All My Relations (13 page)

“I can't believe it,” she said when I called. “Claire, how did it happen?”

We were both under stress, she was angry at Eskison, I explained.

Leah coughed. “I've caught a cold.”

I brought Nyquil and spent a desultory evening, bored with her, impatient to the point of hatred with her sneezes and nose-blows, grinding my teeth in martyrdom as I delivered encouraging statements. Boredom is always a mask for something more serious. Tonight, I discovered driving home, it was sadness.

After a week of halting phone conversations, we set lunch at our cafe.

“We can't let anything happen to this friendship,” Leah said. We locked hands across the table.

“I had stage fright coming over,” I said. “I felt like I was going to a summit meeting.”

“It was fun,” Leah said. “Our adventure. We'll be awkward for a few weeks, but that will wrinkle out.”

“Iron out?”

Leah tapped her head, rolling her eyes.

Munching her croissant, she said, “Eskison showed up.”

“And you drove him off, firing rapidly through the window.”

“Natch.” Leah slumped in the chair, laughing.

“Shit, congratulations.” I tossed my garnish in the air. I appreciated her not boasting, as she would have done before, about the reason for her sleepless eyes.

We undertook friendship-fostering activities, Leah accompanying me to movies. On a spending spree in Mexico, arms laden with decorations for my apartment, we succumbed to feeling privileged and tall, flirting with sidewalk vendors and even the border guards. With Eskison I helped her renovate the house. For three weeks I left work directly for Leah's, put in eleven-hour Saturdays and Sundays. Knocking off, we tumbled in front of the TV and balanced cold Foster's on our knees.

Initially the site was a ruin and Leah's face was drawn. Through the bare picture window—Leah had canned the drapes—I would see her and Eskison again mounting the ladders even as I drove away.

In grub shorts and T's, sweat visors, Leah and I troweled spackle alongside each other. We oohed the newly exposed tongue-and-groove ceiling, which stained the color of oiled leather. The living room rose, spacious, solemn, mysterious, like a planetarium or temple. The bathroom gleamed, the salon of an ocean liner.

“You're part of this house for good, it's kind of nice,” Leah said.

Passing a drugstore greeting card display, I halted at the bursting hearts, curlicued verse: “Darling, dee dee dee dee mine, dee, dee, dee, dee thine …” People really send these, I thought. I considered buying one for Leah but recognized the humor as unbridled, dangerous.

I flew to Wilmington, ostensibly for Dad's birthday, determined that Rick would return with me.

Rick and I were playing gin when Dad fell off the toilet, a thump that brought us running. He was sprawled against the magazine rack. As Rick lifted him onto the seat, I wiped him. His balls were gray.

“Vi,” Dad yelled wheezily, gripping the railing.

Mother was in the kitchen, I said.

“Vi!” He was staring straight ahead.

I went for her.

Our birthday outing led through Amish country, immaculate white Pennsylvania Dutch farms measuring off tidy, abundant fields. Mother had stayed home, grateful, I'm sure, for time alone.

Rick piloted the big family Olds. Dad faced into the breeze, closing his eyes. After he fell asleep, Rick flattened the accelerator and we skimmed waves of green like a speedboat. The car jerked and swerved into a screeching skid. A tire had drifted into one of the ruts left by Amish wagons. Dad woke briefly, murmuring about a branch and rope. Shaking, I demanded to drive. Smiling fixedly, Rick raised his hands from the wheel and, keeping them high in surrender, slid out from the front and into the rear.

Every time I turned to speak, his hands shot up, palms out, alongside his ears; the same frozen smile appeared. About to lose it, gnawing my cheek, I pulled in at a village market, where I bought beer and wurst to go.

“Rick, you could fly back with me tomorrow,” I said. “I'd rent a two-bedroom in the same complex, and we'd be moved in by next weekend. There's nothing more you can do for him.”

“I can do this.” Parting his lips, he squeezed out a cud of mashed wurst and sauerkraut, which leaked down his chin.

“That is revolting.” My voice broke.

Rick laughed. “You should see your face.”

“
Please
listen to me. Even I waited too long to leave.” The summer after graduating from college, I was a bank teller, eating a dozen percodan a day. My job was rote, the smile automatic, no problem. Except for certain lapses. One shift a packet of twenties became circus tickets. Was I supposed to be giving them out to the kids? Twelve and under? I clicked back, but I caught a flight to Tucson. I hadn't left home before, and Arizona had never occurred to me, but it was far.

“Druggie, eh?” Rick said. “I'm surprised at you. I don't need that shit.”

The breeze turned cool and wet. We were driving home under a late-afternoon overcast. Swarms of grasshoppers rose from the fields and spattered against the windshield.

Dad sighed, rolling his head. “Smell that rain,” he said.

“Look at this great sky,” Rick said. “It's like a ceiling closing around us and we're all together.” He held up his fist. “Tight.”

On the plane Rick pedaled his bicycle back and forth in my head. Just when I thought he would burst through my skull, I fell into a mini-nap, waking into a fantasy of Leah and me lying sunbleached in some whitewashed corner of the world, Spain, Greece. The shimmering glare rendered everything practically invisible, a white field of light. Then Leah and Claire sat up, naked to the waist, looking at me through dark glasses.

My first step onto the airport tarmac I knew I was turning right around, going back. I'd need a week to settle my affairs.

At the apartment I riffled through the mail and listened to my messages. “Claire,” Leah's voice said, “Eskison's gone, took his clothes, cleaned out.” Weariness hit me, a pain between my eyes. Postponing her, I watched TV and slept twelve hours.

After my long day trying to wrap up at the law office, Leah welcomed me with a bottle of Kahlua. Perching on a stool in a desert of spotted drop cloths, she was gravely composed.

“Oh, baby,” I said.

“Nothing we haven't endured before. Persevere.” Knocking back a tumbler of Kahlua in one swallow, she gave details. The nineteen-year-old lab partner was transferring to San Diego State, and Eskison had followed her to summer school. “Eskison was abject,” Leah said. “He wanted my permission. I mean, I'd be damned.”

By the cracking of the second bottle, she was singing medleys of pop and show tunes, substituting “fuck” for key verbs: “I'm going to fuck that man right out of my hair … Fuck! I need somebody. Fuck! Not just anybody …”

Her entire face was set in a wince. “I miss him being here, you know?” She threw herself sideways onto the floor. A snarl came through clenched teeth, her legs whipping. Terrified, I pinned her shoulders, grabbed her face, shook her, kissed her. “Stop, stop.” Gradually her frenzy played out into little kicks.

I put Leah to bed and slipped in beside her. Throughout the night her thrashing jumped me awake. Morning, she paced aimlessly, licking her lips and making sucking noises. I canceled work and drove her to a therapist she'd seen pre-Eskison. I had to tell her I'd be in Wilmington indefinitely. She butted her head against the car window.

Leah had a pistol, the therapist informed me after the session, which must be relinquished immediately into my safekeeping.

“We're not talking about that kind of situation,” I said.

My friend, he said, was in an extremely volatile state.

“This is such bull.” I turned to Leah. Her face was smug, glittery, unrecognizable. Reflected in the receptionist's window I saw the outlines of our three heads together. It wasn't real. I should be in Wilmington, with Rick, and yet this mild, thin-lipped stranger, sport shirt casually open at the neck, was providing hotline numbers, detailing hospitalization procedures. It was as if I were in a theater and the movie beginning was the wrong one. I was stumbling across interminable knees, spilling
popcorn, knowing that my movie was spinning in another room, and all the while these huge, hateful images were stamping themselves on my brain.

My send-off from the office amazed and moved me. The girls presented me with perfume and a crossword puzzle book. Roger, the lawyer with whom I worked most directly, assured me he considered my replacement temporary; such excellence couldn't be expected from another.

But once in the air I bottomed out on my failures with Leah, Rick. I was heading home to what? Get a job? Wring my hands in a corner? I couldn't affect anyone's life. I could only attend it.

After a morning delivering resumés to law firms, I was home, where Rick whipped a tennis ball against the wall, scooping grounders. Mother was giving Dad a bath, sloshes and murmuring coming through the door.

“Hi,” I said into the receiver. “I'm thinking about you.”

“Just finished swimming,” Leah said. “I'm into my heavy aerobics endorphin rush. Ahh.” The therapist was teaching her to regard suicidal impulses, panics, weeping attacks as simply distress. Ride them out and they would pass. “I imagine that you're watching, being proud of me.”

“I can't stand that this is happening to you.”

“Weirdhead Eskison” still called, from California, not even collect, to ask if she was O.K. “I tell him I'm completely on the rocks,” Leah said.

I'd been a teller, first job available, for five weeks. Rick buzzed the drive-through lanes once, depositing a cricket in the pneumatic tube. It jumped on my arm when I opened the canister.

Leah's semester had begun, three algebra sections. She was getting by, a grinding existence directed at no particular end. The memory of us waving Madame Rifi's rose bouquets under
a makeshift coffee-can spotlight was like a wonderful invention that was never going to be funded.

Rick was killed when a tire blew and the T-Bird, doing an estimated 90, rammed a concrete pillar. Mother called.

“Oh my God,” I screamed, sobbing, falling against the teller box. “What's the matter? Are you all right?” crackled the intercom. Through the smudged glass a mouth opened, an arm waved at me.

When I ID'ed him the damage was to the back of his skull, and his neck was broken, which I couldn't see. The bruise across his eyes looked very painful, though, and I couldn't believe it didn't hurt. I kept flinching at the thought of it, wanting to press a cold cloth against it.

I would live in Wilmington, I decided. I never should have left, and now it was too late, but staying was the only right choice.

Leah had booked a flight east before I convinced her our family couldn't cope with an outsider.

Overly generous, I gave rides home to a waspish backbiting teller who lived miles across town. I let a loan officer, a bored sexual technician with wavy black hair and a mustache like a streak of Magic Marker, fuck me at his apartment during lunch. I owed everybody.

Immediately following work I helped Mother cook. Soon it was dark by my arrival, a frosty halo around the porch light. After eating, Mother washed, I dried. She knitted in the den, Dad watched the screen, blanket around his knees.

I was splurging on a daily six of good English beer. Having forgotten, I was reminded, by myself, of that puffy, pallid Northeast fleshiness that makes nice clothes a complete waste. I bought suits a security guard would wear.

Leah was calling. “Here's the plan. The day you fly in I make scallops in champagne sauce. You soak in the tub, hot, to soften
you up for … massage! At least an hour, to rub out all that damage. Then you sink back in the pillows while Leah presents Marx Brothers. Steve Martin. Laugh. Empty your head.”

“Sounds really great,” I said. Good-bye, good-bye.

Rick came to me.

I was hanging out regularly in his bedroom. Pause at dresser. Pause at window. Sit at foot of bed. This particular night I didn't switch on the lamp but squatted, holding my knees, in the dark. Then there was a light just outside my peripheral vision. But the light was more a presence, as if the air had been replaced by something purer and colder. I pushed my head deeper into my arms, scared and glad, rocking slightly. “Rick,” I said, and felt an answering warmth.

Nothing more happened. After an hour or so, satisfied, I went to bed.

Leah: “What worries me is that I'm holding myself together until you're here, and then I'll go to pieces.”

“Don't be goofy,” I snapped.

I couldn't wait to polish off the evening beers, for Mother to complete her private crying, Dad to slip down into the couch. I took my place on Rick's carpet. We were there together.

A Sunday afternoon I played his records and emptied his shoe-box of baseball cards. I read his class notes, mostly doodling—a cross-eyed George Washington, centipede crawling up his nose. I tried to envision the classroom the day of that drawing, yellow-painted brick, the teacher's bald pink dome. Restless Butt, in plaid shorts, scooching in her seat.

“Finally laid her at a party when she was drunk, in the backyard,” Rick had told me.

“Real aristocrat, that one,” I'd sniped, faithful to our tradition.

“At least she's not a psycho like your Vinnie Toglia …”

An unbearable emptiness invaded me, moved outside, surrounding me. Walking from window to window, I punched out every pane of glass in the room.

Blood ran along my arm as I drove to Emergency. My skin prickled. It was the kind of winter when the snow sifts down the same gray-white as sky and ground, no sun for weeks. I was following strings of taillights, and when they braked, it was a chain reaction, flashes zeroing in on me like dotted lines. I was part of a natural involuntary process, no need to depress the brake pedal, the car would stop by itself. Calmly I watched the space shrink between me and the forward car. A fraction too late my foot did go down and the locked wheels skimmed my car across the ice, kissing the bumper ahead.