Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Stop!” said Robin. “Don’t tell me another word!”

  She stood up, backing away from him a little, but he snatched up her left hand and pulled her toward him. “Listen, I had to do it,” he told her. “What other way did I have? I didn’t do it to hurt anyone. I just thought—well, a little scare. That’s what I thought. Like leaving my calling card.”

  Robin pulled away from him. She didn’t think she could think straight anymore; she didn’t think she could breathe or eat or do anything ever again. “I was in that car,” she said. “I was driving.”

  “Don’t tell me that!” he cried. “I can’t hear that!”

  “I was driving!”

  “Do you want to make me crazy? I’d die before I’d hurt you. Do you want me to slit my throat with my knife?” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his knife. Robin knocked it from his hand. “Did I make you hang out with my friends? Did I make you sleep with me? Did I ever hit you?”

  “That was my mother,” Robin said. “Who told you that wouldn’t hurt me? Who told you I wanted her hurt or scared or anything?” She couldn’t look at Rick anymore. He hurt her eyes. “Get away from me,” she said, her voice snagging in her throat. “Just get away. Don’t you look at me or talk to me or even think about me anymore. You hear me? I don’t even want you having me in your daydreams.”

  She started walking away, and he followed, desperate, not speaking, trying to get her to just look at him. He touched her arm, her leg, but with each touch, she flinched as if burned.

  “You told me” he said, “what a suffocating bitch she was, that you hated her. You said she never left you alone.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Robin said.

  “Yes I do. I know you.”

  “Get away from me.” She flailed one arm wildly at him, the way she might shoo an animal. “We’re separate. I don’t want to see you.”

  She had never seen him cry before. She had never seen any boy cry, really, and when she saw his tears, something caught inside of her. She thought how easy it would be to touch him, but she forced herself to keep walking, even after she sensed he had stopped following.

  “You’ll call me!” he shouted. “You’re the one who’ll come begging and then we’ll see whose turn it is to shut off, we’ll see who sends who away!” When Robin didn’t speak, he shouted again. “Who likes you? Who ever liked a stupid twat like you?”

  She shut her eyes and kept walking, blinded. It wasn’t fair, having to choose her mother against him. It wasn’t fair that he would do something she could never explain to herself. For a moment she wished herself back in the belly of the car, back to the moment when the brakes failed. She willed it to speed, to hurtle recklessly down a twisting, turning highway, gaining on the raw, broken side of a mountain. The crash, when it came, would be nothing more than a blinking away of her life, a clean erasure of all the memory she was now going to have to bear.

  For a while, it brought her closer to Leslie. She thought it was her own guilty efforts—her staying at home, her hesitant help at dinner. Instead of reading in her room, she’d venture out into the living room where Leslie was stitching facings. She’d plop herself down on a nearby chair and crack open her book. She felt protective of her mother. She didn’t sleep nights for a while, just waiting for something to happen. She wasn’t afraid for herself. She saw Rick lingering around the high school, but now when he saw her, he scowled and made a big production out of turning his back to her. Sometimes she’d come out of school and see him with his arm about another girl, but she still felt his eyes trailing her and she knew that the other girl might just as well have been a newspaper for all the attention and desire he was showing her.

  She never discussed the accident with Leslie, and she certainly never told Nick. Leslie had filed a report with the police, but later she insisted that the mechanic had been wrong, that there had simply been a problem with the car, and anyway, it was fine now, so what was the problem? She never told Robin how easily she had managed to put the pieces together.

  She went into Robin’s room one day while Robin was at school and prowled guiltily through her papers until she scavenged his last name. There it was. Pruitt. Like spit, she thought. She went to the phone book and carefully traced down his address with her finger. She knew from Robin that he liked to hang out in his driveway, tinkering with an old car.

  She waited until one afternoon when Robin was at the dentist. She wasn’t going to do much. She was going to threaten him, tell him she’d see him in juvenile court if he so much as called Robin again. And if he wasn’t there, she’d ring the bell and talk to his parents, or she’d sit out on the porch and wait for him.

  When she turned into his street, she saw him, there in the driveway, swabbing down an old green car with a red rag. He stiffened when he saw her, but Leslie parked, got out, and strode toward him.

  He denied everything, of course. He even had the balls to threaten her right back, to accuse her of defamation of character and tell her she’d be good and sorry if she didn’t shut up. When she remained unfazed, he threatened to beat her up.

  “Ha!” said Leslie. “You beat me up. Ha!” She was secretly terrified. She could feel the quick thrill of fear; the air seemed charged. “You stay the hell away from my daughter. You come near her and I swear I’ll kill you myself.”

  “Your daughter,” he snorted. “Who wants your daughter!” His eyes turned hard and glassy, and then, to Leslie’s shock, he started crying. He was furious with himself. He kept trying to twist away from her so she wouldn’t see his face. She was half expecting him to tell her some story about allergies, but he just kept repeating that no one in his right mind would want anything to do with Robin. “Like mother, like daughter,” he spat out, and Leslie felt another quick snap of surprise, realizing that Robin must have gotten to Rick first.

  She was so touched, so amazed, it made her suddenly gentle. “It’s all right,” she said out loud, half to Rick, half to herself. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “Get out,” he said.

  She turned and walked back to the car. She drove home half in a dream, and when she came into the living room, Robin was there, reading one of Leslie’s novels. Leslie didn’t say anything, just walked over and rested one hand against her daughter’s hair for a moment, until Robin touched her hand, and then she went upstairs to sew.

  TEN

  Nick couldn’t help it, but he always thought of the bookshops he visited as his own. He knew all the layouts; he knew the windows and how light struck the displays; he knew where the dust was most likely to settle. Every visit, he gave himself lots of time so he could prowl about the shop and see how things were doing. He made minihomes of each shop, relatives out of every buyer, and he felt this tremendous flush of pleasure every time he walked through a door, every time a buyer walked toward him with a hand out to grasp his.

  Really, he considered the book buyers caretakers of his shops, and he enjoyed giving them advice. He didn’t like the way a new line of books was just junked onto the shelves. He hated a window cluttered with tiny Styrofoam men holding up the books. Some of the buyers listened. One girl was just as happy to have Nick climb into the greasy front window to set up a display the way he said would do the most good. She was just as content to have him be the one to pick out all the dead flies that had kamakazeed into the fluorescent lights. The truth was, she didn’t give a hoot what he put into the window as long as he was the one doing it.

  Nick talked to the customers. He’d try to figure out what kind of book they needed to read and then go and find it, popping it into a pair of surprised hands. He found comic novels for depressed-looking women; he pulled out murder mysteries for bored-looking men; he suggested kids’ books to grandmothers. Once, he started telling a little girl one of the stories he had told Robin a long time ago, but halfway through it he began to feel guilty, as if he had somehow betrayed something, and he had to excuse himself, making up something about needing to see someone in
the back.

  But lately there were complaints. At one shop, he had seen a thin, anemic-looking blonde in a white coat hunching surreptitiously over books. Curious, he trailed her a little, until he got close enough to see her unfurling a long loop of pink stickers with JESUS SAVES printed on them. She was furtively pasting them into the pages.

  It enraged Nick. He knew you couldn’t pull off a sticker without lifting up print, too. He saw the books she went after—books on abortion, books by Sartre, for Christ’s sake—and he grabbed the girl’s arm. “Hey, who you touching?” she said, jerking around, socking him squarely in the eye before she sprinted out of the shop.

  The buyer, a new man, gave Nick a paper towel soaked in cold water for his eye, already blooming into blues. He was cross, though. He told Nick it was none of his business, that what he should have done was just call the manager. “It’s not your responsibility,” he said, miffed. “And we never touch customers. That’s how you get sued.” After that, he was never as friendly to Nick, never as glad to see him in the store.

  There were other complaints. Nick’s boss told him buyers didn’t appreciate Nick homing in on their clients, fiddling around with their shops. They didn’t like the way he kept rescuing what he called the “orphan books,” the novels no one but him had ever heard of, the poetry volumes that were lucky to sell one or two copies, and then displaying them beside the best-sellers. People wanted to be left alone to browse; they wanted to pick out their own books. If they wanted to read nothing but trash, that was their business, wasn’t it? “The buyers say you bother people so much they don’t come into the store as often. Can’t you just do your job? You’re a wonderful sales rep. Isn’t that enough?”

  It made Nick feel a little lost. He began bringing home pieces of his bookshops—fiction, mysteries, first novels, and travel books—packing the whole back seat of the car. He liked looking in the rearview mirror and seeing all those books as he drove home. He stacked them in the bathroom, tucked them into the kitchen cabinets, on top of the refrigerator, and by the napkin holder on the table. He never remembered where each book was, but it didn’t matter. He just liked being able to walk into any room in the house and be surrounded by books. He liked being able to pluck up any book and know it was worth reading.

  Everyone in the house read. He never forbade Robin to read at the dinner table, and he set up a special stand so Leslie could read at her design table. The silence in the house didn’t matter so much if everyone was reading his books.

  But even that began to change. If the bookshops were getting away from him, he felt as if his family was, too. Oh, they still read, but more and more when he called home there was no answer. Sometimes Robin picked up the phone, but she often told him that Leslie was out walking. “Walking?” Nick had said the last time he’d called. “But it’s eleven at night.” Pittsburgh streets emptied at eight. People were in robes watching TV, and Shadyside was wooded, it bred shadows.

  “It’s okay,” Robin said. “She always does. The neighbors watch for her.”

  Nick didn’t like it—Leslie loping fearlessly through Shadyside’s deserted streets, Robin thinking her mother was under the protection of neighbors they didn’t even know. He pressed her for details. What did Leslie wear on these walks? Who did Robin actually think watched her, and how did she know? He imagined people watching Leslie, but instead of comfort, he felt a sudden new chill.

  “Do you miss me?” Robin suddenly blurted.

  Nick felt something cramp inside of him. “What kind of a question is that?” he said. There was another moment of silence, a noise, and then Leslie’s voice, out of breath, came on the line.

  “Please don’t go walking,” he said.

  “Please don’t go away,” she said.

  “That’s no kind of deal.”

  “We’ll talk when you get home,” she said.

  They never did talk, not really. Leslie, in her habit of walking, couldn’t seem to stop, not even when Nick was home. He offered to go with her, but she let him come along only once, and then he felt as if he were trailing after her, rather than walking with her. She walked too fast for conversation, staring dreamy-eyed in front of her, and he had this feeling that because of his presence, neighbors who might have been looking after her, watching her through the film of their curtains, had just turned away.

  He began to tell her when he might call, so she could get her walks out of the way, or save them until afterward. Still, she was difficult to reach.

  He was in Boston one night, dialing her. He wished she would answer. He wished he had someone else to call. When he was a kid at the home, he’d had a little red notebook into which he had copied the numbers of half the pay phones in Pittsburgh. People who were lonely always answered ringing pay phones and almost always would talk to you. He had never admitted he was an orphan, had never admitted he was lonely, and he’d had some good conversations until he’d run out of dimes. Things had changed, though. He didn’t feel comfortable anymore calling pay phone numbers, and the one time he himself had answered a ringing pay phone, a raspy male voice had asked him if he wanted a blowjob.

  Idly, he dialed his boss’s number, then dialed a book buyer he liked, but no one answered. He didn’t know why, but he suddenly began dialing his old number, the one he had shared with Dore. He knew she wasn’t there, but it made him think about her again, it made him remember, and he called information to see if she was still in Boston. To his surprise, she was listed in Chelsea.

  He dialed the number, and when he heard her voice, he hung up. He felt dizzy, felt the present crazily starting to recede. Leslie, he thought, but Leslie wasn’t there beside him, Leslie wasn’t on the other end of a phone whispering all the things she wanted to do to him. Leslie was out walking in the night, striding alone under the eyes of his neighbors. He called Dore again, nerved up, and this time her sturdy voice belled out that one more crank call and she was going to get her gun and shoot the phone out. She hung up.

  He found himself dialing her number all the next day, never with any luck. He tried as soon as he woke up, right before an appointment; he even excused himself during a business lunch, leaving his catalog with the buyer while he dashed outside to make a quick call. He couldn’t help himself. He just felt the need to know if a man would answer, calling out, “Honey, I’ve got it,” if a child would pick up and plaintively call for mommy. No one picked up, though, until the evening, and then it was a young voice. He froze until he heard the voice call politely, “Miss…” and then he relaxed. Dore must still be teaching.

  He wrote her address on a piece of paper, his hand trembling. He wondered what she looked like, if she had let her hair grow, if she still wore those glass earrings that trapped the light in small halos. He didn’t go visit her, not then. He didn’t even call her again until another month had passed and he was back in Boston. He drove by her apartment. He told himself he just wanted to see how she was living, what kind of a neighborhood it was. It was perfectly all right to still be concerned about someone you had once loved, wasn’t it? He strained to see the numbers on the buildings.

  Her place was brick, small, well kept, and he drove right past it. He didn’t want her to see him. He remembered when he had first fallen in love with her, how the impossible fact of someone loving him that way had transformed everything. The air had smelled different—he used to swear he could feel it around him. Colors had shimmered. He had walked around the city wanting to stop people and tell them about her. He had felt that he was two people—himself and her—and that no matter what he did, no matter what happened in his whole life, he could never lose her.

  He drove to Cambridge, parking, walking over to a burger joint. He’d eat some lunch; he’d think about what it was he really wanted to do. And then, no matter what it turned out to be, he would leave. He would go home to his wife and his daughter.

  Dore was teaching English as a second language the day Nick came back into her life. It was a fairly new job for her, and she
was still dumbfounded that they had hired her. She knew no Spanish, no Japanese, but the administrator had told her it didn’t matter, that ignorance was a plus because it would force her to be a better teacher, and force the class to be better students. She nodded, then went out and bought herself some elementary language texts and began teaching herself.

  She had two classes—a beginning class that stared at her, and an advanced class that didn’t. Her students ranged from a sixty-year-old doorman at the Ritz to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a South American dictator. She liked the doorman, but the girl gave her haughty looks and finally left the school abruptly because of a military coup at home.

  Dore took her classes on field trips. She made them go into McDonald’s and order; she made them stop people on the street and ask for the time. Her students never called her anything but “Teacher,” and although some told her their problems, none came to her house or even phoned her. She told herself it was progress.

  The day before she saw Nick again, one of her students gave her a present. She was a sad, soft-eyed girl named Ria, just sixteen, but married. She and her husband had been living in her mother’s house in Puerto Rico. She had once told Dore that she married him because her mother said he was a good choice, and they had moved into the house because her mother said Ria couldn’t do laundry or cook well enough to please a man, so she would do it for her. Ria also told Dore that when she was little, she had had epileptic fits, but her mother, shamed, had never told the school. Ria had nearly died because no one knew what to do with her. She had come to the United States for just six months, on her mother’s savings, staying long enough to learn English because companies in Puerto Rico paid more money for that kind of skill. “Go,” her mother had told her. “I can take care of your husband.”

  Ria had told Dore this her first day, waiting until the other students had left. She whispered her life to Dore, dredging in her dictionary to find the words, but she never spoke in class, and when Dore called on her, Ria looked at her in reproach.