Object Lessons

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she heard her mother-in-law say. “Is Tom there, dear?”

  “He’s at work.”

  “Oh, dear. Has he talked to James?”

  “I don’t know. I just talked to Monica.”

  “You did?” said Mary Frances, her voice trembling. “How did she sound?”

  “Haughty.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She sounded fine,” Connie said, lying back on the bed. Joseph began to chew the telephone cord.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on anymore,” Mary Frances said, and to Connie she sounded pitiful.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Connie said, and meant it.

  “Do you? Oh, good. Oh dear … well, I suppose I’d better call Tommy. Is he still at the cement company, or has he started working with Mark already? I don’t know; your father-in-law told me he was starting in the business, but he didn’t tell me when.”

  There was a long silence, and finally Connie said slowly, “I don’t know exactly where he is. He doesn’t know anything about this.”

  “I know, dear. It’s just a help to talk to him. He’s a good boy.” There was another long silence, filled by the labored breathing, and then Mary Frances said in a rush, “Of course, the boys do marry, and then what have you got? ‘A son’s yours till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’ I’ve heard that many times and the other day it was in Dear Abby, can you imagine, so it must be true. ‘A daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’ You should remember that.”

  Connie felt as though she had walked in on Mary Frances naked, as though for the first time she was seeing beneath the pale bouclé coats and the hats with the little veils. She could remember John Scanlan joking about what a flibbertigibbet his wife had been when he first met her—“diarrhea of the mouth,” he once had said, and both James and Connie had winced—but Connie had never known that girl, only the woman who sometimes watched her family with bright, apprehensive eyes as she passed around the cocktail franks.

  Finally Mary Frances said again, “Tom was a good boy.”

  “He still is,” Connie replied, her empathy evaporating.

  “Of course, dear,” Mary Frances said, her voice a little firmer, more like her old self. “I’ll call him now.”

  When she hung up Connie put her hands back down on the spread and stroked it again, up and down. Joseph was beginning to breathe regularly; his black eyes were only slits in his chubby pink face. From below the window came the honk of a horn, then another. The baby’s eyes opened slowly.

  “Oh, good,” Connie said to herself, jumping up and brushing her hair. “Want to go for a ride, Jojo?”

  “Ride,” Joseph said as she scooped him up.

  “Go bye bye,” said Connie.

  “Bye bye,” said Joseph, waving at the bed.

  Joey Martinelli was sitting in the car in the driveway, and as she came out he moved over to give her the driver’s seat. She put Joseph in the back, where he curled up and began to suck his thumb. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life,” Connie said, and they drove in silence until they reached the empty parking lot of the public high school, a squat building tinted aquamarine after the misguided architectural style of public buildings of the 1950s. Connie felt that by now she knew the big rectangle of asphalt by heart. She’d done sixty miles an hour on it, stomping on the brakes just short of the grass; she’d learned to accelerate coming out of a curve and had practiced doing a K-turn over and over again. The skid marks in one corner were hers from two weeks before. Now she was working on parallel parking.

  Joey got out of the car, took two sawhorses from the trunk and placed them a good distance apart at the end of the lot, just in from the grass. Getting back in, he said quietly, “I’m glad to see you, too.” Connie thought his voice sounded strange, but when she looked at him his face was turned away, toward the athletic field and the stand of trees at its edge.

  “Could you go and direct me, like the other times?” Connie said.

  He looked at her and smiled. “Nope. Your test is next week. Today you do it yourself.”

  “What if I scratch your car?”

  “You won’t scratch my car,” he said.

  The only sound was the breathy snoring of the baby in the back seat. Connie pulled forward, backed up, cut the wheel, pulled in, straightened the car. Then she did it again. Each time she imagined the crunchy sound of the back wheels running over a sawhorse, like the sound a Fifth Avenue candy bar made when you bit into it. She was sure parallel parking was like algebra; she knew she would never need it, but she had to do it to pass the test. After half an hour her arms hurt. “I need a break,” she said, opening her door, looking down, and seeing with pleasure that she was only six inches from the grass and that the car was perfectly parallel with the edge of the blacktop. She let her head fall back against the seat, and lifted her hair up off the sides of her face. She could feel her thighs sticking to the leatherette upholstery.

  “My niece calls to say she’s getting married in a hurry, which means she’s pregnant,” she said. “Then my mother-in-law calls and starts talking about what she’s read in Dear Abby. What an afternoon.” She did not add that Mary Frances had suggested that Tommy was taking a new job, a job Connie knew nothing about, a job that filled her with fear and rage. She somehow felt that discussing Tommy with Joey would be disloyal.

  Joey laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the Scanlan family to me,” he said.

  “I know. But who knows what really goes on with other people? My father-in-law, who’s Superman, is in the hospital. My mother-in-law, Emily Post, is reading Dear Abby. Tommy’s brother’s daughter, who has never been seen in public with a spot on her dress or her hair uncurled, turns up pregnant. And my own daughter, who seemed as if she’d stay a kid forever, has two fancy grown-up bathing suits in the bottom of her underwear drawer and goes out at night to talk to boys in those damn houses you’re building.”

  “She does?”

  “They all do.”

  “Ask her if she knows who’s setting these fires. They burned down an entire garage last night. If there’d been a breeze, it would have taken half a block with it.”

  Connie sighed. “My God, what a summer. Will we live through it? I feel like all hell started to break loose as soon as you showed up.”

  “Hey,” Joey said, “don’t blame me.”

  “I don’t blame anyone for anything. People just believe what they want. That if you’re a kid, you’ll stay that way forever. That if you look like a Shirley Temple doll, you’re a good girl. You live in a big house, everything’s fine.” Connie shrugged. “You know who my husband’s family thought I was going to be like? Doris Delgaudio.”

  Connie and Joey both began to laugh. Doris Delgaudio had lived down the block from the Martinellis. She had worn red lipstick as thick as her ankles, crystal costume jewelry, and Capri pants. When she walked, her bottom swayed from one side of the sidewalk to the other, and she made a noise like Oriental wind chimes from the sound of all the crystal knocking together.

  “I swear,” Connie said, gasping for air, “the Scanlans were all waiting for me to fill the house with crushed velvet and red curtains, waiting to see if I’d stamp grapes with my bare feet in the backyard. I think what bothers them as much as anything else is that I didn’t turn out to be what they expected. Their son married a guinea, she ought to at least act like a guinea. I think it drives them crazy, that I’m not one thing or another.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Joey said, “you’re terrific.”

  For just a moment, before it happened, Connie could see what was coming, but in the same way she was always convinced people who were hit by a bus froze in the middle of the street, she found herself incapable of doing anything about it. She saw his face move, then his arm and his shoulder, and then he had his arm around her and he was kissing her. Her mouth opened in amazement and she could feel his teeth.

  I
t was the oddest feeling, being kissed by someone who wasn’t Tommy. She kissed him back, and her body warmed and she shifted a little in her seat so she was turned toward him. She put her hand on the back of his neck and felt the short hairs, and try as she might, all she could think, while pleasure welled within her, was: This is different from Tommy. And this. And this. He put one hand on her bare knee and she felt a throb inside her groin, and then in her stomach.

  “Oh, my God,” he groaned, “you are so beautiful.”

  She imagined this was what she had read about in Reader’s Digest, an out-of-body experience. She felt that she was looking at herself from somewhere near the inside light of the car, and thinking: Why, it’s true. I look wonderful, all white whites and black blacks. Joey ran his thumb over one of her nipples, and the her that was still inside her body felt her joints grow warm. She whimpered softly. She had forgotten all about the baby in the back seat. When he put his hand between her legs she started to slide down, her shoulders jammed between the steering wheel and the seat, and the woman watching it all, the other woman she was, thought to herself, “This is exactly the spot I was in when I got pregnant the first time.” She did not know whether it was the power of that suggestion, or the prone position, or the hormones that-flooded her body as her excitement rose, but she suddenly realized she was going to be sick.

  She opened the door of the car with one hand over her head and lurched out somehow onto the grass. She gagged a little, and the ground beneath her felt liquid.

  When she got back into the car she left her door open because of the sharp vinegar scent of her mouth. Joey was sitting with his head in his hands, and she felt so sorry for what had happened that she started to reach out to stroke his hair and then stopped in midair. She wondered what would have happened if her stomach had not betrayed—or saved—her. When he finally looked up, she could see herself again in his dark eyes; her hair was ruffled and she looked seventeen, and beautiful.

  “My being sick had nothing to do with you,” she said. “From what I remember about kissing, you’re a good kisser.” She tried to laugh but no sound came out and he kept his head down. “I always feel sick like that when I’m going to have a baby.”

  “You’re pregnant?” he said, and when she saw how dead his eyes looked she knew that she had been careless and mean without even suspecting it. Marriage had done that to her, she thought. Marriage had made her feel so safe and inviolate that she had felt free to let some man drive her around without ever thinking about how he might feel. It had made her secure enough to be surly with her husband and to ridicule his family. Once she had thought being married would make her part of a group, but instead it seemed to have made her a person so complete that she could refuse to look outside her own borders. Or maybe this was how she had become whole, by doing something selfish and wrong, just for herself, just so she could see herself in the mirror for the first time in her life and say: Ah. There you are.

  “I thought you knew,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  She supposed that was how it looked to someone from the outside when you complained about your life, when you were lonely and confused. It looked as if you were ready to leave, as if you were looking for something else. She knew that was how Monica would think of her own marriage, would think that something you were forced to do, something that you hated sometimes, could not be something you might want. But she would be wrong to think that.

  In the back seat the baby started making the wet sucking noises that meant he was waking up. Connie closed the door on her side. “I need to get home,” she said softly, and she smiled at him.

  “You drive,” he said, and he looked out the window again, his chin in his hand.

  When they pulled into the driveway, Maggie was sitting on the front steps. When she saw her mother she went inside. Connie thought again about how marriage could make you feel safe enough to hurt people without even knowing it.

  “I’ll come and get you for the test next week,” Joey said.

  “I don’t think so,” Connie said. “I think I’ll go myself.”

  “You can’t do that. You can’t drive without a licensed driver.”

  “I’ll get Celeste,” Connie said. “Or Tommy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joey said. “I really feel like a jerk.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Connie said.

  “Yeah.”

  Connie lifted Joseph out of the back seat. “You’re not a jerk,” she said. “You’re a great guy. I meant what I said about being a good kisser, too. You’re going to make somebody a terrific husband.”

  His face hardened, and for the first time that afternoon, he looked mean. “You sound like my mother,” he said, and there was no humor in his voice.

  “That’s a good way to think of me.”

  “No. I meant what I said. I don’t care about the other thing. About the baby.”

  “It’s a pretty major problem,” said Connie with a tight smile.

  “It didn’t feel like a major problem back there,” Joey replied, and Connie felt that warmth again.

  “I’m a married woman.” Connie could hear the quaver in her voice.

  “You didn’t feel so married back there. Admit it, Connie; you made a mistake. You and I, we’re the same kind of person.”

  “I’m not sure what kind of person I am,” Connie said.

  “You’re the kind of person who should be appreciated. You’re not the kind of person who should be treated like some kind of outsider.”

  “Maybe I’ll always be some kind of an outsider,” she said. “Maybe that’s the kind of person I am.” She turned and began to walk into the house. When she looked back over her shoulder, he was staring at her. “Thanks for teaching me to drive,” she said.

  “That’s not enough,” he said, starting the engine. He leaned out of the window.

  “I’m coming back,” he said.

  “We forgot the sawhorses.”

  “I’m not coming back for any sawhorses. I’m coming back for you. I’d worry about taking you away from the Scanlans, but they never had you in the first place.”

  Connie looked at him levelly. “I’m a married woman,” she repeated.

  “Arrivederci, Concetta Mazza,” Joey said, and he peeled out of the driveway, leaving two heavy black stripes of rubber tread behind him.

  16

  THE FRONT HALLWAY OF THE HOUSE HAD a faint odor, a pleasant mixture of wax, cut grass, and what Tommy supposed was the smell of emptiness, a musky smell that was a bit like the smell of the classrooms in the Catholic boys’ high school he’d gone to. Everything he did echoed: closing the heavy oak door, walking across the parquet floor, placing the freshly cut key, its edges still a little sharp, on the white wooden mantel in the living room. The only thing in the house was a bottle of window cleaner on the kitchen counter, left there by the black woman who took the train up from the Bronx to clean his mother’s house once a week.

  The living room was long and cool even in the summer heat, with four big windows along the outside wall and the brick fireplace across from them, with small flowered tiles laid on the hearth and cabinets built in on either side. Across the hall was a dining room with wood paneling halfway up the walls. The kitchen was enormous, with room for a big table and lots of chairs. Beyond it was a screened porch, and a yard with grass so smooth and green it looked like a golf course.

  Tommy had gone to Sal’s for lunch and hadn’t had the heart to go back to the office, where Buddy Phelan kept looking at him sideways, wondering when he was going to say that he was leaving. He’d had lunch alone at Sal’s, a roast-beef sandwich and a draft beer. He liked to eat alone, although he never admitted it. It seemed an eccentric kind of thing, like something you heard murderers had liked to do before anyone found out they were murderers. But after years of sharing a table, first with his four brothers and his sister, then with his wife and children, he found it soothing to sit with the Daily News propped between his plate and his cup and eat his sandwich
without having to talk to anyone.

  Sometimes, while he had his coffee, he and Sal would talk. He thought that Sal must be lonely, living upstairs above the bar in two rooms, alone since his mother died three years before. Sal was an only child, and now an orphan. Whenever Tommy tried to think about that, it was like imagining a man from Mars. Tommy thought how quiet it must be upstairs, and how Sal must have all night to read the papers, even the box scores for teams not in New York.

  That morning Sal had just looked at him. Finally he said, “Word is you’re getting a promotion.”

  “Word is sometimes wrong,” Tommy said.

  “I’d miss you,” Sal said, wiping the bar with his rag. “But don’t cut off your nose to spite your dad, Tom.”

  Perhaps that was why he had driven out here. He had parked his car down the street and walked up, so that none of his brothers would see the station wagon and report back that Tommy had given in. Or perhaps it was that he thought he might discover here how he felt about everything that was going on in his life, and what that everything was. Two nights ago he had gone upstairs to bed and heard his daughter crying behind the closed door of her bedroom, a high and lonely sound, like the sound the house made when it creaked in a high wind. He had stood outside for a minute, and then gone into his own room. For an hour he had strained to hear that sound, sometimes thinking he heard it, other times that it had stopped. Then Connie slid into bed beside him, and he fell asleep.

  “Connie,” he said aloud, as he went upstairs in this big house, and the word came bouncing back from the clean white walls.

  Upstairs there were six bedrooms and four bathrooms. The bathroom off the biggest bedroom had a glass shower stall and a dressing room with big red roses climbing up the papered walls. In the ceiling of the dressing room there was a pull-down door and steps to the attic. As Tommy hoisted himself up he heard tiny footsteps, like fingers drumming on a tabletop, and he thought to himself, “We need an exterminator.” He wondered if that thought meant that he was going to live here. For a moment he looked down below him, at the luminous oak beneath his feet, at the edge of one florid rose where the wall met the molding. He wondered if he was looking at the rest of his life.