Riggs Park (16 page)

“Come here,” the man said. It was his place, not hers, so she had to go to him. There was kindness in his eyes, and that familiar expression of wanting her. Penny always thought the kindness promised something, that there was something on the other side.

It was Steve touching her, as always. He touched her arms and breasts and anywhere he wanted. Sometimes he was gentle and sometimes, like now, quick and rough because of wanting her so much. She didn’t mind. Her last name was Weinberg and his was Ginsburg. Once after they started going together, Wish Wishner greeted them by saying, “Hi, Bergs,” as if they were one thing. She saw this was true. She’d let other boys touch her so she could become whole, but it didn’t happen until she was with Steve. Allan Kessler said she was a tramp.
Tramp.
An old, used-up word. It made her feel even less than half.

The man had taken off her blouse and was staring at her, in a disapproving way, like the man in the upholstery shop. “Don’t,” Penny said.

“Shut up,” the man said. He held her by the wrist. “In there.”

She let him lead her to the bedroom. She knew she had to. His hands were workman’s hands, thick and sandpapery. She watched through the cameras in her eyes. It didn’t take long. It had been quick and rough.

Sometimes, she’d come up through an envelope of cool breeze and be as sane as anybody. “I have to make a phone call,” she said to the man at her side. They were in the bus terminal. Yellow lights had been turned on; outside it wasn’t quite dark. She’d been away from the bus station and now was back. She might have eaten, but wasn’t sure. The important thing was: she had to let Steve know she was on her way to see him. He’d be finished with his afternoon classes and might have a gig that night. She needed to hear him play and sing. As long as he composed his songs for her, hearing him was the least she could do.

“You only wrote
one
song for me,” she liked to tease him, pointing out that there was only one song actually entitled “Penny.” Steve always replied, seriously, “Not just one song, baby. All of them.” She didn’t want to get to Morgantown without knowing where Steve was singing.

“You only got a couple minutes till your bus leaves.” The man was fidgeting, eyeing the clock. “Maybe you better call from the next stop.”

“No. I’ll miss him if I call later.”

“Yeah, well hurry up.”

She had mostly dollar bills. “I have to get change.” The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of coins. He looked annoyed. “Here.”

She closed herself into the booth. The man stood outside, nervously checking the parking lot where the buses were waiting. Penny dialed. The phone rang miles away in Steve’s dormitory, connecting them by wires through the night air. Someone answered. Not Steve. “I think he went out to eat,” the voice said. The air crackled all around her. The voice said, “Hey, wait a minute, here he comes.” Steve spoke to her and the air went still.

“Penny?” he said.

She told him she was coming. She told him what time. She had come up through a fine stream of air and was calm.

“Do your folks know you’re coming here?” he asked.

“Oh. No.”

“What about Dr. Novak?”

“No. Should I call somebody?” It wouldn’t matter. Her father was dead, her mother didn’t much care, her sisters were married and gone.

“No, never mind. I’ll call. I’ll fix it. You just get on the bus.” Steve’s voice was full and deep, the color of wine. When she hung up, a man was waiting outside the phone booth.

“You just got time,” he said. The man had brown hair and eyes like Steve’s, but she didn’t know him. The man tried to take her by the arm. She shook her arm away.

“Hey, you okay? Jenny?”

He kept calling her Jenny. She walked out the door toward the bus. The man followed.

“You ever come through here again, you look me up,” he said. Penny found her ticket in her purse. The man winked at her. “See ya, Jenny,” he’d said.

The bus had turned on its headlights. Faint outlines of trees floated against the darkness, but mostly Penny saw her own reflection in the glass. She closed her eyes against it. Your reflection was your outside; it had nothing to do with your spirit.

The bus was speeding through the night. Steve said he didn’t want Penny just for touching. He wanted her for more than her reflection.

Why had the man in the bus station kept calling her Jenny? He acted like he knew her.
Who was he?
He didn’t even know her name.

Steve had never wanted to go away to college. He wanted to stay in D.C. with Penny and sing with his band. For three years, he lived at home while Marilyn went to college. His father said he was getting nowhere. He made Steve go back to school. “Just for one year. After that, you don’t like it, fine. But for a year—try it.”

So Steve came to West Virginia, where a family friend helped him get in. Fall and winter passed. Penny felt the sickness grow larger in her all that time. Now it was spring and the bus was speeding through the night. She thought of the color of the grass, the color of wellness.

At the terminal in Morgantown, Steve waited for her in a pool of light. She let him hold her, closing her eyes, leaning into his chest. Then he spoke. She recognized his words as truth, and remembered kissing the man from the other bus station, remembered the kindness going out of his eyes. She had let him do what he wanted, but he had not been kind. He was the same man who’d called her Jenny when she came out of the phone booth. It was not a dream. She was a feather dropping, falling in a spiral until she hit the bottom, falling from right now. It would take a long time before she’d be brave enough to do the rest. She didn’t think of that yet. All she’d thought about in the Morgantown bus station was Steve holding her in his arms, rubbing her back, and saying in a voice that had been full of love, “Penny, you must be crazy to run away from home like this. You must be crazy, baby.”

With an effort, I put aside my version of Penny’s bus ride and the sadness it always brought me and turned onto Oneida Street.

At Essie’s door, we were greeted not just by Taneka, but also by the bulk of Marcellus, who loomed in the entryway as if he meant to protect Essie from physical assault.

“She ain’t used to a lot of company,” Marcellus said, barring our way until the old woman, sitting in her chair by the window, barked, “I’m fine, Marcellus. Let them in.”

“Good thing I could come over,” Marcellus persisted. “Taneka got to go out pretty soon, and Essie got trouble getting to the door.” He gestured toward her walker.

“Nonsense,” Essie said, not budging from her seat. As Marcellus moved to let us in, Essie’s gaze slid quickly over me and lit on Steve with an expression of such undisguised joy that I found it painful to watch.

“So,” Essie said as Steve bent to hug her. “Steven Simple. The important singer.” Playfully, she patted his bald head and grinned. “The heartthrob singer becomes a middle-aged man,” Essie teased, wagging a finger. Then her features grew rigid again, stern. “This isn’t a social call, is it? You came to find out about Penny’s baby.”

Steve lowered himself into a chair, put his face level with hers. His confidential tone was soft and personal. “Barbara said it was a girl, Essie. She said Penny named her Vera.”

Marcellus, who had situated himself on the sofa next to Taneka, got up and crossed the room to stand behind Essie’s chair. Still grim, the old woman reached over and took Steve’s hand. “Steve, believe me. I’ve thought about this. This is something you don’t need to know.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Essie paused a moment, and I wasn’t sure whether she was gathering strength or sizing him up. “Penny stayed with me while she was pregnant,” she said finally. “I took care of her. I helped her with the adoption.”

Steve lifted Essie’s hand toward his chest, drawing her closer. “All those years ago, you asked me not to ask any more questions. I’m asking now.”

Essie shut her eyes as if a great weariness had settled upon her. Marcellus placed his hands protectively on the old woman’s shoulders. “Remember the first time you called me? That summer after the bus ride? I told you I didn’t know where Penny was and I was telling you the truth,” Essie said. “Penny wasn’t in touch with me that summer. She came here in the fall. Right around this time of year.” With her head back against the wing of her chair, Essie’s fragile closed lids seemed nothing but a web of delicate purple veins.

“October? That was pretty late,” Steve said. “Penny would have been pretty far along.”

Withdrawing her hand from Steve’s grip, Essie opened her eyes. “The baby wasn’t yours,” she said abruptly.

For a second, the room was perfectly quiet. Marcellus’s hands began to knead Essie’s shoulders. On the sofa, Taneka sat frozen.

Steve didn’t flinch. He tried to stare Essie down, but finally gave up and dropped his head into his hands. “Vera was born…in January, right?” He studied the carpet. “I always thought it was January.”

Essie reached forward and lifted Steve’s chin so he’d have to look at her. Her voice was tender as lullabies. “Not January, Steve. April. April 16, 1964.”

Marcellus walked around Essie’s chair, stood in front of Steve. “What she’s saying is, Penny didn’t get knocked up the weekend of that bus ride—it happened later.”

“I know what she’s saying,” Steve told him.

In my head, I was doing the math. Though it made no sense to me yet, a wave of light-headedness passed over me, clouded my thoughts.

“So it wasn’t his, either,” Steve said. “The guy on the bus.”

“No,” Essie said softly.

“She must have gotten pregnant in the summer,” I muttered to myself. When I realized I’d spoken aloud, I felt stupid and slow. “She must have been with someone after she came home from seeing Steve.”

For the first time, Essie turned her attention to me. “She stayed with some college friends in June.” The old woman’s expression was guarded, wily. “In July she took a little trip. For a few days.”

“A trip?”

“To Camp Chesapeake,” Essie said.

A knife blade of understanding sliced through me without cutting quite to my brain.

“Why would she go to Camp Chesapeake?” Steve asked. “She hated camp even when we were kids.” He turned to me. “You remember that year.” To Essie he said, “The only ones who kept going as counselors were Seth Opak and Jon. Didn’t Jon become swim director or something?”

“Yes, he did.” Essie’s tone was so precise it was clear she’d been preparing for this. “Penny went to the camp to talk to him. To clear up some things that bothered her.”

I felt the blood drain from my face and thought I might faint.

“Clear up what things?” Steve asked.

No one answered. I returned for a moment to the summer of 1963, when I’d graduated from college and packed for Europe and kissed Wish goodbye. I heard him say in the young, hopeful tone I would never hear again, “Don’t worry, Barbara, you’re in my heart while I’m eating, while I’m sleeping, even while I’m rescuing those nubile young twelve-year-olds from jellyfish in the Chesapeake Bay.”

I recalled myself laughing, saying, “Fat chance.” Believing him all the same.

It had not made sense that the person who returned from Camp Chesapeake three months later was not Wish at all, but someone who called himself Jon and wanted to put as much distance between the two of us as he could.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered.

“I’m lost,” Steve said. “Does someone want to fill me in?”

“Jon,” I gasped.

“What?” Steve’s face was all bewilderment.

“The baby,” I blurted. “She’s Jon’s, isn’t she?”

Essie shrugged. “He may not even know it.”

“Don’t play games with me, Essie. He may not know about a baby, but he certainly knows if…if it’s a possibility.”

“Then he’s the one you should talk to,” Essie said.

“That’s why you wanted me to bring Marilyn. To hold my hand.” Until I felt the wetness on my cheeks, I had no idea I was crying.

“It’s bad news, I know. But it’s not the way you think,” Essie said. “Ask Jon. Ask him what they talked about. Him and Penny. Before you do anything you’ll regret, Barbara, think. Think how you and Jon started and how you ended once. Think if you want that to happen again. Talk to him. There’s more.”

“More?”

Essie nodded. “Talk to him,” she said again.

I
didn’t know how I managed to stand without my knees buckling, but somehow I did.

“You all right?” Taneka put a hand behind my elbow for support. I was too startled to pull away.

“I’m all right.” Without willing to, I leaned on Taneka and moved toward Essie. The old woman also stood up, with agonizing effort and slowness, as if enacting some painful but compulsory ceremony.

“Thank you,” I said, aware I was expressing gratitude for the worst moment of my life. I hugged Essie, though it was the last thing I intended. Inside the circle of her arms, Essie’s bones were as birdlike and brittle as the illusions of my youth, and I resented them all: Essie and a thousand tarnished memories. If I got through this, I would never come back, not to Riggs Park and not to this house, not even for Marilyn.

When I released her, Essie said, “It will be worse when you see him. Don’t give up on him until you hear him out.”

“I won’t, Essie.” Without meaning to, without a shred of feeling behind the gesture, I smiled.

Steve said his own goodbyes, then tucked his arm around my shoulders. Marcellus and Taneka followed us out to the porch.

“You still glad you came around asking all those questions?” Marcellus asked me.

“She feels bad enough, Daddy,” Taneka said.

“I told you it might be complicated. I asked did you still want to hear.”

I stood up as straight as I could. “I wanted to hear. I’m not sorry.”

“It’s hard for her, too,” Marcellus said. “She old. It’s hard.”

I was shaking too badly to drive. In a gesture of great tenderness, Steve plucked the keys from my fingers and slipped into the driver’s seat.

Wounded and dull, I felt my mind move slowly, ineptly, like heavy boots through mud. “All this time, and I never knew,” I said. “I’m actually living with him, and he never said a word.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know, either.”

“You mean about Vera? He certainly knows he slept with Penny.”

Steve said nothing. Another thought crossed my mind. “Maybe Penny did go after Jon,” I heard myself say. “Maybe it was the payback.”

“You mean because you were in that sorority back in high school and she wasn’t? No. She didn’t hold it against you. All she wanted was to be your friend. Besides, that sorority business was—what?—six, seven years before all this happened. Penny loved you as much as she could love anybody. She certainly never cared about Jon.”

“Then why did she go all the way out to Camp Chesapeake to see him?” Anger filled me like hot liquid, so searing that it finally cleared my head. “Why did she sleep with him?”

“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it?” With his free hand, Steve made as if to smooth the hair on his bald crown, but his expression was stony. He sat in a rigid posture I didn’t recognize, and it finally dawned on me what strong emotion there must be behind that unyielding pose.

“I guess I’m having a real pity party here. Poor little Barbara. I’m sorry, Steve. What about you? Are you mad? Sad?”

“Just puzzled.” A long pause. “Jon and Penny? I don’t get it.”

I didn’t, either, but the wound had become too raw to touch. “I mean how do you feel about the baby?”

“Relieved. Beyond relief. It’s not something I’d want to have to tell my kids.”

“I guess it’s not something you’d want to have to tell Kimberly, either.”

“Kimberly’s not an issue,” he said softly.

“What do you mean?”

“I was hoping this wouldn’t come up this particular trip. I was going to wait until Marilyn was stronger.” Steve watched the road, didn’t look at me. “We’re separated. Soon to be in the process of getting a divorce.”

“Oh, Steve—
no.
”

“We’ve been keeping it quiet because we didn’t want the media to know before the kids did.”

“Well, sure. I just can’t believe—I thought you were the perfect couple,” I blurted. “I’m so sorry.”

“We spent all that energy trying to have kids, and then adopting them, and then raising them. Once they moved out, there was nothing left.” His tone was wistful. “It was one of those marriages that just wore itself out.”

“Still—”

“You asked me before why I mentioned Penny’s baby to Marilyn that day she called to say she was sick again. I think partly it was because I didn’t want to tell her about Kimberly. Not with so much else on her mind. It seems pretty small now, but I thought the story would give her something to focus on besides herself. I didn’t think she’d go anywhere with it. I didn’t want to burden her right then with another family failure.”

“It’s not a failure. It’s—”

“It is a failure, sweetie. When people break up it’s a failure. For whatever reasons. It is.”

We drove for a time in silence. In the distance, two dark clouds merged, heavy and smothering, and drifted across the blue clarity of sky. Steve watched the shadow cross our line of vision. Then the sight of a shopping center distracted him, pulled him back into the world, and he turned on his blinker to switch lanes. “We need some glasses,” he said.

“Glasses?”

“To show Marilyn. Remember? You and I went out because I forgot my glasses.”

“Oh. Right.”

“And we’ll get her some kind of gift. A get-well present. To cheer her up.”

We ended up buying her a stack of CDs.

In the checkout line Steve said, “I’m going to stay a couple extra days. Push my trip to New York back to the weekend. I should have done that in the first place. That means you can go back to North Carolina and talk to Jon. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure ‘want’ is any part of it.”

“Well, you’ve got to talk to him. Essie said there was more. Maybe there’s some explanation.”

“Whatever the explanation is, it won’t change the fact.”

The cashier was staring at Steve, trying to place him. I could almost see the thoughts racing through her head.
Steven Simple? No, it couldn’t be. Well, maybe.
To her credit, the girl didn’t say a word.

“Are we going to tell her? Tell Marilyn?” I asked.

Now it was Steve’s turn to hesitate. “She wanted a niece. She doesn’t have one.”

The cashier counted change into Steve’s outstretched hand.

“If it’s not going to make any difference,” I said, “then maybe we should wait.”

I left Marilyn’s house an hour later, having been more or less shooed out. “Brother Stevie will take care of you,” Steve told his sister. “I’m sending Barbara home so I can have you to myself. After all, you can see Barbara any time. How often do you get personal attention from an internationally acclaimed rock star?” Marilyn giggled, so enchanted by his attention she hardly knew I was there. Having a full night’s sleep had restored her.

“Are you mad at me for hauling you up here and now sending you back?” she asked.

“Of course not, Marilyn.” I hugged her gingerly, trying not to touch her face. “I have work to catch up on. But if you need me again—if you need anything—just say the word.”

Steve carried my bags out, put them in the trunk. “Bernie and I will take care of Marilyn,” he said. “You take care of Barbara, sweetie.”

“I will.” He seemed so solid that for a second I wanted to throw my arms around him and melt safely into his soft blue shirt. Instead, I opened the door and got in. Steve bent over and planted his usual sweet, chaste kiss on my lips, but held it so long it began to feel almost unbrotherly before either of us thought to move away. We were that rattled, that confused.

Southbound, homebound, I was so deep into my memories that I hardly noticed the gathering clouds or the beginning of a steady, lulling rain. The gas gauge dropped toward a quarter of a tank, usually my signal to stop, but just then it was not enough to concern me. With festering anger I recalled our senior year. Ever since our sledding accident, Wish and I had become a pair, but we’d been sly and furtive, cautious as cat burglars. Wish was eighteen, old enough to have a girlfriend, but too afraid of his father—who, everyone knew, planned for Wish to become a doctor and had been grooming him for it forever. I must have been afraid, too. Carefully, we began to limit our “official” dates to major events like Christmas night and New Year’s Eve and senior prom. The rest of the time we went out with other people. Or we went solo to parties where secretly we could join up—but never freely, never lightheartedly, always with an eye to staying under Murray Wishner’s radar. We sneaked around.

All in all, I spent less time with Wish than with Barry Levin, who for all his beauty was never more than a casual friend. I went out with Barry because I knew word would get back to Wish’s father, who always kept a sharp eye and tight rein on his son. Barry was handsome, witty and cheerful, a superb dancer, the perfect date to show off at a social function. Given Barry, why would Murray ever suspect my relationship with Wish?

But Barry was neutral. He gave off no fire. He didn’t want a girl, he wanted to be a social director, and he used our many casual dates as opportunities to invite everyone to the parties he threw at his house. On those evenings, after his parents lost interest in chaperoning and he could dim the lights, Wish and I clung to each other during the slow songs, not dancing so much as simply hugging. It was as if Barry had been in league with me all along, orchestrating his parties exclusively for my benefit.

“Maybe he does,” Penny mused once when I was spending the night in her dungeon of a bedroom. “Maybe it’s—in gratitude. Sort of.”

“Gratitude for what?”

Looking up from polishing her toenails, Penny seemed puzzled that I would need to ask. “For not telling anybody he’s queer.”

“Queer! What a thing to say!”

“Does Barry ever kiss you, Barbara? Or—you know. Touch.” Penny lifted the brush from a painted toenail, cocked her head.

“Well—”

“I didn’t think so.” She placed the brush into the jar of polish, tightened the cap. “He’d die if he thought anybody knew.”

“But
you
know.”

“That’s different.” We didn’t dwell on how Penny knew, or why. “It’s nice the way you treat him. The way you never mention how he is.”

“Well, thanks.” But sometimes I wondered if Wish knew, too, and that was why he never seemed jealous. And sometimes I wondered if he conceded Barry to me because secretly he enjoyed the other girls he dated “casually” to keep his father in the dark. It was a stupid, stupid game. It had robbed us of a year.

Now I drove as if by rote and seethed with anger. I didn’t notice that dusk had fallen, or that the rain was steady now, and pelting. I didn’t see the Blazer pull around me, or register the puddle in the other lane. When the Blazer began to hydroplane, it came at me so slowly that I might have veered away as easily as Jon and I had once veered our sledding bodies to safety on Oneida Street. It would have been simple to pull out of the Blazer’s path and drive on. In retrospect, everything is always simple. But I didn’t see. I kept going straight just long enough to let the Blazer drift into me, starting the chain reaction that involved, finally, half a dozen cars.