Love Invents Us

by Amy Bloom

  Mr. Stone, my English teacher, read poetry to our class and told me I could show him my own poems after school. I sat next to him, smelling his coffee and tobacco and middle-aged-man smell, watching him roll up his sleeves over his wide arms. He tapped a ridged fingernail over each line, circling a misplaced word, running a yellowed fingertip back and forth over a nice phrase.

  I wrote poems about loneliness and terrible fires in crowded tenement buildings and poets dying in the Russian snow.

  Mr. Stone said, “I know you know about the loneliness, honey,” and he crossed out every other line and made me put away all the poems located in places I’d never been. I brought him three boxes of blue pencils.

  Mrs. Hill and I were working our way through Pride and Prejudice and the story of her courtship with Mr. Hill. I gave her a couple of manicures without hurting her too badly and hoped she wouldn’t ask for a pedicure. One afternoon, I found her smiling in her sleep when I walked in, her feet, brown and yellow and bumpy as toads, soaking in warm water and chamomile leaves. I dried her feet and moisturized them and filed down her toenails and painted them Carnaby Crimson.

  I had everything I needed.

  Peace Like a River

  From behind Mr. Stones desk I watched the entire junior high walk by, their faces passing between my pointy toes. I drank Mr. Stones coffee and waited for someone to admire my red cowboy boots propped up on a pile of blue books. I shut the door and read everyone’s grades.

  In that little office, with the frosted-glass window facing me and the view of the parking lot behind me, with the dirty metal file cabinets and the film of cigarette ash and dust and the apple cores rotting in Mr. Stone’s wastebasket from Monday to Friday, I felt whole. The dreams other girls tried to make real with boys or clothes or horses were nothing to me. The best dream, the true red heart of my life, was Mr. Stone; Rachel and Mrs. Hill were the ribbon, and books were the lace trim.

  When he came in, I was crying.

  “Liz, what’s the matter?”

  “My father’s moving out.”

  My sharply proper mother had loosened the reins on me entirely, distracted by weekly legal encounters over the Chippendale, the Klimt, and the Fiestaware. My father gave me twenty dollars every time he saw me, and offered me all the things he wouldn’t let me eat when I was little. It wasn’t really so bad. It wasn’t tragic.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Stone said.

  I think he felt sorry for us all, even for my mother, who never inspired sympathy.

  “Maybe things will get a little better now. Maybe you and your mother will fight less and you and your father will spend more time together.”

  I didn’t think he really thought that.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” I stared at the toes of my boots.

  “Maybe not,” Mr. Stone said without smiling. Sometimes he would smile when I was looking away, but when we really looked at each other, I saw the pink rock of his face with grey mossy hair on top and wild, twiggy crescents of eyebrow above his small, slanty blue eyes.

  I loved him for not lying to me, but I started crying again, drops falling on my notebook. I hoped he’d give me permission to skip class. I hoped my nose wasn’t running and that I wasn’t ruining Rachel’s mother’s silk shirt.

  “Can you go to class? The bell’s ringing.”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “All right, forget it. Stay here. I’ll write you a pass and you can go later. Whose class are you missing?”

  “Algebra. Mr. Provolone. I mean, Mr. Provatella’s.”

  “Well, you can’t get much more behind than you are, I guess. You’re not going to be a mathematical genius, Miss Taube. You better cultivate your other talents.” He poured some coffee out of his thermos. “I have to go teach. I can give you a ride home if you want.” He walked off quickly, a kind of fast, barrelly cowboy’s walk.

  I sighed and rummaged in his desk for the chocolates in the back of the bottom drawer. He loved me.

  Mr. Stone drove me home that afternoon, and in the cocoon of his little Volkswagen I inhaled the smoky air and held my breath, smiling and trying to memorize each passing house, to make the trip from the junior high parking lot to my driveway seem longer.

  “You’re growing up.”

  “Yeah. It happens,” I said.

  “Do you babysit, grown-up?”

  I had, but I was still scared to stay by myself at night. “Yes. I mean, not much,” I said. “But I can.”

  Mr. Stone frowned. “Okay, maybe you’ll babysit for us sometime.”

  He pushed my hair behind my ear, squinting at me through the smoke, and I thought that he wouldn’t ask me to babysit, that we would never sit in the Volkswagen, driving past darkened houses in the moonlight, but he did, right before school ended.

  I expected to be a good babysitter, even a great babysitter. I liked cats, I admired the toddlers at my father’s office Christmas party, I cleaned up after Mrs. Hill all the time. I could babysit for the Stones. Really stupid girls babysat for three kids, even three boys, all the time.

  I waited in the foyer, watching for him through the colored glass panels. His car drove through the purple, the blue, and the yellow, and at the green I went out to keep him from honking the horn. The thought of my parents and Mr. Stone in the same room, standing in the foyer, sitting side by side in the leather chairs, chatting about me, was so horrible that at night I would imagine it to scare myself, the way I used to shut my eyes and see, on the deep red screen of my inner lids, blood-tipped green monster claws hanging over the edge of the clothes hamper.

  Mr. Stone didn’t say much on the ride over. I wore my low-riding bell-bottoms and a Mexican blouse with lemons and oranges and red hearts swirling down the front of my breasts. I sat completely upright so my stomach wouldn’t come close to my belt. He said, “Pretty blouse.” He talked like a father, about his sons and what they were good at; he didn’t even look my way. He said that they were good kids and exceptionally bright, which even my parents said about me. He said Danny was shy, Marc was outgoing, and Benjie was nine going on thirty. I thought I would probably get along with Marc and maybe we could watch TV while the other two played chess or read The History of Western Civilization or did whatever brilliant children do. I told Mr. Stone I loved children, and he laughed.

  I had never seen a house like the Stones’. Later on, lots of the houses I went into reminded me of theirs, but then it was as new as a foreign language. I loved the zebra-striped door and the leather-and-bronze knocker and the brambly brown lawn. Every cliché of bohemian life was new and charming to me: the black and red canvas pillows on the scuffed wood floor, the low black foam couch on fat mahogany feet, the grey, balding rugs, and the trailing, two-generation spider plants in bulbous hand-thrown pots, their hairy green strands winding down through the macrame onto the backs of people’s necks and into their lumpy, half-glazed mugs. A headless mannequin with an army cap on its neck and a peace symbol on its chest stood in the front hall. My parents had taken me to Versailles when I was eleven and I was not half so impressed. The only things I didn’t like were Mrs. Stone’s paintings. I didn’t not like them; they terrified me.

  Mr. Stone practically pushed me through the front door, and when I had to go back to the car for my knapsack, he disappeared. Mrs. Stone invited me to look at her pictures and made me cross the room with her until we stood facing them. They hung on the wall like nightmares, even the frames oddly pale and uneven, covered with worm lines and tiny brown bug holes. I could hear Mr. Stone in the other room, rumbling over the sound of the little boys and the Muppets.

  “Well, now you see what I do,” she said, like I’d been wondering.

  “Uh-huh, yes, I do.” I looked around, hoping Mr. Stone or the boys would come out of the TV room.

  The biggest picture was a corpse, a woman with her belly slit open to her breasts and little creatures—I didn’t look too closely—miniature soldiers and animals climbing out across her body.

  �
��What do you think?” She reached up and put her hand on my shoulder and just left it there.

  “It’s trying to say something” is what my mother always said when she looked at things this ugly, but I couldn’t say that. I did not want to know what these pictures were trying to say, or why Mrs. Stone was trying to say it to me.

  “Elizabeth may not be ready to comment on her employer’s artwork, sweetheart.”

  I kept quiet, listening to that complicated “sweetheart.”

  “All right, Max,” she said, and she took her hand off my shoulder.

  The boys were behind Mr. Stone, hanging on like little freight cars and wearing the weirdest pajamas I had ever seen. They were like flannel nightgowns, but instead of being navy or plaid, which would have made them a little less weird, they were hot pink with tiny black houses, grey with rust-colored stars, and yellow with blue frying pans printed all over. Danny and Marc were real twins, not fraternal, and one of them was wiping his nose on the hem of his nightie. He wasn’t wearing underpants.

  “You’re quite tall,” Mrs. Stone said.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say, And you’re quite old. Or, Your teeth are quite yellow and your paintings are quite nuts.

  “I designed the boys’ nightwear,” Mrs. Stone said.

  I figured. “What time do you want them to go to bed?” That’s what babysitters always asked my parents.

  “Oh, let’s see. Eight-thirty for the twins, I don’t know, they’re only eight. Nine for Benj, I guess … if that seems reasonable.” She didn’t seem to have much experience with babysitters.

  I asked them for the phone number where they’d be and if the boys were allowed to have snacks and everything else that my babysitters used to ask. My parents’ favorite sitter wrote it all down in a little notebook, which I thought was pretty obsessive, even though I hadn’t known the word at nine. Benjie probably knew the word.

  Mrs. Stone clasped each boy’s face in her palms and turned around to look at us all as Mr. Stone led her out, as if she were going away for years. When the door closed, all three boys sucked thoughtfully on their lower lips, just like Mr. Stone.

  “So, who eats ice cream?”

  I was the babysitter I’d never had. I was better than Mary Poppins because I didn’t care what kind of people they became, I just wanted to be their favorite; I wanted them to despise other babysitters. I showed them how to soften the ice cream, mix it with broken-up cookie pieces, and refreeze it. We ate a quart of that. Their eyes got big and starry when I found the hot fudge and let them eat it out of the jar while we watched Million Dollar Movie. We played cowboys-and-Indians-in-outer-space until the twins collapsed in the hall, and then I wiped the biggest chocolate streaks off their faces and dragged them heels first up the stairs to their beds. They had bedspreads as weirdly patterned as their nightgowns.

  Benjie said, “They have to go, you know. Or else.” And I got them back up for that and threw them in bed again.

  “Let’s play something,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, and took out a deck of cards in case he wanted to learn Spit or Crackerjack.

  He leaned back against the couch, opened his mouth wide, and rolled his eyes up until only the whites showed. Opening his mouth made him look much worse, the wet pink hole and the brown-tipped fern leaves almost grazing his bulging, blank eyes.

  “Benjie. Benjamin.”

  “I can’t hear you or see you. You are invisible.”

  “Okay. You can unroll your eyes if you want. I’m now invisible.” I had a babysitter who would play this kind of game with me: Let’s pretend you’re an animal in the zoo, you get under the table and you can’t get out, while I go talk on the phone. I hated her when I understood, but if he wanted to play like that, I didn’t mind. I picked up a Life magazine and flipped through pictures of hundreds of girls getting their hair cut like the Beatles. Benjie unrolled his eyes, and they were very bright and liquid, like they’d been washed while they were up there. He stood up and pulled his nightgown over his head, making a flannel column with his arms, so I could get a good look at his naked body. It was like his brothers’ but bigger, and I had more time to look. His thing was like a soft, taupey cigar. A cigar with a droopy little bow around it. He kept standing there, and finally I picked up the magazine again.

  “Any time, Benj.”

  “You are invisible,” he said from within the nightgown.

  “Oh, yeah. Okay, I’m invisible.”

  He threw his nightie across the floor and took the magazine out of my hands, making me look at his naked chest.

  “Do you want to play cards? I can teach you a game.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Strip poker.”

  “Definitely not. How about regular poker?”

  “You’re invisible,” he said.

  He dove onto the couch and began rubbing up against the cushions in this really disgusting way.

  “Oh, Max, Max, Max,” he squealed.

  “Come on, don’t be gross.”

  He kept pumping away at the cushions and finally just lay there shaking, his little butt sticking up like another cushion, round and shiny.

  “I’m going to look in my father’s room,” he said, and I followed him because I thought I should keep an eye on him and because I loved to look at peoples stuff.

  “You want to put something on? It’s cold in here.” It was cold. The Stones must have kept their bedroom at fifty, and Benjie’s whole body was covered with goose bumps.

  “Invisible,” he said, and headed for their dresser.

  Which was exactly what I would have done if I was by myself. The things I liked best about babysitting, in the three jobs I’d had so far, were the eating and the snooping, both unfurling through the evening, lushly inviting, any small wave of shame easily subdued by the prospect of being, for once, satisfied. I ate smoked oysters and caviar for dinner, having discovered that people’s pantries yielded up interesting hors d’oeuvres tucked away behind the flour and the Crisco and the onion soup mix. And I ate ice cream with my fingers and shook Oreo crumbs down my throat when I’d finished the box. No one saw.

  Benjie crouched in front of the dresser, his little thing dangling between his ankles. He held up a few pairs of his mother’s baggy white underpants, more like my panties than a grown woman’s, I thought, and then he put them back in the drawer. I certainly wasn’t going to make fun of his mother’s underwear, but if that was all we were going to find, I’d go back to the magazine and he could call me when he was tired. He held up a little plastic shield.

  “Athletic cup,” he said, putting it in front to show me how it worked. “My dad used to wear it for rugby.”

  I started looking around on my own. If I waited for Benjie, we’d never get to any good stuff. I stuck my hand under the bed, and then I got down on my knees. Under the bed and back of the closet had been the best places so far. I didn’t like going into basements, certainly not for the split garden hoses, rusty skates, and used tires that everyone kept.

  There was nothing under the bed, but in the back of the closet there were shoe boxes half filled with curling photographs. I let Benjie rummage in the underwear drawers. The pictures were of Mrs. Stone.

  She was naked, kneeling in one, on her hands and knees in the others, looking back at the camera with a stupid smile. Her long hair hung over one shoulder, and her rear end was dark with pimples and little creases and hairs. The whole thing was worse than her paintings. I put the photos back in the box and the box back behind Mr. Stone’s winter boots.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”

  “Look at this. It’s Greta.”

  I hated it when kids called their parents by their first names, like they were other kids.

  She is skinny and tall in the photo, taller than she looks now. Maybe it’s because her skirt is so short and her hair is short too, with bangs sticking out in three directions. She’s wearing shoes with no socks, but it doesn’t look like sum
mer; she’s wearing a boy’s jacket, her hands stuck in the pockets.

  “Where is that?” It’s obviously not America.

  “Prague. That’s in Czechoslovakia. They speak Czech. My mother speaks Czech.”

  “Do you?”

  “A little. Not really. She looks weird.”

  “Yeah.” I looked at the picture again. I knew what she was thinking as if I were standing there myself, my hands in her pockets, our fingers wedged together in the torn lining. She is trying not to cry. Everyone wants her to be happy now, and she’s trying.

  “It’s late, Benj. You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  “You’re invisible.”

  “I am not fucking invisible and it’s ten-thirty. Come on, put the picture back.”

  He jumped on the bed, bouncing like a trampoline expert, knees bent, arms parallel to the mat, thing flapping up and down in a blur.

  “Come and get me, milacku.”

  “What’s that?” I began circling the bed. I wanted to grab him, but I didn’t want to smush my face against his thing or his butt.

  “Milacku, sweetie pie. Milacku, sweetie pie. Mam te rad. I love you. Mam te rad. Dobrounots. Good night. Dobrounots. Good night, good doughnuts.”

  He kept singing the words and repeating them until the English and Czech ran together and I couldn’t understand anything. The bed was creaking loudly, rocking on the short wooden legs.

  “Benjie, get off the bed.”

  “Say the f-word again.”

  “Get off the bed. I’m sorry I used bad language.”

  He started screaming. “Say it. Say the f-word.”

  “Okay, stop it. Jesus. Get off the fucking bed. Okay? Get off the fucking bed and give me the fucking picture. Your parents will never fucking hire me again if they come home at eleven and find you wandering around the fucking house butt-naked. Okay?”