“Good night, sweetheart, I’ll see you in my dreams.” She’d said it but didn’t sing it, a joke. They’d used to sing it when he was little. He smiled, but didn’t laugh. He was getting too old.
“’Night, Mom.” He rolled over onto his side and she covered him. He looked back at her over his shoulder and said, “You’re going to stay up here for a while, right?”
“Yup. Going to put clothes away for a bit in my room, okay?”
“’Kay.”
She smoothed the covers over him and brushed hair off his forehead. Looked at the bruise on his cheek. There had been incidents at his other school, but they had been rare. Kid stuff, Dennis claimed. She hoped this was just a one-time thing, some kind of initiation. Not every child could be popular and on top but she hoped to god, and anyone else who might be listening, that her child didn’t end up on the bottom.
She snapped off the light.
“Love you,” she whispered into the dark. He heard her.
“Love you, too,” he muttered from under the covers.
Please leave him alone.She thought-prayed to whoever was listening that he needed a little extra help (because his mother might not be quite up to the job, just yet).
Barbara Parkins-Staizer? Not Parkins anymore, but Staizer again, maybe, or maybe just the hyphen. It was hard to get used to either, neither sounded exactly right, and she still hadn’t really,really decided to change, but was still sort of trying those changes on (out of anger).This too shall pass. That was what Debra had told her, anyway.
She folded the sweater in her lap and tucked it neatly into the middle drawer of her childhood dresser. She would keep that dresser in the closet, pushed to one side, and use the ample space on the other side to hang her few hangables. Not so many now—half, really. Dennis had got the big dresser in the divorce. She hadn’t cared. He probably could have taken everything in the house and it would have been weeks before she had noticed. She hadn’t even seen him take it. He’d left a note. Near the end there, he’d taken to coming to the house when she was out and taking what he needed then and leaving a note in order to avoid the scenes that ranged between tearful acceptance and offers of friendship (always ending in tears of hysteria) to angry rages during which she might actually throw something—especially something he wanted. He himself was always the same, and it was still impossible for her to admit that his general feeling seemed to be one of relief.
He got the big dresser. She got the smaller, daintier bureau with the mirror—sort of good of him to leave that for her since she felt the need lately to look at herself all the time, just to make sure she was still there—and she’d pinched her childhood dresser from home. Her mother had shaken her head in disgust at that, the unsaid,you had a husband and you let him go. And then what?Now you have no dresser? Barbara smiled grimly.
She spent an hour putting things to rights in her bedroom. Herown room, something she hadn’t had since she was a girl. She had done things her way.
Her bed had been pushed up against the wall, beside the window.
There was a pretty picture in her head of the girl she wanted to be, looking pensively out the window late at night and keeping watch. The first day in the house—when there were so many things to be done—she had gone upstairs to start on Petey’s room (priorities: bathroom, Petey’s room, kitchen), and glanced into her bedroom. Dropping the bag she had been carrying—towels—she went directly into it and pushed her bed frame up against the wall. It had to be moved out again to put the mattress on, but it had been amoment. My room. My bed. My window. There had been a sadness under the ferocity of the act, but she had chosen, briefly, bravely, to ignore it. She had her bed by the window.
She’d always wanted that, it touched some kind of childhood chord in her, but Dennis had been adamant about there being enough space between the bed and the window to get out in case of a fire.
“You want us to burn in our beds because we can’t get out the window?” he’d said firmly. The thing was, both she and Petey had been small enough to crawl across the bed and get out the window. Only Dennis had been too large. ’Course, he was smaller now. That had been the thing. In the last six months before he finally left her, he’d been losing weight. He’d started working out, going to the gym, running in the morning before work, and she’d been pleased—I was so stupid!—and had dropped about thirty pounds. He’d lost more since. Not for her, like she’d foolishly believed. For the other one.
The other one. Nameless. She could pass her on the street and not know she had.
It was impossible to stop the process once it had begun, and there it was, the bad pain, the terrible pain, worse even than the reality of the situation she was currently in, the pain that she imagined was like a bone breaking, the first, nearly audible snap ofPAIN, then the flooding over her of the real stuff, the real pain, visceral, whole body, complete.
She breathed deeply, tilting her head so that the tears would stay back. She felt the stinging in her nose first, and the full feeling of her face tightening. Her lips quivered for a second. She breathed and sat like that until she thought it would stop. It would stop.
Ancient history now. And no one cares.
She had a phone number. In the dark, disturbing days after she’d realized it, after checking the phone bills, she’d called. Again and again and a terrible, horrible voice (actually an ordinary voice, which was strangely worse, but she was not about to allow that thought, not yet butit would come, it would come) had answered every time. She’d fought the urge to speak, not hard because in the space between the last ring and the voice that answered there was every terror she felt, every fear, no anger at those moments, just terror, and in the stark face of it, she had nothing to say. What to say to the woman who has everything? She would hang up.
Another victory: she hadn’t dialed the number in three weeks. By now it was probably changed. And, of course, there were no more phone bills to check.
Her room was almost done. She planned filmy lace curtains for the big window beside the bed where she could look (pensively) out at the moon. Her pretty picture. Her largest piece of art, Klimt’sThe Kiss, would go over on the far wall. It was romantic and moody and had lots of bright yellow in it, a good color to wake up to. She might, when next spring rolled back around, paint the bedroom yellow. Bright, sunny. Not the yellow that was in the back bedroom (which would eventually be a sewing room–book room), but somethingnice. Whatever it was called, that color was unsettling.
The sweaters put away, she gave the room a good look-around. Her bed seemed small in the large room, and as yet there was nothing to add to it except an ancient rocking chair that was ready for the dump but that she kept for sentimental reasons. She’d rocked Petey in that chair. She had her little dresser, daintier in the largish room than it had been in their cramped, smaller room at home, but other than that it looked a little vacant. A guest room with a permanent guest. It would be pretty with curtains and the big picture. A nice fat overstuffed chair, maybe, and a tea table. Next spring.
It was a good house. It had to be. She had spent the bulk of her settlement on it, and now it was hers without a mortgage. There was about twenty thousand dollars with which to start their new lives, hers and Petey’s (Peter, she reminded herself). She wasn’t absolutely sure, but she thought it was enough for about six months, and then she would have to work in earnest. Fifteen years of marriage had come to about $110,000, plus child support.
Goddamn bastard shit Dennis hope you get herpes (not AIDS I need the child support ha ha).
Ancient history.
Barbara had just shut off the light in her room when she heard Petey’s muffled voice, like shouting, saying something she didn’t catch. She went to his door and looked in. “Honey?”
His arm waved in the air above his head.“Don’t!” It dropped and his elbow twitched up in a reactive gesture and he said something else, fiercely, unintelligible. He was sleeping. Talking in his sleep.
Barbara slipped into hi
s room and knelt beside his bed, stroking his head. “Ssssh…” she whispered. She soothed and stroked, whispering quietly, close to his face. He shifted on the bed. His little hands were clenched into fists, his face scrunched up, bottom lip jutting out because of his fat lip or some dreamt injury. “Ssssh…”
Slowly his face lost its tightness and he settled down. She stroked his hair softly and stared at him intently, as if able to will away his troubled thoughts.
“Baby, ssssh…”She stayed there for a long time. Until every demon passed.
Those little bastards. Why was everyone such a bastard?
She made it as far as the top step outside his room before dropping down and sinking her head into her hands. What kind of place had she brought him to?
With an ear half-cocked, just like when he was little, she listened for his breathing to get slow and regular, waited for sleep to truly take him—to a safer place. When he slept, just like he had as a toddler, he tucked a pudgy fist under his chin. His face would lose that look of concentrated confusion and relax. His lashes would lean gently on his cheeks. He would look like a baby, an angel.
God, at least let his dreams be nice.
A couple of years before, she would have called the parents. She wanted to; she wanted to call up the mothers of those children and scream into the phone,What kind of animals are you raising?, scream until she was hoarse and if she was a man, by god, she might have gone over there and thrown her weight around, see how they liked it. See how they liked to be the little one, the one on the dirty end of the stick.
He was just a little kid. How could people not see what a beautiful little boy he was?
Barbara had debated explaining their situation to Petey’s new school—in brief, of course, at least to his teacher and the principal. Explain Petey’s silence, the expression of disbelief that he seemed to have on his face all the time, explain the little compulsions he had picked up over the last year, like eating without stopping, barely taking time to chew, that look he got on his face when he was doing it. Like a good mother, it had crossed her mind to explain, enlighten and, with hope, garner some compassion for her boy. The thought had crossed her mind and then disappeared in the—
In the what?
In the mess that had become her world. In the melting-pot of her brain, where all facts, initiatives and ideas came together to be about Dennis, the divorce, the pain of Barbara Parkins-Staizer. Petey had been lost in that mess for nearly a year.
She cried very quietly so that he wouldn’t hear her, and she did this with practiced skill, so second nature by then that this time she realized she hadn’t even noticed that she had been crying at all. Once she did she cast a guilty glance toward his room and listened for a minute. His breathing was slow and easy. He was asleep. She smeared tears across her cheek and felt her nose running. She stood up on uncertain legs and stepped carefully down the stairs, not wanting to wake him up.
She needed to talk to someone. To hear a voice.
The phone at the bottom of the stairs was mute with accusation. Who would she call? She could call her mother, she could always call her mother. Barbara was lately of the opinion that her mother spent whole days thinking about the fool she had raised. But she’d also noticed Petey before Barbara had really given it a thought.He’s getting very fat, Barbara. What are you feeding him? Mother! She didn’t have to call her mother, she could hear her voice in her own head as clearly as if she were in the room. Hovering over her shoulder, shooting spiny comments at every move Barbara made, every decision, until everything she did became so filled with trepidation that she ceased to move altogether. And yet, her mother was often right; cruelly right.
You have to watch out for the boy now. He’s without his father.
I know, Mother.
You could change that, Barbara.
No, I can’t, Mother.
Men are men. They’re all bastards. You have to turn a blind eye and take your licks.
He’s gone, there’s nothing I can do.
You’re not a woman, Barbara.
She could call Debra. Debra was divorced. Successfully. Their friendship, since Barbara and Dennis’s break-up, had changed course somehow, and they had both known it. Her shoulder, hardened by her own break-up, was no longer a place to cry. They could discuss clothes, clubs, movies, books, but nothing heavy. If Barbara tried to bring up a subject on theverboten list, Debra’s eyes glazed over. She did not want to relive her own pain. Understandable.
The only other friend of any consequence she had was Gail, the neighbor from two doors down at the old house. Gail with 2.4 children, her husband in affable agreement to almost everything Gail said, her suburban life with blond kids, good kids (thin,acceptable kids), her dog, and unspoken judgments and pursed lips about the way the world had turned, and right in her own backyard!). Dennis still saw them, she knew. She supposed that he had gotten custody of Gail and Bob in the divorce. The temptation to ask (and the gleeful telling, probably) about Dennis would be worse than any tone Gail would take with her, and shewould take a tone.
You’re not a woman, Barbara.
Barbara walked past the phone, the hallway cold, the cold seeming to follow her into the kitchen. She would have a drink. There was a bottle of Canadian Club that Debra had given her for Christmas, about a month after Dennis had left. It had been a joke, to cheer her up. Debra’s divorce was four years old already, long past the point of regret and pain and well into the realm of her own life. She was a good example of how things can goright after a divorce: her life was so wonderfully full and she was always laughing and running off somewhere with someone. “Greener pastures and bigger dick,” was how Debra referred to divorce now, but it hadn’t always been so, and Barbara, under the constraints of their current unspoken agreement, couldn’t help but feel resentful for the hours of time she’d put in listening to Debra cry and rage. She also, regretfully, remembered her own smugness, which now looked so foolish and naive, listening to the details, a Gail-liketsk-tsk carefully hidden under veils of sympathy.Poor baby. Men are bastards.
The bottle wasn’t hard to find. The label had been replaced by one of those fake ones that you can produce on the computer; at the time (after a couple of belts at Debra’s) it had seemed funny, but now was not funny in the least.
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS, and under that it had said,THE BROKEN HEART ’S BEST FRIEND.
It was a little after, or before, breakfast, but she didn’t think anyone would notice.
Barbara sipped her drink and opened boxes of books, shoving them indiscriminately on the shelf adjacent to the sofa. It would crowd the one corner of the room, but if she got a big chair or a love seat or something LARGE for the other corner, it would all balance out.
No ice. The whiskey was warm and sharp in her mouth and down her throat—this too shall pass—but the ice-cube trays were still buried in one of the many boxes still to be unpacked in the kitchen. She supposed if she was going to take up drinking whiskey that she should also take up making ice cubes. For now they would stay buried. Too bad. She liked the sound of ice tinkling in a glass. It soundedfestive.
She separated Petey’s books from her own (and the ones of Dennis’s that she had taken because she liked and because shecould). The titles were all so familiar to her:Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Secret World of Og, Henry and Ribsy; just before Dennis left she and Petey had finished reading the first in the Harry Potter series. It occurred to her that they hadn’t read “a long book” together since then. They had stuck to comic books and Arthur stories. Short, easy things. She couldn’t really remember what they’d read.
She’d been in a fog. She would not be up for any mother-of-the-year awards. Not for a while, anyway.This too shall pass.
She’d always assumed, vaguely at least, that she would have another child. They’d talked about it. But it was as though suddenly Petey was five and then he was seven and then, by the time he was eight, any desire for another child had been eclipsed by the slow
disintegration of their marriage. If there had been two children, they might have been able to comfort each other during those first months after Dennis had left, but there had just been Petey. There had been nights when she hadn’t been able to speak, and if she did, then it was to rage or cry. There had been many times when she’d cried while cooking supper, doing the dishes, laundry.All day. She’d broken down once in the middle of the grocery store, in the bread section, as she recalled, standing there, leaning against the cart, bawling like a baby, Petey looking at her, his round, freckled face white with—embarrassment? Fear?A lady had stopped and asked her if she was going to be all right and she’d blurted out that her husband had left them and that she was never going to be all right again. The woman had patted her shoulder or back or something tentative and then pushed her cart away as though it were catching. Petey just stood beside the cart, silent through the whole thing. After the woman walked away, he went to the shelf and picked up two loaves of bread. “Two enough, Mom?” he’d asked, and she’d nodded and they moved on to Produce.
I’ll make it up to him, all of it.
God knew he had enough on his plate. He was a big boy. The doctor said he would grow out of most of it, but that he might just be big. “Like his dad,” Dr. Poulin had said. Like his dad. Dennis had been on the heavy side when she met and married him, not something that had ever mattered to her, and when Petey inherited his weight, she hadn’t thought about what it could mean for him. Red hair and freckles didn’t help. And in a couple of years—if he was like Dennis—he was going to need glasses. She hoped that somewhere in the neighborhood there was a Jeremy—
There was athump! from upstairs, loud, like the sound of something (soft) falling over, and in her haste, Barbara jumped up and knocked over her drink onto the bare floor of the living room.
The Dwelling Page 24