Black and Blue

by Anna Quindlen

  I didn’t know how much I’d be able to buy him for Christmas this year, or how in hell I’d ever get through it, get through the tree and the meal and the goddamned carols. I pushed the cart and stopped thinking. I’d gotten good at that, at just cutting thoughts off, as though I was changing channels. From Christmas to chicken cacciatore.

  The one thing I wouldn’t scrimp on was food. Once the heat began to wane a bit in what, up north, passed for the beginning of winter, once I began to feel the least bit at home in the windowless kitchen in the apartment, I’d begun to cook the Italian food that Ann Benedetto had taught me to make years before. I figured it would make Robert feel more at home, the way it had made me feel as if I was making one, really making one, all those years ago.

  “My mother needs a daughter,” Bobby had said, “and you need to learn to cook a decent meal.” Every Sunday he dropped me off, when we were first married, at his mother’s house, in his mother’s kitchen so clean that a spot of red sauce looked like blood. I took a shower before I went, did my makeup, but sometimes I thought she could smell it on me, what we’d been doing before, while Ann was at nine o’clock mass.

  Her cooking was a list of don’ts: don’t buy cheap cheese, don’t put the sauce on too high, don’t use garlic salt instead of real garlic, don’t layer the lasagna more than three times no matter how deep the pan. A list of don’ts, a list of Bobby doesn’ts: Bobby doesn’t like the hot sausage, Bobby doesn’t like the thin spaghetti, Bobby doesn’t like the bread from Emilio’s bakery, only from Marie’s. Most Sundays she had a new shirt for him, a soft, fine double knit with a collar in a dark color. “I was at the outlets,” she always said. Later she bought things for Robert, polo shirts and oxford button-downs. “Rags,” she called T-shirts and blue jeans. “Garbage,” she called frozen food.

  “She came from nothing,” Bobby’s grandmother hissed when Ann went to the bathroom. “You just remember that. Don’t take any crap from her. She’s half Polish, for Christ’s sake. My son, God love him—she gave him such a time.” Bobby’s grandmother always liked me, until the day she died. She gave me her cameos, that I’d had to leave behind in the rosewood jewelry box on my bureau. God, I’d thought to myself, Bobby’ll really kill me if I take Mama’s brooches. Mama, we always called his grandmother. Ann, I called my mother-in-law. She never asked me to call her anything else.

  But she made me a cook, and so I could make Robert meatballs and braciola, pasta e fagioli and lasagna, little pieces of home at this flimsy table 2,000 miles away. He invited Bennie for dinner, and the two of them hunched over their plates without speaking until finally their mouths were shiny with tomato sauce and grease. Bennie’s mother did the same for Robert: beans and rice, chicken with a sauce of tomatoes and onions. Bless our boys, talking with their mouths full.

  “You want chicken cacciatore?” I said as Robert and I traipsed down the endless meat aisles in the supermarket, and he nodded, bent over another video game, which he’d traded his old one for to some boy at school. This one was soldiers and kick boxing. It made little grunting noises when one man hit another with his booted foot. Unh. Unh. Unh. We went past pork and beef to poultry. At the front of the store a bulletin board held flyers with pictures of missing children. The faces changed twice a month. I knew because I always looked at them while I was pretending to get a cart with wheels that really worked. All the kids looked happy in the pictures, as though they didn’t care that they were missing.

  “Don’t put mushrooms in it,” Robert said.

  “You don’t have to eat the mushrooms.”

  “Can I go look at the comics?” he said without raising his head from his game.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. They’re over there. I’ll find them.”

  “I’d rather you stayed with me.”

  “Mom, I’m not a baby. I’m all right. Just let me go.”

  “You come back to me in ten minutes,” I said as he trotted away. I still hated to let him out of my sight. Each afternoon when I heard the school bus pull up I stood behind the screen, a peeping Tom of a parent, making sure he got off the bus and in the house safe and sound. Sometimes I wanted to hold Bennie and say, thank you, thank you, over and over again, thank you for being an ordinary boy, for making my boy seem ordinary, too, for going everywhere he goes.

  “Where’s your father?” I heard Bennie ask Robert one day, but nicely, softly. There had been a long silence from the bedroom, or maybe it just seemed long because I was holding my breath. Then Robert’s voice came, low: “He and my mom are split up.”

  “Jonathan’s mom and dad split up last year,” Bennie said. “Allyson lives with her mom. I don’t know where her father is. Sean, too. His parents got divorced when he was real little. He stays with his dad every weekend in East Preston.” It was as though he would go on and on with his litany of fractured families, of kids walking on the broken glass of their parents’ lives. “Your mom cooks good,” Bennie had said after a moment.

  “I know,” said Robert. “She cooks really good at Christmas.” I held the back of my hand against my mouth and a little saliva ran over my fingers with my tears. Everything we’d lost, everything I’d forced him to leave, seemed somehow to be in that simple sentence. She cooks really good at Christmas. In that moment I thought of going back, of walking in through that familiar door just so I could see the look on Robert’s face. All my life I’d tried to make my boy happy, and now to keep him safe I had to make him sad. And angry, too. I could see that in the set of his mouth, sometimes. I’m not sure he knew who he was angry at. One night, doing his homework, he’d thrown his math book onto the floor and hit the wall with his pencil and I’d stood up from the couch, but stopped, so still, because the jerky choreography of violence and rage was so familiar to me that I couldn’t come any closer, even when the object was long division.

  “This is so stupid,” he’d shouted. “This is all different than what we learned last year, and besides, it doesn’t make any sense, the way they want us to carry things. And she makes us show all our work, and there’s not even enough space on the page.”

  “What about using another piece of paper?” I said quietly.

  “We’re not allowed, Mom,” he screamed, and tears were beginning to run down his face. “You don’t understand. We’re not allowed. We have to do it on this sheet or we get points off. This is so stupid.” And he pushed over the chair, ran upstairs, slammed his door so hard that I swear I felt an answering vibration in the living-room floor, like the aftershock from an earthquake.

  “You want to talk about things?” I said that night as I sat on the edge of his bed.

  “Nah,” he said.

  “It might make you feel better.”

  “I feel okay.”

  “You didn’t seem okay when you were doing your math homework.”

  “It’s really stupid, the way they do it here,” he’d said.

  I watched him walk away in the supermarket, his head still bent over the video game, skirting the carts intuitively, the way I imagine a blind man negotiates his living room. The long bones in his legs had begun to grow, so that he had that Tinkertoy look a boy has as he becomes a young man, sticks and knobs precariously held together. He would be taller than his father, and better looking, too. He had my nose, not the hawk beak that made Bobby look so terrifying sometimes, his black eyes predatory above it. What else was it that boy, Tyrone Biggs, had said from the witness stand? “That cop, man, he scared me.”

  “Did he threaten you?” his stupid defense attorney had thundered, breaking the rules, asking a question he didn’t know the answer to.

  “No, man. He just looked at me. Looked at me real cold.”

  The way some mothers look at their kid for birth defects when they’re babies, try to suss out signs of stupidity as they learn to walk and talk, so I watched and waited to see that dark, lowering look on my boy’s face, the look the sky has before the rain comes down in gray sheets. Three months I’d wa
tched him for signs of colic, finally relaxed into motherhood when the danger period passed. It’d take longer this time, looking not for gas but for the early signs of rage. It was why I tried to draw him out, so that he could vent that way instead of the other. “Use your words,” I used to say when he was little, and most of the time he did. But once, walking away from St. Stannie’s in the morning, I’d heard a group of boys calling him Robert the Hobbit, of all things, no more than a silly singsong following him down the street, Robert the Hobbit, Robert the Hobbit, as he trudged along the pavement with his head down. And then, almost without breaking stride, he’d turned and hurled himself at them, his arms pinwheeling, his eyes big. “Shut up!” he shrieked as he hit and hit and hit, the other boys stunned, backing away, putting their hands up palms out. “Shut up!” until I pulled him away, screaming myself, “For God’s sake, Robert, stop. Stop it!”

  “Daddy said you have to fight back,” he’d said as I hectored him on the way home. And when I complained, Bobby just waved his hand and shrugged. “The trouble is, Fran, that you don’t know about boys,” he’d said.

  Moving away from me down the long market aisle, Robert looked just as Bobby might have as a boy, except that there was something defenseless in the way he held himself, a kind of roundness to back and shoulder. And I wondered whether Bobby had ever been like that, defenseless, before biceps and bravado and badge. Before me. Or whether Robert had learned to walk like that from me, from all the years that I’d made myself small, trying not to attract notice, give offense. Suddenly, as though he’d felt my eyes on his back, Robert looked over his shoulder and smiled, a smile that on that dark pinched face was more than a smile, was a hand, a hug, a kiss. That was the smile Bobby had had, too, when he saw me when we were both young, that made my spirit levitate, warm from the inside out.

  “You know what, Frances Ann?” Bobby had said, sitting next to my bed in the single room on the hospital’s maternity floor, Robert’s misshapen little head cupped in his palm. “We got everything.”

  Jesus, I loved him. There, I said it. It makes me feel stupid, sometimes, feeling my scars, the spots where you can just make out the damage and the ones where the bruises and hurts live on only in my head. I loved Bobby, and he loved me. Anyone who heard him say it once would never disbelieve it. In the beginning I loved him, loved him, loved him pure and simple. And then after a while I loved the idea of him, the good Bobby, who came to me every once in a while and rubbed my back and kissed my fingers. And I loved our life, the long stretches of tedium and small pleasures that marked most of our time together. Our life was like a connect-the-dots drawing, and those were the lines, the bad things only the haphazard arrangement of dots they connected.

  And now all the love goes into what’s left of that life, one boy, his basketball shoes too big for his little body. I watch him and I’m afraid my face looks the way Ann Benedetto’s face looked when she watched Bobby, like a hungry cat when it hears the can opener, all eyes and appetite. I’m afraid that I’ll wind up the way she did, with nothing but the casual, almost charitable, almost condescending affection that a grown man has for his mother once he’s moved on to another woman, another source of intensive care. Alone in that spotless house, with the photographs on top of the television, Bobby at four, his foot tucked under him, his chubby fingers wrapped around his knee. Bobby at twenty-six, in his dress uniform. Across the living room, on the wall unit, was the photograph of her husband in his own police blues.

  “My old man was some piece of work,” Bobby always said. He’d been shot, Robert, Sr., by a junkie who didn’t know how to wave a gun around during a bar robbery without having the thing go off. It was two months after we started going out, and I cried at the funeral, not for Lt. Benedetto, who I’d met only once, but for his son. The sound of the bagpipes was like strange birds, and the cops were like an army, blue with black swipes of elastic over their badges.

  That’s all he ever said, some piece of work. Never an anecdote, or a word of affection or even anger. His father was the stone in Bobby’s heart. And maybe his own father would be the stone in Robert’s. The patterns, the patterns, as inviolate as a clan tartan. Red, green, black, blue, father, son.

  I’d been standing staring into the depths of a half-filled cart, and when I looked up a tall man had stopped Robert at the end of the aisle and was putting a hand on his shoulder. Suddenly I felt my stomach empty out, felt as though I might faint. I pushed forward, but there were two elderly women crowding the aisles, peering at coupons, and by the time I got past them Robert wasn’t there. The man was looking at chickens, or pretending to. Looking too hard, I thought, like a bad actor, so that he didn’t look up until I’d planted myself in front of him.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “What were you saying to that child?”

  “What?”

  “That boy? The one with the dark hair? What were you saying to him?” I realized the two women with the coupons were looking at me. My voice was too loud, even to myself.

  “Robert Crenshaw? I teach him PE. At the elementary school.”

  The relief in my posture, the surrender to the safe and commonplace in my shoulders, head, face, must have been so profound that he peered at me perplexed for a moment, then smiled. “You’re Robert’s mother,” he said. “And I just scared the heck out of you. I am really, really sorry.”

  “No, no, forget it. It was silly. It’s just—”

  “—that you have to be more careful today than when we were kids. Hey, in my job I know.” He stuck out a big hand, thick-fingered. My own disappeared inside it, then reappeared as I pulled away, like a small fish released from the maw of a big one. He was a bigger man than I’d thought, seeing him across the parking lot and lawn of the school that first day, big and bulky, flushed and friendly, with thinning blond hair and light eyes behind aviator glasses. What kind of animal does your gym teacher remind you of? I’d ask Robert walking home, another game we played. And the answer would be something good-natured, plodding, big and big-hearted. A bear maybe.

  “Mike Riordan.”

  “Beth Crenshaw.”

  “I know,” he said. “You and Mrs. Roerbacker work in the library.”

  “Sorry. I missed meeting you somehow.”

  “I’m a gym rat,” he said. “I’m practically mildewed. You from New York?”

  “No,” I said, feeling my shoulders tighten again. “Delaware.”

  “You sound like New York,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you about Robert.”

  “Why?”

  “Hey, he’s fine. You know, he’s new. He’ll open up more when he gets used to the drill here. There’s no problem. I just want him to play on our soccer team. No big deal, no high pressure, two practices a week and they’re before dinnertime. I never yell and scream, and I give them off the day before a big test. But we start next week and he’d need to stay after school and either walk home or have you pick him up. He’s new and he didn’t seem too sure it would be okay with you. Bennie Castro’s playing, if that makes a difference.”

  “I’ll talk to him. It’s fine. It would be good for him.”

  “Great. Great.” He paused. “I’ll send home a permission slip and some more information. You can call me if you have any questions. I’m the vice principal, too, whatever that means. Call about anything, the school, the homework, whatever.” He hesitated, looking into his cart. “Would you mind if I asked you something?”

  I shook my head.

  “How much do you know about chicken?”

  “Chicken?”

  “Cooking chicken.”

  “I’ve cooked a lot of chickens, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You know those things that you can put inside the chicken, sort of holds them standing up so they cook faster? They’ve got them back with the pots and pans and things. They’re metal, shaped kind of like a big golf tee. Do those things work?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said. “It never occurred to me to buy
one. A chicken only takes an hour anyhow. Why rush it?”

  “That’s what I thought. Thanks,” he said, staring into the meat case.

  Suddenly I heard Gracie’s voice, as clear as if it was coming over the loudspeaker instead of John Mack Carter’s tips for using exciting, exotic cilantro in a variety of dishes with an international flair. Where were we sitting, Grace and I? Was it that coffee bar on Lexington Avenue, where the counterman always called her “Professor,” or the Greek restaurant in the Village with the homemade pita that made us both so full we would groan all the way to the subway? The Greek place, I think, and Grace talking about the tall man she kept running into at D’Agostino’s, who wanted to know about tarragon, about potatoes, about sour and heavy and light cream. “As though I wouldn’t know that asking a woman about how to cook is the oldest pick-up line in the book,” Grace said, shaking her head.

  “I didn’t know that,” I’d said.

  “When was the last time somebody picked you up?” she said.

  “Almost twenty years ago,” I’d said. Bobby, in the bar where Tommy Dolan had introduced us. Bobby, one black apostrophe of hair over his forehead, saying, “Hey, Fran Flynn. I guess if everybody likes you I might like you too.” Bobby, leaning against the bar, a perfectly natural pose, his elbows back, his big forearms knotted, his pelvis thrust forward, which was the whole point.

  “Well, good luck,” I said to Mike Riordan, and then felt myself turning hot, and red, the same way I’d colored that first time I met Bobby. I felt foolish as I strode off to pick up parsley, tomatoes, and garlic. Soccer season. Rules, practices, uniforms. Maybe while Robert was at practice, after I got home from the Levitts, I would do something to his room, cheap bright curtains and a new quilt, some more posters, a desk. I thought there had been an old desk in one corner of Cindy’s basement. Vermicelli, chicken stock, tomato paste. The cart was getting too full; Robert would complain about the weight of the bag all the way home, particularly if he had a comic he wanted to be reading instead. It was time to check out, head home. A stockboy sent me seven aisles over, to where the comic books shared an aisle with greeting cards and paperbacks, but only one elderly woman was there, reading birthday cards with her face close to their gaudy surfaces. I walked slowly, snaking through aisle after aisle, thinking about how big the market was, bigger than any I’d visited in the city, looking for Robert. Looking and looking. I began weaving through other shoppers, past cans of soup and coffee, cases of Coke and Pepsi, stacks of paper towels and toilet paper, back to the comic aisle, empty now. Part of my mind kept thinking that I needed paper towels, and the other part was saying, shouting, screaming over and over again, “Robert? Ba? Baby? Where are you?” I turned in aisle sixteen, dairy, and made my way back again. “Have you seen a boy, about ten, in a green T-shirt with a tiger on the front?” I began to ask the other shoppers, and “No,” they said, no, sorry, no I haven’t. Of course they haven’t, thought one part of my mind, because he’s in a car now, driving down the highway, saying, hey Dad, I missed you Dad, how’s Grandmom, where we going, when are we going to go back and get Mommy?