Concrete Angel (26 page)

Nothing happened.

Neil ended up spending the night in the Martins’ basement. The phone rang at seven-thirty the next morning. “I think we have something of yours,” Mrs. Martin told me icily.

“Hi, Christine.” Neil sounded dopey, either from lack of sleep or embarrassment. Or maybe he
was
a dope. Why had I chosen so poorly—was it a family curse? Was I on the road to a Mickey already?

“Why didn’t you go home?” I hissed into the phone. He started to answer when I interrupted. “No, never mind. We’ll talk about it later.”

I hung up quietly and then heard a snuffling sound, only partially muffled, and remembered too late Mother’d be awake and was probably listening in.

Downstairs, she sat at the kitchen table clicking her nails, now platinum, on the vinyl. Even after the night she’d spent, the troubles she had, Mother was prepped for the day ahead. Her negligee was apricot and her bare shoulders were peachy in the morning light. Her hair, loose for once, was well-brushed. She wore light makeup. A light scent carried on the breeze coming in the tiny kitchen window. I couldn’t help but stare at her; after the night we’d spent, she was ready for action whereas I was my usually soggy mess.

Mickey never rose before ten on Saturdays so there’d be plenty of time to discuss recent events. I sat down. Nobody said anything for a long time.

“Well, I don’t know what to do with you,” she finally said. She jerked her head suddenly. “After what I already have to tell Mickey, you bring me this? Was this Neil person hiding in the basement the whole time, making a fool of me? When I was pouring out my heart to you? Were you planning a little escapade of your own?” She paused. “Hey, is that Mickey getting up?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Well, I can’t talk about this now, Christine. If Mickey finds out what you did, he’ll probably send us back to your grandmother’s. Or if he finds out about what I tried to do. He takes his orders from Rome, you know.” Tears streamed down her face suddenly, and I started crying, too. “I can only hope we aren’t both pregnant,” she said as a parting shot.

This took me by surprise; the idea she wouldn’t know whether I was having sex. I thought she knew everything about me. I was years away from such an episode—how could she not know it? She’d made me fearful of anything sexual. Afraid of close relationships. How could she not know the price I’d paid for
her
choices?

She began to water the African violets that sat on the kitchen windowsill. Each one had to be placed individually in a pan of water where it bobbled unevenly like a sail-less boat on a lake. The leaves didn’t like to be wet, she told me, making it sound like the plants had confided this tidbit to her. Mary Theresa, Mickey’s daughter, brought a plant with her whenever she visited. This almost ceremonial gift giving had the air of a religious act since Mary Theresa always wore her school uniform, holding the plant out to Mother like a communion wafer or a religious relic.

Racine, Mickey’s ex, had a miniature greenhouse in a knocked-out kitchen window where she raised the violets from cuttings. My mother lived in deep fear that one of the possibly rarer plants might die and she’d be unable to replace it, though I voiced the opinion that none of the violets were rare, repeatedly assuring her of this. But she regarded the ritual as a test—one she was bound to fail.

So far we’d had to buy eight replacements at the Kresge plant department. The supposed
gifts
put an enormous pressure on Mother, who’d never had to raise anything other than me before this year.

I felt sorry for my mother. Wasn’t there a single thing in her life that was easy or normal? There was our impossible-to-keep-clean white house, the finicky fish with their funky diseases, the oversensitive plants, the bookkeeping duties of the return business, her health-conscious husband, her delinquent child, her hair and skin requirements, her scornful mother across town, her ex-husband in Bucks County who’d recently become engaged to the heiress to a chocolate fortune—all of these things preying on her mind, requiring an output of her limited resources.

But why did she marry Mickey? How many of these problems emanated from his presence in our lives? More than half by my calculation. I could have kept her happier were we alone—when had I once let her down. But she’d preferred having a consort.

I crept up to my room and stayed there all day. Maybe I wasn’t convinced I wanted Mickey for a stepfather, having him tell me what I could do as if he had a right to it, being forced to witness the million quirky things that were part of him, watching Mother alternately drool and grovel in his presence. But sending Mother back to her previous life was too cruel. Another defeat could be her undoing and she’d be back in an institution, trying out the latest therapy for whatever ailed her. Or spritizing innocent women who entered a store.

On Monday, Neil was waiting at the bus stop. “Why didn’t you get out of there when they went to bed on Friday night?” I asked, swiping at him with my lab book.

“The old man threw the lock on the kitchen door before they went to bed. The basement door was locked, too. Dead bolted.”

“Did your mother go crazy?”

He nodded. “I’m not allowed to see you anymore. She called the Martins and apologized Sunday morning. They were laughing about it by then.” He scratched his head. “But they didn’t think it was so funny when I knocked on their basement door Saturday morning. The old man opened the door with a Louisville Slugger in his hand.”

I shuddered. “What if he kept a gun?”

I knew this scenario all too well. Being involved, in any way, in a second shooting would probably send me to jail and examples of how it might happen threatened me from every corner. Would I have to tread carefully forever?

Neil nodded, “Don’t think I didn’t give it some thought before I knocked at the door. I kept yelling I was Christine’s boyfriend.”

Boyfriend? Was this how he saw himself? Well, it was over now. I wouldn’t take a chance like this again—not for a long time.

The bus came and we climbed on, finding seats as far apart as possible. Neil faded into the advertisement for Noxzema medication pasted behind him on the bus and ceased to exist. Having a
boyfriend
, or any friend at all, was too much trouble with my mother around. She was right to warn me off friendships. It was better to keep other people out of it. Perhaps someday the situation would change, but I wasn’t hopeful.

Days turned into weeks as I waited for Mother to tell Mickey about her condition. The tension continued to mount as day after day passed. I spent much of those weeks alone, staring at the fish tanks, throwing darts at the board in the basement. I pushed the ping pong table against the wall and played against myself. I cleaned out my bureau drawers though they were already perfectly fine. Mickey floated above or below me, making his demands, eating his lemons, spending time with fish, working on his pecs. I avoided him as much as possible, waiting for the explosion to come.

She managed to get to the fifth month before showing. I came home from the library and found Mickey sitting on the front steps, a beer in hand at noon. He looked at me, frowning. “I suppose you knew.”

I slid around him. Mother was in the kitchen, polishing the burners on the stove wearing rubber gloves. “I can’t go back to the way things were before, Christine. Hank’s out of the picture. I can’t depend on my mother’s help or our return business. Or working at the makeup counter in Woolworth’s like a teenager, spritzing people with perfume. On my feet all day. I’m thirty-six old, Christine!” Her voice died away. She hated to talk about her age. Even when she was taking off many years as she was now. It took all the life out of her.

If Mickey leaves me, I don’t know what I’ll do.” Mother dabbed daintily at her eyes. “He means the world to me, Christine. To us! I bet a son will turn things around.”

R
ussell was born four months later and our lives changed profoundly.

M
ary Theresa and I stood on one side of the hospital bed, Mickey on the other. Mother held the sleeping baby—as yet unnamed—in her arms. Frankly I’d never heard them discuss a name or anything else related to the coming child. Mother’s swelling middle was a topic nobody wanted to take on—and Mickey’s enmity simmered just beneath the cracking veneer of our family life.

Even though Eve was
my
mother, it was hard to imagine her taking care of a baby, hard to picture her changing a diaper or breast-feeding an infant, giving over a part of her body to someone else if only temporarily. Now that the kid was on the scene, it was even more improbable.

Our small living room was already crammed with stuff my grandmother had sneaked in, nearly crowding out Mickey’s fish. Knocking the wall down added to the difficulties. It’d be a tight fit in other ways with Mary Theresa wanting her share of Mickey too. Mother’s late announcement gave Mickey very little time to adjust. An uneasy and unnatural silence had held in the household until Mother’s first scream, and unsurprisingly it was me escorting her to the hospital, sitting with her in the delivery room, present for the birth.

Now Mickey was looking grimly at his offspring.

“A boy, huh?” He sounded neither pleased nor overly interested. “Don’t suppose you got a name in mind.”

Before she could open her mouth, Mickey said, “Well, let’s name the kid after my father. Russell John DiSantis. Russ, for short. What d’ya think, Mary Theresa?” he asked his daughter—as if her opinion counted for anything—as if it were solely a DiSantis family decision. “You remember him, don’t you? Your grandad? Always had a pipe sticking out of his mouth. Looked kinda like Popeye.” He turned toward his wife. “Smelled like a walking ashtray, Eve. Funny how smoke clings to some people and not others. Him—you could smell fifty feet away.” Then back to Mary Theresa, smiling like it was a grand joke. “Still, he was my dad, God love him.”

Popeye? It would be hard to wipe that name from my mind. Popeye DiSantis? Why would you want to name a baby after a man who stunk of smoke? Or resembled a cartoon figure?

“I think I remember him,” Mary Theresa said, cautious as always.

She was probably calculating the odds in the name being a joke before she spoke. No daughter was more eager to please her parent—except me, perhaps— though I thought I hid it better. The intensity of paternal love I saw in her eyes had faded in mine. It was more about risk management and self-preservation; more about keeping the harm to a minimum. The beads of perspiration on her face as she tried to please him were unlikely to pepper mine again.

I was certainly wrong there, although my forced involvement in the death of Jerry Santini had started the process of separation. What came later hardened me more. Mary Theresa wouldn’t be as cool under fire. Her hands, clutching at her skirt until she’d made a horizontal pleat, always got my attention because she’d no idea what real stress was.

“Popeye, Daddy?”

I groaned inwardly. This was bound to be the kid’s nickname after this lengthy discussion.

“Well, he wasn’t a sailor. Didn’t wear a sailor uniform. Kind of bandy-legged though.” Was he treating this discussion as serious? Mother and I flashed each other a look.

“Racine remembers him. He had a thing for her near the end. Wouldn’t let anyone else feed him. Always looking for an excuse to put his paws on her. Rub up against those boobs.” He laughed.

So Racine was big-breasted? I’d only seen her once and hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t an era for tight knit tops revealing such things.

“You wanna name him Russell?” Mother said. Apparently the name had taken a while to sink in or she was still under the influence of the drugs she’d insisted on. “I don’t know, Mickey. Sounds like an old man. Who’d want to name an itsy bitsy baby Russell?”

She said the last words in baby talk, looking at her swaddled offspring. Russell—and he didn’t look like a Russell, but who would—was silent. He’d always be able to sleep through tight situations. A stoic. I felt something stir inside me, in a place unknown until that moment.

“I was thinking of something like Jason. Or Joshua. Maybe Ryan.” Mother paused a second. “I thought you hated your dad, Mick? Didn’t he used to whip you with his belt? Accuse you of doing things he’d done? Beat your mother? Drink till he passed out?”