Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  He touched the poster, remembering, and then he walked on. Past the woods where the botany students were always collecting leaves and muttering the names of the shrubs and trees to themselves, past the center of town, and over toward the lake. All the time he kept reciting to himself, like some secret litany, These are my boundaries—this is what I can own.

  He kept walking, faster and faster, and when he got closer to the lake, the wind sprang up and stung the tears from his eyes. He thought about the fall here, turning into winter. “Nine o’clock nights,” they called them here. Nights when it got too cold to go out, when the wind was so strong it had once pushed a small girl into the path of a car. It had been in the papers—last year, he remembered—and although the girl had only been scratched up a bit, the whole thing scared people so they stayed close to the trees when they walked, or kept a grip along the chain link fences. It had made the college kids giddy in their boldness, and sometimes they would link arms and play snake in the wind, winding in and out. There were warnings for people with respiratory ailments to stay indoors. You could sometimes see people trudging in the snow, white surgical masks warming the air they breathed, insulating them.

  It made him think of Pittsburgh, one terrible summer when there had been some sort of failure at one of the mills. The home had put surgical masks on all the babies. They had tried to put them on the boys, but the kids wrenched them off, angry at being asked to take on another thing that would make them different from other children.

  Nick thought suddenly that maybe winter would be good—maybe a cold, bony freeze might slow down feeling, might stun pain itself into a kind of woozy hibernation. There was hope in thinking that. Abruptly, he stopped walking. He was exhausted. He turned, toward the home he owned, the home he had shared with his daughter, and moved toward it.

  EIGHTEEN

  Leslie had spent three whole hours at the brightly lit Giant Eagle trying to decide what foods she should buy for Robin’s homecoming. She wheeled her cart up and down every aisle, tumbling in boxes of pastel ice cream, plastic bags of cookies, soda pop and luncheon meats. It wasn’t until she was at the counter, and paying for all the food, watching its steady slide down the conveyer belt, that she felt suddenly depressed. Look at it. It was all the kinds of food an eleven-year-old kid ate, but foods Robin at eleven never touched, let alone asked for. Every item passing her now seemed like just another part of her that Robin could reject.

  There were four brown bags, and she struggled home with them, unloaded them. Then she cleaned the house, debating the logic of keeping Robin’s room exactly the way it had been left, or changing it, buying a new spread, new curtains. In the end, she did nothing to it at all, not even dust.

  She kept telling herself, this was a girl who had been living with a man, who had done God knew what else. She wasn’t an ordinary kid anymore. She sat down, dreaming, realizing that what she really wanted returned to her was a baby, who clung to her skirts, who sucked at her breasts, who cried out for her in the endless deep quiet of the night. She wanted a runny nose to swab dry; the effortless pilings of laundry; the hand that reached out to hold hers; the damp, open mouth that cried when she wasn’t there. Oh, Lord, she thought, fool that I am.

  She sat out on the front stoop to wait for Robin. Robin had told her not to come out to the airport, that she’d take a limo, and Leslie knew her well enough not to argue. When the cab drove up, Leslie stood, her heart expanding so she thought her chest would break open. Then Robin stepped out, looking ragtaggled and tired, a dog beside her, growling low in his throat as Leslie slowly walked toward them, willing her face to stay calm. It was Robin who was suddenly crying, who wrapped both arms about her, and this time Leslie was careful to be the one to release her grip first, to step back, and to beam.

  “And just who is this?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at the dog.

  “He’s with me,” Robin said. “Toby, good boy, sit.”

  “Well, I guess he’s with me, too, then,” Leslie said. She lifted one hand and gently petted the dog’s head. “How much?” she said to the cabdriver, but Robin was already fanning bills into his hand, and Leslie thought suddenly, Now it begins.

  It wasn’t what either one of them expected. At first they were careful about each other, almost too polite. Robin spent a lot of time in her room. She put on the clothes she had left behind, but they didn’t feel comfortable, didn’t seem to quite fit anymore. She tried playing her old albums, but halfway through, the music would begin to irritate her and she’d shut it off.

  She didn’t know what to do with herself a lot of the time, and she hung around Leslie, who never mentioned what had happened in the past, who acted as if a time warp had occurred, as if Robin had just stepped out one day to go to the market, and here it was ten minutes later and she was home. She said “I love you” a lot to Robin, and Robin tried to trust it, tried to relax. She didn’t see how Leslie sometimes sat up nights by herself, rocking in the chair that her own mother used to rock her in when she was a baby. Leslie never let Robin know how much she wished Robin would be the one to say “I love you,” to surprise her with it. And she never for one moment let Robin see that every time she looked at her daughter, she saw something of Nick, and it hurt.

  Robin called Nick every week, walking down to Walnut Street and using the pay phone at the Gazebo coffee shop. She had to shout over the din and squeeze close to the phone so people could jam in and out. It was hard talking to Nick. As soon as she heard his voice, she felt as if she had made the wrong decision, as if she should get on a plane and go back to Madison.

  She didn’t like hearing that he had hired a “temp” to take over her duties at Brini’s, even when he assured her that the new person wasn’t a fifth as good as she had been. He told her everyone at the shop missed her, that the salesmen asked for her every time they came in, that the bats in the attic were cranky without her.

  “Oh, they are not,” said Robin, pleased.

  “I miss you,” Nick said. “I love you,” and she pulled in a breath. He kept asking her questions she couldn’t answer: How was she doing with Leslie? What did it feel like to be back in Pittsburgh? She couldn’t bring herself to hang up, and would have just stayed on the phone, feeding quarters into the slots, if two boys hadn’t started jostling her impatiently.

  As soon as she gave up the phone, she felt the pull of Madison leaving her; she saw the Gazebo, she remembered Leslie, and she went to buy a cheesecake—blueberry, the kind Leslie liked. Then she walked home, hoping Leslie was there, feeling good because she had such a hope.

  Leslie was indeed home, sewing. She stopped to smile at Robin and got up to fix something for the dog, who still eyed her suspiciously. “Goodness,” Leslie said, “it’s tuna in springwater, better than most dogs get.”

  Robin held out the cheesecake. “Just what I want,” Leslie said, beaming.

  What Robin began to want was to go back to school. She kept thinking how nice it would be to have her days planned out for her, to have fixed schedules and rules, boundaries you couldn’t cross. Still, she hedged: She was going to be eighteen in a few months; she’d stick out; she wouldn’t be accepted. She would have given the whole idea up, but she kept yearning.

  When she broached the idea to Leslie, Leslie looked up at her. “I think that’s great,” she said, “but you left in your sophomore year—they might want you to repeat that whole grade.”

  “I can’t go back to that school!” Robin cried, alarmed.

  “Listen,” Leslie said, “that half-finished coat lying right in the next room belongs to a client who’s on the school board. She’ll know what programs are available for you. Adult education—whatever you want. I can call her right now.”

  When Robin nodded, Leslie smiled, buoyant. There were still things she could do for Robin. She called her client, and when she hung up she had the names of three different programs. High School Equivalency—GED, they called it. Robin wouldn’t have to set foot in a traditional classroom i
f she didn’t want to.

  Leslie set it up for her—a program at a private school, classes of ten adults, every day from ten to three. Three Rivers Institute, it was called, and it was right across the street from Kaufmann’s, so Robin could poke around and shop afterward, buy herself some little thing as a reward.

  “Is it all right?” Leslie demanded.

  “It’s fine,” Robin said, and she turned, so Leslie couldn’t see how scared she suddenly felt.

  She practiced feeling confident. She stared at her face in the mirror, willing the fear away. Whenever she talked to Nick, she made him remind her of how well she had helped him run the store. “No one dared to steal a thing when you were around,” Nick said. “The terror of Brini’s.” Then he told her he loved her, he missed her, and that made her feel better, too.

  Robin dressed in one of Leslie’s blue wool dresses and took the bus to Three Rivers. As soon as she walked in, she felt like turning around and walking out. It was really just one big room, with gray, peeling linoleum and white walls, a series of wood tables pushed together in front of a long blackboard. People were already sitting, talking, and none of them looked anything like Robin. There were two women in their fifties, both in print dresses, passing a lipstick. There were a few men in shirts and ties, and there was one boy, who looked younger than Robin, in torn jeans, who stared angrily at the floor. Robin sat down at the end of an empty table, looking at her bitten nails. This was not being fifteen again; this was not where she had left off.

  The classes were terrible. The teacher was an impatient woman, not much older than Robin, and she talked too fast. The material was endless—a series of twenty-five pamphlets on grammar, arithmetic, and reading comprehension. Robin didn’t see why she had to learn the things she knew already, why she had to wait and wait for someone else to figure out what the subject of a sentence was, what the verb was. She shot up her hand so many times, the teacher sarcastically suggested that Robin give others a chance. “We all know how smart you are,” she said, which set something boiling in Robin. By the time they moved on to the arithmetic, which was really nothing more than word problems with addition and subtraction, Robin felt ill.

  At the end of the class, she got up and asked the teacher if she could just take the GED test cold. She said she was sure she could pass it—that she probably could have passed it back in third grade.

  The teacher gave Robin a long, cool look. “So you think you can pass it, do you?” she said. “Well, you need sixteen hours of this class before I’ll even allow you to look at the test. Now, have you had sixteen hours?”

  Robin wouldn’t ever have more than the three hours she had managed to tolerate that day. She came home and took off Leslie’s dress. Then she made a careful list of all the high schools in Pittsburgh and asked Leslie if she would call them to see if they would let her attend.

  There were problems. Zoning restrictions. If Robin wanted to attend a certain school, she’d have to live near it. Leslie would never be able to bring herself to give up the house that had been handed down to her, the one thing she always felt was really hers, and it would cost too much for Robin to have her own apartment. Besides, none of the schools much liked the idea of a student living on her own in an apartment; they said it set a poor example for the others.

  In the end, Robin realized that if she wanted her high-school education now, she would have to go back to her old school. It made her dizzy. She tried to talk to Leslie about it, but Leslie told her that it was her decision, and that whatever she decided was perfectly fine. She talked to Nick, who said only how proud he was that she even wanted to go back to school, and that he knew how difficult a thing like that could be.

  Panicky with impatience, she was about to hang up when he started telling her how he had made it through his own high-school years. He had made it a point to dress differently, with his black sweater, his sunglasses, and his cigarettes. He had prided himself on the fact that he didn’t fit in at the home, that he was different. “Unique,” he called it.

  She listened to him, and realized that she could do that, too. She could swagger her way through school without letting any of it wound her where she was still tender. She could be her father’s daughter.

  Robin was eighteen when she finally reentered her sophomore year. She asked Leslie to design her some clothes, something very different. Leslie was delighted. She hadn’t made anything for Robin since Robin was a baby, and it touched her that Robin had asked. It made it very important to her that what she designed be wonderful. It also gave her a chance to show Robin what she could do. Robin would see how the owners of the fabric stores fell all over Leslie as soon as she walked in, how they saved the imported silks, the special linens for her because they knew what she could do with them.

  Leslie spent hours taking Robin’s measurements, drawing sketches for her. Robin would peer down at the drawings. “I can’t tell…” she said. But Leslie held up one hand. “I can,” she said.

  Leslie stayed up nights sewing. Sometimes she’d wake Robin to come downstairs and try something on. She’d hold her breath just watching her girl touch the fabrics. She’d make her stand very still while she draped on extra pieces, while she tucked in the cloth with her fingertips, making the fit right.

  The clothes were unusual. Fluid jersey dresses; pants that draped and tied and snapped; everything in the deep, dark colors Leslie always thought were more provocative than brights. Leslie tried to be cool, to steel herself for Robin’s reaction. She doesn’t like them, she thought, watching Robin squint, feeling her own mouth start to tremble. She hates them.

  Robin wrapped her arms about herself and then tentatively reached out and touched each dress, each skirt. “Oh, God,” she whispered to Leslie, and when she looked up her face was bright. “These are fantastic.”

  “What did I tell you?” Leslie said.

  She was so pleased, so proud, that all week, whenever Robin was out of the house, she’d go into Robin’s room and just look at the things she had designed for her, she’d see how they were hung in the closet, and then she’d feel giddy with a pleasure that lasted all day.

  Robin took a city bus rather than the school bus to school. She didn’t want more contact than she would be forced to endure. When she got off the bus, two blocks from the school, she walked with her head very high. Like a dancer. Like Nick striding into Marks, she thought suddenly, remembering the stories he had told her.

  Even if she weren’t who she was, she would have stood out in school. No one else was wearing clothing like hers, no one else had the kind of shoes Leslie had ferreted out from the wholesale theatrical shops she liked to frequent. The other kids were in frayed jeans and T-shirts and high-top Converse All Stars. Robin walked down the hallways and felt the stares, heard the whispers. She didn’t recognize a single face—her old class was gone, and this new crop was strange to her. But even so, they somehow seemed to know her. She’d see groups of kids nodding to one another as she passed. Once, she saw a girl actually pointing her out, and heard her say clearly, “Mr. Nylon,” and then, “That’s the one—that’s her,” and the others huddled around to hear the rest.

  Robin had thought at first that if she tried to be friendly, that might ease things, but she hadn’t realized that an eighteen-year-old sophomore would be such an anomaly. The three years’ difference might have been twenty, and her experiences seemed to doom her to solitude. She might as well have been a Martian for all she had in common with the others. She overheard conversations. Kids worried about whether to call up and hang up on a boy they liked, whether to pretend to have lost a class ring rather than have to give it back. They discussed in detail who was putting out and with whom and how; who would let you; and who had birth-control pills to pass out as casually as sticks of gum. It all made Robin feel so old, so distant from everything, because none of that meant anything to her anymore. All of it seemed just like memory.

  It was different with her teachers. Most were kind, welcoming her
back as if she had been on vacation and praising her for trying so hard. Only one teacher gave her any sort of grief. His name was Robert Engles. He taught math, but he had Robin for study hall every day at three. He had been a friend of Douglas’s. They’d palled around after school and played softball in Schenley Park, and once or twice, Douglas had told Robin, they had double-dated. Robert was always going from woman to woman, Douglas said; he liked having three-month relationships that never went any farther than Friday night dates and Saturday breakfasts.

  He hadn’t known that Douglas was seeing Robin—he hadn’t even suspected Douglas liked her, let alone that he would run off with her. But no one in the school believed that he hadn’t known what was going on, so they made him share some of the blame, some of the stigma. The principal had called him in to question him, to remind him what effect scandal had on tenure. And now, there was Robin, that girl in his study hall, back here where Douglas couldn’t be anymore. He treated her as though she were taking up someone else’s rightful place, as indeed he thought she was. He sniped at her when he caught her dreaming. “This is study hall. So study,” he said. He didn’t have to mention Douglas; his disdainful look was enough to make her feel small.

  No one really talked to her. She knew she had a reputation. Some of the boys followed her. One or two asked her out, their stance defiant, and when she refused, they whispered things under their breath at her. She began taking her time leaving her classes, going out into the hallway only when the few kids there were rushing to class and had no time to stop to stare at her. She ate her lunch in the girls’ bathroom or in empty classrooms, hiding from the school monitors.