That Night

by Alice McDermott

  A policeman rattled the screen door and then let himself in. Two of them, both large and hippy with their gunbelts and nightsticks. One of them was carrying a small black pad. The other, who was somewhat older, tipped his hat to the ladies and asked their forgiveness for barging in. Sheryl’s mother immediately gave them Rick’s name and what she knew of his address. The other cop took it down while the older one simply smiled. “We’ve got one of the cars already,” he said. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “It’s not going to be any trouble picking them all up.”

  Taking a seat on the edge of one of the thick plastic-covered chairs, he leaned forward and in a soft, fatherly voice advised her about pressing charges. She nodded, listening. Yes, of course, of course. The quiver had left her voice.

  At one point, my father crossed the room as they spoke and gently took my mother’s arm. She was still holding the glass of water she had gotten for Sheryl’s mother, and wordlessly, he urged her to drink it. She did, looking all the while like a runner-up in a game with only one perfect prize. (Later that night, after a botched, embarrassed and only sporadically explicit attempt to explain what Sheryl had done, she told me, “Let’s just say the stork missed our house and landed on hers.”)

  When the officer stood again, the plastic slipcovers or his leather holster groaning, he told Sheryl’s mother he’d be glad to drive her to the hospital if she wanted to get her legs and her wrist taken care of, have a doctor make sure everything else was okay. He turned to Mr. Rossi, who now held a handkerchief to the wound on his head. He said it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to come along, too.

  The cop turned to my father. “You okay?” he asked. My father’s shirt was ripped and there was grass and dirt on his pants and in his thick hair, but he said he was fine.

  “How about you, tootsie?” the cop said to me.

  Involuntarily, I smiled. I had always liked policemen, but now my loyalties were torn.

  Suddenly, Sheryl’s mother said, “I know you.” We all turned to see that she was looking carefully at the officer with the notepad.

  “You’ve been here before,” she said. “The day my husband died. He died in his car.”

  The cop pushed back his hat and said, “That’s right,” as if he were making a confession. He looked sheepishly at the other men, Mr. Rossi, my father, as if he feared they’d think him a harbinger. “Maybe I can come back sometime when the news is good,” he said.

  Sheryl’s mother continued to study him. Then she said, “No,” shaking her head, still not crying. “No,” she said.

  Outside, the men who were to go to the hospital were easing themselves into the police cars. The others were sitting on the curb or standing on the lawn, waiting to go to the police station. The lawn itself had been badly ripped by the tires and was littered with chains and sunglasses and a leather jacket, but as they waited, our fathers leaned on their rakes or their hoes, Mr. Carpenter crouched beside his upright baseball bat, and so they gave the scene a somewhat wistful portrait-of-America air. They might have been farmers standing over their plowed fields, sandlot baseball stars. Mrs. Sayles, almost luminous in her tennis whites, picked her way among them, offering praise and consolation and cool facecloths.

  In the distance, the bells of an ice-cream truck tinkled gaily. Mr. Rossi, still holding a handkerchief to his wound, took a deep breath and told my father to take a look at that sky. “Planets,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “You always know which ones are planets.” But she refused to look up for him. Instead, she began what was to become the women’s second chorus of the night. She put her hand over her heart and whispered, “Stupid kids. Those stupid, stupid kids.”

  My mother’s determination to have another, or as she so often put it, just one more, child had always confused and puzzled me. My brother was born first and then I had been born and it seemed to me her luck in having one of each, both talented and healthy and, in my opinion at least, perfectly formed, should have filled her with gratitude and pride, not longing. And yet, through our thin walls had come the nightly thumping, the hard quick breaths. Listening to them each night, I would imagine both my parents as I had once seen them an hour before the start of one of their New Year’s Eve parties: my mother in her slip and her jewelry, my father in his undershirt and good suit pants, puffing frantically into one balloon after another, apparently trying to fill the room. They had seemed to give themselves entirely to each, blowing into it with one long breath (always futilely for the first few seconds, then a miraculous blossoming), quickly examining it, then blowing again. The fruits of their labor, yellow and green and blue and red, bobbing at their feet, bright and useless.

  Twice that I remember, my mother had announced that a new brother or sister would indeed arrive, and twice the delicate thing she and my father had managed to form broke without warning. I came home from school to find she was in the hospital for the evening. I was awakened one night by the sound of her voice: every light in the house seemed to be burning, and I found her sitting on the edge of her bed, already in her coat and shoes, waiting for my father to retrieve the fetus from the bathroom.

  (Even now in her pleasant and irresponsible retirement, she can say without hesitation how old those children would be today and just where in school or marriage and their careers they might be, had they lived. Even now I’m surprised by the precision and the detail with which she has imagined their lives, and I’m forced to make such calculations of my own.)

  That summer, my mother was past forty and in her quest to conceive had begun to resort to what I can think of now only as a kind of voodoo.

  Each night she would run hot water into the bathtub before she went to bed and then, when their lovemaking was over, trot from the bedroom to the bath to soak for an hour or two in a solution of Epsom salts or baking soda or whatever powder or potion the other women had advised. Often, my father would go in to keep her company. He would turn down the toilet seat and sit there in his bathrobe, his voice made hollow by the water and the tiles. Sometimes he would read to her from one of her magazines, stories of married women triumphing over various domestic difficulties, reviving their husband’s love, rewinning their children’s affections, escorting their friends through innumerable tribulations.

  In the morning, I would find these magazines on the edge of the tub or the back of the toilet, folded over to the last page and buckled here and there by the dampness, as if the end of each story had been wept over. I would reread them myself to fill in what part I hadn’t heard the night before, either because my father’s voice had grown too soft or my mother had swished the water too loudly or I had simply fallen asleep before I’d caught the resolution.

  In these stories, the women who longed for children got them, usually just as the longing itself had been nearly obscured by something else: a death, a birthday party, an adoption, as if the longing itself had been the culprit. I suppose the message was that too blatant a desire to manipulate your own life was unseemly. I suppose my mother never caught on.

  One early morning not many days before the night he came for her, I woke to a kind of drumming sound: hard/ soft, hard/soft—long interval—hard/soft. In the hallway I passed by my parents’ room and through the partly opened door saw my mother attempting a headstand at the foot of their bed. Her head was pressed firmly against the mattress and her hands gripped the spread as if she would tear it, her pale legs kicked up again and again, flailing like arms beneath her white nightgown, one foot hitting the floor each time she was drawn inevitably back to the earth.

  I probably would have laughed, rushed in to join them (probably would have offered some good advice), were it not for the serious and determined way in which she tried again and again to raise herself. Were it not for the solemn and somewhat bemused look on my father’s face as he watched her from his pillow.

  I later learned that it was Leela, Jake’s mother, who had advised these acrobatics (meant, of course, to get the sperm moving more swiftly toward its mark). Th
at same summer she and my mother were involved in one of those brief yet intense bouts of friendship the women in our neighborhood so often experienced. They had gotten to talking in the supermarket one morning and for a good number of weeks after were suddenly inseparable. I would smell the smoke from their cigarettes and hear Jake’s thick voice as I dressed in the morning. I would see Leela, with Jake on her lap, ride past in my mother’s car as I played outside in the afternoon or find her still in the kitchen, Jake’s dark head just under the red ash of her cigarette, his cheeks covered with ice cream or cookie crumbs, when I came in from the Everses’ pool. In those days, they spent an hour or two on the phone each evening too, talking in low voices that made my father look over his paper to ask me, “They’ve been together all afternoon, what have they got to talk about?” as if, being female, I would understand.

  They talked about conception. Headstands and Epsom salts and vinegar douches that would not only guarantee a baby but a baby boy. They told their life stories. Leela, it seemed, had been married once before. (My mother sharing the news with me on various weekday evenings as she made dinner in much the same way some other lonely woman might have shared it with a bird or a dog, not expecting either response or comprehension, her eyes bright only with the pleasure of repeating what she had heard.) That first marriage had ended precisely because she had not been able to conceive. It was neither of their faults, they were told. It was simply that the atmosphere of her particular womb was inhospitable to his particular seed: an unlucky and insurmountable problem of chemistry. Leela herself had been willing to accept the verdict, had contacted a few adoption agencies and begun sending long chatty letters and eight dollars a month to an orphan in Indonesia, but apparently her husband had been determined to prove the doctors right and, out of nowhere, said my mother, after nine years of marriage, asked for a divorce so he could marry another woman.

  My mother slammed pots and let the water in the sink run violently. Forget all that had come before, she said—wielding a serrated knife like a machete—forget the years of their courtship, their big hotel wedding, their first apartment, the hundreds of beds she’d made for him and shirts she’d washed and meals she’d cooked. Forget the headstands and baking-soda baths, the painful and intricate advice, not to mention the humiliating questions, of the pharmacist in her old neighborhood, who had used his white lab coat and mortar and pestle to give credence to the foolish formulas the women themselves brought him: hot-water douches and citrus diets and intercourse performed with your head and throat hanging from the side of the bed. Forget what she had once confided to her husband, believing they were forever bound: if I fail at this, I am neither male nor female; I cannot know my worth. Forget especially that he brought that confidence with him to his new marriage and his young wife.

  She’d been barren three years into her own second marriage, already moved into her house down the block, when she finally conceived Jake. She knew, of course, the first time she held him with something like a clear head that he wasn’t right, and she momentarily recalled, as the doctor explained, what another had said about her inhospitable womb. But she remembered, too, my mother said, what it had been like to have no child at all.

  On the night of the fight, the night Rick came to claim her, Leela had followed her husband farther than most of the other women had done. She was just in front of the Sunshines’ driveway when she stopped to put her hands to her mouth. She wore a white scarf around her bleached blond hair, wore it tied into a bow at her crown because even then, when she had grown chunky and was no longer young, she wanted to look like the GI’s dream of Betty Grable. She wore white shorts, a turquoise top that was ringed with perspiration. She called to her husband as the other women were doing, not moving any closer, not making any other gesture to retrieve him, but seeing, no doubt, as the other women saw, the sharp black edge of the hoe he’d lifted as he ran, the threat that had suddenly transformed the night.

  And then, just as the first police car arrived and the boys began to retreat, she turned (God only knows, she said in our kitchen the next morning, what made her turn) to see Jake in his pajamas, standing in the middle of the street, the sharkish nose of a car headed toward him. Somehow, she found his arm and pulled it hard, so hard the child screamed and something cracked (although, she said, it may have been a bone in her own jaw). On the sidewalk, she slapped him so fiercely his teeth were bloodied, so savagely that the faint bruise mark of her hand was still there the next morning when I came downstairs and found them both in our kitchen.

  Jake was on her lap, a piece of bread crust in his hand. He was grinning and chirping, but she jiggled him on her knee as if he were still wailing. She held a cigarette in one hand and his shoulder with the other. Her nose was running and her eyes were filled with tears. When she saw me, she wiped at her cheek with the heel of her palm.

  My mother reached across the table to touch Jake’s fist. “But he’s fine now,” she said, thinking, I’m sure, just as I was thinking, that the child had never been fine.

  Their friendship was already beginning to wane. In another week or two, Mrs. Carpenter would have briefly moved into my mother’s affections and Leela and Jake once more returned to their own end of the street. I saw her a final time just before my parents’ house was sold, and she told me that she, of course, could not leave the neighborhood as nearly everyone else was doing. Jake had a job at the mall and knew how to take the bus there and back. If she or her husband met him at the boulevard each evening, it was safe enough for him to walk home. “If we moved,” she’d said, “he’d be losing his whole world.”

  I saw her raise her eyes to the cloud of smoke that hovered under the light fixture. She sniffed loudly, rubbing her son’s shoulder. “If I lost him,” she began to whisper. “If I’d lost him.”

  My mother was stroking the child’s hand, her eyes, too, filled with tears. “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Don’t even imagine it.”

  But Leela wanted to complete her thought. “If I lost him,” she said, “I’d end up with nothing. I only have this one baby. What will I end up with if I lose him?”

  My mother glanced at me and I knew for the first time that it was not our perfection, my brother’s and mine, that she’d been hoping to duplicate. It was insurance she’d been looking for, and any living child would have sufficed.

  Sheryl called hi to me from the sidewalk in front of our house and then to my surprise and delight walked up our driveway. She carried her looseleaf binder and a small paperback book. There was a dark, pilly sweater thrown over her arm.

  This was in the early spring, four months or so before that night. It had been a warm day, perhaps the first warm day of the season, and although it was now growing cool, there was still the lingering odor of bright sunlight, the spring smell of fresh dirt. I had brought my Barbie doll out to the front porch, probably because my brother and his friends were somewhere in the house and this was my way of showing my disdain. I had the black dollcase opened at the top of the steps and was choosing a dinner outfit.

  Sheryl said as she approached, “How are you?” as if she asked quite regularly.

  I must have said something like “Fine.”

  “This your Barbie?” she asked.

  I said yes.

  “It’s nice.” She suddenly sat on the step just below mine and placed her books on her lap. I could see the initials she had written all over her looseleaf binder with black magic marker, hers and Rick’s. I noticed how the ink had bled a little into the fabric. I could have been glimpsing her garter belt, her diary, the initials seemed so adult and exotic, so indicative of everything I didn’t know.

  Turning a little, she reached back to my dollcase and gently touched all the tiny dresses and skirts that were hanging there. Her fingers were thin and short and the edges of her nails pressed into her flesh as if she had only recently stopped chewing them. Then she touched the bare feet of the doll.

  “She needs shoes,” she said.


  I told her I was trying to decide which outfit to put on.

  Sheryl looked through the clothes again and extracted a pale blue jumper with a white frilly blouse.

  “This is cute,” she said.

  I’d had something more sophisticated in mind, but I was somewhat bewildered by her presence—did she really want to play?—and so I bowed to what I thought was her better judgment.

  I slipped off the brown sheath the doll was wearing. (Someday I’ll do a study: What’s become of that part of my generation who insisted that their Barbie dolls wear underpants and bras? What’s become of the rest of us, who dressed her only in what could be seen?)

  “Where’s she going?” Sheryl asked.

  “Out to dinner,” I said.

  Sheryl held the dress by its little hanger. “On a date?”

  I nodded.

  “With her boyfriend?”

  I said, “Yeah.” At that age I was suspicious of any adult, any teenager, who too willingly joined in my imaginary games. But Sheryl was good. There was no smirk behind her words.

  “Well then,” she said, “you want something dressier than this.” She again looked through the clothes and this time extracted a strapless red dress with a wide gold lamé belt. It was the dress I had more or less planned to choose from the start.

  As I slipped the naked doll into it, Sheryl opened her purse and began to rummage through it. There was a sound of tumbling and clicking, plastic and glass.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked me.

  I said I didn’t.

  “Not even anyone you like a little bit?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t saying. “Where’s your boyfriend?” I asked her.

  She looked up from her bag and glanced toward her house. “He had to go to the hospital to pick up his mother,” she said. “She’s been sick, she’s a nutcase, but now she’s coming home. For a while anyway, the weekend. He’s got to help out.” She lifted her black bag again and squinted into it. “I guess I won’t see him until tomorrow or something.”