Seventh Heaven (2 page)

“Well, I hope you came up with some good ideas,” Ellen said to Hennessy after he'd walked his neighbors to the front door—as if they didn't take the exact same path in their own houses every single day. Hennessy watched his wife wipe down the linoleum countertops with a pink sponge. She was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar; her hair was cut short, so you could see the back of her neck.

“Sure we did,” Hennessy said. He had brought the Fritos upstairs and now he held the bowl and tossed chips into his mouth.

They could hear the crows cawing as they nested for the night. John McCarthy had told the other men that he wore earmuffs to bed so he wouldn't have to hear the birds fussing.

“We're going to dynamite the place.”

“Ho,” Ellen said, “that's a good one.”

The crows didn't bother Ellen as much as they did her husband. She set her hair on wire rollers at night, and before she put on the hairnet she tucked wads of cotton over each ear.

“I like your hair when you don't set it,” Hennessy said to her. “Just straight.”

“Please,” Ellen said. “You've got to be kidding.”

Hennessy went to her and put his arm around her waist. The house was small, but at times like this, Hennessy could almost forget that the children, already tucked in, might not yet have fallen asleep. “Let's go to bed early,” he said.

“Uh uh,” Ellen told him. She wiped the burners of the electric stove with even strokes.

Hennessy let go of her. He waited to see if she would turn around, and when she didn't, when she kept on cleaning, he went to the kitchen hallway that led to the garage. He walked into the garage, flipped on the dim light, and rolled open the door. It was cooler here; a circle of moths gathered around the light bulb that hung from the ceiling. Hennessy didn't even feel angry anymore when she said no. He crouched down behind his workbench, and when Ellen came and stood in the doorway she couldn't see him in the dark, searching for a can of gas.

“Joe?” she called.

Hennessy picked up the gas can and pulled his new mower out of a corner.

“I'm going to finish up at Olivera's,” he said.

He rolled the mower out past their car in the driveway, then guided it across the street. Ace McCarthy and Danny Shapiro saw him approaching; they knew, from Hennessy's son, Stevie, that he often wore his gun when he wasn't on duty.

“You boys bored?” Hennessy said as he rolled the mower past them.

“No, sir,” Danny Shapiro answered right away.

“Because if you are,” Hennessy said, “there's a lawn that needs mowing.”

“Oh, no,” Ace said. “Sir,” he added, so easily you'd never guess how the word stuck in his throat. “This being Friday night, we have much, much better things to do.”

“Yeah,” Hennessy said, because he suspected Ace of following in his brother's footsteps, with a pocketful of fake I.D.s and those pointy black boots. He probably had some bottled beer cooling in the creek behind the high school. “I'll bet you do,” Hennessy said.

The half of the lawn Hennessy had mowed had already grown as tall as the wild side. He stopped in the Oliveras' driveway and looked up at the chimney. The crows cackled to one another, then edged out of their nest and peered down at him. Hennessy had to pull on the mower's starter three times before it caught, and when it finally did, the engine started with a roar that sent the crows circling into the sky, screaming. It took Hennessy nearly an hour just to finish the front lawn. At first the crows tossed stones at him, but after a while they gave up and went back to the chimney; they watched him carefully as he worked.

It wasn't a good job, but it would do, although the lawn was still uneven in patches. McCarthy would be showing the house in the evenings, and you could get away with a lot in the dark. Hennessy was sweating hard; he took off his shirt and wiped his face with it, then opened the chain-link gate and dragged the mower into the backyard. He stopped only for a moment, beside the grapevines. In August the grapes always turned purple; because there had been no one to harvest them, they had dropped to the ground in overripe mounds. It was getting darker, already it was difficult to see, and Hennessy had to work fast if he wanted to finish tonight. And even though Hennessy worked without stopping, the children on Hemlock Street fell asleep to the sound of his lawn mower, and on all sides of the abandoned house neighbors could finally throw open their windows, thankful that at last the disturbing odor of the Olivera place had been replaced, at least temporarily, with the crisp scent of newly cut grass, a scent that made your throat tighten and reminded you exactly how good it was to live here.

On summer evenings like these, when the children were tucked into bed, safety hung over the neighborhood like a net. No one locked windows, no one locked doors. The G.E. refrigerators hummed and the stars were a brilliant white. In the morning, the traffic on the Southern State would be loud enough to wake sleepers from their beds, but at night the parkway was nothing more than a whisper, lulling the children to sleep beneath their white sheets and their quilts patterned with rocking horses. The later it grew, the more the hands of kitchen clocks lingered on each hour. A summer night lasted longer here than it did in other places. The chirp of the crickets was slower, and when children fell out of their beds they never woke, but instead rolled gently under their beds, still clutching onto stuffed bears.

In the moonlight you could see that, even after six years, everything still seemed new: lunch boxes and bicycles, couches and bedroom suites, cars parked in driveways and swing sets in the yards; there weren't even any cracks in the cement. When the potato farms were being torn apart and the builders were bulldozing the sandy earth, the fireflies grew so confused that they left one night in a shining cloud. But this year they had returned and had stayed on for an unusually long time to drift through the rosebushes and the crab apple trees. None of the children who grew up here, or even those who moved here from apartments in Brooklyn or Queens, had seen a firefly before, yet they immediately knew what to do, as if their response to the bugs had been tacked to their brain waves. They ran inside for empty pickle jars and filled them with the fireflies they'd trapped in their hands. Beneath these children's beds were green globes of light that never dimmed until morning. Good night, these children had been told, and they always believed it. Sleep tight, they'd been told, and they always did. When monsters appeared in the closets, or under the catalpa trees, the children kept it to themselves. They never told their parents or whispered to each other. Sometimes the monsters reappeared on paper in school, drawn with crayons and colored pencils; they had purple hair and large yellow eyes, and you could tell they didn't believe in good nights or sleeping tight.

In some of the houses on Hemlock Street, good girls slept with their fingers crossed. They believed it was wrong for boys to want to touch their breasts, and luckily for them they never dreamed. They never thought about how babies were made; they wouldn't even tell their best friends if they did. And yet on summer evenings they felt weak in the knees. They sat in the bleachers at the high school and watched the boys play baseball; they chewed Juicy Fruit gum and combed their hair, and suddenly they felt as if they were made of glass, as if they were on the edge of something they knew in their hearts was bad.

And when the sky grew darker, the late blue dusk of summer, boys of sixteen and seventeen stumbled along the bases in the approaching dark. Boys who had never had a thought in their heads found themselves feeling defeated. They thought about their fathers, how they set out the trash cans on the curb, how they could always be found at the kitchen table on Saturday nights, their checkbooks in front of them, stacking up the bills. Water, electricity, mortgage. They had no idea why thinking about their fathers should make them stumble, why suddenly they couldn't stop wondering what a girl's mouth was like, what her fingers would feel like against their skin, how pale a girl's eyelids might seem when she closed her eyes.

These boys' fathers had once felt what their sons felt now, that terrible freedom of a summer night. But lately odd things pleased them; they found themselves grinning when they paid the bills, they found themselves thinking, This is mine, and they didn't mind so much being home on a Saturday night. They had poker games to think about and promotions at work, they had candy-colored cars with long fins in their driveways. So why was it that they were so moved when they saw their oldest sons button their white shirts and comb their hair back with water? Why did the youngest of their sons, the fearless ones who climbed to the top of the monkey bars and begged to stay up past their bedtimes, make their throats grow tight with longing?

On August nights these men's wives no longer looked at themselves as they tissued the cold cream off their faces. Many of them still could not believe they had children; put into a twilight sleep, then handed a baby they hardly recognized as their own, they were suddenly much older than they ever thought they'd be. Just before winter each year they took down the red boots from the top shelf of the hall closet. Just before spring they carried up light jackets and Easter coats from the basement, shook out the mothballs, and hung the coats on lines in their backyards. They had recipes for coconut cake; they had chicken soup with rice for the littlest children, home with sore throats; they had orders in for new dinette sets with laminated tabletops that looked like real wood yet were easily sponged off after a meal.

But this year the women saw that the fireflies had returned. They saw a flash of light at their windows just as they were about to get into bed. The green light formed a net of stars within the grid of silver fences along the backyards. When the women went into their bathrooms they could hear their children's even, sleepy breathing through the thin plaster walls. They sneaked cigarettes while sitting on the rims of the tubs, which they had scrubbed with Bon Ami earlier that day. Then they faced the mirror and took the bobby pins out of their hair and combed out their pincurls, but by the time they went back to their bedrooms their husbands were already asleep, and the fireflies were hidden between the blades of grass on their own front lawns.

I
T WAS SO HOT YOU HAD TO KEEP YOUR EYE ON
the road because all along the Southern State the asphalt had buckled and snapped apart. Lately the heat had been fueled by a wind from the west that tore up the last of the brown, matted grass on either side of the parkway. Nora Silk was trying to keep up with the moving van, but every time she stepped down hard on the gas and hit sixty-five miles an hour the Volkswagen shimmied for no reason at all. Nora had to hold tight to the steering wheel whenever the tires edged into the fast lane. She looked past the heat waves and concentrated on driving until she heard the pop of the cigarette lighter.

“Put that down this minute,” she told Billy.

He was eight and he couldn't keep his hands off the lighter. Eventually, Nora knew, he'd drop it and the carpet would catch fire and then they'd have to pull off the road. As soon as they did the baby would fall off the backseat and wake up, and Nora would have to climb over, comfort him, and start to search for a clean diaper and his favorite teddy bear.

“This instant,” Nora said. “And hand me a Salem.”

Billy took the new pack of cigarettes out of the glove compartment and pulled off the cellophane. “Just let me light it,” he said.

“Not on your life,” Nora said.

“Just this one time,” Billy pleaded.

He was a real bulldog about some things. You had to shake him off or, if you didn't have the energy, if the weather was broiling and your mascara was melting and the asphalt was cracking into bits, give in to him.

“This one time,” Nora said darkly.

Billy quickly pushed the lighter in and dangled the cigarette between his lips. Nora looked in the rearview mirror to make sure James hadn't fallen off the backseat. He was covered with a cotton baby blanket and he looked as cozy as bread. Nora fluffed up her bangs, then noticed that Billy was inhaling.

“Hand it over,” she said.

Billy held the cigarette high in the air. He was a thin child, blond with satiny blond skin, but when he wore his awful taunting look, complete strangers had to fight off the urge to smack him.

“Now,” Nora said.

She took the cigarette away from Billy and inhaled. Her hands always shook when she yelled at him, and the charms on her gold bracelet jangled. “And close your window,” she added. “Do you want Mr. Popper to jump out and get caught under someone's tires?”

The black cat, who was so lazy he rarely bothered to blink, was curled up on the floor, his head resting on one of Billy's sneakers. The cat wasn't about to make an escape, but Billy felt sick to his stomach, so for once he did as he was told. Nora stole a look at him when she realized he had actually minded her, then she turned back to the road, inhaled, and let out a stream of smoke. She knew that Billy felt like crying—well, maybe she did, too. She had a boy who liked to play with fire, a baby who hadn't the slightest notion of what a father was, and a cat who liked to run his claws up her leg as soon as she put on a new pair of nylons. She didn't have to look at Billy to know what he was doing.

“And stop pulling on your hair,” Nora said.

Ever since Roger had moved out, Billy had taken up the habit of twirling his hair so hard he'd pulled out patches and you could see his scalp showing through all along the right side of his head.

“You're going to love the house,” Nora said. “You'll have your own room.”

“I'll hate it,” Billy said in a singsong voice that made Nora want to throttle him.

Nora stepped down harder on the gas; the car vibrated and a high-pitched whine came from the engine. She'd known they had to get out of their apartment when she found the baby at the window, calmly eating paint chips off the sill. She started looking just after Roger had left and the heat had gone off and she'd begun to take Billy and the baby into bed with her, to keep them warm. All night she had felt their small feet, like pieces of ice against her spine, and whenever she managed to fall asleep she dreamed about houses. They began to spend every Sunday looking out on Long Island, and every Sunday Billy stuck wads of gum under the cabinets in the kitchens of model houses, he peed into the bathtubs of newly tiled bathrooms, knowing as he did that Nora couldn't grab him and smack him in front of the realtor. All she could do was grind her teeth and hoist the baby up on her shoulder as they were led through dens with knotty pine paneling and living rooms with shiny oak floors. When the tours were over, Nora would stand on the front lawns of houses she couldn't afford, unwilling to leave until the smell of freshly cut grass sent the baby into a fit of sneezing.