Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  Slowly she stacked the plates and placed them on the bottom shelves of the breakfront. From outside she could hear a peculiar noise, and looked out the dining-room window to watch Maggie come up the street, moving toward home, flat-footed and slow. It struck her again that Maggie walked a little like Connie’s own mother had, head down, shoulders thrust forward. “The weight of the world on her shoulders,” someone had once said to Connie of her mother, and it was true of her daughter, too. Otherwise, she knew, the two couldn’t have been more different.

  Anna Mazza had been built like a cardboard box, and Connie had often thought she had all the sensitivity of one. Maggie was always thinking, thinking, thinking, keeping silent only so she could figure out what made the world work. Connie didn’t feel qualified to tell her; she was still trying to figure it out herself. And so the two of them had sunk into silence just around the time that both had noticed that Maggie would soon be taller than Connie.

  Her cousin Celeste had assured Connie that this was the way it was with girls, that they should be put in the deep freeze until they were twenty-one, that every mother was made to feel she was a palpable insult by a daughter of a certain age. But all Connie could remember was how much she had loved Maggie as a baby, how the nurses would hold her up at the nursery window and perfect strangers on the other side would say “oh” with such conviction that small spots of fog would appear on the glass.

  Maggie had had a great furry head of black hair, navy eyes that seemed bottomless, a moon face, and two small violet bruises where the forceps had reached in and pulled her out. She had weighed an even ten pounds, and Connie, small and wan in her satin bed jacket, had felt that Maggie was her great accomplishment, the finest thing she had ever done. But the connection between herself and her daughter had slowly disappeared, until there were only memories of warm curves, of a little pink mouth working against her skin. When Connie had asked the last week of school whether she should order next year’s uniform blouses with darts in them, Maggie had seethed for three days, leaving the house for hours on end, discernible when she was around by the way she made the closing of a door or the placing of a glass on a table sound like something between profanity and physical violence. “You know why they call them growing pains?” Connie had said to Celeste, who sometimes seemed to be the only person she could talk to. “It’s because I’m going to kill her.”

  From the window Connie could see the length of the street, could see Maggie coming slowly toward the house and realized that the noise she had heard was the slapping of Maggie’s rubber flip-flops hitting the pavement. From this distance Connie was struck anew by the way in which Maggie favored Tommy, who was skinny, with one of those bony Irish-boy bodies that hang from the shoulders as though their shirts were still on hangers. Maggie was thin and bony, too, the moon face of babyhood now squared off at the jaw. She insisted on wearing last year’s bathing suit, even though it was too short for her lengthening torso and she spent all her time yanking it down to cover her butt. Connie thought of Joseph up in his crib, pink and wet in the heat, his mouth open, silver slug trails of saliva on the sheets. An hour ago she had stood over him and thought that the rift would come soon. Now he was her little love, warm and sweet, always ready to wrap his arms around her middle and lay his head on the pillow of her breastbone. Soon he would change, develop edges to his character that would come to cut the connection between them. It had happened with each of his brothers. She supposed the boys were down at the ball field, Damien trailing after Terence forlornly, although Damien hated athletics nearly as much as Connie did. The odd couple, their mother had thought as she watched them go, the elder boy dark, stolid, and so attached to his baseball mitt that he cradled it in bed at night, the younger as high-strung and uncoordinated as a colt.

  Connie put her hand up to touch her hair. She realized that she had gone all day without once looking into a mirror, and she wondered if there would be no reflection in the glass, as if she were a vampire. In the house in which Connie had grown up, there had been only one mirror, over the sink, and its silver was scarred and grubby. In her own house there were many more mirrors, but somewhere along the line she had stopped looking into them. The silence pressed in upon her like a damp hand.

  Connie Scanlan had been raised in the Bronx, and had never been able to adjust to what she considered the sneaky sounds of the suburbs, the hissing of the sprinklers, the hum of the occasional car, the children’s voices calling to one another, carrying so clearly that they had learned to whisper anything important. The city sounds had a primary color: horns, screams, the solid thwack of a broomstick connecting with a hard ball, the clunk of the ball coming down into the leather glove. The section of the Bronx where her family lived was considered a kind of suburb by them all, not like the Lower East Side or Little Italy. But it still smelled and sounded of the city. In Kenwood sometimes, particularly on summer afternoons, the street would be so still that she would be tempted to put South Pacific or some Sinatra album on the stereo and turn it up loud enough to drown the quiet out. But she was always afraid someone would hear; she didn’t want to give them one more reason to talk about her behind her back.

  She was sure they did already, in this homogenous place where the second generation Dohertys and O’Briens and Kellys lived after they married one another’s sisters, cousins, friends, and left the city behind. Only a few had muddied the blood lines with outsiders, and often those brave or foolish ones had done it to spit in the face of their families. Connie had not believed this was the case when Tommy had proposed to her, even when Celeste, big and bold as a helium balloon in bridesmaids’ blue taffeta, had said at the wedding, “This is a pretty elaborate way to make sure your old man never talks to you again. You sure you want to play Cinderella the rest of your life, kid?” Instead of fading with time, experience had intensified those words in Connie’s memory.

  The back door slammed as Maggie came in and dumped her damp towel on the counter. Her wet hair had made a big spot on the back of her blouse, and for some reason this made Connie angry.

  “Don’t they make you wear a bathing cap at that pool?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t work with my hair,” Maggie said, drinking water at the sink. “It’s hard for me to get it all inside the cap.”

  “So it gets wet anyway.”

  “No it doesn’t. I wear the cap and then I take it off when we’re ready to go, and I go under to get my hair wet.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Connie said. “You wear the cap to keep your hair dry and then at the end you take the cap off and get your hair wet? Does that make sense?”

  “You don’t understand because you don’t know how to swim,” said Maggie. “Everybody does it.”

  “If everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do that too?” Connie said, without even thinking.

  “You always say that.”

  “Hang this on the line before you leave,” Connie said, unrolling the towel with a snap. The red suit fell on the floor, and with it a flutter of damp dirty paper. Connie stooped down. It was a twenty-dollar bill. She picked it up between two fingers as though it was a bug. “How is your grandfather Scanlan?” Connie said.

  Maggie took the money and her wet things and turned away. “He said we’re all going to the house on Sunday. How come?”

  “On Sunday I am cleaning the linen closet,” Connie said, turning toward the sink. “Go hang up your suit.”

  From the window she watched her daughter fumble with the clothespins and slip the money into her pocket. It enraged her that even without being present John Scanlan could ruin her day. “Don’t you wake your brother up,” Connie hissed, as her daughter came back through the kitchen on her way upstairs.

  She looked at the sink filled with cereal bowls, coffee cups, Mickey Mouse glasses with low tidelines of orange pulp. Upstairs she could hear Joseph humming to himself. “Damn it,” she said, spraying detergent onto a sponge.

  A thousand times Tommy had told her
she was doing it wrong, that you were supposed to fill the sink with water and let the dishes soak. A thousand times she had shut her mouth and done it her way. She’d been doing dishes since she was seven years old, standing on the red leatherette seat of a stepstool, when there had been only her own plate and glass to wash. She’d washed her own cereal bowl before school and her own plates after dinner, while her father and her mother worked. Nobody was going to tell her how to do a dish.

  Suddenly there was a stultifying silence, oppressive as the heat, as the last earth mover working in the fields behind the house quieted, rumbled once like a death rattle and was still.

  Connie was a short woman, low to the ground, and even if she stood on tiptoe, she could not quite make out how much work had been done, except that there seemed to be great gashes in the reedlike weeds, and here and there a massive pile of fresh brown earth. A half dozen of the big machines stood at rest. For the first time Connie noticed that someone had placed two portable toilets at the far end of the field. The man who had been driving the last earth mover was almost at the back door before she realized he was coming to her house. Connie noticed that his gray undershirt was stained black beneath the arms with huge half-moons of perspiration. He peered through the screen at her, blinded by the dim indoors after the glare of the day.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Yes?” Connie’s voice was cold.

  “Could I trouble you to use the phone?” he asked, still peering through the screen.

  Connie opened the door a bit. The man had glossy hair, like an animal’s pelt, and eyebrows so thick that they looked like an amateur theatrical effect. He looked at Connie and Connie looked at him; for a moment they just gaped at one another, and then both started to laugh.

  “Connie Mazza,” he said, smoothing back his hair.

  “Oh,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Don’t tell me, I’ll get it. Don’t tell me.”

  He laughed again. “Martinelli,” he said.

  “I knew that part.”

  “Joe,” he added.

  “Joey. Joey Martinelli. I would have had it in a minute. Come in. Use the phone. Do you want a beer?” She started to laugh again. “It’s nice to see a familiar face.”

  “I knew you lived in the neighborhood,” he said, “but I swear to God I didn’t know this was your house.”

  “You’re working on this project?”

  “I’m the foreman. But we’re in such a big hurry that I’m driving the backhoe part time. We did six foundations today. I swear I thought somebody was going to have a stroke in this heat.”

  “You dug foundations for six houses today?”

  He nodded. “And we’re supposed to do six tomorrow. The people are in some kind of a rush.”

  “I don’t know why,” said Connie. “They’ve been planning this for years.” She pointed to the phone. “Go ahead.”

  She watched him as he dialed. He had the sort of muscles men developed from heavy lifting, and he stood awkwardly when he stood still. She remembered that he had been one of the good athletes when she was a girl, one of the nice boys in the neighborhood who always held the door if you left the drugstore when they did. She hadn’t known him well, although she had gone out with his younger brother a few times.

  She heard him talking on the phone about dinner. “Your wife?” she said after he hung up.

  “My mother,” he said ruefully.

  “How ’bout a beer?” she said, even though it felt strange to be alone in the house with a man. A noise from above made her start; she hadn’t counted the children, or even remembered them for a moment.

  “Thanks, but I gotta finish up and get home. We’re supposed to be done here by the end of the year. Nice houses, too. Laundry chutes. Disposals. Carpet. Not like these old ones, but nice houses.”

  “An old house is a lot of work,” Connie said.

  “Yeah.” He looked down at his shoes and at the grime he was leaving on the speckled linoleum. “Oh, boy, I’m sorry. My mother would kill me if she could see this.”

  “You’re right,” said Connie, and they both laughed again. As she watched him cross the fields she remembered that his father had died in the excavation of a subway tunnel somewhere deep beneath the surface of the borough of Queens. Perhaps that was why she was surprised to find him in this line of work. Or perhaps it was that she vaguely remembered he had been smarter than that, one of the boys likely to break free of the Italian immigrant tradition of dirt beneath the fingernails. His brother had worn aftershave that smelled like peppermint. And Joey had delivered papers to earn pocket money; he had brought the News to her father every morning. It was odd what you remembered, like her remembering those bruises on Maggie’s head after all these years. It was interesting to find that one short conversation with an almost-stranger had improved her mood immeasurably.

  Hot as it was, she stretched up to get the big bowl from the top shelf of the kitchen cabinets, and humming to herself, began to make a cake.

  3

  TOMMY SCANLAN STARED OUT THE WINDOW of his office in the gray-green cinderblock building that was the home of First Concrete. Below him was the lot where he and the other men parked their cars, and behind the chain-link fence was another, larger lot where they kept the cement mixers, great clanking beasts incongruously painted in red-and-white candy-cane stripes. At the moment there was a single cement mixer there, its hood up, its enormous greasy motor exposed like the entrails of a big animal, and next to the cement mixer was a black Lincoln Continental with a high-gloss shine.

  “Ah, shit,” Tommy said aloud, looking down at the big car. There was a faint tapping at his office door, and Tommy switched off the radio atop his filing cabinet. “Ah, shit,” he said again, going to open it.

  One of the mechanics, a squat, swarthy man named Gino, whose wavy hair looked like the ocean on a rough day, stood at the door in his red-and-white striped First Concrete shirt. All the men hated the shirts, but Gino was the shop steward and he never showed up at First Concrete out of uniform.

  “The old man is downstairs,” Gino said. The men never used a salutation when they addressed Tommy in the office; they weren’t sure whether to call him Mr. Scanlan or not.

  Tommy had failed to notice this particular semantic dilemma, but he appreciated the fact that they always said “the old man” and not “your old man.” It made Tom feel small to be reminded of his father’s power.

  “Did you tell him I was here?” Tommy asked, looking out the window.

  “Downstairs they told him they weren’t sure where you were,” Gino said. “I don’t think he’s coming up. He’s got us changing the oil in his car. Your brother’s with him.”

  Tommy could see his father standing in one of his gray suits, in the maintenance lot, looking at the disabled cement mixer. The old man turned and said something to the mechanic working on his car, and the man handed him a rag. John Scanlan wiped the striped side of the cement mixer, then shook his head. “Oh, hell,” Tommy muttered, lighting a cigarette.

  The stripes on the trucks had been Tommy’s father’s idea of free advertising; no one, John Scanlan had reasoned, would ever be able to mistake a First Concrete cement mixer for the cement mixers of Reliable, or Gatto Brothers, or Bronx River Cement. On the other hand, no one ever made fun of those other cement mixers, either. Sometimes, when Tommy handed his card to a developer, or a factory owner, or someone from the city who was looking for a couple hundred dollars in exchange for a contract to lay some sidewalks or pour the foundation for a school gymnasium, he would see a look of discovery pass over the guy’s face. No matter how often it happened, Tommy’s chest would tighten at that moment. “The ones with the stripes, right?” the customer would say. “The red-and-white stripes?” And the look of discovery would be replaced by a big grin. “Can’t miss those babies.”

  Tommy was in charge of keeping the trucks looking good, but he hated the stripes so much that he would let them go until they’d faded to pale pink and dirty gra
y. It wasn’t the ridicule; it was the reminder. “Look at me!” the stripes seemed to shout, just as John Scanlan always did. If Tommy had had his way, the trucks would have been gray. They would have looked like what they were: trucks that carried cement, not big pieces of peppermint candy on wheels. But Tommy never had his way. Sooner or later his father would see one of the trucks, on one of his trips around the city to have lunch in some parish rectory or another—“good booze at Queen of Peace,” he might say to Tom the next time he saw him, or “one more plate of corned beef and cabbage and I’m not going back to St. Teresa’s”—and the old man would be on the phone complaining that the trucks needed a fresh coat of paint.

  He never called Tommy directly. Buddy Phelan, who was the president of First Concrete and, not coincidentally, the godson of the monsignor who handled purchasing for the biggest suburban diocese in the metropolitan area, would come into Tommy’s office with a bemused grin on his face, and say, “Hey, Tom. Time to give the trucks a going over, whattaya say?” And Tommy would know that his father had called that morning to suggest that the man who owned one hundred percent of First Concrete, and who had the right to hire and fire those who worked there, did not like his clever subliminal advertising gimmick compromised by a failure of upkeep and a heavy layer of city grime.

  Buddy Phelan always assumed that Tommy hated him, but this was not true. In his heart of hearts Tommy hated no one, except occasionally himself, and he was pleased to be vice president of operations at First Concrete, a big title for a mundane job. If he had been the “big boss,” as the men who drove the trucks called Buddy, he would not have been able to chat with the workers so effortlessly when they came in at the end of the day, smelly and glad to talk without the roar of the mixer or the road in their ears. He would have felt constrained from going into Sal’s at lunchtime and sitting at the bar with a sandwich and a draft beer, putting in his two cents about the Yankees, the weather, or the coloreds. It would have been impossible for him to join the pick-up basketball games that took place across the street most afternoons, when he felt free and young and extraordinarily competent: dribble downcourt, push off from the knees, send the orange ball sailing with a motion of his wrist that had become second nature in Catholic school gyms, watch it sink with only that slight lisp of a sound that had given the shot the name “swish.” Basketball made him feel simultaneously like a man and a boy. Everyone nodded to Buddy Phelan when he left for the night, climbing into his Olds 98, but no one ever asked him to join them for a beer, except Tommy, when he had nothing better to do. He felt sorry for the guy.