The school secretary sighed when she handed the phone to Molly. “Keep it short,” she told Molly.
“Oh, thank God you’re there!” Suzanne cried.
“Could you call me at home? We’re not supposed to get personal calls at work—” Molly said, loud enough so the secretary could hear.
“No, no, I can’t! My rent is already three weeks late. I have to give them the money by this Friday. Please. Just this once. It’s just five hundred. That’s all.”
The secretary loudly stapled papers together. She looked pointedly at her watch and then at Molly. She looked over at Mrs. Daisy’s open office door.
“Okay, okay,” Molly said. “I’ll send it. Just call me at home from now on.
Molly gave Suzanne the rent check, and though she waited and waited, though she sorely could use the money, Suzanne never paid her back. And Suzanne began calling more and more, and always for money. Five hundred dollars there. A thousand for a collection agency. Two hundred for a dental bill insurance wouldn’t cover. “Just until I finish school,” Suzanne said.
Molly sighed. She reached for her checkbook, glancing at the balance. She had never let herself get this low before. She’d have to fudge a few bills this month. Pay a little portion so they wouldn’t hound her so much. And she’d have to forget about the new coat she needed. She’d have to make do with what she had.
Molly’s finances were getting screwy. She had a second notice on some bills. She even had a notice from a collection agency. She began to worry. It was just her, all alone; what if something happened? She was a new teacher without tenure. Already, Mrs. Daisy had intimated that Molly’s review could suffer if she kept getting personal calls, if the calls kept disrupting her class. She could be fired, and then what would she do? It wasn’t so easy to get a teaching job, especially if you had lost one. She had read in a magazine that you should have money in your account, enough to last a year if you had to, if you were fired, and Molly now had barely enough for three months, and it began to worry her. Because of all the money she was loaning Suzanne, she was late on the gas bills, on her car insurance, and her car was making funny noises. And she was beginning to get a little scared. She knew Suzanne was in trouble, but she couldn’t let her pull her down with her.
Late one night, the phone rang. Startled, Molly picked it up.
“Listen.” It was Suzanne, clear-voiced, bright and happy. “I’m going to open my own shop!”
“That’s great—”
“I’ll start small, and then expand with the business. I already have people lined up. If you can loan me just a little money—”
Molly had barely scraped by this month because of all the money she had loaned Suzanne. Her savings were next to nothing. “Suzanne. I can’t.”
“Five thousand. That’s all. I know teachers don’t make that much, but five thousand is nothing.”
“No, it’s not that I won’t. I can’t. I can’t pay my own bills. I don’t have five thousand. I don’t even have five hundred.” As soon as she said it, she felt sick. How could she manage on just five hundred?
“Molly, I took care of you for years. I did everything. You know I did. You remember. Can’t you help me now? I’ll pay you back in six months at the latest.”
“Suzanne, you’ve never paid me back ever before! Not even a part! I must have given you thousands of dollars!”
“Now, wait a minute. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to—”
“No,” Molly said, “I can’t—”
“Or you won’t,” said Suzanne bitterly, and then she slammed down the phone.
For weeks, every time the phone rang, Molly tensed. At school, every time a monitor came into the room, Molly felt frozen, but it was always just a message about milk money or recess duty. Suzanne never called Molly back. And after another while, Molly began to realize that she wasn’t tense at night anymore, that a hall monitor could come into her room and she didn’t instantly freeze.
Suzanne had an unlisted number. Molly wrote it on a piece of paper and put it into an acrylic puzzle she had and snapped it shut. She thought suddenly of what Lars had said about Angela. Sometimes you needed to forget. Sometimes you needed a little distance.
When they were kids, Suzanne’s recklessness had always drawn her like a magnet. Molly had wanted to be like Suzanne, a beautiful, glowing flame. Brave, strong, a girl who flung herself headlong into danger and came out on top. Just being near her had made Molly feel she could survive any trouble, too. Or if she couldn’t, that Suzanne could save her from it. But now Suzanne was wildfire. And if Molly wanted to survive, she would have to get out of Suzanne’s path.
She began to put away money again, to like her life again. She thought it was a good one. She was taking care of herself. There was just her, but it felt okay. It felt safe. She had thirty kids she loved and a few friends at school, and a house. Nights she began going to the Tastee because the waitresses let her stay there as long as she wanted. No one bothered her, and she liked the light and the noise. She could sit there and read and listen to the music and get fat on ice cream. And that could be enough.
And then she had met Gary, and everything had changed all over again.
chapter three
Gary bought a cheap camera and began taking pictures of Molly. He stashed photos of her in his apartment, in his pocket, in his office desk drawer so every time he’d go to grab a pen, he’d see her face, every time he opened a cabinet, there she was before him. He called her four times a day, not at school where he might get her into trouble, but leaving long funny messages on her machine at home, waiting for her to pick up, to call him back on one of the school’s pay phones.
He even came to her school once, taking half the day off to pick her up. He got there early, when she still was on bus duty, but he stood outside his car and watched her. The other teachers were standing together, their hands burrowed into their pockets. They looked weary. But Molly was zooming up and down the bus lines, flashing smiles, joking with the kids, her wild hair like a parade unfurling behind her. She didn’t see him, not yet, but she saw a little woefullooking boy standing apart from everyone else, his hands balled into his pockets, and she strode over to him and crouched down and said something to him, and he suddenly threw back his head and laughed, and then she laughed, too. She zipped upright, bounding toward another group of children straggling into their bus, and Gary saw how the boy’s eyes followed Molly, how they wouldn’t let go.
Gary held Molly’s hand during dinner, on their walks, and once in the subway, on a crowded E train. The doors slid open and a man barreled through, dislodging Gary’s grip. He reached back his hand for hers, twining his fingers into those of a surprised old man while Molly, in the corner, watched laughing. At night, he hooped his arms about her, he held her. She sighed and stretched and she looked so suddenly tiny to him, so childlike. He put one hand gently on the top of her hair. He held it there. She turned and looked at him, sleepily. “What are you doing? Is my hair too scratchy?”
“I’m protecting you,” he told her.
They planned to get married in the fall, in a judge’s study in Manhattan, with just a few friends present. By then, they were living out of each other’s houses, but Molly was superstitious and wanted to go home to dress. “It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.” She laughed. “I’ll meet you there.”
They spent the night before their wedding at Gary’s place. In the morning, he woke to find Molly already up, sitting in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. Her face was thoughtful, a little sad, and he sat beside her. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about my mother’s wedding. The thing I remember most was Suzanne not being there.”
Molly started to take a sip of tea and then put the cup down. “Do you think I’m awful for not inviting her? For not calling her?”
“No. I don’t want anything or anyone to hurt you. Or us. And anyway, she should have called you.”
“I guess you’
re right,” Molly said, but she still sounded doubtful. She got up and put her cup in the sink, and when she turned back to him, she was smiling. “Well, I had better get going.” She leaned forward to kiss him playfully. “I’m getting married today!”
Molly went home and he dressed, in his best navy jacket, his good black pants. Six people from his job were coming, a few teachers from Molly’s school, and a few friends of Gary’s: Bob and Rayanna, Peggy and Allan. He grabbed for his tie, thinking about Molly at her mother’s wedding, Suzanne not being there, and then he glanced at the photo on his dresser: his aunt Pearl, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, laughing into the camera, her arms circled about his shoulders, the two of them leaning on her car in an empty supermarket parking lot. He remembered that day. He had been ten and upset about not making the soccer team at school. “Oh, posh,” Pearl had said. “Anybody can play soccer. But how many people can drive at ten?”
“Not me,” he said, and then he saw the look in her eyes.
“We’ll see about that,” she said and held up her car keys.
She had taken the camera to commemorate his first lesson. She had let him drive around and around the parking lot until he was laughing and then she had set up the timer and taken the shot.
He touched her face in the photo and he suddenly felt pained. He wanted her to be at his wedding. He wanted his parents or a relative or a sibling. He thought of Molly, the way she had looked at the photograph of her mother, the hard yearning way she had just spoken about her sister. He wanted family there with him, too.
He was five minutes early to the judge. He stood, nervous and awkward, and then Molly rushed into the room.
He felt stunned by the sight of her. She was in a long, shimmering column of pale blue velvet, her feet were nearly bare in thin black high heels, and she had braided bits of tiny blue flowers throughout her hair. Her face was flushed and she looked at him, and then away, suddenly bashful.
All through the ceremony, he was aware of her beside him, like a force field blocking everything else out. He couldn’t hear a word the judge was saying, couldn’t hear the chamber music they had arranged to play on a boom box. Instead, he heard Molly breathing. He heard the rustle of her dress, the sound her shoes made on the floor whenever she made the slightest move. Her hair rippled along her back. Her fingers curled and uncurled about his, and he heard his own heart pulsing toward hers. And then he heard the judge say, “Go ahead and kiss,” and the words were like a shock in the silence and Gary moved through the force field toward Molly. Her eyes were clear and wide open and suddenly it didn’t matter at all that Pearl wasn’t there or Suzanne or Angela or his parents, because Molly was right there before him. She was all the family he would ever need.
Molly sold her house in Elizabeth. He had thought it might be hard for her, because it had been her mother’s house, a last vestige of family, and when he noticed her standing in the rooms, one hand tracing a wall, he came up behind her and slung one arm about her shoulders. “Did you want to stay in this house?” he asked. “We could probably squeeze in here.”
She shrugged. “It’s just a house,” she said quietly. “We’ll have our own.”
With the money she made from the sale, and his own savings, he was certain they could find something close to the city. They spent weekends scouring Manhattan, not being able to afford even a studio. They went farther out to Brooklyn, to Park Slope, and finally began looking back in Jersey City in New Jersey.
It was a changing area. Hardscrabble, but pocketed with good houses, with lofts. Artists were moving in, writers, Wall Streeters. And it was only a seven-minute PATH train ride to the city. And not a bad commute to Elizabeth and Molly’s school.
A realtor showed them twenty different houses, and two lofts, and all of them were way out of their price range, and finally, just as they were about to give up, she showed them one house they could afford and bid on, a two-story row house in need of repairs. “Ah, the miracle house,” he overheard the realtor say to herself, but Gary wasn’t sure whether she meant it was a miracle they had found it or a miracle the house was ever sold, and he could never bring himself to ask.
The house was painted the same bright blue as the house attached to it. It had two baths, a mahogany staircase, and four big rooms Gary and Molly counted out. “Our bedroom,” Molly said, stepping into the biggest and sunniest.
“Office,” Gary said when he was in the smallest.
They walked over to the side-by-side smaller rooms. Molly turned to face him. “Baby’s room,” he said, making her smile. She looked at the other room. “Guest room,” he said, but Molly shook her head. “Another baby’s room.” Their grins widened.
The kitchen was old, with boxy yellow cabinets and pink linoleum. One of the two bathrooms had three kinds of pastel-colored tile and green plaid wallpaper. Molly ran her hand over the silver foil wallpaper in the hall, over the yellow plastic light fixtures and wood paneling. There was wall-to-wall blue shag carpeting, lowered acoustical ceilings, and a claw-footed tub painted pink.
“It’s just cosmetic stuff. We can fix it,” Gary said. “We have all the time in the world.”
Their neighborhood was predominantly Italian, a mix of brownstones and row houses painted over in violet and pale green and blue, hung with awnings, festooned with flags. There were small front yards and stoops to sit on, and square backyards that were large enough for a garden and a deck. The realtor had told them that people had lived in these houses their whole lives, they had married and raised children right in the confines of three or four blocks, and even though Manhattan was seven minutes away, most of them never left the neighborhood, never thought or wanted to. Manhattan could have been a foreign country. “You know what they call the bad side of town here?” the realtor had confided. “Brooklyn.”
The first day they moved in, three weeks before Halloween, the neighborhood seemed empty. Almost every house had a stoop or a porch, but no one was there. The windows were heavily curtained, the doors were firmly closed. But signs of life, Halloween decorations, were everywhere. Paper witches hung in the windows. Scarecrows positioned on the roof, gaily waving in the wind. Blinking orange and black lights circled the doorways and slung along the iron railings. Across the street was a six-foot-tall stuffed Dracula complete with drips of red blood. “Must be a lot of kids,” Molly said.
But they didn’t see any kids, didn’t hear the shouts and squeaky bicycle wheels and bumping balls that went along with children. In fact, the only person they saw was a young woman in a black leather jacket and jeans, who stopped to watch the movers. She waved and introduced herself, her stubby brown ponytail bobbing behind her. “I live on the far end of the block,” she said. “Lisa Jordan.” She worked in marketing in the city, her husband Timothy was a lawyer. She loved the neighborhood, but hated the nosiness of the neighbors. “You can’t sneeze without one of the neighbors commenting on it.”
“What neighbors? Where? We haven’t seen a soul yet,” Molly said, and Lisa laughed.
“Ah, but they see you,” she told them, rolling her eyes. “You just wait. They know everything and they’ll comment on it, soon enough.”
Gary did his best to find other neighbors, to connect, but more and more, he began to feel that he was lying in wait. He was watering plants in the living room when he happened to look out the window and see a middle-aged woman and a man he assumed was her husband emerging from the house on his left. Watering can still in hand, he pushed open the front door and stepped outside. He waved and said hello, he introduced himself. The woman blinked doubtfully at him. “Emma Thorton,” she finally said. “This is my husband Bill.” They were polite, guarded. They looked at him as if he were somehow dressed wrong.
“Would you like to come in and have coffee?” Gary asked.
Bill tapped at his watch and then took Emma’s arm. “We have to go. We’re late as it is.”
It bothered Gary. He thought of his friends Bob and Rayanna in Boston, where every month they
had a different block party. He remembered Allan’s chunky white house in Ithaca, his big backyard where he threw barbecues in a neighborhood so safe, he swore he left his door open and never worried once about it. Even Gary’s old neighborhood in Chelsea had been friendlier than this one.
Finally, one night, when he and Molly were coming home from a movie in the city, Molly suddenly pointed. “Look.” He followed her finger. A group of neighbors were sitting on the porch next to their house, lazily talking. “It’s showtime.”
“Hello,” Gary called. The neighbors looked up. They grew suddenly silent, watchful, as if they were studying him. Gary recognized Bill and Emma, but there was a surly-looking teenaged girl there with them, her hair dyed white, a rooster shelf combed high on her forehead. There was a woman with short black hair and a flowery dress, a bald man in a brightly patterned shirt chain-smoking.
“We’ve been hoping to meet all our neighbors—” Molly said.
The woman in the flowery dress nodded. “Theresa,” she said. “Theresa Morella.” The bald man was her husband Carl, a retired factory worker, and the surly girl was Emma’s sixteen-year-old daughter Belle. “Where did you live before?” Theresa asked.
“New York.”
“Cool,” Belle said. Her face softened. She pulled up from her slouch and looked hopefully at Gary. “Where? In the Village? In SoHo?”
“Chelsea.”
“I’ve been to Chelsea.”
“When have you been to Chelsea?” Emma said sharply.
“I’m from Elizabeth,” Molly said.
There was another long silence, and because he felt awkward, Gary began to ask questions. “Where’s the best place to get groceries?” he wanted to know, even though he had already found a Korean greengrocer’s he and Molly liked. “Where’s the nearest PATH train station?” he asked even though he took it every day to work.
Coming Back to Me Page 6