Black and Blue

  “What about Christmas?”

  “Christmas is different.”

  I always did Christmas, at our house. I cooked standing rib roast and Murphy potatoes and caramelized onions and Ann Benedetto went to her brother’s house on Long Island. Grace came to our house for Christmas, and Mrs. Pinto, whose children all lived in Florida. That was one of my biggest fears when I was out with Cindy at the mall, the possibility of running into one of Mrs. Pinto’s daughters, with their big hair and their sharp eyes, fringed with lacquered lashes like anemones.

  “Nana told me once Daddy hurt his finger on Thanksgiving and she carried him to the hospital because the cab didn’t come. She said he was yelling and screaming and she was running down Ocean Avenue with him getting blood on her.”

  “I know that story,” I said. “He needed eleven stitches in his hand. He fell on a bottle out in the backyard. He still has the scar.”

  “It’s a big scar. When I got that cut on my head when I was five I got stitches but you can’t even see.” Robert raised his bangs to show his smooth, high, golden-brown forehead. There was the suggestion of a straight line across its center, as though someone had drawn faintly with a ruler. “Jesus, Frannie,” Bobby had said, cradling the boy in his big arms on the sofa in the living room, running his lips softly over the bandage. “You should have called me at work. They could have raised me on the radio.”

  “It was only five stitches. And I got the plastic surgeon to do it.”

  “You know what, champ?” Bobby had said to Robert. “When you’re grown-up, girls will say, oh, Robert, how’d you get that scar? And you can make up a story. You can tell them it was a racing-car accident. Or you were in a sword fight. You don’t have to say you were bouncing on the bed and you hit the headboard. Which you’re never going to do again as long as you live, so help me, God; keep him off the bed, Frances, do you hear me? Hear me, buddy?”

  Robert had nodded, burying his face in his father’s chest. Bobby had smiled at me over the brown head, so small, so fragile somehow. I’d felt Robert’s head with my fingers for years after infancy to make sure that the bones had joined over the exposed fontanelle, the soft spot.

  Why at that moment, pushing stuffing around the thick white plate with the side of my fork, did I suddenly remember what Patty Bancroft had said at the hospital? Winnie was discussing a case, a case of children brought in and then scattered to foster homes after their mother had been beaten into a coma in the middle of the night by an old boyfriend. “The children were asleep,” Winnie had said, and Patty Bancroft had answered, spitting out the words, “The children are never asleep. They only pretend to be.”

  “Daddy broke his leg when he was in high school, in a car,” Robert added, eating a roll. It was as though he had permission to talk about Bobby because I had done it first, but maybe only a distant Bobby, the Bobby he’d heard about in stories, not the man he knew, the man who did things while he was sleeping. Or pretending to be.

  “He almost got shot, too, when you were a baby,” I said, pushing him into the present. “Some man pulled a gun on him in the park but his partner got the guy to put it down.”

  “Daddy said it wasn’t even loaded,” Robert said. “He told me once.”

  “But he didn’t know that until it was over. They were chasing the guy because he’d grabbed somebody’s bag on Fifth Avenue.”

  “He told me.”

  “Your daddy is a good cop,” I said. I didn’t know if even that was true anymore. There was that teenager in the projects who said Bobby banged his face against the back divider in the patrol car. There was the minister who said Bobby had used a “racial pejorative” to a member of the congregation who’d complained when the cops tried to move along some teenagers from in front of a sub shop. I was like most cop wives; he told me just enough to make it a story but not so much that it’d make it real, feel what he felt, know what he knew. After a while I couldn’t tell if he was a good cop. But at least he’d never come home with money in his pocket I couldn’t explain, hadn’t been like some of his friends, who suddenly came into A-frames in the Adirondacks or cheesy cruises to the Caribbean. “He’s working a lot of overtime,” the wives always said as though they were just passing the time of day, that breezy way they lied.

  I looked down into my coffee cup. “I was really proud of your daddy then, Ba. I was proud of him lots of times. And I really loved him.”

  “But he hit you,” Robert said. It was the first time he’d ever acknowledged it. Somehow it was like a benediction.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Because you did stuff he didn’t like.”

  I sighed. “Not exactly. Not really. You know how you know the things that will make me mad, like not doing your homework or being mean to someone or getting in a fight? The thing about Daddy was, it was really hard for me to tell what he didn’t like. You couldn’t really tell what would make him mad. And that made it hard. And even if you don’t like what someone does, you can’t hit them. When you’re mad at someone, you have to talk to them, not beat them up. Beating them up is wrong. It’s always wrong.”

  “You don’t hit me,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You would never hit me.”

  “I would never hit you,” I said.

  “Daddy never hit me either.”

  “I know, Ba. What happened with Daddy and me, it had nothing to do with you,” I said. It’s what we’re supposed to say, isn’t it, whenever a marriage is ripped apart and the kids come tumbling out, tumbling down? And I don’t know why, because it’s such a big, bald-faced lie that any kid with half a brain could figure it out. Robert just nodded, played with the surface of his pumpkin pie. “That was kind of a dumb thing to say,” I added. “What I meant was that it’s possible for me and your daddy to be angry at each other without either of us being angry at you.”

  “I bet Daddy’s mad at me.”

  “Why?”

  “For going with you.”

  I leaned forward, took hold of his hand. It just lay there, a small warm thing half-asleep. “Ba, he’d know that you didn’t have any choice in that. He’d know that I made you go.”

  “I bet he’s mad at you.”

  “I’ll bet he is, too,” I said.

  We walked home then, along the highway, and somehow it was better. Somehow it was good. The wind blew trash across our path, bits of wrappers, foil and plastic, and we must have looked a sight to anyone passing by. But it felt somehow festive, our isolation, as though we were having an adventure. “I’m full,” Robert said, patting his belly, smiling up at me, kicking at a soda can along the gravel verge. I felt the ghost of Bobby at my shoulder, but it was the good Bobby, the Bobby who I’d found sitting quietly in the dark by the side of Robert’s bed that night so many years ago, when our little boy woke up crying, reliving the fall on the bed, the doctor’s hands, the needle with the lidocaine, the operating-theater light in his eyes. “I got him, Fran,” Bobby had whispered to me, and I’d gone back to bed.

  We walked over to the Lakeview with a Styrofoam container of food from The Chirping Chicken for Mrs. Levitt. Her hair was every which way when she opened the door, and there was a football game on the television. The living room was dark but when she saw Robert she moved around turning on the lights. “This is a beautiful boy,” she said. “He should have some soda.” Robert was frightened, I could tell, his eyes ricocheting around the room, lighting on the hospital bed then bouncing away. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Levitt said. “That’s Mr. Levitt. He likes the Green Bay Packers, don’t you, Irving?”

  “That’s college football,” Robert said, looking at the TV.

  “Aah,” said Mrs. Levitt, “what do I know? Besides, you don’t complain, right, Irving?” Her food was on the kitchen counter, and I put it on a plate and brought it to the card table. The two of us sat on either side of her as she ate, patting her mouth with a paper napkin. She held forkfuls out to Robert, but he shook his head.

  “Yo
u make house calls on holidays, Mrs. Nurse?” she said, and I smiled. We didn’t stay long, just long enough for her to feel as if she’d had company on the holiday. As we left she handed Robert an old, old copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with a dark-green cover and a gilt fleur-de-lis on its spine. Inside in faded ink was a big, round, florid signature: Irving S. Levitt. Robert clutched the book as we walked home.

  There were almost no cars on the highway, and the breeze was a little cold, as though even the tropics had to pay homage to the Pilgrims’ chilly feast. It’s as if life stops in America on holidays. Or maybe it’s that way everywhere, all over the world, all the places I’ve never gone, countries I’ve never seen. It used to be that way on Sundays, when Gracie and I were young. The newsstands and the variety stores were quiet and dark, the OPEN signs in the windows flipped over to CLOSED. The little knots of people at the corners where the buses stopped on weekdays, workdays, were gone, and the streets had a sleepiness like the sleepiness indoors, where working people dozed in their chairs and children chafed at the torpor, bored with checkers and Old Maid and the bickering of their elders. Now only the holidays—the real holidays, not President’s Day, or Labor Day—have that bittersweet air of stop time I remember from Sunday, the sabbath. It was the way life had seemed to me when we’d first arrived in Lake Plata, like falling through nothing. It didn’t seem that way as we walked home, the turkey I’d asked the waitress to give us for sandwiches in a plastic shopping bag in my hand. It seemed as though we were taking it easy, having a real holiday, nothing to do, no stories to tell. Or to make up as we went along.

  “I love you, sweetie,” I said.

  “I love you, too. If I can get that video game for, like, half price, can we buy it?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “Please?”

  We had a good time, the rest of that desultory day. I know, because I read about it later in Robert’s composition, which made it seem real to me, so real that I put the composition in my bedside drawer after it came home from school. We took out the pot of wallpaper paste I’d bought to paper the bathroom and used it instead to paste pictures from old Sports Illustrateds to Robert’s closet door. Mattingly, Dr. J., Boomer Esiason, even the women from the Olympic basketball team. We sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, which was dingy and had a line of dirty rubber soles marks around the wall a foot above the molding, as though some kid had kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked. We made a mess, Robert and I. We’d never made much of a mess before. The closet door was covered with biceps, long legs, faces. It was almost like company. We crammed the leavings from the magazines into a garbage bag, and Robert stood back, his fists on his hips, and narrowed his eyes.

  “This is the coolest thing we’ve ever done,” he said. “Bennie’s not gonna believe this.”

  “It looks really good,” I said.

  “How will we get it off?”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” I said.

  Then we watched an old movie on television, wound around one another on the scratchy old couch, and ate turkey sandwiches, and toasted each other with ginger ale. There was an old jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door, just like in an ordinary house, like my real house, on the bay in Brooklyn, the jar of cherries you bought for one guest who drank Manhattans—Bobby’s aunt Mae, his uncle Thomas’s wife—and that ever after sat and sat on that shelf inside the door. I put a cherry in each of our sodas.

  “I used to do that for Aunt Grace when we were little girls,” I said. “I’d put the cherry juice in, too, and make it a Shirley Temple for her.”

  Maybe that was what did it. Or maybe it was just curling up on the couch with Robert, feeling him warm and pliant beside me, smelling his hair the way I used to smell Gracie’s as I pulled it into an unruly ponytail. Or maybe it was just that it was, after all, Thanksgiving.

  My sister’s Thanksgivings were like those horrible short stories in The New Yorker, that seemed to have no beginning, no ending, no point. A visiting professor from Oxford who wanted to know all about the Pilgrims. A research assistant whose husband had just left her for another man and who wept in the kitchen and drank too much wine. The couple who lived down the hall from Grace, artists who brought couscous with cranberries in it. Oh, it was funny to hear all about it afterward, and I always did, because the last thing Grace did on Thanksgiving night was to call and tell me all about it.

  “And, naturally, she’s sitting at one end of the table telling me how satisfying it is to work with her husband, how close it’s made them, and he’s sitting at my end with his hand on my thigh,” she’d say, and “Have you ever made stuffing with chestnuts? If not, don’t, because it sucks!” and “Tell Robert this Brit brought me little plastic Pilgrims and I’m foisting them on him when he comes to see me next week.” She always called me, just shy of eleven o’clock, Grace did. And so, after Robert stumbled from the couch to his room, his breath smelling of mayonnaise as I kissed him good night, I picked up the old rotary phone on the wall in the kitchen, poured myself more ginger ale, and sat on the linoleum cross-legged, my heart going like a mouse in a cage. She knew, when she picked up; I could tell she knew by the way her voice was, soft and whispery, not like Grace’s insistent alto at all. She had to say it twice—“hello … hello?”—because the shock of hearing her overcame me suddenly, knocked the wind out of me.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, baby girl,” I finally said, and my voice wasn’t my own either.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, and she started to cry, “oh, my God. Oh, Frannie. Oh, Frannie.” For a minute or two all we did was cry.

  “Where are you?” she finally wailed, and then immediately, in a more ordinary adult Grace voice, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me anything that matters. Don’t tell me anything that I can give away.”

  “To Bobby.”

  “To Bobby. That son of a bitch.” Her voice thickened again. “He sat in my living room and he cried. He cried. I almost felt sorry for him. I would have, if I hadn’t seen your face. Even then, he got to me. I wound up telling him that if I heard from you I’d make you call him.”

  Her words caught in her throat, part grief, part fury. “A week later he comes back and wants to know, have you called, where are you, what’s your address. And I said I had no idea, I hadn’t heard anything from you. And he accused me of being an accessory to a kidnapping! I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about at first. I said, Bob, don’t forget that I saw her face. And he says to me, that’s exactly why you don’t want to fuck with me, Grace.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  You could hear the hum of the telephone static in the silence, in the moment when Grace tried to decide which would be better for me, the truth or a lie. She went for the lie. Don’t we all?

  “No,” she said.

  “Don’t let him in again, Gracie. You can’t take the chance. He just goes out of control.”

  “I know. I know. My God, Fran, what you’ve been living with all this time.”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Robert’s fine. He’s getting settled. I’m working. I’ve got a place, and a little money.”

  “Let me send you more.”

  “I can’t. I can’t give you the address. Or the phone number. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just safer.”

  “The bastard could break my leg and I wouldn’t tell him anything. That son of a bitch. My God, Frannie, I feel like such a fool. All those years you taking care of me, such good care, and you were in so much trouble and I didn’t even figure it out, or do anything. Nothing. I did nothing.” She started to cry again, my little sister, the way she had when she was a child, when I’d hold her head to my chest, hold it still to stop the sobs. “I didn’t do anything to help you.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “How could none of us have known? I called Winnie at the hospital. She said the same thing. She suspected, but she said they all told themselves that you wouldn’t put up with it.”

>   “It’s amazing how much you’ll put up with,” I said.

  “I lie in bed at night and think about having him killed and dumped some place where no one will find him. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s me. I want him dead. If he were dead, then everything would be fine. You’d come back. You’d be safe. I pray that a car will run him down, or that some scumbag on the streets will shoot him.”

  “I’m safe now, sweetie,” I said, matching Grace lie for lie. “Don’t talk about killing anybody.”

  “Twice my mailbox has been broken into and the super thinks it’s druggies, but I think it’s him. I had my phone checked for bugs.”

  “Jesus, Grace, he wouldn’t bug your phone.”

  “Oh yeah? You sit there and tell me you’re sure he wouldn’t do that.”

  “He might,” I finally said. We were both silent again, the silence of two people who have long lived with and loved the sound of each other’s breathing. That’s what I wanted Robert to do, when he was grown-up, living a life away from me. I could hardly stand to think of it, but when I did I thought of telephone calls when I would just listen to him breathe over the line.

  “How’s Mom?” I finally said.

  “The same. She told Aunt Faye you’d decided you needed a change of scene. She told me that Bobby was rude to her when he came to her house. Rude. Jesus God, what an understatement. ‘He was really rude to me, Grace Ann,’ she says.”

  “Oh, I bet he was,” I said. “Never mind. Tell me the dinner story.”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  She thought I was crazy, wanting the old familiar story of her Thanksgiving dinner, the story of the strange food, the urban strays. But she did it. There’d been a defrocked priest who’d been prominent in the antiwar movement a quarter century before, who brought a bottle of good wine and then drank the whole thing himself. “It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone actually use the word imperialist in conversation,” Grace said. There was Grace’s lesbian friend Trudi, who taught Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and got into an argument with everyone else at the table about whether the Virgin Birth meant Mary was gay. There were two old women from the building who sounded like second cousins to Mrs. Levitt, who brought rutabagas that had turned out to be surprisingly good, and a graduate student from American Samoa who felt compelled to tell Grace in the kitchen just as she was whipping the cream for the pie that he loved her. “Oh, for God’s sake, Ramon, cut that pie and put it on plates, I told him, and that was the end of that,” Grace said in her old, wry, dismissive, strong Grace voice.