“First grade, he filmed Jason on his first field trip, Jason giving his report on alligators to the class, Jason trying out for peewee soccer, which, by the by, he’s not real good at. Last year he tried to film Jason taking some standard reading test they were giving. I figure that was the last straw. He’s not allowed inside the school with the camera anymore. Came close to suing, too, I heard, ’cause of infringement on his constitutional rights. Does the Constitution guarantee you the right to be a weenie?”
Both of us looked toward the school. The sun made such a glare on the windows that they looked like one-way mirrors; we couldn’t see a thing. But I could feel Robert inside, feel him sitting at his new desk looking furtively around the room, trying to get used to this, trying to scope out who mattered and who didn’t, who it was safe to approach and who would backhand him with a word, a look. I could feel him watching the teacher, trying to pay attention to what Mrs. Bernsen was saying while every hair on his body was vibrating to the atmosphere in the classroom the way the new kids’ did. Or at least the way mine had when I’d been the new kid. And, along with it all, he’d have to remember his last name as though it was fractions, or division, something difficult he’d barely been introduced to. I could see Robert taking a test, writing in his crabbed script a capital B to begin his last name. I could see him erasing the B, his tongue snagged between his front teeth, writing a capital C instead.
Or maybe not. Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were. “Hi,” I said over and over in my head sometimes in the morning as I was making coffee, or in the evenings as I fixed toast and eggs for dinner. “I’m Beth Crenshaw.” I practiced writing it the way I’d once written “Mrs. Robert Benedetto” in the margin of my notebooks in nursing school.
“If a man who says he is Robert’s father comes to the school, you have to call me immediately,” I had said on the phone to the school secretary.
“We already know that, Mrs. Crenshaw,” she said wearily, as though her entire life was made up of custody disputes and parents’ paranoia. And again I felt an invisible hand at work. It was a hand that made it impossible for me to ask questions, for surely there would be something peculiar about a mother who didn’t know who had given the school fair warning, about a mother who asked where her son’s school records had come from and who had sent them, about a mother who asked the office, “By the way, do you know our phone number?” “Guardian angels” Patty Bancroft always called the members of her invisible nameless network, and I was grateful. But at times it felt less celestial than intrusive, almost suffocating, for other people to know more about me than I knew about myself. It was as though I existed in someone else’s imagination. I glanced at the narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered woman next to me in the parking lot, and wondered whether our conversation was accidental or whether the clothes I wore every day, those charity size eights, had once belonged to her.
“Beth Crenshaw,” I said a little irritably, sticking out my hand, watching for a reaction.
“Oh,” she said, “sorry. Cindy Roerbacker. You new?”
I nodded.
“What grade is your kid in?”
“Fifth.”
“Which class?”
“Mrs. Bernsen.”
“Good. Mrs. Jackson is an idiot. The sweetest woman in the world, but my two-year-old could teach her social studies.”
“What about yours?”
“Fourth.” She sighed. “Her name’s Chelsea. My little one’s Chad.”
“Your husband Charlie?”
“Craig,” she said. “Isn’t it awful? I got carried away, and now I’m stuck with it. If we have another girl we’ll have to name her Caitlyn, I guess.” The man who’d led the screaming child into the school emerged from the double doors in front and walked halfway down the walk, looking from one end of the road to another. He was still wearing the whistle and carrying a clipboard, and his face was as flushed as my own.
“Vice principal,” Cindy said, her arms folded on her chest. “Mr. Riordan. Nice man, but a little—” she whiffled a slender hand through the air like a bird. “Maybe not. I can’t tell.”
“You never can,” I said, grinning. I remembered the day at the hospital I pulled an aide into the supply closet and gave her hell for telling one of her friends as they were unloading lunch trays that Dr. Silverstein smelled like a fairy. “Jesus,” I said to my friend Winnie afterward, “if a man dresses nicely and has the littlest bit of drama about him, everyone has him written off as gay.”
Winnie had patted my hand with her own, with its square nails and short fingers. “Fran, I love you dearly,” she said, “but Dr. Silverstein’s been living with an architect named Bill since he was in medical school. You need to pick your fights.”
I missed Winnie, the head nurse in the emergency room at South Bay Hospital, who could calm a rape victim just by rubbing the back of the woman’s hand as I combed her pubic hair for evidence, Winnie who made me feel afterward, as I cried in the bathroom, that I’d done good instead of harm. I missed Mrs. Pinto, our neighbor, who left Baggies full of ripe tomatoes on my steps during August and September and called Robert “handsome man,” making his olive skin darken to a dull red-brown. And God, how I missed Grace, missed talking to her on the phone every blessed day, about her students, about my patients, about nothing at all, where to buy cheap sneakers, what mascara didn’t irritate your eyes. “Where were you?” she’d say if she couldn’t reach me in the morning. God, how she must miss me.
I wished I missed my mother more, but after my sister had gone away to college and my father had died, she’d moved in with her sister Faye and out of our lives into a life of day trips to factory outlets and Atlantic City, of communion breakfasts and bingo games. It was as though her marriage and children had been only a brief interlude in her real life, Marge and Faye, two sisters watching the Weather Channel and bickering about the verisimilitude of their girlhood memories. I had talked to my mother once a week, said less than I’d just said to Cindy Whatever-her-name-was, a complete stranger squinting at her watch in the merciless sun.
“You going to work?” she said.
I shook my head. “What about you?”
“Not until this afternoon,” she said. “I sell Avon part-time. In this weather the lipsticks melt half the time. Sometimes I keep everything in the fridge—they don’t like it if you do that, but darned if I can sell cream blush that’s as soupy as paint.” She sniffed down the front of her blouse. “Lord, I wish I could get inside into the AC. The first year with Chelsea I had to sit in the kindergarten for half the day and then sneak out when she was at music. That’s how I wound up doing PTA. First grade we tried to make her go cold turkey, but she cried so hard I had to stay out in the hall where she could see me at least until circle time. Second and third grade I stayed around for the first hour until January. Volunteered in the library and all that. This year, I said, Chelse, honey, it’s time to cut the cord. But she asked me to stay outside where she could see me out the window for just half an hour the first day. Craig said, first it’s half an hour, next thing you know it’ll be until lunch. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Nah,” I said. “It’s hard being a kid, never mind a mother. I can’t ever figure out whether I’m doing things because they’re good for him or because they make me feel better.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” she said, fanning herself with her hand. “Although I’m still wondering where she got all this fear stuff from. Like she’ll ask whether you can get your shoelaces caught in the escalator at the mall. They’ll be earthquakes or tornadoes on television and she wants to know where you could stand or how you could hide to get away.” She shielded her eyes and looked toward the school. “Our house got struck by lightning once, when Chelsea was three. All it did was char the side of the chimney, but who knows with kids what
sticks in their minds? You have one of those real fearless boys?”
I shrugged. “He’s a boy. He keeps his fears inside.”
She nodded. “Boys,” she said, and I looked at her, at her glossy dark hair and painted nails, and wondered what she’d say if I replied, Yeah, that and the fact that his father used to beat the shit out of me and he figures he’d better be quiet and nice or the whole world will blow up. What would she say if I replied, Your kid wants to see a natural disaster, she should have seen my face after the last fight?
What if, I thought to myself, I’m talking to myself the rest of my life? What if I can never say what I’m thinking to anyone ever again? I looked back at the school building, and then grabbed Cindy by the arm. “What?” she said, and turned to see the two patrol cars, white and red and blue, pull up outside the school. Men in uniforms were stepping out of the cars, loping up the path and into the building, stopping just inside the door to talk with the man in the khaki shorts. Telling him, telling him. Next, one of the cops would pull a photograph from his breast pocket, the picture of Robert taken last year at St. Stannie’s, sitting on the steps beneath the statue of the Blessed Mother, wearing the same polo shirt he’d worn as we traveled from New York to Lake Plata. I’d given a copy of it to my mother-in-law; she kept it in a gilt frame on her bedside table, with the tissues and the Sominex. I could see her handing it to Bobby, see him taking it into the photo shop to have copies made, see him finger his big lower lip as he tried to figure how best to deal with me when he found us.
The men were moving inside; I could almost see the three of them bent over a sheaf of manila folders in the office. I imagined them looking through the files for new students, walking to the fifth grade classroom, seeing Robert, whispering to the teacher, taking him out of class. It all came to me, like one of those flip books Robert had gotten for Christmas, all the little pictures moving fast, making a story, the story of the beginning of the end of my life.
“What are those two cops doing going into the school?” I said. The only woman in America terrified at the sight.
“They always come here the first day,” Cindy said. “They talk to the kids about not talking to strangers, not taking a ride from anyone, only going with someone you know, the usual.” She squinted across the lot. “That one’s Officer Bryant, I think. I don’t know about you, but I hate knowing the police are younger than I am.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” she said. “He’s a good ten, twelve years younger than I am. The other one, I can never remember his name, but he’s even younger than that.” She looked at me. “Are you okay? You want to have a cup of coffee?”
It sounds stupid, saying how I felt at that moment. Maybe it was the sheer chemical relief, the balloon deflating in my stomach, the buzz subsiding in my head. Maybe it was knowing that the police officer would see my boy as nothing more than another face in a crowd of children and that this woman saw me as nothing more remarkable than one of the moms. Maybe it was the way Cindy talked about her daughter, that combination of fear, ego, and love that oozes out of a good mother like perspiration when the kids are small, the fuel that had stoked my fires for a decade. Or just the way she stuck one pinkie under the white sunglasses to wipe away a raccoon circle of mascara from beneath one blue eye. Maybe it was that cornpone accent, so different from my own. Or the sense of relief I felt knowing that the police were there to tell the kids to be careful, although the attentions of a stranger toward my boy took a distant second place to my fear of a rental car parked at the corner and his father with his arm right-angled out the driver’s side window, saying “Hey, buddy,” in that rich, persuasive voice.
Or maybe it was me remembering female friendship, what I had with Winnie and with Gracie, too, as much friend as sister. What I had with Bridget Foley in elementary school, until her parents moved to the Island, and with Dee Stemple in high school. I hadn’t had too much of it; I’d never been the kind of girl who traveled with a big boisterous pack. Maybe that’s why I’d been pulled so powerfully toward Bobby, because there was always a circle around him, faces turned toward his, listening, looking, laughing. I’d had too much to do always, filling jelly doughnuts at the bakery to earn money for nursing school, helping Grace with her papers, taking my father in a taxi to the doctor’s office, waiting for a plumber when the heat cut out on a January day. But I’d always had one good girlfriend, and looking at Cindy Roerbacker, hearing her easy confidences, I remembered how much that friendship had meant to me, that way you could just open your mouth, sitting on a bench in the park, lying across your twin bed, standing over a sink in the girls’ room, pulling the phone into the closet—just open your mouth and let your whole self out, all those small mosaic pieces of self that felt barely held together with plaster of personality half the time. And then it had been wrecked for me by Bobby, who didn’t like my girlfriends, called Dee a tramp, Winnie a dyke, Grace a bleeding heart, and who gave me a secret so big that it might as well have sat in the middle of the friendship like a wild animal, ready to tear it apart.
“So how’s Bobby?” someone would say.
“Good. Good. Fine. Busy, you know?”
“Everything okay?”
“Sure. Everything’s fine.”
So much of my life was stuck in my throat like a bone, and I could never, ever let it out. But I had gotten used to that. Bobby had given me one secret about who I really was, and now I had another. Or Fran Benedetto had a thing she couldn’t tell, not over a beer, a burger, a cup of coffee. But Beth Crenshaw could talk about her life all she liked. Lies were so much easier than the truth. Maybe I’d be good at this.
It was clear to me in only a few minutes that our meeting was chance, that Cindy wasn’t a Patty Bancroft construct. In the minivan she said her best friend had moved to California over the summer, commiserated with me over the difficulty of divorce, apologized for the juice box and the cracker wrapper beneath my seat. In her kitchen she made decaf and put out a plate of mini-muffins, and something about the way she talked and laughed and sometimes stared out the sliding doors to the deck and the pool told me that she needed company as much as I did. Her life sounded more like an itinerary than an existence, Gymboree with Chad two mornings a week, lunch every Wednesday for the seniors at the Baptist Church, Chelsea’s ballet and gymnastics, Sunday school, selling Avon. But it seemed like the patches stretched a little long once she got back here to her own kitchen table.
“I got a bunch of stuff I cleaned out of Craig’s mom’s house when they moved to a condo,” she said. “It’s just sitting in the basement, if you’re short anything. Curtains or chairs or whatever. I had a girlfriend from high school, she was so busy holding onto the big pieces, the armoire and the entertainment center, that she didn’t even notice till after her husband was gone that she hadn’t saved one single chair. She was standing around in her own place for the better part of a week.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Sure, now?” Cindy said. “There’s a mess of stuff down there. Go look if you want. Some of it’s real nice. Well, not real nice, but presentable. And clean. Craig’s mother’s a real clean person.”
Our kids give us courage, I think. The only way I’d gotten through Robert’s first day of first grade had been to remember the stalwart set of those little shoulders, and the thing that kept me in my seat during soccer games when the coach yelled at him was the dignified way he’d lift his bony pointed chin. And I thought of how he’d refused to let me unearth his fears about a new school, a new name, a new life, of how he’d decided to swim in alone in the stream of children I’d seen that morning, with only Bennie and his backpack as life preservers. He was beginning a life, a life as Robert Crenshaw, making a place for himself. And so would I. Goddamn Bobby Benedetto, so would I. Maybe I was supposed to hide behind my blinds, to make myself invisible. Maybe that was what Patty Bancroft thought would be safest. Maybe that was what most of the women did. Not me. I’d changed my hair
and my clothes, my name and my address, so that I could live, really live. I needed a job, and a friend, and a shot at changing that closed-up little apartment, with its thin carpeting and colorless couch, into someplace that seemed like people lived there, lived ordinary uneventful lives.
“Actually,” I said, “I could use some curtains.”
“Couldn’t we all?” said Cindy Roerbacker, laying on the drawl plenty thick, her eyes bright, smile big, a smudge of lipstick on her teeth. “Girl, let’s decorate.”
Robert started his second week of school, liked the kids, liked his teachers, slept less, spoke more, although not as much as another kid would have done. And I splurged on a gallon of butter-yellow paint, to mark a month in Lake Plata, living through it, learning to let some of the fear out of the tight muscles in my shoulders. That’s how small the living room of the apartment was: one gallon of paint was enough. I’d hung a sampler in the kitchen that I’d found in Cindy’s basement: in cross-stitch it said, “May you be in heaven an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.” Mrs. Roerbacker’s old multicolored afghan hung over the back of the couch, and some throw pillows were plumped up at either end. From Cindy’s basement I’d taken an old oak rocker, a seascape in a maple frame, a chenille spread with blue and yellow pompons, a set of café curtains with cherries printed on them, and some drapes with stripes so bright they made you dizzy. “You sure about those?” Cindy said when we put them in the back of the minivan. She didn’t try to patronize me when she helped me carry all the stuff into the apartment on Poinsettia Way. She just looked around and nodded as though it was what you could expect from a divorce, a dislocation. That’s how she was, realistic but never grim. “You can work with this,” she said. It didn’t take long to paint the place, it was so tiny. But when I was done with the downstairs it looked like a feature in a woman’s magazine on decorating on a budget. Except that the venetian blinds were still closed tight. The overhead light stayed on all day.