Black and Blue (28 page)

“I know,” he said again. “I want to, too.” The silence seemed to vibrate. The crowbar felt heavy in my hand, and I wanted to put it down.

“Then why did you?” Robert said. And then, “I am. I’m playing soccer and basketball and baseball. I play third base. I’m getting pretty good.” He rubbed his eyes, winced when he touched the bruises by mistake, pulled an Oreo apart and licked the cream. “I watched it, too,” he said. “I knew you were watching it.”

I should have moved sooner, but it was only then that I was sure. I stepped out of the blackness in my white nightgown and Robert dropped the receiver, staring at my face and then at the crowbar in my hand. The receiver bounced on its long cord three times gently against the wall, and then I picked it up with two fingers and dropped it into the cradle, but not before I heard his voice on the other end, deep and sleepy: “Robert? Hey? Robert?”

“Put the cookies back,” I said.

“You lied to me,” he said, rising to his feet, his eyes only a little lower than my own.

“About what?” I said.

“About a bunch of things.”

“I didn’t lie about anything, Robert. You did something really really foolish tonight. And if you ever do it again we’ll have to move and start over someplace else. No Bennie. No Cindy. New school, new friends.”

“I want to see my dad,” Robert said. “You lied to me about him.”

“About what?”

“About a lot of things. He said you lied about a lot of things.”

“Tell me what he said.”

“No. You’ll just say bad things about him. He loves me. He misses me.”

“I know that. I never denied that.”

“He loves you, too, he said.”

“Did you tell him where we were?”

“No,” Robert said, his voice cracking.

“Did he ask you?”

He nodded.

“And what did you say?”

“I told him I wasn’t allowed. He said he never meant that about the spics, that he had a friend in narcotics who’s Puerto Rican. He said it was good that I stood up for my friend. He said sometimes you have to do that.”

He said, he said, he said. It was like having him there in the room all over again as the words came at me, the old familiar justifications and accusations, all in Robert’s voice, still high and light.

“Ba,” I said, then stopped. “I didn’t lie to you about anything.” I touched his face. “Do you remember when my face looked like this? Only worse. My nose broke. I’m lucky my jaw was okay.”

His tears shook him, so that he bounced in my arms almost the way I had bounced him as a baby, trying to lull him to sleep. The front of my nightgown was wet. There was a little blood mixed with the tears.

“I didn’t tell,” he finally said.

“I know, honey.”

“I wanted to ask about the spic thing,” he said.

“I know.”

I left the crowbar by the hall closet and together we climbed the stairs. An hour later, when I was certain he was asleep again, I went downstairs and pulled a business card from behind his baby picture in my wallet. It was an answering machine, I knew, and after the beep I said, “This is Elizabeth Crenshaw. I need to speak to Patty Bancroft immediately. She has my number.”

After he’d left on the bus in the morning, more than a little proud of his raddled face, Bennie’s arm around his shoulder, I walked over to the school. Mike Riordan was at his desk when I tapped at the door. When he saw me he looked the way I must look when Robert opens the door at the end of the day. It made me hate myself, that look—such happiness, such shamefaced yearning. To cover up he lobbed a wad of looseleaf into the toy basketball hoop stuck to the wall next to his desk with suction cups. There was a poster next to it of a cat trying to hold onto a high bar. “Hang in There, Baby!” it said underneath. We’d had it in the nurses’ lounge at South Bay, too.

“I need help,” I said, and I sat in the straight chair on the other side of his desk.

“Okay,” he said.

“To begin with,” I said, “my name is Frances Benedetto, and I’m from New York City.” It was ten minutes to nine when I started, and nine-thirty by the time I was done. How short a time it took to tell him everything, to feel the secret fall from my shoulders like a yoke.

H
e drove me to Cindy’s house the first Saturday after school let out, half a dozen foil containers filled with food slithering from side to side on the backseat. “Don’t take those corners so wide,” I said, “or you’re going to have barbecued riblets and chicken wings all over the car.” He frowned slightly into the sunlight and took his foot off the gas, until his little car was going maybe ten miles an hour and an elderly woman had edged around him and then pulled in front. “Ha ha ha,” I said.

I’d been cooking for two days, and I’d had to smack the boys with a dishtowel on their skinny dark brown legs as they filched potato pancakes and mahogany-colored riblets. “You’re a good cook, Mrs. Crenshaw,” Bennie said politely. “Don’t try to get around me with sweet talk,” I said. Robert only smiled. The marks on his face were gone, and maybe it was only my imagination that he seemed quieter. He’d always been so quiet, anyhow.

“I understand him so much better now,” Mike Riordan said to me after I’d told him our story. “Thanks. It makes it easier for me.”

It had made it easier for me, too. The notion that the man had seen me naked, had put his tongue into my mouth, had unbuttoned my dress—none of it meant anything compared to the fact that he knew where I really came from, what my name was, what I really did for a living, what my son had had to live through. Even
his smile seemed to have knowledge in it, and understanding, and it had made me feel more myself and less afraid with him than with anyone else, even Cindy. That day when I came to talk to him he had leaned forward, asking no questions, looking me straight in the eye, and when I was finished he had come around the desk and sat in the chair the dads usually sat in, when Mike was having parent conferences. He had taken my hand and he had rubbed my fingers hard, as though they were cold and he was trying to bring back the blood into them. “You’re amazing,” was all he said.

He looked over at me in the car, speeding up and smiling now. “Robert’s fine,” he said, reading my mind.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. But I do. He’s a smart kid. He’ll work all this out.”

But I do know. I know it’s not true. Children are resilient, some of the shrinks like to say, and everything marks them, say some of the others, and both things are true. Sometimes it seems as if Robert never called Bobby on the phone that night, never took his side over mine. Sometimes it seems as if Mike Riordan and I are no more than a boy’s coach and a boy’s mother, as though I never chose him over Robert. But Robert has scars as surely as I do, and his are more dangerous, because he cannot see them and so can believe they are not there.

“You think too much, Fran,” Bobby told me once, when I was analyzing this or that. And he was right. I guess I do. What I’m thinking is that I can hardly hear his voice anymore, Bobby’s voice, that ruled my life, that made me jerk like I was at the end of a leash. Even on the phone, it had sounded like the voice of
someone I’d once known, a while ago. You think too much, Fran. I can’t quite hear him say it.

He was right about that: I do think too much. If you’re a good nurse you always do think too much, see too much, know too much. You look at the cleaned-up junkie with pneumonia who’s telling you it’s just a cold, a cold, man, a little vitamin C and some sleep and I’ll be good as new, and you know, practically without double-gloving and drawing the blood, that he’s slipped over the border from being HIV positive to having AIDS and is skidding toward the finish line of death. You see a little kid come into the waiting room with her mother, see the child do a slow and subtle lean back when the mother turns toward her, and you know, you just know, that the mother hits her. The X rays will only tell you how hard. Winnie used to say that she knew what some of them would tell her before they even opened their mouths from the set of their shoulders, the slant of their gaze. She used to say that it was like being a priest, sometimes. I felt the same way.

I call Grace now and I know that something is wrong. Suddenly there is an answering machine on her home phone. The message is curt, anonymous: “Please leave a message after the beep.” Three times I’ve said, “Gracie, it’s me.” But I am afraid to give her the number here, afraid of who else might hear it, see it written by the phone on a scrap of paper. Twice I called her office, but it is the same thing there, the recorded voice, the honk at the end. “We’re good,” I said the last time. “We’re fine.” She’s not. I can hear it in the cold timbre of her recorded voice. The cold in her makes cold in me. That, and Robert’s phone call. And the television news program after the carnival. And what I know about Bobby, how good he is at finding out what he wants to know.

I look at the hump growing larger between Mrs. Levitt’s perpetually slumped shoulders and I pretty much know that if she takes the slightest tumble two or three years from now, it’ll be a broken hip and a nursing home, a walker if not a wheelchair. “Take your calcium pills,” I say, banging the plastic bottle on the tiny kitchen counter. “Ach, they bind me up,” she says, eating Chips Ahoy. I bring another kind of calcium, one that doesn’t cause constipation. “You need to build up your bones,” I remind her, and she looks at me pityingly, as though to say, Mrs. Nurse, what do you think happened to my bones those four years they fed me mealy grain and dirty water and did whatever it was to my insides that meant I would never have a child. I see Mrs. Levitt now always in terms of her great secret, the numbers on her arm, the story of her marriage, and I realize that everyone has, her whole life, ever since that May day half a century ago. I hid my wounds because I was ashamed, ashamed of Bobby and ashamed of myself for staying with him, but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced, of becoming in the minds of all who knew me that poor woman whose husband beats her. Or used to. I have begun to think of myself as someone who used to get beat up by her husband. I am a recovering battered woman. God, I hate that term, all those classifications that seem to reduce our wounds to the same status as eye or hair color, that make us a type, a cover line in a magazine.

“The Holocaust survivors,” Mrs. Levitt said savagely one day when she saw a story on the news. “Like a club. People have no shame.”

I see and I know. I know by the dandelion yellow of my patient Melvin’s skin that if he does not get a kidney transplant in the next
ninety days I will be attending his funeral instead of taking his temperature. I know that my cerebral palsy patient is lonely for love and romance because of the name she uses when she goes into chat rooms on the computer: Sexyjen. I wonder how she describes herself when she is no more than a line of black letters on someone else’s screen, wonder if she makes herself tall and lithe, with muscles that run smooth beneath the surface of tanned skin instead of arms and legs that shiver and shake in an uncontrollable dance. She wants to be someone else, somewhere else, and I can’t blame her.

I know that Mike Riordan has decided to try to make things right by making them lighter. Robert plays baseball now, just like he told his dad, and Mike takes us out from time to time afterward. Bennie usually comes along and Robert measures the distance between his coach and his mother with his eyes. It is considerable. The week after we’d gone to bed together I had bought myself some contraceptive sponges, but I’d done it the way you buy aspirin in case some Saturday night you have a headache. Things are back to where they were. No more flaming steak or tuxedoed headwaiters. Still, whenever Mike brings us home, if it happens that Robert goes down the pavement to Bennie’s or upstairs to start his homework, Mike steps inside the apartment, puts his arms around me and kisses me, less gently than he had that first time. Once, when we met in the Roerbackers’ basement during a school swim party, he coming out of the concrete shower stall in his shorts, his hair wet and raked back with the marks of Craig’s comb still in it, me in the blue tank suit Cindy lent me, smelling of coconut from the sunscreen, he had
reached for me, held me for a long time, finally pushed back, groaning. “I’m a patient person,” he said.

“You’re being cruel to that poor man,” Cindy had said next day as we watched the kids swim.

“I don’t mean to be. He’d be better off if I stayed out of his way, but that’s hard, under the circumstances.”

“I like him,” Cindy said.

“I like him, too.”

“Then what’s your problem?”

“I like you, too.”

“And, honey, I’d have you in a minute if we were so inclined. But we’re not. How come all of us are attracted to girlfriends who are nice and smart and helpful and love us and we’re all attracted to guys who are mean and give us a hard time?”

“Craig’s not mean.”

“Craig’s different. So’s Mike Riordan. Which is the point I’m trying to make. You want to try this new scented insect repellent we’re coming out with?”

“What’s it smell like?”

Cindy sniffed. “Musk.”

“No, thanks.”

“Plus he loves kids,” Cindy had said.

I knew when Cindy got pregnant almost before she did. Her hair went limp and one day, in the library, as we sent out overdue cards, she snapped at Mrs. Patrinian, “We know what we’re doing here.” Mrs. Patrinian turned red, and so, I think, did I. In April she started drinking herb tea in the morning instead of coffee, and when we all had burgers and beer out back she drank soda water.
The buttons on her white blouse, the sleeveless one, bulged a bit, showing a patch of skin between her breasts. For some reason she didn’t tell me right away. There were long pauses in our conversation, and she was dying to fill them with this, the most exciting news that any woman ever has. Or sometimes, the worst.

“My son misses his father,” I had said to Mrs. Levitt, taking her blood pressure as she ate a frozen yogurt with her free hand. After Mr. Levitt died her doctor had given her a physical and pronounced her hypertense, overweight. The diagnosis had enabled him to continue sending me to the Levitt apartment. Nothing has changed there, except that the hospital bed is gone and Mrs. Levitt keeps the door to the terrace open, although the freshening warm breezes of a Florida spring will soon blow hot. “The air should come in,” she had said the first time I noticed the sliding glass doors ajar. “You smell a little cold in the morning, you know it’ll be a nice day. Too cold, with that hard feeling, snow. At least in Chicago. You need the fresh air.” Irving is in a stainless-steel jar on an occasional table. It rattles if you shake it. Robert once asked what it was. “Ah, a knickknack thing,” Mrs. Levitt had said, rolling her eyes at me.