Seventh Heaven (3 page)

She was about to give up hope when she found the ad for the house on Hemlock Street. She phoned the number listed right away, even though it was a quarter past nine. Once she made sure the price hadn't been misprinted, she carried her sleeping children over to Mrs. Schneck, who had the apartment next door and who made good noodle soup and babysat for fifty cents an hour. Then Nora drove out to Long Island. The exit off the Southern State was easy enough to find, but she'd gotten lost in the development for close to an hour, circling Hemlock Street but never quite finding it. She put on her brights, and still she couldn't tell one identical house from another. Desperate and running out of gas, she made a right-hand turn and suddenly there she was, right in front of the house. The next-door neighbor she'd spoken to on the phone was waiting for her in the driveway. He'd worried that she'd had an accident and had planned to give her five more minutes before he called the highway patrol. As he let Nora in through the side door, he apologized for the state of the house. It may have been foolishness, it may have been because the electricity had been cut off and Nora couldn't really see—she had to keep one hand pressed against the wall to feel her way through the dark—but Nora fell instantly in love with the place. At this asking price, she could afford to.

She contacted Roger the next day. He was working in Las Vegas and bothering her for a divorce, and finally Nora was calling to give in, on one condition: Roger had to cosign for a mortgage to make the bank think she still had a husband. Of course Roger agreed. He had so many outstanding loans—including one for the Volkswagen, which, in Nora's opinion, no sane man would have ever bought, on time or otherwise—one more didn't make a bit of difference. As soon as the mortgage came through, Nora signed the divorce papers Roger had sent her. The documents accused her of alienation of affection, and since that could mean whatever you wanted, it was probably true. Frankly, Roger didn't even seem like a real live person to her anymore. Two weeks later he sent back the divorce certificate along with a photograph of himself and his rabbit posed in front of a motel in the desert. He was so thrilled about being single again you could see the red aura of delight all around him, even though the photograph was a black-and-white. The rabbit, whose name was Happy, was a part of Roger's act, but Billy had always thought of him as a pet. After Roger left, Nora couldn't get Billy away from the spot where the rabbit's cage had been kept.

“It was never fair to keep a rabbit here with Mr. Popper,” she had told Billy. “You know Happy drove him crazy.”

And it was true. Whenever Happy wasn't working, Mr. Popper sat on top of his cage and the rabbit would wriggle his nose excessively as if to dare the cat to try to get his claws through the wire. But God, did Nora feel alienated then. She could have shot Roger with a real .45, not the one he used in his act, which only spat out confetti and streamers. Every time she caught Billy sitting in the corner and twirling his hair, Nora wondered what had possessed her to marry Roger in the first place. She had been eighteen when they met, and he'd been so handsome just looking at him made Nora feel faint. But even back then, when they couldn't keep their hands off each other, Nora had sensed something false about Roger. She wanted to believe in him, but there seemed to be less and less of him to believe in every day. He wasn't even a good magician. His heart wasn't in it. He wasn't, for instance, the sort of magician you'd hire for a children's party, because children could see right through him. They weren't the least bit surprised when he pulled silk scarves out of his sleeve or found quarters behind their ears. They yawned and asked for M&Ms and could tell with just one look that his magic wand was made of wood. Adults, on the other hand, found Roger charming. He may have been sloppy when he pulled the rabbit out of his hat, but he had a particular knack for killing his audience with cynical one-liners. He was a putdown artist, with definite stage presence, and yet whenever Billy tried to conjure up his father he got nothing more than an image of Roger during his blackout trick, an illusion in which Roger was a man in top hat and tails with no body, no face, and no hands.

Billy was trying to imagine his father, and failing, when they arrived at the house. The moving van was blocking the driveway, so Nora had to park on the street. When she took the silver key John McCarthy had mailed her out of her purse, the key felt hot; Nora had to hold it up and blow on it. She got out of the Volkswagen and flipped the front seat forward to scoop out the baby.

“We're home,” she cooed to James.

Up in the passenger seat, Billy was stiff; he stared straight ahead, his hair a mass of honey-colored knots.

“Come on, killjoy,” Nora said to him. “Out.”

Billy dragged himself out and came around the car to stand beside his mother. He was slight, with thin shoulders, and in that way he resembled Roger; the perfect body for folding itself up into boxes and trunks. Nora held the baby sideways, under one crooked arm. The lawn had been unevenly mowed, and all along the driveway there were dandelion puffs.

“These weeds are nothing,” Nora told Billy.

They walked up to the front door, with Billy following so close he stepped on the backs of Nora's high heels. The key didn't work, so they went through the backyard to the side door. Nora signaled to the three moving men, who were gathered around a rotting wooden picnic table, drinking coffee from their Thermoses.

“This is it,” Nora said to her children, as the moving men went to lift their belongings out of the van.

The sound of traffic on the Southern State was loud enough to give you a headache if you weren't used to it, and a low plane rumbled overhead. This was clearly a house that made a better impression in the dark.

“Never mind the way it is now,” Nora said. “Think about the way it's going to look.”

James clapped his hands and pointed at the screen door, which swung back and forth on its hinges. But Billy just stared at his mother. Nora caught Billy studying her; she hoisted James up on her shoulder and patted his back. She bit her lip when she noticed that the painted trim on the house was peeling, and she looked so worried that Billy almost said something nice. Instead he wrinkled his nose.

“This place stinks,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Nora said, even though it was true. “I knew I could depend on you to say something cheerful.”

Nora unlocked the side door and stepped inside. As soon as the moving men brought in James's playpen, Nora set it up in the kitchen and popped the baby safely inside. She walked through the house to unlock the front door, then made her way past the couch and the bed frames out in the driveway and went to the car for the bag of groceries she'd brought with them. She ignored the horrible smell in the kitchen and opened a large brown box with a knife, finding her baking trays on the first try. The oven was smoky when she turned it on and there was a pot of thick, purple stuff forgotten on the rear burner, but Nora just grabbed a mixing bowl and started to tear open packages of baking soda and vanilla.

“Yum,” Nora said to the baby, who was standing up, holding on to the bars of his playpen. Before she began to bake, Nora unlatched her bracelet and laid it on the counter. Roger had given it to her; she should probably get rid of it, except it seemed her whole life hung from the chain: the heart Roger had first given her, one of Billy's baby teeth, a gold-plated teddy bear Roger brought to the hospital when James was born, a tiny guitar Nora had bought for herself the day Elvis was drafted.

Nora never measured ingredients, and she wasn't much of a cook; she might even have been considered awful. But she was always lucky with her baking. Roger, the conceited bastard, was always too concerned with his looks to eat cookies or cakes. He liked the way women gravitated toward him; he always ran his fingers through his hair and pretended not to notice, but Nora was certain he noticed plenty whenever she wasn't around.

“Who's a conceited bastard?” Billy asked her.

He hadn't moved since they'd entered the house. He was still standing with his back against the screen door, twirling his hair.

“No one,” Nora said. She turned to him and rattled the baking sheet in his direction. “Never say bastard.”

It was a quirk of Billy's to look right through people as if they were nothing more than panes of glass. Fortunately, he never picked up a complete thought, just the frayed edges of things, and still Nora was never quite certain if she had said something out loud or if Billy's antennae had picked up what she'd been thinking in spite of any silence.

“Find something to do,” Nora said. She held her nose and grabbed the pot of purple goop off the stove, then spilled the mixture into the sink.

“There's nothing
to
do,” Billy said.

Nora could see that he had his eye on a box of matches Mrs. Olivera had left behind.

“Don't even think about it,” Nora said. “Clean your room,” she suggested.

Billy groaned, but he went into the dining room. He could hear his mother quizzing one of the moving men who had gone into the kitchen about whether or not anyone had come across her Elvis collection, which, aside from the battered velvet couch, was probably the most substantial thing they owned. The living room and dining room were really one L-shaped space. There were cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and a thin layer of white dust along the window ledges and on top of the air conditioner that had been jammed into one window.

Down the hallway were a bathroom and three small bedrooms. James's crib was a pile of wooden slats in the tiniest one, and in the largest Nora's suitcases had been tossed into a heap. In the third bedroom, the one facing the street, Billy found his cowboy boots and his globe of the world that glowed in the dark when you plugged it in. From the window he could see the identical houses opposite theirs. He could see the Volkswagen, parked sloppily, with one wheel up on the curb, and the rhododendrons Mr. Olivera had planted. Billy sat down with his back against the wall. He didn't think he was tired, but once he leaned his head forward, he instantly fell asleep. As he slept, a spider on the ceiling let out a thin, silky strand and dropped down from its web, and in no time it had climbed into Billy's shirt pocket.

Unlike most people's mothers, Billy's mother believed that spiders were good luck. She always had to close her eyes before she could force herself to take a broom, cover it with a dishcloth, and bring down a spider's web. Having had very little of it, she knew a great deal about luck. She knew that you could wrap a cut with a spider's web and stop the bleeding. Spirits would disperse when you set out a saucer of salt. Three rainy days in a row meant an arrival. And—this one Nora could testify to—a husband who talked in his sleep meant betrayal.

So it was easy for Nora to ignore the mess around her and keep on with her baking, stopping only to pry open some windows and air out the house, and then again to write a check for the moving men, who leaned against the kitchen counters watching her, made mute by the scent of vanilla and the way Nora's tongue darted out from her mouth while she signed her name. When the moving men had gone, and the first batch of cookies was out of the oven, Nora dusted the flour off her hands and lifted James out of his playpen.

“Da da,” James said.

“Please,” Nora said. “Don't mention his name.”

The awful thing was that Nora knew she would have continued to put up with Roger if he hadn't left her. Roger would have known how to fix a roof when it leaked, he would have known there was such a thing as an oil burner. And, of course, if she was still married to him, Nora could have told herself she wasn't alone.

The baby reached for her breasts, so Nora sat at the kitchen table to nurse him. She knew she had to get him onto a bottle soon; he wanted to nurse in inconvenient places, in the grocery store or the post office, or whenever he was startled, just for comfort. Nora leaned her back against the old kitchen table and wriggled her feet out of her high heels. As the baby nursed he grew warmer, the way he always did when he began to drowse. It was a good sign when a baby fell right to sleep in a new house; that was a fact.

Nora gently eased off James's knitted yellow booties, and the baby sucked harder and curled his toes. He was ten months old, and each time he cut a new tooth Nora rubbed scotch on his gums and wept because he was less of a baby. He fell asleep with his arms outstretched and his mouth open. Nora put him down in the playpen and covered him with a warm dish towel. She put in a second batch of cookies and carefully closed the oven door.

Somewhere, Mr. Popper was mewing. Nora found him in the living room, perched on the air conditioner. The cat leapt to her shoulder and stayed there as Nora surveyed the house, stepping over the boxes, the pots and pans, the snow boots, the Elvis collection, the record player, which was in need of a new needle. The baby's room would have to be painted, the toilet gurgled, and Nora's bed seemed to have been damaged by the moving men. Nora reached up to stroke Mr. Popper. Then she went to stand in the doorway of the third bedroom, where she watched Billy sleep. His face was hidden in his arms and his hair stood away from his head, electrified by all the dust in the house. You could hear the hum of the Southern State here in Billy's bedroom, like a cricket caught in the wall.

The children were so exhausted from the move that Nora let them go on sleeping. She mopped the bathroom floor and hung her dresses and her woolen car coat in the closet. When it was nearly suppertime, Nora went out to the back patio, and she was there smoking a cigarette when the crows returned. Right away they set up a horrible racket. They cawed and shed their feathers and began to pick up stones, which they tossed down, one by one, so that stones skittered along the boards of the picnic table like hail. Nora shaded her eyes and finished her cigarette. You had to be careful about birds; they could be good luck just as easily as bad. So Nora waited, and when she was sure, she went to the side of the house where the grapevines grew. Big purple grapes were all over the ground, and Nora carefully stepped over them as she set up a rusted ladder Mr. Olivera hadn't had time to put away. She went back into the house, and while the baby stirred in his sleep and moved his thumb into his mouth, Nora took the container of salt and slipped back outside.