Family
Page 11
He hung up. He got on his bike and he was halfway across the field when the tornado struck. Terrified, he managed to bolt down into a ditch, peering up at the storm. He thought the world was ending, turned inside out. He saw trees cracking like matches, soaring up into the black swirl of air. He saw a dog, frantically barking, hurtling past him before his neck was snapped by the ferocity of the wind and he was still. Danny rolled into a ball of fear. He peed into his jeans, his heart slammed up against his chest, and his breath felt stitched up tight. He was in the ditch for over four hours, and then the black spiral moved away and the rains came. He couldn’t move. He clung to the mud, he let the water fill in until he was soaking, until he was weeping and calling for Leslie, over and over.
He didn’t make it home until the next day. He was muddy and chilled and he had to ring his grandmother’s bell for ten minutes before she came to the door, and then her face went white when she saw him.
He was a celebrity in the town. His picture made the front page, and people said that TV should buy the rights to his story. It made Danny a little irritated when the talk turned, when people started saying it hadn’t been such a terrible tornado anyway, and it wasn’t such a miracle that he’d survived. The damage to the town was minimal—a few phone lines were down. Danny called Leslie, who had heard about the tornado on the news and had been white-knuckled by the phone. He told her he was taking the next flight out, home to her.
He went back to the field to get the motorbike. A neighbor told him to forget it, that a life was worth a lot more than a bike, but Danny went anyway. He found the bike in the field, a little battered, but he got it to run, and then he was racing it back, speeding and alive, until the bike struck one of the fallen power lines and he was instantly electrocuted.
Leslie refused to remember the details now. What she did recall was taking the black prom dress and burning it in her garage. When her father saw the smoke, he made her put out the fire, but he didn’t yell at her. Instead, he took her and the rest of her ruined dress in the car to the incinerator by the plant in town and waited for her to drop it in, and then he drove her back home, the two of them silent.
It had done something to Leslie. She stopped expecting anything in relationships, stopped letting herself believe that a future could spin out of her like magical sugar. It was funny how it worked, but it made the boys around her, and later the men, fall hopessly, easily in love with her. In college, a man named Eddie fell in love with her, making a magnet of her disdain. He would stare dreamily at her in class, he would follow her to lunch and dinner. He kept asking her out, and when she refused, he made up excuses to come to see her: He had to get study notes; he had to get an assignment. She told him right from the start she wasn’t interested in any man, but he told her he would kill himself if she didn’t give him a chance.
She thought he was crazy—and in truth, he was a little. He wound up in the infirmary with a pumped stomach from an overdose of antihistamine pills. When she came to see him, he was quiet, removed. The attempt had burned the fire out of him—and inexplicably, her own interest suddenly kindled.
She was like that a lot. She had liked Nick when she first met him because he seemed so transient in her life. The months she hadn’t heard from him, she had thought about him, and when her mother had phoned with the name of some new young man that a friend of a friend knew, Leslie had said she was seeing someone.
She stared outside at Nick. She wasn’t angry, the way she might have been. He would be gone again in a day, and then he’d either be back or he wouldn’t. She stood up straight, she stretched, and then she went to get her jacket.
Nick was dreaming when he felt the knock at his window. He blinked. He jerked up. It was still dark outside. The music was sapped from the air, and when he turned, he saw Leslie studying him through the window. Her hair was impossibly long, impossibly black. “You’re watching me,” she said. He rolled down the window a little more, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her hard.
He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t care about the neighborhood. He pulled her into the car with him and slid his hand under her soft flannel shirt. Her body was damp; she smelled of powder. Who took a shower in the middle of the night? He was so used to Dore’s silences, and here was Leslie, rough, moving, kicking out one leg so the horn honked, making low easy moans like she was dancing. He touched her, he tasted her, he kept his eyes forced open, afraid if he shut them he would see Dore’s face shimmering back to him. When he entered her, she gave a small cry. She threw her head back and pushed herself against him, and then he stroked her eyelids until she opened them, until she saw him.
Afterward, stunned, he sat up. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant—”
She put her hand over his mouth. She said that she was sleepy. She wanted to go inside. Her bed was freshly made; she had changed the sheets just that morning. It was a bed big enough for two. He shook his head no, and she didn’t ask him why. She burrowed up against him, and in minutes she was sleeping. He watched her, absolutely amazed, and then he tentatively touched her shoulder. She didn’t move. He settled back against the door, looking out at the vague light of the stars, and after a long while he slept, too, as best he could.
When he woke—his back stiff, his left leg cramping so he had to stamp the pins and needles from it—she was gone. His mouth tasted funny. When he peered at himself in the rearview mirror, his eyes looked old, his skin sallow. He didn’t know what to do—whether to ring her bell and take her to breakfast, or leave her a note, or just drive and drive and drive back to Dore.
He got out of the car. Across the street, a little boy was pushing dirt with a stick. He made a face at Nick and then sat down on the curb, rat-a-tatting his stick like a drumbeat. Nick started up Leslie’s walk, wondering what she’d do when she saw him, how he’d feel when he saw her face. And then the door suddenly opened and there she was, in blue jeans and a rose-colored sweater, her hair wound up on top of her head.
“I’ve got to get to a fitting,” she said, rushing, stooping to buckle a shoe. She looked at him. “No breakfast,” she said cheerfully.
“I’m going to call you,” he said, and she smiled, she dipped one shoulder.
“No, really, I am,” he said, and then she leaned toward him and gently kissed him before she brushed past him to get to her car.
“I’ll be here,” she called out, and then she raced the motor and pulled out of the driveway, leaving him standing there, watching her, unsure.
SIX
Nick hadn’t counted on missing Leslie the way he did. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was an undertow sucking at his heels, pulling him inexorably toward her. She jammed up his thoughts, appearing when he least expected it. He’d be trying to tally his sales for the month, making rows of figures, and he’d think Leslie. He’d be driving, looking for an exit sign, two hours late, totally lost, and he’d see a green road sign, and when he looked closer, Leslie’s face would suddenly bloom into his mind. She made him see her in every woman with unruly black hair, in every pair of bottomless black eyes.
He told himself it was all craziness, and when he went to Pittsburgh—three times, then half a dozen—he told himself he was simply looking her up because of the warmth she always offered, because with her he seemed to shed his past as easily as a winter coat. When he was with her, he forgot how Susan had once risen from the bathroom steam, he forgot how Dore was transforming into a stranger he couldn’t reach.
He told Leslie as much as he could. He talked about Tom and Helen, he told her about the home, and he sketched his first New York City apartment for her. She, in turn, opened up her house to him, showing him where she had written her name in indelible ink when she was six, where she had buried a doll in the backyard, a body that was still there as far as she knew. She towed him about the city, making him ride up and down the incline on Mount Washington, squiring him to the zoo, to the park, to the river, where she rented a boat. Every five minutes, sh
e demanded, “Isn’t this wonderful?” “Yes,” he said, meaning her, meaning how light he felt, meaning the only reason to tolerate the city was because she was in it. “Pittsburgh is a great place,” she said.
At home, he was confused, on edge. He kept trying with Dore, trying to get back to her. He even gave up one or two trips to Pittsburgh, although Leslie’s face yearned across his mind. He took Dore to dinner, spent long evenings at home with her, but she was so silent, so reserved, it made him miss Leslie even more. “Talk to me,” he said, sitting with her on the couch, stroking her pale hair.
“Talk to you about what?” she responded flatly.
“Anything,” he said.
She looked at him. “You don’t mean that,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
She asked, abruptly, “You think this is a new life?”
“Sure it is,” he said.
She shook her head, sinking down into the couch. “Susan was gone in the trailer and she’s gone here. What’s so different about that?” Dore wiped one hand across her face, and Nick started plundering his pockets, looking for a cigarette.
“You can’t talk about it anymore, can you?” Dore said. “Or you won’t.”
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t want to remember anymore,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to be reminded all the time.”
“But I do,” said Dore quickly. “I want to be reminded now. I want to remember everything about her, every detail—the Pampers, the powder, the toys she liked in her bath. I’m afraid if I don’t, she’ll just get fainter and fainter in my mind, she’ll disappear for good and I’ll never find her, never.”
“Stop looking,” Nick said, and then Dore’s face abruptly closed and he couldn’t reach across the space to pull her back. She got up, she left the room, and then he heard the TV going and she was as distant from him as another country.
Sometimes he worried that she might leave him. Every time he came into the house, he tensed, half expecting to find her things gone, a note crumpled and bleeding ink into a damp water glass in the kitchen. He’d start speeding when he was driving home from business trips. He’d sometimes show up when her school was letting out. He sat in the car in front of the school, and when she came out, she was surrounded by students and her face was illuminated, laughing, and he saw how her smile faltered when she saw him, how she took a step back.
Sometimes when he was most lonely, when she was in the other room grading papers or reading, when they had spent another silent evening, he’d find himself looking through his travel logs, running his fingers across the pages until he came to a Pittsburgh entry. It always triggered something. It always made him feel a little better.
Leslie was having her own problems. She didn’t trust the way she felt about Nick. He began calling her now, odd hours, from places she had never heard of, and he’d want to talk and talk. It’d be four in the morning, and she’d make him wait while she fixed herself coffee, while she got a sticky bun from the bread box and a clean fork to eat it with. He said he just wanted to hear her voice, but when she talked, he was so silent that sometimes she thought he had drifted off to sleep, and she’d go silent, too, waiting for him to speak, to make himself real to her again.
He was always the one doing the calling. At first, she wouldn’t even let herself ask him where he could be reached, and he never offered her the information. Oh, she didn’t really care—she thought the relationship was simply what it was, and it would be stupid to try to make any more out of it. When she saw him, it was wonderful; and when she didn’t…well, she had her own life—she had, as her mother would say, her own sweet self. She wandered aimlessly about the house, fiddling with sewing projects, with jacket facings that wouldn’t lie flat, with zippers that snagged. She miscut things. She had to toss pieces out, because suddenly, for the first time, fixing them seemed like too much effort.
She didn’t want to be in love. At least not with someone in and out of her life like this. Have you heard the one about the traveling salesman? she told herself, trying to lighten her own gloom. She told clients she would finally go out with whatever sons they had in mind to fix her up with, and although the men came, showing up in jackets and ties, with roses and candy, nothing took, and every time Nick came back to town, she was glad to see him.
One night she had a dream about Danny. He was crouched under a crackling tornado, burrowing into the ground, and there she was, too, about ten feet away, in her black prom dress, pinned in place by the maddened wind. She shouted his name, and suddenly the wind stilled and he heard her, and he started to stand, half-smiling, his whole body relaxing. As soon as he was straight, the vortex began screaming toward him, swallowing him up, and she was crying, crying, and her own sound woke her, and then it was suddenly Nick’s name she was crying, Nick’s name making her throat raw.
She thought love was making her ill. The work she adored suddenly irritated her. She didn’t like the feel of certain kinds of cloth anymore, the way silk swished, the nub of corduroy. She talked a sixteen-year-old bride into a linen dress just so she wouldn’t have to handle all that lace. She assured the girl that linen was really so much more adult, so much more soigné. The girl didn’t have the foggiest idea what soigné meant, but she was easily swayed by it. Leslie talked the girl’s mother into cotton because, she said, it could be worn as a day dress, too, and was more practical than silk. But then the cotton, too, began to annoy her, and the linen made her hands swell and burn, so that it took her twice as long as usual to finish the dresses.
When her clients left her house, Leslie collapsed. She had deadlines to meet, but she couldn’t work at all. She burrowed into the couch and slept dreamlessly. She filled the tub with bubbles and slept there, too, her magazine drowning down toward the bottom. When clients called, complaining, frantic about dinner suits and party frocks, Leslie would stay up all night and work, her head pounding. She chewed on aspirin and fingernails while she sewed. She felt her fingers betraying her into ruining necklines and hems, and she ripped out almost half the work she finished.
Leslie didn’t feel like eating much anymore. She forced down salads, made herself eat an apple every morning, choking it down. At night she felt feverish; she kicked off sheets and blankets and then shivered without them. When Nick was with her, he worried. He kept asking her if she wanted to go to a doctor, but she told him of course not, she was fine. She didn’t want to talk about illness when she was with him; she didn’t want concern eating away their time together. And, too, she wasn’t sure how he’d react to adversity, what pain of hers he might be willing to share. She didn’t know, either, how he’d react to her being in love, what he might want to do or not do about it, and that scared her even more.
It wasn’t until another few weeks, another visit from Nick, that she finally recognized what was wrong, realized it wasn’t just love doing this to her. It was love growing, sustained within her. She was pregnant.
She had no idea what to do. On some days she took it all as a kind of sign, a sign of permanence to her relationship with Nick, and then, a minute or so later, she was sure Nick would see it as an unwelcome claim and never come back to her. It all made her half-crazy. She was super-aware of the life inside her, but she couldn’t manage to spit the news out to Nick. Sometimes she’d try to will him to know; she’d sit on her porch and think the baby out across the night to him.
She rode her bike to the library and read book after book on motherhood. She read articles about what you should name the baby, about the power certain names held, the way the wrong name could damage a child for life. Allison, she thought, Rob, Betty, Beth. She read about parenting, and once, she shyly dipped into a book about weddings. She gorged on such books, and then, uneasy, she’d wander over to the other shelves and get out books about money management, about investing, about the single parent in the Sixties. She went to her bank one day and spent an hour and a half talking to a woman in a blue plaid suit about trust funds and college funds.
She got up alone. She stumbled into the kitchen and called Information for Nick’s work number. Maybe she could talk the operator into giving her the home number he always said was unlisted, he always said he never answered. He’d answer her call this time, she thought; he’d answer it if she had to let it ring and ring and ring eight million times over.
Dore no longer let her students camp at the house. Her time was more her own now. She treated Nick like a sad memory, like someone who had died right along with Susan. She sat out evenings on the porch and missed him, and then sometimes Nick would come out and sit beside her, and it would just make her miss him all the more. It wasn’t the same. She didn’t want to spill out her thoughts to him. She couldn’t bear his baffled, yearning face; his stiff, retreating silences whenever she tried to talk about Susan. She thought he didn’t know one thing about her misery, he didn’t know one thing about his own pain.
She’d stand up and leave him sitting there. She’d walk to the end of the block and then back again, and she always felt a little relieved to find the porch empty when she came back. She’d sit down again and dream up into the sky.
At night, she liked to read on the couch. She fell asleep there with just a light blanket over her. She began waking up even earlier, getting to school nearly an hour before she had to. She didn’t mind being alone, she didn’t mind Nick’s business trips anymore. By herself, everything was less tense. She knew what to expect.