Hooked (18 page)

“Remind me not to get a ride with you again,” I said, pushing the seat belt through the holes in the base like the instructions
on the side of the seat said. “I’m sure I’m doing this wrong.”

Dad put his foot on the clutch and the car lurched out of the driveway. He drove his car just like he drove his boat, as though it had a single stop-start button. I immediately thought of waterskiing, or
not
waterskiing.

“So this is the famous Aston,” Will said, stroking the burled-wood window panel.

“This is it,” Dad said. “Where am I taking you to again?”

“Ninth Street, between Fifth and Sixth,” I said, watching Will push a panel in front of him that revealed an empty slot.

“Don’t tell me, this is where an eight-track player used to live,” he marveled.

Dad glanced at him, unsure of what he meant.

“I read that you’re supposed to walk them around the house and introduce them to everything,” I said.

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.” Will smiled, turning back to me.

“You never know how much they can take in,” Dad said, his voice weirdly animated, like he was a game-show host trying to psyche up his contestants. I felt a pang of appreciation that he was being such a good sport. “I always thought you were wise beyond your years when you were a baby.”

We got to Florence’s apartment and hoisted Ian back out the way we got him in. Dad made a big deal of holding open the doors and carrying my bag, looking for things to do. We climbed the three flights, Will gripping the car seat. The stairs were dark except for a bulb with grubby fingerprints on it dangling from the second landing. Dad would be seeing where we lived, where Ian would be living, for the first time. We all watched Ian in his car seat, levitating up the stairs.

Will put the seat down to open the door and Dad picked
it up and walked in, looking around for a place to set it down. He finally nestled it into the crook of the couch, and set my bag down next to it.

“Do you want a drink or something?” I asked.

“No, I should run along,” Dad said, fixing his eyes on Florence’s hanging wall-quilt. “How about I run out and get you guys a few things first? Something for dinner? Some fruit? A chicken?”

“That’s okay, thanks,” said Will. “I’ll run out later.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” we both said.

Dad went over to Ian and bent down to kiss his forehead. The kiss seemed to last forever. I made a face at Will from behind him.

“Okay, you guys,” he said, coming up for air. “Call me if you need anything.”

“Thanks for taking us home,” I said, walking him to the door.

“I’m glad everything went well.” He opened the door with one hand and threw his other arm around me in an awkward hug.

I shut the door and turned back down the hallway. “What was with that kiss? It was like he was anointing him or something.”

“Give him a break,” Will said. “It was nice of him. Do you think he was horrified by this place?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“He looked horrified to me,” Will said. “Considering where he lives, I’m sure it was not up to par.”

“You haven’t seen where he lives,” I said, sitting down on the couch next to the car seat.

“Yes, I have, and it’s slightly grander than this.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to undo Ian’s straps. “He doesn’t care about that stuff.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You don’t have a job like that, you don’t work like that and not care. Anyway, I’m starving.”

Will went out and came back with four slices of pizza stacked in a white paper bag. Ian slept on a blanket next to me on the couch while Will figured out how to straighten all four legs of the Pack ’n Play at the same time. Dad had ordered it online and had it mailed to us, along with a stroller that carried the car seat, and another regular stroller. After we’d unpacked everything, a mountain of cardboard, plastic wrap and Styrofoam engulfed the living room. I couldn’t help but think how lucky we were to have benefactors on our side who had sent us everything we needed. No matter how hard things might get, I thought, we were lucky. I told myself to remember that.

The Pack ’n Play had a plastic U-shaped bar that hung across the basket and shined lights and played music.

“I bet we never turn this thing on,” he said.

“You never know,” I said, inhaling my second slice.

“There’s something very
Rosemary’s Baby
about it.” He wound it up and moved his eyes from side to side, imitating a marionette. He glanced at Ian from where he was on the floor.

“I have a son,” he murmured.

“You have a son,” I said.

The Pack ’n Play clicked down and Will leaned over to turn the dial in the middle of the base, his boxer shorts puffing out of the top of his jeans. Every part of his body still struck me in the same way that a piece of art or the idea of heaven did: enduring and pure and a little bit out of reach.

He stood up, fists on his hips, proudly assessing his
handiwork. I went over to him, feeling all banged up and contorted inside, and put my arms around him. “This is totally freaky,” I said, “but kind of fun.”

He smiled and pressed his forehead to mine. “Yup.”

“I can’t help being a little happy.”

“Me too,” he said.

“Really?”

He nodded slowly, glancing at Ian. “He’s so cool. His tiny little everything. Did you smell him? When he first came out? I’ll never forget that smell.”

I put Ian on Will’s chest and they both fell asleep in Florence’s armchair. After that, Ian woke up every twenty minutes, sometimes to eat or cry. I thought of what Mom had said when I used to stay up late watching old reruns of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, fixating on the wool furniture and swinging kitchen doors and married life: “Once you lose sleep, you can never get it back.” I remembered my old self, how I used to brush my hair by the radiator and make it stand up. How Vanessa and I would lie in bed and talk in the dark, and it was like our universe hung in the air and we were somehow talking about everything and the night would go on and on. An unbelievably loud motorcycle roared down the street and I waited to hear the sound of someone cursing out their window at it, but it never came and then everything went quiet again, Will on my left side in the creaky, lumpy bed, Ian on my right, where he’d fallen asleep at my boob. It seemed easier to hold him there; he cried when I put him down. I couldn’t move an inch, but I didn’t care: it was warm and still and us.

“Whoa!” I yelled into Florence’s empty apartment. Ian’s umbilical cord stump had popped off as I bathed him in the battered porcelain sink. It fell onto the floor and I picked it up and looked at the TV and there was footage of a submarine coasting along the bottom of the ocean, sand puffing out of its way. I dipped a Q-tip in alcohol and rubbed it around Ian’s belly button like the doctor said, which made him scream his nuts off. I picked him up, featherlight and sweaty, and walked around the room, wondering what Will was doing at his job. Was he sitting at a desk, holding a pencil? Was he doodling a baby’s head with a curly sprig on top? The air conditioner was barely working and we were smack in the middle of a heat wave. Was he relieved to be out of our house?

Ian fell asleep and I spotted the yellow, rolled-up bikini bottom sitting on the second shelf of the side table. It felt like a million years since I’d touched it. The last time I worked on it, I didn’t have a baby, I thought. I set Ian down in the crook of the sofa bed and silently picked up the bikini. It was time to start the top, so I cast on fifteen chains, like the instructions said, which would be the bottom right triangle. I told myself the top would be easier compared to the bottom because it was triangles, which meant dropping stitches instead of gathering them into a circle. I sat for hours while Ian slept, the bed creaking underneath when I uncrossed my legs, and thought about all the people in the world who had crocheted who were now dead. I felt a sense of connection with all those dead people, with my dead grandmother sitting on another couch in another house in another time with her large,
star-patterned, mustard-colored blanket. I wondered what she’d been thinking about as she’d crocheted my bikini. Did she worry about her son, my dad? Did she worry that his life was out of control? That he drank too much and that his wife was a shrew? My grandmother hated my mother. Why did she hate her so much? As I worked, I noticed that my stitches were becoming more even and less lopsided. I was getting better at it, and it felt like the only thing in the world I was getting better at. The rest of the time, I was in a haze, unable to get out the door.

In the movie on TV there was a blond girl with a ponytail and bangs cut very sharply across her forehead, exactly the way Mom used to wear it when I was younger. It reminded me of Mom sitting in a seafood place on the Charter Island harbor with me and Dad when I was younger, around the time Dad had come back from “drying out” in Arizona. I remembered, out of nowhere, I’d asked them where I was conceived. Dad was sitting across from me, but I looked at Mom when I’d asked. “My friend Sherry was conceived in Mexico,” I’d said. “That’s why she loves Mexican food. Where was I conceived?”

Mom pretended to choke on her popcorn, shocked.

“Interesting question,” she’d said. She was about to launch into something, but Dad interrupted.

“Fiona, not appropriate,” he’d said.

“What’s not appropriate?” she’d asked. The familiar dynamic: Dad gruff, Mom innocent.

He shook his head and said nothing.

“What’s not appropriate?” she asked, louder.

“She’s twelve,” Dad said, not looking at me.

“Oh Ted, relax,” Mom said, dismissing him with as few
words as possible. She picked a single piece of popcorn from the basket, crunched and turned to me.

“I was managing the Kettle, my first job in charge, so I was the big stuff, and I knew it and Daddy knew it. He showed up every night. Didn’t you, Daddy?” She looked at him, but his eyes were up at the bar TV.

“He would come when he was done with work, at around eleven or midnight, and he always stayed till the last set. In the beginning I thought it was his abiding, unrequited passion for music, you know, the poor, trapped artist inside the banker thing, but soon I realized it was really just a ploy to catch me as things wound down for the night.”

A trace of a smile crossed Dad’s face, but he stayed on the TV.

“Anyway, he’d gotten into the habit of waiting for me to close up, very gentlemanly. And then he’d take me home to his place on Warren Street. I was afraid of his lift. It had one of those metal accordion doors, and Daddy would start kissing me and I worried I’d get my hair caught or lose a finger on the way up.”

“Fiona, can we leave it?” His chin burrowed into his hand. His other hand rubbed his graying, wiry sideburns. He’d let his hair grow out while he was gone.

“She asked, so I’m telling her,” Mom said. “What’s the problem with that?”

He leaned hard on the table, the weight of his elbow bringing it toward him.

“I don’t think it’s necessary for her to hear the gory details at this stage.”

“Gory? Lighten up, Ted.” She leaned toward him, her hair falling across her eyes. For a second I thought she was going to
kiss him. “Please don’t let this little rehab stint deplete what’s left of your sense of humor. Please. Reformed is one thing. Puritanical, another entirely.”

“Humor has very little to do with it,” he said. “Can you wait on anything? Can you let anything wait?” He was talking in a way where the corners of his mouth seemed to be trying to seal his lips shut. It was something his mouth did when he drank, which confused me because he’d just stopped.

“You’re right, Ted, I should just continue waiting. That’s what I should do.” She picked up the big menu and closed herself behind a pissed-off tent, where she remained, it seemed, until the end. They split less than a year later.

By the time the movie ended, my neck was killing me from hunching over the yarn. I took Ian out for a walk in the scorching August heat, and Vanessa and everyone else from my old life were like ghosts in my head, conversing and vivid, floating and following my every move. A truck emblazoned with the words
Halal—Schwarma Kabob
emblazoned on it stopped at the corner. I laughed with imaginary Vanessa, who by then was at freshman orientation at Vassar—“What the hell is a schwarma?” I imagined her teasing me: “You’ve lived in New York City your entire life and you don’t know what a schwarma is?”

Will came home that night in a good mood because all the summer associates were getting five-hundred-dollar end-of-summer bonuses. “Maybe we can fix up this dump,” he said,
ruffling Florence’s dusty quilt on the wall. “Let’s go celebrate,” he said.

I packed Ian in the sack and Will carried the car seat to the coffee shop down the street, where he wedged it into the seat of a booth. The waitress made faces at Ian as she took our order.

Will looked around with a self-satisfied smile. “We could get married and have the party here,” he said, balling up his straw wrapper.

“In the back room of Aristotle’s?” I asked, confused.

“Sure, it’d be fun. Why not? That guy could host.” He nodded at the guy stacking cups by the coffee maker, the guy who’d asked me and Will, “How are you, my friend?” through his mustache. I reached over to stick the pacifier back in Ian’s mouth. Will had a strange, forced grin on his face. He looked almost embarrassed, like he’d said something he shouldn’t have.

“Seriously,” I said. “Do you ever think about it?”

“Yeah,” he said a little too casually, lifting his spoon to his mouth. “Every once in a while. Not every second, mind you—I’m a guy.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’m a wild and crazy guy,” he said, bobbling his head from side to side. I stirred the paper cup of coleslaw on my plate with my fork. I didn’t understand where he was coming from and it was making me nuts. He was being offhanded and nervous at the same time.

“If you’d really thought about it, you wouldn’t have mentioned it like that.”

“Like what?” he asked, wide-eyed.