Now she thought that he’d have to be dead to sleep through all this. She muted the TV and went back to the kitchen and dialed Nathan’s number. But there was no answer. She redialed and let it ring and ring this time, but he still didn’t pick up. On the third try she heard a series of shrill beeps and then a recorded voice saying that all circuits were busy. In the living room again, she perched on the arm of the sofa and watched the silent mayhem for a few minutes. Then she tried phoning Nathan once more, and got that same recording. What if he was sicker than he’d seemed? What if he needed help? Linda had never felt so trapped and helpless herself. If she wasn’t afraid of leaving the children alone, she might get into the car and drive to his place. There had to be a way to bypass the area where all the trouble was. If only the telephone lines were open, if only she could talk to Nathan, or Vicki, or Rosalia, or someone. She thought of waking Robin, just for her company, but she knew that Robin, awakened like that, would be miserable company, and didn’t Linda want to spare her the horror show still playing on the television screen? So she watched by herself and paced and tried the phone from time to time, and then she opened the front door and stepped outside into the mild, smoky night. The lights were on in almost every window around the courtyard, and Linda could see the nervous flutter of other television screens. Then she noticed someone lurking in the shadows near the apartment opposite hers. She felt a quake of apprehension, but she called out, “Hello? Hello?”
After a moment another robed figure emerged and stood in the dim glow of the coach-style lamps, like a religious statue. “Linda, is that you? It’s me, Regina, from 1J. Isn’t this the pits?” Linda had met plump, middle-aged Regina Clark several times near the mailboxes, where they’d mostly exchanged pleasantries about the weather. All Linda knew about the other woman was that she worked for a wholesale butcher (she’d once offered to get Linda a break on a side of beef), and walked her pet cat on a leash.
“It’s terrible,” Linda agreed, “and I’m so worried about my boyfriend.”
“Why? Where is he?” Regina asked.
“Home, right near where everything’s happening, and he’s sick, besides. And I can’t get through on the phone!”
“Maybe he’s okay,” Regina said doubtfully.
“I wish I could go over there and be sure,” Linda said. “But I don’t want to leave the kids alone tonight.”
“Well, I could stay with them if you want me to,” Regina offered, “but I think you’d be nuts to go out there. Just listen to that.” The sirens continued to howl obligingly in the background.
Linda hesitated; after all, Regina was a comparative stranger. But wasn’t Phoebe left in the hands of comparative strangers all the time at Kiddie Kare? There, two middle-aged, widowed sisters—Rose Petrillo and Angie Davidson—kept ten small children of working parents in their home. The sisters were licensed, of course, and Linda trusted her instinct that they were responsible and kind. She had no reason to think otherwise of Regina, and she remembered that rainy day in January when Nathan came so gallantly to her rescue and into her life. If their situations were reversed now, he would probably already be on his way. “Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?” she said. “I’d just see how he is and come right back.”
Regina followed Linda to her apartment, and they stood together watching the rioting on the television screen for several seconds before Linda headed for the bedroom to get her purse and shoes. “I’m not even going to bother getting dressed,” she said. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” But when she got to the front door, she turned around and ran in to look at the children one last time before she left.
In the car, she took a street map and a flashlight from the glove compartment, and tried to figure out a way to Nathan’s without getting too close to the rioting. Against the far-off sirens, her own neighborhood seemed eerily quiet. There was very little traffic, and no one at all walking in the street. When Linda finally decided on a route, and pulled away from the curb, hers was the only car in sight. Before long, though, there were others, especially police cars and fire trucks that sped urgently by. Linda pondered how often fate seemed to put her at the wheel of a car during difficult times, a place she dreaded being even when things were normal. This was like an extension of the nightmare she still couldn’t quite shake off. Why else would she be out alone in her bathrobe in the middle of the night, in the middle of a civil crisis?
There was a construction detour on the route she’d chosen, and she found herself in a narrow, bumpy rut of road between trenches, following glowing arrows into residential streets she didn’t know and couldn’t find on the map when she was able at last to pull over and look. Her flashlight flickered, the sirens went on wailing. She started out again, and soon realized that she’d passed the same house twice. She urged herself not to panic. After all, it wasn’t like getting lost piloting a plane; you wouldn’t eventually run out of gas and plummet to earth. The worst that could happen was that she would ride in circles for a while, and maybe get closer to South-Central than she’d intended. When another car pulled out of a driveway ahead of her, Linda decided to follow it, and soon she was in another area she didn’t recognize, but at least she was going somewhere. She tooted her horn at the car she was following, hoping the driver would pull over and give her directions to Nathan’s street, but he promptly picked up speed, and went right through a traffic light and disappeared. The sirens were louder and closer now; they were all around her, it seemed, and searchlights lit the darkening sky the way they did at Hollywood premieres. Linda realized that she was heading toward the conflagration, like a moth seeking the candle’s flame. She decided to turn back at the next corner, but there she was caught, in a single-lane, one-way street, in a cortege of emergency vehicles—a fire truck, two police cars, and an ambulance—with their lights flashing and their sirens going like mad. At first, she saw only the fire truck and one of the police cars, but as soon as she slipped in behind them to make her turn, the ambulance and the second police car came up quickly behind her. Everyone was moving so fast Linda had to go fast, too, to keep up and not get in the way. It was insane; with cars parked on both sides of the street, some of them double-parked, there was really no chance to slow down and pull over once she’d joined the procession. Please let me be dreaming, she pleaded, leaning earnestly forward and clutching the wheel. But she was alarmingly awake, all of her senses heightened by the incredible noise and lights. By the time they came to a wider street, where the Mustang could break away from the screaming pack, Linda saw that she was in the middle of the battlefield, inside the very picture she’d watched with such dismay earlier on her television screen. The buildings all around her were burning and people were running wildly in every direction. The air inside the closed aquarium of Linda’s car was steamy and hard to breathe. “Oh, God, oh, please,” she intoned, before breaking into a spasm of coughing. She drove very slowly, wheezing and crying, through the crush of people. She could feel their bodies brush and bump against the doors of the car. Then somebody banged so hard on the roof Linda jammed on the brakes and threw her arms over her head. When she looked up again, faces appeared at all the windows, shouting and grimacing, and the car began rocking back and forth on its springs. Linda’s immediate impulse was to step on the gas, but she was afraid she’d mow somebody down. So she honked, over and over again, as if she was stuck in rush-hour traffic. The horn made only pathetic little bleats in the general din; she could barely hear it herself. Then she tapped the gas pedal lightly, hardly enough to get moving, and the engine belched and backfired—once! twice!—like gunshots, scattering the crowd around her. She drove quickly through the hole they’d left, and out of there.
Later, looking at the news on television, she would recognize the street she’d been on. She and Nathan had been there together once on a sunny Saturday afternoon, to buy a leather jacket for him. Linda remembered the animal smell of the shop called Hide and Seek, and she imagined that when it burned it must have stunk like a slaughter
house. She was sure she would never be able to wear leather again, never again eat meat. Of course, her revulsion diminished with time. Within a few weeks, she could put on her shoes without thinking of burning flesh, and she could bite into a hamburger without gagging on it. That was the blessing of human memory, she knew, that it allowed the worst images to gradually evaporate, so that your spirit and appetites can return, and you’re able to live.
But that night, as soon as Linda arrived at Nathan’s street, she jumped out of the car and vomited into a trash can, until she believed the very lining of her body had been shaken out and emptied of everything—food, guts, emotion. She moaned and hugged herself as she made her way to Nathan’s building. When she got there, she looked up toward the second floor and his dark windows. If he had really managed to sleep through all of this, it would be one of those amazing, ironic anecdotes that people loved to tell. Once she got through this night, it would be something she and Nathan could talk about for the rest of their lives. Right now she just wanted to see that he was safe, and to feel that way herself again, in his arms.
She rang the bell downstairs, and when Nathan didn’t respond, she rang all the bells until some poor trusting soul buzzed her into the building. Upstairs, she knocked weakly on Nathan’s door. Again, he didn’t answer, and she gathered the strength to knock harder. She began calling him, too, with her eyes shut and her face pressed against the cool, varnished wood. “Nathan? Honey, it’s me! Come on, open up! Please.” But all she could hear when she listened was her own blood thumping in her ear.
She went downstairs to the parking lot and saw that Nathan’s car wasn’t in its designated spot. Oh, this was even stranger and more ironic than she’d imagined—while she was rushing here to take care of him, he was probably rushing in the other direction to see that she and the children were all right! It was something, she thought distractedly, like that story about the couple who sell their most precious possessions to buy each other Christmas presents they can’t use anymore. Staggering back to her own car, Linda laughed out loud, a short desperate yelp, like the sound a skittish dog might make in its sleep.
It took her a long time to get home—there were traffic jams everywhere and some streets were completely closed off by then—but the return trip still seemed easier, because she was calmer now and better able to orient herself. As she ran up the walk to her own front door, it occurred to her that she’d been crazy to rush out like that, leaving the children with someone she, and they, didn’t really know, someone who wore a bloody apron and kept a cat on a leash.
Nathan wasn’t there, to her acute disappointment, and Regina Clark was snoring loudly on the sofa. She seemed as innocent in her sleep as the children, who Linda hurried in to check. They slept, too, under her burning gaze—her angels, her demons. Back in the living room, Linda had to shake Regina to wake her.
She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Where am I? What time is it?” she asked. “Oh, shoot, I’ve got to walk Whiskers. How’s the boyfriend?”
“He didn’t come here?” Linda asked.
“What do you mean? I thought you were going there. I thought he was sick.”
“Yeah, of course,” Linda said. “I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m saying.” Where was he?
After Regina went home, Linda tried using the phone again, to no avail. Then she washed her face and brushed her teeth. Still wearing her bathrobe, she got into bed, intending to just rest until she could figure out what to do next. She was startled awake shortly after dawn by the jangling of the telephone, and again she sprang up from that same nightmare of fire. But this time it was true! She groped for the phone and heard Nathan saying, “Hello! Hello! Linda, are you there? Are you okay?”
Two people who’d worked at the Beverly Body Health Club and Spa died in separate circumstances the first night of the riots: one of the cleaners, a middle-aged man named Louis, was killed in a fire, and Kim, a seventeen-year-old shampoo girl who’d wanted to be an actress, was caught in a shootout between cops and looters. There was a discreet notice from management in the locker rooms a few days later, after it was all over, regretting the deaths and suggesting where commemorative donations might be made. Some of the employees clung to one another and wept, but the club’s routine of workouts, massages, lip waxing, and earnest laps in the rooftop pool continued as usual. There was a new charge to the atmosphere, though. People avidly exchanged stories and opinions. A towel attendant at the pool held court there as she proudly told a rapt audience of clients and colleagues how she had to be rescued by firemen from her building that first infamous night. Somebody suggested that it would make a great television movie. And somebody else, a producer who had been in Paris during the whole mess, reported how a close friend had almost been killed when her chauffeur made a wrong turn and skirted the disaster area. Linda, on her break, was listening politely and thinking how much better (and worse) her own story was, when she suddenly remembered a conversation she’d overheard as a child between her mother and a neighbor about President Kennedy’s assassination. They’d been discussing, in terribly thrilled voices, where each of them had been when she first heard the news. The neighbor was in a beauty shop getting a permanent wave that she claimed never took, because of the shock. Linda’s mother had been on a job, caring for somebody else’s colicky newborn. The baby had cried inconsolably that day, as if, Linda’s mother said, it was grieving for the poor dead President. Years later Linda found out that both women had voted for Richard Nixon, and had never liked or trusted President Kennedy. The women at the Bod were divided on the political issues surrounding the riots, and there were little flare-ups about right and wrong and good and evil, but that didn’t truly matter. The thing was, something was happening to them, at last! They were a part of, or at least close to, a historical event. That it was bad, even disastrous, seemed beside the point—they were horrified, but they also felt exhilarated, involved, alive. To her shame, Linda felt that way, too. People suffered and died in this, she reminded herself, and she slowly withdrew from the excited group and went off to her next class.
At home, Robin acted as if nothing unusual had taken place. Linda still wanted to protect her, but she had decided it was healthier to air things, and to let Robin express her own feelings. So Linda cautiously prompted her. “Isn’t it a shame we all just can’t get along with each other?” she said. But wasn’t she merely being hypocritical? After all, Robin had more black friends than she did.
Robin didn’t respond, but Linda went on anyway. “Why must people resort to violence,” she asked, “when it never really solves anything?” Robin only slid further into herself, the way she did whenever a touchy or painful subject was raised. And when Linda turned the television on, to let the commentators speak for her in their wise baritones, Robin switched it right off, grumbling, “News, news, and more stupid news!”
Linda contemplated telling Robin about her ride into hell, just to get her full attention for once. She hadn’t told anyone but Nathan so far, and he’d only deflected her questions about him by berating her for being so foolish. When he called that next morning, he insisted he’d been home all night, practically in a coma; that was why he didn’t hear the phone or her knocking.
“But your car wasn’t there!” she exclaimed.
After a pause, he said, “I know, that’s right. I lent it to somebody, some guy in my building. His car was in the shop.”
That was pretty hard to imagine—Nathan hated anyone touching his precious car. As Linda was getting ready to comment on that, though, he challenged her: Why was she giving him the third-degree? And what the hell was she thinking of, driving into the combat zone like that? She could have been killed! He was so upset he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
Robin, on the other hand, might simply resent Linda’s going off and leaving her and Phoebe in the hands of a total stranger. Or she might further demonstrate her lack of interest in anything related to Linda, who felt too tender about personal relationships righ
t then to risk another blow of rejection. So she gave up, and they didn’t discuss any of it, as if it had never happened, as if it all actually was only another bad dream.
13
Blood Will Tell
EARLY ONE MORNING IN May, Linda lay in bed nursing Phoebe and struggling to stay awake. She hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before, and there was the hypnotic drone of the endless shower Robin was taking. Then the baby paused in her steadfast sucking and bit firmly with her two premature little fangs into Linda’s nipple. At that same moment, the lullaby of the shower stopped in a screech of braked plumbing. “Ouch!” Linda cried, pulling herself free, and then watched in horror as twin pinpoints of blood welled up. The baby, of course, began to wail in the shock of her separateness. Anyone coming upon that scene would think that Linda had bitten her.
Indeed, seconds later, Robin, naked and with her hair streaming, trailed talcumed footprints across the floor and yanked Phoebe from Linda’s arms. “What’d she do to you now, Feeble?” she demanded.
Linda was certain that if Phoebe could speak, it would be in Robin’s fresh, sarcastic lingo. “What hasn’t she done?” she might have said. “You know that jerk can’t do anything right. How come we never have any money? How come she’s so dumb, huh? Did she leave her brain to science back in Newark? Huh? Huh?” It was almost as if Phoebe really had spoken those words, and Linda was stuck, as usual, for a satisfactory response.
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