Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  She knew she was drifting from him, but she knew he was drifting, too. She began thinking about escape, about going away somewhere, taking a leave from school. She thought about going to Mexico. It was hot and pretty there; the sun could burn away memory, peel it away like skin, leaving you a whole new layer of life. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to go.

  She told the school first, and then she blurted out to Nick that she was taking a leave. He nodded. “Just let me see how much time I can take off,” he said to her. But Dore shook her head; she said she wanted to be away by herself, that she wanted to think. “Think about what?” said Nick, frozen, but she walked past him, touching his shoulder in the way you might touch anyone, a friend, a casual stranger.

  “So when do you think you’ll be coming back?” he said, his voice trailing, waiting for her to fill in the date, the time, the hope.

  She shrugged, she said she didn’t know, and when she packed, he saw how calmly she folded. “We both need the time,” she said, wearily, as if she didn’t believe it.

  “Don’t go,” he said, but she kept moving about the apartment, taking things from hangers. She left behind photos, wool sweaters, her favorite pair of red earrings, and he told himself it would be all right then, she’d be back.

  When she left, a week later, he was at work, half furious, half missing her. When he came home that evening, the house felt empty. He missed her; he missed the times when he hadn’t been able to pass a school kid without feeling her so clear and sharp inside of him that it hurt. When the phone rang, he picked it up, expecting a client, and there was Leslie’s voice on the wire. “I have something important to tell you,” she said.

  Nick walked outside, head down, seeing nothing, his heart wild. It was crazy, crazy, Dore leaving his life like this, Leslie entering it in a way that was too permanent to ignore. He remembered once in the home, a baby dying, and then another appearing, just one hour after the funeral, brought into Mr. Rice’s office by the social worker who had found her, abandoned in an alley. “Happiness out of grief,” Mr. Rice had said, dandling the baby, showing her off. “It turns on and off like a light switch.” Nick pulled in a breath of night air. A baby, a baby. It made him feel this incredible sense of possibility. A real child instead of a ghost, a woman who loved you instead of one who kept walking away.

  He had taken control, talking to Leslie. He had told her not to worry, that he’d be right there, and then he could feel something changing in her, something alive and moving over the wires, and she had stammered out that she loved him. Oh, God. She had never said that to him before, and as soon as she said it, it was like that light switch, clicking something on in him. He loved her, he had for a while now, but he loved Dore, too, and he didn’t know what to do about any of it.

  He worried the situation, weighed it. It was a second chance. Dore might not return; a large part of her had left him a long time back. He could have a whole other family, a woman who clearly loved him, a child, a life. He could marry her, too; he could give it all a permanence it wouldn’t be so easy to drift away from. And the baby—his baby—well, he’d never leave it with a sitter, he’d never let it out of his sight. He’d be such a spectacular father, nothing would dare to hurt it. He thought suddenly of Dore, struggling to get pregnant, crying in bed after lovemaking, or sometimes before, making him so guilty, he couldn’t get hard.

  He felt almost feverish. He’d make good as a father, good as a husband. He felt for a moment as though he were promising something to Susan, and to Dore, too, off in Mexico.

  He had no idea what to tell Dore, how to leave her. She hadn’t left him any number, any city, only the whole vast country of Mexico in which to find her. He called Leslie every evening, soothing her, making up emergencies that kept him from being there at that very moment, and then as soon as he hung up, he’d start composing his goodbye letters.

  It gave him an odd strength, leaving Dore before she left him. He wouldn’t take a single thing from the apartment, he’d let her have it all. Oh, maybe he’d take books. Photographs. He thought about the picture of Dore he had on his desk. He had taken it the week he met her, when he was already dizzy in love. She was smiling fearlessly into the camera. What could he possibly tell Leslie about that face? Could he say it was the face of an old friend, a neighbor? Could he say it was the face of his first love? Leslie was private enough herself not to ask more than he was willing to tell, but just that small bit of information, that naming, might be dangerous. He might as well tell her all of it, and in the telling, he’d give his past sudden new power over him, give all that pain entry into a new present, and he didn’t want to feel it anymore, not Susan dying all over again, not the love dying. None of it.

  In the end, it was Dore who found him. She called one night when he was asleep. “Remember me?” she said.

  He sat up, clicking on the light, pulled by her voice.

  “I was going to write you,” she said. “Then sometimes I thought I’d just stay and stay and not tell you, but I was afraid you’d come and find me, and I didn’t always want to be looking over my shoulder thinking I saw a detective in every friendly face.” She started crying. “I don’t want to be found,” she said. “I’m tired of everything. I don’t want boys pulling up their T-shirts pretending to scratch, all the time watching me to see if I’m getting turned on. I don’t want lovesick compositions from girls.” She sighed.

  “Dore—” Nick said, but she interrupted him.

  “God help me,” she said, “but I can’t do it alone; you have to help me out a little here.” She was silent for a moment. “I just want to be by myself for a while. We don’t have to say it’s forever. We could call it a separation. I mean, we could get back together, couldn’t we? We could work things out. Maybe you could see a therapist or something, talk it out in Boston, and then come here and talk it out with me.”

  “Dore,” Nick said. “It’s all right.”

  “Right,” she said, bitterly. “And cows can fly.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “Do you want to give me an address or a phone?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “I won’t stay in the apartment,” he said. “I’m going to get some new kind of job, move away.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Look, don’t tell me your address, all right? If I have it, I might write.”

  He didn’t want her to hang up. He suddenly wished she would come back and stay in the apartment, just so he would know where she was. He wished he could take her along with him to Leslie’s. “I still love you,” he said abruptly. “Isn’t that horrible?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.” And then she hung up, leaving him only the empty hum of the wires.

  He didn’t get any new kind of job. All he did was switch from one publisher to another, only now he would be handling more than just kids’ books, he’d be selling an adult list as well. The home office was in Philadelphia, and it was enough of a change to make him feel he was completing his new life, and it was enough of a stasis to make him feel safe.

  He packed Dore’s things and put them in storage, sending the information along to Dore’s parents. Then he rented the place to three college girls, leaving them his share of the furniture and the dishes.

  He left the day after he rented the place, and when he got into his car, he couldn’t help it, he kept seeing Dore in Mexico. She’d be eating at a café, her skin brown as it had never been. He tried to picture her with some man, but every man became himself. He couldn’t imagine her without him, he couldn’t.

  He had taken no pictures of her with him, not one photo of Susan. And here he was, driving, moving toward a city he had always hated, moving toward a woman he now loved, and a child.

  On a damp Saturday afternoon, Nick and Leslie married. The ceremony was performed in a judge’s chambers, and the two of them stood very close together, fingers linked. The only other people there were Leslie’s parents. Leslie’s mother had a Brownie camera
strapped loosely about her neck. She sat because the arthritis in her legs bothered her. She leaned forward to snap a few pictures, then handed the camera over to her husband and wept quietly into her hands.

  Nick was astonishingly aware of Leslie beside him. He had thought the ceremony was going to be very casual; he had told Leslie he was going to wear his favorite black jacket and his black sneakers. When she was secretive about her own dress, he had simply assumed that she wanted to surprise him. And here she was, in glimmering blue satin, a formal wedding dress, beaded in a paler blue, covered in lace. He had never seen anything like that dress; he had never imagined Leslie so beautiful.

  She beamed and beamed when she saw the expression on his face. She told him the dress wasn’t just for him, but for herself, too. Some nights, while Nick slept, she had carefully gotten out of bed and padded to her sewing room. She had painstakingly beaded the satin, squinting as she grew more and more sleepy, half-certain she was ruining her sight and spoiling the dress. After a few more hours, she’d collapse back into bed, her head knotted. She woke with headaches so terrible she would have to bind ice chips into a scarf about her head, freezing the pain just enough so she could get back to work again.

  He couldn’t believe it when they were finally married. Leslie hadn’t wanted rings at first, insisting that they distracted from the natural beauty of the hand, but Nick had said that rings were important, a piece of jewelry like that carried magic.

  He insisted on a honeymoon, too, although Leslie said it wasn’t necessary, taking her up to a cabin someone at work loaned him. There wasn’t much to do—the air was too cold to swim in the lake, but they could walk, they could sit inside, and every time Nick felt her watching him, every time she told him she loved him, he felt as if he had somehow gained a reprieve.

  They moved back into Leslie’s home. Nick had wanted to find a new place, so they both could start out fresh, but although Leslie agreed, he had seen her face whenever he scanned the real-estate section, whenever he pointed out the places he circled in red. Every house they looked at had made her cramp up and get wary. She’d pace out the rooms, narrowing her eyes, squinting against the light she said was much too poor to sew in, running her fingers over the walls she claimed were already chinking off powdery plaster. She found flaw after flaw that no one but she seemed to notice. She said the places were too expensive, too charmless, too small, and in the end they just stopped looking.

  She told Nick it didn’t matter—they could redo the house, paint every room a new color for all she cared, get all new things. They went to a few stores, they sat in leather chairs and Haitian-cotton couches, and they even bought four gallons of blue paint. In the end, though, the paint was stacked in the basement, not one stick of furniture was ever bought, and the house was left the way it had always been, exactly the way Leslie loved it.

  It took some getting used to, living in Pittsburgh, actually having to be there day to day. It wasn’t where he wanted to be, but it was part of the territory his job gave him, and with a baby coming on, he couldn’t afford to quit. He kept sending feelers out about other jobs; he’d read the papers with the same restlessness he had once watched in his father. But nothing seemed to happen. He reminded himself the city was different, that he was different, too, and that his wife, his child, could make any city livable. Still, he couldn’t help feeling angry when the Sunday New York Times came out and he saw all the shows and films sprawled across the pages; he couldn’t help his claustrophobia when night came on and the streets emptied to a chilling quiet. He’d try to fill the space with the raw blast of the stereo, he’d go for walks with Leslie, talking loudly, stamping his feet, filling the city’s vacuum.

  The city seemed to suffer from an inferiority complex, too. Every once in a while, Nick would see glossy articles about transplanted New Yorkers or San Franciscans who thought there was just no place prettier than Pittsburgh. “They dragged me here kicking and screaming,” said one man—a plastic surgeon from Los Angeles. “Now they’d have to forklift me out of here.” Women from Boston claimed Pittsburgh had every bit as much fashion as their old city had. You could buy T-shirts or posters emblazoned with the city’s newest slogan, “New York might be the Big Apple, but Pittsburgh—what a plum!” Leslie thought he was being silly. “Come on, it’s not so bad,” she said. “Aren’t you happy?” And seeing her, he was.

  He liked living with her, waking up to find her beside him, coming home to her at night. But sharing the house still took some getting used to. He was always stepping on pins, pricking them into his feet. Needles caught in the nap of the rug, found their way into the cracks of the bathroom tiles. He checked his shoes before he put them on; he shook out all the sheets before he would sleep in them; and still he dreamed about rolling over onto a pin and blinding himself, about wolfing down morning eggs and puncturing his gut with a stray needle.

  Only sometimes did he feel himself unraveling. He’d be out on the street and a woman with short, pale hair would pass by and he’d root to the sidewalk, paralyzed, watching how easily she moved from him. He was even half-sure he saw Dore once or twice. He knew she wasn’t in Boston, at least not yet; but even so, when he had business there, he crammed his time with activity so he wouldn’t even think to find her. He took detours around their old routes.

  Whenever he came home from one of his business trips, he was newly determined to tell Leslie about Dore. There was nothing so terrible about his past, nothing to keep from anyone. But as soon as he opened his mouth, he felt a sudden new clip of pain, stopping his heart, his breath, his speech. Leslie remained clear, cool, undisturbed.

  Dore’s grip kept loosening, though, replaced by Leslie, her gold wedding band, the soft swell of her belly, and he felt as if this incredible miracle had happened to him without his even being aware of it happening. Leslie was so different from Dore. He could walk into the house and no matter what client was there, revolving slowly in a half-finished skirt, peering at some sketches, Leslie never shut him out. She winked at him, she removed pins from her mouth so she could introduce him to her client. She never waited for Nick to leave; instead, she pulled him into the gossip, made him laugh so hard he couldn’t ever imagine leaving her.

  Leslie had a special sewing room, but there were always design projects scattered about the house. She had a portable machine that she moved all over the house, sometimes sewing in the kitchen when it was sunny, sometimes in the living room when she felt like seeing who might walk by. Her own clothing was always indifferent, but his began changing. He’d pull out an old denim shirt and find it had a shimmery new row of mother-of-pearl buttons. Before the weather turned frosty, there was a new heavy wool coat hanging in the closet for him, a cashmere shirt.

  Leslie would watch him put her creations on. She couldn’t relax until she had seen him walk around; she said she could tell if he liked the clothes by the way he moved in them. Nick was astounded. He asked her how and when she had done such wizardry, but she just laughed, pleased.

  He hated traveling, hated leaving her. Sometimes it felt even worse than it had with Dore. He wanted Leslie to come with him, but she wouldn’t. She said she didn’t really like hotels; she liked staying home and sewing, dreaming about her husband. When he was at a hotel, he would miss her so much, his whole body would tighten up into his heart, moving in one single beat of desire. When he called her on the phone, she was delighted to hear his voice, yet pulled back to one of her designs, and it fueled his adoration, his need for her.

  She loved being pregnant. She wanted to make love. She wanted to admire her own Buddha belly as she stood naked in front of the mirror, and as she grew, he sometimes thought that she wasn’t just carrying a baby, she was carrying their whole life together, nurturing it, giving it life.

  Nick’s daughter was born during one of the worst rainstorms Pittsburgh had ever seen. Some of the streets were badly flooded, and Nick, not trusting himself to drive, hailed a cab to take Leslie and him to the hospital. He sat in bac
k with Leslie, who had her eyes squinched shut, her hands gripped about her belly.

  On the radio, the news talked disasters. The Vietnam war was escalating. Students were rioting at Columbia and Berkeley. A couple wading in a lake in the rain had been struck by lightning. One was instantly killed, the other hovered on the critical list. The station wouldn’t divulge any names until the parents had been notified. “Dumb shit kids,” the cabbie muttered. A cat had been found angrily swimming in the river. The announcer described the cat’s peculiar dime-size black markings, and gave a number you could call if you wanted to claim it. He said that everyone at the Animal Rescue League had just fallen head over heels with the cat, that they had named him “Rainy Day.”

  Nick, staring out the window, saw yellow slickers, umbrellas abandoned like bones along the roadway. Gliding sheets of water hit the windows and the cabdriver sped and cursed and slammed on the breaks.

  The baby was born in the hospital ten hours later. Leslie’s mother, when Nick called her, cried and told Nick that it was an excellent omen, being born in a storm, that it meant their daughter was a child of danger, that nothing could ever hurt her, because she was now protected. Nick felt a silly flush of relief. He went to tell Leslie, who laughed and said her mother was unduly superstitious. “When I was little, she wouldn’t let me stitch up a tear in her blouse if she was wearing it. She said the needle wouldn’t just be mending a blouse but stitching right through her brain.” Leslie smiled at him. She was pale and lovely in her bed, dressed in a favorite faded nightgown she had insisted on wearing. She had her hair loose and tangled about her. “Go and see your girl,” she told him, “and then get back here and be with your other one.”

  He saw the baby, one small red face among the others. He pressed his nose against the glass. The nurse held her up, and then abruptly he felt something snaking up along his spine, he saw the baby’s features shimmy, and for a second she looked like Susan. He bolted back from the glass, bumping into a nervous father, who apologized, as if it had been his fault and not Nick’s. Terrified, Nick moved back toward the glass, and when he dared to look at the baby again, she looked only like herself, only like his and Leslie’s baby. He motioned to the nurse that it was all right, that she could put the baby down, and then, without daring a second look, he started walking, up and down the floor. When he finally returned to Leslie, he sat on the edge of her bed, taking her hand.