Keeping Lucy

by T. Greenwood

  As Ginny got out of the driver’s seat, she realized that every muscle had been tensed as she clutched the wheel, her body aching in the aftermath. Still, she had driven. A vehicle. All by herself. The time Ab gave her a driving lesson had left her in tears. She’d felt foolish and incompetent as the car bucked and stalled down their street in Dover, the neighbors coming out to watch her failed attempts, standing in their respective driveways, pretending they were tending to their roses or checking their mail. When she finally did get some traction, she’d accidentally driven up over a curb and hit one of the neighbor’s lawn jockeys. She’d gotten out of the car, slammed the door, run past that fallen statue back to their house, and told him she never wanted to drive again.

  “I never thought you were capable of a hit and run!” Ab had teased. “That poor lawn jockey didn’t see it coming.”

  She’d hated that he was making fun.

  She wished he could see her now. She wished he’d seen her on that highway, the needle on the speedometer rising to forty, fifty, even sixty miles an hour.

  “There’s a Laundromat over that way,” Marsha said, gesturing across the street. “We can do a couple of loads and then get some breakfast while they fix the leak.”

  They grabbed all the dirty laundry from the trunk, including the dirty cloth diapers that Ginny had been washing by hand and drying by hanging them out of the car, window rolled up pinching the edges to keep them from flying away. They’d bought a pack of Pampers in Virginia, but they were all gone now, and they’d been so expensive. It didn’t make sense to Ginny to waste her money just for the convenience of the disposable diapers.

  The only clean clothes any of them had were the ones they were wearing. Even then Ginny could smell the faint scent of her perspiration on her blouse. They say the scent of stress sweat is distinct from the smell of exertion, and this was the smell of stress.

  “Hey, did you notice that car that pulled in behind us at the gas station?” Marsha asked as they entered the Laundromat.

  “What car?” Ginny asked.

  “That green one,” she said, gesturing out the window across the street. An olive-green Duster was pulled up next to the gas pump, and an attendant was lowering a dipstick into the engine. The sun was reflecting off the driver’s-side window, making it impossible to see inside.

  “I swear I saw that same car back at the motel,” Marsha said.

  She was right. Ginny had seen it, too. Ginny felt her heart thunk. They both peered out the window, waiting to see if the driver would get out of the car. But the sound of a child screaming pulled her away. Lucy was sitting on the floor, happily playing with a pile of toys that had been left to occupy the Laundromat patrons’ kids: wooden busy beads and one of those blocks with the pegs and a hammer to push them through. Peyton, however, had opted to use the shiny linoleum floor as a skating rink, having somehow managed to remove his shoes and slide himself right into the corner of one of the machines.

  The egg on his head appeared almost immediately.

  “Come here,” she said, scooping Peyton up from the floor and sitting down with him in one of the plastic seats, ignoring the raised eyebrow of the attendant and the muttered complaints of the older woman who had her laundry spread across one of the folding tables.

  Snot was streaming down from each of Peyton’s nostrils. She grabbed one of the stiff cloth diapers from their pile and dabbed at it.

  “I’ll go grab some ice,” Marsha said. “There’s a Krystal restaurant right next door.”

  Ginny nodded and cradled Peyton, shushing him softly until his cries turned into an occasional hiccup. All the while, she studied the car across the street, wondering if the driver knew that she and Marsha were over here. The gas station attendant filled the Duster’s tank and then used a squeegee to wash the car’s windshield. When the driver rolled the window down to pay for his services, the attendant was blocking Ginny’s view so she couldn’t see inside.

  She hadn’t checked in with her mother since Atlantic City, choosing ignorance in case the school had sent someone after her. But if someone was following her, someone sent by Ab, or worse, by the police, or FBI even, it would probably be best to not remain in the dark.

  They hoped to get to Weeki Wachee that night. Just one more day on the road. She’d call her mother once they got settled. Hopefully, she and Marsha were only being paranoid. Perhaps the driver in the Duster was just somebody taking the same route as them; they were on the main interstate, after all.

  On the TV hanging overhead, a newscaster was talking about a riot that had just broken out at Attica, a prison in upstate New York. A thousand inmates involved. She stood up and walked to the TV, turning the channel to I Love Lucy. When Ricky Ricardo hollered “Lucy!” Lucy looked up, startled to hear her own name coming from the television. Ginny smiled.

  Marsha returned with a paper cup full of ice as well as two soft-serve ice cream cones for the kids. Hardly a good breakfast, but if it kept Peyton from crying, she was game.

  They loaded the soiled clothes into one large industrial-size washer, purchasing a small box of powdered soap from a vending machine.

  “Peyton,” Marsha said, “come help me?”

  Marsha lifted him up and let him shake the soap into the machine. She handed him the coins. Because of the Magic Fingers, he knew exactly what to do and deftly put the coins in the slot. He squealed with delight as the mechanism returned empty and the water began to fill inside the machine. Marsha gave him a high five and asked for a lick of his cone.

  Ginny was delighted when Peyton held the cone out to Marsha. For a child who found sharing a sort of affront to his nature, this counted as progress as far as Ginny was concerned.

  She tried to imagine Marsha with her own child. When they were in high school, Marsha had always said she never wanted kids. Unlike most girls their age, she never babysat. Found no allure in babies. But watching her with Peyton, Ginny could almost imagine her with her own child. Her own son.

  Ginny had been terrified when the doctor told her that she’d given birth to a boy. She didn’t have brothers. And after her father passed away, there hadn’t even been a man in the house. She would never have admitted it to anyone, but she’d been praying for a girl. When she imagined being a mother, it had always been as the mother of a daughter. As the baby grew inside her, she entertained thoughts of ballet lessons and piano lessons and the quiet talks they’d have when she became a teen. She would be the confidante her own mother had never been. She would be her best friend. And so, when Peyton had come out screaming bloody murder and the doctor had announced his sex like she’d won a prize, she’d felt tremendously let down. She never told Ab, but she’d been deeply and profoundly disappointed when Peyton was born. It made her ashamed, filled her with guilt.

  Of course, over time, this sense of disenchantment eventually gave way to a new sort of happiness. She did, indeed, take pleasure in Peyton as he grew. The small milestones truly thrilled her: his first laugh had brought tears to her eyes, and his first steps had made her feel inordinately proud. She’d realized after not too long that he too loved to be read to (even if the books were not the ones she would have chosen herself as a child). She comforted herself with the idea that there was always time. That perhaps the next child would be a girl. And how lovely for her to have such a sweet older brother to care for her. It was what got her through the grass stains and wild streaks. It was the place she went when Peyton and Ab wrestled in the living room and broke the coffee table. When she sat in the hospital emergency room waiting for the X-rays to confirm a broken bone. When Peyton and she seemed to communicate in an entirely different language, she dreamed of the girl-child that would one day come. That placid beautiful creature that would understand her on the most primitive level. She waited for the kindred spirit.

  She watched Lucy now as she played with the painted wooden beads, sliding one then another over the twisted wires, delighting when they were all stacked up on one side. Her heart trilled
as Lucy looked up at her for approval. She nodded, tears filling her eyes as she reached out and stroked Lucy’s soft curls. The lice, thankfully, were gone now, and the mayonnaise method had left her hair shiny and soft to the touch.

  “Good job!” Ginny said.

  “I’m going to go check on the car,” Marsha said.

  While the clothes spun in the dryer, Ginny read a Cosmopolitan magazine, the cover promising all sorts of things inside: THE STRANGE HAPPY LIFE OF A WOMAN WHO SUPPORTS HER HUSBAND and HOW SEXY DO YOU SEEM TO MEN?: A QUIZ. She flipped ahead instead to AN EXCERPT FROM THE BELL JAR, AN IMPORTANT NEW NOVEL. Ginny had read Ariel, one of Sylvia Plath’s poetry collections, a couple of years earlier. She had always felt a certain kinship with Plath, yet another troubled Massachusetts poetess. But her suicide, that horrific domestic drama that played out in her kitchen while her children slept, was something she could barely comprehend.

  Ginny studied her children. Peyton was occupied with a toy dump truck, which he was running across the rows and rows of washers. Lucy was still contentedly playing with the busy beads.

  “It’s fixed!” Marsha said as she zipped back in. “Just like Jesse said, a pinhole-size leak in the radiator. They repaired it and said we’re good to go. I called Theresa and told her we should be arriving tonight. I figure we’ve got about five and a half hours to Weeki Wachee, not including stops. We can stop in Gainesville for lunch and then try to power through the rest of the way, get there by the time she’s getting off work tonight.”

  “Was that guy in the Duster still over there?”

  “I didn’t see him,” Marsha said.

  “Do you think he’s following us?” Ginny asked.

  “Do you know anybody who drives a green Duster?” Marsha asked.

  Ginny shook her head. Her father-in-law drove a Lincoln, and Ab drove the same baby-blue Galaxie convertible he’d had since they started dating.

  She wondered if she should call Ab once they finally arrived in Florida. So long as she didn’t speak to Ab, she could imagine that he had simply just continued on with his life. Like a worm whose head has been cut off; it just keeps on wriggling. (She knew this because Peyton had demonstrated with one of the fat night crawlers he insisted on keeping in an old Chock Full o’Nuts can in his room.) But if she were to speak to him, this fantasy might very well be shattered. Facing Ab meant facing whatever consequences might arise from all of this. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that. Wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready for that.

  The fact that someone appeared to be following them, even if it was just a paranoid delusion, reminded her of the very real possibility that Ab would not just let her walk out of his life. Certainly not with his son in tow. It was only when she thought of Peyton that her heart snagged. What would she do if the situation were reversed, and Ab took off with her son without a word? She’d lose her mind; she knew this. She probably would get in the car herself (despite having exactly three hours of driving experience as of this morning) and chase them down.

  She and Marsha folded the clothes quickly and stuffed them into Ginny’s bag. They were hot and smelled so good and clean. There was a certain familiar comfort in the scent of the soapy detergent and fabric softener, but also a sort of sentimental longing for normalcy, for home.

  They waited for the traffic on the now much busier street to wane before they ran across the road to the garage, each of them carrying one of the children. What a motley crew they must seem to the people who had emerged and were now filling the shops and restaurants on this small strip.

  Ginny offered the garage manager her credit card, saying a silent prayer as he disappeared into his office. She knew that at some point the credit would be used up, though she had no idea when. He was gone for a long time. When he failed to return, Marsha looked at Ginny, eyebrows raised.

  Ginny felt her pulse quicken. Peyton was restless, fiddling with the gumball machine in the waiting room.

  “Can I have a penny?” he asked, tugging at her shirt.

  She shook her head. “Not now.” She jostled Lucy on her hip when she started to rub her eyes and fuss. The room was smoky, the other waiting patron an older gentleman who was chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, reading a ragged issue of Field & Stream.

  “What is he doing back there?” Marsha whispered, leaning and stretching her neck to catch a glimpse.

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said, feeling her heart rising into her throat. She moved a little to the left where she could see the man through a smudgy window, holding the card up and speaking into the phone.

  She tried to recall if Ab’s number was anywhere on the card. Was it possible he was calling to make sure it wasn’t stolen?

  Another minute passed. The paperwork, detailing the repairs made on the car, was sitting on the counter, along with Marsha’s keys. Marsha gestured with her chin to the keys, and, feeling queasy, Ginny nodded.

  Marsha grabbed the keys, motioned for Ginny to follow. Lucy on her hip, Ginny took Peyton’s hand and hurried them all out through the door, the electronic bell announcing their departure. The man with the magazine didn’t even look up.

  They ran to the waiting car and leapt in. Marsha started the engine as Ginny threw both kids and the laundry bag in the backseat, and as the manager emerged from the building, Marsha peeled out of the parking lot and onto the road.

  She raced through a flashing yellow light and then accelerated so fast, Ginny felt like she’d left her stomach behind. They climbed onto I-95 South, and Marsha kept accelerating.

  “Whee!” Peyton squealed from the backseat.

  “Whee!” Lucy mimicked. Ginny turned around to see them both gleeful in the backseat, and despite the sheer terror she felt at what might happen next, a small part of her felt absolutely and unequivocally happy.

  * * *

  “We’re going to need to take some back roads,” Marsha said. “If that guy at the garage called Ab or the police, they’ll be looking for us on I-95.”

  The momentary rush of adrenaline, the hot liquid feeling that had coursed through Ginny’s body as they made their getaway, had now pooled into a sort of molten dread in the center of her chest.

  Both kids had fallen asleep again in the backseat, the narcotic effect of the engine’s lullaby something they both seemed to suffer from, and Ginny took this opportunity to verbalize her fears.

  “Abbott could have us arrested,” she said.

  “Well, he’s definitely going to shit a brick,” Marsha said.

  Marsha had met Abbott Senior exactly three times. The first time had been enough for her to make her assessment of him. That he was a Class A Jerk. The kind of man who felt entitled to whatever it was he wanted. Money, power, women. Marsha said she knew the second he shook her hand, holding on too long, assessing her even as he wouldn’t let her hand go, that he was somebody who saw the world as his for the taking.

  Twenty-seven

  1965–1968

  Peyton was born in February 1965, while Ab was in the throes of his first year of law school and he and Ginny were living in the little house in Cambridge. By the time Ab headed into his second year of school, they learned the news that one of those boys sent over to Vietnam by the IVS had died, killed in an ambush in the Mekong Delta. He was a Wesleyan graduate, of all things, and just a year older than Ab. It could have been him, she thought. Her pregnancy had simply been fate’s way of keeping Ab away from harm.

  And she enjoyed motherhood more than she had thought possible, though it did feel a bit as if their lives were on hold until Ab finished school. She knew that as soon as he had his degree they’d have much more freedom to forge the life they truly wanted. First of all, she wanted to move to a place where they could raise this child in nature. She’d never pictured herself raising a family in the suburbs with a husband who disappeared into the city each day only to come home bedraggled and weary each night. She knew she wasn’t the only one who felt this way; there had been a virtual exodus from many of the urban areas on the East Co
ast, people of their generation fleeing the city for simpler lives. Getting back to the land.

  Ab shook his head sadly. “How would we live?” he asked. “How would I make money? We have three mouths to feed, Gin.”

  They were sitting at their small kitchen table eating dinner. Ab’s textbooks were next to his plate. He gripped one of the fancy forks they’d gotten for the wedding in his left hand. She used their good china and silver for every meal because she had neglected to register for everyday dinnerware, having difficulty imagining needing two whole sets of dishes.

  “It’s communal living,” she argued. Marsha had told her about a friend of theirs from high school who had joined one such community. “Everyone works, and everyone shares. You raise your own food, live off the land.”

  Ab set his fork down and picked up his gold-rimmed goblet of iced tea. “I don’t know the first thing about farming, Gin. I grew up in Dover, for God’s sake.”

  “How hard can it be?” she asked. “You loved working for the produce company!”

  “I don’t think that counts,” Ab said, grinning.

  “It’s a simple life,” she said, staring at the ridiculous china upon which her miserable attempt at chicken cacciatore sat. “A good life. It’s what you wanted, Ab. What we wanted.”

  Ab reached across the table and took Ginny’s hand in his, ran his fingers across her dimpled knuckles. “Just let me finish school, pass the bar. Then I’ll at least have my degree, something to fall back on. Maybe I can start my own practice.”

  Ginny sighed and reached for her own glass of iced tea. But it was bitter, and the ice had melted.

  “I don’t want to raise this baby here,” she said softly.

  “Well, of course not, we’ll get a bigger house eventually. We’ll outgrow this one after a couple of years.”

  She shook her head and gestured stupidly at Ab’s fork.