by Amy Bloom
By the third “fucking” he stopped bouncing, and then he just sat on the end of the bed, waving the photo at me like a little grey flag. I took it out of his hand and put it back in the black leather wallet he’d found it in.
“Where’d you get the wallet?”
He shrugged.
“Come on. You can’t go looking through people’s stuff and leave it all over the place.” Lessons in Rudimentary Snooping.
“In the thing there.” He pointed to the nightstand.
I wasn’t a genius, but at nine I knew the word for “nightstand.” Of course, because of my mother, I also knew “escritoire,” “armoire,” and more about Chippendale Chinese than most people.
I slid the picture out, looking again at her face, skinny little scared face with a big fake smile. I put the wallet back in the drawer, laying a pencil stub across it to make it look normally messy.
I was getting used to Benjie being naked. I didn’t even care when he left the bathroom door open while he brushed his teeth and peed.
I pulled the covers over him.
“Sit with me,” he said. “I’m scared of the dark.”
“Come on,” I said. I wanted to watch TV.
“I am. You have to sit with me. Max does when she’s not here.”
“Usually it’s your father?” I liked the idea of Mr. Stone’s being a great father.
“No. Her. Because she’s here. You know, she sleeps in here.” He pointed to the twin bed on the other side of the room.
“Your mother sleeps in here?”
“Yeah. Is that weird?”
“No. Maybe she sleeps in here because you’re scared of the dark. To keep you company.”
“Maybe,” he said, and he yawned.
“You can fall asleep now, you’re all right. Good night, Benjie.”
“Dobrounots, milacku.”
“Dobrounots, you doughnut.”
Scandalize My Name
“Let’s have a look-see at that right hand,” Mrs. Hill said, eyes on the ceiling.
“Vivian said absolutely no more pork rinds.”
I was fifteen, and in our two years we had one ambulance ride, two angina attacks, and more than a few sponge baths between us. After Pride and Prejudice, we alternated between the tabloids and the poetry of Mr. Paul Dunbar.
“Do you see Vivian on the premises?”
“Come on, Mrs. Hill, it’s not good for you.” There was no other adult I could talk to like that. My mother never did anything that wasn’t good for her, my father’s arteries were of no interest to me, and Mr. Stone, who knew something about everything, made it clear that we could talk about me but not about him.
“Who dropped you off? I heard a car door.” Mrs. Hill liked to think that her hearing was extra sharp to make up for her eyesight.
“Mr. Stone.” Very proud.
“Who’s that?”
“He’s my English teacher this year.”
“Why’s he dropping you off here?”
Mrs. Hill was always faintly accusatory. I shrugged, which I knew she couldn’t see but would feel, and started peeling carrots.
“Elizabeth, am I talking to myself? Are you in some kind of trouble at school?”
“No, I’m not. I imagine he dropped me off here because I was going here.” I spoke very slowly and clearly, to show her how stupid she was being.
“How old a man is this Mr. Who?”
“Mr. Stone. How should I know? Old. Do you want these carrots pureed or in circles, to go with peas or something?”
“He drives you home a lot?”
I sliced the carrots into inedible oversized chunks and went into her bedroom to gather up the laundry. She would sit and wait for me to come back. Her legs hurt too much for her to follow me around pestering me.
“Has your mother met him?”
Not on a bet.
“Your legs are getting long.”
I shrugged again.
“You stopped wearing your glasses. How come?”
“Contacts.” I loved my contacts. I loved the sharp world and I loved my eyes, edged in black eyeliner. I had scratched my corneas twice because I couldn’t bear to take the lenses out, except to sleep.
Mr. Stone dropped me off on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and after that, I tried to shut the car door softly, grabbing it with both hands to keep it from slamming, and as soon as I walked through the door Mrs. Hill would say, “Fool,” as though she were speaking to someone else.
Charlotte Macklin was the school social worker, and if she had heard Mrs. Hill, she would have felt better about me, She thought no one gave a damn that I spent all my study halls in Mr. Stone’s office and was frequently seen getting into his car after school. Mrs. Macklin knew, even if no one else did, that although it did not violate any school rule, it undermined morale for students and teachers to see a ninth-grade girl sitting behind the desk of the English department chairman, sipping coffee out of his thermos, showing her boot bottoms to the passing world. Mr. Stone had already heard from her, but I didn’t know that then. Mrs. Macklin looked at me knowingly as I skated past, her pale blue eyes narrow with concern, her handkerchief twisting into damp white loops. She sent me three notes, inviting me to a self-esteem group, to a girls-with-divorcing-parents group, and finally to a one-on-one interview to discuss my goals and expectations for high school. I declined, and she called me out of algebra, showing that she had not read my school records all that carefully. She asked how I was feeling about my parents’ divorce and I said fine. She said she’d noticed that I preferred to have my lunch in Mr. Stone’s office rather than in the cafeteria and I said that was true. We eyed each other for five minutes, and she sent me back to class. I told Mr. Stone about it, and his face got really red, which meant trouble for Mrs. Macklin. Mr. Stone and the principal were old friends and Mrs. Macklin was nobody.
By the end of May my parents were legally divorced. My mother took on a secretary, a yoga teacher, and a bottle-green MG. She was already talking about where I would go to college. She’d had enough.
My father moved further out on the Island, to a cottage in Sag Harbor, and came by for oddly formal, oddly pleasant visits. We gave up on eating out together after trolling up and down Northern Boulevard in his Oldsmobile, looking for a place to get to know each other, silently fishing broccoli out of broccoli and beef, anchovies out of Caesar salad, and raisins out of rice pudding, and discovering that this was what we had in common. He’d knock on the door and come in with bags of Chinese food or gargantuan deli sandwiches, so fat the white paper unwrapped by itself as he laid them down, crumbling slices of pastrami and corned beef falling out the sides, shining heaps of pink meat, enough for another meal. My mother had never liked cooking, but the kitchen was her domain, and it didn’t occur to us to eat in there or to put our big Polish paws all over the glass dining room table. The living room was out; I didn’t mind smears of Ba Tampte Kosher Mustard on the four-hundred-year-old Turkish prayer rugs, but even estranged, my father wouldn’t have it. We: ate in the TV room, surrounded by enough food for six people, and when my mother walked past she shook her head, smiling politely, as if my father were an extravagant, ultimately unacceptable suitor, as I guess he was.
He stopped wearing the navy blazers and light grey pants he’d always worn to make himself look like a German-barely-Jewish-almost-a-Warburg financial adviser instead of an accountant from Pustelnik by way of Brooklyn. He stopped wearing the ties my mother bought him every year, red silk prints of stirrups and foxes and unicorns. Now he wore denim shirts and cotton pants that weren’t jeans but were nothing my mother would have approved, and soft, goosey brown loafers, and he began every conversation telling me how great the air was in the Hamptons. He didn’t touch me much, but when he did, I didn’t flinch. When I was eight, we’d bumped into each other naked outside my parents’ bathroom, and as he gently pulled me off him I cried out at his trembling, helpless sac; I felt so sorry for him, appalled that that dangling, chickenish mess was th
e true future of boys. He was friendlier, away from my mother. She was the same. No warmer (I saw mothers put their hands to their children’s cheeks for no reason and wondered how you got a mother who did that), no cuddlier (not that I wanted cuddling now), no more interested in my life as her daughter than she’d ever been. My poor father belonged somewhere else, not the somewhere else that was right for me, certainly not the somewhere else of the narrow, balconied brownstones and stark glass apartment buildings that seemed right for my mother.
After he left, my mother put the moo goo gai pan and the shrimp in garlic sauce in plastic tubs and said, “Another shiksa in your father’s life? I daresay she won’t have to convert.”
Mr. Stone still picked me up after school most days. I was pretty sure I’d stopped growing; I pressed my knees one way and my feet the other just to sit almost comfortably in the VW’s front seat. I rode with my hands tucked between my legs. I put on lip gloss in his visor mirror. Comic book remnants and paper cups and cigarette packs covered my sneakers. One Tuesday afternoon, at the second light, I said what I’d been wanting to say since February vacation.
“I think it’d be nice if you met Mrs. Hill. I think she’d like to meet you. She used to teach, I think.”
“Really.”
“She said she did. Here, don’t forget, it’s the next one on the left.”
Mr. Stone said, out the window, “You know, I grew up in a place a lot like this. Mostly white, though—my God, look at those.” He pointed to twin blue-shuttered houses with orderly twin gardens and bitty porches, each with two chairs and a small plastic table set with four tall pink glasses and matching pitchers. “You smell that? That’s the smell of the South, right there. Mint, dirt, and cornstarch.”
I led him in, describing our progress so Mrs. Hill wouldn’t be surprised and pissy.
“We’re here, Mrs. Hill. I brought Mr. Stone, my English teacher. He thought he’d stop by and say hi.”
Mr. Stone didn’t look like he appreciated being shanghaied into the middle of Mrs. Hill’s blue brocade living room set. Mrs. Hill looked right at him, which was like turning her back.
“Welcome, Mr. Stone. Elizabeth’s famous English teacher. Honey, why don’t you make us some tea?”
I just stood there until Mrs. Hill flapped her hands a couple of times like I was a loose chicken, and then I backed out, watching Mr. Stone. He smiled at Mrs. Hill and flapped a hand too. I listened on the other side of the kitchen door, which was so thin I could hear Mrs. Hill sighing and Mr. Stone sighing back.
“Could you come a little closer? My eyesight’s not so good.” Mrs. Hill’s sweet-little-old-lady voice.
I heard him drag the ottoman over, which meant he was sitting a good six inches below her, putting them face-to-face. Ear to face, since Mrs. Hill was probably trying to get him in her sights.
“You’re not even a young-looking man,” she said, and I heard Mr. Stone laugh.
“No, ma’am.” He sounded different, Southern, not his classroom voice, not his smoking-in-the-car voice.
“Come a little closer,” Mrs. Hill said. “South Carolina?”
“Yes, ma’am. Kershaw. And you?”
“Mars, Alabama.”
The tip of his nose had to be denting her puddingy cheek for them to be talking so quietly.
“All the way from Kershaw. My.” For a minute, I didn’t hear anything. “And what do you want with my girl? You like girls in particular? Children?”
Mr. Stone breathed in fast. I wanted to rush in and hit her, and as she lay on the floor we would drive off to someplace pastel and foreign in our dark-red convertible.
“No, ma’am. I’m not like that. I don’t prefer girls to women. I’ve got a wife at home. And three boys.”
“Well, then,” she said, and I thought, So there, and wondered how close they were now. I could just see a sliver of his shoe tips pointed toward the recliner.
“Well, then,” he echoed. “I know it doesn’t seem right. I could lie to you, that’s what a reasonable man would do. A reasonable man, oh Jesus. I beg your pardon, ma’am.”
I heard Mrs. Hill’s wheezing and Mr. Stone’s deep cough and the clock on the mantel.
“I don’t do anything I shouldn’t,” he said.
“Except what you’re thinking, and you won’t stop that, will you?”
“Can’t, not won’t. How can I? I’m not leaving town, if that’s what you mean. And that’s what it would take, about three thousand miles. Could we throw in an ocean?”
Very softly, Mrs. Hill said, “We could throw in two oceans for all the good it’ll do you, and you know we should, because there is no glory coming from this and this is not a conversation about forgiveness. I don’t care how you end, that’s your concern, or your poor wife’s. You put one hand on that child, who thinks you love her fine mind, one hand, even when she’s more grown, and I’ll see you turning in Hell, listen to you pray for death. And don’t think I won’t know. That child tells me everything. So maybe you can keep your hands to yourself, and I won’t have to think so badly of you. Mis-tuh Stone.”
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t want you to think badly of me, and I don’t want to think badly of myself. I have no intention of harming her. You must see that whatever it looks like, it is love. And I have to say it is, in part, for her fine mind. I give you my word. Well, I don’t have much else, under the circumstances. I would cut off my hand first.”
It didn’t sound like it was so hard for him to give me up and just admire my mind for the rest of his life. He didn’t sound so madly in love with me that it was scaring him and Mrs. Hill. He just sounded happy to be talking Southern, the two of them purring along, word endings gone to nothing, their voices loopier and wider and sweeter than when they talked to me.
I brought in the teacups, went back for the spoons, and had to go back a third time for milk; Mr. Stone poured. Mrs. Hill told a couple of funny stories about the kids in her Sunday school class, all of them now at least Mr. Stone’s age, and Mr. Stone slapped his leg and laughed.
I walked him to the door, and he said my name and straightened my shirt collar. I lifted my shoulders to meet his fingers, and he dropped the little bit of shirt he’d been holding. Mrs. Hill said of course he should come by again, and he said of course he would hope to come again, without imposing on her hospitality, it would be a pleasure.
I closed the door behind him. She was already sighing and sucking her teeth, getting warmed up for something.
“That’s your Mr. Stone.”
“Yeah. Do you want some dinner? Turkey tetrazzini? You’ve got that three-bean salad from the weekend.”
“All right. In a minute. Come in here, Elizabeth. Are you going to make me shout all night?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, sighing at least as loudly as she had.
The ottoman was still warm, even damp, from when Mr. Stone sat on it and told her he loved me.
“He sure does like you. And you like him.”
“He’s okay. He’s a good teacher. He’s interested in poetry.”
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning / fair as the moon / clear as the sun / and terrible as an army with banners? Like that?” Mrs. Hill said.
I didn’t answer, just walked into the kitchen while she was reciting.
“You’re in the room, you’re out of the room, I know what I know. Were you eavesdropping?”
“I don’t care what you know and I don’t care what you said. I’m starting dinner.”
“Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”
I gave her the water and cooked and washed up while she ate, which took forever. I wiped up the bean salad goop and the turkey shreds and wiped down the counters.
“I’m going.”
“Be good. Be careful. You are going to thank me someday.”
I slammed the door.
Mr. Stone stopped waiting for me in the parking lot. When I went to his office, there were always other kids in it, kids who could hardly read, kids
waiting to show him their papers or ask for advice or just sit around with him. I ate lunch behind the field house until school ended, and watched the little kids at recess, and saw which girls sat by themselves near the monkey bars or the back steps. Mrs. Hill gave me the rosebud cup and saucer to cheer me up.
My mother established accounts with our four favorite food places and never made another meal. I didn’t tell her I’d learned to cook. She offered to send me anywhere for the summer—to sail in the Caribbean, to slop pigs and make jewelry in Vermont, to study architecture in Venice. I got a job at the Great Neck Public Library and boxed old magazines and stole old books. Mr. Stone didn’t call me.
In the fall I was in high school. In the middle of October I walked over to the junior high to visit Mr. Stone. I brought Tony DiMusio, who went with me everywhere for two months, until we exhausted ourselves dry-humping and made the mistake of having a conversation. I wanted to bump into Danny or Benjie in town and remind them of what a great babysitter I was, but I never saw them, although I looked in the comic book store and near the parks. Rachel got skinny again and we fell out over Eddie Sachs, who was supposed to be her boyfriend but asked me over to his basement when she was in Bermuda with her parents. I said yes and he told her what we did and she told me she would never forgive me even though it was only one time. When they passed me in the halls, they put their arms around each other and their hands in each other’s pockets and looked through me.
I studied a little, went on hamburger, cottage cheese, and hot water diets so my ribs would show under my leotards, and stole money from my mother. I bought pot from Eddie Sachs’ brother and smoked it under the football bleachers. It made me sleepy and compliant, and I stopped when I woke up in the dusk with my head on a rock and someone’s hand under my shirt. My father moved to Ohio for six months and came back. He said Cleveland was not the West and he was still working on getting out to the wide open spaces. I told him I might not go to college.
