by Ann Hood
“Some grip,” Howard said.
Don’t let go, Elizabeth thought.
Howard wiggled his finger free from his daughter’s grip, and gently laid her in her crib.
LIFE WITHOUT HOWARD WAS the hardest thing Elizabeth had known. Rebekah cried through the night. New York City never had a hotter summer. During the day, an old pea green fan spit choppy hot air at Elizabeth as she painted. She was having her second show in the fall and, as she planned for it, memories of her first show that spring flooded her. Sometimes she had to put down her brushes until the images passed.
She had tie-dyed Rebekah’s outfit for the opening that spring, purple and pink broken circles intersecting, bleeding into each other. Howard had stood beside her, so proud that his eyes shone stronger and bluer than ever before. Later, Howard had told her that she had upstaged her own paintings, that was how beautiful she looked. They laughed at the man who showed up in a paisley print Nehru jacket with a fat white rabbit on a leash. When it was all over, they took champagne to the roof and drank to her success. And to their love. The city blinked at them.
Since he’d been gone, he wrote to her every day. She read the letters over and over, silently to herself and then out loud to Rebekah as she wailed into the sticky night.
At six o’clock every night, Elizabeth sat in front of the TV, an old Zenith that elongated all the images on the screen. Helicopters whirred, their rotors distorted so they looked like lava lamps, dripping into the jungle behind them. She scanned the pictures for a glimpse of Howard, even though she knew he was somewhere beyond all that, in a hot hut, where the war played in the background like a distant transistor radio. At eleven o’clock she looked again.
Elizabeth wrote to Claudia. “We want Rebekah to grow up free.”
“We’re looking for a farm,” Claudia wrote back. “Maybe we can all live there together. You can teach the boys about the constellations. All I can tell them is they’re both Libras.”
IT WAS WINTER WHEN he came back. The very end of winter. March. A day so cold that even in the apartment puffs of air came out of her mouth when Elizabeth spoke. She dressed Rebekah in layers of clothing, Elizabeth’s own knee socks over the child’s legs, the bright zigzags of yellow, pink, red, and purple climbing toward her hips.
Elizabeth decided to make vegetable chili. She sat Rebekah on the countertop as she chopped eggplants, tomatoes, and squash. The chopping helped to keep her hands warm. Every now and then the radiator hissed. Elizabeth had placed a bowl of orange peels and cinnamon sticks on top of it and the steamy air smelled vaguely spicy.
Rebekah pointed to the bowls of vegetables. “Yuck,” she said.
“Not yuck, Rebekah. Yum.”
“Yuck.”
The elevator door slammed downstairs. The gates pulled shut.
“Sounds like we have company. Maybe Mrs. Santini has brought us some more soup.”
Since Howard had left, Elizabeth and Rebekah had often eaten dinner with different families in the neighborhood. They were proud that Howard had gone off to war even though Elizabeth made a point of telling them that he was a conscientious objector. “He doesn’t fight,” she told them. “He translates messages.” Still, grandfathers showed her their World War I uniforms and their wives brought out sepia-toned photographs of proud sons in World War II.
“Soup,” Rebekah said. “Yuck.”
“No, kiddo. That’s another yum.”
Often, Mrs. Santini brought them thick escarole soup, full of chopped eggs and celery and carrots. “Usually,” she had told Elizabeth, “I put in little tiny meatballs, as little as this. But for you, I leave them out. Even though babies need meat to grow.”
“Can you say escarole?”
“No,” Rebekah said.
The elevator grunted and groaned toward them.
“Can you try?” “No.”
“Try, Rebekah. Come on. Es—ca—role.”
“No!” she wailed. Her face crumpled, turned red.
Elizabeth heard the elevator gates slide heavily open.
“Come on. Don’t cry now. Mrs. Santini’s here. Don’t cry.”
Rebekah cried louder.
Elizabeth scooped her up and carried her to the door. A knock.
“Mrs. Santini,” Elizabeth said as she opened it.
Rebekah pounded on her mother’s shoulders.
“It’s good to know,” Howard said, “that nothing has changed.”
He had lost weight. His hair had thinned. He had a thick short beard crowded with gray hairs. Howard drew them into his arms and underneath the smell of days of travel, Elizabeth smelled him. She buried her face in his chest and breathed him in. Already Rebekah had found his beard and clutched it as her cries faded.
“YOU CAN’T JUST QUIT the army,” Elizabeth said.
“I did.”
“How? Did you write a formal letter of resignation? Fight with the boss?”
They were in bed, under three quilts in the darkness. Elizabeth had lit fat candles, white ones, that sent round chubby shadows onto the ceiling. Rebekah snored loudly in her crib. They drank hastily chilled champagne, left over from her fall show.
She felt giddy. From the champagne and from Howard.
“I just quit. Stopped working.”
“What did you do all day?”
“Walked around mostly. Meditated.”
Elizabeth remembered them driving to Boston back in college to listen to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He lectured about transcendental meditation. TM, everyone called it. Howard hadn’t liked the little man in white with the flowing beard. She had. There was a simplicity about him, a kind of peace. “Oh, no,” Howard had groaned, “you’ll go off to India with the Beatles. Learn sitar music. Marry Donovan.” She had tried it for a while, repeating her mantra over and over each morning.
“Did you dredge up your old mantra?” Elizabeth said, clutching Howard’s hand under the quilts.
Howard laughed. “Funny you should ask. I ran into Paul McCartney in the jungle. He sends his love.”
Howard had found his peace. That was apparent to Elizabeth. She had found hers when she met Howard. And that balanced with the joy she felt each time she picked up a paintbrush. Life, they both thought, was all about balance, a perfect circle with all the parts equal and full.
“It was all wrong to be there,” Howard said softly. “Bob from the deli may have felt he was doing something peaceful, but I didn’t. It was all war. That’s it.”
In their months apart, life had become clearer to them. They both knew that living a pure life and not supporting the war in any way was the only answer for them.
Howard had decided to apply to a program in Japan to learn to be a potter. Elizabeth could paint the patterns for him. It was the perfect way to combine philosophy and art and lifestyle. It was a way to keep their circle balanced. And that night, sipping champagne together in the dark, part of the answer was in Claudia’s letter. “I found it,” she wrote, “a big old farm that, with a lot of work, can support us all. At least come and see it. There’s a barn and grass and a pond in the back—perfect for the kids. Perfect for us all.”
“We should go to see it,” Elizabeth said.
“A farm,” Howard said.
“Maybe the country life will make Rebekah smile.”
“Don’t expect miracles,” Howard laughed.
“Why not? You’re back, aren’t you?” “Small miracle.”
Elizabeth put her hand on Howard’s chest. If the room weren’t so dark, she would have seen gray hairs there.
“By the way,” Howard whispered later, “this dishonorable discharge means I can never work for IBM.”
“That’s okay,” Elizabeth whispered back, “I won’t tell Suzanne.”
THEY DROVE TO THE farm on the first Saturday in April. As soon as they saw it, they both knew it was right. A crooked crab apple tree was in bloom, its tiny flowers so delicate that Elizabeth could never quite capture them on canvas, though she tried for years later. A
lready, Claudia’s sons had filled the yard with children’s things. Scooters and trucks and blocks.
Howard picked up a spongy yellow ball.
“A Nerf ball,” Claudia told him. “For Nerf baseball.”
“Maybe I should stick to Frisbee.”
“Come on,” Claudia laughed, her red hair shining like a polished penny in the sunlight, “you’ve got to keep up with the times.”
All around them there was the quiet noise of the country—birds and crickets, someone sawing in the distance.
Simon came over the hill from the pond, wet and tanned, wearing only a pair of faded cut-off jeans with long strings dangling from the bottom. “Here,” he said, and handed Rebekah a small bouquet of wild daisies. “These are for you.”
She looked up at him and broke into a wide smile.
“That’s it,” Elizabeth said. “If he can charm Rebekah, he can charm anyone.”
“He charms me every day,” Claudia said.
“Maybe we’ll be in-laws someday,” Howard laughed.
“Let’s move in first,” Elizabeth said, “and then wait twenty or thirty years.”
They all watched as Rebekah let Simon take her hand and lead her up the hill.
Suzanne, 1972•
THE REAL ESTATE AGENT looked like Suzanne’s old Barbie doll—frosted blond hair in a bubble cut, pointed breasts, and tiny feet in spike heels.
“I think, honestly, you’d be better off in Newton. Or Wellesley.” The woman’s dark green eyes looked down at Sparrow. “I mean, the only thing you could afford, or rather, in your price range, is in an unsavory neighborhood.”
She leaned across her desk and pointed to a spot on the map she had opened in front of Suzanne.
“Like here.”
Suzanne didn’t look at the map.
“I think,” she said in a controlled voice, “that the South End is going to turn around. It will be an excellent place to invest in property right now. That’s what I do for a living. Investments, Miss Wills.” Suzanne could not bring herself to call the woman “Candy,” as she had requested.
“Please,” the realtor said again, “Candy.”
“Perhaps there’s someone else here who would be willing to show me the property I’m interested in.”
“I’m willing to show it to you,” she said quickly. The woman smiled. Her lipstick was coral. “I just want you to understand what the neighborhood is like. That’s all, Suzie—”
“Don’t call me that.” A flash. Abel caressing her hair, wrapping it around his fingers, whispering “Suzie.”
“I’m sorry. Suzanne. Mrs.—”
“Why don’t you just show me the town house on St. Botolph Street?”
Miss Wills unfolded a second map, this one of the MBTA subway system.
“You would have to use the Symphony stop on the T,” she said, pointing with her pencil and shaking her head. Her fingernails were perfectly shaped coral ovals. “Not a real safe stop. I mean, an attractive woman, alone, with a two-year-old child.” She shook her head again.
Suzanne could imagine Miss Wills—Candy—in Barbie’s black chiffon cocktail dress with the tight bodice and full skirt made of layers and layers of scratchy material.
Miss Wills sighed. “All right,” she said. “Maybe once you’ve looked at it you’ll see what I mean.”
Suzanne felt, more and more, the importance of planning. And Miss Wills could never understand how this property on St. Botolph Street fit into the plan. All through graduate school, cramped with Sparrow in a studio apartment in Brighton, Suzanne had taken the subway and walked all over the city studying the neighborhoods. She watched them rebuild warehouses in the North End and panicked because she hadn’t saved enough money to invest there while the prices were still low. Finally, out of school and with money for a down payment, she had walked around the South End, where old town houses crumbled and signs that read FOR SALE OR RENT were springing up everywhere.
Letters from Claudia and Elizabeth talked about them looking for a farm. They wrote about space and trees and fresh air. Reading the letters, Suzanne longed for the comfort of their friendship. She longed for the little house in Maine that was drafty with the ocean air. But after she read each letter, Suzanne tore it into tiny perfect squares. Sometimes, especially alone at night on the lumpy sofabed she slept on, she imagined them there with her. Somehow, they would manage to make her laugh. “The Queen of Weldin Hall in this dump,” Claudia would probably say if she ever saw the small apartment.
But to Suzanne, Claudia and Elizabeth were living symbols of her mistake. And she had sworn to leave the past behind her and start over. In a way, she paid for her mistake every day. She had taken on so much alone. And she had to make it all work, to come out right. Her old friends would reminisce, talk about Abel. They would show her pictures of their families, strong husbands, and children. It was too much for her. If ever she had to see them again, let them into her life for even a little while, Suzanne would show them how well it had all turned out. Otherwise, she would never be able to live with herself. It would be like advertising her mistake, making it permanent somehow. No. Someday, perhaps, they would see her as an accomplished career woman with a beautiful daughter who had turned out just right.
The management training program at the investment firm was the first step for her. Only the top five trainees would be offered positions at the end of the six months. And only the best of those five would move up in the firm. Suzanne was going to be one of them. And she planned to move up rapidly.
“Here we are,” Miss Wills said.
She parked her yellow Datsun but didn’t get out. The sidewalk was crowded with people on plastic and metal lawn chairs. Radios blared. Old men in sleeveless T-shirts and women in housedresses sat in front of the old brownstones that lined the streets. A pit bull puppy on a chain sniffed at the car. The air smelled garlicky.
“A lot of Puerto Ricans,” Miss Wills said, tapping her coral fingernails on the steering wheel.
Suzanne got out of the car and lifted Sparrow onto the sidewalk.
“Hey, lady,” a toothless man said, “you lost?”
“May I have the keys to the apartment, please?” Suzanne said. She stuck her hand in through the car window. The puppy sniffed at her and wagged its tail. “You can wait in the car if you’d like.”
“No. No, I’ll come in with you.”
They walked down the block and into one of the old buildings. As they entered, Suzanne halted right inside the doorway. She heard a buzz saw from across the street. She turned and looked out. The building there was being renovated. She smiled as she followed Miss Wills into the apartment. The ceilings inside were high, the rooms long and narrow. Suzanne could smell roach spray.
“A real fix-it-up,” she said. Already in her mind she was stripping the linoleum off the floor and replacing the torn and spotted wallpaper.
“It needs more than a little face-lift,” Miss Wills said. She pointed to the staircase. A broken banister showed splintered wooden spokes all the way to the top.
Suzanne removed a broken shade from the front window and sunlight streamed in. The brightness made the apartment seem even more faded and dingy. From outside, salsa music drifted in. She watched the workmen across the street, armed with ladders and buckets of paint.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
“What?”
Suzanne turned. Across the room was a fireplace that had been boarded up, the mantel painted a heavy green.
“I said I’ll take it.”
She scooped Sparrow into her arms and walked out.
AFTER ALL THIS WAS over, Suzanne promised herself a manicure. Her fingernails had all broken, her hands were full of scabs and fresh cuts and bruises. She had never hammered anything but a picture into a wall before this. She had never wallpapered, or sanded, or even cleaned so much. Sometimes at night she was so tired from her job that she wanted to just come home and fall into bed. But she never did. She picked up Sparrow at day care
, made them dinner, then worked on the apartment. More than once she had fallen asleep on the floor, surrounded by tools and wallpaper samples.
Suzanne looked away from her hands and poured herself another glass of wine. She had discovered hardwood floors under the layers of roach-encrusted linoleum in the living room. Her back ached from nights of scraping it off on her hands and knees so she could sand the floor underneath.
Exhausted, she leaned her head against the wall. My next apartment, she thought, will be new and clean. No one will have ever used the toilet. The shower will work. The oven will light without any trouble.
Suzanne closed her eyes and imagined the farm where Claudia and Elizabeth had moved. She pictured the crab apple tree, the pond, the hill covered with daisies. What would they say if they saw this place? she thought, looking around. Elizabeth would probably roll up her sleeves and start helping. She would know how to steam off old wallpaper and how to use the sander. She would know the difference between a chisel and pliers. Somehow, Elizabeth always seemed to know everything.
Sometimes, Suzanne blamed them for her situation. But she knew she was wrong to feel that way. It was all her doing. That time with Abel, with them. Thinking of it, she shook her head, as if to make it all go away. She had to make up for what she’d done. She had to do it on her own. Even her parents had made that clear. They had never acknowledged Sparrow. Last Christmas, in a burst of loneliness, Suzanne had sent them a cheery letter and a package with a small bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a box of Belgian chocolates. They sent her an elaborate card with silver snowflakes embossed on the front and their names engraved on the inside, the same card her father sent his clients.
Again, Abel’s face floated in front of her. There would be another man someday, when she was settled. Maybe he wouldn’t make her feel the way Abel had, but he would be more like her. And that’s what she needed. She would give their—no, her daughter a good life.
And then, feeling exhausted down through her bones, Suzanne cried. She cried for Abel, and for her old friends, and for the mistakes she had made that would not go away unless she made them go away. She cried because she hadn’t had the time to read Sparrow a bedtime story. Suzanne reached down. Her tears fell onto the sticky wooden floor she had uncovered as she pulled out one more crumbling square of linoleum.
