“You like being spoiled and watching TV. That’s what you like.”
Sometimes she spoke to him as a mother does—not their mother but the starchy, coiffed kind from television long ago. She employed the faintest British accent. They always walked to school together. Sometimes they sang a song—the boy hated to sing but also hated when she pestered him. The song was always the same, something she’d learned at school. It was from the Underground Railroad. It went: Somebody’s knocking at my door. Somebody’s knocking at my door. She sang a line, then the boy. Their voices overlapped in a round. Then, together: Oh sinner! Why don’t you answer? Somebody’s knocking at my door. Her voice was clear, tender, and flat. The boy had a finer voice but swallowed the words. It was Black History Month.
“Sounds like the Lord,” she sang now.
“Sounds like the Lord,” he sang halfheartedly.
The boy was forever making snowmen and fake boogers of rubber cement. He carried its scent on him—a gluey, bitter smell. It didn’t alarm her; most boys smelled this way, until they smelled like their father’s cologne or body odor.
“Sing nicely.” She was that mother again. Her posture was too good; some of the girls found it suspicious.
But instead the boy wandered off. They were supposed to stay together but he was always wandering off. Boys. They were programmed to mindlessly collect, to yell about what they found, to scream their good fortune and then forget it a second later. She had never met a different kind and didn’t expect to. Today her brother discovered a big plastic owl poking out of a garbage can. She called his name but her throat hurt, her toes were numb, so she didn’t protest too much when he ran off. She wanted to get to school, to settle into her over-warm classroom where the radiators hissed and where her own pastel portrait of Frances Perkins hung over the social studies shelf. Mr. Broom would give her a piece of toffee candy when she submitted her math homework.
Oh sinner.
The fresh icy air, the great white open sky, all this felt scarily at odds with the dim and humid world in the book. She wanted it to stop, the bug story, but her father was so sweet, perched on her stool in his old blue robe, his morning breath, sleep in his eyes, he loved so much reading his favorites to her. Anyway, that was the point—wasn’t it? Creepiness? To let creepy things menace the perimeter? Otherwise you were an ignorant girl. Otherwise you were naïve, oblivious, sheltered. Then you became the ghost—then you became the thing at the perimeter. Or so it seemed to her.
Gregor was the name of the bug. Once he’d been a regular guy, a middle manager, her father said, and then suddenly he was a roach, the basest thing, despised, forlorn, disgusting, and ancient. She was interested in literary transformations but usually liked them to go the other way.
She sang under her breath. Sounds like the Lord. The song made her happy. Was it supposed to make her happy? Probably not. It was a song from a horrific period in American history. Even so, she liked to think about the Underground Railroad, a tunnel deep in the earth, deeper than the subways, with rail tracks made of bone, candles dripping gloomy wax, cockroaches galore, all manner of person humping along, filthy, shoeless, and babies tied to backs, everyone singing this sad, hopeful, feverish song, and of course afros and mites and rats and pee. She knew there was not really a railroad or even a hole in the ground, knew it was a metaphor, but clung to the image of a train of people, a mournful conga line, voices merging and echoing, the whole world, over and under, dark and messy, mud. What did it say about her that she took pleasure from such a scene? Was she a racist? All people are racists, her mother told her, in some secret part of themselves. You can’t avoid it. You too? Leonora had asked, aghast. Me too, her mother said. Why else would I devote my life to helping black people?
In the distance she saw her brother holding the plastic owl over his head and running down the street. A smaller boy in red earmuffs trotted after him.
She would have opened her door to slaves or Jews. Which is why when the man appeared, which is why when he said, “Could I bother you a moment, miss?” which is why when she saw he wore glasses with fingerprint smudges on them, a nick from shaving on his cheek, when she saw he had the same tartan plaid scarf as her father, she stopped. It was her instinct; she didn’t think twice. He wore a scarf like her father’s.
She hadn’t seen where he came from. He was a regular-seeming guy, a middle manager, newspaper under his arm, briefcase with shining gold hinges.
“Hello,” she said.
Her brother was gone.
“You seem like you’re in a hurry,” he said.
She didn’t know how to respond.
“Well, I guess.”
“I’d love just a moment of your time.”
She did not think, Who is he? What does he want? Is he safe? This is what she was supposed to be thinking—in the thoughts under her thoughts there was: Why aren’t you thinking what you’re supposed to be thinking? For her real, uppermost thoughts were these: I’m pretty. He stopped me because I’m pretty. She wished it were not so. She wished he’d stopped her for some other reason. Girls aren’t supposed to know they’re pretty. They’re supposed to be oblivious, to believe that beauty is an accident, irrelevant, a trick, but of course no one is oblivious. Girls know where they stand right from the start. When the man looked at Leonora, when she saw him looking down at her face, her coat, her boots, her face again, when he blinked—was he blinking maybe more slowly than was normal?—even though he gave no impression of indecency, even though he seemed harmless, ordinary, even embarrassed for himself—well, it didn’t matter. She was sure he thought she was pretty, that this is why he stopped her, and she knew it to be true, knew she was pretty, and so she was ashamed for them both.
He said, “So. Let’s see. How should I say this?”
He swallowed, setting in motion a massive Adam’s apple. She watched the mechanics of his swallow, watched how his throat moved and felt the same thing she felt when she watched a machine do something ordinary and miraculous, like sort change.
“On your way to school, I imagine,” he said.
“I am.” She was staunch, confident.
“Maybe fifth grade? Sixth?”
She hesitated; he blinked; she confirmed the latter.
“I have a proposition.” He swallowed again. It was so elaborate, that swallow—casual, wondrous.
She said, “What kind of proposition?”
“It means I’d like your help; it means I have an idea to run by you.”
She was mildly offended. “I know what it means.”
“It won’t take long. It would—it would make a world of difference.”
She was supposed to run and she did not. She prepared herself to run, she knew the risks, but now, face-to-face with him (a notorious Him, a textbook stranger), her instinct was merely to listen. She said, “What can I do for you?” and was surprised by the rote, disinterested way it came out, like the voice of a tired waitress.
1
Sam’s girl wasn’t pretty. You couldn’t call her that, but he didn’t mind. He liked her long neck, like a dancer’s, pale clean hair to her shoulder blades. She was gangly, wide-hipped, big feet. It didn’t matter. He liked everything: her shirts a size too big, her sagging kneesocks. She went without a bra but not in a wild way, not like Mimi McKendrick who wore beads and black nail polish and let her little breasts knock about. His girl crossed her arms over her chest, drew attention to her own embarrassment, her shock at having wound up, one day, today, for no reason except dull destiny, a woman. Her eyes were clay-colored, her fingernails bitten to the quick. He admired everything about her. In her presence he was all clenched fists and thubbing heart.
“Helen.”
It brought to mind his grandmother (who wasn’t a Helen but of the age when women were Helens) and a wooden horse and also a cat with half a tail he’d known as a small boy. The name was many things, belonged to people and animals and some cities, but it was hers first and hers foremost. It had a formal
ity, he thought, a sanctity. It was proper. His first-grade teacher was Mrs. Helen. It could be a surname or a pet’s name or a myth, but now that it was her, this girl, that’s all it would ever be.
“Helen!”
There was nothing to do but shout it.
“Keep your voice down,” she said. “Hush.”
She said things like that—hush. She was just sixteen but spoke like a mother already, in a weary, vaguely amused voice.
“Helen,” more softly.
“That’s better, yes.”
They were sitting on her bed and kissing. It was nearly dusk on a Tuesday in early spring. Her room was a child’s room: pink walls, braided pastel rug, shelf of dolls in church dresses and straw hats, a ribbon tacked to the back of the door, which was closed. The door was closed and they were sitting on her bed and they had been kissing. It was kissing, yes, but it wasn’t what he had imagined. It was kissing in name only: lips brushing dryly, no exchange of saliva, idle tongues, hands on their own laps. Still, he would take it.
The ribbon behind the door said Runner-Up in gold letters. A pink ribbon with gold letters, and at once he saw her as the runner-up, a too-tall girl pulling herself from the pool, out of breath, bloodshot eyes, a scrape on her knee, downy fuzz in her armpits. The sky would have been overcast, her mother frowning—“There’ll be more races”—and handing her a towel which her sister had already used.
“I have a paper to write,” she was saying. “It’s due Wednesday. The War of 1812.”
“I know about that war.”
He knew nothing.
He loved her as the Swimmer. She pretended not to mind being runner-up. She hated her mother, hated the girl who’d won the race. She loved the color of sky, like bone, and the chlorine burn in her eyes. Her face didn’t show anything. She rode home in the back of the station wagon, arms and legs goose-pimpled, lips blue. She hung that ribbon up out of defiance. I will not care. I am not this ribbon. He saw everything with precision: her blue lips, bloodshot eyes, her cold and healthy heart. He was making it all up. He didn’t know about the ribbon. He didn’t know about her heart. He barely knew her. “Helen,” he sighed.
“They’ll be home by seven.” She was talking about her parents. “I need to get dinner ready; they’ll want to eat when they get back.”
On the wall was a piece of framed needlepoint, a peach-colored baby face and, in needlepoint script: Babies are such a nice way to start people. Beneath this was the date of her birth. But he couldn’t believe she was ever a baby. It was impossible to imagine her without this particular gravity, this restraint.
“Helen.” He was careful not to yell.
“Yes?”
But he didn’t know what to say.
“Oh, Sam.” She patted her hands on her lap.
He said, “I need you is what I think I’m trying to express.”
Express? Why did he talk this way?
But she said, “Need?”
They were silent.
“You’re something else, Helen. I want. No. Everything.”
“You mean intercourse, right? That’s what you mean by everything?”
His hands and feet and neck burned.
“Sam.” She said this, too, like a mother. “Is that what you mean by everything? Intercourse?”
“Don’t call it that.”
“Why not?”
“It sounds medical.”
“I want to,” she said. “I do want to.” Her voice was light, cool, a little mean.
He was terribly afraid. “Maybe we’re not ready. No, we’re not ready.”
“I want to,” she said. “Listen to me.”
He was listening.
“Helen. Helen.” He said her name the first time to remind them both of the girl she was supposed to be, and then said it again, louder, to celebrate the departure of that girl. He meant to speak to both Helens at once. A wonderful thought occurred to him: She was two Helens. He didn’t need to choose.
It was six-thirty. Soon her parents would return.
They agreed to meet in the woods by the river, the next day after school.
They went outside and stood on her front stoop. The trees, newly budded, cast long shadows on the lawn.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said.
“Who would I tell?”
“Patricia?” This was her slit-eyed best friend.
She laughed. “You don’t really know me.”
His throat tightened. “Of course I do.”
“Is the girl you know the kind of girl who wants to have sex with you in the woods tomorrow?”
The answer was a terrible, blessed no.
He walked down the street. Daffodils aimed their cyclopic heads at him. The dusk sky was yellowish, speckled with dim clouds. He walked until he was out of her sight and then ran. His mouth wanted to make a sound but he was afraid to let it. He clamped down on his bottom lip. What could he do between now and then? He couldn’t go home yet. He couldn’t run forever. Finally he let his mouth do what it wanted and it made a small, breathless gasp like cresting the Ferris wheel for the first time.
He ran until he came to Marco’s, a dilapidated sundry at the corner of Maple and Eve, chimes on the door, old Marco with his cigarette behind the counter humming some dead song from his youth. It was rumored that Marco hired a woman to bathe him once a week though he was perfectly able to take care of himself. Sam wasn’t supposed to be here; his Aunt Constance didn’t approve of the place. There was a faint panic and pleasure in disobeying her. He looked through the selection of rude greeting cards, old ladies on the toilet, buxom nurses. One card was just some naked guy wearing one of those plastic Groucho Marx disguises on his penis. Incocknito, it said inside. He touched animal figurines, boxes of candy cigarettes. Everything was dusty. A stuffed frog. A squirt gun. A pencil that played the New Year’s Eve song when you pressed a button where the eraser should be. Nothing was right. He couldn’t present Helen with some trash.
“For a girl? I can tell.” Marco flashed his orangey teeth.
“No girl,” said Sam.
“Sorry. A woman? You got your hands on one of those, I bet.”
“I don’t think there’s anything here,” Sam said. “But thanks for letting me look.”
“You know who’s one swank doll? Mrs. Marcusi, that’s who. She’s a tall drinka.”
Mrs. Marcusi, in kilts and flesh-colored knee-highs, shelved books at the library.
Sam moved for the door.
Marco called, “Hey! Hold on. You own the world and have no idea. I know what you want. You want a present for a real woman, right? I envy you. Come back here a second. I have the perfect thing.”
Marco fumbled below the counter, lifted a small bundle wrapped in brown paper. Slowly, tenderly, as one removes the dressing from an injury, he peeled back the paper. It was not what Sam expected to see. A mug. A large, beige coffee mug encircled by a ring of giraffes. These giraffes were engaged in an act of—well, it was intercourse.
“Orgy,” Marco declared. “Orgy of the animal kingdom.” Giraffe heads in giraffe crotches and rears and ears. They were linked, lapping and caressing and humping, tails entwined, necks and ears and hooves and tongues.
“Erotic safari,” Marco said. “Shows a wild side. Women want that, trust me.”
A wild side? They were children. They needed a pass to use the bathroom. They drank milk from tiny cartons. He couldn’t give that mug to Helen. It was disgusting. He would never give it to Helen.
He paid.
He was supposed to be dead, was supposed to feel that he deserved nothing, not happiness or home or peace or Helen. He was supposed to feel that his life was borrowed. He was an orphan and therefore his life was not the puzzle everyone else’s was. It was just a clean, flat surface, and he would one day slide off. His death would be a kind of catching up. He had to remember that. He ran home, holding the paper bag to his chest. He would keep the mug in the back of his sock drawer. His Aunt Constance could never see
it; she would have cried at a mug like that. But he had to have it. It was the first disgusting thing he owned, and it felt like a start.
2
Constance’s life began with another woman’s death. That was its true start. It began not when she was born, or finished school, or left her mother’s home. Her life began, finally, when Louise packed her family into their station wagon, put on her sunglasses, turned the ignition, and drove into a train.
At the time, Constance was secretly pregnant by Louise’s brother. Their wedding was the last time Constance saw Louise. A wedding! With guests and an organ player and a minister whose habit of rubbing his paunch made Constance sure he knew her secret condition and was taunting her. She could hardly believe it was happening to her, so resigned had she been to a life in her mother’s house, to growing old alone. Yet here she was, in this awkward dress, wearing mascara for the first time. After the ceremony, they descended into the church basement. The windows were high, small, and covered with ochre linen that muddied the light.
Constance’s mother pulled her aside, hugged her shoulders, and said, “I hope I’ve prepared you.” They stood in the alcove that held the coatrack and the framed picture of Jesus with a shag haircut. “I mean for tonight. I mean for”—she waved her hands—“for the rigmarole.”
“I’m prepared, yes,” said Constance.
“I wasn’t,” her mother said. “I was not at all prepared. Oh, but I’m afraid I was supposed to give you more advice. Did I give you enough advice? Is there anything you want to know? Ask me! It will hurt some. What else?”
Constance was the only daughter, the youngest. Her father, her three brothers, were long gone. She looked at her mother, saw her mother’s mouth moving, heard her mother’s too-late ministrations, and felt nothing but freedom. She was married.
“I know enough.” She sounded unlike herself—so serene, so effortless. How did she manage that? Such poise! This was not what she expected. She was supposed to quake, to weep. Or maybe she was supposed to confess that she already knew what it was like, that she was already pregnant. She was certainly supposed to feel guilt. But she did not. She was tall and plain and resolved. A wife. Oilcloth covered the plywood tabletops. A buttercream cake and small pile of gifts did not come close to filling the table in the corner. It was a simple, ordinary affair. The music was sappy, the food plentiful, mayonnaisey salads, melon balls, a gravy tureen filled with jelly beans, for it was just after Easter. But forget the food. The food wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that she was pregnant and married and couldn’t stop looking at her husband’s sister.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel Page 6