More than the boys, the girls, even the worst ones, the ones Vera said would sell anything to get high, had polite talk they could pull out like a charge card. It resembled old-fashioned small talk except that it had a high, reciting note, rather formal and pitched across the room, and it carried a warning—with the grassy perfume crushed from their ponchos, the glaze of sweat on their eyelids, complexions sore with the long agonized kisses May caught sight of—a warning to her to come no closer.
At first, May would recall in the first year or so after drugs arrived in his school in a big way, it was the girls who held on. Unlike the boys, they did not let go of their former selves; they still pressed like kittens around their teachers, giggling, keeping one foot in childhood. For a time they continued, almost apologetically, to do their hair and write their papers and keep their lab notebooks up to date. Nick was the beloved of a whole series of such girls. May and Cole agreed they were merely a new twist on the group Vera had belonged to in high school. No question but that Vera had been lucky in her timing.
Then, quite suddenly, the girls were worse than the boys. They were nothing like Vera anymore. They had swollen faces and they ran away and the police found them in motels. “My sister had you for first period last year,” one of them offered blearily every time she saw May. Not English, not a subject at all to them but a time of day, a room, in which May had her hour of infrared, of looking in as you would at slow caged nocturnal hunters unaware of your gaze.
Even for these girls May felt an occasional twinge of liking. They had their virtues. They were loyal. Often one of them would come and sit in the living room with Nick and the girl who had replaced her. Quiet talk between the two girls, urgent, while Nick sat with his head in his hands. May could hear names, names she knew. Some secret trouble. Sacred trouble. An ordeal, something being undergone, described in hushed voices as if the girl they were talking about went running by them, staggering and panting, while they slowly turned their heads to urge her on, the way May would once have stopped what she was doing to send her thoughts to a friend in the hospital in labor. But then a few days later May would hear the name again. “Melissa.” “She’s gone. They took her down to Arizona.” If you had the means, there were private ranches for rehab, by then.
It was Leah who had first uttered the word rehab to Cole and May, a word with a casual, harsh sound to it, but later full of a businesslike consolation.
Toward the beginning, even when Nick was known to be stealing and lying and selling amphetamines in school, his teachers liked him—the ones who went back over the schoolday when they got home, and came to conclusions, and took the time to call parents. “I’m sorry to say this, but I knew you and Cole would want to know if Nick missed a test.” Later Nick didn’t go to school at all any more and this unsought popularity of his did not seem to weigh in his favor with caseworkers and judges.
May took an absurd comfort in the fact that he did not turn savage, like the boy in the paper who painted graffiti all over his mother’s house. Nick would never have done anything like that. He never turned on them, or even argued. When she or Cole or both of them had finished threatening him or begging him, he got up with his sorry smile, his promise. He was respectful; he didn’t talk back to them.
He forgot them.
That was what puzzled her. After all, there’s only one duty in families, isn’t there, really, she thought in her teacher voice, not a reprimanding voice but a sorrowful one meant to bring a student to his senses, and it’s to remember the others.
Nick went where they sent him, to one after another of the quiet practices beginning to show up then, in offices likely to be in the counselor’s house. Once he had an arrest record he went to louder, more crowded waiting rooms, where bulletin boards flapped with notices and memos and handwritten index cards—“Need ride to Monroe (reformitory) 4X/mo”—and he disappeared down the hall with heavyset young men in tight uniforms, who were not much older than he was.
“He’ll turn it around,” her sister Carrie said. “Have faith.”
“Have faith? This isn’t pot. We’re talking about things that can kill him, people who might kill him. People he might kill, kids he supplies so he can get his. Carrie, this is Nick!” Nick. Our son. Carrie never had any sons; her daughters were grown, married; they had gone through the sixties in their teens but none of the three had stepped off the path of responsible maturing and wandered into the underbrush. “It was different then, even though the kids did all that stuff, they weren’t so . . . it wasn’t so hopeless. If they had had Watergate, and Allende, they would have found out for themselves, those kids, and yelled about it, don’t you remember? They didn’t have to just look around and see everybody accept it, they got stoned but they didn’t shoot themselves up, did they? The country was—”
“Don’t start in on the country. May, honey, listen. You know it’s not Watergate. Nick’s got all he can do to get his shoes tied right now and get to his community service. Don’t make it worse. He worries anyway, about who knows what. Something bothers him enough to make him do this.”
But that wasn’t true. In their first parent conference the rehab director had said, “Don’t look for the entry, in the addict. Look for the exit.” With a squeaking marker he had printed the word exit on a big pad of paper he kept on an easel beside his desk, and then he flipped the page back with a crackle and went on to the next. He printed several words on that one, and the next, while Cole squirmed in his chair.
But it was useless to argue with Carrie.
“Don’t you think it might be worse for him when you go around like Mama did, saying this is unfair and that’s unfair?”
“Like she did? Are you kidding? I wish I did. I wish to God I did the work every day that she did.”
“Well, you’re a teacher. Be satisfied. I know it used to drive me crazy when she went on and on, and now with you it’s Nixon, and the war—the war’s over, for heaven’s sake—and capitalism, and blah blah blah.”
“I don’t do that at home,” May defended herself. “Ask Nick if I do. Ask Cole.”
“It’s the whole thing. Oh, you can’t trap me into arguing with you. And don’t try to get into his mind. You have to forget about whatever went wrong.” Now she was contradicting herself. May didn’t say so. How could Carrie, or anyone, know? But Carrie stopped for a minute and sighed. “There’s no one answer. What you have to do is hold tight. They can’t get all that far off course when they come out of a normal home life.”
“A firm foundation,” Carrie’s husband Laban added gently. In his position—he was a minister—another man would have been calling attention to the failure of May’s family to go to church. But not Laban. May had always liked Laban. At that time he was having trouble with his own congregation, which was made up of young faculty from the university. It might be Laban was behind the times. He conceded that. He had seen good men go stale as preachers. The endless war was over, and Watergate was over, yet something, some normality, Laban said, had failed to run back into the space cleared for it. And the ones bringing their insoluble offenses to his office in the church were the ones who still came to church, who had not dropped out. For them too, normality had been mislaid. He couldn’t be sure what was coming next.
“Don’t get May started,” Carrie said.
When he came back from the experiment of living with Laban and Carrie, Nick said, “I asked Uncle Labe how they, uh, pray, at that church. Jeez. I don’t get it.”
“Did he tell you?”
“He just said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, how.’”
“What about Aunt Carrie? Did she have anything to offer?”
“Nah.” He thought it over. “Nah. You know she walks in her sleep?”
“Still? She did when we were little.”
“She would pretend like she was getting something to eat. Came right down the stairs all strange, when I was watching TV.”
“Mm. Must have been pretty late.” May felt a little chill. Wh
en they were children her sister’s sleepwalking had taken place in the very early morning.
“I said, ‘Aunt Carrie?’ Didn’t wanna scare her. She grabbed that post at the bottom of the stairs and went, ‘Oh, Nicky! I just want a sandwich!’” He stretched out his arms and slowly waved them. “Man. The Addams Family.”
This was the longest talk May had had with Nick in years.
“And she and Laban look so normal!” They fell to giggling. “Oh, I’m glad you’re home. So is your dad. We didn’t like this plan at all. It can’t be right. We want you here, no matter what happens. Mr. Penn says you can leave the city next week to go to the ocean with us.” His probation officer’s name was a joke between them.
At least he wasn’t crying the jittery, coughing tears they heard him cry in his room, and he wasn’t lying. She had to shut her mind to the thought that his body, his thin body had been offered to men for money, men with money for that. Whatever he had been doing while he was away at Carrie’s, he was finding things to say to May now that weren’t lies. It seemed he was trying to say something that might comfort her. “Aunt Carrie had those nightgowns like Little House on the Prairie,” he offered.
The day he drove away with Carrie and Laban, May had groaned to Cole, “How did this happen? Why does he have to go over there? Why do we have to do this?” But Cole couldn’t speak, as Laban’s car turned the corner with Nick looking back at the house.
They didn’t have to, it turned out. Mr. Penn said they could change their minds; living with relatives was just one of the methods people were trying. No one knew who had devised it.
It was a new world, in which many new things were proposed.
Lots of kids did every drug in sight and came out of it. Her own students did that, year in and year out. She herself said to certain students, the ones you could talk to, “Everything you’re going through now will change. You’ll look back on it and see.”
See what?
“Let me give you an example,” she’d say to her students. “I can drive past the house I lived in during the Depression. Right here in town. We had chickens! It’s a boardinghouse now, near the university. My mother died there, in that house, when I was fourteen. Oh, I was in a bad way, I was laid low. I thought life would never be right again. You’ll be the same way: someday you’ll say, That’s where I lived when I was so messed up. Your children will say, You?”
She could see them think about children, about a future. If she was talking to more than one at a time they laughed and pointed at each other and said, “You?” The one or two in the most trouble would not be pointed at, in the subtle etiquette they all obeyed, but they would laugh the loudest, at their imagined selves who would have had to leave so much behind to get to those children.
Nick was eight years old when the cat wandered in. He called Laura and she came right over to see it. She was eight and a half months pregnant. They all thought the cat realized that when it jumped onto her lap and rubbed itself against the dome of her belly.
Her husband Will was in school and Laura, though she had left college after a year, had a job writing about women’s interests for the Times. Sometimes she came over on Saturdays to see Nick and read them something she had written. Always, Laura worried about Nick. Right away she saw how things were; she said they should keep the cat because it made Nick happy.
Vera liked the cat too; she welcomed anything that might alter the boredom of her senior year. May could take cats or leave them, but already she liked this one, with its two natures: half of it sluggish and old, with a cataract and a limp, the other half sniffing all the corners and pouncing sideways like a kitten. It was an orange cat, brown along the spine in just the way an orange rind went brown. It was stiff in the joints and had a crooked tail and an upturned mouth that gave it an expression of poised approval.
Once they had the cat, the house seemed to pulse with minimal, previously invisible events. The cat looked up, they followed its gaze to a shoot of the chimney ivy that had pushed through the brick of the fireplace and drooped a green bud into the living room. By the suddenly pricked, transparent ears they knew the mailman had reached their block. The cat detected some sound in the wires just before the telephone rang, and turned to look. It studied May’s rug, an old threadbare rug in the front hall, with a scrolling, imperfectly repeated sentence of shapes on the border. Cole had brought it back for her from a medical meeting in Cairo. This rug the cat sniffed so frequently and at such length, luxuriating, slitting its eyes, lowering its whiskers on one side and then the other to touch it, that May could almost see the ghosts of other cats, or even camels, rise off the worn fibers. She liked to see the cat’s orange length on the rug’s faded chalices and vines.
It was a shy, well-behaved cat. If it had done anything unpleasant, scratched the rug or peed on it, or peed in drawers or bookcases the way her friends’ cats had done, or brought in a dead bird, it would have broken its own benign spell. But it never did any of these things. They took a picture of it and put up signs around the neighborhood, but no one called. The cat was theirs.
May liked its soft, noiseless flop onto the floor where there was a square of sun, in the room where she sat grading papers, and the little jerks of its head as it drifted into unconsciousness. She would bend down and put her hand on its orange pelt, soft and hot, and feel the unexpected skeleton. Why had they never had a cat before?
The cat had chosen Nick. It liked to knead the small of his back and doze there while he lay looking at his Tintin books on the floor. If he began to wheeze it came forward to investigate, and leapt away from the hiss of his inhaler. If he cried, it found him, and climbed up to sniff his tears. It offered no comfort, just the verifying sniffs. May thought, It must have come from a house where the children have grown up and gone.
“It’s mine,” Nick said. Right away he had the cat on his bed and his asthma worsened.
“Why don’t we say ‘she’?” Vera demanded. “We all say ‘it.’ It’s a girl.” Though it had taken weeks for them to find out one way or the other.
“She’s a girl,” Nick said. But the cat remained it. A particular sex did not suit it, even Vera agreed.
“Why haven’t we ever had a pet?” May asked Cole. He shrugged and said, a little plaintively, she thought, “I don’t know, I grew up with dogs and cats.” It was as if he had confessed an earlier, more complete life. Not having had a dog or a cat in the house while two out of three children grew up seemed to May something inadvertently, almost fatally left out, and magically remedied at the last minute. Thus the cat, with the lightest of blows, broke the past off in a chunk that sailed away from them. Now they were a family with a cat. May thought she read in its little half-smile, I have come. Rarely did she let superstitions take hold of her like this, even though she was getting to the age for them.
Laura put the rosy baby up to her shoulder and he burped. “You don’t even have to pat him,” May said, marveling. “We always patted and patted.”
“He just burps,” Laura said, not taking credit. She was a calm mother. Most of May’s friends thought Laura had landed on her feet after dropping out of college and marrying so young; they thought she had come into the rightful, if slightly tarnished, heritage of girls like her, born for motherhood.
“It’s weird,” Vera said to Laura. “Don’t you sometimes make a mistake, with a baby? Don’t you ever . . . not drop it, but put it down wrong? I mean, don’t you every once in a while poke it in the eye? I don’t think I could ever—”
“It’s a he,” said Nick.
“She practiced on Nick,” May soothed Vera.
“Who did? Who practiced on me?” Nick opened his eyes. He was on the floor with the cat on his stomach; he was lying on the sheet he was supposed to be tearing into strips to make a mummy costume for Halloween. He was almost nine. His asthma was not entirely to blame, May thought, for his inability to finish anything. It could be any number of things. It might be this year in particular, 1969, with the war on
TV.
From the table where she was working on her lesson plans she would call, “Don’t watch that!” to the straw-colored back of Nick’s head, on a thin stem like a lollipop. The screen in front of it was a blurred tropical green, with smeared vacant faces of soldiers staring out. She took him with her on peace marches, and Vera’s boyfriend Cliff, who was preoccupied with his own draft status, had the idea of starting a CO file for him. He brought them a manila folder and stuck in Nick’s drawings of smiling robots. “You keep these guys, man. These are peaceful robots. This is your future, man.” But—all the mothers of boys said the same thing—the snapping of rifle fire on TV drew out of Nick an answering sound, the way a call is drawn out of a bird by another bird.
More than her daughters, whose bad habits she had worked on in the sturdy rote of the previous decade, this youngest child seemed to May bound by laws that were not necessarily hers or Cole’s. Not the plain, everyday, arrived-at laws of the house at all. Maybe the mystery he was to her was simply that he was a boy. Though Leah had said, “Be glad he’s sort of inactive. You’re not twenty-five. This is not a kid you’ll ever have to chase down off the high diving board.” Or maybe because he was the last, and born after such a long gap, and by some catch and then a compensatory give in events, he was first a stranger to May and then gradually—Leah made a case for it—secretly, deeply favored. “Luckily your girls don’t see it,” Leah said.
“It’s not so much favoring as carrying. He won’t steer the way the girls do. This one’s a passenger. I have to carry him.”
Seven Loves Page 9