Family Read online

  It would take Nick over five years to get his degree. The whole time, he knew he should have been studying something more practical, something he might make some money with. He sat in on a few business classes, some prelaw, but he was restless, he couldn’t concentrate, and in the end he took class after class in literature and anthropology, in zoology and botany. It didn’t matter. He was less than one month out of school when he found a job. A salesman for a children’s book company. Brooksider Books.

  He couldn’t explain it, but he somehow began feeling real. He had this job. He had this tiny studio apartment over on Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue. He had had to bribe the super for it. It was a six-flight walk-up with a slanting, rotted floor and a dark, dangerous shower that he sometimes entered with rubbers flapping on his feet. The neighborhod wasn’t so great either; he had to pick his way over the winos and around the steady, insinuating hiss of the dealers. But he had three big windows and lots of light; he had so few roaches he never even bothered to buy boric acid, let alone sprinkle it in the corners; and he could walk everywhere.

  He loved coming home. He’d open his door and just beam because the place was his, because he didn’t have to share it or clean it or hide one thing in it. At first he didn’t want anyone stepping into his place except him. He didn’t mind talking to the other tenants as he passed them in the hall—the young mother on four, the old Spanish lady who had three parrots that could swear in Chinese. He liked the sense of community.

  But it was different when the old woman knocked on his door and wanted to come inside just to visit; or when the young mother asked to borrow sugar and ended up spending an hour and a half sitting on his sofa bed asking him over and over if he thought the landlord was going to start evicting people. He felt itchy having people in his place. He felt as though they had somehow taken hold of something that was his, as if they were taking that part away with them, away from him. He began creeping up the stairs when he came in, rushing his key in the lock. He played his radio loudly enough so he wouldn’t hear the knocks, and even when he did, he ignored them.

  He wasn’t home that much. He had his job, which he loved because it let him travel. Oh, not to anyplace exotic, but he did get to Boston, he did get to Washington, D.C., and at every place he bought postcards and T-shirts, he bought processed snapshots of the city sights. The clients loved him because he was so enthusiastic about their cities, because he actually wanted to see what sights there were. And, too, he was honest, he was an unpushy salesman.

  He liked to walk around their shops first. He’d pick up the books and see which ones had jam stains on the pages, which ones had the spines starting to crack, because those were the books the kids loved—he didn’t care what the sales said. Sales were what grandmothers thought their grandkids should want. The whole trick was to promote the books the kids themselves loved, to set them right out front, to lie and say they were the best-sellers if that was the only way to get them into a kid’s hands. He had personal opinions on every book that he showed them; and despite what his company told him about “creative” selling, he had read every one.

  His clients began to know him by name. He had a boss who shared an occasional beer or two with him. And in hotels, it didn’t matter that he was alone, that he had one glass of wine in the bar alone, that he went upstairs early, because it was all part of working, all part of who he was now.

  The only snags in Nick’s life were the holidays, the times when he was most reminded that he had no family. The city seemed to empty out. He’d go buy himself Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant filled with old people and loners, with gay couples who preferred love to family confrontation. He went to all-night movies on Forty-second Street, and he got up at six in the morning to go to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, just so he could be a part of the crowd. It was bone-chillingly cold that day, and by noon it was snowing, white confetti on the black tarry street, but he stayed until the parade was over, taking his leave with the last of the stragglers.

  When he came back to his apartment building, he knocked on the Spanish woman’s door. She wasn’t so terrible. He thought he’d take her out for coffee, maybe treat her to a dessert. But when the door opened, he was startled to see two women in there, two single beds jammed into the corner spaces. “Ah, the stranger,” she said, smiling. She told him her sister was living with her now, but she didn’t introduce him, she didn’t invite him in, and neither she nor her sister seemed the least bit interested in how he would spend his night.

  He walked around the city. He tried to flirt with some of the women, but he must have looked too needy, he must have been sending out the wrong kind of radar, because no one even smiled. He decided to be more aggressive. On subsequent outings, he began talking to women in movie lines, at the poetry readings he went to in the Village where everyone was in black sweaters and boots.

  He had a few dates, but none of the relationships lasted. He told himself, okay, okay, it was all experience and he would keep on trying. He went back home and pulled out his sofa bed and stretched out across it and then he imagined that there was another body next to his. He shut his eyes—he swore he could hear another heart beating, yearning toward his own.

  TWO

  Dore was thirty miles away from Nick’s apartment, in the New Jersey high school where she taught. She had a headache so blinding she could hardly move. It was G block, her last class to teach, and her least favorite. It was an odd assortment of kids, the ones bounced from class to class because they still couldn’t read, still couldn’t write a sentence that made one whit of sense. She would write “food on the table” across the dusty blackboard, and half her class would stubbornly assure her that it was a perfectly good sentence, and that the only thing wrong with it was the messy slant of Dore’s handwriting.

  Debby Brown in the first row told Dore that food was the subject, table the verb, because verbs showed action, right? Wasn’t that what Dore had told them? You ate at a table, and anyone who said eating wasn’t action was just plain dumb.

  Dore was stupefied.

  Donald Steiner stood up and scornfully told Debby she was a moron. “Where are you from, outer space?” he said. He said table was the adjective because adjectives described, and he himself could rattle off five different kinds right now: pine, maple, cherry, oak, and Formica.

  Worse though, and more chilling, was Timmy Mathews, who cleared his throat and then told her that really he couldn’t give a flying hoot what a verb was, because he was going to hire himself a pretty secretary to take care of all that gunk for him. He’d pay her plenty to know that kind of thing, because he was going to be an executive, he was going to attend to the really important junk.

  Dore got more and more tired, but she tried. She never used the textbooks, hating them even more than the kids did. She made up her own sentences, trying to shock them into a little attention, putting up their names, the names of the rock stars she thought they liked. “Elvis Presley took his guitar to the store.” Find the verb. Find the subject. She got startled looks, but only a moment or two of attention. “You look more like the Wayne Newton type to me,” Debby said, squinting.

  Dore made them write, calling it “senior essay” to give it some importance. She scribbled “hunger” across the board and gave them the whole period to write about it, anything they wanted—a story, a description. She loved senior essay. It gave her a whole forty minutes to relax her headache away, and she felt she deserved such breaks. Look at her class.

  Ronnie Dazen. Big and dirty blond, hulking over his front-row seat and mooning at her so she wanted to smack the expression right off his face. His eyes followed her. When she went to the board, she felt uneasy. She kept touching the hem of her skirt to make sure it wasn’t riding up. She fingered her buttons to make sure they were fastened good and tight.

  Ronnie had called her at her apartment once. He was very polite. He told her he had forgotten what the homework was, and could she please refresh his memory? She told h
im to call a friend. “But I am,” he said. He breathed in the silence. He wouldn’t hang up, so she had to do it. One time, he even walked his dog on her block, a whole two miles away from where he lived. He must have packed the dog in the car and driven it over. He teased and tormented the dog until it whined and carried on so much that she came to her window to see what the commotion was. He was soothing the dog down, blinking up at her, innocent. She hadn’t been able to concentrate, knowing he was out there with his dog, knowing he knew just where she lived.

  In the back was Ricky Hall, the boy the others dubbed the Quaalude Kid. He shimmied in his seat; he talked and laughed to himself. He was skinny and small, swimming out of the T-shirts he marked up with Magic Marker, “Eat me” bleeding in a murky black drool across his chest. He strode past her, defiant, turning a little so she could see, but she just told him how pleased she was to see his spelling improve, and that she expected a passing grade from him on his next word test. His grin deflated.

  Ricky was smart enough never to carry any drugs on his person, and the one time she had sent him home on suspicion, his father had called up, threatening her, threatening the school, demanding proof that his boy wasn’t as clean and innocent as a fresh sheet of paper. The principal had taken the boy’s side; she had been reprimanded, reminded what a lawsuit might cost, and she had walked back into her classroom, defeated.

  Beside him now, two boys were surreptitiously chewing tobacco, spitting it into a blue Dixie cup. It was forbidden, and at least once a month Dore had to collect the cups, sickened. When the boys saw her coming, one of them handed the cup to Rick. “Pepsi,” he whispered. Rick was tilting the cup to his mouth when Dore said sharply, “That’s enough,” startling him, making him drop the cup, creating a slide of brown stain across the pale wood floor.

  She sent a boy off to get a wet paper towel, half expecting him not to return. She went back to her desk, removing her glasses, rubbing her eyes. Someone wolf-whistled and she looked up, trying to look menacing. Without her glasses, she couldn’t see six inches past her face, but she didn’t think her students knew that. She hadn’t thought it was such a good thing for them to know, a weapon they might use against her. She sometimes took off her glasses at her desk, looking out across them, just so they’d think she could do without them.

  She had been just about legally blind since birth, although to this day her mother insisted it wasn’t so much physical as plain old stubbornness on Dore’s part. A lack of vision. A refusal to see things the way they really were.

  Her mother could point back through time, pulling out Dore’s baby pictures. Oh, such a sweet baby face; such frilly dresses that Dore consistently muddied up in the backyard; the smooth, buttery hair that had to be clipped short so it would curl, that wouldn’t stay in place no matter how much sugar water was drenched into it. And the glasses. Oh, Lord, the glasses. Candy-striped frames, tipped at the corners like a smile and tied in back with a blue ribbon, because where could you get glasses small enough to stay on a baby?

  No one in her family had bad eyes. But there was Dore, creeping into walls, grabbing for her mush and missing. Her father had bundled her up and taken her to the doctor, had bought her her first pair of glasses.

  Dore had hated them at first. She wouldn’t wear them unless she was watched. She lost them in the grass and insisted she could see perfectly fine. It gave her mother a perfect reason to blame: Dore’s poor vision and her refusal to correct it were clearly why she wore too much makeup at fifteen, why she couldn’t dress with a little ladylike reserve. And of course there was the time when Dore was seventeen, when she had fallen in love with the neighborhood butcher.

  His name was Franky Hart. He was a high-school dropout who had inherited his father’s business, and he was twenty-five when Dore knew him. He knew absolutely everything there was to know about tenderloin and rib roast. He could tell you how to bring out the flavor in chicken, how to dress up liver so that even the kids would be clamoring for seconds. He charmed women. He noticed their dresses, their hair, and ignored their protests that they were certainly too old to be called “pretty.” He kept the air sweetly sugared, and even Dore’s mother fell under his spell. She took special pains with what she wore when she went in there, but really, no more than the other women—and anyway, having a harmless crush yourself was a hell of a lot different from having a daughter actually go out with the object of your affections.

  Dore started going out with Franky the first and only time she ever stopped at the store, to pick up some hamburger meat for her mother, who was shivering out a summer cold, bundled up in bed. Franky hooked Dore with his smile, and persuaded her to let him drive her home on his motorcycle. When he showed up one Friday to take Dore to the movies, his hair slicked back, his jacket pressed, Dore’s mother was livid. She felt betrayed. She stood watch at the window; she saw how Dore hitched up her skirts to get on his motorcycle, how she looped her arms about his waist, pressing herself in close.

  “I don’t care for that class of boy,” she sniped to Dore when Dore came home, out of breath, rumpled, her glasses stashed in her purse or lost. “Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

  “I see just fine,” Dore said.

  She sneaked around seeing Franky for over a year. Her mother began going to a different butcher, and the family sat at dinner after dinner picking at fatty roasts, pushing away stringy gray lamb. Dore never wore her glasses when she was with Franky. He didn’t like them. He’d take them off if she didn’t, stashing them in his own shirt pocket so that she sometimes forgot to get them before she went back into the house. She got used to seeing her world in a blur, got used to the headaches that sent her to her room nights with the lights off, a towel stuffed under her door to muffle sound.

  In the end, she had gone off to college. She had seen him for a while. He had come to visit, but he was ill at ease and out of place. He stayed overnight with her in her dorm room, chipping in ten dollars to get her roommate to stay someplace else, but the lovemak-ing wasn’t what Dore had expected. He was impatient. He preened and he said he’d known it would be this good. He tried to joke. “It takes a sexual man to make a chicken sensual,” he said. But she didn’t laugh; she sat up in bed, reaching for her glasses, and when he tried to stay her hand, she brushed it away.

  He took up with another girl, a tall redhead with big green eyes and perfect vision. It had mattered once, but it didn’t anymore. Dore was through with him, suddenly through with school and Chicago, and she graduated and moved out to her new job in New Jersey. She thought about getting contact lenses, but her eyes wouldn’t adjust, and now she just wore her glasses all the time.

  “Jeepers creepers, look at teach’s gorgeous peepers,” Ronnie sang. “You ought to ditch those dumbo glasses for good.”

  “Finished your essay, have you?” she said, and he took up his pen again. She twisted round to the file cabinet, just for a second, to get a Kleenex to clean her glasses, and when she turned back around, her glasses were gone.

  “Ha-ha,” she said. “Very funny. Okay, Ronnie, let’s have them.”

  He looked up. “You said we had until the end of class to finish.”

  She told him what she meant, and, insulted, he stood up and emptied his pockets. He dumped out his knapsack on the floor, spilling packs of gum, cigarettes, some stray papers, and a packet of rubbers. Defiantly, he sat down again. She was close enough to make out the objects on the floor, to know her glasses weren’t in that jumble. “A joke is a joke,” she said. “Now let’s have them.”

  No one knew a thing. Debby said she hadn’t seen anyone do anything. Rick said he bet the glasses were in Dore’s top drawer. “I want those glasses on my desk by the bell or you all get F’s.” Dore felt like a fool. She couldn’t read what was playing in their faces, but they knew her well enough to know what a softy she was, how unlikely her threat.

  “First good grade I’d have all year,” Tim muttered.

  The bell rang, and then her class was s
pilling past her, dusting her desk with papers, calling out hopes that she’d find those glasses, voices friendly, uninvolved. “Ronnie,” she called, thinking he’d surely help her if it meant a little extra flirting time, but he was whisking out the door, waving his blurry hand at her in goodbye.

  She patted her way along the corridor to the office. She could see well enough to know where she was going, but she’d never be able to drive home. She trailed her fingers up against a big sticky wad of gum and recoiled. She had this sudden image of all the students she had ever flunked emerging from the corridors, coming in for the kill when they realized how helpless she was. Things like that happened here. Cherry bombs under the French teacher’s skirt. A gym teacher getting knifed because he had made a boy do one too many squat thrusts.

  She told herself she was different, she was invincible. Two years of teaching and not one bad thing had happened to her. She had confiscated whiskey bottles and knives, and no one had threatened her, much less retaliated. She’d even had students come back to visit her after they had dropped out of school because she had failed them for yet another term. Students gave her gifts on her birthday. She remembered one boy had written her a poem. She had begged him to try to publish it, and had brought him the addresses of small literary magazines. She couldn’t understand his moody refusal—until a month later, when she had been in the Thrift-T-Mart, buying grapes, and had heard the words of his poem woozily crooned out by Frank Sinatra over the loudspeakers.

  She suddenly felt someone in the corridor with her, and she squinted. Up ahead. A muddied image. A man, leaning against the wall, silently watching her. She wasn’t sure what to do. She knew every teacher here by shape as well as sound; she knew the colors and clothing they wore. This man was small and lean and in a suit, something the other men avoided. It could be a parent, she thought, except he didn’t seem lost, and he didn’t seem angry about his kid making him trek all the way out here. He was just leaning, just waiting for her.