Object lessons (17 page)

“I saw your mom with that guy today at the high school, Maggie,” Debbie said, and there was an edge to her voice. “They were parked in the parking lot. Bridget says—” Before Maggie could hear what Bridget Hearn had said about her mother and Joey Martinelli, she had tossed the match away from her like an unwelcome thought. The corner of the garage burst like fireworks, and a roar swallowed up the echo of the scratch of the match. And they all turned and ran into the darkness.

Maggie came around the corner of one of the raw new roads and thought she heard sneakers behind her, but after a minute the sound faded and was gone. There was gravel on the ground, waiting for asphalt to be poured, and her shoes suddenly skidded sideways, and she fell onto the road; she felt a sharp sting in the side of her calf and on one of her palms. She heard another sound behind her, and then headlights swept the gravel, a car traveling slowly by. She felt caught in the lights, and closed her eyes, afraid the headlights would pick up the pale green of her eyes in the darkness. But the car crept past. In the light from the dashboard, she could see Joey Martinelli behind the wheel. He looked strange, and it was not until he was gone and she had gotten to her feet, blood running down one leg and onto her white sneakers, that she finally figured out that it had looked as if he was wearing a clover chain on his head.

When she got inside her own kitchen she washed her leg and wrapped it with gauze. “Mom?” she called softly, and then a little louder, “Mom?” Finally she heard her father’s voice in the darkened living room. When she went in, the ball game was on the television, and the only light in the room was the white light from the screen. “She’s not here, Maggie,” he said. “She’s at Celeste’s. Or someplace.” There was such an air of quiet acceptance in his voice, and his eyes were fixed on the screen so completely, that Maggie asked no more questions. She went upstairs and cried, using Helen’s old bathing suit, limp on her pillow, to wipe her swollen face.

15

W
HEN THE TELEPHONE RANG
, C
ONNIE
gathered Joseph up off the floor, holding him close as she walked across the hall to the bedroom. She distrusted the telephone, had never been able to see it as anything other than the bearer of bad news. Her parents had agreed to have one installed only after her mother had had a fainting spell one day, but even when it was put in, it sat there silently, like a big black toad, gathering dust on an occasional table, an outsider amid the cheap china figures. When the phone did ring, all three of them had stared at it with amazement, and it was always left to Connie to answer. Tommy had never understood why she liked to make dates with him at the end of the evening, instead of talking later in the week, and she did not know how to explain. What could she tell him: that she lived in a house where they preferred to keep communication at a minimum?

She put Joseph down on her bed and picked up the receiver. The baby stared at the ceiling, fingering the bridge of his nose and rubbing the ear of his old brown bear across his cheek and chin. “Bear,” he said.

“Hello,” Connie said, rubbing his warm stomach and smiling at him.

“Hello, Connie. It’s Monica. Is Maggie there?”

The Scanlan grandchildren did not get away with calling their aunts and uncles by their first names. Connie did not know exactly what to say. Finally she said, “No.”

“No, no, NO,” said Joseph loudly, talking to the bear.

“I beg your pardon?” said Monica.

“I said no,” Connie repeated.

Joseph was still babbling, making it hard for Connie to hear. “Would you tell her I called to ask her to be a junior bridesmaid at my wedding?” Monica said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Monica repeated herself, as though she had been practicing the sentence for some time.

“I’m confused,” Connie said. “You’re getting married?”

“You’ll get the invitation this week. The wedding is at the end of the month.”

“The end of the
month?
Who’s the guy?”

“You don’t know him. He goes to Fordham. His name is Donald Syzmanski. His father is a police officer.” There was a silence. “A sergeant,” Monica added coldly, as though the silence had implied criticism.

Connie did not know what to say. This was the longest conversation she had ever had with her niece. Monica had always reminded her of Gigi Romano, a beautiful girl she had known in high school, who had had an impossibly tiny nose and numerous matching cashmere sweater sets, and whose father was said to be a member of organized crime. She had married an older Italian man and moved to Las Vegas the summer after graduation. There had been 700 people at Gigi Romano’s wedding, and her gown had been hand-beaded at a convent in Italy. In high school Gigi Romano had always referred to Connie as “deadbeat” because of the cemetery, and she had always gotten a good laugh out of it. Connie couldn’t imagine why she was thinking of that now.

“Have you gotten a dress yet?” Connie finally asked, groping for something to say, and as soon as she said it she realized it was such a non sequitur that she laughed.

“Yesterday,” Monica answered coolly.

Connie still did not know what to say. Finally, in the silence, Monica said, her voice cracking, “I assumed that you of all people would understand this. Please just give Maggie my message.”

“I think you should call back and ask her yourself.”

“No thank you,” Monica said.

Connie paused. “I’m sorry, Monica,” she finally said.

“Everything is fine,” Monica said. “Thank you very much.” And she hung up.

“Bear,” Joseph said.

Connie lay down on the bed beside him, her hands cradling her lower abdomen. It was only slightly rounded, but it no longer flattened out when she lay prone. Three months pregnant and she had lost three pounds from the nausea, so that her ribs made her naked torso looked like a striped shirt. She knew that it would not make any difference. The baby would be large and healthy. They always were. She had worn a size-four dress the day of her wedding, and yet Maggie had weighed ten pounds. Who could tell what was inside you until it came out?

She felt tiny fingers on her arm. Joseph was patting her softly with one hand while he held his bear in the other. He put his thumb in his mouth and she buried her face in the nape of his neck. He was the only one she could love like this now. The two oldest children always pulled away from her, although it had been years since she had tried to kiss Maggie, both of them squeamish in the face of their shared femininity. And she was wary of Damien, who would climb all over her like an overanxious boy in the back seat after a high school dance. But Joseph was passive and pleased with the attention, and she lay there for a long time.

She felt sorry for Monica, not because she obviously was getting married because she had to, but because she knew the girl would let that fact simmer below the surface of her life, a boil of discontent forever. She would always feel as if she had been trapped, even though she would likely wind up with the same life she would have had whether she had gotten pregnant or not. Connie tried to remember when she herself had realized that, but she did not think she had ever needed to realize it. She had been happy on her wedding day; as she watched the little Tudor cottage surrounded by flowers and tombstones recede through the window of the limousine, she had thought to herself, “Now my real life can begin.” She suspected that Monica’s real life had been the one she had led up to now, and Connie supposed it would be hard to give that up.

She thought of Gigi Romano again: Celeste had once told Connie that Gigi had no children, only poodles and a midget chauffeur who took her everywhere, moving through the dry warm Las Vegas air in an air-conditioned car. Connie did not think it was going to be easy being Monica Scanlan’s child. No, she thought, from now on it will be Monica Syzmanski. She knew it was unkind, that it was true that she of all people should understand, but she couldn’t help herself: she began to giggle. Joseph giggled too.

She ran one of her hands up and down the bedspread, a quilted flowered spread made out of some sort of synthetic that was supposed to look like silk. Even in the heat it was slightly cool. She knew it was not a Scanlan spread, that she was supposed to have plain chenille, but she hated chenille, felt whenever she saw the spreads in the Scanlan house that she was looking at spare rooms in a convent or a hotel.

She caressed the spread, up and down, up and down. She loved to run her hands over things, to let sand filter through her fingers or to stroke the tiny fur collar of her winter coat. She supposed that that was what she liked about the babies, too, that for a year or so she could run her hands over their bodies, pale pink as the inside of a conch shell, and feel the thrill of their real silk skins. At a certain point she began to feel bad about it, and she stopped. Perhaps it was the memory of that moment in the cemetery years ago with Celeste and her own father, when she had seen into the sexual chasm that opened up, almost overnight, between parent and child. Or perhaps, Connie thought, it was that for a time touching your babies was like touching the best part of yourself. Connie, raised in isolation amid the dead, had never learned to touch others easily, except for her husband, who wanted to feel her just the way she felt her small children, proprietary and sure in the knowledge that he was stroking an extension of himself. She liked the feel of Tommy, too, but not casually, not out of the blue, only when they were actually determined to touch, in bed at night, which happened rarely when she was pregnant and not at all now. He was sleeping on one side of the bed, and muttering when he did sleep. Feeling her belly, she sighed. The phone rang again. When she answered there was a long silence, and the sound of breathing. “Hello,” Connie repeated irritably.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she heard her mother-in-law say. “Is Tom there, dear?”

“He’s at work.”

“Oh, dear. Has he talked to James?”

“I don’t know. I just talked to Monica.”

“You did?” said Mary Frances, her voice trembling. “How did she sound?”

“Haughty.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She sounded fine,” Connie said, lying back on the bed. Joseph began to chew the telephone cord.

“I don’t understand what’s going on anymore,” Mary Frances said, and to Connie she sounded pitiful.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Connie said, and meant it.

“Do you? Oh, good. Oh dear … well, I suppose I’d better call Tommy. Is he still at the cement company, or has he started working with Mark already? I don’t know; your father-in-law told me he was starting in the business, but he didn’t tell me when.”

There was a long silence, and finally Connie said slowly, “I don’t know exactly where he is. He doesn’t know anything about this.”

“I know, dear. It’s just a help to talk to him. He’s a good boy.” There was another long silence, filled by the labored breathing, and then Mary Frances said in a rush, “Of course, the boys do marry, and then what have you got? ‘A son’s yours till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’ I’ve heard that many times and the other day it was in Dear Abby, can you imagine, so it must be true. ‘A daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’ You should remember that.”

Connie felt as though she had walked in on Mary Frances naked, as though for the first time she was seeing beneath the pale bouclé coats and the hats with the little veils. She could remember John Scanlan joking about what a flibbertigibbet his wife had been when he first met her—“diarrhea of the mouth,” he once had said, and both James and Connie had winced—but Connie had never known that girl, only the woman who sometimes watched her family with bright, apprehensive eyes as she passed around the cocktail franks.

Finally Mary Frances said again, “Tom was a good boy.”

“He still is,” Connie replied, her empathy evaporating.

“Of course, dear,” Mary Frances said, her voice a little firmer, more like her old self. “I’ll call him now.”

When she hung up Connie put her hands back down on the spread and stroked it again, up and down. Joseph was beginning to breathe regularly; his black eyes were only slits in his chubby pink face. From below the window came the honk of a horn, then another. The baby’s eyes opened slowly.

“Oh, good,” Connie said to herself, jumping up and brushing her hair. “Want to go for a ride, Jojo?”

“Ride,” Joseph said as she scooped him up.

“Go bye bye,” said Connie.

“Bye bye,” said Joseph, waving at the bed.

Joey Martinelli was sitting in the car in the driveway, and as she came out he moved over to give her the driver’s seat. She put Joseph in the back, where he curled up and began to suck his thumb. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life,” Connie said, and they drove in silence until they reached the empty parking lot of the public high school, a squat building tinted aquamarine after the misguided architectural style of public buildings of the 1950s. Connie felt that by now she knew the big rectangle of asphalt by heart. She’d done sixty miles an hour on it, stomping on the brakes just short of the grass; she’d learned to accelerate coming out of a curve and had practiced doing a K-turn over and over again. The skid marks in one corner were hers from two weeks before. Now she was working on parallel parking.

Joey got out of the car, took two sawhorses from the trunk and placed them a good distance apart at the end of the lot, just in from the grass. Getting back in, he said quietly, “I’m glad to see you, too.” Connie thought his voice sounded strange, but when she looked at him his face was turned away, toward the athletic field and the stand of trees at its edge.

“Could you go and direct me, like the other times?” Connie said.

He looked at her and smiled. “Nope. Your test is next week. Today you do it yourself.”

“What if I scratch your car?”

“You won’t scratch my car,” he said.

The only sound was the breathy snoring of the baby in the back seat. Connie pulled forward, backed up, cut the wheel, pulled in, straightened the car. Then she did it again. Each time she imagined the crunchy sound of the back wheels running over a sawhorse, like the sound a Fifth Avenue candy bar made when you bit into it. She was sure parallel parking was like algebra; she knew she would never need it, but she had to do it to pass the test. After half an hour her arms hurt. “I need a break,” she said, opening her door, looking down, and seeing with pleasure that she was only six inches from the grass and that the car was perfectly parallel with the edge of the blacktop. She let her head fall back against the seat, and lifted her hair up off the sides of her face. She could feel her thighs sticking to the leatherette upholstery.

“My niece calls to say she’s getting married in a hurry, which means she’s pregnant,” she said. “Then my mother-in-law calls and starts talking about what she’s read in Dear Abby. What an afternoon.” She did not add that Mary Frances had suggested that Tommy was taking a new job, a job Connie knew nothing about, a job that filled her with fear and rage. She somehow felt that discussing Tommy with Joey would be disloyal.