His sober friends were relieved that it wasn’t one of his students this time, but they compared her to Nora Joyce: she was uneducated, crudely outspoken, and bossy, while he, the poet, as a result of what they called “the damage,” was a ruin. Under the charter of long friendship they listed his traits: could someone like her have any idea what it meant to join forces with this most embittered, tense, infantile, drunken, paranoid, alienated, critical, silent, secretive, and easily hurt of men?
Of course Lisa knew that first night that there would be scars on him, all over the chest and ribs, where his mother had stabbed with his father’s Buck knife, in search of the heart. “What an awful thing to do to a little boy,” Lisa said in a practical voice. Her finger rubbing with no awe on the fat seams of scar on his naked torso made them seem a simple thing, almost something that might be discovered under the clothes of any man, just one more in a tangle of things in the past, some of them ugly, that a decent person could only shake her head at. “Ah. And your poor sister who didn’t have your luck.” His luck!
That night in bed, as if he were any old friend, she reminisced. “We lived not all that far away, but I couldn’t come over to the trailer park, not even for trick-or-treat. None of us kids could. We were the Asian kids, so proper. I always wanted to. You-all had that little house thing, at the gate. We called it the witch’s house, even before that happened. My mom went, she went right in there because she knew you kids were in there. She wanted you out of there. She talked to your mom. She said your mom should be in a hospital.”
His father had been the manager of the trailer park until he ran off. Thereafter, by virtue of living in the gatehouse instead of the trailers, his mother was the manager, but she never did any of the things his father had done or went outside or answered the phone. People stuck notes in a hole in the screen, left broken fans and sink pipes by their step, and torn-out stove burners and bags of garbage. Their own stove was black with the overflow of things his sister tried to cook.
He was not in kindergarten, because you had to have the shots. His sister was in second grade and had the shots; his father had seen to that, Mrs. Rao told him, giving him a choice: a father running off, ducking into the woods behind the propane tanks, or a father taking his sister for her shots. Some things allowed this choice of what to remember.
When he went back to Michigan with Lisa the first thing she did was take him to see her mother in the nursing home.
At the sight of Mrs. Rao he stopped in the door. He would not have known her, any more than he had recognized a five-year-old girl in Lisa. “It’s Robbie, Mama, Robbie Forney,” Lisa said. Mrs. Rao lay on her side and did not speak, though she was awake and breathing quietly, her eyes open and looking at him. The first lines of a poem came to him. There was no way to hug someone lying in bed and he was not a man who would try that, although now he sometimes found himself wrapped in the heavy arms of Lisa without knowing how he got there. He was a famous man, but once he was her husband he meant the same to her whether he was a known poet or nobody.
He stared at a cup of water with a bendable straw on Mrs. Rao’s nightstand. Feeling shaky doing without his drink, he picked up a plastic fork in cellophane and scratched at his wrist. “Robbie’s a professor now,” Lisa said. She didn’t say “poet.” To him she said, “You can call her Mama, or Gloria. Call her Gloria. I guess Mama could be anybody, but Gloria is her. Take that chair.”
He sat down. “Mrs. Rao,” he said, very low.
Mrs. Rao might be ninety-seven and lying there with white hair, but she had the same big eyes in smooth heavy lids. She looked back at him. The irises had gone a lighter brown. Far down in them was a table with scissors and paste, and his sister sitting on Mrs. Rao’s lap, having her fingernails cut with a pair of round-tipped scissors. His sister had laid out the scissors herself, each on top of the armor man from the teacher’s workbook, while he chose the locations for the big jars of paste and the flat sticks they used to get it out. He would have no children, so for the rest of his life he would not recover the smell of the paste.
Mrs. Rao lifted his sister’s thin long hair from her neck and drew it up in a ponytail. “Like mine,” said Mrs. Rao, whose hair gleamed with comb-lines and bars of light that traveled up and down the black, offering the eye a quiet for which there was not a word. His sister got down and went off to her own classroom. This was not the last day of her life, a day hidden even from his poems because there were no words for it, the day of who and why. This was a hot summer day in the first week of Vacation Bible School. He remained at the table, carefully tearing from their perforations in the teacher’s workbook a set of pages containing breastplates and helmets and metal shields for the front of the legs: a page per child, enough for each one’s silhouette to have on the full armor of God.
The Blue Grotto
IT was after midnight. Capri was counting out three minutes, with Elizabeth folded in her lap. At the age of five Elizabeth still wouldn’t open her mouth for the thermometer, and Capri had to hold her arm down to keep it pressed in the armpit. She had unbuttoned the pink pajama top and carefully taken the arm, not much heavier than a table knife, out of its sleeve. The child seemed asleep. “Are you with me here?” Capri whispered.
They were sitting in the window seat in the baby’s room, where Capri had almost fallen asleep after his last bottle, looking out at the water. The security floodlights fastened to the big houses across the lake made white stakes in the water. You felt like spinning out into the clear night and weaving back and forth among them. A vague feeling but it had a torment in it. The houses over there are bigger than this one, she said to herself idly. Those on the suburb side were right on the lakefront; this one on the city side was a block up the long bank from the water. Back ten blocks to the west was her own street, everything getting quickly smaller between here and there as if you were looking in the wrong end of binoculars.
She knew families in every block between here and her own house, from babysitting. She was the sought-after babysitter, though Tia was making inroads, without even taking the babysitting course, on the strength of being her little sister. If they couldn’t get Capri they’d ask for Tia, despite her punk clothes and her maroon hair. “Our kids are going to send you girls to college!” more than one of the fathers had said, to both of them. Mr. Yates had said it again to Capri last week when they were gone eight hours. When she was twelve, Tia started right in at what Capri was making. She didn’t have to come up laboriously past all the evenings of surprised, disappointed smiles as Capri explained that everybody was charging more now. “Well, now,” an outspoken father might say, “we might have to get a wage freeze in place here.”
“It’s not the big money, over there,” her mother would say. “The Yateses aren’t the ones on the lake. Here’s somebody in the paper making eighty-five million for running a company. How do you like that? Bet that guy’s a winner.” If her mother flipped through the paper, she was in a good, if irritated, mood. If she just stared at the page, it was a sign that she had been made to think of the things that stood in the way of her plans. Capri didn’t answer her mother when the subject was money, guarding against the next subject, which could be her father. He was tied to money, in her mother’s mind. She swore he never sent any. Capri did not believe this. She knew he would send something, even if it wasn’t the sum her mother was waiting for so that she could cut back to one job and begin saving to travel.
Her mother had made only one trip in her life, on her honeymoon. One trip down to Oregon, camping in a van, and then, defiantly, laughingly, down to nothing but gas money, back home: that was it. She was still waiting to travel. There were places in the world she saw as absolutely waiting for her. Provence. Italy. Capri and Tia looked at each other. When their mother talked about these places it was as if they, her daughters, were the skeptical parents.
Capri took the thermometer out. One hundred four. She realized that she had not shaken it down, but before trying again she p
ut Elizabeth on the window-seat cushion and went to find the Tylenol.
When Capri came back Elizabeth was sitting perfectly still, and put her lips delicately to the spoon. When she swallowed the red liquid, she shuddered, giving off heat and the silent whine that hummed from her body. That was normal with Elizabeth, the feeling of a whine. This time she was getting over the flu.
“It never fails, when I have a busy week, she’s home,” Mrs. Yates told Capri. The girl was sunk among the sofa cushions, breathing with the little hitches of one who has stopped crying. “And I couldn’t call you, because of course you had school.” Capri did not feel like telling Mrs. Yates that her mother let her take off from school to babysit. Mrs. Yates had a job with what she called “the Commission.” Capri did not know what it was but she knew Mrs. Yates was a lawyer. Usually she wore suits but tonight she was wearing a silver dress with uneven pieces floating off the skirt like seaweed. Capri wondered why Mr. Yates didn’t do the job that must be a husband’s and tell her that her right cheek was redder than her left one, but she looked much better than usual, with all the makeup and earrings dangling to her jaw and giving her face a surprised, hopeful look.
Mr. Yates crossed the room with the baby on one arm, his black shoes flashing under the lamps, and lifted his daughter’s chin. “Cheer up,” he said firmly. “Capri here is going to feel lousy if she has to look at that face. Let me see a smile. That won’t pass. Overruled. Hey, there we go.” Elizabeth’s smile was the worst Capri had seen on her, as her father gave her a kiss on the hair.
“How many times have we left her with Capri?” Mrs. Yates said to him as he handed the baby over to Capri. “Should I do something? Do you think she’s going to give Capri trouble?”
“She’s all right. She’s been sick,” he said, and to Capri, “Don’t let her breathe on the baby.”
CAPRI put the thermometer back in her armpit. “Hold your arm in tight, like this. Grab on to that sucker,” she said in a TV voice. She knew how to talk to kids.
You had to add a degree to armpit temperature. This she knew from the babysitting course in middle school, where Mrs. Inigo had taught them about charging appropriately for such a vital job. “A vital, vital job.” Mrs. Inigo was young; the boys who took Spanish from her called her Mrs. Ego because under her eye makeup and tender gestures she was a feminist. It was well known in school. She had four earrings going up the rim of one ear, like rings for a tiny curtain, and she was not Spanish; her name was Dawn. Although her husband was from somewhere among the countries Capri thought of as dangling from America, it was not he who had taught her Spanish, she made clear, but travel and long study. Travel in particular.
The girls were always telling Mrs. Inigo they intended to hitchhike all the way to South America as she had done, coming back with a husband. Capri was not one of these. In her house their mother’s wish to go places was a kind of quicksand they all had to step around. But it was a good thing she had taken Mrs. Inigo’s course: the fathers were right, if she got to college it would not be with her mother’s money from Supercuts or her phone-survey job, but with these folded checks held out for Capri to come forward and accept, or pressed into her hand along with the extravagant thanks. “Thanks so much, Capri. You saved us again.” “You don’t know what you did for me today by taking them.” Sometimes the mothers seemed ready to cry when they were looking at what their kids had drawn with her and thanking her. The fathers were not as emotional. As often as not they would be trying to get her to understand something about the ordeal of whatever evening out they had had.
All the children in these big houses were young, though the parents were not particularly young. They were all quite a bit older than her own mother, even though several of them had new babies. Mrs. Yates kept saying Capri’s mother looked like a high school girl. Over the years Capri answered steadily. “She’s thirty-two.” “She’s thirty-three.”
The baby lay wheezing softly in his crib, but Elizabeth was out of bed again, standing in the doorway of his room, where Capri sat in the dark. “I don’t feel good.”
Unwinding her arms—she had been holding herself as she watched the lake—and stretching them out, Capri said, “Come here, honey.”
“I don’t feel good,” the girl said again, without moving.
Capri got up, went to her and scooped her up.
“Ow.” A whisper.
Capri felt the heat of her skin when the pajama top came up. “Sit here, OK? I’m going to check you again.”
The child sat tilted back. As Capri passed his crib the baby gave a gasp and flailed for a moment, blindly lifting his head off the mattress and bowing it around like a caterpillar. She put her hand between the shoulder blades and he settled back.
Robert. Robert and Elizabeth. The names were reserved like parking places for later. Capri liked to call the baby Bobby and Baby, so he could hear the syllables bump each other. Babies liked words with double sounds, blowing and popping sounds. The girl she called Lizzie. She still had to make friends with her every time. At the same time she sometimes had the wish to tease and corner a child so flinching and wary, so sliding-away, so dissatisfied by everyone except the father. But lots of children were this way, she knew, rich or poor. They didn’t want you; they wanted just one person, the mother or the father. Usually not both. This one was a father’s girl.
Capri was fairly sure she had been one herself. Her most specific recollection of that time was of sitting in the front seat, no seat belt. (“You will all be driving someday,” Mrs. Inigo said. “Car seats and seat belts if you ever ever put a child in a car! And the child is in the back!”) She must have been five or so, Elizabeth’s age, because her father was still there, in the family, and she was with him in the car.
How did she get all the way from there to here? How did she come to be in the Yateses’ house watching Elizabeth and her father, and with a shamed attention, as if it satisfied her?
Why did you keep thinking you could get back to a certain point? How did it happen that there was one life, and then a different one succeeding it, and maybe another and another, like trips farther and farther away when you had not gone home from the first one yet?
Her father had reddish blonde hair—the hair Tia had under the maroon—and thick, light eyebrows. He kept banging the heels of his hands on the steering wheel in time to the loud music on the radio, and she discovered in herself a determination not to think, as her mother would, that it was not necessary to do that.
“On a level street, don’t have to use the gas much,” her father was telling her above the radio. “This is a machine that just rolls along if you let it. Don’t even have to steer all that much.” She liked the idea of the car rolling along on its own with the two of them inside. She had cut her tongue on the glass-like grooves of the hard candy he kept in the car since he had quit smoking. “Let’s have a looksee,” he said. He stopped banging the wheel and looked over at her when she put out her tongue.
Everything about her father’s face was strongly pleasant to her. This was a memory blunted with use. He said, “You know, I think you need another one for that.” It must have been summer: the sweat on his T-shirt, the sticky wrapper. “You’re my girl,” he said.
That day or another day, her mother was wearing cutoff jeans. She had her hair in a braid and they all four sat at the supper table. Her mother was talking fast and then crying, and then she threw a glass of milk that hit the refrigerator and broke into skidding bits on the floor. Tia spilled her own milk. Everybody scrambled around the table like musical chairs. On Tia’s heel was a scar from a knife of glass. It could be seen today, even touched from time to time when they were painting their toenails.
Capri held her breath and sopped at the milk with the dishtowel, and when she opened her eyes her father was down there with her, sweeping glass into a dustpan. When she got the milk cleaned up he said something to her, as Tia screamed, and their mother, with incomprehensible low groans, squeezed and picked at the dripping
red heel. He said, “Thanks, Cappy.”
Mrs. Yates called Elizabeth “E.” When Capri heard this “E” she thought it was not really a nickname. She did not care for the initial, the removal of a name, nor for the occasional references made by Mrs. Yates to the name Capri, which reflected on her mother. “Has she ever been to Capri?” Mrs. Yates once asked, but at the time Capri had been thirteen and unsure what Mrs. Yates meant when she said “Copp-ry”; it sounded like a local town, or worse, some class you took, like pottery.
“I don’t know.” She had looked away, though she did know, if she had understood the question, that her mother had never been to Capri, having left home at seventeen to get married in Discovery Park, in a circle of tambourines. Her new husband was nineteen. In Capri’s room there was a picture of them standing on the bluff above the Sound, her father’s hair short because he was thinking of joining the army, her mother windblown and smiling, a little bouquet with flying ribbons in her hands.
They had driven to California in the van, they had come back, they had had two children. So of course her mother had not been to Capri.
But it was one of the places she talked about going. Islands were her favorite. She was going to Hawaii, she was going to Bermuda. But first Capri, where there was a cave that filled with blue light when the sun shone: the Blue Grotto. “I will get there. One of these days I’ll be sitting there in the blue light,” their mother said. She showed them a brochure. Capri carried around a distinct set of facts about this little island of mountains. So did Tia. They didn’t like the word grotto, a word for a body part or something under the street. But it had a sound of importance, of something guarded or hidden, even religious, so that it seemed their mother was not just longing for beaches or fun.
They began to joke about it: “Where did you get those earrings? They look like they came from the Blue Grotto.” “We took off today. Lin and me.” “Where?” “We went to the Blue Grotto.” Lin was Tia’s boyfriend. He was from Taiwan and had been Tia’s boyfriend from the time she was eleven; now she was thirteen and couldn’t babysit the kind of hours Capri did—twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours a week—because she was glued to Lin so much of the time. Half the time they didn’t go to school. Lin lived with his uncle and came and went as he pleased. So did Tia, for that matter.
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