Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  The kids began showing up in her neighborhood, walking back and forth in front of her apartment until she chanced to notice them, bumping right into her in the supermarket. It made her remember Ronnie Dazen again, how he tried to court her interest, only this time she didn’t need to be courted, she almost always invited the students right into her apartment. She ended up disinfecting irritated tattoos, making strong tea for broken hearts and family miseries. She watched each kid gradually heal and then fade away, replaced by another wounded soul. She began giving out her phone number to a kid or two, telling them they could call her only if it was a dire emergency, and when her phone rang, she leaped to get it.

  Nick would come home with his hands full of blooms for her. Orange tiger lilies like small flames; white roses. He’d saunter into the living room and there would be four kids sprawled on the floor, leaning toward Dore. Dore would stop talking as soon as Nick came in, and the kids frankly stared. He felt like an intruder in his own home. He nodded curtly, and then he went into the kitchen, trying to jam the flowers into a jelly glass, all the time waiting for Dore to at least dip into the kitchen for a hurried kiss before she went back out to her students. But instead, the talk continued, low and secretive. “They need me,” she told him when he asked about it. “They have parents,” he said, but she gave him an odd, crimped smile; she turned from him.

  There were phone calls. Late at night. Pleas that pulled her into her car, that had her driving to the bus station to pick up some kid who was too terrified to really run away, too scared or drunk to go home. Nick would sometimes wake up to find a stray ragamuffin sleeping on the sofa. He was polite at first, even concerned, but the kids were shy about him. When Dore ran out to get coffee, he’d sometimes approach one of them and try to be comforting, but they always gave him a blank, angry stare, and he sometimes felt they were angry with him for disturbing their privacy with Dore.

  “Look, this has got to stop,” he told Dore. Their apartment wasn’t a halfway house; she wasn’t a therapist. He told himself that the next time a kid came to their door, hungry for talk, for something cool and clean in a glass, he would tell the kid himself to go see Dore during school time, to make an appointment with a good psychologist. He told himself that—but then, of course, when the doorbell rang and he opened the door on some kid stammering out Dore’s name, stumbling on some story, Nick always ushered them right in. Orphans of the storm, he kept thinking.

  He saw Dore, talking, talking, talking. One night, passing by the living room, he heard Susan’s name, and instantly he felt his heart freezing, his blood tamping its flow. He leaned along the wall where it was cool, and then he heard Dore say, “She died…” and then he strode forward, not seeing her, not bothering to get his jacket, and he got in the car and drove out to the Dairy Queen and just sat in the parking lot, a dime-size headache breeding behind his eyes.

  He didn’t know what to do. He wanted Dore back, he wanted her the way she used to be; but he didn’t want the baby being part of it—he didn’t want to have to remember, to have to see that face flickering across his mind, burning, a flame. This was Boston. Everything was supposed to be changed now, the pain was supposed to be past, as unvisited as the New Jersey trailer court.

  When he came back home, his headache in full bloom, the kids had all gone. Dore was sleeping on the couch, a glass of tea beside her.

  “Hey,” he said, nuzzling her.

  “Oh, don’t wake me,” she murmured, her face turning toward the pillow. “Just let me sleep.” She started settling back into the couch, but he didn’t want to go to bed alone, not tonight. He didn’t want to have to bunch up her pillow beside him. He lifted her up and carried her into bed, and then he got in beside her and hooked her limp arm about him, as if she had done it herself.

  The next time he was back in Pittsburgh, he found himself thinking about Leslie. What he wanted was a little laughter, someone to talk to while he ate dinner. He looked through the phone book at the hotel for her number, telling himself it was no big deal if he couldn’t find her; he could go down to the hotel bar and float himself away on a few beers; he could swim upstairs to sleep. He found two numbers he thought might be hers, and he got Leslie on the very first try. She said of course she remembered him, and she didn’t seem surprised that he had called. She didn’t mention that it had been three months since they’d met. She said only that she had a fitting that night but could meet him later at the movies. Children of Paradise was playing and she had seen it only once.

  Leslie, outside the theater, was in ripped jeans and a black sweater, her hair braided down her back like a spine. One of her sleeves had a safety pin in it, but her nails were buffed and clean, and when he got close to her, he caught some piny, mysterious scent.

  She beamed when she saw him. “Well, hi!” she said. She chattered and bounded at him.

  He was surprised that she really wanted to see the movie, that she didn’t want to just go get coffee and talk. She said they could talk later, that the film would give them something to talk about. She made him sit in the first row—she said things looked more real that way—and for one sharp moment he thought of Dore. Dore always sat in the front row because of her poor sight. They never had to rush to make a film, because the front rows were always the last to fill.

  But Leslie didn’t watch films the way Dore did. She didn’t touch him or lean over to make comments; she didn’t want him to put his feet on top of hers because the circulation was jammed up and she needed the weight to start things up. Instead, Leslie hunched toward the screen, perfectly silent, ignoring him, and gradually Nick was suckered into the story, too, and he forgot her there beside him, and forgot Dore.

  When the movie ended, he felt something tear in his heart. He felt as if he were the one in the final reel, racing helplessly after the departing carriage, crying the name of the one he loved, crying, “Dore, Dore,” and there was Dore riding in the carriage, her head held up, an enigmatic smile on her face, oblivious to him. Abruptly, he turned to Leslie, but she was already standing, looking past him into the audience, and when he touched her, she turned to him, smiling, embarrassed at the tears she was wiping away.

  They walked outside. “Oh, my,” she sighed, but she didn’t want to talk about the film. “It’s all in here,” she said, tapping her chest. She walked with her hands in her pockets, her strides long. She didn’t ask him very much. She didn’t even want to know how he had liked the film. She seemed perfectly happy to see him, but he had the feeling she would have been just as happy not to. She didn’t ask him how long he planned to stay, and when he told her anyway, she simply nodded.

  She was funny to walk with. She kept stalling in front of store windows, mesmerized by a row of silky blouses, a fan of skirts. When Nick faltered, when he tried to make some remark about the window, she glanced at him, amused, and continued walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but if I stare at anything long enough, I can copy it. Unfortunately, not all of my clients want originals from me.” She said she had always had that talent. Her dolls had worn the same spanking-white tennis outfits her parents wore.

  Leslie saw Nick looking at her own outfit and she bristled. “It doesn’t matter for me,” she said. “Clothing is for other people. I see it on them. I can’t tell the difference between silk or cotton on me, but on someone else I feel it, I just know how it should be styled. I knew how to change all my friends’ outfits so they’d look smashing, but I was always being sent home from school because my skirt was torn.” She laughed, looking over at him.

  He walked her to her house, a small brick home on Howe Street in Shadyside. It had a small porch, a small yard, and a white front gate that she told him she used to swing on when she was a little girl. “I grew up in this house,” she said proudly.

  “You did? And you still live here?” He couldn’t imagine it, staying in one place that long, having a history that seamless.

  “Well, I moved out when I was at design school. Parsons in New York. No o
ne I knew wanted to leave the city, but every chance I got, I came home. I loved coming home. The house just felt good.” She pushed back a stray hair.

  “Then my parents moved to Arizona when my mother got arthritis, and they couldn’t bear to sell the house. It was all paid for, and filled with their memories. My father thought selling it would be like having a piece of him die. I was through school by then, sharing an apartment with a girl I almost never saw, because she worked nights. I was working myself, for a small company designing women’s golf clothing, trying to sketch my own designs at night. I was designing, but it wasn’t enough. I just never felt very comfortable in New York, it never felt like home. When my father called and offered to give me the house, I got the next plane out. The house always felt like it was mine.” She leaned on the gate.

  “I have lots of clients here,” she said. “It took a while. Word of mouth. Going to people’s homes and showing them my book. I designed originals at reasonable prices—and sometimes, if I was short of cash, I did alterations.

  “You know tennis?” she said abruptly. Nick shrugged. “Both my parents were champions.” She said she had photos of the two of them holding up their loving cups, smiling into the crowds. They’d taken her to all the matches when she was little; she grew up teething on tennis balls and rackets, she grew up playing. “I wasn’t very good, though,” she said. “My skill was sewing.”

  She said her mother was the better player of the two, and when she was diagnosed as having crippling arthritis, she started smashing things. Her trophies, her dishes, her rackets. “She had to give up playing,” Leslie said. “She’d take me to matches and we’d both sit in the bleachers and watch my father win, and sometimes she’d grab me and walk out because it was just too upsetting for her to watch.

  “It affected his game, too, seeing her leave, seeing how her face changed there in the bleachers.” Leslie sighed. “God, he loved her so much. He couldn’t play as well as he used to. It was as if winning were suddenly a betrayal, so he started to lose. He wouldn’t practice, because he saw how she’d tighten when he left her. In the end, they decided to go to Arizona because he thought the sun might heal her.”

  “Did it?” Nick said.

  Leslie shook her head. “She bathed in sulfur springs, she saw faith healers and acupuncturists, she practiced positive thinking until she gave herself migraines, but she kept crippling up. She had to cut the front of her shoes out because her toes were so deformed. She couldn’t move her hands because the fingers kept overlapping, locking on her.

  “Finally, my father talked her into doing some coaching. She did it grudgingly at first, sure she’d have no students—because really, she couldn’t demonstrate much, all she could do was speak and yell and prod. But she got students because of her name, and she built up a reputation, a kind of mystique. Everyone said that because she couldn’t get up and play, it forced her students to stretch their minds, to imagine what the moves should look like, to dig the knowledge out of themselves. She raised holy hell when they did things wrong. But she praised, she gave good directions, and she started producing stars.”

  Leslie stretched in the moonlight. “They both coach now, they both love Arizona, and they both never get back here. I go to see them.”

  “Could I come in?” Nick said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Leslie said. She pulled keys from her pocket.

  “We could sit on the porch,” he said, thinking how cool and lovely it was tonight, how easy it would be to talk away the hours with her.

  “No,” she said again. She was silent for a few moments, fiddling with the keys in her palm. “Call me in a few days, why don’t you,” she said abruptly.

  “What, from Boston?” he said. “I’ll be gone by then.”

  She looked up, studying him, and then abruptly told him to come for breakfast tomorrow, that she liked to get up really early so she could have the whole day to work. “Come whatever time you want,” she said. “I’m up and famished at six.”

  “I’m more nine o’clock,” he said, and then she bent forward and touched his face, pulling away before he could see her expression.

  He watched her go into the house, and then he went grudgingly back to the hotel, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He lifted the phone to call Dore. It rang and rang. He hung up. The room was terrible—nothing-colored chenille bedspreads, green carpet. He knew exactly what would flicker on the TV right now, exactly how the water in the bathroom would taste in the glass after he had un-papered it. He didn’t like it—the phone in his room not ringing, not going to ring; the night settling heavily about him.

  He got his jacket and went outside and walked by the pool. It was still filled, even this late in the season, silent, coolly blue. He walked all around the complex, waiting for the night watchman or someone to come out and ask him who he was, just so he could tell him. They could swap stories, maybe even have a beer by the pool. It made him hopeful, and then he got irritated. Jesus.

  He decided to go for a drive. He drove along the highway, blasting the radio, and he thought about Dore, about what she might be doing, where she might be. Maybe she had been right there when he called, listening to the ringing, knowing it was him and not picking up. And then, before he knew what he was doing, he found himself driving past Leslie’s house.

  It wasn’t a bad place. Her lights, he noticed, were still blazing. Curious, he parked two houses away, rolling down his window a little. He liked being so close to her, and her not even knowing it. He could sleep right here and not feel so alone. He’d just have to wake himself up early enough to drive away and then come back, shaved and clean, to have breakfast with her. It was no problem. He could wake whenever he wanted. It was a talent he had cultivated back at the home, giving himself cues before he fell asleep, concentrating on a clock with the hands set at the hour he needed. It always worked. He’d wake at three in the morning just to sneak a cigarette, just to read undisturbed in the bathroom.

  Lately he had been doing it with Dore, waking in the middle of the night, half hoping she might talk in her sleep, might say something, anything, that would convince him that she still loved him. And, oh, yes, he had done it with Susan, so he could bring her bottle before she even thought to cry for it. He remembered her soft, sleepy face when he woke her, the surprised pleasure when her mouth found the bottle, and his own delight in pleasing her.

  He shut his eyes. Just for a moment, he thought.

  Leslie, in the house she had inherited from her parents, the house she loved, had stopped playing the piano. It was just after three, but she wasn’t sleepy at all. She was pulling down the blinds when she spotted the car, and, curious, she leaned against the window to study him.

  She didn’t have many men in her life. Her mother used to try to fix her up, getting strange men to call her on the phone with dinner invitations. Her clients sent their handsome sons to pick up dresses, to have suits designed when they didn’t really need them. The mothers would later call on the pretense of asking about a hem, and then gradually they’d bring the conversation around to their sons. It always flustered Leslie. She never felt comfortable with any of them. She’d go to the films, to the restaurants, and once or twice she’d bring a man home with her, but in the morning she’d be restless. She’d sense too much male in the house, and she’d hurry the man up and out of her home before she got too used to him, before she expected anything.

  She had been in love only once. She was eighteen. His name was Danny and he played football and was on the honor roll at school and her mother was teaching him tennis. Leslie played tennis a few times with Danny, but mostly the two of them went up to the grassy areas behind the courts and made love. He was terrified of getting her pregnant. He pulled condoms out of his pockets, and he had a brown paper bag with a can of foam in it. She laughed at him. She squirted the foam across the tops of the dandelions even though he told her to cut it out, that it wasn’t funny. She didn’t care. She wasn’t going to have anything b
etween herself and the feel of him, no layer of plastic, no chemicals. She insisted that she could will herself not to get pregnant, that he could help out by willing it, too.

  They were both stubborn, but then she would be all over him, covering his face with kisses, opening his buttons, his pants, and then he didn’t care either. Sometimes, afterward, she’d squirt some foam in because he was so solemn, and then they’d walk back down to her house, the foam leaking out of her, staining her pants so she’d have to ball them up and stuff them into the trash. They were exhausted, pleased with each other, and then her father would walk by and ask them if they had had a good game. Leslie always poked Danny in the arm. “It never hurts to practice,” her father said, and they both had to look at the floor to keep from laughing.

  She had designed her own prom gown. Black satin with ribbon at the hem. She was going to have her flowers dyed black, too. She didn’t care that her mother said black was for funerals and not for proms, that everyone would look at her and whisper trashy things.

  “They whisper now, I bet,” Leslie said.

  “You like that? Fine,” Leslie’s mother said.

  The week before the prom, Danny went to visit his grandmother in Nebraska, and it was there that a tornado struck. The weathermen on the TV stations kept predicting how bad it would get, breaking into everyone’s favorite programs, telling people what to do. Danny’s grandmother, used to nature’s turmoil, calmly packed bottles of water into the cellar, easy-open cans of tuna and juice.

  Danny was riding around on a neighbor’s motorbike, crossing a field in his hurry to get home. The sky was dirty-looking and the air felt clammy. He hadn’t planned on getting back this late except he had wanted to talk to Leslie in private, away from his grandmother. He had gone all the way over to the drugstore in town. She didn’t know about the tornado; she knew only that he whispered to her that he loved her, that he was going to swallow her whole when he saw her again. She had whispered what she was going to do to his body, how she was doing those things to him right now, in her mind, channeling them to him over the phone wires.