Second Nature

by Alice Hoffman

  His voice broke, but his eyes were steady and clear. He was so tall that Michelle had to look up to see how blue they were. She was the first one Robin had called, minutes after he’d been born, and she’d sat up all that night to finish the baby blanket she’d been crocheting. Blue and white, a basket stitch, and Robin had marveled over the match with his eyes.

  “Don’t you dare talk to me,” Michelle told Connor. “Don’t say one damn word to me.”

  “You wonder why I don’t tell you anything?” Lydia said. “You wonder why I despise you?”

  “This is not going to continue,” Michelle said.

  She left school, although dismissal wasn’t for another hour, and drove to Robin’s in less than ten minutes, probably ruining the gearshift on the way. Robin was out in the driveway, shoveling mulch into the bed of her truck.

  “What?” she said when Michelle came tearing up the driveway. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your son,” Michelle said. She was standing in mulch up to her ankles, and her face was so hot she looked sunburned.

  Immediately Robin thought car accident. She leaned against her truck for support. She used to worry about that when Roy worked at night and there was ice on the roads; sometimes she wouldn’t fall asleep until she heard him come home.

  “He’s the one that Lydia wouldn’t tell me about. It’s Connor.”

  “No,” Robin said. “They hate each other.”

  Michelle took off her jacket and tried to breathe deeply.

  “Don’t they?” Robin said, more uncertain now.

  “All this time, he was the one she was running off to meet. He’s like his goddamn father. I’d bet he’d fuck anything, just like Roy. But he’s not getting my daughter.”

  Robin took a step back. She refused to believe she had heard Michelle correctly. As a matter of fact, her ears were ringing; she could have easily misunderstood.

  “It’s up to you to stop him,” Michelle said. “I want you to keep him away from Lydia.”

  Robin looked at Connor’s bike, which he’d left near the back gate. just the other night he suddenly decided he would go see his father, or at least that was what he’d told her. Robin had been so grateful to have that time with Stephen that she hadn’t thought to question Connor. But then she’d happened to look outside as he was getting on his bike, and he’d looked so joyful, intoxicated almost, that she’d been thrilled by his youth.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Michelle asked. “He’s not to see her.”

  “It’s not up to me,” Robin said. “I can’t stop them.”

  “You’d better,” Michelle told her. “You started it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Robin said. “Are you blaming me?”

  “Because you always let Connor get away with murder? You never disciplined him, not ever. And now you’re more concerned with who you’re screwing than what your son is doing every night. And don’t tell me you’re not at it with this assistant of yours. I can see right through you.”

  “We’d better stop.” Robin was truly frightened of where this had led them. “Right now.”

  “Maybe I’d better call Roy,” Michelle said. “Maybe what’s going on is statutory rape. This is the sort of thing that runs in families.”

  “Maybe you’d better fuck yourself.”

  “Oh,” Michelle said, “is that the way it is?”

  Robin grabbed her shovel and started to clear away the mulch. Her breathing was coming too hard, but she refused to cry, and all the tears she might have shed went downward, until they formed a lump in her throat so large she couldn’t have spoken even if she’d known what to say.

  “Okay,” Michelle said. “Fine. That’s the way it is.”

  Robin kept shoveling while Michelle got into her car and pulled away. Once, a long time ago, they had painted a sign with tempera on a large piece of pressed wood—NO ONE ALLOWED—and hung it on the trunk of the tree they most loved to climb, the big oak at the back of the estate. For years it did not matter if anyone else in the world existed; no one was allowed past the gates of their friendship. Robin’s hands shook as she finished her work, but she kept on going, pulling the hose around the side of the house to wash the last bits of crushed mulch off the driveway. When she saw Connor and Lydia approaching, she turned off the hose and wound it in a circle so it wouldn’t get tangled. She knew enough to wait and let them do the talking.

  “We were going to tell you,” Connor said.

  Robin looked at her son and saw how young he was and how little he knew, and she wanted to weep. Instead, she wiped her hands clean on her jeans.

  “When?” Robin said. “After your firstborn arrived?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Lydia said. “That’s taken care of.”

  Lydia had always been this way, serious and matter-of-fact. When she was six she had asked Robin how she could stand to touch the bonemeal she fed to her plants.

  “Well, I would demand to know who those bones came from,” Lydia had said.

  Robin had thrown her arms around the girl, and although she felt like doing that now, all she did was nod and say, “That’s good.”

  “My mother’s just a bitch,” Lydia said. Her face was drawn; she sounded much too harsh and grown-up.

  But Robin knew this wasn’t the truth; it was simply that Michelle refused to see that not everything made sense, love least of all. In a little while Stephen would be coming back from the market—he had gone off to do Old Dick’s weekly shopping, and would drag home the groceries in the two-wheeled cart Ginny had used for marketing before the problem with her legs. Robin’s grandfather was extremely pleased with this arrangement, because Stephen always bought two apple pies, the fresh ones, from the bakery aisle, and together he and Stephen had somehow managed to convince Ginny there wasn’t a bit of sugar in the recipe. Nothing could be done once people fell in love, really; there was nothing anyone could say. Let a chart be printed up, predicting doom and disaster, and unfurled on the kitchen table. Let it be made out of steel and lead, and still it would burn up like an old piece of parchment. Every time she saw Stephen from her kitchen window, Robin felt some ridiculous, incurable hope inside her. Every time she set out the cobalt-blue dinner plates and the silverware, every time she kissed him, every time she saw the way he looked at her, it happened all over again. Who would choose to stop that? Who would even try?

  Lydia and Connor were both staring at Robin, waiting for whatever came next. They looked so nervous, standing there in the driveway, their schoolbooks tucked under their arms, that Robin felt the lump in her throat begin to dissolve.

  “Why don’t you stay for dinner?” she said to Lydia.

  The minute she’d uttered the invitation, she knew that if Connor had been just a little older, or a little younger, he would have thrown his arms around her. As it was, his look of gratitude would have to be enough. All she could hope for was that when it came time for him to judge her, he wouldn’t have forgotten what every boy should know. He wasn’t the only one who wanted something to last longer than a lifetime. He wasn’t the only one who knew how that felt.

  SEVEN

  FORTY YEARS AGO, GINNY Thorne had believed that her life was already over, and she couldn’t have been more glad of it. She’d been cleaning house for Mr. Aaron long enough that the house practically ran itself, and her girls were grown and moved away, and she could finally allow herself to consider how much she would prefer to die rather than continue with this thing that had been given her as a life. She scribbled good-bye notes to her daughters and left her gold necklaces in two white envelopes, with each girl’s name printed carefully on the flap to ensure that there’d be no arguing. Every night when she lay down and closed her eyes she said farewell to the earth as she knew it, and every morning when she opened her eyes and found herself still alive she cursed whatever power it was that controlled her fate.

  No one who knew her would have ever imagined the depth of her bitterness or guessed that she thought the
human race horrid and evil. She played bingo every Thursday night and seemed just as cheerful as always; once a week she took Mr. Aaron’s silverware out of the teak storage boxes and polished each fork and spoon, although no one had thought to use them since Mrs. Aaron had died. Had she been asked, all those years back, if she believed in heaven and hell, she would have had to say she supposed she did; at least it was true of hell, because she was condemned to it, of that she was certain.

  It was the little things that set her husband off—an apple not quartered correctly, the telephone ringing at suppertime, four rainy days in a row. She never knew what would anger Donald, and she wouldn’t know until bedtime—when the girls were at home he’d waited till they’d gone to sleep, growing more furious with each passing hour. He rarely left marks. Instead, he would twist her arm until the bones popped and pull her hair so that it came out in clumps. He would call her names she wouldn’t dream of repeating and make her beg for forgiveness—for what, it really didn’t matter. Once, he had covered her face with a pillow until she blacked out, and as she did, she assumed that the end had finally come, and she was grateful. When the life rushed back into her, she locked herself in the bathroom and wept.

  She might never have fought back if he hadn’t come after her up at Mr. Aaron’s house. It was a cold, rainy day and she was in the kitchen; she lit a fire in the fieldstone fireplace, which was so large a pine sapling could have fit neatly between the andirons, then set about mopping the floor. Every day before she left for home, she placed Mr. Aaron’s dinner on the kitchen table, since he didn’t care to eat alone in the dining room. Tonight she had fixed him lamb chops and peas, and she was about to pull the dinner rolls out of the oven when she heard Donald’s car coming down the gravel driveway. Only something awful, she knew, would make him come after her here instead of waiting for bedtime. Quickly, she thought of things she might have done wrong, but the list was endless, and by the time he walked through the side door, she’d given up trying to guess.

  “You whore.” Those were the first words out of Donald’s mouth, right there in Mr. Aaron’s kitchen.

  He began to berate her for leaving the doors in their house unlocked; he’d found them that way when he came home from the hardware store, where he was a clerk, and maybe they’d been left unlocked for a reason. Some man, that’s what he was thinking, in spite of the fact that at this point in her life, Ginny wanted nothing whatsoever to do with men. Donald was still good-looking, and he had a polite sort of voice, which made every wicked thing he said feel doubly wounding. But perhaps because the kitchen was larger than their own living room, and the wood in the fireplace popped, hard and loud, like a shotgun, his words seemed more puny than usual.

  “This isn’t the place,” Ginny found herself saying, and to her surprise, she meant it.

  “You’re telling me what to do?” Donald said. “Is that it?” This time when he went for her, she moved away instead of simply closing her eyes. Her back was to the hearth and she felt as though her blood were boiling. Years and years later she still remembered the intensity of her single thought: I will not let him get me fired.

  When Donald grabbed her hair, she reached for the iron poker beside the fireplace; a rush of soot circled toward her and blackened her face. He was pulling the hair right out of her head, and she was thinking that if Mr. Aaron had any idea of what was going on under his roof, he’d get rid of her in a second and then she’d be trapped at home, in a house she had come to despise simply because it belonged to her husband. She was in such a panic thinking of this that she didn’t notice when Richard Aaron walked through the kitchen door, drawn by the scent of dinner rolls. By that time Donald had grabbed her around the throat, as if he intended to break her neck, and that was when she hit him with the poker, as hard as she’d ever hit anything in her life.

  Donald staggered backward; his head had been smashed open. As he fell to the floor he went for her one last time, grabbing out such a large handful of hair that from that time forward Ginny had a bald spot on the side of her head. By then, the dinner rolls were burned black. Ginny stood exactly where she was, her shoes in a pool of blood, as Richard Aaron went to the phone and called the police. All she could think of was that she had just mopped the floor, and now it was ruined.

  “It’s Donald Thorne,” Richard Aaron told Sam Tenney, George’s father, with whom Aaron occasionally played poker. “He’s slipped on my wet kitchen floor and managed to crack his head in two.”

  “I killed him,” Ginny said, after Richard Aaron had hung up the phone.

  It was a simple self-evident fact, and Donald had always been irritated by the way she stated what was already obvious, but Richard Aaron hadn’t seemed to notice there’d been a murder. He ate a blackened dinner roll, then wiped the sooty crumbs off his vest.

  “The hell you did,” he said. He took the poker out of Ginny’s hand and held it in the fire, to burn away the blood, then returned it to its proper place. “He killed himself.”

  That night Ginny didn’t go home. She moved into the apartment above the garage, thinking it was only temporary, but then, when Mr. Aaron’s grandchildren came up from Miami, she stayed on and sold the house she hated, dividing the profit between her two girls. She remained when it became clear that Mr. Aaron’s son had lost all his father’s fortune, and even after Robin and Stuart had grown up and moved out it didn’t seem right just to leave. When the big house began to fall apart and there was no money left to repair the roof and pay for the heating bills, Richard Aaron moved into the carriage house with her, and the fact that he often couldn’t pay her weekly salary seemed perfectly natural as well. Through all that, they never said a word about what had happened in the kitchen, even though Ginny knew that her life had started that day. She’d begun to believe in heaven. Each morning when she woke up she found herself awed by the shape of the clouds, the color of the sky, and for that she had no one to thank but Mr. Aaron.

  One morning in October she woke with a headache, but she chose to ignore it. Later, when the pain spread to her arm, she knew it was another stroke. She’d had a series of little strokes that she’d failed to mention to anyone, preferring to think of them as blackouts, but this was a bad one. When Old Dick called for his tea, she couldn’t answer. When her older daughter, Nancy, phoned, Ginny picked up the receiver, then could make only small croaking sounds, as if she’d been turned into a frog. By evening she was able to convince herself that she was on the mend, but when she brought Old Dick his supper he wasn’t so easily fooled.

  “I don’t like the way you look,” he announced.

  “Well, that’s nothing new,” she shot back.

  Old Dick asked for the phone, insisting he wanted to call Robin, but in fact he was calling Ginny’s daughter. At seven Nancy arrived, and she and Old Dick both decided that the time had come for someone to look after Ginny. Old Dick asked again and again if the nursing home in New Jersey was good enough for Ginny, and her daughter assured him again and again that it was. Ginny’s suitcases were packed and brought down to the car. Still she refused to leave. She went into Old Dick’s room and locked the door behind her so Nancy wouldn’t interfere.

  “I’m not ready to retire,” Ginny said.

  “Fine.” Old Dick nodded. “You’re fired.”

  “You could come with me,” Ginny said.

  “To a nursing home?” Old Dick said. “What do you take me for?”

  She took him for the man who had saved her life and now couldn’t dress himself or get out of bed.

  “I’ll die right here,” Old Dick said. “And don’t worry. It won’t be for quite a while.”

  Ginny went to the side of the bed. She made a funny little sound as she approached him.

  “Don’t think you’re going to kiss me.” Old Dick’s voice was thin and brittle; he wiped at his eyes, which were teary all the time, just a bit more so now, making his sight blurry. He couldn’t really see her face as she leaned over him and kissed his cheek.


  “You’re a brave girl,” he said. “I forgot to tell you that.”

  And because Ginny knew Old Dick better than anyone else did, she never considered correcting him, although he could not have been more mistaken. He’d already told her exactly that at least a hundred times a day.

  The first woman Robin hired told Old Dick in no uncertain terms that she was to have every Sunday off. Her family would be coming on Thursday evenings for supper, she’d have to have cable hooked up to the TV, and she wouldn’t tolerate crumbs in the bedsheets or his nasty habit of pounding on the wall when it was time for his tea. He fired her on the spot, and when Robin arrived to see how the new housekeeper was getting on, there was Old Dick alone, munching saltines in bed. The second woman was younger, and nowhere near as bossy; she’d had experience in nursing homes and swore nothing the old man did would faze her. She lasted a weekend, and after she’d gone she sent Robin a dry-cleaning bill; Old Dick had thrown a glass of prune juice right at her, and his aim was still quite good.

  Robin had no choice but to take over. She came and fixed Old Dick breakfast, and while he shouted from bed that Ginny would never have put raisins in his oatmeal, Robin vacuumed and rinsed the dishes in the sink, then sat down and phoned everyone on the island who might have a lead on a housekeeper, preferably one who didn’t understand English and wouldn’t have a clue when she was being baited and cursed. But Old Dick’s reputation was such that no one gave her a single referral; there wasn’t a soul with the right temperament to care for him, not in this hemisphere, and certainly not for what Robin was able to pay.

  When she suggested to her grandfather that he come live with her—a desperate move, really, since she knew they would drive each other insane—he spat on the floor, so that was the end of that. She phoned Connor and had him come over late that afternoon, which would allow her to go see Stuart and discuss a plan of action, however temporary, for Old Dick’s care.

  “After you take him to the bathroom and sit him down, cover your eyes,” Robin warned Connor. “He doesn’t like to be watched.”