Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  He told her he loved her, said he just wanted more time being with her before they really thought about marriage, but she saw how sorrowful his face was, and she waited for the old signs of departure to show up. Always, when it grew time for him to leave, he’d start folding himself up as neatly as a suitcase; he’d start pulling away so that by the time he got into his car, it was as if he were already gone from her, as distant as a star she’d wish upon.

  But when he left this time, things were different. She asked him to drive her to the Star Market at the far end of town, a store so dirty she was sure the food was diseased. She said she needed a special brand only they stocked, but really she didn’t need a thing; she just wanted to ride with him, to see what the road might feel like as he was leaving her.

  He seemed happy that she was coming, and said he’d bring her back home, but she told him she was going to walk over to the library from the store; she wasn’t buying anything perishable and she could easily get a cab. “Come on, that’s so dopey,” he said, but she was so adamant, he finally just gave in.

  He made a show of carrying her from her door to his car, almost as if she were a bride, and he had her scrunch in close to him so he could buckle the two of them up in his seat belt. He kept touching her, he told her he missed her already, but he drove fast, leaning toward the wheel.

  In the parking lot, where all the young mothers were pushing food carts and baby strollers, Nick kissed Dore. He gave her cab money. “Are you sure you don’t want me to wait?” he asked. “I have time. I just hate leaving you here.”

  She shook her head. She reminded him what a pain he was to shop for, how he was always buying things that ended up uneaten in the back of her shelf.

  “Pickled plums,” Nick said. “Get some goat cheese, too, and we can feast when I get back.”

  “It’ll spoil,” Dore said. “Your best bet is to stay.”

  He touched her knee, then unbuckled the belt and got out of the car with her, and there, where everyone could see, he held her and kissed her and stroked her hair back from her brow. She pushed her bangs back down, feeling too exposed, too vulnerable. She took off her glasses, rubbing her eyes. “Now I see you, now I don’t,” she said.

  He wouldn’t get back in the car until she had gone inside the market, and even then, through the dirty glass, she could see him leaning against the front of the car, watching her. He lifted one hand in a lonely little wave.

  She wandered down one aisle, stepping over crumpled store coupons, ignoring the bags of cookies that had already been torn open and raided. She kept her jacket close around her, her hands drawn in so they wouldn’t touch anything, and by the time she came back to the front of the market, Nick’s car was gone. She stood perfectly still until a woman banged her cart against her. “Some people would like to get by,” the woman said, maneuvering. Dore blinked at her, and then she turned and walked outside to the pay phone to call herself a cab back home.

  She ate cookies for dinner, polished off a whole bottle of cheap burgundy by herself, and then curled up in bed, bunched about Nick’s pillow so she wouldn’t feel so abandoned. She should have told him to go fuck himself, to leave her alone. She should call him and plead with him to find another trailer they could move into and be happy. She lay there, waiting for something to go right, drifting, drunk, and when the phone rang, she knocked it to the floor. “Yeah,” she said, plucking up the receiver, trying to sound tough.

  “Dore? Dore?”

  She sat up in bed. “Amy,” she said. “I’m glad you called. Oh, God, I’m glad!”

  “You are?” Amy paused. “You sound funny.”

  “I’m not funny, I’m fine,” said Dore, and then she burst into tears. “You think only you have pain?” she cried. “You think just because I’m not fourteen anymore I know how to work out my life? Don’t you think I wish I had someone I could call up any time I bloody well pleased?”

  There was an edgy silence on the other end of the line.

  “You can’t take it? Fine. Then hang up, why don’t you?” Dore swiped at her runny nose with one hand. “I listen to you,” she said. She pressed the receiver between shoulder and ear and shucked off her shirt, blowing her nose into it. The room swam in front of her.

  “I’m here,” Amy said, faltering.

  Dore sighed. She felt suddenly scared, as if she were emptying out. “Nick just left,” she said. “I want to get married.”

  Amy’s voice started to change. It got higher, smaller; it tightened. “You’re getting married? You’re marrying him? You can’t do that, you can’t—”

  “I didn’t say I was—” Dore started, but Amy was getting more and more agitated, telling Dore she couldn’t do that to her, not in a million years, that this wasn’t supposed to happen, not when she trusted her. “Wait,” Dore broke in. She said it was all right, that a marriage didn’t have to change a friendship. “Is that the problem?” Dore said. “Well, now you’ll have two people to visit instead of just one.” She felt like she was separating out, listening to another Dore talking about another life, a life that now seemed to have nothing to do with her. And then she realized what a fool she was, talking like she was going to get married, like she was married already, and she started crying again. Her tears silenced Amy. She was so drunk she couldn’t think what she was saying, her words kept spilling out.

  For the first time, she began telling Amy about Susan, about how she hadn’t been such a hot mother, how she had loved Nick more than she had ever loved her daughter, and sometimes even thought she had become pregnant just to please him, because the whole idea of family was so damned important to him. It wasn’t enough for him to have just her; if it had been, they could have made it after Susan died, they could have made it after anything.

  “I helped you, though, didn’t I?” Dore demanded. “That money I gave you when you were here, I bet it helped, didn’t it? I would have put you up here as long as you liked. And all our talks over the phone—the way we’re talking now.” She pushed back her bangs, feeling an undercurrent—Nick’s fingers in the same motion, out in the supermarket parking lot—and it made her whole body weaken. She sat up. “If I were your mother, I bet you never would have run away from home. I bet we would have always been close. We could have been real friends. Not just biology, not just relations.”

  “You had a baby,” Amy said, her voice dazed, drifting.

  “Had,” Dore said.

  “I have to get off the phone,” Amy said quietly and then she hung up, leaving Dore only the surprising shock of silence, the dizzying, drunken curl of her thoughts. She settled herself down under the covers, around what she thought was Nick’s pillow, and then, just as surely as she was missing Nick, she was missing Amy. She wanted the two of them to be missing her, too, noticing all that new and sudden need as though it were some marvelous hothouse flower that had just burst into bloom, miraculous and lovely, and fragile enough to remind them to take care.

  THIRTEEN

  Nick didn’t want to choose. He had his life mapped out by the women in it, each one somehow placing him in time, bridging his way from one to the other. With Dore, he was in his past again, when everything was possible. With Leslie, he didn’t have to worry about any possibilities, because things already were—he had his family, he had stability, he had a daughter who connected him to life. How could he give anything up? How could anyone?

  He thought about marrying Dore, thought about her face, so soft and sleepy when she woke up in the morning, nuzzling against him; he thought how she ate her lunch, how she combed her hair with her fingers, and he yearned to be with her again, he did. But then he’d get home, and there would be Leslie with her hair fanned out around her, in one of his old shirts and her jeans, opening up to him for a moment before she slowly closed shut again, making him miss her as surely as he missed Dore. And there would be Robin, his own features subtly altered in her face. Her hair snapped and curled the way his did, but hers was fireworked with golds and reds. He saw he
r mirroring his walk, frowning and biting down on her bottom lip when she read, the same way he did, and it moved him so much it was all he could do to watch her in a kind of dumb wonder, a gratitude, as if she herself had chosen his characteristics as an act of love.

  This time at home Robin trailed him. She wanted to go with him to the market for juice, she wanted to help bring up the lawn sprinkler from the basement, and he kept feeling her eyes on him, although she wouldn’t look at him directly. He found her in his bedroom one evening, going through his things—his suitcase, his top drawer, the pockets of his suits, her face dark. “Hey—” he said.

  “I needed some change,” she said, flustered. “Do you have quarters?” She looked at the floor. “I needed change,” she said again.

  “Tens or twenties,” he said, but she didn’t make a funny face at him, didn’t roll her eyes; she simply took the two dollars in quarters he managed to find, and then half an hour later, as he was walking by the den, he saw her foraging in his desk. As soon as she spotted him, she left, mumbling some excuse about needing a pen with black ink, not waiting for him to try to find one. He opened the drawers and tried to figure out what it was she had been looking for, or what it was she had found.

  It wasn’t just him, though. At dinner she stared at Leslie. “Is something wrong?” Leslie asked. “Are my jeans on backward?”

  Robin had come to the table with pink lids and red lipstick, with lashes so mascaraed they looked black-and-blue. “This color would look good on you,” she told Leslie, touching her eyelids. She had a tiny gold lipstick case in her hand; she showed it to Leslie.

  “Not at the table, please,” Leslie said, but she still twirled the color up and then twirled it back down again. “Oh, I’m not the makeup type,” Leslie said.

  “Sure you are,” Robin said. “I could show you. She’d look just beautiful, wouldn’t she?” She looked right at Nick.

  “She looks beautiful now,” Nick said, and Leslie turned to him, pleased and suddenly shy.

  But Robin didn’t let up. She went shopping and came home with a silky blue shirt for Leslie that she claimed was a belated birthday present. She brought back perfume samples in little glass vials she jammed in her pockets and rolled across Leslie’s bureau for her to find. At night she went out to the library so Leslie and Nick could have the whole house alone; and when she came home, if they weren’t in the same room—if Nick was reading in the kitchen while Leslie sewed upstairs—it made her crazy. She’d orchestrate things so they were all in the same room. She said there was a wonderful movie on TV; she made too much popcorn and needed help eating it. And then she stopped, watching the two of them until Leslie’s hands would flutter automatically to her hair, her face, to wherever she assumed Robin was judging her, and Robin would avert her eyes.

  She didn’t really talk to Nick until the next week, when he was leaving for New York, and then she simply stood in front of him and asked him not to go.

  “It’s just three days,” he said. He turned to get some clean socks. He was going to ask her what was the matter, but when he turned back around, she was gone.

  She wasn’t watching at the window for the car the morning he left. He used to think he’d be so relieved when she stopped doing that, but now it unsettled him, made him feel things weren’t quite right.

  As soon as Nick left, Robin began her steady retreat back into herself. It frightened Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was working with a client, she’d excuse herself, leaving a hem half pinned, a sleeve hanging awkwardly on a bare arm, and go into the kitchen to call her daughter to see if she was all right. The line was always busy. She’d try again in ten minutes, in half an hour, until her client got exasperated. “Forget why you’re here?” one woman sniped.

  Leslie, standing there with the phone clenched in her hand, thought it a funny remark, because really, how nice it would be to forget, to stop worrying, to just get back to pulling forth a dress from a bolt of cloth, the only kind of magic she was ever able to do.

  She came home and asked Robin why the line had been tied up like that, and Robin dipped her head so that her hair covered her face and said she was talking to some friend Leslie had never heard of, doing math homework over the phone. “Homework,” Leslie said. She was certain it must be a boy again, but Robin was still so young, and if she was going to have any dates, Leslie wanted them to be with the proper sort of boy, a boy who would come to dinner and tease her into liking him, a boy who wouldn’t meddle around with cars or emotions.

  When the phone bill came, Leslie glanced casually at the amount, and then stopped short. It was so high. Nick kept a separate line for his business calls and was pretty strict about it, and she herself didn’t call long-distance except for an occasional call to her folks. It had to be Robin. She trailed a finger down the list of phone numbers: 617-555-6788, over and over again. A half-hour. Twenty minutes. Once, two hours. She wondered how many other calls to that number had been made from the home of a friend, whose parents might be angered at the size of their bill. She knew the area code was Boston from all the calls she had made to Nick, and for a moment she felt a stubborn flash of sympathy for Robin, a bond built out of telephone wires and the endless neediness of loving. She looked at the dates of the calls, days when Nick was out of town, in other cities. It made her feel so strange. Her husband and her daughter’s boyfriend might have been in the same city—a boyfriend, that must be it—and she couldn’t imagine how Robin had met such a boy.

  She didn’t know what to do. She’d have to confront Robin with the bill, but she knew Robin would just pay it off with allowance money and wouldn’t give Leslie any information at all about anything. Leslie thought maybe she’d call the number, just to see who answered. Maybe she could pick something up from the boy’s voice. She had a sudden nervous feeling that it might be Rick again, transplanted, dangerous in new ways. And if it was someone perfectly proper, perfectly nice? Well, she didn’t want to interfere with Robin, she just wanted to know what was going on. She yearned to somehow be a part of it.

  She called on a night when Nick was in Philadelphia and Robin was swimming at the “Y.”

  The line rang only once, and then a woman’s voice said, “Yes?” Leslie felt foolish. She rubbed at her eyes, and then the woman said, “Amy, is that you, honey?” and the voice was so kind, it made Leslie want to speak.

  She didn’t give her full name, not at first. She politely explained about the phone bill, all those calls to that number. “I think it’s probably my daughter, Robin, who’s calling, and I think it might have something to do with a boy.” She felt more and more awkward, more and more guilty, too. “Uh, do you have a son?” Leslie asked.

  There was silence on the other end, and Leslie thought, Why, this woman didn’t know what her son was up to. Or maybe she did know—maybe she got calls like this all the time.

  “Listen,” the woman finally said, “I don’t have a son, and no one named Robin has been calling me.”

  “No son?” Leslie said. “But I don’t get it then. The numbers are right here, for an hour at a time. She must be calling you—she has to be.”

  There was silence again, thickening through the wires, and then the woman cleared her throat. She said she didn’t know if she should even be talking about this, but there was this one girl who called her, but her name was Amy. “I can’t tell you what we talk about, it’s all in confidence.” The woman laughed a little. “I guess I’m kind of like a psychiatrist sometimes.”

  “I’m kind of like a mother,” Leslie said, her voice tight.

  “All right, all right,” Dore sighed. She told her what she could. She sketched in Robin’s features, the hair, the stubborn strong voice, the way she had just shown up on her doorstep.

  “It’s got to be Robin,” Leslie said, “but why would she come to you? How would she know?” She bit down on her lip. “What did she say to you?”

  “Nothing so terrible, she just wanted to talk,” Dore said. “I’m sorry—it was per
sonal. I can’t betray a confidence. I feel funny telling you what I’m telling you now, except if you’re her mother—”

  “I am her mother.”

  “Maybe,” Dore said.

  “She’s never even been to Boston,” Leslie said. “Her father gets there on business sometimes, he’s due there in a few days, but Nick’s never taken her with him, although I remember she did want to go.”

  “Nick?” Something snaked up along Dore’s spine.

  “My husband sells books,” Leslie said. “He’s out of town a lot. I don’t know, I think it upsets her. No, I know it does.” She curled the phone cord about her hand.

  “Excuse me, what did you say your whole name was?” Dore asked, keeping her breath quiet, and as soon as she heard Leslie say Austen, something ruptured inside of her and she had to sit down.

  “And your name?” Leslie asked, but then something happened to the phone—it gave an odd click and there was a dial tone. Leslie called back, but the line was busy, and when she called the operator to check on it, she was told the phone was off the hook. It made her a little angry. But she had a number now, she could call back. These calls weren’t about a boy, she thought. They were about something else, something she would have to get from the one person who could storytell it to her, from Robin.

  Dore didn’t know what she was doing. The whole world seemed to be moving in slow motion except for her, and she was moving in small, brilliant panics, she was all bone. She watched the phone, and when it rang, the sound crawled up along her spine. She was half-certain that if she dared to touch the receiver, her own pain might electrocute her.

  She walked. She tried to go into neighborhoods that were unfamiliar, that seemed as lost to her as her own self. She kept her head down, ignoring people if they smiled at her, if they excused themselves past her. She scowled at the dogs lazily loping past her. I’m a stranger in a strange land, she thought. She wished she were getting on a plane and just leaving. For the first time, she felt exactly the way her students probably did, looking for safe haven; for a hand to hold back the fever that raged away inside of you; for a rational, calm voice that knew just what you should do next.