“Hi,” I said, looking at Bobby.
“Remember that book on spiritual healing we talked about a couple of weeks ago?” Ben Samuels said. “There’s a documentary about it on PBS tonight. In about a half an hour. I thought you’d like to take a look at it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “See you tomorrow.” I could tell by the silence that he was puzzle by my brusqueness. I had my back to Bobby as I hung the phone up. Every phone call was like espionage by that time.
“That was Winnie,” I said. “About some documentary on spiritual healing on TV at ten.”
“What the hell is spiritual healing?”
“The idea that the power of the mind can overcome illness as effectively as medical treatment. We’ve been talking about it at the hospital.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Bobby said. He went to the refrigerator, opened another beer, rubbed against me as he went back to the table and sat back down, lifted his beer in the Bobby Benedetto patented lift, drank deep. His sweat smelled like beer at night, his sweat and his breath. He looked up at me. “Who did you say that was?” he said.
“Winnie.”
“It didn’t sound like Winnie from where I was sitting.”
At ten I turned on the television and sat down on the couch. Bobby dropped into his lounge chair. “Give me the remote, Fran,” he said. He had another beer in his hand. Two minutes of narration and he shook his head. “Can the human mind control the human body?” said a voice, and Bobby switched to the Sports Channel. Ah, what a rare pair we were.
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
“You didn’t really want to watch that shit, did you?” he called after me.
“Actually, I did.”
“Bring me another beer, all right, Frances?”
I carried another bottle of Bud into the living room, leaving fingerprints on the icy bottle.
“You couldn’t open it?”
“For God’s sakes, Bobby, it’s a twist-off cap. Even if it wasn’t, you could probably get it off without an opener.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I’d carried the empty back into the kitchen and didn’t answer. When I turned from the trash he was standing in the doorway. He looked good when he was drunk. I’d noticed it when he was younger. His eyes glittered and his mouth went slack in a way that had once made me warm and willing and now made me very, very careful. Most of the time.
“Who’d you say that was on the phone?” he asked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bob,” I began.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake what, Fran?” he said in that low, slow voice, his eyelids at half-mast. He put down the bottle and moved in on me, and I didn’t know which was worse, my first thought—that he was going to make me do it in the kitchen, pressed back against the edge of the white Formica countertop—or my second, that he wasn’t going to be able to do it himself. I could feel that he couldn’t, could feel him feeling it.
“You need to put a little weight on, Fran,” he’d said, pushing against me. “You’re nothing but skin and bones.” He kissed me hard, more holding my mouth down with his face than a kiss. I couldn’t breathe, and I tried to slide my face away from his but he had a hand at the back of my neck, and finally I had to push him, had to, I was suffocated, smothered, fighting for air. He tried to push his mouth back down on mine, although I was gasping, and I slid sideways and he fell forward, bumping his chin into the cabinet door. It was like one motion, the fingers lifted to his own face, the backhand to mine, so that I fell and cut my head on the pointed corner of the cabinet by the window, felt the blood warm in my hair and on my neck.
When I’d imagined marriage, when I was standing at the altar of St. Stannie’s the week after I’d turned twenty-one, I’d never imagined staring at the ceiling, the back of my hair matted with blood, willing my husband to get done and get off.
We’d written our own vows: “I will follow you,” Bobby said, his voice making it sound as though it was in bold italics, “to the ends of the earth.” And he would. I knew it as he snored beside me that night, he smelling of Budweiser, me of blood.
That night I got pregnant again, but I lost the baby after four months, and for a week he gave me a massage every night, working the muscles in my shoulders with his strong hands, straddling my body. Maybe it’s hard to understand, for a woman who has never had it happen to her, never watched her husband sob in contrition with those choking sobs that sound like he’s swallowing glass. He made me feel cared for, Bobby did, at times like that, cared for the way no one had ever cared for me. Babied the way I’d never been babied, even by my own parents. He reached me somehow, reeled me back in, rolled me over and said, “I love you so much, sweetheart,” and touched me so softly all over that I reached for him, although the doctor said to wait, and got pregnant again. And lost that one, too. For the best. For the best.
When we were dating, I thought it would stop when we were married. When we were married, I thought a baby would help. After the baby, I thought if we had another child he’d feel better. And when Robert was two I couldn’t leave because those were the formative years, although maybe I didn’t think enough about what we were forming, Bobby and I. And when Robert was starting school I couldn’t leave because school was a big adjustment. And I couldn’t leave in May because I’d screw up our family summer vacation, and I couldn’t leave in November because it would screw up the holidays. So I stayed, and stayed, and stayed.
And then those three women were killed, and when I read their stories I realized that all of them had left, the way everyone expects you to when he hits you, beats you up. They filed the papers, got the restraining orders, said, “No more.” But two had been enticed back, over and over again, and one had never managed to get away even after the divorce. Her husband had kicked in the apartment door, showed up at her office, grabbed her at the bus stop in front of a dozen witnesses who watched him lay into her. Then finally killed her. All dead, all three of them, even though they left, even though they tried to break away. They were the ones who wound up broken. And I could hear Bobby’s voice, begging, begging, breaking me down. And I could see him following me on my morning run, sitting three seats away on the bus to the hospital, talking Robert into letting him into the house. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to leave the way other women left their husbands. I wasn’t going to be able to leave at all. I was going to have to disappear.
I looked around the apartment as Patty Bancroft talked. Maybe, then, this was the ends of the earth. But at least it had curtains.
“They’ll give you uniforms,” Patty Bancroft said about my new job after she’d fed more quarters into the phone.
“Do they know?” I said.
“What?”
“Do they know who I am?”
“They know you’re Elizabeth Crenshaw,” said Patty Bancroft. “You have excellent references. There’s no licensing requirement in Florida. It’s one reason you’re there. They’ll send you out on a case or two next week.”
“Beth,” I said. “I’ve decided on Beth.”
“Everything will be fine, Beth,” she said, “if you do what we say.”
“You sound like my husband.”
“Excuse me?”
“You sound like my husband. Everything will be fine if you do what I say.”
There was a silence in which I could hear people talking and laughing, walking through what must have been an airport on their way to somewhere else, traveling, not fleeing. “Make no mistake about it,” Patty Bancroft said. “He is looking for you right now.”
Scut work was what the agency gave me, work for an orderly, not a nurse. Cooking, cleaning, shopping. But it was fine. It was wonderful. Places to go, people to see. My first visit was to a thirty-year-old woman with cerebral palsy in a blank-faced apartment complex for the handicapped. Her name was Jennifer, and she told me what she needed by tapping on the keyboard of a computer with a long straight stick harnessed to her quivering hand.
She looked like a bird, her head rising and falling as though she was eating instead of just telling me what she wanted to eat, her eyes rolling above a slack mouth that appeared to smile. “Instant oatmeal,” she wrote my first day. “Quart skim milk. Jello-O pudding cups, chocolate. TY.” TY for thank you.
She said it, too, although it sounded more like a growl or a throat clearing than a word. When I came back with the groceries I could hear the printer attached to her computer humming. After I’d changed the sheets on the single bed in the tiny back room, she used the stick to point to a stack of papers in the printer tray. Eleven pages of painstaking notes, including dates of all her hospitalizations. The first sentence was “My name is Jennifer Ann March, and I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, at 6:14 AM on Tuesday, November 7, 1967. The attending obstetrician was not available and an obstetrical resident, Dr. Gregory Littel, performed the delivery with high forceps.”
“The forceps,” I said aloud, not really meaning to, and she made the growling noise again and bobbed her head, as if to say, yes, yes, that’s why I am the way you see me today, because of damage done by the forceps and the resident. If not for those high forceps I would be a thirty-year-old woman playing tennis at the public courts and working evenings as a waitress at Daisy’s on the highway. Or maybe, given the intelligence and diligence of the medical history I held in my hands, a thirty-year-old woman finishing her doctoral dissertation on single-celled organisms or nineteenth-century chamber music. Everyone needs a way of making sense of their deformities, and a difficult birth was as good a way as any of explaining CP, of explaining to herself why she was slumped sideways, imprisoned in her own body, proffering these single-spaced pages as a way to make me see her as human.
“Is this for me?” I asked, and her head bobbed again. On her computer screen words appeared like magic, messages from people jousting with one another verbally in a chat room. “The meteor showers this weekend were stupendous,” said the last line on the screen. “From Manitoba they looked like silver fireworks.”
“I’m going now,” I said. “I’ll be back Tuesday. Can I bring anything with me?”
Her wobbly head swayed from side to side. Her hair was cut short, perhaps an inch long all over; I knew a nurse dressed her in the mornings. Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people. That noise again, deep in her throat.
“You’re welcome,” I said, closing the door behind me, stepping outside into the heat.
Maybe Patty Bancroft was right; maybe Bobby was looking for me even as I put pudding and milk into Jennifer’s refrigerator. But I was looking for him right back. I walked to my jobs by a different route each time, peering into parked cars, turning around if someone came up slowly behind me. Cindy and I volunteered in the school library for the first hour of every day; she could tell Chelsea she was in the building and I could keep an eye on Robert and on the door to the school, just opposite the library double doors. We traded in sweating in the parking lot for reshelving and covering books under the querulous direction of old Mrs. Patrinian, who called each of us “Mommy.” The school secretary got to know me, to expect to see me around. “If Robert has any problems, you’ll call?” I asked one day when I brought her an iced tea from the cafeteria. “Absolutely,” she said, tapping an envelope of Sweet ’n Low into her cup with a long nail painted pink and white.
Most days Cindy and I had coffee after, unless Chad had Gymboree. “All first-time moms, who talk about the baby falling off the bed like it’s the Titanic,” she said dismissively. “If I hear one more debate about putting tubes in for ear infections, I will spit.” Then we went to work. Cindy loaded her black imitation leather display cases into the minivan and I went to see my patients. There was Jennifer twice a week, and a dialysis patient from the local hospital named Melvin, whose skin was as yellow as margarine. He never even looked away from the television as I took his blood pressure and listened to his heart. He watched the stock ticker on the financial network and made notes on a legal pad. “He’s not taking this well,” said his wife. He was a long-distance trucker waiting for a kidney transplant. In the meantime he played the stock market on paper, buying and selling in his head, GM, Textron, IBM, The Gap. Every morning he sent his wife to the 7-Eleven for lottery tickets. “You think it’s wrong to pray for a transplant?” said his wife, whose name was Ada.
“Why would you think it was wrong to pray for a transplant?”
“I offered to give him one myself, but the doctor said it was no good. Otherwise someone has to die. I mean someone has to die for him to get a kidney. It seems like a hard thing, to pray for someone to die.”
“Don’t worry about that, Ada,” I said.
I saw Melvin twice a week, too. I couldn’t warm to him, although I felt sorry for Ada, who washed his sheets every day in Clorox to get out the sweat stains. But my main job, and my favorite one, was taking care of the Levitts, in a building called the Lakeview on the other side of the highway from our house. It was a good long walk, about twenty minutes, the twin towers of the senior citizens’ complex rising before me like a mirage amid a sea of small white stucco houses with red tile roofs, vibrating with window air conditioners. Some days I would sit down on the steps of one small house or another, scraggly flowered bushes shielding me from view, and wipe my forehead with a Kleenex. Sometimes I stopped at the 7-Eleven myself for a Big Gulp. “Hot out there,” the Asian man behind the counter always said, making it sound like one big polysyllabic word, an idiomatic expression he proferred, along with a big grin, as the price of doing business in this crazy, crazy country. It seemed possible that I was the only person in Lake Plata who didn’t travel in an air-conditioned car. Since we’d arrived in Florida my face had been crimson most of the time, all the blood visible through my thin skin, my hair in spikes every which way.
The first day I went to the Levitts had been a school holiday, Faculty Development Day, and I’d reluctantly entrusted Robert to the Castro family, slowly, loudly asking Milagro Castro if she could look out for him while I was gone.
“Let me tell her,” Bennie had said, turning to his mother. A birdsong of Spanish from the boy, then a series of manic nods from his mother, then more Spanish and another emphatic nod.
“She says she will take care of him the same way she takes care of the rest of us. She says he is a good boy.”
Mrs. Castro poured forth a torrent of words, her head and hands dancing.
“She says Robert will have lunch with us and it will be a pleasure to have him. She says he is a good boy and she will not let him out of her sight. All right, Ma, that’s enough.” Bennie had turned back to me. “She’s saying a lot of praying stuff. Well, not praying exactly, but God stuff. That’s okay, Mommy, she understands.” And the two boys had trudged into the Castro apartment, arguing about which comic superhero was more indestructible, as Bennie’s mother and I bowed and grinned like dolls on the back of a car dash. Women’s work, they seemed to say with their retreating backs. The screen slammed. Then Robert came back out, pulled me aside as Mrs. Castro smiled upon us both and whispered, “When are you coming back?”
“Around four,” I said.
“Four in the afternoon?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with me? I said you could come with me and sit in the lobby.”
He shook his head. “I just want to know.” He turned back to Bennie, and I turned toward the Lakeview and the Levitts.
“Look, Irving,” Mrs. Levitt said the first time she opened her apartment door to me, as I stood outside in a hallway that smelled like Lysol and old people. “Look,” she said, after standing on tiptoe and peering through the peek hole. “They sent a new one.”
The Levitts lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen so small that Mrs. Levitt and I could not make iced tea and sandwiches in it at the same time. It had one of those balconies so many apartment buildings in New York had, just big enough to stand on, small, ugly, and useless, the a
ppendix of modern architecture. Mrs. Levitt used it only to check for a storm coming when she heard the warning on the Weather Channel, and to hang her hand washables. Sometimes, as I got close to the building, I could tell which apartment was the Levitts’ by the assortment of corsetry baking in the still air.
The apartment was as plain and simple as the inside of a box, but it was full of rococo furniture, sideboard next to highboy, a big sectional with old brocade pillows worn soft as baby skin, an assortment of sepia photographs displayed in Lucite frames on a bureau pushed into one corner. There were dining-room chairs but no dining table, end tables with geometric inlay and flimsy plastic tray tables. The Oriental rug was tucked under at one end, six inches too long for its surroundings. One corner of the living room was crammed with a hospital bed, a card table with medications and spray cleaners and adult diapers, and a large oil painting of a dark forest in an elaborate gilt frame. When I was a student nurse I’d done home visits to a seventy-year-old cancer patient, a retired furrier whose small efficiency had been much the same. “Their lives shrink as they get older, but their furniture stays the same size,” my clinical supervisor had said.
“That color washes you out,” Mrs. Levitt said the first day I went there, as she opened the door and looked at the blue polyester zip-front shift that I wore on the job, which fomented and held perspiration like the plastic weight-loss wraps I’d seen in women’s magazines.
“And hello to you, too,” I said.
“Uh-oh, Irving,” Mrs. Levitt said. “This one’s got a funny bone.”
There wasn’t much for me to do at the Levitts, really. Mrs. Levitt and I turned Irving over; he had had a stroke that left him incontinent, mute, and largely paralyzed except for the occasional wild spasm. Together we changed Irving’s sheets and his pajamas. Mostly we drank tea after feeding Irving pureed peas and broth through a straw and changing his diapers.