by Susan Minot
The woman didn’t say anything as they walked along a street lined with small houses behind chain-link fences. He thought, Maybe she just wants to make sure I pay for the pot. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he was terrified regardless. A knife in her pocket.
At the corner, Ned saw a small grocery and was relieved when they got up to it and the woman sort of steered him to enter.
“Pack of Trues,” said a big man in front of them at the bodega. Going into a store was reassuring to Ned. This woman wasn’t so desperate that she wasn’t doing normal things. The man behind the counter looked over the shoulder of the True man.
“Cómo estás?” he said to the woman with Ned and reached back to the cigarettes.
“Dos, por favor,” the woman said. Two packs of Parliaments stacked on top of each other were placed on the counter. “Matches too.” Now Ned heard she had a slight accent, but he had no idea what it was.
Ned tried to catch the eye of the man behind the counter, a guy in his fifties or sixties with a low, dark hairline, but he had the sort of face that had been set like a mask years ago with creases in the forehead and a mouth pressed tight. It didn’t look as if his gaze wanted to take in anything new.
This lady was probably always bringing young boys back to her place to score. What did the man behind the counter care?
* * *
•
Six months earlier Ned’s father had left Ned’s mother because he was now in love with a woman he’d met in Chicago on a business trip the previous spring. He had sat next to her on the bus while they were touring a plant he was visiting. She was a businessperson like him, a little younger than their mother, he’d conceded to his sons when he explained it all to them that July. Her name was Mary Ellen, he said, and they had fallen in love with each other and she very much wanted to meet the boys. Ned’s mother was not in the room for this information. Ned and Matt supposed she’d heard it already, or else their father wouldn’t have dared tell them. She was out at the Rentschlers’ for cocktails. It was a golden summer evening, a Friday at their summer house on the Cape. Mr. Baldwin had just arrived. There’d been thunderstorms all day and now the air was clear and freshly cold.
“So you’re divorcing Mum?” Matt had said.
“Your mother and I have been growing apart for some time,” said Ned’s father. He was leaning forward on the wicker sofa, elbows on knees, clapping his hands together slowly and silently.
“Where’s Mary Ellen now?” Matt was always the one who knew what the important information to gather was. The answer was a surprise.
“She’s nearby,” their father said. To his credit, he looked pained. Ned could see he was trying to be straight with his kids. “She’s at a hotel in Sandwich.” It was the next town over.
Sandwich? Did that mean they were going to meet her now? “Does Mom know?” Matt asked. His eyes were low and unfeeling, not in the least being sympathetic to his dad.
“That she’s here…no…”
“No, Dad. That you’re divorcing her.” Matt’s head tilted back, his ear practically on his shoulder, and he was kind of snarling.
“Your mother understands everything going on,” their father said, something Ned doubted very much. “But our main concern,” he went on, “is how this will affect you two.”
“Right,” Matt spat under his breath.
“It hasn’t been an easy decision, Matt. But I love Mary Ellen and there’s nothing else for me to do. I don’t have a choice.”
“Actually, everyone has a choice.” Matt had been studying debate in the spring, and Ned noticed a change in his tone of voice whenever he found an opportunity to practice it on the family. This was definitely the most substantial thing he’d come across yet. He sat up. “You can stay or you can go off with some other lady. There’s always a choice.”
Mr. Baldwin nodded slowly a few times, as if to concede he would take a few hits, he was willing to do that. His lips disappeared in his face. He looked at the wicker coffee table with the glass cover.
Matt turned sideways on his chair, away from his father. “You’re lame, Dad,” he said.
“What about you, Ned. Mad at your old man?”
Ned had taken off the bandanna he’d had around his head and was tying it tightly around his wrist. He didn’t know what to say. So he expressed a worry. “So we’re going to still live with Mom?”
“That’s the idea.” Mr. Baldwin sat up. “But I’ll be seeing you a lot.” He slapped his knees, meaning this must be over.
“Like when?” Ned said.
Mr. Baldwin stood up with a big smile. “Oh, all the time. All the time.”
Matt didn’t look at him; he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of attention.
* * *
•
Since that Friday in July Ned had seen his dad three times. Their mother didn’t allow their dad to come by. On a Saturday in September his father had taken Ned and Matt to the Harvard game. In November, at the start of Thanksgiving vacation, he’d driven Ned home from St. Peter’s, dropped him off at their house, his father’s previous house, then turned around and drove back to his apartment on Beacon Hill, where he was now living with Mary Ellen.
Later that night on the Cape after Mr. Baldwin had left, Ned and Matt went to their station behind the lattice divider of the porch, where the lights from the porch came through in checkered shadows, and passed a joint back and forth. Their mother had stumbled up to bed after a fake cheerful good night in the living room, clinking together a few bottles in the dining room on her way, so they didn’t talk that night about Mr. Baldwin’s news. His mother didn’t like to talk about gloomy things. Ned was noting stonedly how the joint looked like a slightly oranger version of the fireflies blinking at the edge of the lawn when suddenly they heard from an upstairs window a few strange high intakes of breath as if someone were suffocating. Both of them froze. It was so fleeting that when it stopped they weren’t sure it hadn’t been part of an insect chorus, or even music coming from the house party next door.
* * *
•
Ned smelled burning garbage as he and the woman walked a few slushy blocks down a quiet street to a beige house. A busted front-door window was covered with cardboard, doing nothing to keep out the sudden cold. The woman unlocked a padlock and then put a key in the next door. Nobody knows where I am, Ned thought. No one in the whole world. He thought, I could run now and what if she ran after me and stabbed me in the street, I’d lie there bleeding and die and if she took my wallet no one would even know who I was.
“Up we go,” the woman said and followed Ned in. They went up three flights beside a thick railing, switching back to go up each flight, and stopped at a door with a pale-blue pussycat decal sparkling on it.
“Come on, baby. Be a good boy and I’ll be nice.” She said it with a soft tone and Ned tried to see this as a good sign. But the whole thing was not looking good at all, the whole thing was a bunch of bad signs.
She opened the door and flicked her hand for him to go in first. It was one room sort of divided by a couch with a kitchen on one side by a window and a bed against the wall on the other. The bed had a pink satin cover on it.
Covering the wall by the bed were framed pictures, all of the woman, studio shots of her dressed up in feathers, wearing hot pants, in a sequined dress with a top hat onstage in the spotlight, in cheesecake poses with her butt out and mouth pouting. She saw him looking at them. “I dance at Starlite down in the District. You should come see me sometime.” Ned couldn’t believe she was telling him where she worked. Didn’t that mean that nothing bad could happen?
“You’re pretty cute,” she said, and pushed back the hair from Ned’s forehead. It was weird, it was a thing his mother did. He felt a wave of nausea and thought, What’s she going to do if I faint?
She sat on the bed and unzipped her boots. S
he patted the shimmering pink beside her. “Come here. Come sit with Crystal.” Now she was even telling him her name.
“Listen, I’m sorry. I really have to go. I have to catch a train.”
“No, baby. No. Not yet. Come here.” And then in a sort of harder voice, suddenly impatient, “Take off your coat.”
He didn’t see anywhere to put it and dropped the coat on the floor. He sat down beside her. The room smelled of powdery perfume.
“What’s your name?”
“Ned.” As soon as he said it he realized he should have lied. What was his problem? She’d never have known his name. He had a terrified, drifting feeling, as if something beyond him like the ocean were sweeping him forward and he was supposed to just go along with this current, not fight it. There were so many things in the world you couldn’t do anything about; this was just another one.
She picked up a short roach from a black ashtray on a bedside table beside a white cat lamp and lit it. “This should help,” she said. “This is what you were after, isn’t it?” She took a toke and handed it to Ned. He took a toke and held in the smoke and waited to feel something. It didn’t take even the slightest edge off his terror.
“Neddy, that’s cute.” She put her hand with its rings and long crimson fingernails on his crotch. She took another drag from the joint. “And what have we here, Neddy?” Then the abrupt, low voice. “Take off your pants.”
Ned’s body seemed to lift a couple of feet off the bed and after that it was as if he were watching through a thick glass aquarium. He kept sitting there and she started to move him around, and pulled off his corduroys. She stood and took off her jeans and her flesh-colored stretchy underpants with an unnatural bulge. He was pushed facedown on the bed. He thought his lungs would explode. What was that? Her sharp fingernail…then an awful, familiar softness. “Shit,” Crystal was muttering. “What the fuck.” She fumbled around. Ned closed his eyes, which brought him back close into his body, so he quickly opened them and kept them open, looking over a chipped windowsill at some flat, dark rooftops and tilted gray roofs. He could see the Bunker Hill Monument at the very edge of the window. If he didn’t die, he kept thinking, this would be over soon. If he did die, this would be the last thing he saw: a room he didn’t know with a bedside table and a cat lamp on it. She was mumbling swear words and poking at him with her fingers, then fumbling again. He also thought, I will never tell this to anyone. He would never be able to explain how he had let this happen to himself. He felt a sharp pain.
How long it went on he couldn’t have said. But it wasn’t that quick.
* * *
•
Then she got off him. “Get out of here,” she said and threw Ned his coat. She didn’t look at him. He did everything not to look at her either as he grabbed his pants and his boots without bothering with his socks. His arms felt all weak.
He opened the door and she didn’t stop him. His legs felt shaky but relieved as he hurried down the stairs and out of the house. He didn’t look back. The next day he would have practically no memory of the subway ride that took him back to the Red Line and then to Cambridge. It was dark when he got to his aunt Elsie’s, later than usual. Aunt Elsie remarked on his ashen complexion. “They are working you too hard out on the ice,” she said. “Come on. You need to eat.” Ned said he wasn’t feeling well and after hanging up his parka beside the other winter coats where they were luxuriously loaded deep in the hall closet he went upstairs and lay down on his bed in the guest room. He slept through till morning.
* * *
•
The third time he’d seen his father was at a dinner arranged so he and Matt could meet Mary Ellen. Across from the Marshport church with the rotting steeple was the Brown Mug, a restaurant the Baldwins knew only from driving by. It was here Ned’s father chose to introduce his sons to the person he was in love with, at dinner one October evening. There was no natural light inside the Brown Mug; their father and Matt and Ned were led to a banquette. Mary Ellen was there already and she stood. She wore a ruffled white shirt and a dark skirt with a matching jacket, a suit, not like anything their mother would ever wear. Their mom wore things like purple Marimekko shirtdresses and pink lipstick and carried a handbag that she said came from France, made of quilted flowered fabric. Mary Ellen had a black purse with a snap top. Her hair was pulled back tight and piled on the top of her head, like a country-western singer’s. She wasn’t close to being as pretty as their mother. It would have been one thing if their dad had found, in his words, a dish, but Mary Ellen didn’t fall into the category at all. Her actual face sort of looked like a man’s.
Mary Ellen sat next to their father in the banquette. At dinner they didn’t talk about anything. The candle on their table was a topaz tulip shape with mottled indentations as if fingertips had molded the liquid glass. Ned spent much of the dinner looking at the candle.
* * *
•
Ned waited a few weeks before he told Matt what had happened at the Boston Common. It was Presidents’ Day, so they were both home for the weekend. Matt went to a different boarding school, Westminster, because their dad thought that, as brothers, they should carve out places of their own. Mrs. Baldwin had been checked into a rehab place in western Massachusetts for a couple of weeks, after their cleaning lady, Marsha, found her passed out in the basement in their dad’s workshop. Luckily it had been one of Marsha’s cleaning days. Their mom’s friend Dionne Hayden had driven her to Silver Lane—Mrs. Hayden was very organized and cheerful and even knew the place because Mr. Hayden had been in and out a few times, and Matt and Ned were going to visit her the next day. They’d come home to get the car. Marsha picked them up at the bus station and drove them home. She was a soft-edged person with sympathetic eyes and a tentative manner and Ned noticed, following her oversize alpaca sweater on the way to her car, how she was straining to strike the right note of concern, but it came across as frightened. Ned knew that, at home, Marsha had a “challenged” daughter, whom he’d seen once down the hall when he’d gone with his mother to drop off hand-me-downs. The daughter had been sitting on the floor ineffectually batting stuffed animals. At home Marsha drove them up the winding driveway and told them to call her if they needed anything and that she’d left groceries in the fridge.
They made hamburgers for supper and Ned’s stomach was roiling. His digestion had been sort of screwed up for the past month or so.
Even though alone in the house, the brothers retreated to the rec room past the basement stairs where Matt hid his bong to smoke. That’s when Ned told him what had happened.
Matt listened with an incredulous look and Ned was relieved that he didn’t seem to find anything in Ned’s behavior to criticize. Matt shook his head, and kept on shaking it. This was the sickest thing he had ever heard. Then he got worked up.
“Shit, man, I’m going to kill the guy,” Matt said, holding in his toke. Then he let it out. “You know where he lives. We could track him down. We even know where he works. We could easily turn him in.”
Ned drew in the smoke, unable to answer. He still felt he’d been the one who had allowed it to happen, and no matter how you saw it, it would always be that way. For a long time he had kept going over in his mind the times he could have run or tried to grab the knife. Why didn’t he? He was too completely petrified, that’s why.
They both agreed there was no point in telling their mother.
“You just show me where that fucking guy lives,” Matt said. Matt was bigger than Ned, and stronger. He could really whale on someone if he wanted to.
“I’m not sure I could really find it again,” Ned lied.
“We could go to the place he works. I’m telling you, we should get the guy. He can’t get away with that.”
“But what if they find out I was trying to buy pot? That would be bad.”
They both frowned, thinking. The smoke was d
oing its job of lightening Ned’s head and he thought of their mother, whom they’d see tomorrow. He pictured her in a wicker chair in a sort of sunroom looking out over a lawn of snow, as he’d seen in a movie.
“Well, we’ve got to tell someone,” Matt said.
They looked at each other, but neither could come up with a suitable person to tell.
* * *
•
The next afternoon they were sitting, stoned, with their mother in a wood-paneled room with high windows and mustard-colored curtains. In the room were many other people sitting around in armchairs with low tables, some doing a puzzle at a table. Half the people in the room were smoking. Mrs. Baldwin was wearing her blue-and-white-flowered bathrobe, and her hair was flatter to her head than usual. She kept smiling weakly, and her voice was weak, too. She told Ned he needed a haircut and pretended to have a commanding expression. Then her face sort of crumbled.
“I’m so sorry, boys,” she said, and started crying. “Your mother is having a time of it.” The boys nodded, and even Matt couldn’t come up with much to say. Ned thought in a distant way of the Boston Common, of the spidery net of trees, and even more distantly of the apartment with the pink bedspread and what had happened there. He had half a feeling that it had happened to someone else, which was weird but a relief. Their mother asked them about this Mary Ellen, and her tone changed to nasty, which they were relieved by, so they could at least talk about that. “She looked like a country-western singer,” Ned said and his mother laughed, then started crying again. Their father’s name did not come up.
* * *
•
That was the first time they visited their mother in a dry-out place and it wouldn’t be the last. There would be a number of places after Silver Lane. There would be a place with “Hill” in the name in Connecticut and finally a place in Arizona where neither of the boys visited but which proved to be a turning point to success. Not so long after that, roles reversed, and it was Mrs. Baldwin visiting Ned. Matt would not go; he was married with two kids by then, and besides, he said, he didn’t want to go through all that again. So Mrs. Baldwin would be the one to sit with Ned, looking plump and calm, bringing him things he didn’t need and didn’t want, nodding at her son in an understanding way. She would believe she understood what he was going through, but Ned knew she could not and remained unconvinced that anyone else had the least idea of what it felt like to be him.