Seventh Heaven (8 page)

“The hand,” Nora always told her clients, “is the window into the soul.”

All right, she knew it was supposed to be the eyes, but what was the difference? She held her clients' hands and commented on their cuticles and their skin tones. When she realized that she got bigger tips each time she gave advice on color coordination she stopped talking cuticles. She had a gift for telling a client which colors were right for her, whether shades in the orange family or the scarlet range were best, and she often suggested whole wardrobe changes. “No gray for you,” she'd advise a washed-out client. “Purple,” she'd whisper to a housewife who was splurging on a manicure for the first time in ages.

On James's birthday, she left Armand's with her tip money folded into an envelope in the pocket of her black car coat. Snips of hair stuck to her sleeves and to the soles of her shoes. She took the bobby pins out of her French twist and shook out her hair as soon as she was out of sight of the beauty parlor, then ran her fingers through her loose hair as she rushed into the A&P. She quickly found what she needed for James's birthday and headed for the front of the checkout line.

“You don't mind taking me first, do you?” she asked the checker, a sweet-faced blonde named Cathy Corrigan, who was so startled by Nora's request that she began to ring her up, even though there was a discontented line stretching over to the fruit bins.

“My baby's birthday,” Nora announced to the checkout line. She held up a packet of blue-and-white-striped candles. “You did a good deed,” Nora told the checkout girl as she bagged the four packages of Twinkies.

Nora raced home in the Volkswagen, parked, and grabbed the grocery bag. She still loved coming home; she loved the way her high heels sank into the grass as she cut across the lawn, and the sound of crumpled leaves on the front stoop and the way her hand felt on the unlocked door just before she opened it. Rickie Shapiro had put on one of Nora's Elvis records, and even though it sounded scratchy, Nora turned up the volume when she got inside the house. As she hung up her coat, she admired the closet space. She found James in the kitchen, stacking blocks on the floor. Rickie was at the table, singing along with Elvis and painting her nails pink.

“Birthday boy!” Nora said. She picked James up and gave him a big kiss. “How were they?” she asked Rickie.

“Fine,” Rickie said. “Except Billy wouldn't come out of his room.”

Well, that was nothing new, so Nora put James down, and he clung to her leg while she unwrapped the Twinkies and arranged them on a plate.

“Wrong color,” Nora said over her shoulder to Rickie.

“Pink is my color,” Rickie said with confidence.

“Okay,” Nora said. “Sure. If that's what you want to think.”

Rickie blew on her nails so they would dry faster, while Nora got her purse and paid Rickie the six dollars she owed her.

“Pink looks great on me,” Rickie said.

“Red,” Nora told her. She went to the doorway of the kitchen. “Billy! We're having James's birthday.”

“You've got to be kidding,” Rickie said. “My mother wouldn't allow me to wear red. Not with my hair.”

“Red is your color,” Nora said. “Take it or leave it. You know, you really should stop setting your hair. Just wash it and let it dry naturally.”

“And let it frizz up!” Rickie said. “Not on your life.”

“All right,” Nora said. She was poking candles into the Twinkies. “Fine. If you want to look like everyone else, instead of going with your natural beauty, that's your choice. Did James have his bottle?”

“Yeah,” Rickie said. Her nails were dry enough for her to put on her coat. She tossed the bottle of pink nail polish into her purse, but when she looked at her nails the color looked weaker than she'd expected. That was what she hated about sitting for Nora Silk's kids: she always left confused. She didn't even know why she came back; she didn't need the money that badly. The baby was cute, but Billy could drive you crazy. Some weeks he'd want to play Monopoly for three hours straight and other days he wouldn't even talk to her. He'd stay in his room, wrapped in an old blanket, eating pretzels and potato chips and looking so mad Rickie didn't dare to speak to him. Sometimes she thought she could hear him grinding his teeth through the closed door.

She needed this like a hole in the head. She had always had everything she ever wanted, and, frankly, she felt awful about it sometimes. She developed a habit of giving people things, especially her best friend, Joan Campo, who had to work Saturdays and Sundays in her father's deli. She had a new angora sweater she now decided she would give to Joan; it was seashell pink, and maybe Nora was right about her coloring, maybe she was more the crimson or scarlet type. If there was a problem that Rickie faced, it was simply that her father made more money than most of her friends' fathers. He had a Cadillac Eldorado on order and he was always bringing home clothes from A&S; he even thought he might be able to get Rickie a job in the Junior Miss department next summer and she'd have her own ten-percent employees' discount. Sometimes, especially when she was with Joan, Rickie didn't think it was fair that good things just seemed to happen to her family. She had already been to Florida four times. She knew how to order room service and how to hike up her skirt to make her crinoline show, and that, Rickie knew, drove boys crazy. Everyone agreed that her brother was the smartest kid in the school and the best ballplayer in the town's brief history. But they didn't know that her mother, Gloria, spoke French, enough to order dinner in any good restaurant, and that she always wore nylons, even when she was vacuuming.

And still, Rickie kept on sitting for the Silk kids, even though Nora had none of the things Rickie valued in a woman as old as Nora—namely a husband and a decent house. Rickie certainly didn't consider any house in the neighborhood decent; she had a split-level with a pool and a fireplace in mind. By the time she was Nora's age she planned to have not only a husband and a house in Cedarhurst or Great Neck, but also two little girls, whom she'd always imagined she would dress in identical pink outfits, although red bonnets and boots might be interesting.

“I almost forgot. Someone from the subscription company called,” Rickie said as she was buttoning her coat.

“Oh, shoot,” Nora said. “Did they fire me?”

“You haven't had a sale in two weeks, so they were just checking,” Rickie said. “And you owe them fourteen ninety-five for your past subscribers.”

“Well, they'll just have to wait,” Nora said. She licked her fingers and carried the arrangement of Twinkies over to the table. “Happy birthday,” she cooed to James as she stooped to pick him up again. She held him on one hip as she lit the candles. “Come on,” she shouted to Billy. “The candles are burning down.” She made certain to pocket the matches just in case Billy got the urge to set something aflame, and then she kissed James. “My little pumpkin,” she said to him. “My sweetie pie.”

Rickie didn't like Twinkies, she was on a diet anyway, but she couldn't take her eyes off Nora and the baby. He really was cute. He was a baby doll. And in the glow of the birthday candles, Nora looked so dreamy and dark with her hair hanging down, straight, like a little girl's. Tonight, Rickie and Joan Campo were double dating at eight. They were meeting two seniors from the math club to see
The Diary of Anne Frank
, which Rickie had seen twice before, so she'd make certain to bring a box of tissues. Rickie knew that whenever she cried her face flushed pink, or maybe it was an extremely pale scarlet.

“You want me next Saturday?” Rickie asked as she was leaving.

“Oh, yeah,” Nora said. “I'm stuck at Armand's until my Tupperware takes off. Maybe your mom would like some. I could invite her and some of her friends over this week. Or I could go over to your house.”

“I don't think so,” Rickie said. “My mother thinks plastic is tacky.”

“Well, she's in for a shock,” Nora said. “In the future no one will use china or crystal. Just poor, uneducated people who don't know any better. Tell her that, and see if she changes her mind.”

“Yeah,” Rickie said. “Well, she's not really so interested in the future.”

As soon as Rickie had gone, Nora took James and went to search for Billy. He had barricaded his door and it wouldn't budge.

“I'm getting mad,” Nora said as she pushed against the bedroom door.

Billy sat on his bed, eating potato chips, his wool blanket around him. Nora had no tolerance for this new attachment to a blanket at his age. At night she sneaked into his room and cut off pieces of the material while he slept, so that now it was less than half its original size, less like a blanket than a cape Billy hooked over his shoulders.

“I'm getting really mad,” Nora said as she hammered on his door with her fist.

Billy had managed to bring the blanket to school, but each time he did Mrs. Ellery, the third-grade teacher, had insisted he keep it on the top shelf of the coat closet. But she couldn't stop him from wearing it out in the playground, and at recess he sat on the blacktop hunched beneath it, practicing invisibility. It was working, too, better and better all the time. Now instead of harassing him, the other kids had begun to ignore him, and that's just the way Billy Silk wanted it. His mother refused to believe that. Already, she had completely humiliated him by inviting three kids he hated over to their house, one per week. Each time Nora had made cookies and played lengthy games of war with their guest, while Billy sat on a kitchen chair, watching but refusing to speak. There was no way for Billy to make Nora understand that even if these boys had liked him, which they assuredly did not, their mothers would never have let them come back for a second visit. Didn't she see the reaction when Mark Laskowsky's mother found Mark eating sugar doughnuts and drinking Coke while the record player blared “Teddy Bear” and James waved his spoon around in his highchair, where he sat covered from the neck up with chocolate pudding? Each time Nora thought she was chatting up the other boys' mothers, they were really interrogating her. The stray pieces of their thoughts Billy picked up made him blush: If she didn't know enough to wash her baby's face, she shouldn't have a baby. If she couldn't fix decent meals for her children, she shouldn't have been a mother in the first place.

By the end of October, every mother of every child in his class knew that Nora was divorced; Stevie Hennessy with his big mouth had seen to that, and that was the end of Billy's chance for any sort of social alliances. So why wouldn't she see, why didn't she wonder why Billy was never invited over to anyone's house after school, why she herself hadn't been told about the monthly PTA meetings or the Columbus Day bake sale? Nora had found out about the bake sale at the very last moment and had stayed up past midnight fixing Junket pies dotted with marshmallows and maraschino cherries, which no one bought. By the next day everyone in the third grade knew that the janitor wound up throwing Nora's pies in the trash because he couldn't give them away.

And after all this, she was still bugging Billy about Stevie Hennessy, insisting that he would be the most convenient friend in the world, since he lived right across the street.

“I've been meaning to call Mrs. Hennessy,” Nora said nearly every day, a threat that hung over Billy like a cloud.

No, not a cloud—Stevie was more like a huge, formless tornado. No matter how invisible Billy made himself, Stevie found him. He found him in the boys' room, where he threw wet paper towels at him and aimed spitballs right between Billy's eyes. He assured Billy that his father killed at least one person a day, and that Billy was high on his list. He somehow had the power to make Billy into a monster, even to himself. After Stevie told Marcie Writman that Billy's parents were divorced, Marcie came over to tell Billy how sorry she was about the tragedy in his family and Billy, who had never even pushed anyone before, had hit her right in the stomach. He had felt terrible then. Marcie was smaller than he was, and a girl, and her mouth had made a strange O shape when he punched her.

Every day was torment because Billy was never certain whether or not Stevie would be waiting for him in the cafeteria. Snotboy, he would call Billy. Orphan, he would shout across the milk line. Turd-face, he'd whisper when they rushed out into the hallway to crouch along the walls for cover during an air-raid drill.

“Don't call Mrs. Hennessy,” Billy advised his mother whenever she'd suggest it, and he'd wrap his wool blanket more tightly around himself and reach up to twirl his hair.

After school he'd look out his window and watch as Stevie and the other kids on the block played kickball. He'd see them get out their Hula Hoops at twilight. What could he say when his mother told him he needed fresh air? That he was afraid to walk down Hemlock Street by himself? He twirled his hair and told her nothing; he concentrated instead on the biography of Harry Houdini he'd taken out during library period. Houdini was everything Billy wished to be, everything his father, Roger, was not. Tricks meant nothing to Billy, clairvoyance was a burden. But Houdini's talent was pure and true; he could fight against real boundaries, the physical bonds of ropes and chains, and escape. He could overcome water, fire, and air. He could shine like a lamp lit from within and pass right through the hemp, the metal, the tides.

One afternoon he found some old rope Mr. Olivera had left behind in the garage, and he began practicing slip knots. He'd tie his feet together and then will his ankles to contract so he could wriggle out of the knots. He'd get under his blanket, lash his wrists together, and escape from his own net of ropes. Exhausted then, he'd lie back with a pure feeling inside him, hot as if he'd faced a battle; his eyes would sting, his mouth would be dry, but he'd tie himself up all over again.