Black and Blue

  One evening two weeks after we’d gotten to Florida I was kissing Robert goodnight and he reached up and touched my cheek. The old cotton spread was pulled up to his chin, the air-conditioning laying a light chill and the smell of mildew over the thick, humid air. His hair was getting long, flopping over one dark eye. In the dim light from a small window he looked more like Bobby than ever, but the Bobby I’d always loved, the sweet soft boyish Bobby. I kissed his forehead and smoothed back his hair, and instead of stiffening or pulling away he smiled.

  “Your face looks better now,” he said. “Can we go to the movies sometime?”

  I went into the bathroom, the only place in the house where there was a mirror, which I figured was no accident. The tenants of this particular place wouldn’t want to look at their own reflections, see the bruises and the scars and the grief and humiliation looking back from their own eyes. When I was a little kid I’d stood on a shoe box in front of my mother’s bureau when Gracie was taking a nap in our room, and stared into my own eyes in the mahogany-framed mirror. I don’t know why I did this; maybe just to really see myself, to try to figure out who was looking back at me out of those hazel eyes. I seemed more real to myself if I could see my own face, not walk behind it. Maybe that was why I’d avoided mirrors for the past couple of years, because it was so strange to me to see the look on my face, alert and oddly empty all at the same time, like the face of a blind person moving around a dangerous corridor, her arms outstretched.

  I didn’t look that way all the time. Not at the hospital, where I was never afraid, even with the blood and the screams and the crazies. Not when I was with Robert alone, when I walked him home from school or took him to the movies, when it was just the two of us. But the rest of the time I was afraid. In my own home. With my own husband. It made me ashamed, to live behind that face, to think of myself as a person who looked that way. I left to be that person all the time, every day, every night. Twenty-four seven, as the kids say.

  But it was almost as bad going as it had been staying. Everyone I loved was lost to me. There was country music on the radio downstairs. It had already been tuned to the station when we’d come to this godawful place, with its scrubby trees and its strangers. The good thing about country music is that you can cry when you listen to it, pretend it’s the music you’re crying about.

  I checked the locks on the windows after I came down from Robert’s room. I checked the windows every day. They were still locked. In the closet I had found two boxes of clothes, women’s size eights and boy’s size twelve, T-shirts and jeans mostly. There were some half-used bags of sugar and flour in the cabinets, some tea bags and a jar of peanut butter, and I wondered who Patty Bancroft’s people had last sheltered here, where that woman had gone, whether her husband had found her and talked her into coming back, back home where her own clothes hung in the closet. Maybe he was like Bobby, that shadowy husband, devoted to the notion of the happy family even as he shattered it with his own hands and his words and his dark, dark eyes. “I’m leaving you, Bobby,” I’d said once after he’d grabbed me by the hair, and another time after he’d pushed me down, and another time, and another, and another. “No you’re not, Fran,” he’d said. Real flat, just the way Robert sounded sometimes. His father’s son. Once when I wouldn’t let Robert buy a game at the mall he’d pushed me away, hard, and I’d felt the echo of his father’s big hands in his small ones. Robert had said he was sorry in the car on the way home. But Bobby always said he was sorry, too.

  The venetian blinds were closed. The neighbors must think we’re vampires. Or perhaps they’re used to it. Perhaps all the women who lived for a time in this apartment kept their blinds down.

  From a mailbox on a corner in Manhattan I had sent Grace an envelope of family photographs. Inside was a scribbled note: “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” She must have gotten it by now. Her phone number sang in my skull as I stood in the small kitchen. And it was like I was still chained in a basement somewhere, only this time I’d just stay here forever, alone. I felt so alone that if I’d looked out the windows and seen nothing but black all around me, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But upstairs my son was sleeping with a soft look on his face, a gentle curve to his mouth, that I hoped could someday be the legacy from me to him. And I was going to get through every day so he could have that. I ate stale cereal from the box with one hand and felt my face with the other. Bruise or no bruise, it still hurt deep in the bone, where only my fingers could find the damage. And all I could think was that if I hadn’t gone to one particular Brooklyn bar on one particular night when I was just a kid myself, knew next to nothing about men or marriage or shame or pain, I wouldn’t be where I was. But then I wouldn’t have had Robert. And Robert was all I had that mattered.

  I didn’t begin a new life; it began me. A letter came informing me that Robert was enrolled at the local elementary school, that he would be in class 5-C and that he needed No. 2 pencils and a three-ring binder on the first day.

  Together we walked through the flat, stifling streets of Lake Plata to stand and look at the school building. His school, I called it when Robert and I talked, but it seemed so strange to us both. The architecture was strange, and the plants and shrubs, too, so that there was nothing to remind us of our former life except each other. Robert even took my hand as we stood across the street from the school, a low stuccoed building ten minutes from our apartment, beige plaster, red tile roof, stunted palms at all four corners. P.S. Hacienda, I called it to myself. P.S. Taco Bell, grades K through 6. When I called the principal’s office the secretary said they’d already received Robert’s documents from his old school. It was all I could do not to ask them where that might have been, and whether he’d been a good student there. All Patty Bancroft had told us, at the hospital, was that she had people working for her who were able to create paper trails. Work histories, school transcripts, passports. “I won’t be more specific than that,” she’d said.

  A few days before school started Robert had taken out his black-and-white marbled composition book and sat down at the dinette table angled between the kitchen and the living room. I stood behind him as he wrote “Robert Crenshaw” in the little box that said “This book belongs to.” I made him do a page of “Robert Crenshaw”s until I realized that it was like a punishment, like writing “I will not talk in class” 100 times, the way the nuns made Grace and I do when we were young. And he’d been so good, Robert—too good, I thought sometimes, going to bed as soon as I asked, although I’d been letting him stay up later than usual to keep me company, to keep the walls from bearing down on me and the sound of the moths batting against the screens from sounding too loud. I could tell that he thought if he was good enough I’d take him home. Maybe that’s why he’d always been so quiet and clean as a kid. Maybe he figured if he was good enough his father wouldn’t hit me anymore.

  “This is kind of hard, isn’t it, hon?” I’d said, looking over his shoulder. “A new school, new friends. Plus the name, and the story about where you’re from and everything. I wish I’d come up with some other way to do it. But I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Robert silently put his composition book in his new backpack. School supplies, a backpack, a new polo shirt: the little wad of bills in the bottom of my bag was melting away. It was like my boy and I were playing a role in some phony TV show. Everything felt artificial. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water and stayed there for a minute, trying to figure out whether I could go through with it. The phone was on the wall. Grace would have plane tickets waiting in Tampa before dinner. I don’t know what I might have done at that moment, if I hadn’t stumbled and brought the glass up against one of my front teeth with a sound, a feeling, I never wanted to hear or feel again. I couldn’t go back to Bobby now without Robert thinking that that was all right, that what would come afterward was the natural order of things. He’d traded one set of secrets for another. But this second set was nothing compared to the other.

  “I
t’s phonetic, Crenshaw,” I said, handing him a cookie. “You can just sound it out. And you remember about Daddy not being a police officer, and not talking about New York or Grandmom or anything when you talk about family stuff. We’re from Delaware. Are you sure you can remember that? It’s that real teeny state on the map, the one just down from New Jersey.”

  “Mom,” Robert said, “kids don’t talk about that stuff that much. They don’t talk about their last names or where they moved from that much. Only grown-ups talk about that stuff.”

  At times like that, I did count my blessings. We’d arrived only three weeks before school began, only three weeks of aimless summer emptiness for my son in this still-strange place, and those weeks filled by Bennie, who was to be in the same class with Robert. Once in a while I felt the presence of someone behind all this, moving us artfully around the chessboard of this strange expatriate life. For that I was grateful.

  Children need structure. That had always been my motto, had been from the time I set up story time and park visits and bath before bed for Grace, when I was little more than a kid myself, my mother secretary to the head of the municipal worker’s union, my father signing over his disability check the third of every month. Gracie and I left home at the same time every day, the red headed Flynn girls, one carroty as a cartoon character, the bigger girl more auburn. “Knowledge,” I’d say. “Unpleasant … mythic.” Spelling words on Friday mornings before the test. Times tables on Tuesdays. And every afternoon, as we met on the corner, I’d say before anything else, “What’d you get?”

  “A hundred,” Grace almost always said, student outstripping teacher. Structure. With structure there was no room for doubt, mistakes, sadness, loneliness. Except occasionally, for me, at night, when I could tell by her breathing that Gracie had drifted off to sleep. Ah, Bobby. I was so ripe for you when I first saw you, saw you glowing in the darkness of that Brooklyn bar like a fire on a cold night.

  Now Robert would have structure every day, the hours in school, the hour of homework, not too much time left over to think, to brood. He had Bennie to go with him on the bus every day and a poster of Don Mattingly in pinstripes over his flimsy bed upstairs. There would be sports teams to join and practices to fill the hours. Now only my own day would lie before me, less like a life than like the interruption of one, the part on an old record when it skipped, one chord over and over. When Bennie and Robert were playing upstairs I allowed myself one soap opera on television, an hour of family feuds, impossibly grand weddings, suggested sex. I took the boys on long trips to the Home Depot, a twenty-minute walk for a can opener and a pot holder. I counted my money at least twice a day. I was so worried about going broke that one day I picked up a job application from Kmart, then put it in a drawer in the kitchen, baffled by how to fill in the section on previous job experience. I bought a pack of index cards, intending to tack them up on the bulletin boards at the supermarkets: Will clean your house. But out on walks with Bennie and Robert, looking at the flat, cinder-block ranch houses and dolled-up aluminum-sided trailers planted on concrete slabs on the side streets, I wondered if anyone in Lake Plata could afford a house cleaner. And when I looked at the phone in our living room I saw that there was no number on the dial, and realized I knew no phone number to put on the index card, no number at which I could be reached. I would be reduced to asking for my own telephone number the next time I talked to Patty Bancroft.

  My one luxury was a fat collected edition of some of Agatha Christie’s mysteries that I picked up off a remainder table at the Job Lot store. I read while I listened to the spoken song of an afternoon radio talk-show host, who appeared to hate Hispanics, Democrats, and homosexuals in equal measure, but who enjoyed his hatred so much that it was almost a pleasure to hear. He always said the word influx as though it was gum and he was popping that X between his molars. Big John Feeney, his name was. I always turned him off when the boys came downstairs.

  I still had $402 of the money I’d brought from home. From home. Would I ever learn to stop thinking that way?

  “What if the principal at your new school is a giraffe …” I said the Friday before school began as Robert and Bennie were eating Blimpies, a special lunch I’d arranged as a treat, along with an hour at an arcade in a strip mall on the highway.

  “… and she keeps banging her head going into the classrooms …” Robert replied.

  “… so she wears a football helmet all the time …”

  “… and plays quarterback on the team, which has a winning season …”

  Bennie was looking at us big-eyed, open-mouthed. “It’s a game we play,” Robert said. “My mom made it up. It’s called ‘What If?’”

  “What if,” I’d say to Grace Ann when she was on the swings, “we had a house in the country …”

  “… and I had a horse and you had a horse and Daddy had a big car with no roof …”

  “A convertible, they call that. And what if we had a governess instead of school …”

  “… and she made us eat worms!”

  Or, when we were older, walking to the bus stop, she on her way to Queen of Peace, I to nursing school: “What if you fell in love at the hospital with a doctor with blond hair and blue eyes …”

  “And you fell in love with a writer with an apartment in the Village …”

  “And you and your husband got the apartment next door to us and you both worked at St. Vincent’s Hospital …”

  “And you became a full professor at NYU …”

  “What if,” I said to Robert as he was eating his breakfast on the first day of school, “you went to school today …”

  “And got the desk next to Bennie’s …” he replied.

  “And had a really really nice teacher who liked you a lot …”

  “And got picked for the soccer team …”

  “What if it turned out you really liked it here …”

  “I have to go get Bennie or we’ll miss the bus,” Robert said, picking up his backpack.

  Every first day of school he’d ever had I’d gone with him: carrying him whimpering into nursery school, walking hand-inhand to first grade. Don’t let anyone tell you New York is a big city. “I know you,” said the cop outside P.S. 135 in Sheepshead Bay as we passed him on our way to St. Stannie’s. “You look just like your dad.”

  “I know,” Robert had said, so faintly you could scarcely hear him. The school at St. Stannie’s was red brick, an unadorned box in the shadow of the Gothic church, all the flourishes and frills used up in the service of the tabernacle, the stained glass, and the carved limestone apse. The only thing distinguished about the school was a long brick pathway to its door. Robert had trudged up it on his way to Mrs. Civello’s first-grade class, with that strange defenseless look a dress shirt gives a little boy, wheeled and run to me, holding tight to my legs, pressing his face into my belly. Then he’d turned and run inside, his navy uniform tie whipping around behind his skinny neck. Some of the other kids hadn’t lost their baby fat yet, round thighs emerging from the plaid parochial-school skirts, bulbous cheeks above gap-toothed grins. But Robert was always a wraith, narrow and bony, a chest like a fledgling, his eyes taking up half his face.

  By third grade I’d been ordered to stay half a block behind him, while he walked with Anthony and Sean and Paul and his other friends. But I’d never wanted to be with him so much as that first day of fifth grade in Lake Plata, and instead there was the yellow bus at the corner, on which no parents were allowed. Robert shoved Bennie into the seat by the window, so that he was even further away from me than the thin yellow skin of metal and glass. “It’s vacation time for Mom,” the bus driver shouted over the raucous sound of the engine and the kids.

  “’Bye, Mrs. Crenshaw,” Bennie called, then turned away to talk to Robert.

  I made it to the school building almost ten minutes before the bus did, and checked to see that no one was watching the school from the parking lot. I peered into the lobby, even looked around the corner dow
n the hallways and saw nothing but the occasional teacher whisking by. I went back outside and stood behind a minivan across the street and waited for Robert’s bus. The driver was a heavy woman in a Dolphins hat, who counted heads aloud as children spilled down the steps. Robert was the nineteenth, disappearing into a river of dark and light heads moving toward the doors. “And that’s twenty-seven and I’m outta here,” I heard the bus driver say. When she’d pulled out I could see the door of the school, could see a little girl in a pink dress being wrestled away from her mother and led wailing into the building by a man in khaki shorts and a polo shirt with a whistle around his neck. “She’ll be fine,” he called back to the mother, who was wiping her eyes. Another little boy had turned in the doorway to look back at his father, who was standing on the sidewalk with a video camera. The kid was squinting, one eye shut so tight that it pulled the rest of his face up into the kind of grimace I’d seen on stroke patients. People kept bumping into him, hurrying into the building.

  “What do you want me to do now?” he said to his father.

  “Wave and say ‘good-bye,’” his father said.

  “Good-bye,” the kid said, without waving. He carried a lunch box shaped like a Mickey Mouse head, even though they served lunch at school. I knew because I’d asked Bennie a dozen times, finally satisfied when I saw the menu in the local paper. Today they were having chicken nuggets, green beans, and tapioca pudding.

  “Jason is now officially in third grade,” said the dad with the video camera in a phony weathercaster’s voice. Next to him a knot of mothers were talking about overcrowding in the kindergarten.

  “Poor Jason,” said a woman who’d been standing next to me, shading her eyes with her hand.

  “Dad goes a little overboard?” I said.

  “They had to ban that sucker from the school with that camera of his,” the woman said. She was wearing pink linen shorts and a matching blouse, white sunglasses, and pink nail polish. She sounded like an actress playing Blanche DuBois in summer stock, looked and smelled as though she’d groomed herself as painstakingly for this morning as I had the morning I got married. A drawl and Diorissimo, or something that smelled a whole lot like it.