Black and Blue (6 page)

“I have to go get Bennie or we’ll miss the bus,” Robert said, picking up his backpack.

Every first day of school he’d ever had I’d gone with him: carrying him whimpering into nursery school, walking hand-inhand to first grade. Don’t let anyone tell you New York is a big
city. “I know you,” said the cop outside P.S. 135 in Sheepshead Bay as we passed him on our way to St. Stannie’s. “You look just like your dad.”

“I know,” Robert had said, so faintly you could scarcely hear him. The school at St. Stannie’s was red brick, an unadorned box in the shadow of the Gothic church, all the flourishes and frills used up in the service of the tabernacle, the stained glass, and the carved limestone apse. The only thing distinguished about the school was a long brick pathway to its door. Robert had trudged up it on his way to Mrs. Civello’s first-grade class, with that strange defenseless look a dress shirt gives a little boy, wheeled and run to me, holding tight to my legs, pressing his face into my belly. Then he’d turned and run inside, his navy uniform tie whipping around behind his skinny neck. Some of the other kids hadn’t lost their baby fat yet, round thighs emerging from the plaid parochial-school skirts, bulbous cheeks above gap-toothed grins. But Robert was always a wraith, narrow and bony, a chest like a fledgling, his eyes taking up half his face.

By third grade I’d been ordered to stay half a block behind him, while he walked with Anthony and Sean and Paul and his other friends. But I’d never wanted to be with him so much as that first day of fifth grade in Lake Plata, and instead there was the yellow bus at the corner, on which no parents were allowed. Robert shoved Bennie into the seat by the window, so that he was even further away from me than the thin yellow skin of metal and glass. “It’s vacation time for Mom,” the bus driver shouted over the raucous sound of the engine and the kids.

“’Bye, Mrs. Crenshaw,” Bennie called, then turned away to talk to Robert.

I made it to the school building almost ten minutes before the bus did, and checked to see that no one was watching the school from the parking lot. I peered into the lobby, even looked around the corner down the hallways and saw nothing but the occasional teacher whisking by. I went back outside and stood behind a minivan across the street and waited for Robert’s bus. The driver was a heavy woman in a Dolphins hat, who counted heads aloud as children spilled down the steps. Robert was the nineteenth, disappearing into a river of dark and light heads moving toward the doors. “And that’s twenty-seven and I’m outta here,” I heard the bus driver say. When she’d pulled out I could see the door of the school, could see a little girl in a pink dress being wrestled away from her mother and led wailing into the building by a man in khaki shorts and a polo shirt with a whistle around his neck. “She’ll be fine,” he called back to the mother, who was wiping her eyes. Another little boy had turned in the doorway to look back at his father, who was standing on the sidewalk with a video camera. The kid was squinting, one eye shut so tight that it pulled the rest of his face up into the kind of grimace I’d seen on stroke patients. People kept bumping into him, hurrying into the building.

“What do you want me to do now?” he said to his father.

“Wave and say ‘good-bye,’” his father said.

“Good-bye,” the kid said, without waving. He carried a lunch box shaped like a Mickey Mouse head, even though they served lunch at school. I knew because I’d asked Bennie a dozen times, finally satisfied when I saw the menu in the local paper. Today they were having chicken nuggets, green beans, and tapioca pudding.

“Jason is now officially in third grade,” said the dad with the
video camera in a phony weathercaster’s voice. Next to him a knot of mothers were talking about overcrowding in the kindergarten.

“Poor Jason,” said a woman who’d been standing next to me, shading her eyes with her hand.

“Dad goes a little overboard?” I said.

“They had to ban that sucker from the school with that camera of his,” the woman said. She was wearing pink linen shorts and a matching blouse, white sunglasses, and pink nail polish. She sounded like an actress playing Blanche DuBois in summer stock, looked and smelled as though she’d groomed herself as painstakingly for this morning as I had the morning I got married. A drawl and Diorissimo, or something that smelled a whole lot like it.

“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.