Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  She felt foolish trailing her hand along the wall. She took it down and started striding blindly down the hall to the main office. The principal’s secretary lived near Dore; she’d give her a lift. Dore was almost to the man when she stumbled on something, and then she felt his hand on her arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes… No,” she said, letting him help her stand, moving a step or two from him. She squinted at him. He didn’t look dangerous.

  “Listen,” she said, “a kid took my glasses. I’m afraid I can’t see very well. If you could just help me to the office, I can get a ride home. There,” she said, pointing.

  “I can drive you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know you,” she said. “I can’t take a ride with someone I don’t know.”

  “I just sold two dozen books to your school librarian,” he said. “I’ll take you to her and you can ask her—she can identify me. I’ve got a business card, too, if you think you can read it. And a number you can call to check up on me.”

  Dore squinted at him.

  “Really. I was just leaving anyway,” he said.

  He had stepped back from her. He was too far away for her to really make out his features. She was curious about them, though. Curious, too, about why he had been just standing out there in the hall, what he had been waiting for. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take the ride.”

  The whole time he was driving her home, she kept wondering what he might really look like. She wasn’t so blind she couldn’t see his black hair, cut a little wild and funny, a nose a little prominent, a rumpled dark suit that seemed a bit big. The details, though, were missing, and she couldn’t just move up close to stare, to read his face like braille.

  She made him wait outside her door; she told him she just had to grab her extra glasses and then she wanted to get a catalog from him—maybe she’d be interested in ordering some of his books for her class.

  She went into the bedroom and rummaged around in a drawer for her glasses. They were old frames, out of style, and she didn’t think she looked so good in them. Still, she stopped to fluff up her shortish hair, to smooth her blouse, and then she stepped out into the foyer.

  “Well, teacher,” he said, smiling. “Do I pass?”

  “Do I?” she said.

  They began seeing each other. He lived a half-hour’s drive away and he’d come out to see her or bring her back with him to the city, and when he was on the road, he called her, every night, with stories. She liked him. He was different from the other men she had been with, boyfriends who were always jaunting off mornings to be with their buddies, leaving her with a messy bed, with a breakfast table littered with toast crumbs and cigarettes, with spilled black coffee working its way right into a stain. She had had men who would make love to her, and then, a minute later, would casually wipe off their gummy penises with her lace underwear, would reach for her phone to schedule a tennis game, joking privately to someone whose sex she wasn’t even sure of.

  She felt happier with Nick, who wouldn’t leave her alone, who told her that he didn’t know what it was about her, only that there was something that kept drawing him, that wouldn’t let go. He said that when he had first seen her, feeling her way along the wall, he was certain all the time that she was feeling her way toward him, that he had been her destination right from the start, and that all he had to do was wait for her, holding his breath, mesmerized.

  There was no one else laying claim to him except her. He didn’t even have any real friends to speak of, let alone family. She had to pull all those orphan stories out of him; he seemed vaguely shamed, reluctant, and when she told him that she loved those stories, that they made him more lovable, more charming, he looked at her stupefied. “You do?” he said. “They do?”

  She didn’t tell him that it made him seem more hers, made him seem more vulnerable. She said only that she had never known anyone who had grown up that way, and it made him special. He touched her face when she said that. He couldn’t stop looking at her, almost as if he were searching for something.

  He was interested in everything about her. He pored through her yearbooks, her family albums; he held up face after face for her to identify. Her mother. Her father. Herself, a sulky seventeen, perched on Franky’s motorbike. He made her tell her own growing-up stories, over and over, until he said he felt like they were his. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t get back to Chicago more often to see her parents, why she had moved away from them. He offered to go with her on a visit, but she turned him down. “If you had parents, you’d understand,” she said. “It has nothing to do with love.”

  He charmed her. He didn’t care about her glasses. When she took them off, he just brought himself in close, so near he could see the gold flecks in her pupils; he swore he could feel the boundaries of their skins.

  She felt funny, she felt different with so much attention. She let the kids carry on in class. She ignored it when Ronnie dropped his pen, stooping so he could try to look up her skirt. She daydreamed about Nick while three boys in back threw spitballs, while the girls traded blush and eye shadows, layering it on over their grammar papers, returning the papers to Dore with soft dustings of blue or rose.

  She began wearing more interesting clothing. Softer shirts, silkier dresses, earrings made of cut glass that caught and refracted the light into millions of tiny suns across her desk. She grew her bangs and then went into Woolworth’s and sat for four photos, which she shyly gave to Nick.

  She told him not to, but Nick always called her at school. Teachers weren’t supposed to get personal calls. There were only two phones in the whole school—the one the secretary used and the one in the principal’s office. If you had anything at all personal to say, the secretary was always right there, leaning toward you, fashioning gossip and juice out of whatever words you let slip. When Nick called, a monitor came into Dore’s room to get her. Her students whistled as she left to take the call. “I missed you,” Nick said. He promised he wouldn’t call again, he said he had just ten minutes, and then two hours later he’d call again.

  They ate dinners together. Nick made huge spreads of food for her, so much that she could only stare blankly at it. She never ate a quarter of what he put before her, but Nick kept starting and stopping. He tossed most of the food out, and when she said she’d take some home with her, he laughed. He said he had grown up with leftovers, that he had done more than his fair share of penance and didn’t think either one of them should do more. He was always hungry, always eating, and always lean.

  He slept with his arms about her, sometimes one leg trapping her hip so she couldn’t move. If she rolled away, he rolled with her. It used to annoy her a little, but then she noticed how on the nights he was away, she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she had twisted the sheets about her, until she had the pillow pushed up against her, so close she was nearly off the side of the bed.

  Nick had her pictures all over his place, in his wallet, in his pockets—once, inside his sneaker. He didn’t mind coming home to an empty apartment, because really, it wasn’t empty anymore. No place was. Everywhere seemed flooded with Dore, with her voice, her face, the heady possibility he felt when he was with her. She was suddenly everyplace he had ever wanted to be, she was the road he felt destined to travel.

  Dore was his first love.

  THREE

  They began living together in the spring. They couldn’t afford very much. A client of Nick’s had called up a rental-agent friend in New York, but the places the agent had shown them were all dark and roachy, with cracking plaster and drippy sinks, and they had cost so much money that Dore would have had to work nights and weekends just to pay her share of the gas bill. The places they saw in New Jersey weren’t much better. It was Nick who thought of the trailer courts. He remembered driving past them on his trips selling books. They looked like real communities to him, like places where you couldn’t possibly be lonely—and best of all, they were so ridiculously c
heap, you could own one for less than $10,000. “Think of it,” he kept telling Dore. “It could be ours. No one could take it away from us. We’d own something real.”

  Dore wasn’t so sure about living in such a place, but she went with Nick to scout them out because he was so taken with the whole idea. She went inside a few of the trailers, which were actually pretty spacious, clean and light. They weren’t the kind of trailers you just hooked up to the back of your car; they seemed more like homes to her, with foundations and backyards and driveways, and in the end, they bought one on the spot.

  Flybird Court was the name of the trailer court they moved into. It was in New Jersey, close enough to Dore’s school that she could take a bus to work if she wanted. “Nick loved having a pace they actually owned. Every time he jiggered the key in the lock and walked in, he felt flooded with light. He’d stand in the center of the trailer, grinning like a fool. He’d go and find Dore and make her just sit with him in the living room, holding hands because he was so happy.

  The first night they moved in, struggling to unpack, trying to spread their meager furniture around so it looked like more, three families from down the street came over with a pot of coffee, a home-baked cake. One of the women had brought a sack of sugar and some salt: She said the sugar was for sweetness in the new home; the salt, to give their life bite. Dore was delighted, but when she started talking about her teaching, when it became clear that she and Nick didn’t have kids, that they didn’t even seem to want them, and—worse—probably weren’t even married, the friendliness evaporated a little. “They just need to get used to us, that’s all,” Nick told Dore that night as they lay together in bed. “We’ll be a part of things soon enough.”

  They didn’t worry about it at first. There was the trailer to get used to. Dore couldn’t sleep nights. She’d bolt awake, hearing steps in the kitchen, murmuring voices she swore came from the living room. She got up with Nick to investigate. They stood still and silent until Nick heard a familiar sound. A toilet flushing noisily. A door. He recognized a voice, heard the name of the man down the street, and a kid being scolded for not turning off the lights. Some nights, it wasn’t voices. The wind would crash against the flimsy window, shaking the trailer so the dishes rattled in the cupboard. Breaking glass next door reverberated in their living room. Nick found himself talking to Dore in a low voice, pulling her close so he could whisper, so he could protect his thoughts.

  Things happened in the trailer. Winters, the pipes froze. Dore would step into the shower and nothing would come out of the spigot. The toilet froze up. Dore would have to go next door to the Rivers’ place and, shamed, ask if she could use the bathroom. They were friendly enough, but she was mortified, coming into a stranger’s home while they were eating their dinner, clinking their silver and staring at her. She worried about stomachaches, about getting sick. She wouldn’t leave school until the very last minute, then always visited the bathroom whether she had to go or not, and she wouldn’t drink a thing.

  One night she woke up at four, her bladder swollen. Desperate, she went into the kitchen. She was ready to hoist herself up and pee into the sink the way she knew Nick did when the toilet wasn’t working. She thought about going outside, but there was no privacy, there were still lights from all the other trailers. She finally took a jar of grape juice out of the refrigerator and dumped it out; she peed into that.

  Sometimes they’d pile into the car and drive to a gas station, to the cheap eateries along the highway, ignoring the signs that said rest rooms were for patrons only. Well, they became patrons. They slid into the cheap plastic seats and ordered the least expensive thing on the menu, ignoring the gloomy frowns of the waitress. Tea. Coffee black. One piece of toast, no butter. They’d wait until the waitress left and then they’d get up and use the rest rooms, washing up with a whole sinkful of hot water, brushing their teeth, coming back just to slap a dollar or two on the table and leave.

  But the worst thing about the trailers was that they were firetraps. In fact, it was impossible to get any insurance. Dore was sleeping one night when she felt restless, suddenly hot. She kicked the covers off, and then felt a shimmer of sweat moving over her. She woke Nick, and it was he who noticed the yellow curl of fire through the window.

  They bundled into sweaters and went outside. The trailer down the block was blazing, making the sky blurry with smoke. The whole court seemed to be outside, huddled together, everyone talking and whispering as the fire trucks whined steadily toward them. Dore recognized the woman next to her; she was the one who had brought Dore the sugar, the salt for bite.

  When Dore leaned toward her, the woman gave a weary smile. “Flora,” she reminded Dore. She nodded to Nick. She told them how dangerous a thing like this was, how easy it was for sparks to blow and strike like flint against another trailer. “This fire belongs to everyone here,” she said. “The whole court. The trailer next to the one burning is already so hot you couldn’t get near it if you wanted to.” She pointed to the fireman who was hosing it down, cooling it so it wouldn’t flame. “It happened once,” Flora said.

  “What did?” asked Nick, mesmerized by the fire.

  “A whole community,” Flora said. “Two kids just pranking around with matches because their mother didn’t have sense enough to watch them, and then thirty trailers burned right up, falling like they were dominoes.”

  Dore wrapped her sweater about her, but Nick abruptly walked away, his face averted, unreadable. He walked toward the burning trailer. “Excuse me,” Dore said, tilting her head toward Nick. Flora just nodded, stepping back a bit. Dore went over to Nick, but at first he didn’t even seem to see her. She was about to tap his shoulder when, without even turning, he reached for her hand, he held it.

  “I never saw anything go so fast,” he said.

  The fire lasted another half-hour before the trailer collapsed to the ground. The trailer next to it was badly scorched but still standing, needing only minor repairs, a fresh coat of paint. No one talked much walking away from the fire. The people who had lost their trailer, a family with a two-month-old baby boy, were taken in by another family, and in the eerie stillness you could hear the woman softly crying. That night, Nick stayed up, staring out the front window at the ruin down the street, and when Dore touched his shoulder, for the first time since she had known him, he seemed not to see her.

  The people who had owned the trailer moved out of state. They sent only one postcard, a week or so later, addressed to the whole court. It was tacked up on the community bulletin board, the front of it showing a garish white southern mansion, the back spider-webbed with print. “This is our grand new digs. Ha ha. We’ve been staying with Betty’s folks in Virginia, hope to have our own place quick. Love to all from June, Henry, and Little Bill.” There was no return address.

  Nick kept walking past the burned-out lot where the trailer used to be. Some nights he just stood in front of it, uneasily surveying the court. For a while, there was some talk about the court finally setting up its own volunteer fire patrol, and there were even a few fire-prevention meetings in the community center. Nick went to every one of them, but nothing ever got accomplished. Harry Corcoran, who lived two trailers down from Nick, got up and showed diagrams of commonsense measures, things like throwing out oily rags, not leaving the iron on, never smoking in bed. Another woman, Ellie Lambros, suggested everyone watch out for everyone else. Several people wanted smoke detectors installed.

  Fewer and fewer people showed up at the meetings, and gradually the talk died down. No one really wanted to talk about another fire. The ground where the trailer had burned was going to be all dug up and reseeded. The company who managed the court was already planning to put a new, bigger trailer in there. And the people whose trailer had been scorched were busy sanding it down, planning on painting it a nice cheerful blue.

  Nick, though, couldn’t forget. He brought the fire up in so many casual conversations with other people that they began crossing the street
when they saw him, waving a hand and then moving on. Flora cornered Dore and asked her if she couldn’t do something about that alarmist husband of hers because he was scaring the kids.

  Nick came home one night with a small fire extinguisher. He set it up in the kitchen, taught Dore how to use it, and then tacked up the number of the fire department right by the phone, where they could see it. This was his home, the first he’d had in a very long time, and he had no intention of losing it again.

  Nick waited for the community to take them in. The other men kept watching him suspiciously. They didn’t like the way he was changing the trailer, putting on a small cement porch in back so he and Dore could sit out on cool evenings. He never went down to the grassy field to play ball with the other men after supper, he never sat with them listening to the radio droning out baseball games and pop music, and he never once shared the beer getting warmer in the dizzy heat. Instead, he ran every night he was home, round and round the trailer court, six times by Flora’s own count, his black sneakers attracting all the court dogs like iron to a magnet. He had appeared at the field only once, and then with Dore, the only woman there, holding her hand, bending her to him for kisses, bold as a looking glass, clearly more interested in her than in friendship with any of the men. The men all felt it, and they carried resentment like an itch they weren’t sure how to scratch.

  Dore, too, was carefully watched and considered. The other women all kept house, they all watched over the husbands they had married fresh out of high school. They cooked and shopped and traded recipes, sitting out cool evenings on nylon chairs, watching the kids banging a ball around, playing freeze tag until they had to be pulled inside and calmed down enough for bed. Everyone got up early, but it was to fix the kids pancakes and cereal, to make sure their husbands had their coffee. No one was rushing off to work themselves at 6:30 in the morning unless they had to; no one worked for the pleasure of it. And no one came home with a box of shoes from Saks, leather sandals that cost more money than any one of them would spend on the whole family put together.