Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  Dore and Nick were inseparable. They would take walks at night holding hands, nipping kisses back and forth like hungry teenagers. They’d go for drives and come back sharing the same pint of ice cream, using their fingers to feed each other. The few parties they went to at the community center, they never split up into the husband and wife groups the others made. Nick swooned Dore in his arms, romanced her with whispers, acted as though he saw no one else in that room. It prickled up feelings in the others—so that Flora strode purposefully across the floor and took her surprised husband’s hand; so that Harry Werner, the center manager, watching his wife smoking, her eyes irritated slants, went outside to stand helplessly under the stars.

  They made it so clear that they missed each other sometimes. When Nick was at home, he’d walk to the entrance of the court to wait for Dore to get home from school, a bouquet of dandelions in his hand for her. And when Nick was away on business, Dore seemed faded, a little lost. She’d work on the tomatoes she was planting in the back, laughing when someone suggested that all those plants would just bring bees. She’d sit on the cement porch that Nick had built and read, or correct papers, stopping to look out across the sky. When the phone rang, she’d drop the papers, not caring that they scattered in the yard for the court dogs to fetch and rip wildly, and then she’d be inside on the phone for an hour before she came out again, cheerfully shooing the dogs.

  They both tried to be friendly. The first few months Nick and Dore must have smiled at every face they saw. They both tried to strike up conversations, but nothing seemed to take. Dore even walked next door to ask Flora if she wanted to have coffee with her, but at that time Flora had her hands full making dinner for her kids; she couldn’t stop to get all caffeined up with a neighbor she wasn’t so sure about knowing in the first place.

  Nick began bringing home samples of the kids’ books he sold, thinking he could give some out since a lot of the families in the court didn’t have extra money for things like books. But when he gave a few to some of the fathers, they looked at him like he was from another planet, they flipped the books over and over in their hands before grudgingly accepting. When Nick passed by the women, he tried to small-talk and tease a smile from them, but they dismissed him with curt nods. Yet for all their seeming disinterest, he couldn’t help noticing that every time he got into his car, a shade would flutter; that every time he came home after a few days on the road, the women talking in one of the front yards would go silent for a minute—they’d listen to how he greeted Dore, how she greeted him. It was as if they were piecing together his life for him, making it into a drama he wasn’t to participate in.

  The lack of community really bothered Nick. He bound tighter to Dore and he concentrated on his work. Although he missed her when he was away—although every bookshop and library he walked into reminded him that she was elsewhere—sometimes, too, he’d feel this odd stab of relief when he got into his car and pulled out of the court, when he saw the whole block quietly receding into his rearview mirror.

  And then, just six months after they had moved into the court, Dore got pregnant, and everything changed.

  The stories Dore would later tell Robin always started at this time, when she was the happiest, living in the trailer court with Nick and newly pregnant, basking in a time when love seemed as much an unending miracle as the baby within her. Nick got her a great doctor in New York City and watched her as if she were breakable. She felt smooth and calm and absolutely anchored to her life with him.

  She remembered it all—how her pregnancy had changed things, how it had made all the women in the court suddenly friendly to her. Flora had come over first, balancing a home-baked ginger cake in one hand, a spool of new white thread fisted in her spare. She told Dore she knew how to tell the sex of a child before it was born just by the way a section of thread swayed over your belly; it was something her own mother had handed down to her. It didn’t matter how early a pregnancy was, it didn’t even matter if you knew you were pregnant, the thread would sway rightside for a girl, list left for boy. Flora’s own mother used to put the thread over Flora’s belly every Friday night when she came home from a date, checking, making sure all those kisses Flora was collecting weren’t so sugared up they were causing danger.

  Dore didn’t believe one thing about the thread, but Flora had hardly spoken to her since she and Nick had moved in. Dore placed the cake on the kitchen counter and followed Flora over to one of the sunny benches by the community center. She sat beside Flora and watched her lazily unwind the thread, testing its flutter in the wind. It was silly business, but even so, Dore closed her eyes, letting Flora’s features fade. She found herself taking a breath and holding on to it. She felt the long, loose drift of Flora’s sleeve moving across her, and then nothing. And it was the nothing—the clear emptiness of the moment—that made her jerk her eyes open. Flora was rewinding the thread, carefully wrapping it tight, her face lowered. “Flora,” Dore said, and Flora looked up, smiling. “You got yourself the best,” she said generously. “You got one of your own kind.”

  Dore told Nick, who laughed. Flora told the other women, who began trickling over Saturdays, when Dore didn’t teach. They sat on the floor pillows, eating the pies they had brought over, and they gave Dore advice. They told her to quit her job, that even an unborn child could use some tending. “I never understood why you worked anyhow,” Flora said. “You sure don’t look like it’s a need or anything.”

  “I like to,” Dore said.

  Flora looked at the other women, blinking.

  Dore found she liked the trailer women coming over. She looked forward to their visits. She was nervous sometimes about being pregnant, and they offered support, they opened up their lives to her like training manuals she could keep referring to. They brought over old baby books, the pages turned back and underlined, mottled with formula, and Dore would touch the stains with one finger and think: I’m tracing a life. The women brought her their kids’ old baby clothing, the toys their kids no longer had any use for. They told her how wonderful children were, how there was nothing in the whole wide world nearly so special as being a mother. Ruby Tyler, Flora’s best friend, told Dore that childbirth pain was like a blink. You forgot it as soon as you had the baby; it erased itself into the strong new life of a child that loved you before its eyes were even opened.

  Ruby had five girls of her own, and she kept bringing Dore bags and bags of her old maternity clothing. Ruby was a big woman, with heavy black hair she cropped short. She favored lace and ruffles, the kind of cheap synthetics that felt spongy and dead in Dore’s fingers. There were sweet prints Dore wouldn’t be caught dead in, fluorescent plaids that made her ill just looking at them.

  Ruby insisted on showing Dore every item, fishing in the bags, plucking out dresses and pants and smoothing them flat across her body so Dore could see. She kept up an energetic commentary the whole time she was modeling the clothing. All Dore would have to do was hem a few things, maybe take them in a bit. Later, after she had the baby, she could still wear the dresses just by investing in a few belts or using a bright scarf or two to cinch back a waist.

  Dore was politely grateful. She cared more for the company, for the advice, than for the clothing, and she needed to keep Ruby as her friend. She waited until Ruby had gone before she stuffed the clothes back into the bags, into her closet.

  She never wore any of Ruby’s dresses, even when she was swelling up with baby, but Ruby kept bringing her things. Shoes with the toes cut away because Ruby said your feet swelled during pregnancy. Stained robes she claimed were perfect for feeding a messy baby. What did you have to look good for? Who would see you? Babies didn’t care a hoot, and you didn’t want to be attracting any male attention; when you needed all your energy for caring for a baby, you didn’t want to be starting up another. Dore was amused, but she said nothing.

  The bags of clothing began taking up all the closet space they had. She didn’t want to hurt Ruby’s feelings, so she
waited until night to pack up the car, and then she dropped everything into the Goodwill box by the market.

  Every time Nick came home, there were women in the place, talking, laughing with Dore, glancing up at him when he passed. No one stayed long after Nick came home, and when he asked Dore what they had been talking about, she just laughed at him, told him it was just woman talk.

  Woman talk. But he was involved, too. This was his son, his daughter. These were his cells bonding up with Dore’s in a connection so permanent it never ceased to amaze him. Every time he reached for her at night, he thought about it. He kept tracing his hands over her belly, resting his head gently on the swelling, and whispering down to the fetus.

  Dore laughed. “Hey, what’s going on down there?” she asked, soothing his hair with her fingers.

  “Top secret,” Nick said. “Strictly between me and my baby.”

  He whispered stories to the fetus, having read somewhere that life always recognized life; that even a fetus might respond and remember. He told the baby who he was, how he felt, how he was going to be the most spectacular father the world had ever seen. There would be stories written about him in Time and Newsweek; there’d be other kids clamoring for him to be their father, but he’d have eyes only for his own. He told the baby he’d never leave it, never let it feel unloved or lost or lonely or set apart—no, not for one second. And then he drew himself up and looked at Dore’s smiling face and he began tenderly stroking her breasts, her face, the curve of her back. He rolled her into lovemaking, all the time feeling that he was somehow making love to his child as well, and that it was all right this way, it was just the three of them all connecting at once.

  He wanted to talk to everyone about his baby, but the trailer women withdrew when he sat with them, and the men didn’t do more than offer congratulations. Except for Flora’s husband, Bill, who told him where he might find some innocent pleasures when Dore got too big with baby—girls, he said, who were clean and would do whatever you wanted without stitching up their faces and making you feel guilty about even asking.

  So Nick went further—he began confiding in his clients, courting their advice. The men handed him birth books put out by various women’s groups; the women all told him they swore by Dr. Spock. He liked it better when they told him about their own experiences: when the men talked about their wives giving birth quickly, without pain, and said how wonderful their babies had been, how much fun. His women clients pulled out photo after photo of their kids and, prompted by Nick’s giddy pleasure, asked to see Dore’s. “Oh, such a lovely wife!” they said.

  It made him think, it made him unsure. He and Dore had never really thought about marriage. At least, she had never pressed him, and he had felt so bonded to her, it seemed unnecessary. Besides, the paperwork made him think of all the social workers he had had back at the home, made him think about the whole trapped way the place had made him feel, and he got suddenly uneasy and restless, suddenly almost angry with Dore, as if she had brought that feeling back to life.

  He told himself to forget it, that what a baby needed was love and parents, not paper, and he roamed the stores for baby things, for toys and sweaters. It was only when he was leaving that he passed the jewelry counter, and he stopped, looking down at the shimmery gold bands. One set was very cheap, and when he bought them, he told himself it was just as a token, that it didn’t have to mean anything. He brought them home and hid them in Dore’s top drawer, under the cucumber cream she smoothed on her belly at night because she was worried about stretch marks. When she was finally ready for bed, when she saw the rings, her face went funny. She sat down on the bed.

  “It’s because of the baby, isn’t it?” she said. “I can’t have you marrying me just because of the baby.”

  “That’s not it,” he said, but she shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I couldn’t be sure of that.”

  “I could,” he said, but she wouldn’t listen to him. She carefully wrapped the rings back up in the tissue and put them back in the drawer, and then she curled up around him.

  “I’ll take them back,” he said, but she shook her head again.

  “We’ll keep them,” she said. “For when I’m ready.”

  “Okay,” he said, dipping to kiss her, suddenly light with relief.

  She taught until her eighth month. Her class grew less restless, more polite as she increasingly swelled. The boys began opening doors for her, getting her a chair; the girls shyly approached her after class, wanting to touch her belly, to feel a kick if they could. The whole class gave her a going-away party, a week before her maternity leave began. Ronnie spiked the cherry Kool-Aid with whiskey, but he wouldn’t let Dore have one sip. He insisted she drink the bottle of ginger beer he had bought especially for her; he said he had heard somewhere, maybe even on the news, that carbonation was good for pregnancy. He watched her, his face solemn, as she drank. They even gave her presents. Stuffed baby toys, tiny blue T-shirts, a cut-glass rose with a note that said, “From all of us with love.” Dore felt like crying. “Come back,” Debby told her. “Don’t you dare let that baby make you forget us.”

  “If you do, we’ll find you and we’ll kill you,” Ronnie said. “I’ll walk my dog right in front of your trailer every night at three in the morning, and I’ll make him bark his head off, too.”

  “Oh, don’t do that,” Dore said, but she laughed, pleased.

  The baby was born in March. Nick was in the delivery room, holding Dore’s shivering hands, moving around so much that the doctor snapped at him: If he couldn’t keep out of the way, he would have to leave. Nick breathed when Dore did; the contortions in his face matched hers. He swabbed her forehead with a cool cloth, he bent to kiss her, and all the time he felt his body getting lighter and lighter. When the baby was born, Dore gave a small cry and Nick reached for the child, but they were putting drops into its eyes, they were gently washing it, and when they turned, they walked past Nick; a nurse gently placed the baby on Dore’s sweat-soaked chest. “Girl,” the doctor said, grinning, slapping Nick on the back. “Got yourself a hell of a daughter.”

  They called the baby Susan, and right from the start, Nick fell in love with her. He couldn’t get over the dusting of hair she had, as black as his own, how such tiny eyes could mirror Dore’s. It never stopped astounding him that there was this whole new person in the world, someone so irrevocably his. She made him feel he had a right to be on the earth, if only to take care of her. She gave him his passage.

  The whole first week when Dore was in bed, exhausted, a little dazed, Nick stayed home with her. Flora had given them a white crib as a present, but he liked bringing the baby right into bed with them, where he could sit with the two of them, just beaming and beaming because he was part of a family. He wanted Dore all the time now, but she kept having to wave him away. She reminded him that she had just had a baby, and he told her that that fact was exactly what was moving his desire, heating him up like a Roman candle. She laughed at him, she nuzzled the baby, and then she drifted to sleep. She slept a great deal, in vague fits and starts, and even when she was awake, she seemed tired, content to let Nick take care of things.

  The women in the court never stopped coming over. It was Flora who noticed the curiously shaped birthmark on Susan’s shoulder, who said the baby was marked. When she saw Dore’s startled face, she softened a bit. She said it could be a good sign; that after all, only a fool would be positive about anything. The other women were more polite. Ruby pointed out the baby’s dimples, exclaimed over the blue eyes. The women brought over ready-made suppers in covered casseroles. They brought mops and cleaners and diaper pails.

  At first, Nick was a little unnerved. He wanted time alone with his family. He appreciated the suppers, but he didn’t see why the women couldn’t just leave them on the table and then go. And he didn’t like the way Flora kept studying him, the way she followed when he went into the baby’s room. He shut the door on her a few times just so he could r
ock his own daughter in peace.

  He whispered stories to her. He made up lullabies so sweet and gentle that the one time Dore heard one, she had to catch her breath to keep from calling out to him. He lost track of everything but the slow rise and fall of Susan’s chest, and as soon as he stepped out of the room, he yearned to go back inside, to pick her up and feel her in his arms once again.

  “What’s going on in there?” Flora said, but he refused to tell her; he said it was between him and his daughter, a family matter.

  He would have booted all of the trailer women out if it weren’t for Dore. While she had been calm and strong during her pregnancy, being a mother made her nervous and unsure. At first she kept calling her parents, begging advice, but her mother seemed strangely uninterested. Although Dore was certainly full-grown and responsible, her mother considered being an unmarried mother and living in a trailer court as much a lack of vision as falling in love with the family butcher. Her father was silent and disappointed. They acted as though it were another phase that would pass soon enough. They had no interest at all in speaking to Nick, which bothered Dore so much, she finally stopped calling. “It’s okay,” Nick said, trying to soothe her. He told her her parents would come around, to just forget about it, and in the meantime she could lose herself in him and the baby.

  But it was the other women Dore turned to. They relaxed her. They told her how to diaper and feed Susan, they coaxed her out of bed and into the sun so she could get some color on her. She could ask the women anything and they would reassure her. Everyone had been nervous with a brand-new baby; everyone had felt less than perfect; no one had known what was the perfect way to raise a child. Flora told Dore to call her anytime, even in the middle of the night, and she’d come over. Dore liked the women coming over; she was more than willing to let Flora hold Susan all afternoon, more than happy to let Ruby feed her her bottle. Although she loved the baby, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her, how to behave; and although it made her feel guilty, she was happiest when Susan just slept.