He buried her and everyone agreed the service was nice and the minister said kind things and people brought casseroles around for a while. He dusted the house and gave away her clothes to the church rummage and every evening he sat in the same chair his father had sat in.
Although he’d fooled around with a couple of local girls, dating Rita Kruppman for nearly five years, he’d never felt the pull to the altar. Rita was a fun girl, a tall raw-boned tomboy with a spatter of freckles across her broad shoulders and a sort of cute twisted nose she earned when she got walloped by her older brother Melvin’s elbow during a family game of touch football one Thanksgiving years ago. They had that in common, broken noses, although he’d broken his falling from his bike onto a curb when he was seven. He liked Rita well enough, and she wanted all the things a girl is supposed to want, in terms of family and such, but he kept putting her off.
After his mother died and there was no longer any good reason to delay, Rita told him it was a wedding or nothing. He couldn’t argue with her; he had no right to lead her on. She didn’t take it nearly as hard as he thought she might, which made him laugh. After all, who did he think he was? When she married Harry Cronin he shook Harry’s hand and kissed Rita’s cheek and danced with her at the reception and gave them a place setting from a china pattern she’d picked out at Field Hardware and Homegoods. And that was that, too; which was when he decided to go off to New York City and see what all the fuss was about out in the wide, wide world.
On his second day in the Big Apple, just as evening approached, he meandered along 4th Street and found himself in Greenwich Village, a neighbourhood of townhouses with tiny gardens, fancy clothing stores and trendy-looking eateries. He caught glimpses of leafy courtyards. An AIDs information clinic. Art galleries exhibiting bizarrely abstract works at which he tried not to gawk. Shops selling jewellery from around the world, and vintage (not used) clothing shops. The bookstores were bustling, the markets looked inviting. He walked along Bleeker Street to Christopher and down to Hudson, ambling, taking it all in. The streets were just coming alive and music drifted from the bars. The women wore tight black pants or blue jeans and their hair styles were either cut choppily close to their heads, or hanging straight and long and silky. Expensive, salon-streaked blondes and some with hair the colour of ebony, black girls with fantastical, architectural hairdos, cornstarch-skinned girls with hair of pink, or blue. Their eyes were ringed with black. Their ears were pierced and so were their eyebrows and their lips. The men looked pretty much the same. To Tom, who did not smoke, it seemed as though everyone else did.
He stepped unthinkingly into the street to take a better look at an interesting marble façade. A car horn jolted him from his reveries with a harsh, heart-thumping jolt and a bearded man in a black BMW swore at him—fucking asshole! He jumped back onto the sidewalk. So many cars, so many people. It might have been hunger, or a more general alienation, but he felt dizzy. He bent over, trying to get some blood back into his head. He took deep breaths and stood up slowly, blinking. Then he heard someone singing.
He knew the song, an old Irish ballad his mother used to hum. The voice was a hook; it pulled him by the ear and it drew him down the street to the open door of a smoky bar with the head of a white horse painted on its windows. Only later would he think how he had fallen under Patty’s spell before he even saw her.
The inside was dark and oak panelled. A postage-stamp stage was crowded with musical equipment—a drum kit and microphones and amps—and in front of this stood a tiny girl, with a mass of blond curls flying around her head. She wore a long skirt, made of some gauzy Indian fabric, dark green with silver thread running through it, a white blouse with a drawstring neckline and long loose sleeves. It was an odd outfit, in this crowd of tattoos and black-on-black. The outline of her legs as the lights from behind her shone through the skirt’s thin material mesmerized him. He wanted to run his hands under the material, feel the bones of her knees. A tidal bore of desire overcame him, the intensity of which was completely unknown, a voluptuous sensation not unlike drowning.
“Sit down, man, you’re blocking the view,” someone said, and so he took a seat at a table near the stage.
Her voice was bird song. Her voice was a mermaid singing. Her voice was perfume and wine and a soft feather against his cheek.
He ordered a beer. People chatted around him, half listening. They clinked glasses and coffee cups and ashtrays and he wanted them to stop, to pay attention to her, to respect her. A jewellery box lay on a stool beside her, the kind with a little plastic ballerina that popped up when, as now, the lid was open. Something about that box, the innocence of it, pierced him. A guy with thin legs and huge, military-style ox-blood boots flipped a quarter into it on the way to the bathroom. She smiled at the guy. Tom put a dollar in the box and her smile flowed over him like honey. He listened to her sing five or six more songs. He emptied his pockets of change.
“C’mon, Patty,” someone said. “Time for the next set.”
She closed her little jewellery box, looked Tom straight in the eye and said, “I’m hungry.”
He bought her dinner, and she ate with clear purpose, hunched over her food, making tiny smacking noises with her glistening lips. She put large pieces on her fork and thick slabs of butter on her bread. She ate a 16-ounce rib-eye cooked medium rare with the red juices pooling at the edge of the heavy white plate and lots of pepper. She ate two baked potatoes smothered in sour cream and salad and pecan pie with vanilla ice cream. When she was done she’d licked her fingers one by one, sucking for a moment on her thumb. He watched her over a beer. She ate his French fries. He couldn’t eat—all his senses were full of her. He asked her to come with him, back to his room. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?”
In his room overlooking the street, she stood with one hand pressed up against the window glass, her back to him. She told him her story. She was barely twenty and living in a haphazard relationship with a few people. They were “authentic,” she said. Poets and musicians. They were starting a newspaper. She sang for her supper. They lived in a cold-water flat in Alphabet City, but would probably be evicted soon. She told him there had been a couple of men in her life, in her bed. He thought there might be more. He didn’t care.
He felt enormous next to her, all hands and feet and bony shoulders. When he held her in his arms he felt he held blown glass covered in velvet. He touched his tongue to a tiny mole on the inside of her elbow and tasted vanilla. He circled her upper arm with his thumb and middle finger, marvelling at her delicacy, at the precision of her structure.
Now, driving on this deserted road in the middle of the night, he shifted uncomfortably, trying to rearrange his sudden erection. “Miles, to go, pal. Miles to go,” he said.
That afternoon, as Tom pulled into the driveway, he was surprised to see Patty’s dented Pinto already there. He had stopped into Ed’s Garage to get the spark plugs on the truck changed, then grabbed a quick burger down at Gus’s Corner. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Patty should be at work by now. Was she sick, he wondered? Something wrong with one of the kids? Ivy? The teasing? He’d tried to talk to Ivy about it, but she’d just laughed him off, said nobody was teasing her, what would they tease her about? He had to get a cell phone.
Rascal barked even before he closed the truck door. His bark sounded normal, just his usual dopey glee, nothing alarming. Still, Tom jogged up the steps. As he opened the door Rascal jumped up to greet him. Patty’s singing came from the kitchen. Nothing amiss then. When had he become such a Cassandra, expecting the worst?
“But the sea is wide . . . and I can’t cross over . . .” It was a sad song, but Patty’s voice rang out as pure as clear water.
He went into the kitchen and found her fussing with pots and pans. When she heard him she turned, and gave him a big grin.
“I quit my job! Just like that. It came to me during my
coffee break. I don’t have to do this. I’m not a prisoner. I just washed my mug out in the sink and I walked back into Mr. Wilton’s office, turned in my smock and said I wasn’t coming back.”
Patty twirled around the kitchen holding a wooden spoon in one hand and pot lid in the other. She wore a white, ankle-length dress he hadn’t seen in a long time. Her feet were bare.
“Free! I’m free! Free at last! Thank God almighty I’m free at last!” She spun over to him, smiling. Glowing. Then stopped. “Why are you looking at me that way? It was your idea. You said I could quit if I wanted to.” The wooden spoon and lid dangled from the ends of her arms.
“Sure. It’s great,” He tried to mean it, tried not to think about bills and clothes for the kids who grew out of them almost as soon as their arms were through the sleeves. “I just thought maybe it was something you’d do next year, or sometime . . .”
“You said I could.”
It was as though a screen door slammed. He saw her face there, behind a defensive metallic haze, her features fuzzy and guarded. He wanted more than anything for her not to hide herself.
“And I meant it.” He reached out to brush a curl out of her eyes, but she pulled back. “I meant it, Patty. We’ll be fine. The most important thing is that you’re happy. We’ll manage.”
She regarded him sternly, the way she looked at Bobby to see if he were fibbing. Then she smiled. “It’s going to be better around here. You’ll see, Tom. The house will be clean and I’ll plant a garden next month and grow our own vegetables. I’ll bake bread. Won’t that be great?”
She threw her arms around his neck, stood on tiptoe and kissed him in the soft hollow where his throat met his shoulder. He shivered and his arms went around her. She squirmed away and was back at the sink, gone so quickly he wondered if he’d only imagined the sensation of her lips on his skin, the smell of patchouli in her hair.
She made a celebration dinner. Chicken with lemons, green beans with almonds, rice and cheesecake, a bottle of cheap red wine, which only she drank. It was disorienting to have such a strangely formal dinner in this old house. Ivy made them light candles and wanted Patty to blow them out and make a wish.
“It’s not a birthday,” said Patty, laughing.
“Then it’s an un-birthday,” said Ivy.
“Both your Dad and I will be home now, when you get back from school,” Patty said.
“I want my own car next year,” said Bobby.
“We’ll talk about that when you get your licence,” said Tom.
“And then you can work for it,” said Patty.
“You don’t need your car now,” said Bobby. “Since you’re not working anymore.”
It changed in an instant. A sudden drop in temperature. A crackle of electricity. A draft. Ivy laid her fork on the table and clasped her hands in her lap. Patty’s mouth pulled down, the lines running from her nose deepened. “Listen, you—”
“Come on, now,” said Tom. “Not tonight. Celebration, right? No point in talking about cars just yet, anyhow. You don’t even start driver’s ed until next fall.”
Bobby mashed his beans into green mush. “I’m just saying.”
“It’s all right, son. Every boy needs a car. I get it. When the time comes.” He patted his wife’s arm. “Great dinner, baby. Really first-rate.”
Tom looked at the festive dinner and tried to get in the spirit of the thing. The candles in Chianti bottles. The kitchen transformed through the miracle of soft lighting to a place where even Bobby sat up a bit straighter and was willing to let an argument go.
“What is this?” Ivy said, holding up her fork with a beige sliver on it.
“It’s an almond, silly. You like almonds,” said Patty.
“No, I don’t think I do,” she said and put her fork down, scraping the almond slice onto the rim of her plate.
“I like them,” said Bobby. “I’ll eat hers.”
Tom tried not to think about money. No treats, no dinners out, and certainly no college for the kids. Bobby hardly seemed interested in college, but maybe. No chance now, though, even if his grades improved. Not on Tom’s salary. Unless he doubled up with a second job. Part-time maybe. At least in the warm months. Landscaping. He could handle that. Put something away. He chewed a mouthful of sticky, sweet-sour chicken and smiled at his wife.
Ivy became very quiet, even for Ivy, and in a way that was different from Bobby’s sulking silence. Ivy guarded herself, held herself close. She watched her mother as though at any moment Patty might do something else unexpected. The girl pushed beans around on her plate, built a nest for them in a pile of rice, and smiled whenever Patty looked in her direction.
All through dinner Patty chattered away about what she’d do with all her time now. Read Chekhov and Shakespeare. Grow tomatoes and sweet peas and maybe even potatoes. Take up quilting, or no, maybe she’d become a weaver. “I’ll bet you could make me a loom,” she said.
“I don’t know anything about looms,” Tom said.
“You can learn. We can all learn new things. Maybe I’ll move this stuff out of the dining room. We could put it in the shed. Then I could make it a studio or something.”
“That dining room suite’s from my parents, Patty. It’s good walnut. I don’t want it out in the shed.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Well, somewhere else then. You could turn the shed into a workshop for me. You could, couldn’t you?”
After the cheesecake was finished, Bobby stood up, and said he was going out. Tom said he was not. Bobby said he was meeting his friends. Tom said he was doing his homework. Bobby said he didn’t have any. Tom said he doubted that.
“You want me to call up your teachers tomorrow and ask?”
Bobby held his ground, glared at Tom. His expression matched that of the blond rapper stencilled to the front of his T-shirt, some absurdly rich kid named after a candy, from what Tom remembered.
“Up to you,” said Tom.
“This family’s whacked,” said Bobby and he stomped up to his room and slammed the door.
“I’ve done my homework,” said Ivy.
“Never doubted it for a moment, sweetpea.”
“Are you going to help me with these dishes?” said Patty.
And so he and Ivy did the dishes while Patty watched television. Ivy stood on a little stool and carefully dried each plate, each piece of cutlery, each glass, polishing each one and holding the glasses up to the light to make sure there were no spots. When they finished, they joined Patty in the living room and watched a program in which two sets of neighbours redecorated each other’s houses. Tom picked at the duct tape covering the tear in the arm of his lounge chair. Ivy laid on the floor, hugging a pillow, her expression intent, as though she really cared about valences and ottomans and shades of blue paint. Patty sat cross-legged on the plaid couch, sipping wine. At last it was time for Ivy to go to bed. She kissed them both and said goodnight.
After a few minutes, Tom went up stairs to check on her. As he passed Bobby’s door he heard his son singing a horribly off-key version of something he supposed the boy must be listening to through headphones. He caught a whiff of incense with a possible under-note of cigarette, wondered if he should look in, but then decided against it. Let the kid think he was getting away with something small.
Ivy was already in bed, reading a book called A Wrinkle in Time.
“You all right, sweetie?”
“Sure. The new light helps a lot. You don’t have to check on me all the time, you know.”
“I like to check on you. Good book?”
“Very,” she said.
“Don’t read too late, okay?” He kissed her head and then went back downstairs to the living room.
“She still scared of the dark?” said Patty. “She’s an awfully timid kid, isn’
t she? You’d think she’d be over it at her age.”
“She’s fine.”
He considered sitting next to her on the couch. She was a little bundle of knees and elbows and he didn’t know how he’d get purchase on her if he did. “Patty,” he said as he perched on the edge of his lounger. “Are you happy?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I want you to be happy. Is quitting this job going to make you happy? Happier?”
Patty got up, walked over to him and plopped herself down on his lap. “You’re the sweetest old thing, you know that?”
“Patty,” he faltered and started again. “I feel like we’re drifting.”
She took another sip from her glass and played with the button on his shirt. “The thing is, I’m just stuck, you know? It was like the whole world was going by my cash register, doing things, on their way somewhere and there I was, punching cash register buttons. Wasting time.”
“I don’t think having a family is wasting time.”
She put her glass on the table, put her hands up on either side of his face and kissed him on the forehead. “You never feel cooped up, do you?”
“You feel cooped up?”
“Well, no, not really, not like that. But you know . . . we could go somewhere.”
“Sure, we’ll take a vacation in the summer. Maybe go camping. The kids might like that.”
She stood up, walked away from him and stood at the window looking out at her reflection looking back at her. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
And try as he might, for the couple of hours before he had to sleep, he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He tried to concentrate on the kinetic television dialogue of people who were supposed to be running the White House but who never seemed to stop walking around long enough to actually get anything done, but he could hardly hear the actors’ voices, so loud were his thoughts as they flung themselves against the bones of his skull.
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