Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  Leslie seesawed between anger and relief. One minute she was telling Robin to go get into a hot bath, that she would bring her in hot cider, some aspirin; the next moment Leslie was grounding her for three weeks, shouting question after question about where Robin had been.

  “I called every name I could remember, every name I could find in your room. I woke people up,” Leslie said. “I was so nervous, I called the same names twice, three times—what did I care when people threatened me?” She brushed her hair from one shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said. “I kept seeing you—I kept trying to feel you in my gut, to sense where you were, how you were, and all I felt was how very lost you were to me, and how terrified I was.” She sat down. “Where were you?” she whispered.

  Robin looked at her lap. She hated her mother, she loved her. “Philadelphia,” Robin said.

  “Philadelphia?”

  Robin didn’t even realize she was crying until she felt Leslie’s body cushioned around her, rocking her, telling her that whatever it was, it was going to be all right, that she shouldn’t be afraid to talk. The more she said that, the more hysterical Robin felt. Leslie smoothed Robin’s hair. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. “You get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning we’ll talk.”

  Sunday morning, at the kitchen table, picking at the eggs Leslie had fixed for her, Robin made something up. She said she had impulsively bought a train ticket to Philadelphia to see a friend who had moved there. She had used the money she was saving for a leather jacket. She hadn’t called because she thought she’d be back in time, and when she missed her train, she was afraid. That was why she had been crying, why she had been so wired.

  Leslie, sipping coffee, shook her head. “How could you be so irresponsible? How could you do something so cruel? I was scared.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Robin said.

  Leslie looked angrily over at her. “You could be ninety and it still wouldn’t matter to me, I’d still be terrified and worried if you just up and left without even thinking enough of me to let me know.” She pushed at her coffee cup. “You’re so damned independent.”

  “I’m sorry,” Robin said, but Leslie was getting up, clearing dishes, telling Robin she was grounded for a month. She turned toward her. “Go on,” she said, “finish up those eggs.”

  All that day, Robin felt wounded. She carried Dore’s phone number in her jeans pocket, pulling it out to look at it, stuffing it back into her pocket, unable to just tear it up. Sometimes she told herself it was a mistake. She didn’t have the facts. Dore could have been lying. She might barely know Nick.

  She wandered into Leslie’s workroom and interrupted her to ask if Nick had ever lived in a trailer. Leslie burst into laughter. “A trailer?” she said, tickled. “Does your father look like the type to live in a trailer?” She couldn’t get over it. She wanted to know where Robin had gotten such a wild thought.

  “Oh, it was just something I was reading,” Robin said, leaving the room.

  She began watching Leslie with a new, critical eye. Leslie didn’t brush her hair very often, and she sometimes wore blouses without buttons, even though she fussed at Robin’s skewed hems. She wore stained, oversize T-shirts of Nick’s to work, and heavy flannel gowns to bed. She almost never wore makeup, and when she did, it smeared because she kept rubbing and stroking it off while she sewed.

  When the phone rang that night, Robin didn’t rush to pick it up. Leslie grabbed it, and Robin saw how her mother’s whole face changed, how she said Nick’s name, curling up around the phone as if it were a lover.

  Robin kept thinking that nothing her father ever did had anything to do with her—that was the problem. She was in bed when he finally got home, and she sat up, listening. She could smell the perfume Leslie had put on, she could hear Leslie’s low laughter, but Nick’s voice was low and serious—she couldn’t make it out even though she got up and pressed her face against her door. “Oh, Lord,” Leslie said. “Who do you think you are, making me miss you like this?”

  Robin felt her heart hardening up inside of her, making her rigid. She wanted to walk right out into the living room in her T-shirt and socks and accuse him. She wanted to shout at her mother for not being prettier, for not being somehow better. She lay back in bed in a fever of reverie. She saw herself confronting Nick, shouting accusations, but then, suddenly, she saw Nick moving, on his own, uncontrolled by her imagination. She saw his face fading of feeling. She saw him neither denying nor affirming one single thing she said, only picking up the same two black leather bags he had brought into the house and taking them right outside again. “If you don’t trust me, if that’s the way you feel…” he said. She saw Leslie moving toward Nick, noticing her only enough to flash her a warning look of hatred. The car hadn’t even had time to cool yet; the motor was ready to go, ready to take him back to Dore, back to anyplace that held no room for her.

  Robin pulled the sheet slowly up over her head. She prayed. Not to her old guardian angels, not to Nick, but to Dore this time. She concentrated on Dore’s face, her hair, the feel of her skin where Robin had touched her. Promise me, Robin transmitted, promise you won’t take him totally, that you’ll leave something for here. Promise it. Promise.

  In the morning, Leslie had to wake her. Leslie’s hair was clean, brushed down her back. She had on a red dress and blue clip-on earrings and she looked happy. “Sleepy jean,” she said. “Let’s go.” She waited for Robin to rouse herself, then told her she hadn’t said a word to Nick about the incident. She thought the whole matter was something the two of them could handle between themselves. “Like a conspiracy,” she said. “Now scoot downstairs and say hello to your father.”

  Robin threw on a black corduroy dress, black tights and sneakers, and sprinted out the back door, combing her hair with her fingers, stopping only when the knots were too fierce for her. She turned only so that she could see Nick was actually there, before her head started hurting, and she blurted out that she was late, that if she mad-dashed it, she could catch the bus.

  “I’ll drive you,” Nick said, but she was gone.

  She avoided him as best she could, coming home right after school, barricading herself in her room with sandwiches and cookies, the warm, flat fizz of the canned Cokes she kept on her windowsill. She said she didn’t feel well; she said she had to study. When she could, she stayed at the “Y,” diving, trying riskier and riskier moves, staying submerged so long that the lifeguard came and poked the rescue pole down at her. She was lectured on safety, she was warned, but it only made her more reckless.

  When she heard Nick approach at night, she bunched over her desk, feigning sleep. He came in and gently lifted her from her chair, placed her on the bed, and pulled a light cover over her. She was so startled she couldn’t breathe right. She lay paralyzed, waiting for him to go, but he just stayed there; she felt him so close she could have moved a half-inch and touched him with her shoulder. Go, leave, she willed, but when he finally did get up, when she heard his sigh, she felt like crying out for him to return.

  Mornings, she got up an hour early. She never ate breakfast at home anymore, but stopped at a coffee shop a block away from school. She nursed tinny-tasting cocoa that came from a machine; she picked at greasy cheese Danish and talked to the waitress, the only other person there.

  She didn’t know how she felt when she came out of school one day to find Nick waiting for her, leaning against the car. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, “long time no see.” He was in a leather jacket and jeans. He wanted to know if he was embarrassing her, coming to school like this. He said he knew how kids felt about their parents when they got to be her age, but he figured this was the only way he was sure to see her.

  He made her buckle her seat belt so she felt imprisoned, and then he drove a little; he said he wanted to talk to her.

  “About what,” she asked. She looked out at the street, unsnap-ping her buckle.

  “Hey, hook that up,” he said. “A vacation,” he told her. �
�I thought we could go to a travel agency. It used to be my favorite thing in the world to do.”

  “I’m too old for a family vacation,” Robin said.

  “Too old for Hawaii?”

  “How about Boston?” she said abruptly.

  He turned right. “Too touristy this time of year. And anyway, that’s no vacation for me. I go there all the time.”

  She didn’t want the ice cream. She didn’t want to get out at the travel agency. He pulled out folders to show her, but she just shrugged uneasily at them. He had fliers for Paris, for Egypt, for places so far away that no one could ever reach you; and finally, taking a bunch of them, he said they could go.

  He waited until they were back in the car before he suddenly turned to her and asked her what was wrong. When she just shrugged, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. “You don’t like me much lately, do you?” he asked.

  She looked out the window, her eyes steely.

  “Am I wrong?” he asked.

  “Do you love mom?” she asked.

  He was startled. “Why would you even think to ask something like that? Don’t you think I do?”

  She was so silent that when he sighed, she thought for a moment the sigh came from her. “Do you think I like to leave?” he asked. “Don’t you think it’s hard? Don’t you think it’s lonely?” He pulled out his wallet and showed her the plastic folders filled with her face and Leslie’s. He pulled down the visor on the front window and showed her another picture of herself clipped up there.

  He was buckling up his own face; she was afraid to ask him what he was thinking, afraid to say anything that might put her fear out into the open. You could give flesh and blood and bone to any thought just by giving it a voice; you could make all the dangers you ever worried about take on a life so strong you could never snuff it out. She swallowed.

  “I’m just tired,” she said. “School.”

  “Robin, listen to me—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said. “Really. I feel much better.”

  He looked at her doubtfully, then drove her home, the two of them in silence, and he didn’t show up at her school again. He seemed to be waiting for something from her. He’d walk over to her when she was reading in the living room; he’d stand in her light until she looked up at him.

  “So, what are you reading?” he asked. She told him, but he never seemed to be really listening; he seemed to be just looking at her, just taking her in.

  He began leaving her alone again, although he still talked about family vacations. She found travel brochures scattered all over the house. Bright foldouts of Spanish beaches on top of the kitchen counter, pamphlets about Aruba by the shower. She heard Leslie proposing Florida one evening, telling him about a trip she had taken with her parents when she was just five, down for some tennis matches her mother had easily won, her father sweeping in second in the men’s division. She said she remembered how yellow the sun was, she remembered the crocodiles that were teased for all the tourists. In the end, though, no plans were ever made about anything, and everything, for Robin, just seemed to be dangerously adrift.

  TWELVE

  Robin began calling Dore after Nick left on his next business trip. He was going to Philadelphia. For a moment, watching him pack, Robin had this crazy fear that maybe there was another Dore waiting for him there; that maybe every place he had ever set foot in bred women who loved him with an ignorance so wild it frightened her.

  “Let me come with you,” she blurted, but he just shook his head. He said she’d be bored cooped up in the hotel, and anyway, she had midterms coming up, didn’t she?

  “I didn’t say that,” she said.

  “Well, I saw the books,” he said, folding a shirt. “I saw the exam schedule on top.”

  She was startled, uneasy. She walked to the car with him, following Leslie, who had draped her arm about his shoulders. Leslie held him for a bit, and then stepped away. “You rat, leaving when the weather’s this nice,” she said, managing a smile.

  Robin didn’t hug Nick goodbye. She stood there, aloof, watching him get into the car, and when Leslie turned, squaring her shoulders, striding back toward the house, Robin stayed out on the sidewalk, looking at the place where Nick had been just minutes before.

  With Nick gone, the house emptied out. Leslie had started working every night now, designing dresses for a woman named Emma Sandstrom, who lived just a block away. Emma had a baby that she kept in a playpen in the center of the room, and almost immediately, the baby fell in love with Leslie. He brightened every time she came near him, his serious gray eyes following her as she fit fabric about Emma, as she reached for the new sketches of her design. When Leslie was finished for the evening, the two women would sit and talk over tea and coffee cake, and Leslie would linger because she liked the companionship.

  Robin wandered alone in the house. She wanted Leslie to know about Dore, but she didn’t want to tell her. She wanted to confront Nick, but she was terrified. Instead, she left what clues she could: postcards of trailers; magazine articles about marriages being saved or not because of infidelity; once, a whole clipping about a woman who raised pigs, an article Robin had torn out only because the woman’s name was Dore. She left everything scattered across the dining-room table. She told herself it was in fate’s hands, that she couldn’t be responsible. She was young, she wasn’t supposed to be shouldering pain like this.

  Leslie came home humming, Emma’s conversation still in her mind, feeling less alone. She passed through the dining room and, sniping at the mess Robin always left, gathered up the postcards and the clippings, the torn snippets of newsprint Robin had laid out for her. Sometimes she just put them in another place; sometimes she tossed them out. If she looked at any of them, she never told Robin.

  Robin was so lonely, just sitting in the house, with her father gone, her mother down the block half the time, not able to voice anything to anybody. She had the phone next to her, her hand poised on the receiver, and she was thinking about Dore, about how easily she had let her in, how she had held her. “You call anytime,” Dore had said. The call would show up on the phone bill, but Nick never even looked at the bills except to pay them, and Leslie, too, was careless. It would only be one number, one call. Robin counted to a hundred, and then slowly, slowly, she lifted the receiver, she dialed.

  “Dore,” she said. “This is Amy. You remember. I knocked on your door that day. I never even told you my name.”

  The first time, she was on the phone with Dore for a little over an hour. She didn’t know what it was she wanted, only that she couldn’t seem to hang up; she didn’t want to close down Dore’s voice and be left floundering in the wary quiet of the house. She didn’t lie. Not exactly. She told Dore she lived in Pennsylvania. She said she had run away because she had a father who was always away, a mother who was always there. She told Dore she had gotten her name from a friend who had lived in Boston for a while and then moved to California. She gave a description of this friend that could fit anyone—dark eyes, long brown hair—and a name common enough to forget: Mary Stone.

  That first call, Dore didn’t give any advice. But she listened, she was a presence humming over the wires. Robin wanted to ask Dore everything; she wanted to know everything about her life, and she wanted to know nothing, and she wasn’t at all sure what she wanted to reveal herself. There was a whole series of terrifying i/s, and she hedged around them.

  She asked Dore if she was happy, if she liked her life.

  “Oh, sometimes,” Dore said. “You know. I get lonely like everyone else.”

  “But you have someone,” Robin said.

  “Sometimes,” Dore said. She was silent for a moment, and then she told Robin not to mind her, that she was just having a funny day and that was all.

  Robin made up things just to stay on the phone. She talked about Rick, transforming who he was. The new Rick was in a rock band. He still adored her, even after the cruel way she had spurn
ed him. He had written a song about her, “Birdie,” after her name, Robin. “Isn’t that something, having a song written about you?” Robin said. “He’s gone now, though.”

  “Sometimes they come back,” Dore said. “And you wait, I’ll bet if he does, you’ll appreciate him that much more for his absence.” She mentioned the man she was seeing—Nick, she said his name, and hearing it made Robin twitch back from the phone. Dore said he had once been so close to her, he was just about the same as her husband.

  “He was?” Robin said, chilled. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. Things.” There was silence again, and then she asked, her voice brightening, “Just who is trying to help whom here?”

  Robin began calling Dore more and more. She tried not to. She reminded herself that one lone call in a phone bill was one thing, a slew was another. She tried saving her allowance for pay phone calls, but there was no privacy, she couldn’t cry when she was so exposed, she couldn’t say how she felt; and worse, there were always people waiting to use the phone, tapping their feet and staring at her. She told herself she wasn’t going to call anymore, she wasn’t, but then she’d be so alone in the empty house, she’d feel her sorrow starting to surround her, and then her need to talk to Dore would be so strong it would blot out every other consideration, and she’d pick up the phone.

  Dore asked her once how she could afford the calls. Did she want Dore to call her back? Did she want to call collect? “I work, I have money,” Dore said.

  But Robin was wary. She didn’t know why, but it was somehow safer for Dore’s number to be floating around in her family’s bill than for her own to be on Dore’s. She sometimes imagined that the growing bond between herself and Dore couldn’t help but loosen the bond between Dore and her father eventually, but it was a scheme that would work only if Dore didn’t know who Robin was.