It was funny to have homework to do again, to have this routine, but she found she liked it. It felt safe and stable. She’d come home and Leslie would have a snack waiting and all kinds of funny stories and gossip to tell her. The two of them would sit at the table and talk and eat until Leslie went back to work and Robin started her studying. She sat at the kitchen table, spreading out her math books, her biology texts, and all the time she felt as if she were practicing what it was like to be fifteen years old again, as if enough practicing might help her to get it right. She could hear Leslie sewing in the other room, and it comforted her.
Sometimes in the middle of her studying, she’d write to Nick. She told him about school, said she missed him. It was funny how just the writing made her feel reconnected to him.
He sent her letters, and as soon as they flopped in through the mail slot, she saw how Leslie’s face changed. She left the letters open on the hall table, one of her hairs across them, and went out for a while. But when she came back, the letters were always right where she had left them, her hair still in place on top of them.
When Nick called, Leslie never said more than “Hello, how are you?” before passing the phone quickly to Robin. She’d get moody; she’d get her jacket and go for one of her walks, and later she’d just come over to Robin and put both arms around her, cradling her for a moment, rocking, before she released her with a quick, grateful kiss.
One night, Robin was finishing an English paper on Jane Austen when the phone rang. She picked it up automatically, sure it was Leslie, who had said when she would call, and there, across the wires, was Douglas.
“What do you want?” she asked guardedly.
“I just want to talk to you. I had to risk it. I’m allowed to be interested, aren’t I?”
Robin hesitated. “You talk first,” she said.
So he did, telling her about his teaching job in California, his new apartment that actually had its own outdoor pool and a communal vegetable garden. “I’m cauliflowered out these days,” he told her, laughing. And then he started asking her questions. He wanted to know about living with Nick, about living with Leslie. Did she have curfews? Did they hit her? Were they ashamed?
“What are you talking about? They were never ashamed,” Robin said hotly. “You’re the only one who was ashamed.”
“Oh, have it that way, then,” he said.
“I’m back in school,” she said proudly. “The same one.”
“You’re kidding!” he said, impressed. She felt his interest washing over her, and he launched into more questions. But all of them seemed to center on the past. Did she still wear those Mary Janes she used to wear, the ones that clicked on the floor so you always knew she was coming? Did she still carry her books clutched against her chest the way the junior-high-school kids did, to hide the fact that they didn’t have much in the way of breasts yet? “Do you still sit in the front row and squint at the board? Do you still take your lunch in a brown paper bag?”
“It’s different now,” she said.
“Lord, I remember your curls bent over the microscope, the way you always were sucking on Lifesavers, telling me it was because of a sore throat so I wouldn’t make you toss it into the wastebasket.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said, her voice flattening.
“You were so cute.”
“You only like me when I’m a girl, don’t you?” Robin said abruptly. “You only like me when I’m some kind of daughter, and then as soon as I stop, you don’t even want to know me.”
“That’s not true—”
“Listen, I have to go,” Robin said. “Don’t call me again, all right? Just don’t call me.” She didn’t wait for him to hang up. She gently replaced the receiver.
She was sitting on the front porch, just watching the stars spangling across the sky, when Leslie came home. She sat down beside her daughter. “Douglas called,” Robin said.
“Oh?”
“I wish he hadn’t,” said Robin. “Now, I don’t feel so good.”
“Love’s always a problem,” Leslie said. She looked at Robin. “You still love him?”
Robin shifted. “Sometimes,” she said. “When I think about how it was with him, when I remember being in that car, just driving across the country, and every five seconds he’d have to hold my hand.” She looked at her hands. “No one ever loved me like that.”
“Yes, they did,” Leslie said.
“It’s sad, isn’t it, having to live without someone,” Robin said.
“Yes, it is.” Leslie touched Robin’s hand.
“Would you ever get back together with Nick?” Robin asked.
“Would you with Douglas?” Leslie replied, and then she stood up, stretching. “Look at this night. Isn’t it a beaut?” She bent to kiss Robin. “You smell good,” she said.
Robin smiled, embarrassed.
“Is that my perfume?” Leslie asked.
“I’m eighteen—I thought I should wear something adult. Are you mad?”
“Baby, that’s the first thing of mine you ever wanted. Douse yourself with it,” Leslie said, and then she went inside, leaving Robin to sit out alone, dreaming at the stars, waiting for one to skyrocket across the night so she could wish upon it.
Leslie went to the kitchen for coffee, sitting down at the table while she waited for it to brew. She had never even liked coffee all that much, until Nick left her. Then she had drunk herself silly with it so she wouldn’t sleep, so she wouldn’t have to dream that she was still happy, that things were all right, that all she had to do was tilt her head and there would be her husband, smiling at her, reaching for a kiss.
She had even discovered these caffeine candies at the Rite Aid one day. “Chew a Cup of Coffee,” the package said, and they came in three flavors—lime, mocha, and butterscotch. All three tasted medicinal, but she had gone through several packs a day, so jittery and hyped up that she would sew all night.
She had given the candies up when she became calmer, but she still wanted coffee all the time. She limited herself to just two cups—one in the morning, one in the evening. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to sleep, she’d be up all night, not wanting to sew, not wanting to watch TV, not wanting to do anything except the one thing she couldn’t—dream in her bed.
Ah, but everything changed, everything worked itself right around. All those years when she was sure there must be some mistake, when she was sure the hospital had given her the wrong baby, because her baby wouldn’t pull away from her, her baby would love her right from the start. Robin had seemed to belong to everyone but her. To her friend’s family—what was that girl’s name, the one with all the clothes? To that boy who had nearly killed them both. To Nick, and then—the deepest, widest hurt of all—to Dore. Leslie lifted herself up to get the coffee.
Her clients kept trying to fix her up. Why did people think one love could take the place of another? Hurt didn’t end, any more than love ever did. You just tried to live with it as best you could. You watched it fade a little, but it was always there, always as much a part of you as your own heartbeat. Second helpings, she considered the men they described for her, trying to tempt her interest. Less-than-fresh second helpings.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t have to think about that now. Robin, her baby, was sitting outside right now, living right here, and the marvel of it was that she had come here on her own. She wasn’t an adoring little girl—maybe she’d always be a little private, a little aloof—and maybe, too, Leslie would never, for the rest of her life, be able to look at her without seeing Nick. But she was here. All Leslie had to do was call her name and she would appear, smiling, just like any daughter in front of any mother. Just like normal.
For a long while Nick wouldn’t touch anything in Robin’s room. He couldn’t bring himself to. He liked walking past her room and seeing her things still there, still in place, as if any moment she might be back. Sometimes he’d go inside and sit on her bed and think about her. He’d remember how
it had been living with her and Leslie, and he missed that. Not the same way he missed Dore, but someplace different.
He went to work. He ate dinner with Jack sometimes, or with a neighbor down the street. He sat in the Lamplighter eating cold pizza, and he wrote Robin.
She wrote him back. She called. She was happy. She said she was back in school; she was even getting along with Leslie. It was so funny. He had been sure that as soon as she set foot in the house, the old problems would curl back around and eventually she’d come and live with him for good. He had carried that scenario around with him, because really, what other one did he have? Dore was gone, and Leslie’s only connection with him was through Robin. But Robin’s letters had dwindled, her calls grew less frequent, and then her last letter had said that she was thinking of going to summer school in Pittsburgh. As soon as he read that, he felt his heart being squeezed slowly shut.
He went up to clean her room, to put her things away. He sat down on her bed and he thought, well, at least he had done something right and good in his life, at least he had put a finish to the damage he had been doing to his daughter, and that was something, wasn’t it?
He was lonely with her room so clean and bare. The house seemed newly empty, and he thought about getting a boarder to fill in the spaces. It didn’t work out so well, though. He had one young girl who looked nothing like Robin but who still made him think he had his daughter back whenever he passed her room at night and heard the music going. In the end, the girl left after only one month, apologizing profusely, explaining that she wanted to live with her boyfriend because it would be rent-free. “Of course,” Nick said, “I know,” and he helped her carry her stereo system down to her boyfriend’s car.
He didn’t see Susan in the steam of the bathroom anymore. Now when he fumbled for a towel from the shower, he always thought he saw Robin, and he was sure he heard her in the creaks the house made at night. He had left her so many times, but he never thought she’d leave him, too.
He hadn’t heard from her in three weeks and had just decided to call her when the phone rang, startling him. When he picked it up, there she was, asking if it would be all right if she spent her summer with him in Madison—if maybe she could even go to summer school there. “Leslie said she’d pay for it,” she added. When he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s not all right?”
“Come,” he said. “Your room’s all ready for you and that itchy mutt of yours.”
“My room,” she said, delighted.
When he hung up the phone, he just sat there in the kitchen, resting both arms on the table, amazed that she was really coming back. Frozen, he was frozen. And then he suddenly remembered this game she had loved to play when she was a little girl. Red Light. He’d stand out in front of her, ten feet away on the tarry driveway, and he’d hide his eyes and turn his back to her. He’d call, “One…two…three…” and all the time she’d be moving toward him as fast as her legs would move her, and as soon as he barked out “Red light!”—as soon as he whipped around to try to catch her moving—she’d freeze in place, contorted. The whole game was her moving toward him in stops and starts, frozen in place half the time, and then when she reached him, she would squeal, “I have you! I have you!” and wouldn’t let go, even when he swung her up in a playful arc, even when he gently set her down. The only way to pry open her fingers was to say yes, yes, they could play again, one more time, before they had to go in for dinner. They’d change places, and then he’d be the one moving toward her, he’d be the one paralyzed by her eyes.
It was night, the sky riddled with stars, a night so quiet you could imagine families in the houses in the neighborhood, you could hear the mothers calling their kids into supper, the fathers coming home from work. Slowly, he got up and he got the cleaning supplies from under the cabinets. He took everything upstairs to her room, to clean it, to put her things back into place, to make the room ready for her homecoming.
Family Page 33
