Family Page 19

  Now Ria handed Dore a brown bag and dipped her head. She said she had to go back to Puerto Rico; her mother was ill and could no longer tend Ria’s husband. Her eyes were terrified, dazed. “Open the bag, Teacher,” she said.

  Dore did, pulling out a flimsy pale green blouse with short, puffy sleeves, a riot of green and orange embroidery on the bodice. Dore thought she had never in her life seen anything so hideous, but she held it up against her and exclaimed how lovely it was, until she was almost crying. Ria, pleased, blushed.

  Dore spent half the night trying to figure out something to wear with the blouse the next day. She looked terrible in it. The sleeves were ridiculously girlish, and the material pulled across her breasts no matter how she plucked at it.

  She ended up wearing a black jacket over the blouse, keeping it close around her until Ria came into the class; then Dore took it off. She taught in the horrible blouse, sweating half-moons under the arms, smiling over at Ria, who looked around, pleased. As soon as class was over, she struggled into her jacket again.

  She dashed out to her car, sped home so she could change. She parked, and then she saw Nick, standing there, shimmering in her poor vision like a mirage.

  They went to a coffee shop, Dore wrapping her jacket over the blouse, trying to hide the dizzy colors of the embroidery. She didn’t feel comfortable being with Nick, and she didn’t want him coming to her place. She knew how it would be. His scent would get into the folds of her drapes so it could never come out. His sound would move in and out of the creaks the apartment sometimes made at night. She’d see him in the corners; she wouldn’t be able to turn on the lights without feeling him there, just out of reach.

  Nick told her he was in Boston on business. “Business right in front of my apartment?” Dore said. She watched him skim off the milky layer of his cappuccino. “You haven’t by any chance been calling me, have you? Calling and hanging up?”

  “Someone’s been doing that?” Nick said.

  They didn’t really talk about themselves at first. Nick felt the same way he had when he was at the home and prowling the teashops for company, making up a history for himself, a past that might unlock the kind of present he wanted. He told Dore he lived in Philadelphia now, that he still sold books, and then he noticed Dore’s face changing, and he stopped. “Hey,” he said, and abruptly she started to cry.

  She wouldn’t let him touch her. She lowered her head and covered her face with her two hands. The waitress waltzed by, raising one eyebrow at Nick, lifting the coffeepot toward him, but he shook his head at her. He wanted to touch Dore, but he was afraid. He kept edging his hand across the table toward her. He was halfway there when she opened her eyes. She smiled weakly at him. “Hard day at work,” she said.

  “Sure, I know,” he said.

  She fiddled with the saltshaker, and then she started telling him how it was for her after he had left. After Mexico, she had gone to live in France for a year, because in France it hadn’t bothered her so much seeing all those mothers and babies—after all, they were French babies, French mothers. Besides, everything was in a language she didn’t understand, so she couldn’t possibly imagine they were blaming her. Nick grabbed one of her fingers. “Let’s just drive,” he said.

  He had no idea where he was going to take her; he just liked having her in the car with him. For a moment he could think he was driving her back home to the trailer, back across a bridge of memory into the past.

  “What is it?” she asked. “You look so funny.”

  “You look the same,” he said, “like time just stopped.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.” She put her hands in her lap and then looked over at him. “I had a banker for a while,” she said. “He was perfectly nice—he brought me flowers and took me out to dinner. I thought he liked me. But then he said something about my being the best friend he could ever have, and then he never called me again. The last I heard, he had gotten married.” She looked over at Nick. “Did you find anyone as good as me?” she blurted.

  “No one like you,” Nick said. He didn’t know what to say to her. If he could just shut his eyes, if he could just think, maybe all the answers he needed would come to him. He couldn’t stop looking over at her. He didn’t want to make her uneasy, so he kept pretending to glance over at the traffic, when actually he was looking at her eyes, her face, her hands balled into her lap.

  He felt that without even trying, he was in love with her all over again, or maybe it was just that he had never quite stopped.

  He knew he didn’t want Dore to have anybody, that he was glad the banker had disappeared. And being with her, he didn’t feel like he had anybody but her either.

  “You’re so lovely,” he said.

  “Don’t, please,” said Dore. “Talk to who I am now. Not to who I was.”

  “I am,” said Nick. “I am talking to who you are now.”

  “Whom you remember,” she said.

  “Whom I never forgot,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he felt it was true. “You told me to leave you,” he said. “Remember? You said you couldn’t do it yourself, that I had to do it for you.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to remember this,” Dore said. “I don’t want to think about it.” She sat up straighter. “Nick, this is too confusing for me. Please, I can’t be with you anymore tonight. Would you drive me home?”

  Home, he thought. The trailer and Flora and a baby burbling in a crib. A woman with eyes so black you couldn’t see the pupils, you could never be sure what she was thinking; a daughter who grew and survived only as long as she was a mystery to you, a girl almost old enough to leave. He shut his eyes.

  “All right?” Dore said.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said, and turned down toward her street.

  He stood outside her apartment after she went in, trying to imagine just what sorts of things she’d do inside. He hadn’t kissed her. He’d told her he’d be back in town, implying that he’d call her, but clamping his voice down so it sounded casual, as if they were nothing more than old friends, as if their lives hadn’t once unraveled together.

  It was easy enough to persuade his boss to send him to Boston more often. There were new bookshops sprouting up all along Commonwealth Avenue, all along Harvard Square. There were new “alternative schools.” He had a whole list of them he had culled from Dore, who knew about such things. His boss thought Nick was finally becoming a go-getter, and he was delighted. He gave Nick bonuses, which Nick promptly spent on dinners for Dore, on white tulips.

  He didn’t know what he was doing, except he couldn’t stop. As soon as he drove into Boston, his mood buoyed. Anything was possible. He could stride into strange shops and sell them half his stock before they realized they didn’t need it. He felt that Boston had a frantic new pace, and it was only later that he realized it wasn’t Boston doing the speeding, it was he. Dore made everything seem dizzy, like some obstacle course he had to get through as fast as possible to make his way to her. Everything began reminding him of her. He’d eat a muffin at the Pewter Pot and he’d remember the cookies Ruby had brought over on a blue plate; he’d see women with short, athletic haircuts and he’d see the nape of Dore’s neck. He couldn’t walk past an optician’s office without thinking of her.

  He fetched her at school, selling the headmaster a few basic grammars, leaving his catalogs and his card, and although he talked about books, he talked mostly about Dore. The headmaster told Nick how pleased everyone was with her, that he practically had to threaten students into the next level because they hated to leave her. “I know how they feel,” Nick said.

  He watched Dore coming out. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt as if he had been waiting and waiting for her, that every breath of air he had ever taken had been thick with all those nights with her, and he hadn’t even realized it until he had seen her again. Loving her again made him feel safe, buttressed against loss. It made things possible.

  While Leslie never asked much, Dore wanted
to know about everything, and sometimes, rather than lie, he told her he couldn’t seem to think about anything but her. “Oh, phooey on that,” she said, but he could tell she was pleased. She pressed him, though. She wanted to know why it was so difficult to get him at home (he had given her the phone number of a friend who was in Europe for the year), why she always had to call the main office. And she wanted to know, over and over, just what they thought they were doing, just how he expected things to end.

  “Who said anything about ending?” Nick said. “We’re just going slow, getting surprised.”

  She gave him a long, even look. “Surprised?” she said.

  “I love you,” he said, but she wouldn’t say it back; she kept telling him that when she knew how things were going, then she would tell him how she felt, and not before. He tried to trick her into it. He asked her when they were tumbling entwined across her floor; he whispered to her just as she was drowsing off to sleep and defenseless; but then the look of terror that flickered into her face made him feel suddenly scared.

  He told himself anything was possible, that the best thing was not to focus on any outcome at all, just let things happen. He thought of Flora in the trailer park, with her threads and her cards; he remembered her telling him he’d have a whole family of girls.

  He never really thought of himself as having an affair. It was an ugly, unromantic word; and besides, how did you have an affair with someone you had once lived for and had a child with and shared a whole life with? An affair was cheating, leaving less for one person so you might have more for another, and he didn’t think he was doing that. If anything, being so happy made him generous, made him feel closer in a way to Leslie. He brought her baby roses and tulips; he walked with her at night, and found her silences didn’t eat away at him the way they used to. He waited them out now, or teased her from them until she smiled and draped her hands about his face.

  He felt so protected that he began taking new note of Robin. He kept remembering her as a little girl, how she used to feel inside his coat pockets looking for toys, always taking instead the things he carried for himself—his pen, a small notebook, an inky itinerary sheet. He never knew what she did with those things, why she even wanted them. He only remembered her screaming in fury when Leslie tried to take them away. He remembered how she used to watch him, how he’d sometimes feel her eyes on him when he was in another room, another city.

  Robin didn’t ask him for anything anymore. She didn’t meet him at the door. When he came home, she was in her room, the stereo on, but her headphones keeping her room so quiet that you wouldn’t even know she existed. Sometimes she was out at the “Y” swimming; she’d come home sulky, her hair smelling of chlorine.

  Little girls you could cart to the zoo or the museum; you could prop them up beside you in the bleachers while a baseball game droned on in front of you. He had no idea what you did with teenagers, how you spoke with them. He ended up asking her to meet him for dinner one night when Leslie had a wedding-gown fitting to attend to and was going to be gone a long while. He told Robin he’d take her to the Pasta Palace, a new Italian place in Shadyside.

  She showed up for dinner in a black dress and metallic blue shoes, a silver clip in the wilds of her hair. The dinner was supposed to be special, but it really didn’t go very well. He was nervous with his own daughter, and she kept looking at him as if she expected something to happen.

  They were leaving the restaurant when he ran into a client. Bill Glassman, who owned the Squirrel Hill Bookmart. He took one look at Robin and started making a fuss. He knew her name, which startled Robin because she had no idea who he was at all. He started out with the usual pleasantries—how pretty she was, how he had always assumed Nick was doing the usual fatherly bragging, but really, she was a breathtaker. And then, while Robin stood rooted there, amazed, he began to tell her about her life. He knew what grade she was in, he knew she swam, and he knew that she loved Jane Austen. He knew things she never thought to tell anyone about, like how she drew pictures on the backs of envelopes and liked to make shadow drawings on the misty windows. He knew almost all the outside details of her life because Nick had never stopped collecting them, because he had memorized the facts of her existence and then happily spilled them out in conversation, almost as if he were convincing himself that he played a part in all of it.

  Robin swayed on the heels of her shoes, shocked, glancing from Bill to Nick and back again, all the while listening to her past being played back to her by a total stranger. Before he left, Bill shook her hand and then Nick’s. “You come by the store,” he told Robin. “I’ll fix you up with all the Jane Austen you want.” A little dazed, Robin moved closer to Nick.

  While they walked, she kept glancing over at him, waiting for him to say something, but all he said was, wasn’t Bill a damned nice guy, and that Robin ought to stop by the shop, he had a good selection. He looked at her, beaming, but she stayed silent. At one point she stumbled, and he wrapped his arm about her for a moment. “I’ve got you,” he said.

  ELEVEN

  Robin began buying her books at the Squirrel Hill Bookmart. Every time she wandered in, she looked around for Bill, and every time he saw her, he always had some new story about her life to relate back to her. He showed her off to the clerks, asked her opinions about displays, and sometimes, too, he talked about Nick. He told her stories he thought she already knew—about Nick having to share a room with a drunkard at the “Y” in Philadelphia because of a hotel strike; about Nick riding and riding the swan boats in Boston, a grown man charming a gaggle of little kids. He told her how much Nick loved Boston, and asked her if she felt the same way. Robin was ashamed to admit she had never been there. “Sure,” she said. “It’s a great city.” He sent her home with an armful of new books and regards to “that father of yours.”

  At home, she was restless. When Nick came home that evening, she asked him abruptly if he would take her to Boston sometimes.

  “Boston? Why Boston?”

  “I’d like to see it,” she said. “Maybe I’ll want to go to college there.”

  “It’s just a city,” Nick said, but Dore flickered along his mind.

  “It is not,” she said. “You’re smiling.”

  He sighed. “Why all this sudden interest?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I want to go someplace new. Maybe I want to be with you. Just me and you.”

  He looked at her. “Listen, you wouldn’t have a good time there. It’s dull and it’s dirty.” He scratched at his face. “It’s about time for all of us to take a vacation. Maybe we could all go to Philadelphia for a long weekend soon. What about that?”

  “Sure,” she said, turning.

  It really bothered her that Nick wouldn’t take her. She didn’t ask him about it again, but she trailed him aimlessly about the house, a shadow, until finally he turned around and gave her another reason why he couldn’t take her to Boston, why she wouldn’t like it. “I didn’t even ask you,” she said. He looked discomfited. “Well, you didn’t have to,” he said.

  Less than a month later, he left for Boston. She knew what time he was leaving in the morning, and she set her alarm to rouse her, but when it shocked her awake and she woozily peered out her window into the dim morning light, she saw that he was already settled in his car, the motor already running. And then, before she could rush into her robe and slippers, before she could shout out the window for him to wait, he was gone.

  All that week, things angered her. When she tried to comb her hair, the teeth caught in the tangles and broke off in her hand. When she put on mascara, the brush poked her in the eye. She wouldn’t get on the phone when Nick called, and then later, when she changed her mind and called him herself, he was always out.

  Leslie always took on more work when Nick was gone, coming home later with her hands full of rustling silks and textured cottons. At night, though, she liked having Robin in the house with her. She bought ice cream, she made popcorn—she�
��d do anything to have Robin keep her company. She kept the good TV in her bedroom, so when they both sat up watching old movies, there was always the possibility that Robin would fall asleep in bed with her, that she could quietly shut the set off and cover Robin, that she could wake in the night and have a body next to her.

  On Saturday morning, the day before Nick was due back, Leslie told Robin that he had called to say he was going to be another few days. Leslie was at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, a bottle of aspirin spilled out in front of her. When she looked at Robin, she frowned.

  “Did he say how come?” Robin asked.

  Leslie shrugged. “And where are you going?”

  “To the library,” Robin said. “Swimming maybe.”

  “Dinner’s at six,” Leslie said.”

  I’ll probably just get a hamburger in town.”

  Leslie put her cup down, stroking her brow. “You just be here at six, please.”

  Something prickled along Robin’s spine. She heard Leslie telling her again about dinner, about getting home early and helping around the house, and then she turned and went out the door, into the blissful cool of the morning.

  She didn’t realize she was going to Boston until five that evening. She couldn’t stop thinking about her father, about Leslie waiting at home for her. It was a weekend. If she left now, she could be there a whole day before she had to come back. She could call him to say she was coming; she could get him to call Leslie for her. She fiddled in her jeans for some change, and then, thinking better of it, stood up and began collecting her things. She’d take care of it when she got there. Leslie wasn’t expecting her for another hour, and Nick…well, Nick wasn’t expecting her at all.

  It would take Robin fifteen hours to get to Boston. She was wary hitching out of Pittsburgh. She kept trying to squint into oncoming cars before she jammed her thumb out, making sure she didn’t recognize a client of Leslie’s, a friend of her father’s, or anyone who might know her. Whenever she saw a car that looked vaguely familiar, she tucked her head down and hunched around from the road, as if the wind were too fierce for her.