Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “You’re more.”

  “Look, it’s totally unethical, first of all—”

  “That makes me love you more, saying that,” she said.

  He got up, pacing. “No, it’s impossible,” he said. He grabbed up his books and told her he had to go, that maybe she had better go, too. She tried to follow him, but he was gone.

  He acted differently toward her after that. Sometimes he wouldn’t call on her in class, even when she was the only one with her hand up, and he wouldn’t give her any more passes to the lab, even when she begged him, when she said her carrot clones would die if she didn’t attend to them. He must have spoken to the janitors, too, because they wouldn’t let her into the school before anyone else anymore, no matter how she teased and smiled, no matter how high she rolled her skirts.

  She didn’t know what to do. She wrote him letters in purple ink on white parchment, love poems and songs. She drew on the envelopes and mailed them to his home. “You could never do anything wrong,” she wrote him. “You could never be less than I imagine.”

  She knew he got the letters, because suddenly he seemed to be looking at her differently. His eyes seemed sad, his face a little haunted, and sometimes she’d look up from her work to find him staring at her.

  She walked home from school. The walk calmed her—it stretched out the day before she had to go back in the house and see the look on Leslie’s face, the misery because she couldn’t help missing Nick.

  Robin was taking the long way home when she heard a car beep. She turned, half expecting her father, and there was Douglas, a red baseball cap pulled over his brow. He was unsmiling, but he leaned over and opened the door of his battered blue VW for her.

  “Okay,” he said, “so ethical isn’t working. Maybe we need some new rules of conduct here.”

  She got into the car and he drove, keeping his eyes on the road, not saying anything until he came to a small, deserted parking lot, and then he stopped the car and turned to her. He said he didn’t know what was the matter with him, that this whole thing was crazy, that he should be ashamed of himself.

  “Ashamed about what?” Robin asked, but he shook his head and kept on talking. He told her he had never really been in love with anyone before, that women his age didn’t take to him for long. “I was sure what you felt would just wear off. I mean, Jesus, you’re my student, you’re just a kid.” He tugged at the brim of his cap. “But you were so there, so around me all the time, and at first I just felt flattered.

  “When I started to feel something else, I tamped it down, I told myself I was being an idiot. It was a crush, just a crush, the same silly thing you had for me, only for me it was worse, because I was the teacher and it shouldn’t have been there at all.

  “I was sure it would pass, I was sure, but, God, Robin, it didn’t. It just got worse. I’d come home and I’d be thinking about you while I graded papers. I’d dream about you at night, and when I saw you in school, I thought my heart would stop because I had to make myself turn away, had to pretend I didn’t care when inside I was dying. And then those letters, and—” He stopped, looking at her. “You over-whelm me,” he told her. “I never in a million years would believe I’m sitting here telling you this, but I’m falling in love.”

  “I’m already in love,” Robin said, and she tentatively touched his face.

  They began seeing each other, plotting their meetings as carefully as an experiment, making sure nothing could go wrong. He still ignored her at school—he told her it wouldn’t do to show her special favor; that he’d rather not call on her at all rather than risk someone seeing the look flooding his face when he did. No more labwork outside of class, no more walking down the corridor together. Instead, she was to act cool toward him, do her schoolwork, and keep her eyes focused on experiments, not on him.

  After school, she was to walk home the long way, taking the bus four stops out of Pittsburgh into Dormont, a small working-class town where no one knew them, where she could meet him at Rita’s Coffee Shop at the corner. He bought her hamburgers and fries; he held her hand under the table the whole time he was telling her how mad this all was, that he should have his head examined, falling in love with a fifteen-year-old girl.

  She kept asking him what she had done to make him love her, and when he said, “Well, you just kept at me, you were so open,” she felt triumphant. She came home, her eyes sparking, and studied Leslie. “You look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” Leslie said, suspicious. “What makes you so special?”

  Waiting for the bus back, Douglas would draw Robin under a tree and kiss her, and the whole bus ride back, she’d feel something twitching up inside of her, yearning back toward him.

  He still acted like her teacher, like he was in control. He told her she should wear her skirts a little longer, that she should part her hair on the side, and not the center, because it was more dramatic, more striking. He talked a lot about making love to her, about how important it was to do it properly since it would be her first time and she was so young. He was going to take care of everything; he had already had a great deal of experience, and he gave Robin money to get herself fitted for a diaphragm.

  “I know secrets no one else knows,” he said. He told her he had learned about concentration from the Chinese man who did his shirts, who loaned him books on Zen; that he had learned about lovemaking from the Chinese man’s wife, who took him into the back room while her husband pressed other people’s suit jackets. “We did it sitting on chairs, we did it breathing on the same beats, we did it without moving,” he recited.

  Robin didn’t know what he was talking about, she had no one to compare him to as far as lovemaking was concerned, she had only her belief in him, her absolute trust.

  “We’ll plan it out,” he told her. “We’ll prepare it and do it right. We can get wine, some cheese, all the foods you’re supposed to have. You’ll see, it’ll be so special.”

  But the first time he made love to her was in a park in Dormont. She had on a long black coat and blue jeans. Her diaphragm was at his place because she couldn’t risk keeping it at home. He suddenly stopped talking and lifted up her coat and undid her jeans. He tried to enter her, but the angle was wrong; when he was facing her, he couldn’t push himself in. “You should have worn a skirt,” he said.

  She looked up and saw two joggers going by, but she didn’t care—she was almost glad to have them see her. And then he turned her around, and came into her from behind, making her cry out in surprise. He was quickly finished, and then he turned her toward him again and swooped her up, her jeans still unzipped, and carried her over to a bench. He did up her jeans for her and nuzzled her neck. “You won’t get pregnant, I came outside of you,” he said, stroking her hair back. “You’re all right,” he said. “You’re fine.”

  Making love with him was always like that—quick, sudden. The one time she suggested they try some of the Chinese ways, his brow furrowed in annoyance. “And where are we going to get chairs in the woods?” he asked. He wouldn’t let her come to his house; he said it was just too dangerous, there was too much chance of being caught. Still, he told her he loved her. He talked about going away together, because he wanted her all to himself; he was jealous of the boys at school. “I see how they look at you.”

  “They do not,” she said. “They never do.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before you leave me. Sweet little fifteen and big fool me.”

  She was charmed. “Me leave you,” she repeated, astounded.

  In the end, it was his love, he said, that made him resign. He knew of a teaching job out in California; he had already written to them, and he wanted to take her out there with him.

  “Leave here?” she said.

  “I love you. I want you to really be with me. All the time, not just in bits and pieces, not this skulking around. Don’t you understand—this is for you. We can’t be together here.”

  He told
her he would marry her in a minute if he could. He had spent four hours in the law library checking the statutes of every single state, but the only way a fifteen-year-old could get married was if she had parental consent.

  “I could never get that,” Robin said.

  “But we could live like we were married, couldn’t we?” Douglas asked. “No one would suspect we weren’t. We can buy wedding bands and wear them. You’ll call yourself Mrs. Nylon, I’ll call you my wife. We’ll go out to California where no one knows us and we’ll be man and wife in our eyes and in everyone else’s. It’ll be no less of a bond. And the second you hit eighteen, we’ll get married for real.”

  “You’ll marry me at eighteen?” Robin asked.

  “I told you, I’d marry you now if I could. I love you. I can’t think straight anymore. All I see is you, and I need you to come with me. Please, please, say yes.”

  “I don’t know—” said Robin, torn.

  “Listen, I’ll take the responsibility,” Douglas said. “I’ll take care of everything. Nothing’s wrong if there’s this much love involved. Think about it, Robin, just think. Who else loves you as much as I do, as much as I will for all the days of my life? We’ll be each other’s family, each other’s everything on earth.”

  Robin’s heart was racing. “I’m coming,” she said, and she threw her arms about him.

  He had all these plans. She could finish school out there, they could have a garden. He told her the thing to do was to fade into the background, to act as if nothing unusual were going on.

  So Robin began coming home right after school. It was easier being with Leslie knowing she was already starting to be gone. She sat out in the sunny backyard while Leslie tugged up dandelions. She went with her to do the grocery shopping, idly wheeling the cart while Leslie tumbled cereal and broccoli into it. Leslie, touched, bought a bolt of pale blue silk and made a blouse for Robin. “Something for special,” she said, and Robin, dreamy, saw herself in a VW a little darker than the blouse, riding toward her future.

  There were stories about why Douglas Nylon resigned, rumors about drugs, about his going off to write a play. The school immediately hired a young woman called Dr. Kubler, who came to class in a starchy white doctor’s jacket, her glasses suspended about her neck on a red beaded chain. She didn’t allow any talking in class.

  “I miss Nylon,” a girl whispered to Robin.

  “I miss him, too,” Robin said.

  She didn’t think about Nick showing up anymore; she didn’t keep trying Dore’s disconnected number in hopes it would be answered; and Leslie’s arms about her didn’t seem too dangerously confining. She was filled with Douglas. She felt a part of something other than her own family—and, oh, yes, she was loved. How could you doubt it with a man who was giving up everything for you, a man willing to quit the job he loved and drive across the country just so he could have you, a man who was going to marry you and be with you every second, who’d never drive off and leave you, who’d never be with anyone else?

  She didn’t pack anything. She took her purse and her leather jacket and left the house the day Leslie was home ranting about the divorce papers that couldn’t be signed because no one could find Nick. Leslie was thrashing dishes in the sink. She called out to Robin that she could help out in the house once in a while, that it was her home, too.

  Robin, half-listening, opened the front door and stepped out onto the walk, toward the bus that would take her to her future, to Douglas.

  FIFTEEN

  Nick drove. It was funny not working, not having to meet appointments, not having to do anything but drive. He wasn’t interested in forgetting. He pressed himself to remember everything, to make the past so real it might breathe back into life again.

  He sped on the highway and unrolled his life like a movie. He saw himself standing in a long white school corridor, watching Dore stumble toward him; he remembered the shape of her breasts, how pale her skin was, so that even when she managed to get something of a tan, she still looked completely untouched by the sun. He saw himself in the back of a cab, holding Leslie, while Robin struggled to get born. And he saw Robin, a toddler, teething on his itinerary book, so that when he took it from her, there were her teeth marks in the leather. He replayed scene after scene as he moved from state to state, and when it got to be too much, when it got too real, he pulled over to the side of the road and rested his head in his hands.

  For a while, out of habit, he wrote in his itinerary book. He wrote down the time he made, the Kentucky Fried Chickens where he ate, the Hardy Beef Boys where he got indigestion, and, more imporant, he kept detailed accounts of when he had tried to call Leslie, and when he had tried Dore. At night, sleeping in the too soft bed of some cheap hotel, or sometimes in the back seat of the car with his legs cramped about him, he leafed back through the book, and seeing the names made him relax a little, made him feel as if he were still a part of them. In every new city, he stopped and bought postcards. He wrote “I MISS YOU,” “I’M SO SORRY,” “I LOVE YOU.“ Anyone could tell where he was just by the postmark. Anyone could follow.

  He was in Michigan when he finally reached Leslie, but she was cold on the phone. She wanted to know who he thought he was calling her. She said after they were divorced she might talk to him, but not now.

  “What, I’ll be safe then?” he asked.

  “I’m hanging up,” she said.

  “Let me talk to Robin,” he begged, but she said Robin didn’t want to talk to him any more than she did, and in any case Robin wasn’t home, and then she hung up.

  He was still in Michigan when he decided he wanted a lawyer. He wanted to give support money to Robin, and he also wanted to be sure he had visitation rights in writing. He called Pittsburgh, and wired a retainer to the first lawyer he called, who told Nick to call him regularly to see what was going on. Nick stayed in Michigan a few weeks, long enough for his lawyer to tell him that Leslie’s lawyer said she was adamant about not taking a dime from Nick, and that as far as visitation went, Robin wouldn’t discuss it. “I knew it,” Nick said glumly, but his lawyer told him to give it time. “It’s not like she’s some little kid you can just whisk away. Visitation rights or not, if she doesn’t want to see you, you can’t make her.”

  The last thing Nick did before he left Michigan was open a bank account for Robin. He told the bank he’d be mailing in money, but he wanted all the statements mailed to his daughter. She’d open those statements just because they looked official and adult, just because they were from a bank and not from him, and she’d see the money growing into something, she’d somehow know that he was taking care of her, and that was a kind of love, wasn’t it? That surely counted for something.

  He drove. He stopped in Madison, hot and hungry, missing everything he had left so much that he couldn’t seem to breathe right. He was planning to stay only a day or so, long enough to check in with his lawyer, to relax, but then he started walking around, and he fell in love with the lake and the boats, with the bats idly whirling around the gold dome of the capitol building, and he thought he’d stop his traveling right then and there. He rented a whole two-story house on Miffland Street for less money than it would have cost him anywhere else, and he moved in immediately, filling it with a few pieces of used furniture, a new bed, and lots of books.

  He couldn’t stand not doing anything, but he didn’t want to take on too much responsibility. He kept telling himself that any moment he might have to leave to reclaim his old life, any second the phone might ring and it might be Dore telling him it had all been a mistake. He took a job clerking at a place called Brini’s, a small bookshop owned by an old man named Jack Scarzinni, who clearly thought Nick was nuts to take a job so beneath him, a job reserved for college kids who needed book money and date money and that was about all. But Jack was also smart enough to know he’d be getting intelligent company by hiring Nick; he’d be getting another man with whom to while away the slow afternoons over a good game of chess.


  Jack told Nick he had started the store himself, over fifty years ago, naming it after his wife, Brini. Brini had spent half her life worrying about how she would ever manage to run the place herself if Jack upped and died on her. “She was so crazy that way,” Jack told Nick. “She wouldn’t let me have an ice cream in peace because she was sure I’d have a heart attack. She wouldn’t let me carry anything heavy—she’d try to heave it up herself.”

  In the end, though, it was Brini who keeled over and died one summer day when the mercury had climbed to 104°. She was only thirty-eight, and no one could figure out why she died, even after the autopsy. “I never forgave her,” Jack said. “Lying to me like that, pretending that I was going to be the one to do the leaving. I’d never have left her. Never.”

  Nick liked Jack and he liked working at Brini’s. He kept the stock in order, he worked the register, and when the salesmen came in, he went into the back and kept to himself.

  One evening he phoned his home office in Philadelphia and told his boss he needed more time. “This is getting tiresome,” his boss said, but he gave him the time anyway.

  It startled Nick when he began recognizing the customers who came into Brini’s, when they started recognizing him. And then people in his neighborhood began to be familiar, too. The woman next door waved to him mornings. Once, she brought him some brownies she had baked herself. “Too many rots the kids’ teeth,” she told him. But just the same, whenever he found himself looking forward to going to work, to coming home to a neighbor who waved to him, he told himself it was all only temporary; he straightened up and started planning his next letter to Dore, his next payment into Robin’s bank account, his next call to Leslie.

  Dore stopped expecting anything from anybody. She got herself an unlisted number and a new job teaching high-school English. At night she lay in bed with a book and a glass of wine. Time didn’t seem to be doing anything. She was in a kind of vacuum, which was all right for her, because she knew that as soon as she saw any kind of movement, the pain would start up again, and she would remember just what she had lost, just what she no longer had any chance of having.