Black and Blue (17 page)

“She left the convent, got married, and became a social worker.”

“How about that?” Cindy said.

T
he sweet potatoes in the casserole dish on the kitchen counter looked like a photograph from some recipe in a magazine, if I do say so myself. The secret’s in the bourbon, boiled down with butter and brown sugar until the whole mess is as thick as maple syrup. It was one of my mother’s recipes. One of my mother’s only recipes, unless you count the ones she read off the back of the can of cream of mushroom soup. At my mother-in-law’s, where we always had Thanksgiving dinner, the sweet potatoes were tolerated, not welcome. The turkey, too, was more centerpiece than main course, filled with sausage and aniseed, surrounded by platters of lasagna and artichokes stuffed with cheese. At Ann Benedetto’s I used to eat the sweet potatoes myself, so that my casserole would not sit untouched on the sideboard, even though the food she served was always better. In the battle between turkey and lasagna, turkey doesn’t stand a chance.

The bourbon, that’s what my mother always said. And the pecans. They were expensive, the pecans, almost three dollars a bag. The bourbon I bought in one of those tiny bottles they serve on the airlines. I was afraid of having booze in the house. The second week we were in Lake Plata I bought a bottle of cheap chardonnay, rough and vinegary on the back of my tongue, yet somehow it only lasted two days. After that, no more. Every bit of the bourbon went into the saucepan.

“Sweet potatoes are weird,” Robert said, poking them with his finger the night before as they sat steaming on top of the narrow stove. “But they smell good.”

They were crusty, brown and orange, and still fragrant if you put your face close enough, even stone cold on Thursday morning as I listened to Cindy on the phone, my heart sinking. Her voice was ragged, the static on the car phone in Craig’s van like pebbles rolling around in the receiver. It was Thanksgiving, but instead of putting the turkey in the oven the Roerbackers were rolling south, down the spine of the state to the retirement village where Craig’s parents lived and where, the night before, his father had had a stroke. And the Thanksgiving plans of the Crenshaw family, such as they were, were rolling away with them.

“I am so sorry,” she kept saying. “I am just so sorry.”

“Cindy, stop,” I said, poking the potatoes. “Things happen.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“We’ll make other plans,” I said. “The Castros, maybe.”

“Oh, I forgot about the Castros,” she said, and her voice sounded a little lighter, the static a little more raucous, until somewhere along the highway we lost one another with a rattle, a strange sonic shriek, and a still pool of dead and empty air.

But of course I knew that the Castros had gone away, too, to celebrate Thanksgiving with some cousins in Orlando who had been, Robert told me, billionaires before they found it necessary to come to America and be reincarnated, driving cabs, cleaning motel rooms, another brace of people who’d been somebody else once. That morning, when I had stepped into the quadrangle of the Poinsettia complex, just to see the sky, to sniff the air, it had had the atmosphere of a place that had been evacuated, as though
someone had forgotten to tell us about the coming storm, the floods, the tornadoes. But the only natural disaster was the holiday; our shabby little horseshoe of low-ceilinged duplexes was the sort of place to leave for a family gathering, not a place in which to have one. And we were leaving, too, leaving for the Roerbackers, with Cindy’s family, and Craig’s. Until Cindy and Craig and Chelsea and Chad—it almost makes me smile to give all their names together like that, and I still mocked Cindy from time to time—had gotten on the road at daybreak to travel to a hospital intensive care unit 250 miles away.

“Sweetie, we have a problem,” I called upstairs to Robert, trying to keep the sound of bad news out of my voice. There was no answer and I trudged up, looked in at him on the bed, reading a magazine that Bennie had given him, an expert’s guide to video games.

“Remember the game I told you about, that you said was way too expensive?” he said. “If I could get a used one for half-price, could I buy it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and dancing my fingers up his leg. “That was Cindy on the phone. She and the kids had to go to Mr. Roerbacker’s daddy’s house. He had a stroke last night and they had to go right away to see him. So we can’t go to their house today.”

“So where are we going to go?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I have to write a composition about Thanksgiving,” Robert said.

“You don’t have to write it today.”

“I know. But what will I say if we don’t have Thanksgiving?”

How had I forgotten what it would be like, to go to a cheap restaurant on that day of all days? I knew, knew in the way a person with scars can remember the pain of surgery. The first Thanksgiving after I met Bobby he’d invited me to his mother’s for Thanksgiving. Grace and my mother and father had gone off to my aunt’s house in the Catskills, carrying a cheesecake and a bottle of rosé wine, and I had set my hair, shaved my legs, ironed a dress that didn’t need ironing.

I didn’t know that Bobby hadn’t told his mother until that morning, and I suppose he didn’t know that she would fall entirely apart at the suggestion that there was a strange girl who expected to sit at her table, that white phony French-provincial table with the centerpiece of wax grapes in a silver basket, the table where only family sat. He sprung it on her; that’s the way Bobby put it, as though I was a small animal with sharp teeth waiting to leap at the crepey white skin around Ann Benedetto’s neck. I can imagine now what she must have been like that day: cold, affronted, then tremulous, a shaking hand to her only child’s cheek, begging, begging, not today, not today. And so Bobby had changed my plans. I should have had some vision of the future then, as I listened to him talk on the phone. “It’s no big thing,” Bobby said. “I shouldn’t’ve sprung it on her like that. She’ll get used to the idea. You know, only child, all that. It’s no big thing. She’ll meet you at Christmas. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t eat too much turkey.”

I could have stayed at home, heated up a can of soup, read a mystery novel. Instead I’d gone up to the Boulevard, to a Greek luncheonette, and had turkey with all the trimmings at a stool at the counter, two stools down from an old man with emphysema who smoked all through his meal.

“How was it?” Gracie said when they got home, carrying leftover turkey wrapped in tinfoil.

“Nice,” I said.

“They put out a good spread, those people,” my father had said, wheezing, falling into his chair and breathing into his oxygen mask as though it was the Fountain of Youth.

And still, remembering that, I took Robert to The Chirping Chicken, the two of us trudging along the shoulder of the highway because there were no sidewalks, there was no need for any, everybody rode in cars except for us. The linoleum and the fake leather on the booths was the color of the sun, so that you felt blinded when you walked inside. The gravy was the color of the sun, too, bright yellow with flecks of black pepper swimming on its oily sheen. At least it was not gray. That was what I remembered about the food in the luncheonette in Brooklyn, that the gravy was the color of cardboard, and I cried in the bathroom and blew my nose on a square of gray toilet paper, rubbing off the foundation and the powder I’d put on to go to Bobby’s. I told Robert that story at The Chirping Chicken, and somehow I made it sound innocuous, even amusing, like something from one of the sitcoms, something that would have a laugh track. That’s how I always tried to make life sound for Robert. I couldn’t bear for him to feel pathetic, to see me as pathetic, too.

“These are really good mashed potatoes,” he said. “They don’t have one single lump.”

“Did you not really want to go to the Roerbackers?” I said.

“No, it was okay. But it’s like Grandmom didn’t want you to come when you weren’t her family. I think Thanksgiving
shouldn’t be with someone else’s family. I think it should just be with your family.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Christmas is different.”

I always did Christmas, at our house. I cooked standing rib roast and Murphy potatoes and caramelized onions and Ann Benedetto went to her brother’s house on Long Island. Grace came to our house for Christmas, and Mrs. Pinto, whose children all lived in Florida. That was one of my biggest fears when I was out with Cindy at the mall, the possibility of running into one of Mrs. Pinto’s daughters, with their big hair and their sharp eyes, fringed with lacquered lashes like anemones.

“Nana told me once Daddy hurt his finger on Thanksgiving and she carried him to the hospital because the cab didn’t come. She said he was yelling and screaming and she was running down Ocean Avenue with him getting blood on her.”

“I know that story,” I said. “He needed eleven stitches in his hand. He fell on a bottle out in the backyard. He still has the scar.”

“It’s a big scar. When I got that cut on my head when I was five I got stitches but you can’t even see.” Robert raised his bangs to show his smooth, high, golden-brown forehead. There was the suggestion of a straight line across its center, as though someone had drawn faintly with a ruler. “Jesus, Frannie,” Bobby had said, cradling the boy in his big arms on the sofa in the living room, running his lips softly over the bandage. “You should have called me at work. They could have raised me on the radio.”

“It was only five stitches. And I got the plastic surgeon to do it.”

“You know what, champ?” Bobby had said to Robert. “When
you’re grown-up, girls will say, oh, Robert, how’d you get that scar? And you can make up a story. You can tell them it was a racing-car accident. Or you were in a sword fight. You don’t have to say you were bouncing on the bed and you hit the headboard. Which you’re never going to do again as long as you live, so help me, God; keep him off the bed, Frances, do you hear me? Hear me, buddy?”

Robert had nodded, burying his face in his father’s chest. Bobby had smiled at me over the brown head, so small, so fragile somehow. I’d felt Robert’s head with my fingers for years after infancy to make sure that the bones had joined over the exposed fontanelle, the soft spot.

Why at that moment, pushing stuffing around the thick white plate with the side of my fork, did I suddenly remember what Patty Bancroft had said at the hospital? Winnie was discussing a case, a case of children brought in and then scattered to foster homes after their mother had been beaten into a coma in the middle of the night by an old boyfriend. “The children were asleep,” Winnie had said, and Patty Bancroft had answered, spitting out the words, “The children are never asleep. They only pretend to be.”

“Daddy broke his leg when he was in high school, in a car,” Robert added, eating a roll. It was as though he had permission to talk about Bobby because I had done it first, but maybe only a distant Bobby, the Bobby he’d heard about in stories, not the man he knew, the man who did things while he was sleeping. Or pretending to be.

“He almost got shot, too, when you were a baby,” I said, pushing
him into the present. “Some man pulled a gun on him in the park but his partner got the guy to put it down.”

“Daddy said it wasn’t even loaded,” Robert said. “He told me once.”

“But he didn’t know that until it was over. They were chasing the guy because he’d grabbed somebody’s bag on Fifth Avenue.”

“He told me.”

“Your daddy is a good cop,” I said. I didn’t know if even that was true anymore. There was that teenager in the projects who said Bobby banged his face against the back divider in the patrol car. There was the minister who said Bobby had used a “racial pejorative” to a member of the congregation who’d complained when the cops tried to move along some teenagers from in front of a sub shop. I was like most cop wives; he told me just enough to make it a story but not so much that it’d make it real, feel what he felt, know what he knew. After a while I couldn’t tell if he was a good cop. But at least he’d never come home with money in his pocket I couldn’t explain, hadn’t been like some of his friends, who suddenly came into A-frames in the Adirondacks or cheesy cruises to the Caribbean. “He’s working a lot of overtime,” the wives always said as though they were just passing the time of day, that breezy way they lied.

I looked down into my coffee cup. “I was really proud of your daddy then, Ba. I was proud of him lots of times. And I really loved him.”

“But he hit you,” Robert said. It was the first time he’d ever acknowledged it. Somehow it was like a benediction.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Because you did stuff he didn’t like.”

I sighed. “Not exactly. Not really. You know how you know the things that will make me mad, like not doing your homework or being mean to someone or getting in a fight? The thing about Daddy was, it was really hard for me to tell what he didn’t like. You couldn’t really tell what would make him mad. And that made it hard. And even if you don’t like what someone does, you can’t hit them. When you’re mad at someone, you have to talk to them, not beat them up. Beating them up is wrong. It’s always wrong.”

“You don’t hit me,” he said.

“No.”

“You would never hit me.”

“I would never hit you,” I said.

“Daddy never hit me either.”

“I know, Ba. What happened with Daddy and me, it had nothing to do with you,” I said. It’s what we’re supposed to say, isn’t it, whenever a marriage is ripped apart and the kids come tumbling out, tumbling down? And I don’t know why, because it’s such a big, bald-faced lie that any kid with half a brain could figure it out. Robert just nodded, played with the surface of his pumpkin pie. “That was kind of a dumb thing to say,” I added. “What I meant was that it’s possible for me and your daddy to be angry at each other without either of us being angry at you.”

“I bet Daddy’s mad at me.”

“Why?”

“For going with you.”

I leaned forward, took hold of his hand. It just lay there, a small warm thing half-asleep. “Ba, he’d know that you didn’t have any choice in that. He’d know that I made you go.”