she had treated more women like me than either of us could count. Only Bobby knows it all, but he always said I exaggerated. Mountain out of a molehill. That’s one of his favorite expressions.

My son knows some of it, but he knows it in his own peculiar way, in some closed-up closed-down corner of his mind. I’m
afraid over the years he’s developed a strange kind of color blindness. At some point he stopped being able to see black and blue.

Secrecy, secrecy. As I listen to the sound of her voice on the phone I can picture Patty Bancroft adjusting the triple strand of pearls she wears on TV, wore that day at the hospital, that hide the lines around her neck and complement her pretty pink-and-white skin. Winnie had invited her to South Bay in February to talk to the senior staff. We’d had three women die in our emergency room in a single year. One had fallen out of a window when her boyfriend came at her with a box cutter, another had had a bottle broken over her head by her husband, and a third had been shot with a Saturday night special by a man she’d divorced the year before. All three women had had restraining orders against the men who finally killed them, legal papers saying that the men had to keep away. Maybe they were the last three women in New York to know what all emergency-room nurses know, and cops’ wives know, too: that restraining orders are a joke, made, as they say, to be broken. One of the tabloids did a big story about the three women, about the hospital and what it had done for them, and what it had failed to do.

“Here’s a story about the hospital,” Bobby had said, shoveling in his eggs before going out on an undercover narcotics assignment. He’d sipped at his coffee, glanced up and seen the look on my face, thrown the paper down and then his fork, too, so that it skipped across the surface of the china and landed tines down on the tablecloth. “You take yourself too fucking seriously, Frannie,” he’d said, putting on the army camouflage jacket he wore when he was supposed to be a druggie. “You didn’t used to be like that.”

God, how many conversations I had with Bobby Benedetto inside
my own head, so many words bouncing around, fighting, dying to get out and instead dying on the vine like one of the squash he planted in our little backyard after the black bugs got to them. I didn’t used to be like that because you didn’t used to hit me quite so hard, Bob, I’d say silently. I didn’t used to be like that because I didn’t have to call in sick or stay away from my own sister, with her sharp eyes and sharp mind. Or see my son look at a welt on my arm, a welt like the shadow of a hand, and see the question form in his mind and watch as he shoved it back into the closet where he keeps his fear of his father and his fears for his mother. And for himself.

Talking to myself, always talking to myself. I didn’t used to be like that when I was younger, Bob, twenty and twenty-one and full of dreams and plans and love, because the good times overwhelmed the bad and your hands were gentle more often than they pushed and jabbed. You’d take me out to that restaurant on City Island and you’d talk to me, not about anything important, just like you thought I was your friend. You’d tell me about the lady you met who’d been standing naked, all 320 pounds of her, in her kitchen on a hot, hot New York City afternoon when some young guy with burglary tools tried to climb in her window. When you told her to cover up she said, “Well, I figured I shouldn’t be touching nothing at the scene of the crime.” And we’d laugh until the tears ran down our cheeks into our shrimp fra diavolo. Or you’d tell me how you shoved some punk up against the wall, a kid who’d grabbed a television set from the old Jewish man who’d said he’d never move his appliance store from the old neighborhood, and how you’d discovered the punk had enough warrants to really put him away, not like the other times,
the times when you finished your paperwork and then cruised by the projects and saw the guy you’d busted just sitting out by the hydrant with a big smile on his face. And I’d look at you, with your dark skin and eyes and heavy brows and big bottom lip, the inside the color of a red grape, and think what I’d thought when Tommy Dolan introduced us at that bar down by the water my first year in nursing school, when I was nineteen, when Tommy said, “You got to meet Frannie Flynn. Everybody likes her.” I’d think that you were the best-looking man I’d ever seen.

And, maybe seeing that thought in my eyes, seeing yourself in my eyes, so big and strong and sure of himself, that Bobby Benedetto, always a crowd around him at the bar, listening to his stories, buying him drinks—seeing yourself like that in my eyes, you’d take my hand across the table. And you’d even listen to a few of my stories, too. Although that stopped after a while; you gradually stopped listening and I stopped talking the last couple of years, when you were so angry all the time instead of just occasionally. When you’d been passed over for a couple of promotions and there hadn’t been another baby, when you’d wrecked one car and talked your way out of a DWI, given a free ride by the two young cops at the scene after they saw your badge. A thousand small disappointments, a half dozen big ones, and you’d stopped talking about the people trying to keep their sons out of trouble in the projects, the teenage girls taking good care of their babies, and started talking all the time about the spics and the jigs, the people you busted and I patched up. They live like animals, you’d say, and you’d look around our house, with the flowered couches and the flowered drapes and the flowered canisters lined up on
the kitchen counter, flour, sugar, coffee, tea. You always liked things to be so neat, just like at your mother’s. “The baby’s got fingerprints all over this coffee table,” you yelled upstairs one Sunday morning before your friends were coming over for football and lasagna. “You know where to find the Windex,” I yelled back.

What possessed me? What possessed me, after the guys were gone, to say, “When Jackie Ferrin chews, you can hear him in the next room.”

“Jackie’s a good man,” you said.

“He still eats like a pig.”

“Yeah, God forbid anyone should offend your ears, huh, Fran? Plus he scratches himself sometimes, right? That’s it, let’s take him off the guest list. Jackie Ferrin’s got God knows how many goddamn decorations for bravery, but he scratches his balls and chews with his mouth open.”

“I’m going to bed,” I’d said. “I’ll do the dishes in the morning.”

“We’ll have roaches all over the goddamn kitchen. And with the new carpeting we got no money left over for an exterminator.”

And on, and on, and on, about nothing, until finally he shoved me into the kitchen table so hard I fell and cracked my collarbone. “Jesus Christ, Fran, I was just a little lit,” he said the next day, but it was past the time when he would take me in his arms to say it. The Bobby he saw in my eyes now was no hero. My eyes had become a funhouse mirror that reflected back a grotesque. For two weeks he laid off the beer and came home early from work. He even took Robert out a couple of times by himself. “The boys’ll go to the park and give Mom a rest,” he said. Things were good
there for almost a year. It was my first broken bone; I think maybe that scared him. But I knew he’d try again, and again, and yet again to wipe that look off my face, that reflection of himself in my eyes.

“Women who have had this happen need to understand that domestic violence has nothing to do with them, with what they did or didn’t do,” Patty Bancroft had told the hospital auditorium full of doctors and nurses, advising them on how to treat their patients, how to get them help. It was like listening to an oncologist give a case history when you were rotten with cancer. I spent so many nights listening to the sound of Bobby’s breathing in the dark and trying to figure out what had happened, whether it was his mother or his father, Robert’s birth or envy over the big collar some other guy had made. Or the booze. Or the raise I got that meant I was making $900 more than he was every year, 900 lousy dollars they could have back at the hospital for all I cared.

“Hey, Frances Ann,” he said, doing our taxes at the desk in the little den overlooking the alley behind the house, “you make more money than I do.” And a shiver went all through me. I could read his voice as well as I could read an X ray.

I think that was the night I realized I could never merely divorce or leave him the way other women could leave their husbands, knew he would never let me go. I was packing Robert’s school lunch, making a peanut-butter sandwich with no jelly, quartering an apple, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a beer.

“What, the kid can’t eat an apple like everyone else?” he said, watching me.

“He likes it cut up.”

“You baby him.” That’s what Bobby always said about Robert. “You baby him.”

The phone rang, I remember, and he sighed because he thought it was someone from work, and it was, but mine, not his. “Hey, nurse,” Ben Samuels had said. That’s how he always greeted me, at the hospital. Hey, nurse. Hey, doctor. He was a good doctor. He always touched the patients when he talked to them. He always looked into their eyes.

“Hi,” I said, looking at Bobby.

“Remember that book on spiritual healing we talked about a couple of weeks ago?” Ben Samuels said. “There’s a documentary about it on PBS tonight. In about a half an hour. I thought you’d like to take a look at it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “See you tomorrow.” I could tell by the silence that he was puzzle by my brusqueness. I had my back to Bobby as I hung the phone up. Every phone call was like espionage by that time.

“That was Winnie,” I said. “About some documentary on spiritual healing on TV at ten.”

“What the hell is spiritual healing?”

“The idea that the power of the mind can overcome illness as effectively as medical treatment. We’ve been talking about it at the hospital.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Bobby said. He went to the refrigerator, opened another beer, rubbed against me as he went back to the table and sat back down, lifted his beer in the Bobby Benedetto patented lift, drank deep. His sweat smelled like beer
at night, his sweat and his breath. He looked up at me. “Who did you say that was?” he said.

“Winnie.”

“It didn’t sound like Winnie from where I was sitting.”

At ten I turned on the television and sat down on the couch. Bobby dropped into his lounge chair. “Give me the remote, Fran,” he said. He had another beer in his hand. Two minutes of narration and he shook his head. “Can the human mind control the human body?” said a voice, and Bobby switched to the Sports Channel. Ah, what a rare pair we were.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“You didn’t really want to watch that shit, did you?” he called after me.

“Actually, I did.”

“Bring me another beer, all right, Frances?”

I carried another bottle of Bud into the living room, leaving fingerprints on the icy bottle.

“You couldn’t open it?”

“For God’s sakes, Bobby, it’s a twist-off cap. Even if it wasn’t, you could probably get it off without an opener.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I’d carried the empty back into the kitchen and didn’t answer. When I turned from the trash he was standing in the doorway. He looked good when he was drunk. I’d noticed it when he was younger. His eyes glittered and his mouth went slack in a way that had once made me warm and willing and now made me very, very careful. Most of the time.