Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  He took over some new territory, wanting to stay as busy as possible. The only problem was that his boss wanted him to take over Pittsburgh, too, the one place he never wanted to return to. He wanted the new territory, he needed it, and in the end he told himself that he could go back and be just fine; It didn’t have to matter that he had once been so unhappy there, because, after all, he was a new person now and none of that could touch him anymore. He wouldn’t let it.

  It felt so strange in Pittsburgh now. He walked past Marks, only it wasn’t Marks anymore; it had been torn down and made into a porno theater. No one at the theater seemed to remember much about a student-run café. The girl at the ticket booth scoffed at Nick when he persisted; she told him to either buy a ticket or get the hell away, because his standing around was going to drive the customers away. “What customers?” Nick said, looking around the blank sidewalk. “See? You drove them off already,” the girl said.

  Nick couldn’t bring himself to go past the home. He didn’t want to see boys standing out in the yard, yearning toward him when he walked past, mistaking his interest for their salvation. He didn’t want to walk into Mr. Rice’s office and watch him fumble for Nick’s name, trying to place the man he had once claimed was just like his own son.

  He wouldn’t go to his old house, and he wouldn’t go anywhere near where his parents were buried. Being in the city where they were didn’t make him feel any closer to them; if anything, it almost felt like a betrayal to come back to the place Tom had tried so hard to escape, the place he himself had managed to leave.

  He walked to the stores where he used to buy his clothing, he passed the place where he used to get his haircuts, and then he went back to the hotel and called Dore. There was no answer. He didn’t know where she went evenings. There was no Flora around Sommer-ville, no Ruby. Dore never even mentioned any neighbors she might know, any friends. He couldn’t pinpoint his competition for her anymore, and he felt powerless. He called her three times, letting the phone ring and ring, and then he got his jacket and wandered over to town to get something to eat, to be among people.

  He ended up in Shadyside. He remembered artists used to live here, students, but now he saw only a lone businessman, a few older women walking arm in arm. The Cluck-a-Buck, where he used to work, was now a psychedelic poster shop, but even this early in the evening it was closed. It was funny—even though the city had changed, he still didn’t like it. He walked around. It was only eight o’clock, but the streets seemed so dead, the homes and apartments shut up tight, and he thought, Who could ever live in such a lonely city? Who could live here without going mad?

  He searched for noise, finally finding a small Italian restaurant on a side street. The tables were cramped close; it was fairly crowded, fairly noisy, and it comforted Nick just to see it.

  He was seated by the door at a small table for two, and he was studying the menu, line by line, when a woman tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you mind if we share a table?” she said. “It’s just that I’m in this terrible hurry.” She stared down at him, anxious. “I eat really, really fast,” she said.

  Nick looked up at her for a moment. He had never seen anyone who had eyes like hers, so deep and black he couldn’t make out the pupils, skin so pale it was practically white. An unruly mass of black hair tumbled down her back. She was dressed in black, too—one of those plain, sweatery dresses, hitched up and belted into a mini.

  “Listen, you take the table,” he said, wanting to prolong his release from the quiet, empty streets.

  But she shook her head. “No, come on, I can’t do that,” she said, annoyed. “Please.”

  “Sit,” Nick said, and she did, ignoring him, immediately picking up the menu, bending forward for some of the bread. She ordered quickly, and she didn’t look up until the food came, and then only to clip back her hair. She smiled at him then. She said it made some people squeamish to eat with all that hair around; that even when she was growing up, her teachers used to call her up to their desks just to get her to pin her hair out of the way.

  “Some of the kids thought I was a witch,” she told Nick. She didn’t know how it started. Maybe it was the hair, maybe the dark, ill-fitting clothing her mother bought her. She hadn’t really minded people thinking she was the reason they found twenty dollars on the street. It was only when she was made the cause of someone’s bad luck that she got angry.

  “Kids thought I hexed them into failing a test, that I somehow made their dogs run away. What did I have to do with any of it? Some of the girls at school once offered me five dollars to make up love charms. I told them the truth, that I had no charm, but they didn’t believe me. I needed the money. I wanted to buy a necklace. So I wrapped up some Queen Anne’s lace in a red string, said some words over it, and then I took that money and tucked it into my waistband the way I thought a real businesswoman would.” She took a sip of water. “My father was watching from the window, and when I came inside, he beat me with a tennis racket.”

  She grinned. “It didn’t stop me.” She told him her name was Leslie and that she was no more a witch than he was. She was a dressmaker—a designer—who worked out of her home. She had worked in New York City for a while and done fairly well, but she hated the city, hadn’t been able to cope with the pace or the pressure.

  Nick wasn’t interested in remembering his life, not during a light and pleasant dinner, so he told her only outlines—that he sold children’s books, that he lived near Boston. He was mute about Dore and Susan.

  “So listen,” Leslie said. “Why don’t you let me know the next time you’re in town and maybe I’ll buy some books from you?” She fished in her purse and pulled out a scrap of paper, a nibbled pencil, and scrawled her number and address.

  “You can buy any book I sell right in the stores,” Nick said, but Leslie shook her head; she said she liked things when they were most direct.

  “You like living here?” he said abruptly.

  “I love it,” she said. “I’d never leave here.”

  He was baffled. “But what do you do at night? The streets seem so empty.”

  She laughed. “What does anyone do at night? I go to movies or the theater, I visit friends, go out to eat—you know. Sometimes I just get into an old robe at eight and watch TV.” Nick shrugged and she stiffened a little, defensive. “Listen, we have everything Boston has and we’re prettier.”

  His food arrived, and she didn’t talk much after that, but Nick still liked having her interesting face to look at while he ate, her voice occasionally directed at him. She bolted her food, told him she had to rush to get to a fitting, and when she finished her meal, she abruptly unclipped her hair so it fell, casting shadows about her. “Look,” she said, standing. “Call me, why don’t you. If you lose my number, it’s in the book. And I bet I can make you love this city the way I do.”

  “Not a chance,” Nick said, but he smiled at her, and she smiled back before turning away. He watched her as she left; he saw how she turned around once to meet his gaze, how in seeing him, her face took on light.

  He thought about her as he drove home. He remembered her hair, the way she talked about spells, and it made him feel restless, as if there were fireflies in his blood. But then, as things on the road turned familiar, he began thinking about Dore, and he reached inside his pocket for the paper with Leslie’s name and number and address. He rolled down his window and held the paper out, feeling the pull of the wind tugging it from his fingers, and then he let it go, let it carry back across the endless dark path of the highway. He tried to look back, to follow it, a simple strip of white along the highway, but then a car raced toward him, forcing his mind back on the road, back on Dore.

  FIVE

  Dore began thinking that maybe her redemption lay in getting pregnant. She’d do everything right this time. She’d quit her job and never go back; she’d stay at home reading beside the baby’s crib, breathing when the baby breathed; and she’d strap her child against her own heartbea
t so it would always be reminded of life, so it would never forget. When she climbed into bed, she curled about Nick. He moved, surprised. He was used to sleeping on the edge of the bed, used to being careful how he touched her for fear she’d get up and go sleep on the couch. She touched his face, she whispered against his skin, and she pulled him closer to her.

  Nick wasn’t sure how he felt about having a baby. The whole idea was disturbing and startling; he didn’t want to think how he might react to another child, what memories it might force him to relive. But the thing of it was, he loved having Dore back again. He’d forget everything when he was holding her, stroking her buttery hair. He told himself over and over that she really did want him, that it wasn’t just what she thought he could give her—and then sometimes, too, he thought that even if it was, a baby might bind them together again.

  Sometimes, when they were making love, he’d sense Dore straining against him, and he thought suddenly of that woman in Pittsburgh, the one who kids used to think was a witch, and he imagined charms she might have for making babies bud and bloom, for rekindling love. And then Dore would be rolling away from him, panting, slick with sweat, and he’d slip out of her and feel so lost, so crazy with need, that he’d try to enter her again even though he was soft now. They didn’t sleep entwined after lovemaking, they didn’t whisper secrets anymore or trace the moonlight on the sheets. They were silent. Nick, one hand on Dore’s thigh, swore he could hear her heart beating, but it was a kind of language he didn’t understand anymore, and it made him grieve for her.

  She wasn’t conceiving. She bought books, she took her temperature ninety times a day and made charts, and finally, the two of them went to a doctor. Nick sat in the waiting room holding Dore’s hand, telling her dirty jokes to get her to laugh, but in the end the doctor told them there was nothing wrong that a little relaxation wouldn’t cure, that there was no reason they shouldn’t be popping babies out. It made Dore tense up all the more. How could she possibly relax?

  She waited until Nick was away on business and then she went to a psychologist who did hypnosis. But he made her talk about her childhood, he pulled stubborn answers from her about everything but Susan, and he finally suggested that hypnosis wasn’t a good tool as far as she was concerned; the whole problem was that she was reacting to a mother she didn’t much care for by refusing to be anything like her.

  She visited a chiropractor, who assured her the problem was in her spine, who sat her on a green leather table and kneaded and worked her flesh, who manipulated her spine until she winced, sure it was cracking. Alarmed, she struggled upright, and when she stood, she could hardly walk; her whole back felt inflamed and dangerous. “You shouldn’t have gotten up so quickly,” the doctor accused. She wanted Dore to scoot right back up on the table so she could undo the damage she said Dore had brought on herself, but Dore wouldn’t hear of it. She cabbed home, lying prone in the back seat, shaking her head at the driver, who kept shouting at her in broken English that he could take her to the hospital if she just said the word. When Nick walked in the door that evening, he found Dore on the couch with the heating pad. “I sprained my back,” she told him.

  And then, she missed one period, and then two, and her breasts began hurting. They enlarged so much that she had to go out and buy herself new bras, nearly two cup sizes larger. She couldn’t zip herjeans, and her skirts bulged in front so she had to wear long, loose tops. Delirious, she blurted out to Nick that she was pregnant. “You saw a doctor?” he asked. She shook her head. She said she had just made the appointment—she had wanted to wait until she was sure. “I know I’m pregnant, I feel it,” she said, pulling him down on the floor, rolling and bruising against the walls.

  A baby, Nick thought. It might have made him more uneasy than he was, except for the way Dore had suddenly come back to life, to herself, and to him. She was ravenous in her lovemaking; she’d call him at work and tell him to come home and meet her in the bathtub. He couldn’t get through the day without wanting her, needing her taste. He’d have to leave work because his whole body was pulsing. He’d drive home like a madman and then surprise her, kissing her belly, moving her against him. Now she wanted to talk afterward. She had all these wonderful, dreamy plans about taking the baby to France, about organizing a play group with some of the other women she had seen around the neighborhood. She went to work happy. She began discussing her students’ papers with them, allowing them to cluster about her.

  But when Dore went to the doctor, he told her that she wasn’t pregnant—that the tests showed nothing. She was furious. She wanted to know what the swelling in her breasts was then, why she got so nauseated mornings that she had to keep saltines by her pillow. Why did her stomach swell out? Why was she dreaming about babies every time she shut her eyes? He shook his head, he told her he didn’t know, and in the middle of his speech, Dore got up and strode out of his office. She told herself he was a quack, that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  She made another appointment, with a woman doctor, who was more expensive, who had a plush, all-white office on Newberry Street. The doctor examined Dore and then had her come into the office for a talk. “You’re not pregnant,” she said. She told Dore it was what was called a “hysterical pregnancy,” that it was a common phenomenon, mostly in African tribes, and that oddly enough it was the men who swelled up, carrying it to such extremes that they even seemed to go through labor and got as much attention as their wives.

  “I’m not doing this for attention,” Dore snapped.

  The doctor shook her head. “Of course you’re not,” she said. “But you do want a baby, and your body did its best to oblige.” She told Dore to go home and relax, to take hot baths and wait and the swelling and nausea would disappear. “Then we can start to work on really getting you pregnant,” the doctor said, smiling. “Don’t you worry.”

  Dore, silent, got up and left the doctor’s office. All the way home, she kept her eyes unfocused. She didn’t want to see any pregnant women in the streets, she didn’t want to see any babies, and she didn’t want anyone seeing her, knowing how shamed she felt, how betrayed.

  Nick came home that night with roses for her, wrapped in green tissue, but she was in the kitchen, crying over onions. When he bent to kiss her, she shrugged him roughly from her. “I’m not pregnant,” she said.

  “You’re not?” he said, and she told him it wasn’t a real pregnancy, that her mind had done it to her body, and she didn’t want to talk about any of it.

  He was silent for a moment. “We could adopt,” he said, but she shook her head; she said they’d have to get married for that.

  “But I would marry you,” he said. “I want to.”

  “I told you, I can’t get married because of a baby.”

  “You don’t make sense,” he said, and she turned and looked at the floor.

  “Sure, I do,” she said.

  Just like that, Dore gave up trying to become pregnant. She dieted like a crazy person, refusing to eat breakfast although her stomach twisted and growled, nibbling on toast for lunch, picking at her dinner until Nick told her she was being silly, that she looked wonderful, that a few extra pounds was probably healthy. “Why should I look pregnant when I’m not?” she said. She exercised every late afternoon, as soon as she got home from teaching, dancing around to old rock-and-roll albums in her living room until the people downstairs banged on their ceiling for her to stop. It made her feel lonely, hearing the banging; it somehow reminded her of the baby she wasn’t to have, a baby made of air and imagination, who wasn’t to be her healing after all.

  She called Flora, but the number was out of service, and she took it as omen. She began walking about the neighborhood to keep herself from thinking. When Nick was out on the road, she missed him, but really what she missed was her past with him, those days in the trailer when just seeing him made her breath stitch up inside of her. When he came back from being on the road now, she always felt a faint flutter of pain. Althou
gh he said he loved her, although he said he didn’t care that she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t believe him. She didn’t think he needed her anymore.

  She wasn’t sure why, but she began talking to her students. She sipped her morning coffee right at her desk and struck up a conversation with whatever kid was hanging around. She homed in on the details—the red-rimmed eyes of a girl, a brand-new inky tattoo on a shy boy’s arm—and she asked question after question, surprising kids into answers, pulling out their confidences. She was good with them. She never gave advice, she never revealed her own opinion, but she listened so intently, the effect was mesmerizing. She couldn’t help feeling nourished by all the need. It hooked her. She began getting to school a whole half-hour earlier just to expose herself to that much more student interest. Gradually, she began to reveal bits and pieces about herself. The kids were fascinated by her. They whispered among themselves. They tried to imagine their teacher living in a trailer, carrying some secret pain like a romantic Brontë heroine. They adored her; they began to spread the word that she was a good ear, that you could tell her anything and she wouldn’t flinch or accuse you, or rush to call your parents or the principal. She treated you like a human being.