“You Tampax,” I said, when he dropped back into his seat.
“I know,” he said.” I do all the disciplinary stuff and one of my biggest problems is not laughing. One of the third-grade girls came in crying the other day. I sit her down, I give her a Kleenex. She’s sniffing and blowing her nose and finally she says, “Joshua keeps telling me he loves me and I just want him to stop!”
“That is a great job,” I said.
“I guess most people would quit. If they won the lottery, I mean.”
“I wouldn’t. I love to work. My mother always worked. When I was a kid, it was my father who didn’t work. It was like a life sentence—guilty of emphysema. Sentenced to the big chair in front of the TV for the rest of his life. The poor guy was like a piece of furniture. I never wanted to be like that. I had my first job when I was sixteen.”
“My mother never worked.”
“How many kids did she have?”
“Seven.”
“She worked,” I said.
Out the windows of the bus the sun was sinking behind a grove of trees and a row of shacks the migrants used when they came to Florida to pick fruit. A stray dog chased after our tires, and the noise of the boys began to evaporate with the daylight, their conversation to go gray with fatigue. They’d lost, 4–2, in a tough game. Robert had played poorly.
“How’s your hamstring?” Mr. Riordan said.
“Still sore.”
“You should stay off it.”
“Ha,” I said. “I’ll be out there tomorrow morning.”
“I had Robert in my office the other day,” Mr. Riordan said quietly. “I kept meaning to tell you.”
“Why?”
“He got into some sort of argument with two of the boys. Apparently they were teasing him about the way he looks, how dark he is or something. You know how they are at this age. And he held one of them against the wall and said, ‘I’m going to get you.’ Mrs. Bernsen was just a little knocked out by the way he said it. Like he really meant it, if you know what I mean?”
I knew exactly what he meant. I closed my eyes and leaned against the window. Robert the Hobbit, Robert the Hobbit, making sure that no one got over on him, just as Daddy said. It was Bobby Benedetto’s song, the one he sang as he paced his kitchen. I’m going to get that sucker who sells crack in the quad at the Lincoln projects. I’m going to get that asshole who laughed at us when we stopped him the other day. I’m going to get the jerk-off who threw the tennis ball at the patrol car, opened the hydrant, put his little brother out to work as a drug runner. Getting them all—that was Bobby Benedetto’s vocation.
“Hey,” Mike Riordan said, “it’s no big deal. We talked. Or I talked and he listened. You know he’s basically a good kid. He has some problems dealing with anger. And other stuff. I think he keeps things bottled up inside.”
I know, I said. The divorce, I said, the move, the new school, the new friends. He would be fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Sometimes you say a word so many times that it loses its meaning and shape in your mouth, until it’s like a piece of gristly meat and you want to spit it out, or swallow and get it over with. Fine. First Robert said it, now I did. If we said everything was fine often enough maybe it would be true.
Even Mr. Riordan did it. One day as we were running, trickles of sweat outlining the curve of both our jaws, our breath coming hard and jagged, he suddenly said, softly, then more insistently, “Don’t worry about him too much. Don’t worry. He’s fine.” But of course he had no idea.
“He’s fine,” I said again.
“I know that,” he said. “I do think it would do him some good to talk to somebody. Dr. Stern, maybe.”
What could I say? There was no kid in the world who needed to talk to someone, as people always delicately said when they wanted you to see a shrink—I knew, I’d done it in the ER dozens of times myself—there was no kid who needed it more than Robert. There was no one who needed more to speak the words he couldn’t say, to look at the things he couldn’t see. Someday, I swore, I’d do that for him, so that he could give up the secret, once and for all, so that he could say that his father had lied to him, and his mother, too, all those mornings when they acted as though everything was all right. Fine. Fine. But not now. That was Robert Benedetto’s story. And for now, no matter how bad it was for us both, Robert had to be Robert Crenshaw.
“I’ll think about it,” I finally said. “I really will. I know he needs to get things out of his system more.”
“He might do better if a professional could help him with that. It might give him some ways to deal that would make him feel better.”
“I know. I’m just not sure it’s the right time.”
“Well, think about it.”
“I will. And promise you’ll tell me if anything else happens. Or if you notice any kind of problem. I need to know. Please.”
What could I tell him, this nice man with his nice open face, to explain away what seemed to be my stubborn refusal to help my child? That if Robert talked to the school psychologist about what was bothering him the gig was up, that bottling-up was part of the plan. I knew that for Robert’s sake it would be a good idea for him to take a stroll twice a week through the maze of his memories, to try to reconcile the beloved father who’d done terrible things, the trusted mother who’d lied about them, the happy home that had been rotten at the root, like one of those trees in full leaf that blows over in a storm to reveal the hollow trunk. To talk about what it felt like to be suddenly plucked, still half asleep, from one existence, and set down a day later in another strange new one. But he would have to do it on his own. It was too dangerous for anyone else to know our secret. It was too dangerous for Robert to talk about what had really happened, who he really was. If he told a psychologist, he might tell a teacher. If he told a teacher, he might tell Bennie. And pretty soon everyone would know. Everyone, and Bobby. That was how Bobby would find us, through one missing brick in the wall between that life and this.
“He’ll be okay,” Mike Riordan said.
“I think so, too,” I said.
One of our goalies was snoring behind us, a bandanna covering his shaved head. “Shane’s starting a new fashion,” I said. “Head lice,” Mike Riordan whispered. “We managed to keep it pretty much contained to the fourth grade.” “Nearly there, folks,” the driver said. Crickets were sawing away out in the muggy Florida night. It was already almost Thanksgiving.
“Do you know Chelsea Roerbacker?” I said, to change the subject.
I could see Mike Riordan’s teeth in the dim gray light as he smiled. “I sure do,” he said. “Speaking of Dr. Stern.”
“I don’t know how Cindy does it. It would drive me crazy, to have a kid of mine that frightened of that many things.”
“You know what?” Mike said. “Most kids are that frightened of that many things. They’re just too scared to admit it. And so are most adults. I think the amazing thing about Chelsea is that she puts it all out on the table.”
“Mr. Riordan,” somebody yelled. “Zachary spilled a juice box all over my pants. In the crotch.”
“Go for it,” I said.
He held up his lottery ticket and kissed it. “Please, God,” he said.
I don’t know exactly when I started to call him Mike, but I know that was the moment I began to think of him that way.
“Mr. Riordan,” one of the boys moaned, “do you think we’ll win next time?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
For my birthday Cindy took me to the mall south of Lakota and bought me a decent haircut at a place called The Clip Joint. My birthday was November 10, or at least Beth Crenshaw’s birthday was. Frannie Flynn’s birthday was October 30, a hateful time to have a birthday, Mischief Night, the nasty stepbrother to Halloween, a day of soaped windows, egged windshields, staying inside, safe at home. I’d never had a birthday party, unless you counted the cake with butter-cream icing and pink roses my mother brought home in a white cardboard box from the bakery on
the bottom floor of the office building in Manhattan where she worked. For my Sweet Sixteen I brought the cake home myself, from the bakery where I worked; now I knew the butter-cream was made out of shortening and sugar. “It’s chocolate,” my mother had said, when I cut into it, and Gracie had said, “Fran doesn’t really like vanilla cake. You should have known that.” She grew up fast, Grace; she always said what she thought. In bed that night she’d whispered, “What if I threw you a big birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria …” But I pretended to be asleep.
Birthdays—that’s how they get you. You wouldn’t imagine that, would you, but Patty Bancroft said the biggest mistake people made was changing their name but keeping the same initials, and claiming the same date of birth. Patty Bancroft’s people had shaved two years off my age as well, so that Beth Crenshaw, wearing a rubber cape in the beautician’s chair that squeaked when you moved in it, was thirty-six years old.
“Manicure, pedicure, styling, color,” Cindy said in the car. “On me. And Craig’ll take the kids out water skiing on Lake Lakota, then maybe Chuck-E-Cheese for lunch. Mine are happier than pigs in shit, excuse my language. Chad thinks Robert and Bennie are grown-ups, only more fun, and Chelsea thinks they’re cute boys. Which they are. When’s Robert’s birthday, anyway?”
Someone who thought they knew children but didn’t had assigned Robert a date of birth to replace April 30. “Fourth of July,” I said.
“That’s a tough one,” Cindy said. “No school, so no school party. And everybody doing their own barbecues, beach trips, family deal. On the other hand, you’d always have fireworks. I guess I could work with that. You want your nails wrapped?”
I laughed. “What is having your nails wrapped?” I said.
“Oh, it’s great. You’ll see. They put these little pieces of linen on your nails, spray them until they get hard as a rock, file them, shape them.”
“I can’t have them too long.”
“Don’t be so negative.”
“No one’s messing around with my feet.”
“You’ll see. This’ll be great.”
She was right. Cindy was always right about things like that. My hair fell in soft layers around my face, a more buttery, warmer color than my own home dye job. My nails were painted with white tips and my feet massaged by a Korean woman in a pink smock who smiled all the time. It was pretty clear she didn’t understand a word either of us said. It was early on a Saturday morning and we were the only people in the place except for two handsome, hard-looking, dark-haired women, the elder a shadow of the younger, who came in just as we were finishing. Between them they carried a long white box, and, setting it down carefully on the receptionist’s Formica desk, they lifted out a crown of pearls and beads with a long tail of tulle the color of light coffee.
“Oh, that’s gorgeous,” Cindy said, watching everything in the salon’s wall of mirrors, the ends of her hair falling like dandelion fluff on the shoulders of her rubber cape.
“A hundred and eighty dollars for a veil. Just for the veil!” said the older woman.
“Don’t start,” said her daughter as one of the beauticians began to set her hair in rollers.
“It would look beautiful with her hair up. Look at this.” She held the veil out to us all: me, Cindy, the woman who was cutting Cindy’s hair, the Korean woman who was shaving dead skin from my heels and smiling and nodding. “A chignon inside the band of beading, so that you could really appreciate, you see what I mean? Which would also mean a better view of the back of the dress when she’s at the altar. See, they all look at the front of the dress, these girls, but most of what you see during a wedding is the back. You don’t want the whole back of the dress hidden by all this hair.”
“So you want your hair up?” said the beautician to the bride. The embroidery on her smock said her name was Jenna, and her small, pinched features had settled during the mother’s monologue into the carefully neutral look I’d learned long ago to adopt with difficult patients.
“I told you what I want when I came in for the consult. I want ringlets. She wants my hair up, but she’s not the one getting married.”
“You look one hundred percent better with your hair up,” her mother said.
“Ma, you want your hair up, you get your hair up. I’m not getting my hair up.”
“It’ll ruin the pictures.”
“Chris doesn’t like my hair up. I don’t like my hair up. I’m not wearing my fucking hair up.”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“You’re done,” said the woman who was blowing Cindy’s hair dry. The Korean manicurist handed us our purses so we wouldn’t smear our polish. “Look at how nice her nails look,” said the mother, pointing to my hands. “I told you you should have gotten a French manicure.”
“Ma, don’t start,” the daughter said. Cindy and I waited until we were at the escalator before we began laughing. “What do you bet she winds up with her hair up?” Cindy said.
“You think?”
“Oh, honey, I know.”
My head smelled of flowers, and my hands looked elegant, smooth, like they belonged to someone with drawers full of sachets and closets with padded hangers. “They were so Brooklyn,” I said.
“So what?”
“Never mind. It’s just an old expression. You were right about the pedicure.”
“I know I was. Happy birthday, honey.”
Those were the times I felt bad about what I was doing, the times when I spoke aimlessly of a life in Wilmington that seemed an empty invention to my own ears, the times when Cindy patted my hand while she was telling another story of another friend getting screwed in divorce court. Cindy thought I was having a wonderful birthday, when my real birthday had been a week before and I’d cried most of the evening, thinking about Gracie somewhere, crying too. Gracie always helped me blow out the candles on my cake, even when I was a grown-up. I hated lying to Cindy, hated that I did it more or less every day just by letting her call me Beth. It was all I could do, sometimes, not to tell her everything.
“I bet Mr. Riordan’ll like your hair,” Cindy said, pulling the minivan onto the highway.
“I bet you’ve been waiting half an hour to say that. Ever since I got out of the chair.”
“Tell the truth, I wanted to say something in the shop, but that Jenna lives in Lake Plata so I decided to protect your privacy.”
“Thanks so much.”
“So what is the deal here?”
“Cindy, you watch too much TV.”
“You may be right, hon, but I can tell you that on TV the soccer coach and the player’s lovely single mother wind up together. After many misadventures. Plus, I don’t see too many other stars on your horizon. Except for Jim. He’s a real romantic guy. That last time you ran into him leaving our house, I heard him say to the other guy in the truck, ‘Man, would I like a piece of that!’ What a sweetheart.”
Jim was one of the laborers who worked for Craig’s pool service. He was tanned from all those hours in the sun, and he took his shirt off every chance he got to display muscle definition that made him look like a Saturday morning cartoon superhero. The ends of his Fu Manchu mustache were always a little wet, and I had thought about what it would be like to sleep with him the first moment I saw him, balancing a shovel across the tight shelf of his shoulders, looking enough like Bobby Benedetto to be a first cousin. He smelled like sweat and chlorine, and I tried not even to look at him, those few times I’d run into him at the Roerbackers. But once he’d smiled at me, real slow, and I knew he knew what I was thinking.
“Like I said, you watch too much TV,” I said to Cindy. “Mike Riordan is a very nice man. That’s all.”
“Oh, no. A nice man. That tears it. Remember how in high school, your girlfriend would go, oh, him, he’s such a nice guy. And what that always meant was that she was dying to go out with the guy’s nasty friend.”
“Well, thank God high school is over.”
“Oh, please. L
ife is high school, except everybody’s either ten pounds lighter, or fifty pounds heavier.”
I started to sort everyone I knew into one group or another. “You’re right,” I said.
“I am right, and I’m right about Mr. Riordan. And please don’t tell me you’re holding out for Mr. Right, because he ain’t coming. He never comes.”
“And this from a happily married woman.”
“I’m happily married because I’m real realistic. The statute of limitations on finding them irritating as hell is four, maybe five years. It doesn’t matter how good-looking they are or how much money they make; that’s when you start to notice how they can’t ever manage to put on a fresh roll of toilet paper or put dirty clothes in the hamper. You’ve been married, you know the drill: Honey, where’s my shirt? In the damn closet, dear, where it always is. Couple years gritting your teeth, and then you just got to get on with it. Or not, I guess.” She looked over at me. “What got me going on that?”
“Mr. Riordan.”
“Oh, never mind Mr. Riordan. Let me do your makeup when we get home. I got these new neutrals that’ll look great on you.”
Usually I resisted Cindy’s sample case, but for once I went along with her. She made bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for us both, and then went to work on me with pencils and foam pads, powders and creams. Except for a mouth that was too big for the rest of my face, I looked good when she was finished. “Not a day over thirty,” she said. Instead of thirty-six. Or thirty-eight. Another secret to keep straight, my very age.