Black and Blue

  There are people who will do almost anything in America, who will paint your house, paint your toenails, choose your clothes, mind your kids. In Manhattan, at the best private schools, you can even hire a nitpicker if your kid gets head lice. And there are people who will help you get away from your husband, who will find you a new house, a new job, a new life, even a new name. They are mysterious about it because they say it’s what they need to do to keep you safe; when she goes on television, their leader, a woman named Patty Bancroft, likes to say, “We do not even have a name for ourselves.” Maybe that’s why I’d felt I had to whisper when I talked to her on the phone, even though Bobby was long gone from the house: to keep their secret, my secret. There are people, Patty Bancroft had said, who will help you; it is better if you know no more than that.

  I looked down at Robert, hunched over on the bench, bent almost double over a little electronic game he carried with him everywhere. Ninjas in glowing green lunged forward and kicked men in black masks; the black masks fell back, fell over like felled trees. The ninjas bowed. The number at one corner of the screen grew larger. Robert was breathing as though he had been running. I ran my hand over his dark hair, cut like a long tonsure over his narrow, pointed skull. My touch was an annoyance; he leaned slightly to one side and rocked forward to meet the ninjas, take them on, knock them down. He was good at these games, at losing himself in the tinny electronic sounds and glowing pictures. My sister, Grace, said all the kids were, these days. But I wondered. I looked across the station at a small girl in overalls who was toddling from stranger to stranger, smiling and waving while her mother followed six paces behind. Even when he was small Robert had never, ever been like that. Grace said kids were born with personalities, and Robert’s was as dignified and adult as his name. But I wondered. When Robert was three he sometimes sat and stared and rocked slightly back and forth, and I worried that he was autistic. He wasn’t, of course; the doctor said so. “Jesus, talk about making a mountain out of a whatever,” Bobby had said, reaching to lift the child and never even noticing the way in which the small bony shoulders flinched, like the wings of a bird preparing to fly, to flee.

  “We’re going on a trip,” I’d told Robert that morning.

  “Where?” he’d said.

  “It’s kind of a surprise.”

  “Is Daddy coming?”

  Not if we’re lucky, a voice in my head had said, but out loud I’d replied, “He has to work.”

  Robert’s face had gone dead, that way it does sometimes, particularly the morning after a bad night, a night when Bobby and I have gotten loud. “Is that why you’re wearing glasses?” he said.

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  “They look funny.”

  In the station he looked up from his video game and stared at me as though he was trying to figure out who I was, with the strange hair, the glasses, the long floaty dress. The ninjas were all dead. He had won. His eyes were bright. “Tell me where we’re going,” he said again.

  “I will,” I said, as though I knew. “In a little while.”

  “Can I get gum?”

  “Not now.”

  Around the perimeter of the station were small shops and kiosks: cheap jewelry, fast food, newspapers, books: the moneychangers in the temple. The voice of the train announcer was vaguely English; there was a stately air to the enterprise, unlike the shabby overlit corridors of the airports. No planes, Patty Bancroft told me when we first talked on the phone two weeks before. Plane trips are too easy to trace. The women she helped never flew away; they were not birds but crawling creatures, supplicants, beaten down. Trains, buses, cars. And secrecy.

  When I’d first met Patty Bancroft, when she’d come to the hospital where I worked, she’d said that she had hundreds of volunteers all over the country. She said her people knew one another only as voices over the telephone and had in common only that for reasons of their own they had wanted to help women escape the men who hurt them, to give those women new lives in new places, to help them lose themselves, start over in the great expansive anonymous sameness of America.

  “What about men who are beaten by their wives?” one of the young doctors at the hospital had asked that day.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Patty Bancroft had said wearily, dismissively.

  She’d given me her card that day, in case I ever treated a woman in the emergency room who needed more than sutures and ice packs, needed to escape, to disappear, to save her life by getting gone for good. “Nurses are one of my greatest sources of referral,” she’d said, clasping my hand, looking seriously into my eyes. It was the most chaste business card I’d ever seen, her name and a telephone number. No title, no address, just a handful of lonely black characters. I put the card in my locker at the hospital. I must have picked it up a hundred times until, six months later, I called the number. She remembered me right away. “Tell me about this patient,” Patty Bancroft had said. “It’s me,” I said, and my voice had faltered, fell into a hiss, a whisper of shame. “It’s me.”

  “Where are we going?” I had asked her when we spoke on the phone two days before the man in the Volare had picked us up at a subway stop in upper Manhattan, two weeks after Bobby had beaten me for the last time. My voice was strange and stiff; my nose and jaw had begun to heal, so that if I didn’t move my mouth too much the pain was no more than a soft throb at the center of my face.

  “You’ll know when you get there,” Patty Bancroft said.

  “I’m not going away without knowing where I’m going,” I said.

  “Then you’ll have to stay where you are,” she’d replied. “This is the way it works.” My hand had crept to my nose, pressed on the bridge as though testing my resolve. I felt the pain in my molars, the back of my head, the length of my spine. I felt the blood still seeping from between my legs, like a memory of something I’d already made myself forget. “The bleeding will stop in a week or so,” they’d said at the clinic. Pack plenty of clean underpants, I thought to myself. That’s what it comes down to, finally, no matter how terrifying your life has become. A toothbrush. Batteries. Clean underpants. The small things keep you from thinking about the big ones. Concealer stick. Tylenol. My face had faded to a faint yellow-green in the time it had taken me to plan my getaway. Bobby had been working a lot of nights. We’d scarcely seen one another.

  “What will happen if you leave and then your husband finds you?” Patty Bancroft had said.

  “He’ll kill me,” I answered.

  “He won’t find you if you do what we say.” And she’d hung up the phone.

  The station public-address system bleated and blared. “Mom, can I have a Coke?” Robert said, in that idle way in which children make requests, as though it’s expected of them. The video game and his hands lay in his lap, and he’d tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling.

  “Not now,” I said.

  A line of people in business suits had formed at the head of one of the stairways leading to the tracks. Two of them talked on cellular phones. A woman with a handsome leather suitcase on a wheeled stand left the line and walked toward the coffee kiosk. Her heels made a percussive noise on the stone floor. “Café au lait, please,” the woman said to the girl behind the counter.

  She looked at her watch, then turned and smiled at me, looked down at the floor, looked up again. “You dropped your tickets,” she said. She handed me an envelope she stooped to pick up from the floor.

  “Oh, no, I—”

  “You dropped your tickets,” she said again, smiling, her voice firm, and I could feel the corner of the envelope, a sharp point against my wet palm.

  “Metroliner!” called a uniformed man at the head of the stairs, and the woman picked up her coffee and wheeled her suitcase to the stairway without looking back. I sat down heavily on the bench and opened the envelope.

  “God!” groaned Robert, hunched back over his game.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Inside
the envelope were two tickets to Baltimore on the 4:00 PM Metroliner. I looked at the big digital clock and the wall timetable. 3:12, and the next Metroliner was ON TIME. There were other things in the envelope, too: bus tickets, a driver’s license, Social Security cards. For a moment I was blind with confusion, and then I found the names: Crenshaw, Elizabeth. Crenshaw, Robert.

  I had not liked it when Patty Bancroft gave me orders on the phone, but now I felt a powerful sense of gratitude. She had let me have my way in at least one thing: Robert had gotten to keep his own first name.

  And I was to be Elizabeth. Liz. Beth. Libby. Elizabeth Crenshaw. Seeing myself reflected in the glass of the coffee kiosk, I could almost believe it. There she was, Elizabeth Crenshaw. She had short blond hair, a pixie crop that I’d created with kitchen scissors and hair dye in the bathroom just before sun-up, just after I heard the door shut behind Bobby as he left for work. She wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses bought from a rack at the pharmacy, clear glass with the kind of cheap sheen to the lenses that turned the eyes behind them into twin slicks of impenetrable glare. Elizabeth Crenshaw was thin, all long bones and taut muscles, because Fran Benedetto had been running for more than a decade and because terror had made it hard for her, these last few years, to eat without feeling the food rise back up into her gorge at a word, a sound, a look. “Skin and bones,” Bobby said sometimes when I was naked, reaching for me.

  It had taken me a while, that morning, to decide what to wear, but I was accustomed to being concerned with my own clothes, even though I didn’t care about them much, not like Bobby’s mother, who was forever seeking discount silk and cashmere, trousers cut perfectly to her tiny frame, jackets and skirts with good linings and labels. Much of the time I wore my nurse’s uniform, the white washing out my thin freckled skin and making a garish orange of my hair. But let me change into anything snug, or short, or low, and I would see Bobby’s eyes go narrow and bright. Although it was always hard to tell exactly what would offend until the moment when he put his head to one side and looked me up and down until my pale skin flushed. “Jesus Christ,” he’d say in that voice. “You wearing that?” And I would feel like a whore, me, plain Frannie Benedetto, who had been up half the night with her little boy who had a stomach bug, who had been on her feet all day carrying syringes and gauze pads and clipboards and pills, calming down the drunks and hysterics, stopping to talk to the children, placating the doctors. Fran Benedetto, who had never been with a man other than her husband. But let her wear a blouse whose fabric suggested the faintest hint of slip strap, and all of a sudden she was a slut. Slip strap over bra strap, of course, for if I wore a skirt and didn’t wear a full slip, the way Bobby’s mother always had, there was no telling what Bobby might do. It was funny, after a while: I could tell you what Bobby liked and didn’t like, what might set him off and how much. But I couldn’t have told you as much about myself. I was mostly reaction to Bobby’s actions, at least by the end. My clothes, my makeup: they were more or less his choice. I bought them, of course, but bought them with one eye always on Bobby’s face. And his hands.

  But Beth Crenshaw I would create myself, without reference to Bobby. I started to create her even before I found out her name in the waiting room at Thirtieth Street Station. Beth Crenshaw wore a loose, long flowered dress I’d found in the back of my closet from two summers before, the sort of dress that Bobby always said made women look like grandmothers. Bobby’s own grandmother, his father’s mother, always wore black, even to picnics and street fairs. “C’mere, Fran,” she’d yell across her daughter-in-law’s white-on-white living room, where she sat like a big blot of ink on the couch. She’d fold herself around me and cover me in black, make me feel small and safe. “Aw, God bless you, you’re too thin,” she’d say. “She’s too thin, Bob. You need to make her eat.” She’d died just before Robert was born, Bobby’s Nana. I missed her. Maybe it would have happened anyhow, but I think Bobby got harder after that. Harsher, too.

  “The reason you hooked up with me,” I said to Bobby once, when we were young, “is because my red hair and white skin look good next to your black hair and your tan.”

  “That was part of it,” he said. That was a good day, that day. We played miniature golf at a course owned by a retired narcotics guy in Westchester, had dinner at that Italian place in Pelham, made out in the car at a rest stop on the Saw Mill River Parkway. Both of us living with our parents, he in the Police Academy, me in nursing school: we had no place else to go. The first time we had sex it was in a cabana at that skanky beach club his mother liked; a friend of his from high school who vacuumed the pool let us stay after closing. It didn’t hurt, I didn’t bleed. I loved it. I loved how helpless it made him, big bad tanned muscled Bobby Benedetto, his mouth open, the whites of his eyes showing. It made me want to sit on his lap the rest of my life.

  He talked about getting a tattoo on his shoulder, a rose and the word Frances. I said I’d get Yosemite Sam on my upper thigh. “The hell you will,” he said. It turned out I didn’t need it; Bobby tattooed me himself, with his hands.

  “Red hair is too conspicuous,” Patty Bancroft had said on the phone. It had been the only conspicuous thing about me, all these years. Smart, but not too. Enterprising, but not too. Friendly, but not too. The kind of girl who becomes a nurse, not a doctor. The kind of nurse who becomes assistant head, but not head nurse. The kind of wife—well, no one knew about that.

  “There’s still some good years left on her,” Bobby would say when his friends came over, and they’d laugh. It was the way they all talked about their wives, and I wondered, looking at their flushed and friendly faces, if they were thinking of bones that had not yet been broken, areas that had not yet blossomed with bruises.

  And they looked at me and saw a happy wife and mother like so many others, a working woman like so many others. Fran Flynn—you know, the skinny redhead who works in the ER at South Bay. Frannie Benedetto, the cop’s wife on Beach Twelfth Street, the one with the little boy with the bowlegs. Gone down the drain that morning. Transformed, perhaps forever, by Loving Care No. 27, California Blonde. Hidden behind the glasses. Disguised by the flapping folds of the long dress. California blonde Elizabeth Crenshaw, with nothing but thin milky skin and faint constellations of freckles on chest and cheeks to connect her to Frances Ann Flynn Benedetto. A bruise on my right cheek, faded to yellow, and a bump on the bridge of my nose. And Robert, of course, the only thing I’d had worth taking with me from that tidy house, where Bobby liked to walk on the carpeting barefoot and I cleaned up the blood with club soda and Clorox before the stain set. Beth. I liked Beth. I was leaving, I was starting over again, I was saving my life, I was sick of the fear and the fists. And I was keeping my son safe, too, not because his father had ever hit him—he never ever had—but because the secret inside our house, the secret about what happened at night, when Daddy was drunk and disgusted with himself and everything around him, was eating the life out of Robert. When he was little he would touch a bruise softly, say, “You boo-boo, Mama?” When he got a little older he sometimes said, narrowing his big black eyes, “Mommy, how did you hurt yourself?”

  But now he only looked, as though he knew to be quiet, as though he thought this was the way life was. My little boy, who had always had something of the little old man about him, was becoming a dead man, too, with a dead man’s eyes. There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around. I’d learned that from watching my father, and my husband, too. I wasn’t going to let it happen to my son.

  Frances couldn’t. Beth wouldn’t. That’s who I was now. Frances Ann Flynn Benedetto was always watching and waiting, scared of her husband, scared he would turn on her, hit her, finally knock her out for good. Scared to leave her son with no mother to raise him, only a father whose idea of love was bringing you soup after he’d broken your collarbone. Frannie Flynn was gone. I’d killed her myself. I was Beth Crenshaw now.

  Beneath the rippling skirt I could feel my legs trem
bling as an announcer with a sonorous voice called out the trains. But I could feel my legs, too, feel them free. No slip. I’d left that goddamn slip behind.

  Frannie Flynn—that’s how I’d thought of myself again, even though my last name was legally Benedetto. The name on my checks, on my license, on the embossed plastic name tag I wore on the breast of my nurse’s uniform. Frances F. Benedetto. But in my mind I’d gone back to being Frannie Flynn. Maybe Bobby knew that. Maybe he could read my mind. Maybe that was part of the problem, that he could read my mind and I never had a clue what was going on in his.

  Frannie, Frannie, Fran. I heard his voice saying my name, like the ringing in my ears when he brought his open hand hard against the side of my head in a dark corner of the club foyer, that time I argued with him in front of his friends about whether we were staying for another round of beers at a retirement party. Fran. I can hear his voice in the sound of the train moving south down the tracks. I’m coming, Frannie. You can’t get away. You’re mine, Fran. Both of you.

  I still can’t figure out why everyone in New York talks about Florida as if it’s a cross between Paris and Lourdes. The pilgrimages to Disney World, the fabled retirement condos in Lauderdale. “Moira Doherty, now she’s got a life,” one of the cop wives said at a barbecue. “Kevin put in his time and now there they are, not even fifty yet, in Boca, both of them working parttime. She gave me her rabbit jacket. I won’t be needing it, hon, she said. Nice and warm down here, even in January. What a racket.”

  Maybe Moira’s lying on a lounge chair watching the sun on the water, but Robert and I wound up in a garden apartment court in a dusty town called Lake Plata, almost an hour’s drive to the ocean. Or that’s what I’m told; I don’t have a car, so I wouldn’t know. There’s an irony for you: I went from Brooklyn to Florida and wound up trading down, exchanging a house with the Atlantic at the end of the block, shimmering between two rows of attached imitation brickfronts like a mirage, for a square of gravel studded with gnarled bushes, no water in sight except for the pools that sit outside the motels on the highway. There’s a flatness to Florida, or at least this part of it. It makes me feel like I’m in one of those rooms in a horror film, where the ceiling lowers and lowers and the floor rises, trapping you, squishing you flat. Although, come to think of it, that’s the way I’d felt in my own living room for a long time, whenever I heard the sound of Bobby’s Trans Am pulling into the garage beneath the couch and the carpeted floor.