Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  Leslie couldn’t help it, she couldn’t make herself stop. She’d see Robin leaning along the front window and all she could think was that Robin was waiting for Nick as if he were some white knight come to deliver her out of this castle, and she would feel herself growing afraid. Every car that passed by could be Nick daring to take his daughter, daring to take another thing from her.

  She made up elaborate dinners with all of the four basic food groups represented. She bought tea for Robin, international coffees for herself. Swiss Vienna Malt. Ginger Java. Apricot Java. She thought she was going crazy. Once, feeling Robin’s stare on her, she stared back. “How was I any different?” Her own voice sounded strange to her, foreign.

  “What?” said Robin.

  “I see how it is,” Leslie said. “I know what time the men around here get home, what time they go out again to their clubs or their bowling, to bluegrass bars for half the night. I’m at their houses, listening to the women waiting for their husbands to call, to come home, to just drop by. They spend more time alone than I ever did. Really. And when Nick was home,” she said, “he was home. He was happy.”

  Robin stood up from the table, taking her cup.

  “Stay,” Leslie said. “Talk to me a little, why don’t you.”

  Robin balanced her cup. “I don’t have anything to say.”

  “Turn the dishwasher on, then,” Leslie said.

  That evening Leslie sat in the living room by herself, braiding and unbraiding her hair, thinking about tornadoes, about Danny being saved only to be sparked into oblivion by a live wire. These days, she felt the air thinning out, felt the ground blistering, giving way. You couldn’t count on anything, she thought, and you couldn’t escape.

  She went to bed with pillows at her ears to muffle the sounds, and when in the morning she thought she heard hornets, she decided the thing to do was try to take some control, try to make herself unbend-able, a strip of steel. She forced herself to get up, to start. She walked past Robin’s room, the door still shut, and went downstairs. She got out the Yellow Pages and slapped them onto the kitchen table. Still in Nick’s blue flannel shirt, she flipped the pages, and when her fingers found the columns and columns of lawyers, she started crying, her sobs ragged, torn from her, because it hadn’t taken any time at all for her to get to this place, because it was almost natural, and, mostly, because now there wasn’t any reason at all not to pick out one of those numbers and go ahead and dial it.

  FOURTEEN

  At first Nick stayed in a Pittsburgh hotel. When that got too expensive, and too lonely, he sublet a small furnished one-bedroom over in Squirrel Hill, on a densely shaded street just ten minutes from his family. He brought almost nothing of his own into the apartment. He didn’t want to feel that this stay had any sort of permanence to it, that this was anything at all like how things were going to be.

  He called Dore, but she never picked up the phone. He sent her letters that came back in the mail still sealed, and then he stopped putting a return address on them and they didn’t come back at all. It was easier that way—he could at least imagine her reading them. He drove by Leslie’s house and parked, watching the lights inside dim and brighten and then fade back toward black. He rang her bell, and he wrote her letters, too, with his new address, his new phone number firmly inked across the top. He slept with the phone crooked in his arm, willing it to ring, willing a voice to wake him from his night.

  He was trying to park the car one morning when a man in a black suit approached him and called him, questioningly, by name. “Yes,” said Nick, waiting, and then the man politely handed him an envelope and turned to leave. As soon as Nick ripped open the envelope, he saw the legal writing and knew what it meant. He stuffed it back into the envelope so he wouldn’t have to read any more.

  He tried to call Leslie all afternoon, and finally he called the lawyer whose name was on the papers. He told the lawyer there must be some mistake. “No mistake,” the lawyer said. “Do you have counsel of your own?”

  “Counsel? I don’t need counsel,” Nick said.

  “Good,” the lawyer said pleasantly, “then she’ll be able to get the divorce by default.”

  Nick hung up. He looked at the papers again. She wasn’t asking him for anything; all she wanted was to keep what was hers—the house, her business, and she wanted custody of Robin, though Robin could visit him whenever she wanted.

  He thought suddenly that Robin would never want to visit him, not now, and then he thought of going away for a while, letting things quiet down before he tried to patch them back into place.

  He didn’t know where to go. At first he thought of all the places where his clients were, and he circled those points on the map. Then gradually he began to realize that his job was now part of the problem. He didn’t feel like talking to his clients anymore. He didn’t like it when they asked about his family, and he didn’t want to ask about theirs. Selling didn’t interest him the way it used to, either. Suddenly, he didn’t know how to tell a buyer what he should do, not even in a matter as simple as reordering a book that had sold out. He didn’t know how to be friendly when he felt terrible. As soon as he walked into a store, all he could think about was getting out again.

  He had vacation time coming up, three weeks of it, and he had enough money saved to take even more. Nothing was final. Nothing. He’d call it a leave of absence, that was all, a kind of hibernation of the soul. He wired the people he had sublet the apartment from, telling them he had to leave, giving them two months’ extra rent and a promise to sublet the sublet. He sent postcards to both Dore and Leslie, scribbling on both sides so they would read his words despite themselves. He wrote, “GOING AWAY—I LOVE YOU, NICK.” He called and called, using up the time he should have spent packing, always keeping the phone close.

  He sublet the sublet easily, and then took a day and drove to Robin’s school. He walked right in to the principal’s office, the same easy way he had when she was little and he had wanted to take her on an all-day outing. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, how he was going to act. He saw himself just driving and driving with her, the two of them loose and easy in the front seat, breezing their way out to Arizona, to Mexico. Sometimes he saw Leslie in the back seat, quietly talking to Dore. Oh, God, his family.

  The principal was a tired-looking blonde. She pumped Nick’s hand. “I like to see parents taking an interest,” she informed him cheerfully. “Especially fathers.” She kept talking about Robin, about what potential there was if the girl would just buckle down a bit. She had to ask a computer where Robin was right now, and then she called out to an overweight boy in jeans and a green flannel shirt who was stapling fliers together. “I need you to play messenger, Bob,” she said.

  “Beats this,” Bob said. “I’m getting staples in my fingers.”

  She scribbled him a pass. She wrote down where Robin was and told him it would behoove him not to dawdle because she knew exactly how long it should take him to get back. When she turned back to Nick, Nick saw Bob give her a Nazi salute and then smartly goose-step away.

  Nick waited nearly half an hour before Robin showed up. Her face seemed to be flying off in all directions when she saw him. He couldn’t make out any one expression, just a melding and shifting of many. He took her over to the side of the hall, touching her shoulder. Her eyes were very hard and bright. “I knew you’d come to see me,” she said.

  “I’m going away,” he said, and then she stiffened; she strode from him, pushing her way out the front doors and into the street.

  The principal looked warily at Nick. “I’ll take care of it,” Nick said.

  He went outside and got in the car and drove, looking for her. He was staring so hard at the sidewalks, at the alleys, that he didn’t even see the cab swerving toward him, not until he heard the horn, until he heard the other driver shouting at him to goddamned watch.

  Watch—that was what he had been doing, what he did. He pulled the car over to the side and looked bli
ndly out at the empty road.

  Dore’s line was disconnected. Leslie stayed on the phone with her lawyer or with her friend Emma, talking out her past, crying sometimes. Robin sat out in the back and could hear her. Leslie said how unfair it was—now that he didn’t have her, now that things were ruined, he was acting just the way she had always hoped. Being sweet. Sending cards and letters, all that sugar through the mail, calling, parking his car out front—oh, not anymore, but before the divorce papers, he did. It was as if he knew the secrets to pull her back, only now she had to shut herself off from them, now she couldn’t let herself think they meant anything other than a soggy heart trying to heal itself whatever way it could. When Leslie talked about Robin, she lowered her voice so Robin couldn’t hear. They never spoke about Nick between them, and never mentioned Dore.

  Robin felt completely alone, attached to nothing. For months she kept expecting Nick to show up at her school again. She wore her best blouses, her most adult skirts. He’d have to court her, she told herself. He’d have to be the one to do the proving, because she was going to be aloof and snooty at first; she was going to be untouchable. She waited for him. She got passes and left class so she could parade past the long open windows by the road, where he might drive by and see her. She was tense, expectant. On her fifteenth birthday, she stood out in front of the house and waited for the mailman, sure there would at least be a card, and when there wasn’t, she told herself it must have gotten lost in the mail.

  Nick never showed up. He never called. He wasn’t one of the drivers who honked at her. She kept calling Dore’s disconnected number; she kept calling Information to see if there was a new one. She missed talking to Dore. At night, Leslie would grab a jacket and stride purposefully out of the house, and Robin would just wander around her room. She couldn’t bear it, not knowing if Nick was with Dore, if they were going to get married, circling back to a past before she had even existed.

  She kept to herself at school. She was in the tenth grade then, and she spent a lot of time in the science lab doing experiments. It was quiet and orderly in there; she could do the same experiment over and over, and every single time she’d come up with the same answer. It comforted her. It made her feel there was some stability in her life, and she began showing up so often, the science teacher gave her a permanent pass.

  She liked him. “Legs,” the kids called him, because his name was Douglas Nylon. He was new that year, young and funny, and he wore thick Coke-bottle glasses and his hair slicked back. He was a good teacher. He brought in plants that smelled like rotting meat and that he said were pollinated by flies; he brought in a pitcher plant that dosed insect victims with a narcotic before it began the business of devouring them. He let the kids call him Douglas, until one day the principal came by and heard that, and the next day Douglas cleared his throat and told the class they had to call him Mr. Nylon from now on. He said he didn’t quite see the point, but he had always been one who liked to play by the rules.

  A few kids didn’t believe him. They called him Douglas, and he looked right through them. There were gibes about it. “Playing by the rules,” someone snorted. “Kissing ass is more like it.” But Robin found herself taking sudden new note of him, a man who walked an unbendable path, a man who could be trusted.

  She started watching him. He wouldn’t accept a paper if it was ten minutes late, because those were his rules. He wouldn’t let someone into class late, either—he said you were either interested or you weren’t, and if you weren’t, why were you taking his class? She began to look forward to the jokes he always cracked while he handed back their papers, to the same expression of annoyance that flickered in his eyes when the bell rang. She knew what to expect with him—he made her feel safe.

  She was alone in the lab one day, trying to clone carrots, when she started crying. She happened to look up and she saw Douglas passing, and she dipped her head again, and he continued to walk. She quickly sluiced back her tears and tried to concentrate on her tiny furls of carrot, but in a minute he was back, slapping a chocolate bar against the table. “Come on, it’ll make you feel happy,” he said.

  “Sugar’s junk,” she said.

  “Junk? Who the hell told you that?” He sat down beside her. “Chocolate has the exact same chemicals that your body manufactures when it’s in love.” He tried to get a glimpse of her face. “It’ll make you feel better,” he said. He lifted up the bar. “I’ll flunk you if you don’t.”

  “You will not,” she said, but she took part of the candy.

  “So, you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Okay,” he said easily. He got up, patting her on the shoulder, leaving her the rest of the chocolate, and went on down the hall. She watched him, taking another bite, rolling the sweetness on her tongue, trying to make it last.

  She didn’t know how it happened. It wasn’t like her old crushes, the moony falling until a boy would like her back, his attention like a signpost to his flaws—the crook in a nose, the cowlick marring a part. Douglas wasn’t like the ones she usually was drawn to, the wild ones in leather and torn denims, the ones who couldn’t pronounce the names of the books she kept taking from her purse so she could read while she waited for a sundae, while she waited for her bus stop, while she walked so slowly she could have been standing still. Douglas wasn’t a boy at all.

  Something was snapping on and off inside of her, carrying her. She didn’t wake up remembering Nick wasn’t there anymore, because she was rushing to shower and dress and get to school the same time the janitor did. She was dressing as neatly as she could so she could sweet-talk him into letting her in early, so she could be at the lab doing experiments before Douglas arrived.

  She sat in the lab, her heart thudding, working on her carrot clones, waiting for him, and then as soon as he walked in, she felt riddled with doubt. His belly stuck out. His shirts were so terrible they pained her to look at them. Engineer shirts, short-sleeved striped cottons tucked into red plastic belts. He wore penny loafers that he actually put pennies into. She’d juxtapose him against the boys in her class and feel herself withering, tell herself this was nuts. But then, when she was in another class, the desire would hit her, and she’d have to excuse herself to go into the ladies’ room and fill up a sink with cold water and gently dip her face down into it.

  More and more, he was in the lab mornings when she got there. He praised her experiments, said he was delighted that she was buckling down so well, and then he told her about his life. He said he had grown up in a family of five girls, all of them wanting to be nuns, talking about heaven and Jesus. One of his sisters even had a color picture of the pope she had taken from the Sunday supplement and played with it the way she would a doll, giving it sips of imaginary tea from a cup, folding a blanket up to its chin.

  “I was the bad boy,” Douglas told Robin. “I stole packs of gum from the store, I skipped classes, I swore, and I slept with my hands under the covers.” He laughed and Robin blushed. He told her that only one of his sisters had become a nun, and she had lasted less than a year before she fell in love with another nun and dropped out of the cloister with her. One of his sisters had a drinking problem, one dabbled in drugs; the others, he said, were fine, though no one ever went to church. “Except me,” he said. “Sometimes on Christmas, I like to go. I turned out to be the Goody Two-Shoes of the family, I guess. What can I say?”

  She didn’t care what it was he said, only that he keep on talking to her. The silences were hellish for her. She’d go home and try to plan out conversations she might have with him, writing down possible topics of conversation, the rejoinders he might make. All she usually needed was one line to start him off, a piece of thought about learning to take photos, about learning to dance, and then he would be racing out words, telling her about the time he spent a whole weekend just photographing sneakers, about the time he was the only male in a ballet class of sixteen-year-old girls.

  He was c
urious about her own family, but she was sure he could never love a girl who was somehow involved in her father’s infidelity, so she lied. She said her mother designed dresses for Vogue, that she was planning a whole exclusive line for Robin now. She said her father was away on business again, but he sent her first-edition books airmail, every stop he made.

  “It must get lonely, I’ll bet,” said Douglas, watching her.

  “Oh, not so,” said Robin. “We’re an extremely close family.”

  When school was out, she’d hang around and watch his car leaving, and then she’d cab over to his neighborhood and see if he came out. He never did. When she came back home, Leslie would be all over her, wanting to know where she had been, why she hadn’t called. “Why are you doing this to me right now?” Leslie asked.

  “I’m not doing anything,” Robin said.

  “That’s right,” Leslie said. “No one’s done anything at all around here.”

  “Well, you sure haven’t,” Robin said, and Leslie turned to her, steely-eyed. “You wait until you know a little more, until you get a little smarter, before you dare to say something like that to me,” Leslie said.

  Leslie went upstairs to sew, and when Robin passed by, she saw that her mother’s shoulders were crumpled. It frightened Robin a little, made her feel as if she were floating, as if there were nothing to ground her.

  She was crying in the lab again one day when Douglas came in. He sat quietly beside her, and as soon as he touched her, she blurted out that she was in love with him. He took it very seriously. He told her it was natural for a student to feel that way about a teacher, especially when they were friends, but he had to tell her that nothing like that would never happen. “I’m your teacher,” he said.