“What’s in the bag?” she said the Monday morning after the supermarket, and I pulled out a jar of my red sauce, what Bobby’s family always called gravy. “Bless you,” she said. “I’ll just dump it over some ziti tonight.”
“If my mother-in-law could hear the way you say zee-tee, she’d have a stroke,” I said.
“She’s your ex-mother-in-law, hon, so who cares?” said Cindy. “She Italian?”
“She’s a witch,” I said.
“That’s nice. What else you got in there?”
“Running shoes,” I said.
“Oh, please,” Cindy said.
That’s really how I got to know Mike Riordan, by running three mornings a week, the mornings, after the library, that I didn’t have coffee and muffins at Cindy’s house. It had come to me suddenly, as I was trying to make things normal, ordinary, better, as I was laying shelf paper in the slightly sticky kitchen cabinets. It had come to me again as I rose from bed after those nights awake, listening, when my body would feel stiff and old. It had come to me finally in Kmart, buying white crepe-soled shoes to wear to work, stopping in front of cheap running shoes and remembering the expensive pair Grace had given me for my twenty-seventh birthday, white nylon mesh with turquoise and purple stripes and a bubble of some gold gel in the heel. “Running makes you feel young again,” Grace had said.
“To hell with you,” I’d said. “I still am young.”
I couldn’t think of Gracie too much now. It made it too hard, harder than it was any other time. But when I was running those first few months in Brooklyn, when I was twenty-seven and trying to get pregnant and she was twenty-one and trying to get into grad school, I thought of her every time I ran. I always imagined her making a loop around Riverside Park as I made an arc around the bayfront in Brooklyn. “I’m running with you in my mind,” I said, when we talked about our best times and our injuries, our knees and our hamstrings. I worked the eight-to-four shift at South Bay and I’d get up at six and run in the morning, when the air felt as though someone had just blown it out into the Brooklyn streets, like it had been delivered fresh each morning the way they used to deliver our milk in those smooth glass bottles when I was little. The lights were on in some houses when I went out, the cars steaming in the driveways in wintertime, a few people already on their way to the bus stop. But the streets were quiet except for the thud of my running shoes on the pavement in a perfect rhythm that made me feel that living through any day was possible. Two, sometimes three miles, the sun coming up over the bay, painting a streak of silver across the undulating water, making me squint and stagger until I’d turn away from dead east into the narrow streets running north. I’d watch them run the marathon on television and at the start it looked more like rush hour on the IRT than running, all of them jockeying for a square foot of pavement across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I never ran like that. I liked being alone. Bobby had worked evenings and nights a lot. “It’s when the bad guys work, so it’s when I have to work, too,” he told Robert later on, when the boy was old enough to understand. So I’d do my day shift, go to bed early, run just after or just before daybreak, depending on the seasons, and come in and take a shower as quietly as I could manage, carrying my shoes out into the hallway so the sound of them on the floor would not disturb him. On the kitchen counter would be the dirty plate from Bobby’s dinner the night before, that I always left on a warm setting in the oven. Ann Benedetto hadn’t raised her son to get his own meals or wash his own dishes.
I stopped running when I was six months pregnant with Robert and started again when he was a year old and I went back to work. Bobby didn’t want me to do either one, said we didn’t need the money and I didn’t need the exercise. But I worked part-time on a night shift for a couple of years, so that I was mostly at the hospital when Robert was asleep, and once he started school I was gone only when he was. But that one hour in the morning was for me. In the dark, in the dining room, I laced on my shoes, pulled on my sweatshirt, pounded the pavement until my throat burned with the effort of breathing. I even ran once with two broken ribs, just to show Bobby what I was made of. “Frannie, Frannie, Fran,” he mumbled that morning as I stripped off my shorts, the bed smelling of sweat and scotch and semen, because he never wanted me more than when I was broken and bruised. “You are one fucking piece of work.”
I ran in Lake Plata after I got home from school in the morning, making a circuit of the blocks around the apartment complex: Poinsettia, Hibiscus, Royalton, Largo, Miramar, the musical words that danced attendance on the flat frame houses with the attached garages. The heat was like a sock stuffed in your throat, and sweat ran from me like tears, tickling and taunting my legs and chest and arms. I left my wire-rimmed glasses on the battered chest in the bedroom and the sun made fluorescent spots in front of me and waves of black at the periphery of my vision. Sometimes, despite myself, I’d see Brooklyn in my mind, and it was as though if I ran hard and fast enough, I’d come around the corner and I’d be home, really home, up the street from the bay in Brooklyn. The towels would be soft on my body and the carpeting soft under my feet and Robert would be wandering around half-asleep, dogged by little-boy problems, lost shoes, misplaced homework. And Bobby would be—where? Somewhere else. We’d have the idea of Bobby in the house, as though any moment he might walk in. It would be like a perfume, like the smell of gravy cooking on Sunday, or the turkey on Thanksgiving. So sweet, the smell of safety. I could almost smell it over the smell of gasoline and petunias on the back streets of Lake Plata. Sometimes I cried as I ran, but it was so hot and I looked so raddled that you couldn’t even tell. There was no one to see, anyhow. Everyone was inside or at work.
One morning there was a man standing at the corner of Largo and Miramar, leaning against the corner of a chain-link fence behind which a dog reared, snapped, snarled, filled with frustration at my flashing legs just out of his reach. By the front gate was a sign: BEWARE OF THE DOG it said. It seemed so completely superfluous that I almost laughed. The man nodded at me. His arms were folded across his chest, red as summer roses from the heat.
For a week I ran around the streets, different routes on different days, with certain landmarks to guide me: a trailer painted turquoise as bright as a postcard of the Caribbean, a white house with a black cat always unflappably sitting in one window, a lawn with a bumper crop of yellow plastic sunflowers with whirligig petals, occasionally stirred to a desultory turn in the still, mid-morning air. Once again I saw the man. This time he was reading a paper, standing at the same corner, and he didn’t look up as I passed on the other side of the street. The third time I came upon him I was coming from the opposite direction, thumped around the corner and he was sitting in a parked car, a battered white sedan. It was near the end of my run and I was tired, had gone a good distance, four, maybe five miles. The sidewalk was cracked and heaved up just at the curb line, a nosegay of dried and dying dandelions growing where the earth beneath the concrete showed pebbly and brown. I stumbled, nearly went down, righted myself and felt a pain in my ankle, tried to continue quickly past him, saw him looking at me, noticed all at once his thick arms and chest, his odd disconnected half-smile, the way he seemed glad to see me as he leaned toward the open window. The dog was hurling itself at us both from behind the fence, and I wondered how I could have been foolish enough to assume them connected, man and animal. I was hemmed in by the car and the fence and I moved past him and yet waited, in my mind, to feel his hands. Maybe he muttered something; I don’t know. But as I edged past him I ran faster, faster than I’d ever run before, all the way home. Locked the doors, checked the windows for the thousandth time, changed without showering because I was afraid that the sound of the water would mute the sound of someone coming in the window or the door, though they were locked, locked tight, what did they matter, locks? Once, in the emergency room, the cops brought in a woman who’d had to be carried, naked, from a building the city was demolishing. Wrapped in a blanket, her head tucked between her
shoulders like a dying bird, she’d huddled in the corner of an examining room, and I’d asked her what she was afraid of. Her whisper was so soft that at first I didn’t hear her. “Everything,” she finally said a little louder. It shamed me now, to remember that I’d gone out to the nurses’ station and said, under my breath, “What a head case this one is.” It shamed me, now that I was afraid of everything myself. I’d never found out, after they took her up to psych, whether that woman had good reason to be afraid.
The next week I didn’t run. I told myself it was the ankle. “It’s a filthy habit, anyhow,” Cindy said. “Get yourself one of those Jane Fonda tapes.” But one day I wore shorts, a T-shirt, and my shoes to school in the morning, and after Cindy had driven to pick up Chad from her mother and take him to tumbling class, I’d made a slow circuit of the track that sat, gray-brown and sunburned, between the elementary school and the big sprawling middle school a block away. It was boring, that sort of running, no store windows to offer color and light, no “Good morning” from mailmen with their breath running in a stream of steam from between chapped lips. But from the track I could see the front and back entrances to the school, and the drive leading up to both. From the track I could see Robert and Bennie and the other boys who had begun to gather in a group around them shoot hoops on the blacktop during morning recess. If I could have run all day instead of working, I would have.
Mike Riordan fell into step beside me the third morning I was out there. He was wearing an Orlando Magic T-shirt and baggy running shorts. You can tell a lot by someone’s running clothes. If the colors are bright, the fit fine, the logos designer, it almost always means fraud, someone who likes the idea of running better than the act itself. Mike Riordan’s shorts and shirt looked ancient, one step removed from the rummage sale. The real deal.
“Okay if I join you?” he said, and I nodded, no words, because I was already breathing hard, the way I liked to, so that I felt really alive. For the next thirty minutes we said nothing at all, until as we were pulling up, panting, cramping, he added, “I have a free period now, and this beats evenings all to hell.” Neither of us were chatty runners; both of us could go for almost an hour without giving up. Or maybe he slowed down for me. Or maybe I picked up for him. My fears cooled as my flushed face did, walking home to shower and change into my blue polyester uniform shift, to make my rounds. But at night I still set a folding chair beneath Robert’s window piled with boy stuff, video games and books and little bits of leftover Lego things he and Bennie worked on, things that would fall to the floor with a clatter if anyone came through the window.
I used Mike Riordan, those early days. I felt safer with him around, and I was unapologetic, unashamed about using him for protection, even though he had no idea I needed protecting, no idea that he was any more than my running partner. I’d never run with someone else before, and I was startled by the spurious and instantaneous intimacy it produced, the sound of the two of us breathing hard, ragged, in tandem, half-dressed, single-minded, perspiring and without the usual scrim of carefully arranged hair, polite smiles, makeup, and sunglasses. When I left school after my run, knowing that no stranger had entered the front office or peered through the chain-link of the playground fence, I left also knowing that no one could easily have contact with or news of Robert with Mr. Riordan standing guard. I remembered how he’d bellowed at the manager of the supermarket, and I felt less afraid for my son.
“He’s sweet on you,” Cindy said. “That’s all I’m saying. That’s it. He is.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “He’s a friend. A male friend. Women have male friends.”
“Well, now, dear heart, that’s fine, except that if the good Lord had wanted women to have male friends he would have arranged for men and women to have something in common.”
“You don’t have men friends?”
“I have a husband. He sort of has friends. They’re sort of my friends. You know the name of that tune.”
I’d had a man friend once, or thought I had. Sometimes Ben Samuels and I ate lunch in the pale green cafeteria at the hospital, where everyone looked ill in the watery light from the glass-block windows. Once we went to a conference on trauma treatment in Manhattan, in the auditorium of the medical center where he’d gone to med school, and afterward he took me to a Japanese restaurant for dinner, where we sat on tatami mats, our shoes side by side at the sliding paper door, a pair of brown suede lace-ups, a pair of navy pumps. There was something about those empty shoes that suggested an indiscretion, but all we’d done was eat teriyaki and talk, of nothing, really, although both of us spoke a little more effusively than need be of our family lives.
Over tea he was surprised that I’d missed the piece in the Sunday Times about head injuries, more surprised when I said I didn’t read the paper. “I can’t believe a woman as smart as you can get through the day without The New York Times,” he said, and I’d blushed, and been embarrassed, and replied in a flippant voice, “Cops hate the Times. They think it always takes the side of the bad guys. Cops spit on The New York Times. The News is the cop paper.”
“But you’re not a cop,” he said. I’ve never forgotten the way he said that. It came back to me, even after he’d moved out West. “That’s a good move for him,” Winnie said when she heard about it, giving me a look.
I know Winnie thought I used Ben Samuels to get some of what I didn’t get at home, someone to talk to, someone who took me seriously. I’d been happy in his friendship.
But happiness wasn’t what I got from Mike Riordan’s company. He made me feel safe, safer than I’d felt in a long time. And it made me feel safer having Robert at school with Mike there. Sometimes I think Mike sensed all that, without understanding exactly why, as he ran alongside me, stood on the sidelines in front of me at soccer games.
The first time I watched Robert zigzagging across the flat expanse of the school soccer field all I could think of, all I could watch was the stand of trees at one end. All I could think of was a familiar figure emerging from behind one of the tree trunks as everyone was staring the other way, downfield at the visitors’ goal, of someone reaching out for the Lake Plata school forward with the floppy bangs and skinny legs, the quick kid who called instructions to his teammates in a surprisingly low voice as his feet churned up the turf. Bobby, motioning to Robert: come on, come here. Blink and he’d be gone, my son, floating off like a piece of ashy paper lifted from the fire by a wind up the chimney on a cold night. It was all I could do not to pull him off the sidelines when another boy went in in his place, and I think, turning and seeing me, knowing just what I looked like when I was terrified, Mike Riordan knew some of what I was feeling.
“I need a parent to go with us on the bus to Lakota, Tuesday,” he said one day after we’d lost a home game 3 to 1.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
I’d never known a teacher to talk to, except for Grace, if an associate professor of American studies could be called a teacher. All those years of school with the nuns, grade school, high school, even nursing school, the cool remove of their habits an instant bar to intimacy that remained when the black veils and white wimples gave way to street clothes and nurses’ uniforms. Even the teachers at St. Stannie’s had intimidated me, standing at the heavy school door and shutting it with a thunk when the last of the identically dressed children had hurried inside. I gave them my son, and twice a year they gave me a progress report—mediocre penmanship, decent spelling, an affinity for math and history. A good boy.
So for weeks I did what the kids did, called him Mr. Riordan, silly as it was, he five years younger than I, with that pink baby face and straw-colored baby hair. But it seemed to suit the circumstances. Mr. Riordan dropping Robert off after soccer practice and accepting a Pepsi at the kitchen table while he and Robert complained about the ref they’d had for the last game. Mr. Riordan taking Robert, Bennie, and two other boys to McDonald’s to reward them for perfect attendance at the end of the first month of intramura
l practice and play. Mr. Riordan taking Robert and me to the International House of Pancakes after a Saturday morning game at which Robert had scored two goals.
“Let me say this,” he’d said, bent over blueberry pancakes and bacon, wearing his yellow polo shirt with “Mike” embroidered over the heart. “You came to play today.” He pointed his fork at Robert. “You came to play. And did. That second goal was a miracle.”
“You looked good out there,” I said, smiling.
“You looked great,” Mr. Riordan said.
Mr. Riordan, the two of us sitting on the leatherette seats at the front of the bus, our conversation interrupted by the throwing of paper and the occasional muttered “asshole” from the seats behind. “Keep it clean, guys,” Mr. Riordan yelled, “keep it clean.” It’s hard to call a teacher by his first name. Maybe that was when I started to call him Mike, on the bus. One day he had a lottery ticket in his top pocket, and when I mentioned it he blushed.
“I buy one every once in a while,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “You know, you pick up the paper, some gum. Then you give the man a couple of numbers.” He read them off the ticket: 19, 9, 44, 10, 21. “I don’t even know how I picked these,” he said.
“What would you do if you won? Would you quit your job?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Look at me. I play soccer with ten-year-olds for pay. Why would I quit?”
I laughed. “Mr. Riordan, Sean called me a Tampax,” a boy named Andrew shouted from the back.
“Hold on,” Mr. Riordan said, and walked to the back of the bus. I looked back, pretending I was watching the mediation, when what I was really looking for was Robert, the sheer pleasure of seeing him sitting quiet, maybe even content, near the back of the bus. He was staring out the window while Bennie talked to him about something. His profile looked hard, adult. He glanced up, saw me, waved. Mr. Riordan stopped by to talk to the two of them for a moment and they looked up at him, tipping their heads back on the slender straws of their necks, tipping them far back as though Mr. Riordan was a giant, or God. “He’s doing it again,” Andrew called. There was silence, then more bickering, then the rumble of a deeper voice, then silence again.