Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “You’re crazy. The police will come now. We could all get arrested for this. Look at her. How are you going to get her home like that? What if her mother smells her?”

  “She smells good,” Richard said, and he ran his hand inside the back of Maggie’s shirt. “So what if we get in trouble? Who cares?” He turned his face to her, streaked with soot, smelling of gasoline. “What difference does it make?”

  “Deb, don’t stay here,” Maggie said. “They’ll be here soon. You guys are going to get in so much trouble.” But Debbie just stood there, staring. “Look at it,” Richard said, and he moved toward the burning wall. And then as though the fire had reached out to throw its arms around him, a flame leapt out and flared on his sleeve, played around his hair. Debbie screamed and finally ran from the house, stumbling, and Richard ran behind her, panting, coughing, falling. Maggie knelt down beside him, and by the light of the fire she could see the shriveled red flesh of his hand and arm, and his singed hair and eyelashes.

  “Ah, shit, Maggie,” he said evenly. And then he began to sob with great wrenching heaves. “I think I blew it.”

  A few steps away, Debbie was sitting on the ground, her head turned to one side, being sick all over her hair. Maggie went over to her. “You have to get up,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”

  Debbie lay back and stared straight up at the stars. “You tried to take my boyfriend, too,” she said, slurring her words.

  “Shut up. They could put you in jail for this. Come on.” She pulled Debbie into a sitting position and then hooked her arms beneath her armpits. Richard was starting to wail.

  “Go away,” Debbie said as Maggie pulled her to her feet.

  She went limp in Maggie’s arms and Maggie dragged her to a house across the street that was almost finished. Gently she lowered her onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor. “Stay here,” she said, looking down, but in the dimness she could tell that Debbie had passed out. Maggie buttoned up her friend’s blouse and then ran between the houses, leaping over pieces of lumber and discarded cardboard, trying to keep from falling. Her own house was still dark. She saw a light in the window of the construction trailer, and veered toward it. She knew someone was there; she had watched Joey Martinelli’s car pull up an hour before, moving with a series of little jerks like hiccups. Maggie had laughed out loud because it reminded her of the way her aunt Celeste drove, swearing at the clutch and the gear shift as she stalled in intersections, her middle finger stuck out the window as other drivers blew their horns and pulled around her. Then the lights had gone on in the trailer, yellow squares reflecting down on the dirt, picking up the little silver trajectories of moths dazzled by the beams. Maggie disliked Joey Martinelli, even though she knew in her heart that he was probably a nice person; it seemed that he was always hanging around, the edges of his mustache wet, half-moons of dirt beneath his square nails. She hated it when he asked about her grandfather. She knew that if her grandfather ever met Joey Martinelli, the man would barely be out of earshot before John Scanlan would start calling him a guinea. One afternoon he had come over to talk to her. “You’re almost done over there,” Maggie had said to be polite, pointing to the row of model homes.

  He nodded. “Shelley Lane,” he said.

  “You’re calling a street Shelley? Like Shelley Winters?”

  “Like Shelley the poet,” Joey said, his hands in his pockets. “Every street is going to be named after some famous writer. There’s a Dickens Street, a Wordsworth Street. The models are called the Emily Dickinson, the Lord Byron, and the Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Which one’s the Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “The ranch.”

  Maggie shook her head. “I hope no one who comes to see it has ever read Edgar Allan Poe,” she said.

  “The guy wanted to be an English professor,” Joey continued, “but instead he went into construction with his father. He says it shows the best-laid plans of mice and men do something or other. I can never follow half of what he says.”

  “Weird,” Maggie had said.

  Now she ran along the tamped-down dirt of the sidewalk until she came to the end of what would be Shelley Lane and knew she had to ask for help whether she liked Joey Martinelli or not. The construction trailer lay across a wide swatch of untouched land, a boundary of grass the developers had planned in the mistaken belief that it would placate the residents of Kenwood, when all it did was to make Tennyson Park seem like another country, like a raw-looking mirage floating over their backyards, distant and unsubstantial, somehow hostile. Maggie could hear music from inside the trailer, the Beatles in harmony, Paul’s strained soprano, John’s lower, thicker voice as the backdrop. “Things We Said Today.” There was a window in the door, and she pulled herself up until she could see through it.

  Inside, her mother was standing at a gray table, and as Maggie watched she pushed back her hair with her fingers and looked up at Joey Martinelli, a look of such intensity on her face that Maggie drew back. When she looked again Connie had her head down and Maggie could see that the man was arguing, using his hands, finally putting them on Connie’s shoulders. Maggie thought of the feeling of Richard’s hand moving softly over her collarbone. On the table was a magazine, the same issue of Life Monica had been reading on Sunday, the one with Paul Newman on the cover in an undershirt. Next to it was a half-eaten Three Musketeers bar. As Maggie watched, Joey Martinelli let his hands drop, and Connie looked up again. She took his big fist in her small hand, opened it, and placed something in the palm. For a moment it lay there, under the fluorescent light, and Maggie saw that it was a key. She wondered whether it was the key she had seen on the kitchen table that day she had found out her mother was learning to drive, or the key her grandfather had tossed into her mother’s lap, the key to the new house in which they were all meant to live happily ever after.

  Joey Martinelli’s fist closed around it.

  Somehow Maggie was not surprised at what she was seeing, only a little sickened, as she had been the time she had found the dress that was to be her Christmas present on the top shelf of the closet and tried it on, smoothing the skirt until she looked into the mirror and saw her mother standing behind her, her face soft and dark with betrayal and disappointment.

  Slowly she backed down the steps and went around to the end of the trailer. The car was parked there, a dark-blue Plymouth sedan, like the company cars that her grandfather’s salesmen used on their rounds, anonymous, undistinguished. Her grandfather always said you could pick out plainclothes cops in the city because they always drove cars like this; plainclothes city cops and the priests in the neighborhoods the cops patrolled. “Show me a priest in a Cadillac,” said John Scanlan, “and I’ll show you a priest who is doing things he shouldn’t.” Maggie could see in the light from the trailer that the car was empty. She peered in the window on the driver’s side. On the seat there was a pink cardigan sweater with little pearl buttons up the front, and another Three Musketeers bar.

  She heard the door to the trailer open, and for a moment she was still; then she loped around behind the trailer and made for her own backyard. As she reached the edge of the development, she tripped over a stray cinder block and went sprawling in the dirt, her knees and chin stinging. Turning, she looked back and saw the orange rectangle of the burning development house, and all around began to see lights go on in other houses. From far away she heard screams, and then she realized they were sirens, getting louder and louder. She ran inside the house, upstairs to her own room, and crouched by the window again and watched as the fire engines pulled in, the men shouting to one another to hook up hose after hose to reach the hydrant outside Maggie’s house that had been base for tag for as long as she could remember. “We’re going to need an ambulance,” one of them shouted, and then she knew she no longer had to worry about Richard. Someone stood in her backyard, watching, and then she heard the screen door slam, and footsteps running up the stairs.

  “Maggie?” her mother called in the dark.
Connie moved to the bed and felt the smooth cover. Then she turned on the overhead light. Maggie was facing the window, and her mother said “Maggie?” again and then stood beside her and looked down at her face.

  “Oh no,” Connie said. “Not you. Oh Jesus. Not you.” Maggie raised her hand to her own hot face and when she brought it away it was black with soot, and even she could smell the gasoline on her fingers.

  “How could you do this? How could you? Look what you’ve done. And you stink of booze.”

  “Me?” said Maggie. “Me? What have I done? What about you? What about what you’ve done? You’ve done worse than I have tonight.” Her head dropped onto her knobby knees and the tears streamed down her legs, but instead of cooling her face they only made it hotter. She felt as if she could not breathe and then she raised her head and wiped it with her arm.

  “There are rules,” she said in a treble voice like Damien’s. “There are rules. And if you break the rules you hurt people.”

  “I haven’t done what you seem to think I’ve done,” Connie said softly, and Maggie saw that her mother was wearing a clover chain on her head, and with one movement she rose and snatched it off and held it broken in her hand. Connie didn’t move.

  “There are rules you can break like that,” said Maggie, gesturing out the window at the orange glow. “And then there are the rules that are, are—” She began to sob and the flowers fell from her hand to the floor.

  “I wouldn’t break those rules,” Connie said. “That’s not the kind of person I am.”

  “What kind of person are you?” Maggie said, looking up, and then suddenly she saw herself, and it was as if it was the first time, as if she’d never passed a mirror, never seen a photograph, never looked into her own eyes, and she realized that no matter what she might do with her life, no matter how she might twist or turn or move away, it would be for nothing, that she could never escape, not just who she was, but what she had come from.

  “I don’t know,” Connie finally said, and the two of them stood in silence for a long time, watching as the water leapt through the air, putting the fire out, leaving an empty space in the row of new houses.

  The noise from the incongruous nighttime crowd—men in black slickers, police with their buttons glinting in the light of the fire, people from the surrounding houses standing in their backyards, barely visible, like a ring of ghosts defending Kenwood—gave way to the faint, unmistakable sound of the last pockets of heat popping into oblivion and the water falling from what was left of the wreckage to the blackened earth. The two women watched in silence. They did not touch or speak or look at each other.

  “That’s over, the fires,” Maggie said finally, her shoulders sagging beneath her white shirt. “I don’t want to tell you who, but I promise you it wasn’t me. Not this one. I promise you this one wasn’t me, and I promise it’s over. I promise.”

  She looked up at Connie and her face was wiped clean, and Maggie knew that her mother did not believe her, although she wanted to.

  “I promise you too,” said her mother, and Maggie saw that in some sense she might never understand, she had been right to have the suspicions and the fears she had had, and that this day, this night, was the end of a part of her life as surely as it was the end of the new house, now a tumble of glowing debris framed by the square of her window. Silently Connie turned and left the bedroom, turning the light off as she went, and Maggie lay down on her bed in her clothes. When she woke in the morning she was still in her shorts and shirt, but her sneakers had been placed side by side under her bed, and one of Joseph’s crib quilts had been wrapped around her.

  20

  WHEN TOMMY CAME HOME ON THURSDAY night it was already dusk. His dinner was in the oven, the plate covered with foil, and his wife was sitting on a collapsible lawn chair on the back patio, smoking a cigarette and giggling with her cousin Celeste. Tom stood in the kitchen, watching the moths flail against the screens, the fluorescent tube above the counter blinding him, so that when he looked out he could see the bugs and nothing more. He picked at the chicken and beans on the plate, licking his fingers and absently shaking salt over everything. He was not hungry.

  After work he had played one-on-one for almost an hour with one of the mixer drivers, running up and down the asphalt court until perspiration falling into his eyes turned him blind and clumsy. Then he had gone to the hospital and driven his mother to church, to a novena to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Even with the sun down, it was near ninety degrees outside, and Tom felt as if all his energy and hunger and fight had melted into a puddle on the car floor, right between the acceleration pedal and the brake. When he looked at himself in the mirror in the men’s room at the plant, a gray room with a persistent smell of Lysol, he thought of the old trick of holding a buttercup beneath your chin to see if you liked butter. Almost always there would be a pale yellow shadow cast by the flower, pale yellow like the color his skin was now, the whites of his eyes, the wet circles on his shirt beneath the armpits.

  Down in the basement, below his feet, he could hear the washer going. It seemed as if the washer was always going in his house. He smelled a faint odor of burning and wondered if the vent on the dryer needed replacing again. Then he remembered the fire the night before, already doused and dead by the time he came home from his mother’s house. He wished someone would burn the whole damn development down. Outside he could hear more laughter, and looking inside the refrigerator saw that four of his Miller High Lifes were missing.

  He did not like it when women drank beer. He even thought it was inappropriate for his mother to have Scotch on Sundays. Whenever they went out to dinner he always ordered a whiskey sour for Connie, and one for himself to keep her company, although he could never taste the liquor in those things. Sal said fancy restaurants didn’t use any liquor in drinks like that, only vanilla. He stood inside, drinking his beer, pressing it against his cheek. He did not like it when Celeste spent a lot of time with Connie. The rest of the time he could think of Connie as only his, his wife, nothing more or less. When Celeste came, he felt as though his Connie disappeared, in the way she had taken to doing. He put the bottle down on the counter.

  “Tommy?” Connie called, hearing the clink of the glass. Her voice was high and a little giddy.

  He walked to the back door, his hands in his pockets, and stood behind the screen like a shadow.

  “Come on out,” Connie said.

  “Hi, Tom,” said Celeste, holding the beer bottle by the neck.

  “Come out,” his wife repeated, and he slid around the screen door, trying to keep the moths from coming in. He knew he looked out of place in his dress shirt, his tie slack around his open collar, his lace-up shoes black and heavy in the heat. Even the lightning bugs were sluggish, blinking on and off in one spot for a long time. Connie’s beer bottle was turned on its side on the ground, either spilt or empty.

  “We’re celebrating,” Connie said. “Have a beer.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  “Celeste got married. Today.”

  Tommy stared at Celeste, who nodded. “At City Hall,” she said, with an Ethel Merman laugh. “On my lunch hour. Actually, I took two hours and had lunch anyway.”

  “To who?” said Tom.

  “His name is Sol Markowitz. You don’t know him. He runs a hat company on 37th Street. Mr. Mark’s Hats. I met him at the deli on Broadway. He’s very nice. Fiftyish.”

  Tommy knew this meant the guy was in his sixties. The last time Celeste had dated someone “fiftyish” he had died of a cerebral hemorrhage when they were at the track together and his horse had won.

  Celeste was wearing white toreador pants and a black sleeveless blouse, her hair in an upsweep. “You didn’t get married like that?” said Tommy.

  The two women started to laugh. “I asked her the same thing,” Connie said.

  “I wore a dress, for your information,” Celeste said.

  “Red,” said Connie, bursting into laughter and gro
ping on the ground for her beer bottle.

  “So?” Celeste said. “I’m not a kid. Besides, he already had the big wedding, the hall, the flowers, the whole bit. Thirty-five years ago. Who needs it?”

  “That doesn’t make him fiftyish,” Tommy said.

  “Picky, picky, picky.”

  “It’s not like she wants to have children,” Connie said, folding her hands lightly over her stomach.

  Celeste shrugged. “Sometimes it’s just time, you know? It’s time to settle down, get on with your life, act your age.”

  “Act your age?” Connie said, giggling. “You? Give me a break. Tell me another.”

  “How many beers have you had?” Tommy asked.

  “The enforcer,” Celeste said in a deep voice, picking up her bottle and taking a mouthful. Tommy flushed bright red.

  “Where’s your car, Celeste?” he asked.

  “The enforcer,” Connie said.

  “He’s sending a car for me,” Celeste said. “Sol is. He had business and I’m going to meet him at home.”

  “Where’s he live?” Tommy said.

  “Up in Connecticut. You two will have to come up for a barbeque with the kids. He has a pool. We have a pool. That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? We have a pool. Seven bedrooms. It’s nice.”

  “Celeste Markowitz,” said Connie.

  “Oh Jesus,” said Celeste to Tommy, “your mom and dad will love that. Don’t say anything, okay?”

  “Tell you the truth, Celeste,” said Tommy, pitching his beer bottle onto the grass, the faint beer buzz he got after a long hot day beginning right behind his eyes, “at this point in their lives I don’t think my parents would care.”

  “Get out,” Celeste said. “Your old man would care unless he was half dead.”

  “He is half dead,” Tommy said.

  “Tom,” said Connie, turning to look him in the face, telling him he was spoiling the party.