Nicki carried a plate of fish salad back to her husband. Her father smiled at her.
“She’s something this girl,” he said to her husband. “She doesn’t take a quarter off me all the time you’re gone.”
“I have a job,” Nicki said.
“Not no more you won’t,” the husband said.
“What do you mean?” Nicki said.
“My wife won’t work,” the husband said.
“Eat,” Nicki said. “You’re home only two hours and you’re changing the world.”
“I don’t have to be home a half hour to know what’s going to be,” he said.
“Well,” Nicki said lightly, “we’re going to need my paycheck for a little while, anyway. We can’t live on what you’re going to get for dispatching trucks.”
“The job is just for a couple of months for the parole officer,” the husband said.
“He’ll earn bucks soon enough,” the father said.
“The first thing I do is get you your own car,” the husband said.
“I’ll take it,” Nicki said.
“You’ll have a car exactly four weeks from now,” the husband said.
“Why do I have to wait so long?”
“Three weeks,” the husband said, looking at her father.
“That’s better,” Nicki said.
She looked at her earrings in the mirror once more. Pretty good. A car my own way, without having to take it from my father. Oh, he’ll have it for me in three weeks. To the day. Death before dishonor.
“And you won’t be usin’ it to go to work,” her husband said.
“Well,” Nicki said.
“Well, nothing.”
Her father laughed. “He’s the boss.”
“See what he says?” the husband said. The ownership in his voice brought Nicki’s teeth together. What was the word Maximo used out of his freaking law books all the time? Chattel. That’s it. Chattel cow. Oh, remember what I did when that Spic tried to pull it on me? Sitting in the restaurant saying he owned me? He didn’t do that again. She looked in her mirror at the earrings. This was different. Here, she’d get. I like having things, Nicki told herself. A car. A car is great. It doesn’t talk to you and put things on your mind.
In bed that night, in her own room, Nicki lay still while he touched her nipples lightly, causing them to harden. She turned against him and held his prick while he kissed her. There was a hunger in her tissues, but it was then dulled by her husband’s satisfaction with himself, as if each time he plunged a curtain rose to permit him to take another bow.
“How do you like it?”
She answered with a small sound.
“Tell me!”
She moaned. At this, his eyes blazed with ego. I get the Academy Award, Nicki thought.
The moment he was off her, she went onto her side and bunched the pillow under her. Long minutes later, when she was certain he was asleep, she propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him. Handsome, all right. Oh, he had to be more handsome than Maximo; after all, he was white. Or was he more handsome? Come on, forget about Maximo. She could not. When she had sex with Maximo she always felt she was drowning within herself. She concentrated on her husband’s sleeping face. She wondered if the trouble tonight could all be because of the fuck truck. She put her head back on the pillow and fell asleep, thinking of the color of the car she would get in three weeks.
All the next day, her husband’s friends came to see him. They were young, with faces lined only by sneers, and they moved from seat to seat in the big basement den, snapping fingers, displaying jewelry, passing gas and laughing loudly at it, and punching each other on biceps that had been fashioned by long months in prison gyms. At ten o’clock at night, Nicki found herself staring from one of the den couches while her husband’s best friend, Jiggs, walked around the room eating pretzels and then, ducking down, pretended to throw a punch at her husband’s stomach.
“Pow!” Jiggs said. Straightening up, chewing pretzels, he walked to the bar, grabbed another handful, stuck them in his mouth and walked up to the husband again, bent over, pretended to throw a punch and then called out, “Pow!”
“So how’s it going?” Jiggs asked.
“All right. You know,” her husband said.
“Yeah, I know just what you mean,” Jiggs said.
Pushing pretzels into a crowded mouth, he walked from the bar to the husband, bent, threw his imaginary punch, said, “Pow!” and went back to the bar.
As Jiggs started walking again toward Ronnie so he could throw his punch, Ronnie said, “Hear from Sonny?”
The change in the conversation pattern caused Jiggs to stand still and think.
“He was over in Allenwood and he had some bullshit with a guard. They put him back in Lewisburg,” Jiggs said.
“Yeah,” Ronnie said.
“So, how’s it going?” Jiggs said.
“All right. You know.”
“Yeah. I know just what you mean.”
Jiggs, back in sync, started to move again. Then Ronnie said, “You hear from Biffy?” Jiggs had to stop again.
“You know he got fucked.”
“Yeah, how?”
“They made an absolute deal with the United States Attorney. He was supposed to cop out for a flat two years. He goes into court and what do you think happens? A pound. A fucking pound they give him.”
“What a shame,” the husband said.
“Yeah, what a fucking shame. So how’s it going?”
“All right. You know.”
Jiggs walked over to Ronnie, bent down and threw an imaginary punch at Ronnie’s middle. “Pow!” Jiggs said.
Nicki yawned, stretched, smiled at her husband and said she was exhausted. She ruffled his hair and told him to stay with his friend. “I’ll see you later,” she said, smiling, and in meaningful tones. Up in the bedroom, she closed the door and dialed the outdoor phone booth on Maximo’s corner. Maybe he’s still out walking the dog, she thought. Of course she never would talk to him if he answered, but she could at least listen to his voice for a moment. The phone rang twelve times without an answer. Disappointed, she went to bed.
When her husband came to bed, she told him that she had just started her period.
“Do you love me?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the difference?”
As his body came toward hers, she put her hands against his chest. “What are you, some kind of a filthy Spic?” she said.
Later, as he slept, she again looked at him in the darkness. For a long time, an hour perhaps. She knew something had died during the time he was in jail.
At seven o’clock the next morning, Thursday, Angela was standing in the kitchen in sweatshirt and jeans when Nicki came in from the bedroom similarly dressed. Her mother and two aunts stood along the long counter in the uniform of their generation, flowered housedresses, bare fleshy arms pouring out the tops, and flat shoes. The five women smoked cigarettes and drank coffee; two crack units awaiting morning formation and the opportunity to smash the enemy most hated, old wax on parquet flooring.
“You got your furniture comin’ Saturday,” one of the aunts said.
“Why should she lose the weekend?” Nicki’s mother asked.
“It costs extra to have it moved on Saturday,” the aunt said.
“It’s worth it,” the mother said. “Let her get in her own house with her own husband and nobody around to bother them. That’s putting nature on the job.”
“Ma, how can you even talk like this so early in the morning?”
“Because I can talk like this in the night and I can talk like this in the morning. I always got the same story, which means I’m telling the truth. The surest way for a young girl to make absolutely sure that she don’t wind up alone is to have a baby.”
Nicki placed a hand on her midsection. A baby? Imagine having a baby inside me and having to sit here like this? Pills. One a day. Somebody like me ought to be allowed to take tw
o and three at a time, like aspirin. Upset stomach, try Tums. Like hell. Upset stomach, take cyanide. Because it isn’t food poisoning, sister.
Nicki, who had taken two drags on her first cigarette of the day, mashed it into the ashtray.
“I want to go,” she said to Angela.
“Say the truth,” the mother said. “Don’t I know what I’m talking about?”
“Sure,” Nicki said. The word had the beginnings of bitterness in it. Angela put down her coffee cup and covered everything with a laugh.
“One step at a time,” Angela said. “We’ll start by getting her to the stores and then we’ll see you at the apartment.”
The mother looked at the clock. “Floor waxer comes eight o’clock. We’ll get in there, start on the windows before he comes.”
Nicki started for the door, but instead went swiftly back to her bedroom in the back of the house. She was standing on tiptoes at her closet, reaching under the shoeboxes, when the bedcovers rustled and her husband picked up his head.
“What are you doin’?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then come on back to bed with me.”
“Not a chance. I’m up. It’s daytime.”
“You’d love it in here,” he said, patting the bed alongside him.
“You think,” she said. She said it lightly, to keep his head on the pillow.
“Come on.”
“Nope.” She took the folded copy of the Times from beneath the boxes of her summer shoes. Nicki held the paper against her, so her husband wouldn’t see it.
“I’ve got to go to the apartment,” she said.
“Come here and give me a kiss.”
“Later.”
“I said, come here.”
She held the Times behind her back with one hand and took two great strides, stretching out so the arm behind her wouldn’t be so noticeable and kissed him on the cheek.
“There. Now I’ve got to go fix up the apartment.”
She whirled away from the bed, bringing the Times against her stomach again, and she went down the hallway, past the kitchen, calling out, “Later,” and was out of the house with her paper. She imagined the tension that would have assaulted her if she suddenly remembered, while working in her new apartment, that the paper was home and could be thrown out at any moment by somebody packing her things.
“What’s in the ads?” Angela asked when Nicki got in the car with the paper.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing in there you could buy from?”
“Nope. It isn’t even today’s. It’s old.”
“What’s in it, then?”
“Never mind. But you’re keeping it for me until I get my place straightened out, if I ever do.”
“You will.”
“You think,” Nicki said.
“He’s only been home a few nights. Of course it’s strange,” Angela said.
“I get a car, I’ll feel better,” Nicki said.
“Sure you will. And he won’t stop at a car,” Angela said.
“No, he won’t,” Nicki said. That was one thing, anyway.
As they came to a diner that sat alongside a brake-lining garage, Nicki had Angela stop. They went into a place that was a Greek’s pride, Formica and tile, platters of muffins that had been injected with imitation blueberries, an ugly plant atop the cashier’s counter.
As she got into a booth, Nicki saw that Angela was not carrying the paper. “Where’s my paper?” she said.
“In the car.”
“What if the car gets stolen?”
“You’ll get another paper.”
“No, I won’t. I only want this one.”
“What’s in it, some story saying how great the Spics are?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can forget about them now.”
“I guess so,” Nicki said.
“Then why do you still want the paper, for whatever the hell is in it?”
“Because I want it.”
“What good is it going to do you?”
“None. I want coffee.”
“Coffee for me. And an order of rye toast,” Angela said.
“I get confused sometimes,” Nicki said.
“Nicki, you gave it almost four years already. What’s another three or four months? For that matter, what’s another year? You’re a young girl. You’re twenty-six. You’ve invested all this time. Now just because you wake up one morning a little irritated you want to throw it all away?”
“I wonder why I waited.”
“You did. You did because that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s your life. Now you just have to wait a little longer to get used to it. Let things get settled.”
The coffee arrived and Nicki stared at it moodily.
“As for the other thing,” Angela said.
Nicki looked up sharply from the coffee.
“It’s ridiculous even to think about,” Angela said. “Even if you were allowed, and you know you’re not allowed, nobody is allowed to leave a husband when he just gets home from jail, but even if you were allowed, you can’t just go throwing over a life for somebody you can’t even bring home. You can never even introduce him to anyone you know. Forget it.”
“I guess,” Nicki said.
“You mean you know. You’re not allowed to leave your husband, so don’t let your mind play games with you. Relax and get your car.”
“Give up my job?”
Angela’s lips pursed. “Well, he’s your husband.”
“And have a baby?”
“Well,” Angela said.
“Well what?”
“Well, either you’re married to him or not.”
Nicki held the coffee cup with both hands. The closeness of her wrists reminded her of someone in handcuffs; she almost felt them pinching the flesh over the bones. She realized that throughout all the months of evasion and turmoil over Maximo, through all the nights of writhing, she was playing with a freedom that she never had had before, and she became so accustomed to it that she began to hold it in contempt. She had limited ability to choose, but still she could listen to her own voice debate, at the ring of a phone, whether or not she would go to meet this Maximo. She had come to regard this as being nothing more than opportunity to torture herself. She ignored it and dreamed of true freedom, a cornfield in Iowa. And now her small freedom had been jerked away from her, by heritage, by her husband’s sneer and mother’s glare, even by her best friend’s counsel, and there could now be no small decisions to make, and certainly no more dreams; she was to stroll about a cage made sparkling by cleaning fluid.
As they were leaving in the car, Nicki took the folded Times from the dashboard and placed it on the back seat.
“I want it back next week. I can’t have it around today,” Nicki said.
“Where is he, anyway?”
“Work, I guess.”
“Now that you’re gone, I might give him a call myself,” Angela said. “As long as he’s got what you keep giving all these sighs about.”
Angela laughed and Nicki did not.
Late Saturday afternoon, when the movers were gone and her mother and aunts were busy in the apartment kitchen, Nicki was alone in the living room, with the lights off, looking out at a sky the color of tree bark that covered the cold river. On the far side of the water, the first lights of night appeared in the old apartment towers of Riverside Drive, the dull tans and reds of the buildings beginning to recede into the dusk.
Her mother came into the entranceway. “It’s so beautiful,” she said.
Nicki nodded.
“You could get up here in the morning and have your coffee and sit here and relax until you want to go out shopping for something,” her mother said.
Nicki nodded.
“Then in the summer, look what you got. Run right over the bridge and you’re at the beach in no time. You could spend every day just relaxing in the sun. I’m telling you, you got it beautiful, young girl like you.”
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The mother went back in the kitchen and Nicki looked at the long couch she had against the wall on her right. As soon as the movers had walked out, she had known that the couch belonged on the opposite wall. She went into the kitchen and picked newspapers that hadn’t been crumpled up out of the garbage pail. She carried them inside, placed them on the floor and then, hurriedly, so nobody would come in to help, she sent the couch skidding across the floor on the newspapers.
“What the hell are you doing that all by yourself?” her mother said.
Nicki stepped back and looked at the couch; she liked where it was now, and its look, long and comfortable and new, with the sky and the river right outside the window, gave her a feeling of great satisfaction. Who knows? she thought.
“Ma.”
“What, dear?”
“When is Ronnie coming?”
“When we finish here. He’s sitting home with your father nice. What do you want the two of them here? This ain’t their work.”
“All right,” Nicki said. She bent down and began to pull the newspapers out from under the couch. She glanced down at one of the sections. It was the leisure section of the Bergen County Evening Record. The small print at the bottom of one story, a list of people in a winter charity dance, reminded her of the type in the Times story: Escobar, Maximo. She crumpled the newspaper up and threw it aside, as if tapping her computer to clear the screen.
On that Monday morning in the apartment, the husband was gliding around the bedroom at six o’clock, a towel around his neck, workboots in his hands, enough cologne seeping through his skin to form groundwater. He chose the living room to finish dressing for his first day’s work at the trucking company.
“Don’t you want coffee?” she called.
“Stay in bed.”
She swung out of bed and walked into the living room in her nightie, glancing out the window at the river in the morning. For a moment, she could understand how all of them felt they were saying the truth; it appeared to be a most attractive reward to awake in the morning to such a sight as this and have nothing more pressing to think about than a shopping trip.
“Where do you think you’re going today?” he said.
“Work.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“You won’t be going anymore. Why don’t you start today? Stay home. Don’t even call them.”
Forsaking All Others Page 39