by Lee Martin
“Nothing like it as long as we live,” he said.
One by one, they looked up at the sky. They stood in the middle of the street and looked up, as if waiting for some blessing to find them, these neighbors, glad for now to be where they were, in each other’s company, on Thanksgiving, the way people were meant to be.
LOVE FIELD
ONE NIGHT, THE BABY DIED, AND A FEW DAYS LATER, THE MOTHER, Mrs. Silver, came to Belle’s house and said, “I want to talk to you.”
Belle had been fearing this moment, because on the evening the baby died, before she had known anything about it, she had put a card in the mail to the Silvers. CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BEAUTIFUL BABY. She had known the card would be hurtful to the Silvers. The baby had come home from the hospital with jaundice, and it was obvious, even without that taint, that she was unattractive. Then Belle had heard the news of the baby’s death, and she had felt stupid and mean. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have been so ugly, but so much had already happened before she decided to send the card.
The story started earlier that summer when, each evening, she tied back the lace sheers at her front door, eager for a glimpse of the Silvers’ first daughter, Naomi. “Sweet Naomi,” she often whispered. “Funny little Naomi.” She loved to say the name, her mouth rounding with the long “o” and then puckering with a kiss to the “m” as gently as the dusk curtained everything with its soft light. Belle welcomed the gaslights’ yellow blooms on the lawns, the silvery ropes of water arcing from sprinklers, the last red of the sky shrinking in the west.
Then, with a flourish that delighted her, Naomi appeared. One evening, she came in a bathing suit, her round little tummy pooching out, her feet covered with rubber flippers that slapped the street. Another time, when it was raining, she came on roller blades, a black umbrella held over her head.
With Naomi, it was always something. Privately, Mrs. Silver had told Belle that Naomi, who for eight years had been an only child, was having trouble getting used to the fact that she would soon have a little brother or sister. Sometimes Belle went to backyard cookouts at the Silvers’ house, and there she saw Naomi bouncing on a trampoline, tooting a toy horn she clamped between her lips. “Oh, that’s Naomi,” her father said once, with a shake of his head. She went down the slide into their swimming pool, a bowling ball held in her lap. She stuck her arms out to her sides and spun round and round in her driveway, shouting something she must have heard on a television program. “My fellow Americans,” she said. “I am an idiot.”
“You’re a pistol,” Belle said to her once.
“That’s me,” said Naomi. “I’m a pistol-packin’ mama.”
She came to noodle around with the piano, the baby grand Belle had bought for her granddaughter, Irene. But Irene was in Hawaii now, and there was that baby grand, its mahogany cabinet gleaming. “So she’ll play here,” Belle had told Naomi’s father when he mentioned, at one of the cookouts, that Naomi had begun taking lessons, but, after putting in the swimming pool that summer, not to mention the fact that a new baby was on the way, he wasn’t keen about springing for a piano, especially given that this was Naomi he was talking about, Naomi who flitted about from one thing to another like a bee, delirious as it drank from this flower, and this, and this. “Your little Naomi,” Belle had said. “You send her to me.”
She came each evening at eight thirty, saving the piano like a last piece of candy, a treat at the end of the day. After water balloon fights, bicycle trips, swimming shenanigans, soccer games, she came smelling of chlorine and raspberry-scented sun block, and, when she was finally there, she gave Belle a hug, her cheek pressing into Belle’s stomach—latched onto her, she did, as if she were dizzy with all the exertion of her day and wanted now nothing more than these few moments with Belle, alone in this house where the old Regulator clock on the fireplace mantle ticked off the minutes and the water garden in the atrium babbled and the piano waited to sound its splendid tones.
In her own home, Naomi told Belle, after the baby had come, there was too often the noise of her crying. “Wah, wah, wah,” Naomi said, opening her mouth wide and scrunching up her face in imitation of her new sister, Marie. “All the time. Wah, wah, wah. Please, just shoot me.”
“She’s getting used to being in the world,” Belle said. Marie had only been home a matter of days. “I bet you fussed and fussed when you were that small.”
“Oh, no,” said Naomi, with a grown-up earnestness. “I never cried.”
Belle could almost believe it. Naomi seemed so convinced she could tame whatever was before her, it was easy to imagine her untouched by misery or distress even as she first settled into life. Nothing daunted her. Belle had seen her fall on her roller blades, go scraping over the street, and get up laughing. Once, during a thunderstorm, Naomi had sneaked out of the house to collect hail stones, and one of them, as big as a golf ball, had thumped her in the head hard enough to knock her to her knees, but she was up in a flash, shaking her fist at the heavens, shouting something Belle couldn’t quite make out, but which sounded to her like, “Try it again. I dare you. Just you try.”
Oh, Naomi was full of the most outrageous stunts. She put firecrackers in clay flowerpots to see whether they would shatter. She climbed onto her roof one day, pretended someone had shot her, and fell backward, arms akimbo, onto an old mattress she had dragged out to the lawn.
The planet could barely hold her. At any moment, she seemed ready to escape its natural laws. But then she sat at the baby grand, and suddenly she was timid. She pecked at the keys, her fingers barely disturbing them, and the notes were faint in Belle’s ears, so faint they reminded her of the emptiness of the house now that Irene had gone. She encouraged Naomi to play with more gusto. “A little zip, please, darling,” she said. “Don’t worry. You won’t hurt it.”
Irene had played like a house on fire; she had banged the keys with stunning chords and runs, had shot them with one finger the way Chico Marx did in the movies. She played ragtime, classical, jazz. Day and night, she had filled the house with music. Then, in the winter, she had gone off to Hawaii instead of finishing her performance degree at the university. “Oh, Gran,” she said. “I’m ready for a change.”
What could Belle tell her? She was merely her grandmother, the one who had given her a place to live while she went to school so her father, Belle’s son, could save money on her room and board. He had lost so much on oil investments. Belle had even bought the baby grand with the last of her husband’s life insurance money so she could entice Irene into her home. “We’ll be roomies,” Belle had told her. “You’ll have the piano, a room of your own, home-cooked meals. None of that cafeteria junk. You’ll be on easy street.”
In the end, it hadn’t been enough. Irene had gone away with a boy who told her there were humpback whales off the west coast of Maui whose mating calls sounded like notes played on a bass flute. She thought it would be marvelous to record them. “I’ll always be able to play the piano,” she had said, “but how many chances will I have like this?” Though Belle wished her smooth sailing, she couldn’t help but feel betrayed.
She was glad to give Naomi the use of the baby grand, and later, when she had finished practicing, her favorite snack, a concoction called “Dirt and Worms” that Belle had seen Naomi’s mother prepare, a mix of chocolate pudding and crumbled-up Oreo cookies and strings of gelatin candy that wiggled like fishing lures.
“Like this,” Naomi said, as she showed Belle how to grub down into the pudding with her fingers, pull out a worm, tilt back her head, and drop it in her mouth. “Gulp it down,” Naomi said. “Just let it slide down your gullet.”
“Goodness,” said Belle. “I’ll choke.”
Naomi shook her head. “No, you won’t. And even if you do, I know the Heimlich maneuver.” She stood behind Belle, wrapped her arms around her waist, and squeezed, her little fist driving into the soft flesh just below Belle’s ribs. “Just like that,” said Naomi. “You’ll pop it right out.”
&n
bsp; When she finally left Belle’s and started walking down the street toward home, she sang a song Belle had taught her, the same silly song Belle had taught Irene when she had been that age, “Mairzy Doats.” Belle held the door open so she could listen to Naomi’s voice drifting out of the dark, a thin, dreamy voice, as hushed as the notes she played on the baby grand. “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey. A kiddlely divey, too, wouldn’t you?” As the voice faded in the distance, Belle ached for the hours to pass so Naomi would come again.
Then, one night, she failed to appear. Belle waited by the door as the Regulator clock ticked and ticked. Eight thirty passed, and then it was nine, and all she saw was the dusk turn to dark, and as it did, she became aggravated with Naomi, who had, she assumed, lost interest in the piano and forsaken her.
Well, as her father said, that was Naomi. Belle untied her lace sheers and let them fall across the glass in her front door. She turned back to her house, such a cavernous house now that she was alone. Her husband, when he had retired and built the house forty miles up the freeway from Dallas, had insisted on the two stories, the rooms and rooms and rooms they would need if their grandchildren came to live with them, as surely they would when it was time for them to attend the university. But all of them had gone to schools out of state, except Irene, who, like Naomi, had turned out to be a flibbertigibbet. Off chasing whales. The idea. As practical as the notion that their grandchildren would one day fill their house. Belle tried not to blame her husband, but there were times, when she felt the space of the house about to swallow her, that she couldn’t help but resent him for dying—a heart attack while mowing their expansive lawn—and leaving her with so many rooms and so many days to wander through them.
It was nearly nine thirty when the doorbell rang. Belle peeked out through the lace sheers and saw Naomi on the step, about to press the bell again with her nose. She held her hands behind her back and leaned over. Belle opened the door, and Naomi jumped back with a scream.
“Lollapalooza,” she said. “How about a little warning? I was just getting ready to ring the bell, Belle.” Naomi giggled. “Get it? The Belle bell?”
At any other time, Belle would have thought Naomi’s play on words endearing, but on this night, when she had waited and waited, she only found it irritating. “Don’t be fresh,” she said. “You’re late.”
“It was her fault,” Naomi said. She pointed back in the direction of her house, and Belle saw that she had wrapped each of her fingers with rubber bands. The bands were scissoring into her flesh, cutting off the flow of blood and turning her fingertips the color of pencil erasers.
“Whose fault?” Belle squinted out into the darkness, looking off to where Naomi was pointing. “Who are you talking about?”
“Yellow Baby,” said Naomi. The doctors had told the Silvers to make sure the new baby got plenty of sun, plenty of vitamin D. “We kept her out by the pool until the sun went down, but she still wouldn’t go to sleep. I sang and sang to her.” Naomi gave Belle a shy smile. “She likes it when I sing to her.”
“What did you sing?”
“The song you taught me.”
“Mairzy Doats?”
“Most of the time it conks her right out. But tonight.” Naomi rolled her eyes. “Oh, brother. She made me so mad I pinched her. Hard. Right on her fat old leg.”
“Oh, you didn’t do that?” Belle felt certain Naomi was exaggerating. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“I didn’t,” said Naomi.
“I knew you were playing the devil.” Belle took Naomi’s hand and led her to the baby grand. She sat beside her on the piano bench. “What will you play for me tonight? ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’?”
“All right,” said Naomi in a meek voice, and she began pecking at the keys.
Such a mouse, Belle thought. What was it about the baby grand that spooked her? “I can barely hear you,” Belle said. “Can’t you, please, give it more zing?”
Naomi lifted her hands from the keyboard. Her fingers, still wrapped in the rubber bands, were trembling. “Aren’t I pressing hard?” she said. “I thought I was.”
“You can’t feel a thing.” Belle felt her irritation return. “Look at your fingers. Take off those rubber bands.”
“Oh, I can’t do that,” Naomi said. “If I do, Yellow Baby will wake up.”
“That’s nonsense.” Perhaps, on some other night, Belle might have thought Naomi’s superstition charming, but tonight the hocus-pocus with the rubber bands was merely a further annoyance. “That’s just a game you’ve made up. How can you play the piano with your fingers like that?”
“I can’t play the piano at all.” Naomi put her hands over her eyes. “I’m rotten.”
It was true that Naomi’s playing, even though she had only begun her lessons, lacked the confidence it would need if she hoped to continue with it.
“You can’t be afraid,” Belle said. “The piano knows when you’re afraid and it won’t give you anything. Maybe you need to let it know who’s boss.”
“Like this?” Naomi brought her hands down on the keyboard, and the jumbled notes, the most forceful she had ever played, rang out with a vitality that delighted Belle.
“That’s it,” she said. “Yes, if that’s what it takes.”
Naomi was shaking her hands as if they were on fire and she was desperate to put out the flames. “That hurt,” she said. “I mean it really hurt. Yowza-wowza. I’m going home.”
She tried to get up from the piano bench, but Belle grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “You’ll be all right. It’s those rubber bands. Here, let me get them off you.”
Belle tried to roll the rubber bands off Naomi’s fingertips, and Naomi began to yowl. “Stop it,” she said.
She tried to wriggle away, but Belle had her own finger between Naomi’s and one of the rubber bands and it stretched out until it snapped.
Naomi’s hand flew up to her eye. “You’ve hit me,” she said. She jumped up and ran out of the house. By the time Belle made it to the door, Naomi was running down the street. “I’m blind!” she was shouting. “I’m blind!” And though Belle wanted to follow to make sure Naomi was all right, she saw neighbors opening doors, stepping out to see what the fuss was, and she couldn’t bear the thought of passing by them, feeling their questioning eyes upon her, hearing herself saying to them, with a wave of her hand, “Oh, you know Naomi.”
The next morning, early, she called Naomi’s house, and Naomi’s father answered in his subdued baritone that Belle always imagined might be the voice of God. Mr. Silver held an endowed chair in Peace Studies at the university. It was his job, in his research, to figure out why groups went to war. Whenever Belle listened to him, she got the impression that he could tame any unruly force with merely a word. Any force except Naomi, for whom he had no answer.
“She has a scratch on her cornea,” he told Belle. “Nothing serious. We’ll keep it covered for a while.”
“So she’ll be all right?” Belle had spent the night imagining she had maimed Naomi forever.
“A scratch,” said Mr. Silver. “She’ll be Naomi in no time.”
The musical lilt of the phrase, “Naomi in no time,” reminded Belle of the baby grand and how she had encouraged the girl to play with more pizazz. “She had rubber bands wrapped around her fingers,” she said to Mr. Silver. “I was only trying to get them off.”
For a while, Mr. Silver didn’t say anything. Belle could hear the baby cooing in the background. She could hear the chirr of the swimming pool filters, and she imagined Mr. Silver on the cordless phone, sitting by the pool, the baby snuggled against him. Finally, he said—and his voice was even more quiet than usual when he spoke—“That isn’t exactly the way Naomi tells it.”
“No?” said Belle. “What, then?”
“She says you got angry with her.” Again there were only the sounds of the baby and the pool filters and then a thread of static on the phone as Mr. Silver cleared his throat. “She says you tried
to slap her, and your fingernail scraped across her eye.”
Now it was Belle who could barely find her voice. “And you believe her? You believe I’d do that?”
“In my work,” Mr. Silver said, “I know that the truth is always somewhere between stories. One party says this, one party says that. What do we know? Only that we have trouble, and almost always each side is partly to blame.”
“Those rubber bands,” Belle said again.
“Who’s to say why Naomi does what she does?” Mr. Silver chuckled. “Don’t worry. She won’t bother you anymore.”
“If I could just talk with her.”
“I don’t think she wants to do that. At least not now.”
“Just a few moments.”
“Belle, I’m afraid I must insist.”
She heard just the slightest tone of irritation in Mr. Silver’s voice, and in that instant she knew what she had become, the old woman in the neighborhood whose granddaughter had left her alone, an object of pity, a burdensome test of the compassion of those who lived around her. She feared Mr. Silver would soon end their conversation. The thought of not being able to speak with Naomi—she wanted so badly to ask her why she had lied—while the rumor that she had tried to slap her spread through the neighborhood, left her desperate, and all she could think to do was to tell a lie of her own. “Naomi’s right,” she said. “I lost my temper. I feel just awful. Please, I must see her to apologize.”
But already, Mr. Silver had hung up, and all Belle heard was the hum of the phone line, which seemed to mock her admission to a crime she hadn’t committed, all for the chance that she might once again see Naomi.
Belle, if she had to admit the truth, had never quite taken to motherhood. She had never gotten used to the feel of a baby squirming in her arms, the heft of it slung against her hip, and somehow, she feared that her children had sensed her discomfort, knew it even now that they were grown. She thought it must be particularly true for Irene’s father, who had left home as soon as he had been old enough to join the Army. Now, though he lived in Houston, he rarely made the trip north to visit. He telephoned from time to time to let her know, in brief conversations, that he was well. Irene was as bad, throwing away her music studies for some wild expedition to Hawaii. Belle began to wonder whether the fault was hers. Did some lack in her, some inability to give herself wholly to people, end up driving them away?
