Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  It cost her sometimes. Dore was so sympathetic, such a willing ear, it was sometimes tormenting to hold herself back, to have to skirt around the real pain instead of simply telling it in a great rush.

  Still, she couldn’t wait to talk to Dore. She rushed Leslie out to her night fittings, told her to stay as long as she wanted because she had a math exam and would be studying late.

  Robin pulled pieces of her father’s past from Dore, and when they cut her, when they made her feel ruined, she told Dore the pain was about something else. It was about Rick, it was about failing an exam in school, or sometimes it was just because her period was coming on and that was how she got. When Dore told her how long she had lived with Nick, how Nick had proposed marriage, Robin cried for ten minutes, and when she finally managed to get out a word, she blurted the most dramatic thing she could think of: She said she had tried to kill herself because she felt so alone. She remembered vague details about how you did such things—razors, pills; a girl at school had once become comatose because she had drunk quart after quart of vodka. Robin wouldn’t say how she did it, but she told Dore her father had made her go for counseling and her mother had hidden all the scissors in the house and kept the aspirin in her boots in the hall closet, the second place Robin had looked.

  She cried out her frustration and fear over the phone, and she let Dore comfort her. “You’re not alone,” Dore said. “I won’t let you be,” and then Robin cried some more. By the time she hung up, she felt parched, exhausted. She went to the sink and leaned into it, gulping water from the spigot. She got a Pepsi from the refrigerator and let the fizzy, silky flow of it burn her throat, cauterizing what tears she had left.

  When Leslie came home, her spirits high, Robin was as distant as if she had been on another planet. It was a state that occurred more and more. Sometimes Robin was red-eyed, stormily raging about the house, barricading herself in her room. Sometimes she was dreamy-eyed and still. Now, though, she was frozen, sleepwalking through the dark dining room toward her room, gently closing her door without even saying hello.

  It worried Leslie. She waited until she was sure Robin was in bed and sleeping before she began scavenging the house for clues to Robin’s sudden new shift in behavior. She saw makeshift Ricks hiding out in the bushes, saw Robin’s thumbs hitching a way to places where she might never be found. She looked behind the couch cushions for drugs, her fingers curling around stray pennies, pricking on a sewing needle. She sniffed the air for alcohol, for cigarettes that might belong to some boy she’d really rather not know. She stood in the center of every room and shut her eyes, trying to make her body into a kind of radar, trying to track whatever hidden signals might be around, but the only thing that happened was that she began noticing all the things that were wrong with such an old house—the funny way the boiler clicked on, the creak in the ceiling.

  She went to check on Robin, who was sleeping fitfully, tangled in the sheets, a faint patina of sweat across her forehead. Then Leslie went downstairs to call Nick, waking him, whispering about Robin as if Robin were a secret she couldn’t risk exposing.

  “Wait, I can’t hear you,” Nick said, sleepy.

  She spoke a little louder. She told him how Robin was sleeping, how she wandered the house. “Something’s very wrong,” she said.

  Now he heard her perfectly. He wanted to know if Robin had a fever, if she had eaten lunch, eaten dinner. The details somehow calmed her, made her feel that he had control of the situation. He said he was going to drive home right now; that it was just as well to go now rather than wait until morning when the traffic would be terrible.

  He got dressed. He woke the clerk downstairs so he could check out, and then he drove the six hours home.

  He found Leslie asleep on the couch, and he carried her upstairs to bed, he kissed her, and then he went into Robin’s room. All her covers were on the floor and she was curled up, shivering, mumbling something in her sleep. He knelt beside her, straining to hear what language she was speaking to him, what message. A snag of memory caught at him. In the home. Tony, the boy who slept next to him, a stocky, dark-haired boy who wet his bed every night, who woke shamed and miserable, bunching his wet sheets into a laundry bag, his wet pajamas, telling tales about spilling water in the bed, refusing to meet any pair of mocking eyes that might be affronting him.

  The home tried everything. They told him he wouldn’t be adopted, but that made Tony so nervous he began wetting his pants during the day. They made him go to counseling. They set alarms that were supposed to wake him up and remind him to go to the bathroom. They had him change his own linens in the dim hours before morning. Nick would wake up to the sounds of Tony’s bare feet padding and clicking on the linoleum; he’d open his eyes just enough to see the trail of sheet. But Tony ended up using too much linen, costing the home too much.

  Finally, one of the counselors came in to hypnotize him. He said you could do it while someone slept; you just watched for the REM sleep, when the eyelids started rolling, because that state was the same as a trance. Every night for two weeks, Nick heard someone whispering by Tony’s bed, the voice low and insistent, and then suddenly Tony didn’t wet the bed anymore. He got cocky and proud about it, and Nick could sleep through the night, riding on a crest of dream, escaping.

  He leaned closer to Robin, studying her restless lids. “Robin,” he whispered, and she stirred a little. “Lift one finger if you hear me,” he said. He held his breath, saw her turn, and in the shadows he told himself he saw her finger twitch. He leaned closer. “Listen now,” he said. “You’ll keep yourself safe, no matter what.” He watched her for a moment. “You hate black leather, you hate motorbikes and drugs.” He rubbed his eyes; he tried to catalog all the dangers, but they kept multiplying, crowding into view. “You hate wine,” he whispered. He slowly stood, his knees creaking. He moved back toward her for one moment, and then he whispered, “Sweet dreams,” as if that, too, were a kind of command for her to willingly follow.

  He was planning to watch her all the next day, studying her, but instead, he felt her gaze on him, long and hard and so insistent he had to get up and go into the backyard just to escape it. He tromped in the scrabby grass, waving aside the big black bumblebees that liked to hover around the bushes. He told himself he should get a badminton set, that maybe he could play it with her. Or croquet. He had clients whose kids loved croquet—but then again, what were they, kids of eight, twelve at most? Robin was a teenager, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He began taking her picture out of his wallet and holding it in his hand while he drove, sometimes talking to it as if she were right there beside him. He’d carry on whole conversations, taking her part as well as his own, until the constant pressure of his fingers started warping the picture, lining her face with years she hadn’t lived through yet.

  He hated it when she wore her hair a new way, butchering the front with bangs, straightening it once with Curl Gone. The Curl Gone made her hair so greasy, it took a week of nearly constant shampooing to get it back to normal. He hated it when she came home one day with a tiny fake diamond shimmering in one ear, an ear that two days later became so badly infected she needed two weeks of an expensive antibiotic. She admitted piercing the ear herself, using one of Leslie’s sewing needles that she had sterilized in the blue flame of the kitchen stove. She said it hadn’t hurt at all, that she had packed her ear in ice and held a potato against the earlobe so the needle would go through clean. She had been so proud of it all, so sure of herself, and it had made him furious. He wanted her in braids. He wanted to be a different father, flipping his baby up in the air on a bright sunny day.

  For the first time, when he was at Dore’s, Robin began itching her way across his mind. Dore was getting all these crazy phone calls from some girl named Amy, just another runaway who had shown up at her door. Dore always took the calls, she never said she had company, but he sometimes heard his name mentioned, so it didn’t bother him; it soothed him into t
hinking he was still first in her mind.

  When she finally hung up, usually after a half-hour, she didn’t apologize. Instead, she was thoughtful. She curled up around him on her old sofa and told him story after story about this girl, trying to make him see her. But every word out of her mouth was a magnet, pulling him toward his own daughter, making him want to get up and call her to make sure she was all right. He didn’t know how to sort things. He needed his family to be settled in Pittsburgh; he needed them to be his family. But here, now, right in front of him was Dore, unbuttoning his shirt, rubbing her nose against his chest, so that he forgot everything but the feel and smell and taste of her, the dizzying way she was stopping time, the sheer miracle of it.

  Lines kept blurring. At sales meetings, he began noticing that some of the men who had started out as salesmen with him were now working desk jobs—editing the books he was selling, designing the jackets, and managing production. He didn’t know them that well; he had never been to their homes, and had never thought to invite any of the other sales reps to his. But still he had small-talked with them, shared a beer after the meetings, and he had always felt they were somehow friends simply because they were all on the road.

  Now Henry Robson, who used to joke to Nick that the one territory he really wanted was Paris, France, told Nick he was in PR. It was less money, he told Nick, but it made up in time at home. He had just gotten married, he said, and he had a baby son, a rough-and-tumble kid named Mike, whom he couldn’t bear to be away from. “I’m home every goddamned night by six,” he said. “I get to feed him and burp him, and I even get time with my wife.” He shook his head at Nick; he wanted to know how Nick could still stand the road.

  “I like it,” Nick said.

  Henry just looked at him for a moment. “But you have a family, too,” he said, and then he mentioned an opening in production that Nick might be interested in.

  Nick began noticing, too, that the new salesmen were all so young, some of them fresh out of college. They worked out with weights and ran around to after-hours clubs in strange cities. He didn’t feel like talking to any of them; he didn’t feel any connection.

  He began to feel a little unsure. He doodled all the raises and bonuses he had been given in just one year; he wrote down all the buyers he knew who had been in the same stores since he first started selling. He began sitting through the sales meetings sunk against his chair. He stopped arguing about the books he didn’t think he could sell, telling himself he was a kind of company unto himself, that he’d promote or bury books the way he wanted. He kept a yellow legal pad by his side and sketched out his plans, private strategies that pleased him.

  Sometimes, watching Henry, he thought about what it would be like staying in one place all the time—coming home at six every night to a dinner cooking, to a table set with a white cloth, sterling at each place, maybe even a decanter of wine; being able to meet the woman he loved for lunch anytime he wanted, for sweet summer kisses, for the intoxications of afternoons in bed.

  He started feeling so uneasy, so out of breath, that he had to excuse himself from the room. His memories were a raw tangle. He couldn’t center on whom he really wanted to be with—wife and daughter, or Dore. And it was just the whole matter of staying in one place, the sheer, final terror of it, because when you chose to stand still, when you weren’t the one doing the leaving, then you were the one giving someone else that chance—you were the one risking being left.

  Dore found herself looking forward to Amy’s calls. Sometimes she wouldn’t go out at night until she was sure the phone wouldn’t ring. Other times, she’d find herself rushing home to be near the phone, leaving a movie before the closing credits started to roll, irritating just about everyone in the theater as she bumped her way over knees and legs. Amy was the first of her kids to keep reconnecting, to seem actually to like her after the first flush of need had faded. Amy wasn’t just telling Dore problems now; sometimes she talked about her life a little: how she loved to swim, and that the thing she liked best was diving, because it was dangerous—if you were a fraction off, you could break your neck, sprain your back, ruin yourself so you’d never in your life be able to do anything more strenuous than a dead man’s float. Amy had lists of dangers she was sure could never touch her, including some she had already thwarted: hitching; Rick. There was only one danger she wasn’t so sure of, and that was the one she refused to talk about.

  Her mood switched on and off like electric lights. She’d talk about herself, about school, and Dore could feel her loosening up, becoming almost fluid enough to float through the wires if she chose to. Then she’d tentatively start asking Dore things, hushing down into silence to listen, and when she spoke again, her voice was wire-tight; the distance between them seemed to have expanded.

  It was so odd to Dore. She had long ago stopped having any real confidants—not since Flora, really—and she liked being able to spill out as much of her life as she chose to Amy, but she learned to read Amy’s silences as if they were braille, to know when to stop. She figured that something in her life was touching on one of Amy’s wounds, that that was what was making her so silent, and that when Amy was finally willing to open up, the silences would stop.

  Dore missed Amy when she didn’t call. The girl touched her. All she had to do was say that she needed to talk to Dore, that Dore was important to her. Dore’s whole being hinged around that word—need. It would warm her, and when the feeling started to wane, there was the next call, come to refuel her.

  Amy’s need made it all right that Dore was alone in the purpled fluorescent light of the supermarket, tumbling frozen TV dinners into her cart because it was lonely preparing meals just for herself. Amy’s need made it all right for Dore to buy more paperback novels than she could read, rather than risk being alone in the house with just the TV for company.

  It even made it easier when she was at the Suds’n Duds, and there amid her lace panties and tank tops she found a pair of Nick’s jockey shorts, torn at the waistband, left in her tangle of clothing from the last time he had been with her. She had lifted the shorts to her cheek, not caring that the woman next to her was giving her a fishy stare, and at the moment when her desire turned to despair, she remembered Amy. She wanted to talk to her. She liked the feeling of being an authority on something, as if helping with someone else’s pain might heal her own.

  The connection with Amy made her want more connection with Nick. She had two people to miss now. She got tense; she brooded. Her dreams had Nick in them as well as Amy, and when she woke up alone in her bed, she felt there would never be enough to sustain her. When she saw Nick, all she could think about were the minutes, the seconds. She spaced his visits out by breakfasts and lunches. She glowered at his car as if it were her enemy, kicking the tires when she passed it. Sometimes it was hard to enjoy just being with him, because his impending departure kept crowding her pleasure.

  And lately, too, he was different about her, he was sad. He watched her, frowning, and then gave her a half-smile and blamed his mood on work. At night sometimes she woke to find him sitting up watching her sleep, but he’d never tell her why. “Oh, your mouth was wide open,” he teased. “I was watching the flies going in.” She socked him with a pillow. “It was not,” she said. Once, when she had a cold and had to sleep sitting up against a buttress of pillows instead of cradled in his arms, she woke up coughing and noticed him with surprise. He was sleeping on his back, his arms tenderly cradling his pillow as if it were her, held to his heart. She sat there, amazed, and told herself that a man who could miss her enough to fantasize her into a pillow just might be a man who could stay.

  It was Amy who made her gather the courage to confront him. Amy kept saying she didn’t feel love, she felt abandoned, and she didn’t know what to do about it. “Sometimes you have to ask for what you need,” Dore said.

  “And what if you still don’t get it,” Amy asked.

  Dore told her that you never knew if you didn’t try�
��and as soon as she said that, she felt her nerves exposed.

  She finally broached the subject to Nick one day when they were walking around Harvard Square, the two of them buying books and records. “We don’t have to live here,” she blurted out by the Harvard Coop. “We could move. I could teach anywhere. I could be a cashier in a supermarket. One of my students did it for a summer and ended up making more money per hour than I did.”

  Nick stopped walking and turned to her, his face miserable.

  “I hate these halfway measures,” she said.

  He fingered the ends of her hair. “They stink, don’t they,” he agreed.

  “You think that?” she said.

  “Of course I do. I miss you. I love you. I’m just not sure what to do about it right now.”

  “Marry me,” she said, and then burst into tears. A young mother with a baby passed by, her eyes averted. “I never wanted to marry you before, but now I do.”

  Nick put his arms about her and pressed her face along his shoulder where it fit. “Don’t you love me the way you used to?” she asked. “I was your first love.” She looked up at him; he looked like he was breaking apart. It made her words dry up inside of her. She placed her hands on either side of his face. “Is it no dice?” she asked.

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. He looked toward the glass windows of the market, out toward the darkening streets, and she suddenly wasn’t so sure she wanted to know what it was at all.

  It wasn’t a good three days. He just kept looking sadder and sadder; he seemed to be somehow contracting. She’d go out of the room for two minutes, and when she came back in, he looked caged. He was always at the windows, at the doors, always checking and re-checking the black itinerary notebook he carried, until she felt like ripping it from his hands and burning it.