Seventh Heaven (21 page)

She was still waiting for one of the other mothers on the block to drop off a cake or invite her for coffee or suggest that she bring the children over to play. The truth of it was they still wouldn't talk to her when they ran head into her with their carts in the A&P. On the first Monday of every month Nora hired Rickie Shapiro so she could go to the PTA meeting in the school cafeteria, and she made certain to wear flats now instead of her stiletto heels; and still when she raised her hand to speak the board members, who sat up at the first table, refused to recognize her and conversation would stop dead after the meeting when she came up to the refreshment table with an angel cake or a pan of muffins.

Studying the other women in the cafeteria, Nora began to realize that they didn't really talk to each other either, even the ones who saw each other nearly every day. Their mouths were going a mile a minute, but they were lying to each other, and they lied about the smallest thing, whether their children were getting good grades at school, how they felt about their mothers, what their husbands had whispered in their ears, as if any truth would be a horrible admission. Nora could always tell when they were lying because their necks would grow rosy and they'd run their tongues over their lips as if their mouths were dry. And when Nora had finished stirring sugar into her tea and stepped up next to a group and sighed “Jesus Christ, I'm tired,” after a day when she'd sold four cartons of Tupperware and fixed supper for the kids and hung out her laundry and done the food shopping and helped Billy with his homework and changed the baby's diaper nine times and reapplied fresh lipstick three times, the other mothers would stare down at the floor, embarrassed, as if she'd made the crudest remark they'd ever heard. And once in a while one of the other women, the younger ones with three or four small children, would say “I am too” before she could stop herself and then she'd look guilty and break into a sweat and forever after avoid Nora like the plague.

On the days when Nora looked out her window and the chain-link fences looked suspiciously like prison gates or when she longed to go dancing or have Ace stay with her the whole night through, she forced herself to think about laundry drying in the fresh air, about her baby's footprints on the grass, and cicadas and lilacs and baseball. She'd give Hemlock Street another month or two or six, two years at the most, because it was worth it for her children not to grow up as she had, isolated and so desperate for people that she fled to Manhattan as soon as she turned eighteen and said yes to the first man who asked her to marry him. She was working in the Joke Store on Lexington Avenue; she'd met Roger there when he came in to buy six exploding cigars, not for his act, but for dinner parties, where they were always a big hit. He told her afterward that what had attracted him most was how completely happy she was, there behind a counter crowded with junk and bad jokes. And why shouldn't she be? When Roger had met her Nora thought it was heaven enough just not to be in New Jersey any longer. She'd been raised by her grandfather, Eli, twenty miles outside of Atlantic City, out beyond the marshes, in a run-down house surrounded by chicken coops. Eli was an electrician, and a good one. He could have lived anywhere, but he happened to despise, or at the very least mistrust, people. You would have thought he'd have some faith in science, would trust the mechanics of his own trade, but when he talked about wiring new buildings he always spat over his shoulder, so as not to jinx the job, and if a blackbird flew over a house he refused to go inside. When Nora was sick he wrapped her cuts in spiderwebs and gave her a mixture of rosemary, horehound, and cherry bark for her bronchitis and never once took her to a doctor's office. He, himself, drank a mugful of his own personal elixir made out of woodruff, nettle, and thyme every day and he lived to be ninety-three, all on his own, taking only Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July off from work. He never touched a drop of liquor and he was convinced that cigarettes left tar on your lungs and he never raised a hand to another man in anger. He didn't have to, he had his own ways of righting things when he was wronged, and maybe that was why he liked to live out by the marshes, where the sea grass turned silver after the moon rose and no one complained if you kept some chickens.

When Eli was stiffed on a bill or insulted by a bigger man, he never said a word. But at night he would make small figures out of beeswax and food coloring, which he'd shape with his thin whittling knife, and by morning the dispute would be righted somehow. When she was a girl, Nora begged for some of these dolls to play with and her grandfather, who would have given her the world, or his world at any rate, and who drove ten miles to buy her jelly doughnuts every Sunday, slapped her hand if she reached for the figures he was working on. Later, when she was more interested in climbing out her bedroom window and meeting her boyfriends to drive to Atlantic City, Nora began to think of her grandfather's whittling as quaint, something like folk art or quilting.

When he died, in his own bed during a thunderstorm, Eli left Nora everything, even though he had met Roger twice and despised him, but then who, if anyone, would he have approved of? Nora was pregnant with Billy when she drove down to the house, alone, because Roger needed a good fourteen hours of sleep on days when he performed. She wept in the kitchen and took off her charm bracelet and packed up her grandfather's clothes for Goodwill and the few personal items, his watch and his wedding ring, for herself. Before she left she dug up two orange lilies from beside the house, but they wilted as soon as she entered Manhattan and then died on her windowsill. For two years her grandfather's house stayed on the market and then finally a chicken farmer bought the place, and the three thousand dollars Nora had left after taxes and outstanding bills went into a cigar box. She never told Roger about her inheritance, thinking she would someday surprise him, take him on a trip to Europe or buy him two new tuxedos and a gold ring, but in fact she used part of the money to pay the hospital bills when Billy and James were born, and the rest she used as her down payment for the house on Hemlock Street.

In a way, then, this was her grandfather's house, although certainly he would have hated the neighborhood beyond words. He would have been spitting over his shoulder day and night. He would have known, long before Nora found Billy's bloodstained coat under the bridal wreath, that something was wrong. Nora ran the coat through the wash and dried it in the basement and hung it in Billy's closet without saying a word. She crossed her fingers and waited, she thought good thoughts and experimented with casseroles that contained olive loaf and hoped that would be enough. But it wasn't. Stevie Hennessy just couldn't leave Billy alone. Billy's other tormentors had grown bored, but not Stevie, and he knew no limits. Billy's blanket was now as small as a potholder, he could keep it in his pocket and stroke it when he was nervous, but one day he forgot it in his desk and when he remembered he saw that Stevie had already gotten it and was cutting the piece of material into bits with a pair of scissors. Billy got up to grab it away, but the teacher asked him where he thought he was going and she ordered him to his seat. Billy had to sit back down and watch Stevie destroy his blanket; and he put his head down on his desk, embarrassed, because he was crying. It should have been a good day—Billy had batting practice with Ace to look forward to—but now Stevie Hennessy had ruined everything. Billy cried on and off all day, and at dismissal his eyes burned when he had to look at the floor as he walked past Stevie.

“Baby,” Stevie said, rubbing the last remaining scrap of the blanket between his fingers. “Snotface.”

Billy walked right past him, out into the hall.

“Why don't you go back where you belong?” Stevie said, following him. “Sewer rat. Your mother is a whore.”

Billy turned around and he was so surprised to be facing Stevie Hennessy that he nearly tripped.

“Take it back,” Billy said, and hearing his own voice he thought he must really be crazy.

Stevie lost his balance for a moment, then regained it and came closer. He was as big as a fifth-grader; he grinned when he looked down at Billy. “What?” he said.

“You heard me,” Billy said. “Jerkface.”

Stevie pushed him and Billy pushed back, and when he did Stevie's eyes lit up. He punched Billy hard in the face, and in spite of himself Billy let out a wail, but Stevie pushed him up against the wall and hit him again, in the mouth.

“Who's the jerkface?” Stevie said, and he walked away and left Billy gasping for air. Billy felt dizzy and his mouth tasted like rusty iron. He stood there buttoning his coat, then walked to the front door. The VW was already there, idling in front of the buses, and Stevie was across the street, so Billy had no choice. He went to the car and got in.

“Do you have to be late on the one day I have to drive to Freeport?” Nora said.

Billy put his head down and figured he could not talk or she'd find out everything. He planned to leap out of the car as soon as his mother pulled up in front of the house, then wave good-bye with his back to her.

“I won't be back till six, so when you get home from playing ball you start the baked potatoes,” Nora said as she put the car into gear. “Bake at three fifty. Or maybe it's three seventy-five.”

“Teddy Bear” was on the radio and Nora turned up the volume and she got that dreamy look on her face that she always got whenever she heard Elvis. In the backseat, James was rattling a bag of pretzels. Billy made certain not to move at all.

“Oh, shit,” Nora said.

Billy figured there was something major wrong with the car, because it had begun to buck like a horse and he prayed it wasn't anything too serious because he didn't know if he could talk. His mouth was hot now and he couldn't seem to move his tongue.

“Oh, lord,” Nora said and she stopped the car completely.

Billy shifted his gaze from the floor of the car and realized that a pool of blood had formed in his lap. Before he could do anything about it, Nora took his chin with one hand and tilted his face upward.

“What did they do to you?” Nora said.

Her fingers felt like ice, but maybe it was because his mouth was burning hot.

“Open your mouth,” Nora said.

Billy wrenched away from her and faced the window and began to cry. Nora took his chin in her hand and tilted his head back again, and when she did his front tooth fell into her hand.

“Who?” Nora said.

Billy lowered his eyes and rubbed one hand over his mouth; the places where he had pulled out patches of hair in the fall had grown back in wild, unmanageable tufts. “It doesn't matter,” he said.

Nora looked across the street. She saw Stevie Hennessy watching and instantly she knew.

“That little shit,” Nora said.

“Why do I have to be this way?” Billy said.

He had such fine bones and long, delicate fingers and all his shirts were too small; his sleeves didn't reach to his wrists. Nora pulled him over to her, onto her lap.

“I have a headache,” Billy said, turning away from her.

“Every morning when you wake up you tell yourself you're just as good as everybody else. Tell yourself that three times. You hear me?”

Billy nodded and put one thin arm around her neck.

James was jumping up and down in the backseat, shaking the car. Nora leaned her head close to Billy's.

“Who's my best boy?” she whispered.

Billy shrugged and put his hot cheek against hers.

“Who?” Nora said.

“I am,” Billy said in a small, froggy voice.

Nora drove him straight to the dentist, who immediately set to work making the mold for a cap. While Billy was in with the dentist, Nora ran out to the pay phone on the corner and canceled the Tupperware party in Freeport, saying there'd been a death in the family and she was immediately flying to Las Vegas; then she called Marie McCarthy and left a message for Ace that Billy was too sick to play ball. By the time they got home it was dark and James was whimpering for his supper and there was no time to bake the potatoes, so they had TV dinners and Kool-Aid and Nora let Billy stay up late to watch
The Untouchables
. When he went to bed, Nora tucked him in, something she hadn't done for a long time. Billy liked the weight of his mother on the edge of the bed; he liked the way she smelled—a mixture of Kool-Aid and Ambush. He fell asleep holding her hand, and Nora sat beside him for a long time and then went into the kitchen. She cleaned up the dishes and put cold cream on her hands, so they wouldn't wrinkle. Then she took four white candles from the drawer next to the refrigerator and put two in holders, lit them and shut off the light. She held the two unlighted candles over the flames until they were soft enough to mold. She stopped working only long enough to fix herself a cup of Sanka and then she kept at it, until she had formed the figure of a boy. She got a flashlight and went outside and searched until she found the perfect stone, one she could easily mold into the boy's hand. Her Sanka was cold by then, but she drank it anyway. Her grandfather used to do that too, he used to drink cold coffee and eat a stale jelly doughnut before he cleaned his whittling knife of wax. The cat came and sat by Nora's feet; he curled up and Nora could feel him purr. She couldn't bring herself to switch the lights back on, so she sat there by candlelight, smoking a cigarette and turning the wax figure over in her hand. And before she went to brush her teeth and clean her face with cold cream, she held the boy over one of the lit candles and let the wax drip from it, until it formed a white pool on the kitchen table.

In the morning Stevie Hennessy didn't realize anything was wrong, not even when he pulled on his jeans and found he had to roll the cuffs up three times. When he went to eat breakfast, his mother asked him if he was feeling all right and she touched her lips to his forehead. Stevie said, “I feel great,” even though he wasn't so sure. He felt off balance, as if he had a fistful of marbles in one pocket. He forced himself to eat a bowl of Kix and drink a small glass of orange juice.