Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  So she waited in the bar, sitting in a booth, snacking on stale goldfish crackers tumbled into a plastic bowl, sipping a weak bloody mary. Every once in a while, a man would approach her and offer to buy her a drink. She wouldn’t look up—she pretended she didn’t hear the soft invitations. Someone dipped toward her, and she sprang up, scattering the goldfish across the table, and there was Nick, uncertainly smiling.

  “Surprise,” she said weakly. If he asked what she was doing here, she would kill him. If he didn’t seem glad, she would go home and pack her bags and take Robin and go and live in the mountains someplace. They could live on Milky Ways.

  Instead, he gave her a real kiss and led her to the elevator, carrying her bag, and as they passed the desk clerk, Leslie turned and gave him a hard, deliberate stare.

  The room was small and done in faded blues. Nick made a big deal of showing her the small white refrigerator filled with soft drinks and beer, the soap and shampoo in the shower, the complimentary toothbrush wrapped in cellophane. And then he grabbed her and rolled her with him onto the clean bathroom floor, so if she looked up she could see the papered glass by the sink, the folded white towels he hadn’t used yet. He burrowed into her hair, started undoing her braid, and Leslie sighed, letting out all her fears in a rush of air.

  Nick woke in the middle of the night. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. The room seemed strange, dangerously unfamiliar. Leslie was curled on the far side of the bed. When he touched her, she moaned and curled up tighter. She made him think about Robin, made his mind drift into disasters. He felt like getting up and calling her, waking her at whatever friend’s she was camping out with, letting her voice soothe him.

  He got up and sat in the chair by the window. There were heavy blinds, but it didn’t matter. There was no view. He was glad to see Leslie. He loved her. But it was funny, too, how much simpler it was to love her at a distance, how much safer when he could imagine her invincible in his mind, when he didn’t have to see her shaken or stumbling. He got back into bed and wrapped his body about her as protectively as he could.

  It wasn’t much of a morning. Nick had too much to do, and it discomfited him having Leslie sitting there on the edge of the bed, watching him rush about, her serious black eyes unblinking. She had wanted to laze in bed with him that morning. When he bolted at the alarm, his appointments worrying in his mind, she had stiffened. Now she was silent—judgmental, he felt.

  He tried. He squired her to a soggy breakfast, but he had to stop her from ordering a second cup of coffee or he would be late. He dropped her off at a movie theater and then dashed for his first meeting. But he couldn’t concentrate. He kept seeing Leslie sitting in an empty theater, watching a bad movie. At every store he walked out of, he knew he had lost sales. By the time he was through for the day, he was irritated. She shouldn’t have come.

  They were both stony during the ride home. Leslie was annoyed that Nick wouldn’t stop for dinner, he was in such a hurry to pick up Robin. “She’s a big, capable girl,” Leslie said, but Nick was silent. They were halfway home when Leslie fell asleep, her eyes rolling into dream. It was tornado weather all over again, only this time she was the one down in the ditch, alone, calling for Nick, calling for Robin, and all around her there was only the sound of the wind, screaming its way toward her.

  Nick felt Leslie changing. When he looked at her, he remembered everything about her—the way she combed her hair with her fingers because it snagged on plastic combs; the way she would pull on one of his sweaters even if it didn’t match her skirt; the smell of her hair, her touch. When she moved, when she spoke to him now, she seemed somehow different. She didn’t ask to visit anymore. She didn’t call him several times a night at his hotel. Sometimes when he came home, he was surprised to find the house empty and a note tacked up for him—the phone number of a client she was visiting. His dinner would be a dish in the oven, a boiler bag in a pot on the stove.

  He missed her. He didn’t want her to get up mornings, but kept her in bed with him. He made love to her, lapping at her until she cried out, and then he kept her taste in his mouth as long as he could. But it was suddenly metallic and unfamiliar. It worried him so he would have to keep her in bed even longer; he wouldn’t let her get up to shower until she just kicked the covers back and pushed herself free.

  He wanted Leslie to last. She still hypnotized him. He remembered how her face used to fill his mind those last months with Dore, how he couldn’t bear to drive away from her. She was drifting and he didn’t know where she was headed, didn’t know how to bring her back to him.

  Sometimes he worried she’d leave the way Dore had. He could sit right beside her and suddenly he’d be missing her, as if she had left him already. He felt as if he were being slowly erased.

  And then, of course, there was Robin. She had turned thirteen when he was on the road; she was a teenager now, already whispering about boys. Kids that age ran off to New York City and lived on the streets until they were turned into hookers or found strangled in the seamy pit of the subway. Kids that age got themselves pregnant and had babies of their own to edge them into adulthood.

  He slunk about the house watching her. He went into her room when she wasn’t there, ignoring the KEEP OUT sign that drove Leslie mad. It was tattery on the edges from all the times Leslie had yanked it off. He found The Facts of Love and Life for Teens on her bureau, and leafed through it, trying to gauge which pages looked the most wilted, the most read. Married people had intercourse twice a week, it said. He snorted. That wasn’t very much, that was impoverished. There were all these line drawings in the book. Girls shaking their heads no so adamantly that there were wiggly lines emanating from their heads like halos. Flat-chested girls woefully staring at big bras in store windows. He put the book down and lay on Robin’s bed. He leaned against her headboard. If she had a diary, would he read it? He felt this sudden rapid clip of tension about what might be scrawled there. His fingers burrowed under the mattress, but he found nothing.

  She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was more than half a dozen times older than Susan had ever gotten to be, and still he felt that she might leave any minute, he was aware of the danger of getting too close. He watched her at dinner that night and suddenly saw how lovely she was becoming, with her flash of red hair, her serious deep eyes, and he thought how soon there would be boys coming around. He felt as though a milestone he hadn’t ever been looking for was somehow passing. She was at that age now where parents didn’t fit. He reached across the table to touch her, and ended up startling her so much that she toppled her glass of grape juice, pooling it across the table. She jerked up. “God, will you watch,” Leslie sniped, but it was at Robin and not at him.

  He began to look forward to the little things he could do that didn’t act as disturbances, that Robin sometimes didn’t even notice. If he was careful, he could kiss her hair as she brushed past him to get to school; he could stand at the window and watch her striding past the house, her long legs as coltish as Leslie’s, her hair nearly as wild. He looked in at her when she was sleeping, before she got up mornings, and he prowled through the photo albums until it began to chill him a little, seeing how she had managed to grow; how, so far, she had been safe.

  She was angry a lot now. When they all went to dinner and he took Leslie’s hand, she scowled and grumped, but when he tried to take hers, she pulled away. She told him she was no baby.

  “You’ll always be my baby,” Leslie said, and Robin frowned and walked ahead.

  “I can’t help it,” Leslie said to Nick. “She will.” But Nick, who considered babyhood the most dangerous of all possible states, felt soothed by Robin’s denial.

  NINE

  As they got older, things began changing between Mandy and Robin. In ninth grade, when they were both fourteen, Mandy suddenly began wearing makeup, layering on frosted blusher and green eyeshadow. She clipped her hair into elaborate styles and fooled with long, sparkling earrings that her mother was
always telling her were going to ruin her earlobes. She had a boyfriend who drove a yellow Camaro, who wanted everyone to call him Head. After the skis, Mandy claimed, and also because he had such a big head, made even larger by a bushy corona of hair. Sometimes, though, Mandy confided that the name was because of the things he did to her, the things he liked done to him.

  “I’m not calling him Head,” Robin said. But it didn’t really matter what she called him, because he ignored her. When she spoke to him, he looked at Mandy. When she touched his wrist to get his attention, he put his own hand on Mandy’s thigh. Robin went over to Mandy’s less and less. Jake was as friendly to Head as he was to her; Evie as mothering. Mandy wouldn’t make any plans with Robin until she had checked to see what Head wanted to do, and what Head wanted usually involved a dark place and something for two.

  Robin didn’t have any other close friends, and she didn’t like coming right home from school. Leslie trailed her, wanting her to go shopping, to come take a walk with her. She was always asking questions, always prying, and sometimes she would go into sudden heated rages, yelling at Robin about the dust under her bed, about the dental bill caused by all the candy wrappers she found in Robin’s pockets. When the phone rang and it was Nick, Leslie would grab the phone from her, curling her back, suddenly acting as if there were no one else around.

  There’s no place on earth for me, Robin thought. She was always trying to escape from Leslie’s smothering attention, always trying to make her father like her. She didn’t know what it was she had done, but she knew she must have done something to make him so distant. He had stopped telling her stories, making her tapes, a long time ago, and when she tried to play the tapes now, it just ended up making her feel blue. Sometimes at night, when he was sitting outside, looking at the sky, she’d feel a little lonely and go out and sit beside him. His whole body seemed to tense up. He made small talk with her for a while, and then kissed her cheek and went back inside, and it all made her feel more alone than she had felt before she came out to be with him.

  Whom could she live with? She had no relatives except an arthritic grandmother and a grandfather, who lived out in the desert, called twice a year, and never could manage to visit. They were very old now. Robin knew Leslie worried about her parents because when they died, she’d be as orphaned as Nick was. Robin didn’t know them that well, although she did remember a few visits when she was younger. She remembered her grandmother carefully telling her the whole story of her birth, reminding her that she was protected, a child of danger.

  Robin had once asked Leslie about it, and Leslie had told her she was much too smart a girl to believe in any superstition like that. But Robin did anyway—it comforted her. She tried to strengthen what power she was supposed to have. She made herself a beaded leather bracelet and blessed it herself so it might act as an amulet, a reminder that she was special. She told herself that if her life was different from anyone else’s, if it was more lonely, then maybe it was supposed to be; maybe it was just part of the price you had to pay for being really unique.

  She didn’t make any new girlfriends, but suddenly, there were boys. She was attracted to the ones who didn’t fit in, the wilder boys who wore black leather jackets even when it was ninety degrees outside, the boys who didn’t even go to the regular high school but attended the vocational school just in back. Everyone said it was because they were too stupid to make it in regular school, that they were all outcasts who couldn’t even cut it in the remedial program.

  Robin didn’t think that. She was curious about them. They learned trades: They could take apart a car and put it back together so it ran as good as new; they could wire a whole house if they liked. She felt drawn to these outcasts; she liked the way they carried their label defiantly, proud. There were only a few girls in the program, but there were stories about them, too. They carried nail files to fight with, or orange sticks that they rubbed against the sidewalk into points. The boys didn’t have to carry anything at all.

  Robin, protected, walked past the vocational school every day on her way to class. The weather was warm now, and the mechanic students were working on a car outside. Her coltish legs shone under her short skirt, her red hair caught and tumbled the light. Some mornings she felt bold. She’d go right up to a boy she thought looked interesting and start talking to him. She’d ask him about the car, about what he was doing. She even leaned under the hood to look. The boy was always so startled that a girl from the regular school would talk to him with something other than disdain that he almost always fell in love.

  She saw the vocational boys after school—for walks, for a Coke and a piece of pie at Jerry’s Sweet Shop. At first there was no one special. She saw two different boys in one week, or sometimes one particular boy for a week straight until someone else caught her eye. She wrote name after name in her books, and some in the palm of her hand so she could close her fingers around them and keep them hidden. She never slept with any of the boys, although she was certainly pressured, and although almost all the kids assumed that she did. Mandy, passing her in the hall one day, stopped her and told her that she was getting herself good and talked about, and that Head had even stood up for her.

  “You can’t just hang all over guys,” Mandy said. “You got to be a little cool about it.”

  “What do you know?” Robin said. She didn’t tell Mandy that the reason she hung on to the boys so much was because she was sure if she didn’t, they would float away from her; that having boy after boy lessened the chance that she’d be alone.

  The boys left her, of course. They were always leaving her, just when she’d convinced herself she loved them. When they started getting twitchy, turning back to the girls they knew would part their legs for them, Robin concentrated her energies. She wrote desperate prayers into a journal to her grandmother, to the guardian angel she was sure she had. Please, please, let Ron come see me at lunch and apologize. Please, please, let Timmy smile. And when a boy did what she had prayed, she felt protected again, she felt strong.

  Robin never told Leslie about her boys. She was the one to call them, keeping her conversations clean of names or details. She was the one to go to their houses, their meeting spots. And then, there was one boy who stuck around longer than the rest, one boy Robin really, really liked, and for him, she opened her life up a little—she took him to her home.

  His name was Rick. He was sixteen, with dirty-blond hair, one side shaved close against his skull. He wore battered brown work shoes with steel toes he claimed were for fighting and not for protection like the auto-body manual said. He had a reputation. The other kids stayed clear of him. He was said to have put his own father in the hospital because he had caught him beating up his mother one day. He was said to have been suspended from the regular high school for slicing up a student who had pulled a gun on him. But he didn’t seem dangerous to Robin. If he fought, he fought for principles, it seemed to her. Every time she saw him, he was quietly tinkering with a car in the parking lot. He would look up and see her, give her a dazed, sleepy smile. He talked to her more and more. He began walking her to class, walking her home, talking to her about small engines, about spark plugs and motorbikes.

  He was protective about her. He didn’t seem to mind that she wouldn’t sleep with him, and he never pretended that she did, not even to the other vokies who had gone out with her, the ones who had never managed to even unbutton her blouse. He told Robin she was a refreshing change from the girls he was used to, that it underlined how different she was from everyone. “Yeah, different,” Robin said. He held her hands; he told her he’d wait for her to make whatever moves she wanted. “You’re a loner, just like me. You make your own rules,” he said.

  He talked to her about cars. He told her he could match up any person in the world with a car.

  “What matches me?” Robin asked.

  He squinted over at her. “Oh, a nice little VW, something compact that whips around, that lets you know you’re never in control.
” Robin smiled; she pulled on his hand.

  He was sensitive about not being smart enough for her. He saw all the books she stashed in her purse, saw that she was always reading when he came to pick her up at the drugstore after school. She read in the coffee shop when he went to the can. She read walking down the street, for Christ’s sake, dodging people, so skilled she didn’t even have to lift her nose up. He brought her paperback editions of Kafka stories he had underlined and made comments in. Most of the comments he lifted from the Cliffs Notes he bought for himself. He memorized bits so he could say something intelligent to her, and when he couldn’t remember, he lied. He told her that Faulkner had loved cars and was almost a mechanic. He told her that Fitzgerald rode a Harley. He was very polite with her, very solicitous.

  Robin adored him. She never told him, but she really couldn’t have cared less whether he read anything at all. She didn’t care if he knew the difference between Kafka and comics. When he talked that way, she just let her attention glaze over; she concentrated on the shape of his hand, the bark of his neck. She liked it best when he talked about the two of them together—about the body shop they could run, the house they could live in, filled with dogs and cats and music. And she loved it best when he was just staring at her as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune, as if he would never leave her, no matter what she did, no matter how she was. “Say it,” she commanded. “Tell me again.” She swooned on his words. He loves me, she thought.

  The first time Leslie saw Rick, he was coming up the walk holding her baby’s hand and blowing smoke rings. She stopped sewing and strode out onto the front walk, her hair unraveling from its topknot, her blue dress streaky with tailor’s chalk. He dropped Robin’s hand, but he didn’t put out the cigarette; he kept insolently drawing on it, and he let his eyes slide over Leslie. Leslie noticed the tight fit of his jeans, the shirt he had half unbuttoned, the threatening stance of his boots. Rick kept one hand in his pocket, but he answered Leslie’s questions so politely, he almost made her like him a little. But then, he started talking about the vocational school, and when it was time to go, he just jerked Robin to him, tumbling her off-balance, kissing her as if he didn’t even see Leslie standing in the sun. When he strode off, he was humming something low and dangerous in his throat.