• • •
Mr. Leonard would’ve like to have talked to Linsey’s mother—no longer Mrs. Hart; now she was Mrs. Stein, and she had taken a course at the reform synagogue for non-Jews who had married in and didn’t want to convert, but wanted to give their homes some Jewishness (Mr. Leonard thought about this: some Jewishness, like a twig from an olive tree: like a spray can of something, eau de prewar Eastern Europe: or better yet: German Jew, crystals hung in the windows, Viennese cakes with fig fillings), so she made Shabbat dinner on Fridays. Linsey loved eating the challah; Mr. Leonard knew this because she often took hunks out to the wicker landings of the porch, fed them to Timmy, before Timmy was banished—Mr. Leonard would’ve like to have told Mrs. Stein not to push her daughter so hard. To let her stay with Timmy: if they were going to split up, it would happen. Linsey was young, but she wasn’t stupid. Abortion was legal—for now, anyway. Children lived together now, they decided whether they fit together like puzzle pieces or whether they ought to share only meals and conversations and maybe sex but not the rest of life. The rest of life—Mr. Leonard thought—should belong to Linsey. Her mother was making the worst mistake, trying to conduct a soloist, trying to instruct her daughter’s life in a way it could not be forced to go. He had always been cordial with the Harts/Steins. He brought their papers up to the porch—stacked them neatly under the rocker, bundled the mail just inside the screen door, feeling presumptuous but helpful—when they went away on vacation. They didn’t ask him to do this, but he knew they appreciated it. Once, a hundred years ago when she was still a girl and he was still a teacher, Linsey had been sent over with a plate of brownies as a thank-you. She’d been eating one she had slipped out from under the cellophane as he came to the door. He heard her coming, but let her ring the bell anyway.
“For you,” she’d said. “Um, for the mail.”
He’d wanted to swipe the crumb from the corner of her mouth. He’d wanted to tie the lace of her pink sneaker, unlooped and dangerous.
“Thank you,” he said, taking a single brownie, not the whole plate.
“No,” said Linsey. “All of them.”
“Okay,” he said. “Except this one’s for you.” He removed another, just three left. The brownie tasted of cocoa, and vaguely metallic, like mix. Not unpleasing.
“Did you make them?”
Linsey was eating again. “Mmm,” she said.
“Do you want milk?”
“I have to go back,” she said.
“I could give you a lesson,” he said, and Linsey looked puzzled, though she’d been eyeing the piano through the curved glass of the turret.
“No,” she said. “I play flute. Bye.” She turned and ran, and Mr. Leonard watched with trepidation, but she didn’t trip. The brownies had come on a paper plate, so there was nothing to return.
• • •
Now Mr. Leonard watched Linsey leave her porch. She’d slung her little black backpack over one shoulder and she looked small under the weight of the morning light. The zipper wasn’t closed all the way; he imagined the contents spilling out like food from an interrupted mouthful. She stepped out to the street as if waiting for something. Then she started down Sycamore, sneakers almost silent on the sidewalk. She walked past Mr. Leonard’s house, and then she was gone.
The houses were quiet, his and hers. He fingered the keys without pressing for a while, then allowed himself a Lully minuet, softer than it should be, but innocent. It was almost nine by the time the twins slammed open the door, running for the camp bus. Mr. Leonard was playing a requiem now; he felt like something was ending. Cody and Toby kicked the screen door on the porch and let in the quick, hot breeze. A single yellow leaf fell from the dogwood in front of their house. As the boys shoved each other along toward the bus, legs long and brown, one face pinched, the other open, the note in the mailbox stirred. The breeze broke the tape’s kiss with the iron, tugged the corner free from the lid. Mr. Leonard didn’t see the paper as it floated free, then landed with fateful precision, the edge slipping between the floorboards of the porch. The door opened again, Mrs. Stein calling after her boys, “I love you! Have fun!” and the note fell into the lightless land between the porch’s latticed-in legs and the concrete foundation of the house.
Later, when they came to question him, Mr. Leonard would try to be faithful to the morning. He remembered the note, but assumed they already knew. He remembered a lot of things, but only answered their questions. By then, the word “vanished” had wafted into his windows like the stray spittle that worked its way from rain through the screens. But vanished, Mr. Leonard thought, was a relative term. Linsey knew where she was, he thought, Linsey knew what she was seeing and hearing, what tastes touched her tongue.
He’d seen her seeing him. It wasn’t as if he could help himself—it wasn’t as if he was really living in his body—sometimes at the piano, sometimes inside the music. Mr. Leonard knew something about Linsey, something secret. But then, he had secrets of his own; he understood, and he wasn’t telling.
26 SYCAMORE STREET
Abigail Stein listened to the hissing of the trash truck as it turned the corner from Cedar Court, the cul-de-sac. She loved that the twins were gone for the long camp day, dashed out to the bus at the curb like birds toward a handful of tossed crumbs. During the school year, they were home or on the Mom bus to sports by 2:56 PM—but camp went until four and their bus wasn’t back until suppertime. Motherhood had transformed Abigail from a reasonably round object (though she was a slender woman, with softly brown, short-cropped hair, and a childlike sweetness in her rounded knees and shoulders), a red rubber ball perhaps, firm sided and elastic, into an accordion. She was always flexing out and squashing in, accommodating the music of their breath. She was always becoming smaller and larger, always folding and expanding. She turned off the coffeemaker, which still held its daily wasted half cup—her husband, Frank, wanted enough of everything, so sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was waste. Better, she thought. Better to live within his wide margins. She tipped the hot brown liquid into the garbage disposal, smelled the decay as it hit the cantaloupe rinds; she missed her husband, the boys, and Linsey.
Linsey came and went at will—she would already be at work by now with no need for a mother’s breakfast or kisses good-bye. It was entirely appropriate, of course, but still startling that her once-infant could make it through days without any sort of parental support or intervention. She had named Linsey for her Scottish grandmother, Leslie, who had given Abigail a pocket-size book of fairy stories with gold paint on the edges of the pages. She didn’t like the spelling with the D; it seemed too syllabic, too hard. Her mother wasn’t fond of Leslie, her father’s mother, and she hadn’t wanted to hear anything about the name; she’d wanted it to be her own gift to her daughter. Soon enough, Linsey would be gone, really gone. Abigail was doing her best to let go without hysteria, but some requisite fanfare. She thought of her own departure from Highland Park, Illinois, for Wellesley—her mother’s tight-faced refusal to go along for the car trip. Mrs. Cardinal hated long car trips; she’d even borne a paper bag for the fifteen-minute ride to the high school for graduation, breathing in and out while Abigail’s father drove, his arm on his wife’s leg, half comfort, half possession. So her mother stayed home with her laundry and alphabetical coupons, and Abigail’s father and brother took her to Massachusetts, and there was hilarity along the way, ordering too much food at Waffle House (her mother insisted on cleaned plates); letting her brother, age twelve, take the steering wheel and loop eights in an empty rest area parking lot somewhere in Pennsylvania. Roadside stands, pies they ate with their fingers. It was a wild last hurrah. Her mother never went to college, and both expected it of Abigail and never forgave her.
They would all ride together for Linsey. Her ex-husband, Joe, had wanted to take his daughter, but Linsey had asked him if he’d meet her there instead. Linsey intervened more than she should; Abigail was grateful and ashamed, as she had be
en all along. She knew the divorce had wrapped her daughter in grief, but she had been too lost then to peel it off, to help her enough. It was going to be awkward, the handover, the letting Linsey go to him before really letting her go. Abigail had imagined the scene, the boys playing in the stairwell of the dorm, which she could smell already, old beer and hot linoleum, and Joe would be waiting in the room like a suitor. But then he had a conference he had to go to, or perhaps it had been invented, bless him, and he said he’d just take Parents’ Weekend. Which he might miss; Abigail was prepared to take over if he did.
“He won’t, Abby,” Frank had said, soothing her, perhaps, or riling her, she wasn’t sure which. One week ago. They were in their bedroom at night; Linsey’s music, Coldplay, made the walls vibrate softly.
“He might,” she said. “You never know with Joe. And I don’t want Linsey to expect someone and then have no one. It wouldn’t be fair. The twins will have their last game that week, the regionals. In Ramsey. Will you go if I have to go to Cornell?” She planned ahead. Not for everything, but for the things that worried her the most.
“I’ll go even if you don’t.”
“You’re managing me,” she said, squeezing his broad back as he sat on the bed, his legs crossed ankle to knee to untie his pretty brown lace-ups. Abigail had been suspicious, at first, of her second husband’s vast collection of Italian shoes.
“Maybe,” he had said, leaning back against her. She loved that he was so big. She loved feeling small beside him, a bird in a lion’s paw.
Now it was almost time, just another week left before they took her daughter away. Abigail walked up the steps, listening to the music from next door, Mr. Leonard, playing Chopin, or maybe it was Beethoven, very fast, insistent, a bit wild. She liked Mr. Leonard though she didn’t have much to say to him. She was afraid he’d heard every argument through the windows, afraid he might mind them as neighbors, and at the same time, she resented his early morning playing sometimes, or late night, even if it was spectacular, it wasn’t always what she wanted, it wasn’t her particular brand of passion and grief.
Abigail smoothed her short linen dress. She checked her makeup in the mirror—the first makeup she’d worn in days, and it wasn’t for the women’s group at the temple, where she felt welcome and shunned at the same time. It wasn’t for Frank, a lunch date; it wasn’t for coffee with any of her friends in town—most of them were still away in Long Beach Island or Cape Cod. She had dressed up for Margaret, her Wellesley roommate, who was now a management consultant—a partner, in fact—with a company that owned its own glass-and-chrome dagger of a building in midtown. Margaret had an office the size of Abigail’s living room. Childless, single, she was the target of the “me finger” diamond advertisements in the New York Times Magazine.
Abigail’s cell phone rang as she was locking the door.
“Resumé?” said Margaret. “I should’ve had you e-mail it, but you remembered, right?”
Abigail chuckled. She did have a resumé, folded in halves and quarters and wedged into her Coach bag, her one purse, between her tiny new spiral notebook and her long checkbook wallet, which she always thought should have MATERNAL stamped on the cover.
“I’m serious,” said Margaret. “Just because you’re not talking full-time yet doesn’t mean it has to be Gap or Starbucks. You can do better, lady. This is your apprenticeship, your chance to decide what’s next on the Grand Abigail Itinerary.”
“I’m not even sure—,” started Abigail.
“No,” said Margaret. “You called me, and you know how I am. You’re sure. I’m excited. Morgan Library at noon. We’re so ladies who lunch, you know; no one here has lunch before two.”
“Okay,” said Abigail, because acquiescing was what you did with Margaret. When they were roommates, Margaret made everything a hunt, a battle, be it dates or choosing the best dining hall or graduate school, where she went immediately after graduation. Harvard. Abigail had married Joe, and had relinquished her casual dreams of art school, or art history, or maybe trying B school herself—though that was just Margaret’s rabid influence. Abigail had never really wanted to fight that fight. Or any fight, really.
After the divorce, Abigail had worked at a nonprofit arts agency for three years, administering grants. There were things she loved about work: the purposefulness, the sense of spreading pleasure to children and teachers, giving them a dance troupe performance, a puppeteer for a workshop; she also loved dressing up for work, flirting in the elevator, going out for lunch. She’d met Frank at a benefit. And four months into her twins pregnancy, she’d given up the job, thinking it wouldn’t be for good. She still thought that when the twins were one, two. By the time they were three she knew she couldn’t juggle like that; she’d have to wait and start with something else, something that let her check in at nine and check out at three. Still, she’d always daydreamed about having an arts café—art shows hung monthly on the walls; music performances and poetry readings coupled with divine desserts, chocolate-raspberry cakes and espresso with perfect crema in thick cottage blue cups.
Margaret indulged Abigail’s dreams. “When you open your café,” was something only Margaret said, regularly. She wanted to help; she wanted to see Abigail doing, the way she had when Abigail was lost and needed to emerge from her darkness. It was Margaret who forwarded her the job opening after the divorce, Margaret who lent her a suit for her first interview.
They met every four or five months for lunch in the city, though Abigail realized she’d let it go too long this time—over a year. Last time a school nurse had called her home because Cody had broken his collarbone diving for a kickball.
Margaret still made everything a project, and was ruthless in approach, whether it was trip planning, a nanny quest, or buying a new black dress. She helped Abigail with all her acquisitions and battles—and flushed with the pleasure of the endeavor. When Abigail had needed a divorce lawyer, Margaret had met her in Hoboken, a first, with a vanilla legal-size folder, a box of tissues, and a baseball cap with MAKE ME spelled out in rhinestones on the crown.
“This is for going incognito,” she’d said. “When you want to dress up as someone other than Supernice Abigail and stop thinking about everyone else and make a list of wedding silver, dining sets, bank accounts, testicles, whatever you really want to get from the bastard.”
• • •
The train was full for midmorning. Abigail squeezed into the middle seat and recognized a man across the aisle—Charlie Sentry, her neighbor. She’d always assumed he was off at the crack of dawn, and back after bedtime, because she’d never seen him out retrieving the paper from the walkway or seeing off the kids. She’d made quite a few assumptions about him, actually, as she had many of her neighbors, perhaps because they seemed so uninterested in her, and she’d never questioned the shield of invisibility from house to house, even when they could hear each other’s voices from sidewalk to open windows.
He wore a suit, but he was surreptitiously eating an apricot Danish, and she worried for his white shirt. It was kind of charming, eating forbidden food on the train, and his eyes were open wide with childlike pleasure. Then he tucked the paper bag into a briefcase and started chatting with his seatmate, a woman in a long, soft dress who laughed and leaned back, revealing a strangely long neck. She reminded Abigail of an otter.
How did people do this every day, commute? How did they spend the whole morning getting from here to there and then plug themselves into there, producing work like the electricity that ran their empty houses, refrigerators and air-conditioning chilling and lights lighting and clocks counting the minutes of absence? Was this what she wanted to do—work in the city, or even work in town? She had spent too much time living in her house, too much time using its walls like her own skin.
She transferred in Secaucus, and her neighbor disappeared. She walked off the train in midtown, feeling the heat from the sidewalks and buildings, a whole summer’s worth of heat. She saw a young woman with
hair like Linsey’s disappear around the corner and almost stepped off the curb before the light changed. An arm reached out to stop her—it was Margaret, early for once.
“You’re early!” she yelped.
“Ready to become a working girl?”
“Probably not,” said Abigail, but Margaret waved the thought away as they crossed in the stream of pedestrians, and walked up the stone steps to their lunch destination. Then she was folded into her friend’s wings, where she spent an hour and a half eating chicken salad, looking at the correspondence exhibit at the library, noting all her possibilities, and letting herself be the pure subject of Margaret’s marvelous passion and attention.
61/2 SYCAMORE STREET
It was nothing like The Graduate. First of all, she wasn’t that old; her oldest was in high school and Jordan was done with college, practically a man, though practically, she thought, not actually, despite how he made her feel; he still had this particular hesitance, this asking for permission, that occasionally made her cringe when they were together. But he did know what he was doing; there was nothing virginal about the way he pushed her up against the door inside his diminutive carriage house, the way he liked to keep their clothes on, to thrust past unzipped teeth and the crotch of her underwear pulled aside. There was no way around the fact that he thrilled her, that she thought about him when she was emptying the dishwasher and came without touching herself, that his mouth was just the right amount of hard and narrow, that he was rough enough, but never cavalier. Second, it was nothing like The Graduate because, despite his underlying indecision, he had come after her. Fully.
One morning she’d been at Starbucks with Helena, ordering her usual—a single shot of espresso with hot water and a tiny dollop of foam, which she and her friends called short-hot-shot; it was their joke, only she said it a bit too loudly at the bar, waiting for her drink, and the barista, a young man who looked familiar, as if he was one of Steve’s friends; perhaps she’d seen him in the local paper as captain of the hockey team, said, “Short hot shot for you, gorgeous.” He was young, but deeply masculine, his mouth lush and ironic, his black hair glossy as wet stone. It was as if they were in a bar, a real bar, a drinks bar with desperate men and flashy ones, with women who were hot without trying and women who were trying too hard. She hadn’t been trying anything. She was a housewife. She talked mostly to women, to Helena, the Group, to children and to cashiers and on the phone to mail-order folks in Wisconsin who joked about the kids’ footie pajamas with comforting aplomb and thanked her for being such a good customer. She was; she was a good customer. But she’d forgotten how sexual she had once been, until this young man.
When She Was Gone Page 2