Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  She came back out fifteen minutes later, her eyes red, the doctor behind her. She wouldn’t talk to him in the car; she kept looking down at her hands, lifting them to bite her nails. She wouldn’t tell him anything. He stopped at the first Dairy Queen he saw, telling her that he didn’t know about her, but he certainly needed one. But when he came back carrying two chocolate double-dipped cones, she took one look at them and started crying. He didn’t know what to do with the ice cream; he hadn’t really wanted one anyway, so he just dropped them into the trashcan and got back into the car and sat beside her.

  “It’s alive and I can’t have it,” she cried, and then abruptly drew herself up. “Millions of girls have abortions,” she said stiffly. She started talking about how simple a procedure it was—it could be done right in the office. He’d have to come with her, though, because she might need help getting home.

  “Of course I will,” he said.

  “You hate me,” she said. “You think I’m disgusting.” Her voice was so flat, he turned to stare at her, astounded.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think about me,” he said, and then she looked at him for a moment before turning toward the window, lifting her face up to the breeze.

  She was told not to eat, and to count on spending some time at the doctor’s office, one hour just lying down so she could be monitored after the procedure. The appointment was in the morning, and she dressed up for it, in a new blue dress, in black heels she could barely walk in, her hair twisted into a knot and fastened with a silver clip. Nick, in blue jeans and an old black sweater, not wanting to take the time to shave that morning, felt grubby beside her. “You look very lovely,” he told her.

  “I just want to look old,” she said.

  Nick sat in the empty waiting room and tried not to think about what was happening to Robin. He thought about birth. He remembered Dore telling him how her mother had given birth to her one sulky, shiny, hot summer day while her father was at a baseball game, and even though they had had him paged, he hadn’t shown up at the hospital until late that evening, when Dore’s mother was asleep. He remembered Leslie telling him how one time her mother, in a rage, blamed Leslie’s birth for the athritis that robbed her of her tennis career, and then felt so guilty she went out and bought Leslie a fresh box of Crayolas with a built-in sharpener and three new coloring books. He remembered Susan’s birth; he remembered Robin’s, how hard it had rained that day; and then he remembered Helen nuzzling his boyish hair when he was small, telling him his birth had been a privilege.

  It seemed like hours before he was allowed to go in and see Robin. “She’s just fine,” Dr. Nagle told Nick. “Though I’d make sure she takes it easy this week.”

  Robin was lying on an examining table, a light blue blanket over her, her hair coming undone from the silver clip, and when she saw him, she sat up. “I thought you had gone,” she said. “I kept hearing the door.”

  He sat down beside her, taking her hand.

  “I kept thinking and thinking,” Robin said. “The whole time they were doing it, I kept thinking how I’d have to get myself up and get on the road and start hitching someplace, only I didn’t know where else I could go anymore, who I could go to.” She lay back against the pillow. “I’m no child of danger anymore, am I?” she said.

  “Who wants you to be?” said Nick.

  He sat with her that hour, while a nurse whisked in and out, cuffing Robin’s forearm for pressure, bringing her something red and sweet to sip, and then eventually he helped Robin get up, he had her lean on him.

  The dog was crazy at the door when he spotted Robin. He had chewed up three books and the toes of Nick’s favorite cowboy boots, but rather than being the least bit ashamed, he had left his damage in the center of the living room. “It’s lobotomy time for dogs,” Nick warned, but the dog cheerfully ignored him and wagged his tail at Robin. “You good boy,” she said.

  He set Robin up on the couch downstairs because she said she didn’t want to feel isolated. He rolled in the small black-and-white TV so she could watch the old movies that ran through the afternoons. He set up a small bookcase for her, filled with new books from his store. She wasn’t supposed to be in bed very long. He knew some women who had an abortion in the morning and went to a film that evening, but Robin stayed prone on the couch for three days, and then four, until he began to worry. He kept asking her if she was all right, if he should drive her back to the doctor’s. “I’m fine,” she said, but she didn’t get up, she just lay back against the pillows, staring moodily out at the night, her hands on her belly.

  He began noticing how tense she sometimes got when he went out to the back with the plastic bags of garbage, when he went upstairs to shower; how she didn’t seem to relax until he was back in the room with her. Sometimes her eyes were red and she’d shield them with one hand and blame it on all the books she was reading. He had the groceries delivered and tried to run his bookshop by phone, always promising to be in the next day.

  In the evening, he let the dog out into the backyard. It was fenced with white picket, and the dog could run wildly without bothering the neighbors. Nick made grilled cheese sandwiches for Robin and himself, and they ate together. He waited for her to talk to him, but she was silent. After a while her silence began to make him uncomfortable, so he began to talk.

  At first he thought he was just going to tell her some stories, the way he had when she was little. He thought he’d talk about the shop, about growing up in the home, maybe tell her how he had met Leslie, how he remembered her as a baby. He didn’t know what it was—maybe the strangeness of having his daughter in the house with him, without Leslie, without Dore in the distance. Maybe it was just Robin’s stubborn refusal to reveal her own life that made him want to reveal his.

  He found himself talking. At first about places—about his first year in New York City, his slanted, grimy floor, the roaches, the way he used to like to sit out on his fire escape nights with a book and a transistor radio and a bottle of wine because he thought it was such a New York City thing to do, because for a moment, before he remembered who and what he was, it made him feel he belonged to the city, that it was all right for him to be there.

  He told her how he used to sit on the steps of the Forty-second Street library at lunchtime amid the throngs, just hoping to meet someone. Sometimes on the streets he’d pretend to be lost so he could stop the first friendly face he saw and ask directions, make some contact. He told Robin how he had once lied on the subway, how he had told this perfectly nice old woman that his young wife had died in a farm accident and he had moved from Iowa to New York chiefly because there wasn’t a chance of seeing a cornfield there. The woman had told him that it was all right. “My own husband ran off with my best friend when I was twenty-three years old. I was crazy in love, and I’d told my best friend every secret, everything. That, to me, is worse.”

  He told Robin about the trailer park—what it was like to live in a home that swayed when it got too windy, where you could hear the sounds of a family fight from halfway down the block.

  Robin never took her eyes from him while he talked, and she began asking questions. But then the dog started barking, wanting to be let in, and Nick had to get up.

  In all, Robin was on the couch for a week, and each night, he’d let the dog out, serve her a dinner she rarely did more than pick at, and then tell her stories. He told her about Leslie—how he had met her, how she had worried that Robin as a baby didn’t like her.

  “She worried about that?” Robin asked.

  “Well, you weren’t a cuddly baby with her,” Nick said. “She took it personally.”

  And then he began talking about Dore—how he had met her that day in the school hall, how she had been his first love, his first friend, his first everything. He stopped, yearning back toward the past, when everything was possible.

  “I know the Susan story,” Robin said, her voice low. “Dore told it to me.”

  He looked over at
her. “Well, now I’ll tell you,” he said. “It’s my story to tell, too.”

  He told her about Susan, about a baby so beautiful that people would stop him just to take a look at her, a baby so precious he had to interview twenty girls before he found one he could trust to babysit. “She was me,” he said, and then he told how he was robbed of his daughter by a thing as simple as a single breath; how in a way it had robbed him of Dore, too. “I used to watch you sleep,” he told Robin. “And every breath you took just made me worry about the next.”

  “You left me to go back to Dore,” Robin said. “I saw you. I hitched to Boston to surprise you, to be with you. I had it figured out how happy you’d be to see me, where we’d go for dinner.” She sat up. “I saw you.”

  “It had nothing to do with how I felt about you,” Nick said.

  “How did you feel about me?” she cried. “You tell me how. You were with Dore and I was home with Leslie, and you were leaving us both, you were leaving me.”

  “Who told you that?” he said. “If I were with Dore, or by myself for the rest of my life, I’d still never leave you. I’d make sure I saw you, that I spent time with you—”

  “You were never with me!” Robin cried. “You were on the road, you were at the office, you were anywhere and everywhere except with me!” She was furious. “Leslie will never take you back,” she said. “Dore won’t either.”

  For a moment, Nick felt something giving way inside of him, and then he sat up a little straighter. “I know what I have and what I don’t have,” he said. “You don’t have to do any reminding.”

  She sighed, some of the anger leaving her, making her body looser.

  “You know what?” Nick said. “Any minute, you could leave me, too. Don’t think I don’t know that. And don’t you think I don’t love you.”

  Outside, the dog was barking frantically, and Nick stood up to let him in. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said to Robin. “But tomorrow I’m going to work. I just want you to know in case you wake up late and don’t see me, that’s all.”

  “So go to work,” she said.

  She was sleeping when he got up the next morning. He went to open the bookshop, and every time he went to phone her, something came up: a new salesman wanting to deal directly with Nick; a wrong shipment; a customer trying to resell some books he had stolen from the shop. By the time Nick closed up, he was exhausted. He stopped at the grocery and bought a frozen pizza and two ready-made salads, forcing himself to believe she still might be home.

  By the time he got to the front door, he could smell something cooking inside, he could hear the dog’s short, angry barks. She opened the door in the same blue dress she had worn to the doctor’s, a wood spoon fisted in one hand. “I made dinner,” she said. “I was bored, that’s why.” She made him sit at the table while she set down platters of cheese and bread, then brought out pasta in a strange green sauce that tasted delicious. She insisted on feeding the dog scraps from her plate.

  They never discussed her staying or not staying, but every day he woke up expecting to find her gone, and every day she was there, the dog on her bed. She began showing up at the shop. He introduced her to the staff and let her sit in one of the chairs reading book after book. After a few days, Nick told her to make herself useful. He showed her how to unpack the books, how to check invoices and manage the stock. Once, he heard her talking to a customer, recommending books, and it made him smile.

  He began to get used to her being in the shop. She never walked over with him, and she never showed up at the same time. She spent her lunch hour going home to walk and feed the dog, but she always came back. In the evening, she usually waited for Nick to close the shop, and then the two of them would walk home together, stopping at the Quick-Check to pick up something for dinner.

  She was the only one of his whole staff who actually liked working the cash register, who didn’t feel the need to tell every person who approached her with a few dollars and a paperback that she was really a student at the university, that she was really writing a novel due out in the fall. She didn’t mind people asking her how old she was, and she wasn’t afraid to confront someone she suspected of shoplifting. One afternoon she even washed out both display windows, picking out the dead flies and dusting off each book.

  At the end of her first week of work, Nick handed her a check. She was baffled. “You work, you get paid,” he said.

  She blushed a little. She said he didn’t have to do that; it wasn’t as if he had really hired her. “I don’t even know how long I’ll be here,” Robin pointed out.

  He said as long as she was there, she could have the job. He watched her. He was always waiting for her to leave, and every morning he was grateful to see her at his breakfast table, rubbing her eyes, stroking the dog’s rough fur.

  There were pieces of her all over his house now. Pastel stockings dripping from the shower, powdered eye shadows and tubes of lipstick across her bureau. She liked heavy dime-store perfumes—Lily of the Valley, Gardenia—and because the fragrance was so strong, he could catch her scent almost as soon as she walked in. She didn’t ask permission to do anything, and the only thing she refused to do was answer the phone or the door. She’d flinch as soon as she heard the ringing; she’d go and get Nick out of the shower, or from the backyard garden. She tried to talk him into getting an answering machine; she said the great thing was you always knew who was calling and you never had to speak to anyone at all if you didn’t want to.

  “I hate answering machines,” Nick said.

  She drove him crazy with the phone. He’d try to call her when he knew he was going to be late, and he never could tell if she was just ignoring the rings, or had gone out to walk the dog, or if she had left and was already standing out on the highway, her thumb jabbed out, headed for nowhere he could ever find. He made up this signal for her to know that it was him calling her. Two rings, hang up, two more rings, and she was to pick up on the third.

  Sometimes, though, when he was home and picked up the phone, she would stand quietly against the long white expanse of wall and listen to him. When it was just a client, she’d turn away and go upstairs. When it was Leslie, she’d stand perfectly still until Nick had hung up. He waited for her to ask something, but she never did. He’d tell her that Leslie had sent her love, that Leslie missed her, that Leslie wished Robin would call. Robin would nod and then turn away, her face hidden from him.

  At dinner one night, Nick talked about Leslie. He did it casually, as he was spooning green beans onto his plate, and he watched Robin, trying to gauge her reaction.

  “What do you tell her about me?” Robin asked, picking at her food. “What do you say?”

  “I say you’re doing fine here. I say you seem happy. Is that wrong?”

  “What else?”

  “Listen,” Nick said, “your life is your life to tell or to keep secret. She knows you went to California.”

  “The rest?” Robin asked. “Did you tell her the rest?”

  “That’s for you to tell if you want,” Nick said. “It’s your business.”

  Robin relaxed into her chair. “She hired a detective on me,” she said.

  “No,” Nick said. “I did.”

  Robin gave him a sharp look. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “She drove you away. She drove us both right out of the house, only I didn’t have any Dore to run to the way you did.”

  Nick rested his head in his hands, rubbing at his forehead. “You think that’s what happened?” he said quietly. “You think it’s that simple? She didn’t drive anybody away, least of all me.”

  “I can’t eat this dinner,” Robin said, pushing her plate away, stiffly getting up.

  Robin watched the Madison teenagers sometimes, and she yearned. She wanted to be fifteen again. Really fifteen. Feeling like a kid, whispering secrets to a girlfriend or moonily smiling up at some boy she liked. She didn’t want to know anymore what it was like to live with someone like you were married t
o him, what it was like to have been pregnant, to have had an abortion. She didn’t want to know what it was going to be like to have an ex, how to live with a baby that was made up of nothing more than memory and pain, a baby that would never get any bigger than the small hopes it once generated, hopes that had died right along with it. And she didn’t want to know anymore how pain could amplify, how you could suddenly find out that all the roads you had ever waited and waited to travel were dusty and dirty ones, seeded with dangers you were unprepared to face.

  None of it would leave her alone. She couldn’t stop thinking about the baby she had lost, about almost having been a mother. She kept away from the children’s book sections at Brini’s; she froze when a mother pushed a stroller through the door. The doctor had told her she was doing the right thing, that there could always be other babies, when she was ready, when she was prepared. And Nick, who made such a big deal about family, had supported her. She unconsciously took up her old habit of touching her belly, the way she had when she was newly pregnant and working at Arby’s, and when she realized what she was doing, she angrily jerked her hands away.

  She wanted a different kind of comfort than what Nick was giving her. She dreamed about Dore holding her, rocking her as if she were six years old and everything could be healed in a hug. She remembered Dore’s hand soothing her brow; she remembered Dore before Dore had refused to see or talk to her anymore. She remembered feeling mothered.

  Mothered. When she had been pregnant, she had told herself how unlike Leslie she was going to be. She had listed the ways to herself like a litany: She would never pit the baby against Douglas; she would never grow cool and then warm, but would be as constant as the stars. But when she started ticking off all the good things she would do, memories about her mother cropped up despite herself: the way Leslie had let her climb into the big bed and cuddle when she was frightened; the songs Leslie sang to her; the time Leslie taught her to drive. And then Robin’s whole mood would change. She’d find herself missing her mother; she’d feel unsure and lonely and lost to herself and to everyone.