“She’ll be all right,” Sheryl’s mother said for her.
Out in the car, Pam told her, “This is the last of it, Ann.” (She had dropped the “Aunt” some time this fall, recognizing her own new authority.) “Tomorrow we can begin to believe it never happened.”
Sheryl’s mother nodded. She had rented a house in a nearby suburb, and Sheryl would begin school there after the winter break. Her house back east had been sold and the furniture was on its way. She had found a job in Columbus as a receptionist. Six years from now she would tell Mrs. Rossi, Leave or you’ll always hear him coming back, because in her sister’s house she no longer woke in the middle of the night believing he was back and beside her. In the basement family room where she and her mother slept, she woke only to confirm that the floodlight still shone brightly into the yard and that her ideas about what to do with her life had not left her. That she was getting better, getting on.
At the hospital, Pam asked her mother and grandmother to stay in the car with the children and then took Sheryl’s mother’s arm as they crossed the parking lot.
“I’m all right,” she said, but Pam held her arm anyway. Tomorrow they might no longer need her.
Sheryl was dressed and sitting in a chair in one corner of the room. The other three beds were empty. Her labor had been long and difficult, but she had gotten through it quietly. The doctor had praised both her courage and her youth. She was wearing one of the plaid maternity blouses Pam had made for her but the change in her body was clear, and although she still held her hands over her stomach, as she had taken to doing during the past few months, her face, suddenly thinner, suddenly seeming to fit properly under the heavy makeup, told them that she was finished with the ordeal.
“I have to ride down in a wheelchair,” she said as they entered, and Pam answered—she had been in this hospital herself when her own children were born—“That’s standard procedure.”
“They don’t want you to fall,” her mother added.
Sheryl held out her hands to show them she was not carrying anything.
She hadn’t wanted to see the child. She’d told them there was no point in it. But Pam was persistent, certain it was this, the children she had held in her arms, that carried her into her own future when the chasm at the heart of her daily life drained her of hope. She asked a nurse she remembered to give the girl another chance.
Sheryl had just finished her first breakfast when the nurse walked halfway into the room. “Just a peek?” she asked.
Sheryl merely nodded.
The thing was incredibly small and ugly and would not open its eyes. Sheryl unwrapped it and touched its elbows and knees, the waxy remnant of its cord. His skin was pale and tinged with yellow and his fingers were tightly closed. She pressed her lips to the top of his head, brushed them against the fine dark hair, touched the eyelids and lips in a kind of blessing. Then she closed up the blanket and handed the child back to the nurse. The first and last time she would see him.
They brought the wheelchair to the door of the room, and Sheryl stood slowly, her cousin and her mother at her elbow. “I’m all right,” she told them.
Out in the corridor, other women in nightgowns and slippers, blue or pink ribbons in their hair, walked slowly up and down, touching the walls. They looked carefully at Sheryl, only a small suitcase in her lap. She was wheeled the long way around to the elevators, avoiding the nursery.
Pam ran ahead to pull the car up to the hospital’s entrance. Sheryl and her mother and the orderly who pushed her waited together in silence. She was surprised to see her aunt and her grandmother and the three children in the car. She could tell already that her grandmother had tears in her eyes.
There was a great fuss about who would sit where, and Pam swept all the children out of the car as if she were rearranging the luggage in a small trunk. She sent two of them around to the other side as the grandmother moved into the middle and then, as Sheryl got in, lifted the youngest child into her lap. “You don’t mind,” she said. “Watch your fingers,” and shut the door.
Sheryl’s mother and aunt rode in the front seat beside Pam. Her grandmother’s fleshy elbow pushed into her side. The child squirmed on her lap. Outside, the streets they passed were dull with winter, the lawns gray, and the remaining Christmas decorations, strings of lights and plastic Santas and Nativity scenes littered with scraps of snow seemed, as they always seemed in those days after Christmas, colorless and limp. Next year they’d look new again.
Her little cousin felt the tag on her wrist and began to finger it. Next year she’d be in her new house and her new school. The child—traveling now in another car, in the arms of a woman who, Pam had told her, had nearly given up hope—would be nearing its first birthday.
She bowed her head and put her lips to her cousin’s fine hair. The woman who had nearly given up hope, Pam had told her, would be pushed from the hospital in a wheelchair, the baby in her arms, just to make the picture complete.
Sheryl brushed her lips against her cousin’s hair, his determined squirming like an echo of the child she had carried. What she thought of then was not the nights they had shared, or of all that had insinuated itself between them since the door flew open and her life began again. What she thought of instead was summer. Another summer evening on our street. The dinnertime stillness slowly giving way, the sound of chairs scraping away from tables and, through window screens and opened doors, of dishes tumbling in sinks full of water. Children, numbed briefly with food and already taller than they had been, stepping out into the new light, walking carefully into the cooled air, across the lengthening shadows. Her father’s death still new to her; her throat still strained with the effort of not calling out his name.
The three females linger at the table. The plates before them are full of food, only the crumpled paper napkins and the empty glasses and the silverware crossed over each plate mark the time that has passed since they sat down. Her grandmother says, “Too hot to eat,” although there is only cold meat and salad. Her mother wipes her throat with a napkin. “There was a breeze,” looking toward the dining room ceiling, into the still air, “but it’s gone.” Her voice saying of course. Of course there is no relief.
Sheryl moves her bare thighs, pulling them from the sticky plastic seat. “Can I go?” she asks, and her mother nods and tells her somewhat indifferently to be home by nine. Then something in her face seems to relent.
“There’s a movie on TV tonight,” she offers in a way that implies she is doing her best, but it’s hard enough keeping herself alive. “When the ice-cream man comes, I’ll pick up some ices.”
Sheryl shrugs and pulls herself from the chair. She climbs the stairs slowly, her hand trailing along the banister.
The lights of her vanity mirror seem dim in the red evening sunshine that fills her room. She sits before it, carefully studies her face, then reaches for the thick blue compact. With one hand steadying the wrist of the other, she draws a careful black line across each eyelid. She lifts a hank of hair, rats it vigorously, wets it with hairspray. Her lipstick tastes of peppermint although no one has yet to share the flavor. She slips a thick plastic bracelet over her wrist, and then another. The sound of them, she knows, will reach the boys, make them turn away from their cars. She practices a slow, wise smile.
She wants to love someone else. This emptiness left like an impression by the way she loved her father must be filled or else it will be as though he never lived.
Downstairs, her mother and grandmother are watching an unfamiliar program on TV, thrust a half an hour too early into their evening because there were so few dishes to be done. Her grandmother clucks her tongue when she sees her tight clothes. Her mother says only, “Nine o’clock,” no kindness in her voice now, only the sense that she had once thought her children would save her but there is no relief.
She leaves by the front door, going quickly down the three steps and across the lawn. Jake stops on his bicycle to watch her. My parents peer over
the rhododendron. Mrs. Evers, eyeing her carefully, knowing what she is dressed for, says “Hi” as she brings her garbage to the curb.
The air is still hot and her shoes echo against the pavement. There is the pale swish of lawn sprinklers, children appearing here and there, in trees, behind fences, across the grass, as numerous as fireflies.
Angie is waiting for her at the corner. Sheryl greets her with a piece of gum and the two girls turn, their hips bumping and their shoes scraping over the sidewalk, and once more head for the schoolyard, where they know the boys will be.
The miracle, then, was not the door banging open and filling the small bloody room with hot sunlight, bringing her more life; the miracle was that, despite all she had lost, despite all she knew was no longer true—her love alone was not enough, it would always, eventually, come to nothing—still, there was the blind, insistent longing, stirred now by the child in her arms, that this emptiness be filled again.
In the front seat, Pam, her mother and her aunt were keeping up a bright conversation to which the three children added their own bright and nonsensical things. Sheryl pulled her small cousin closer to her, held him more tightly in her arms. She tossed her hair back over her shoulder as Pam drove out onto the highway and the car picked up speed.
Read on for an excerpt from
Alice McDermott’s new novel,
Someone
Available Fall 2013 in Hardcover from
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX • NEW YORK
Copyright © 2013 by Alice McDermott
Pegeen Chehab walked up from the subway in the evening light. Her good spring coat was powder blue; her shoes were black and covered the insteps of her long feet. Her hat was beige with something dark along the crown, a brown feather or two. There was a certain asymmetry to her shoulders. She had a loping, hunchbacked walk. She had, always, a bit of black hair along her cheek, straggling to her shoulder, her bun coming undone. She carried her purse in the lightest clasp of her fingers, down along the side of her leg, which made her seem listless and weary even as she covered the distance quickly enough, the gray sidewalk from subway to parlor floor and basement of the house next door.
I was on the stoop of my own house, waiting for my father. Pegeen paused to say hello.
She was not a pretty girl particularly; there was a narrowness to her eyes and a wideness to her jaw, crooked teeth, wild eyebrows, and a faint mustache. She had her Syrian father’s thick dark hair, but also the permanent scattered flush, just under the fair skin, of her Irish mother’s broad cheeks. She had a job in lower Manhattan in this, her first year out of Manual Training, and, she said, she didn’t like the people there. She didn’t like a single one of them. She ran a bare hand along the stone balustrade above my head. The other, which lightly held the strap of her purse, wore a dove-gray glove. She’d lost its partner somewhere, she said. And laughed with her crooked teeth. Fourth pair this month, she said.
And left the library book she was reading on the subway yesterday.
And look, tore her stocking on something.
She lifted her black shoe to the step where I sat and pulled back the long coat and the skirt. I saw the laddered run, the flesh of Pegeen’s thin and dark-haired calf pressing through between each rung. The nail of the finger Pegeen ran over its length was bitten down to nothing, but the movement of her hand along the tear was gentle and conciliatory. A kind of sympathy for her own flesh, which I imitated, brushing my own hand along the unbroken silk of Pegeen’s stocking, and then over the torn threads of the run.
“Amadan,” Pegeen said. “That’s me. That’s what I am.”
She pulled the leg away. The skirt and the blue coat fell into place again. Across the back hem and up the left side of Pegeen’s good spring coat there was a long smudge of soot that I impulsively reached out to brush away. “You’ve got some dirt,” I said.
Pegeen turned, twisted her chin around, arm and elbow raised, trying to see what she couldn’t see because it was behind her. “Where?” she said.
“Here.” I batted at the dirt until Pegeen threw back her head in elaborate frustration, pulling the coat forward, winding it around her like a cloak. “I’ll be happy,” she said, slapping at her hip, “to stop going to that filthy place.” Meaning lower Manhattan, where she worked.
She paused, put her nose to the air in mock confidence. “I’ll get a boyfriend,” she said. She batted her eyelashes and drew out a sly smile. They were great kidders, the Chehabs, and no boyfriends, it seemed, had yet called for Pegeen. “I’ll get myself married,” she said, and then licked all at once the four tall fingers of the gloveless hand and swatted them against the dirty cloth.
“Amadan,” she said again. Which, she explained, was her mother’s word for fool.
And then she released the skirt of her long coat and, dipping her shoulders, shook herself back into it again. She reminded me of a bird taking a sand bath. “I fell down,” she announced. She said it in the same fond and impatient tone she had used to describe the lost glove, the forgotten library book. “On the subway.” It was the tone a mother might use, speaking about a favorite, unruly child.
Pegeen blew some exasperated air through her pouched-out lower lip. “I don’t know what the blazes makes me fall,” she said impatiently. “I do it all the time.” She suddenly squinted and the flush just under her downy skin rose to a deep maroon. She lowered her face to mine. “Don’t you dare tell my mother,” she said.
I was seven years old. I spoke mostly to my parents. To my brother. To my teachers when I had to. I gave some whispered response to Father Quinn or to Mr. Lee at the candy store when my mother poked me in the ribs. I could not imagine having a conversation with Mrs. Chehab, who was red-haired and very tall. Still, I promised. I would say nothing.
Pegeen shook herself again, standing back and lifting her shoulders inside the pale blue coat. “But there’s always someone nice,” she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. “Someone always helps me up.” She struck another pose, coy and haughty, as before, her chin in the air. She touched the feather in her hat. “Today a very handsome man gave me his hand. He asked if I was all right. A real Prince Charming.” She smiled again and looked around. Just a few doors down, the older boys were playing stickball in the street. There was a knot of younger ones on the curb, watching. Bill Corrigan was in his chair on the sidewalk just behind them.
Pegeen leaned forward once more. “Tomorrow,” she said breathlessly, whispering now, “I’m going to look for him again. If I see him, I’m going to get real close.” She leaned down, her hand on the banister above my head. “I’m going to pretend to fall, see? Right next to him. And he’ll catch me and say, ‘Is it you again?’”
All human eyes are beautiful, but Pegeen’s were very black and heavily lashed and gorgeous now, with the sparkle of her joke, or her plan, or, perhaps, her vision of some impossible future.
She straightened up. “We’ll see what happens then,” she said, sly and confident, her thick eyebrows raised. She swung her purse slowly, turned to move on. “That will be something to see,” she said.
At her own house, Pegeen didn’t use the basement door, as usual. She climbed the stone steps, taking them one at a time, like a small child. At the top, she paused again to swat at the back of her coat, only touching the dirt with her wrist. It was early evening. Spring. I could see Pegeen’s reflection in the oval glass of the outer door—or at least the blue heart of the reflection, which was both the reflection of her good spring coat and the evening light on her flushed face. Pegeen pulled open the door and the thin image in the glass shuddered like a flame.
I turned back to the vigil I was keeping on the stone steps. Vigil for my father, who had not yet come up from the subway.
From the far corner, the neighborhood’s men and working women were coming home. Everyone wore hats. Everyone wore trim dark shoes, which was where my eyes fell when any of them said, “Hello, Marie,” passing by.
At seven, I was a shy child,
and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eyes, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth—a little girl cartoon.
With my heart pinned to my father’s sleeve in those days.
The boys were playing stickball down the street. Always at this time of day. Some of them friends of Gabe, my brother, although he, young scholar, remained inside at his books. The younger boys were lined at the curb, watching the game, Walter Hartnett among them. He had his cap turned backward and the leg with the built-up shoe extended before him. Blind Bill Corrigan, who had been gassed in the war, was on the sidewalk just behind Walter, sitting in the painted kitchen chair that his mother set out for him every morning when the weather was fine.
Bill Corrigan wore a business suit and polished shoes, and although there was a glitch in the skin around his eyes, a scarred shine in the satiny folds of his eyelids, although he was brought to the kitchen chair every afternoon when the weather was fine by his mother, whose arm he held the way a bride holds the arm of a groom, it was to him that the boys in the street appealed whenever a dropped ball or an untimely tag sent both teams, howling and cawing, to his side of the street. They were there now: shouting into each other’s face, throwing their caps on the ground, and begging Bill Corrigan to make the call. He raised one of his big, pale hands, and suddenly half the boys spun around, the other half cheered. Walter Hartnett rocked backward in despair, raising his good foot into the air.
I pushed my glasses back on my nose. Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill. Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand. He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing. There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed. Big Lucy, a girl I feared, pushed a scooter along the opposite sidewalk. Two Sisters of Charity from the convent down the street passed by, smiling from inside their bonnets. I turned my head to watch their backs, wondering always why their long hems never caught at their heels. At the end of the block, the Sisters paused to greet a heavy woman with thick, pale legs and a dark apron under her coat. She said something to them that made them nod. Then the three turned the corner together. The game paused again, and the boys parted reluctantly as a black car drove by.
That Night Page 16