Suzanne got out of the cab, staring around her. Oh, God. This was the boonies. She had forgotten what an armpit New Jersey was, how the whole state made her want to scream. Those squatty houses in those weird pastels, the scrubby trees and the stupid plastic ornaments on the porches, the cloth flags. I’ll have to kill myself, she thought. I won’t last a day here, let alone months. I’ll die. Unless I’m driven nuts, first. There wasn’t even a dog on the street. Did people here still think if you weren’t in your pajamas and in front of the TV by eight that there was something wrong with you? She suddenly thought of this cartoon she had once seen, the caption on it: Houdini fleeing New Jersey. Well, she wanted to run, too, but she was no magician. It wouldn’t be so easy this time.
The driver finished dumping her things on the sidewalk. “Forty bucks,” he said. Suzanne cursed under her breath and dug into her purse. Gary had sent her the plane fare. He should have sent her cab fare, too. Maybe he would have if she had told him she was being evicted, that she hadn’t had a head of hair to cut or color in nearly two months.
Jesus. She was freezing right down to her toes. How could she have forgotten how cold it got here? She shivered, blowing on her hands, turning up the collar of her blue cotton coat, stamping her feet.
Suzanne blinked at Molly’s house. One of those two-story deals with a black iron gate. It looked better than anyone else’s on the block and she had to admit it beat her crummy little studio by miles and miles. A house. God. Suzanne hadn’t cared when Angela had given Molly the house in Elizabeth. Suzanne certainly hadn’t wanted it, especially if it meant coming back to New Jersey. But now that all of Suzanne’s money was gone, the thought of having a house—even a New Jersey one—made her feel a little prickly. It made her wonder, how did Molly get to have a house and she didn’t?
Gary had told her he was in dire straits, that there really was no money anymore. Anyone would have heard the begging in his voice, anyone would have believed him, but that was on the phone, and here was this whole house, with those pricey-looking blinds and that fancy carved door.
What she believed about Molly was a whole other story. How could Molly be as sick as Gary said? How could she possibly believe that? When they were kids, Suzanne was the one always dosing up on antibiotics. Molly never missed a day of school—not that she would have, even if she had had the Bubonic plague.
Well, maybe Gary was exaggerating about Molly, the same way he was about his money. Maybe he was playing her for a fool, wanting a free nursemaid, a free housekeeper, the way Angela had. Blood didn’t mean anything. Family was a cheat. She had learned that lesson early on, and she wasn’t about to forget it now. She blew on her fingers again. What did it matter? She had no other place to go.
She rang the bell. Musical chimes. So corny they made her wince. The front door opened and a man came out onto the rim of the porch. So this was Gary. He wasn’t much. She’d pass him on the street and not look twice. Certainly not anyone she’d want to be with. Not like Ivan. She saw Ivan’s beautiful face, his hair, black and soft like a wing of a crow. She shook her head until his image disappeared from her mind.
“Suzanne?” His voice was hoarse and deep.
“In person.” She tried to sound upbeat.
He looked past her, his smile fading. She felt a flash of shame. She
knew what he was looking at. She could see the gears in his mind whirring away when he saw all her stuff: the five big battered suitcases, tied shut with rope, the taped-up cardboard boxes. Everything she had managed to grab from her apartment except the furniture and the roach motels.
He opened the door wider. “Please. Come in.” He ushered her inside, helping her with her coat. He hung the coat on a padded hanger, buttoning it at the throat, as if it were worth something.
It took him four trips to drag her things in. He never once asked her to help, and she never offered. He was panting when he was finished, all red in the face like a half-ripe tomato. For a moment, she and Gary just stood there looking at each other, and then he awkwardly motioned to the couch. She was still freezing. She looked around for the thermostat, rubbing her arms. “Could you turn up the heat?”
He knotted his brow. “Can I get you a sweater?”
“It’s really freezing in here.”
He stalled for a minute and then walked over to the thermostat and turned it up. She heard a little flare, like a match striking. The pipes banged. The heat hissed on. She had forgotten all the sounds a house made. Creepy. Like the house was alive, breathing down your neck. Waiting for you.
She sniffed. The house smelled, too. Milk and powder and dirty diapers. She wrinkled her nose and dug around in her bag for a cigarette, pulling up a rumpled pack from the bottom of her purse, a fold of matches. She was down to her last four cigarettes but she held the pack out to him, thinking she’d start off on the right foot. She’d be polite. Generous. “Luckies okay?”
“Actually, could you not smoke in the house? We don’t smoke, and with the baby …” his voice trailed off.
“Sure. Of course. Only outside.” She dropped the cigarettes into her purse. She had only vaguely wanted a cigarette, but now that he told her she couldn’t, she was dying for one. No cigarettes in the house. She was going to have to be locked up.
She looked around. Her whole apartment was only slightly larger than Molly’s living room. Molly used to be so neat, you’d think she
used a ruler to line things up. But this room was just as cluttered and messy as Suzanne’s studio. Dirty plates were stacked on the coffee table, laundry piled on a chair.
Gary followed Suzanne’s gaze. “It’s usually tidier,” he apologized, “but the baby nurse just left.”
A baby nurse, she thought. How could you afford a baby nurse one week and not another? “Nice place.”
Suzanne looked past the shelves of books (she had never been much of a reader herself) and saw a wall of photos. She got up to look at them: Gary and Molly. Gary and Molly. Kissing. Holding hands. On a beach. At the park. Hallmark stuff. And then a single black and white photo swam out at her, startling her.
She knew this photo. She had grown up hating it. It was a picture of Angela, the year she won the beauty contest. Thin and beautiful in a little two-piece, laughing like she didn’t have a care in the world. Like her whole life would always be apple pie and ice cream. Angela always made everyone who came into the house admire it. She’d fish for compliments and then she’d sigh and say how entering that beauty contest had really been the worst thing in the world for her because if she hadn’t, maybe then she’d have been able to make something of herself. To be someone, other than a child bride, a struggling single mother stuck in suburbia. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my girls—” she always added, her voice trailing off. That was the part that always hurt Suzanne the most. Almost as much as seeing the photo now.
She scanned the wall again. Not a single picture of herself up there. Just as well. She’d never be that beautiful again. People used to stop her on the street just to comment on her long black hair. Her clients used to beg her to make theirs look like hers, with its glints of blue and plum running through it, its mirror sheen. Now, Suzanne’s black was from a tube. She didn’t have to look in a mirror to know she had faded from too many worries, too little sleep, and too many cigarettes. Suzanne blew a puff of air up toward her long bangs. They used to make her eyes look as big as soup bowls. Now, they just hid some of the tiny lines that had begun to etch their way into her skin like they
were a road map to Nowhere. Well, at least she was still thin. Maybe too thin.
“Otis is sleeping,” Gary said. “We don’t have to whisper or anything because he seems to like noise. He’ll be up in about an hour and then I’ll show you all about the care and maintenance of a newborn. He’s really very good.” He rubbed at his forehead. “You’ve been around babies?”
“Yup,” she lied.
“Come on, let’s have some tea.”
She shuddered. She hated tea. Angela used to have Suzanne make big pitchers of it because it was cheaper than juice or soda. Supermarket brand, the same bag used for three cups, so what you ended up with always tasted like boiled socks.
“Do you have coffee?”
He led her into the yellow kitchen and dug around the shelf. “No coffee.” He shook his head. “No lots of things. I need to go shopping.”
It was just as well. If she even smelled coffee she’d probably jump out of her skin.
He stopped. “Maybe when I’m at the hospital, you could take Otis and pick up some things. Some days I could leave you the car.”
“The car?” Her mood brightened. She could get away, drive places. She could plunk the baby in the stroller and maybe he’d snooze while she window-shopped.
“You just tell me when you want to go see her.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Or the day after.”
He was quiet for a minute. “I really appreciate this. I know you and Molly haven’t been exactly close these past years.”
Whose fault was that? she thought, but she didn’t say it. She could just imagine what Molly had told Gary about her. That she was selfish and a terrible person. That she had broken Angela’s heart and taken all of Molly’s money. But did Molly tell Gary about the last time Suzanne had called, desperate, pleading, weeping for another loan, and Molly had flat-out refused? Did Gary know that Molly had never even once called Suzanne back after that to see if Suzanne was managing,
to ask whether or not Suzanne might need something other than money?
Suzanne bet Molly didn’t tell him how she had practically raised Molly all by herself. How by the time she was twelve, she was babysitter, maid, cook, and laundry lady, doing just about everything because Angela was either working long, crazy hours or trying to land a husband, because Angela had put her in charge and Molly was no help. Suzanne had had to say no to more parties than most people were ever invited to in their whole life. That was the way her life had been, right up until she had met Ivan, and then all that stopped. She shook her head again. It had been five years already. When did you stop loving someone, when could you hear their name and not feel so sick inside you wanted to die?
“Suzanne?”
She looked up at Gary, waiting.
“The baby’s crying.”
“He is?” Suzanne didn’t hear anything. Gary was still looking at her, like he expected her to take care of things, even when he was home.
Gary started walking, then he looked back at her, waiting. “We’ll get a bottle.” He went into the kitchen and took a bottle from the refrigerator, running it under the tap for a while. “There. That ought to be warm enough, now. Come on.”
Suzanne reluctantly trailed after Gary. The baby’s room was in the back of the house.
Gary put his hand on the door, bright yellow with blue stars, and Suzanne sipped in a breath. Here we go, she thought. Molly’s kid was on the other side. He opened the door. It was a kid’s room all right—white furniture, puffy clouds on the ceiling. A small braided rug. She could hear the baby, baaing like a lamb.
“Come here.” Gary motioned her forward. Reluctantly she came closer. She looked into the crib. The baby’s face was scrunched up. His hands were tiny fists. Oh, yeah. He was crying all right.
“What’s wrong with him?” Suzanne asked.
“He’s hungry.” Gary bent and picked him up. “Right?” he asked the baby. The baby’s pajamas had a big damp spot down the front. “Sit,” he said to her. “I’ll give you a feeding lesson.”
She looked around. She stared hard. There was only one chair in the room. The white rocker from Angela’s bedroom.
The rocker was like new. A friend of Angela’s had bought it for Angela when Suzanne was born, but Angela had never used it for anything but decoration. “It’s a Whistler’s Mother kind of rocker,” Angela always pointed out. “And I’m hardly the Whistler’s Mother type.” Suzanne’s throat knotted. Leave it to Molly to take this thing. Suzanne wouldn’t have taken anything from Angela’s. She would have burned the whole stupid house down and everything in it.
He placed the baby on her, upright, so his head lolled against her. The baby felt like a bag of soggy fruit. Gary lowered him on her a bit, and then she saw the soft spot on the top of the head, moving, like it was breathing. Like it was alive.
Gary handed her the bottle. “You can breathe, you know.” Suzanne didn’t even realize she had stopped. She sucked in air. She tried to look at anything but that terrible breathing spot on the baby’s head. The baby worked greedily at the bottle, his mouth tugging like a leech, his eyes squinched shut. His whole body felt like it was pulsing against hers. All she wanted to do was get this over with and get the baby off her.
Gary watched her for a moment. He frowned and looked confused and then he held up one finger. “Was that the door? Be right back.”
“Wait—” she said. “I didn’t hear anything—” but he was gone. Great. Just dandy. He didn’t seem to her like he really knew what he was doing, either. At least the baby did, busily stuffing himself on the formula. But she couldn’t get comfortable and her nose began running like there was no tomorrow. She had a tissue in her pocket, but getting at it was something else. As soon as she lifted one hand from the baby, he startled, the bottle jumping from his mouth. He slid down her leg. She panicked, grabbing him about the belly, hoisting him up, closer to her than before. Suzanne shoved the bottle back in his mouth.
“Jesus. Sit right.” She sniffed and then she couldn’t help it. She sneezed loudly, and the baby suddenly stopped feeding. He looked at her with interest.
“False alarm. No one there.” Gary came back into the room, watching her. “Getting the hang of it?” He bent and repositioned the baby, perching him up on her shoulder, so that his soggy mouth was right up against her blouse. He drooled and gummed at her neck. She recoiled. It felt as if he were trying to burrow through her.
“Pat his back,” Gary said.
Suzanne moved her hands in an awkward circle.
“Harder.”
She pressed her hands in. The baby burped, like a popped cork, and suddenly she felt a puddle of something wet and disgusting on her shoulder. She jerked back.
Gary quickly grabbed something from the changing table, a small white cloth he handed her. “Burp cloth. I should have put one on you before you fed him.”
She couldn’t take this another moment. She lifted up the baby and Gary, thank the Lord, finally took him from her, holding him as awkwardly as she had. She daubed at her shirt with the cloth.
“You think you’ll be okay with him?” Gary asked. The baby began to move his head side to side. Suzanne stared. God Almighty. He’s saying no.
“I’ll take the night shift, mornings and evenings when I get home.” Gary gave her a pleading look.
“Piece of cake,” she lied. She didn’t really have a clue. And Gary didn’t seem to know all that much either. Well, she’d do what she had to do. What she always did. Fake it. Take her clues, trial and error, from the baby. He, at least, seemed to have a good sense of what he wanted.
“You look exhausted. Let me show you your room. Try to get as much sleep as you can. You’ll need it.”
I’ll need a sanitarium, Suzanne thought.
The room was too pink for Suzanne’s tastes. Like a facial tissue. And it looked unfinished, as if it were waiting to become something. The bed looked too big for the room, as if it had been thrown in as an afterthought, and the dresser looked too small—like a child’s dresser. Even Gary seemed uncomfortable in the room, leaving almost as quickly as he showed her in. Still, it had a door she could shut, and it faced out to a backyard, the one thing Suzanne had never had unless you counted alleys and concrete and brick walls. The silence made her antsy. She was used to car alarms and yowling stray cats and drunks screaming out the names of the people they loved enough to want to kill.
She was still freezing. She had changed into the warmest thing she owned, her jeans and a sweater, which were about as comfortable to sleep in as an iron lung. She shifted under the comforter. She took away one of the down pillows on the bed and then put it back again. She wanted to shut her eyes, to not have to think about anything. There had been nights like that in California, but then she had squeezed herself into some spandex, sprinkled glitter through her hair, and gone to a club. All the light and noise and male attention had made her forget that she was lonely, that she hadn’t heard anything from Ivan, that she had grown so shamelessly desperate she had even left notes taped to his front door. We have to talk. Or: We can work this out. Or simply: Please.
She got up, pacing, feeling caged. If she didn’t have a cigarette, she’d die. She looked out the window and touched the glass, which was ice cold. No way was she going to go outside to smoke. Screw it. She’d do it in here. What Gary didn’t know wouldn’t hurt anyone. Especially her. She smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, waving away the smoke, tapping the ashes into an empty vase. She began to feel calmer. Thank God for cigarettes. You could tell her about cancer all you wanted and it still wouldn’t stop her from smoking.
She opened the window a crack to toss the butt outside. She threw it far into the bushes, and then she suddenly saw a woman in the next yard, staring up at her. The woman had on a flowery blue bathrobe and her hair was in pink curlers, but she bent and disgustedly picked up the
butt and lobbed it into her trash can. Then she straightened and glared accusingly over at Suzanne, who pulled back from the window. Great. Would that old biddy tell Gary?
Suzanne shut the window and then crawled back into bed. She put a strand of hair in her mouth, something she hadn’t done since she was a kid. When she and Molly had lived in California, they had been friends. They used to romp on the beach, and she could boss Molly around and Molly could make her laugh. They used to work for hours making sand sculptures. A woman with a big belly and big breasts in a bikini. A murderous-looking octopus, scallop shells pushed in for eyes, a growling seaweed mouth. And they always went to the movies.
At night it was Suzanne who gave Molly supper and washed the dishes. She did some laundry and swept up and then took her shower, and as soon as she stepped out of the bathroom, Molly was at her. “Let me comb your hair,” Molly begged. Suzanne rolled her eyes, but she always let Molly do it. Sometimes she told herself she let Molly because she felt a little sorry for her sister. Molly’s hair was so wild and curly, you couldn’t even get a comb through it. No matter what you did with it—braids, hot combs, curlers—it still ended up a tangled mess.
Suzanne sat on a kitchen chair, her long wet hair spread out over the chair back. Molly stood on a hassock to reach. Suzanne arched her back, leaned back her head. Molly used her fingers to free some of the tangles. Her touch was so gentle, Suzanne slowly shut her eyes. Molly drew the comb lightly through Suzanne’s hair and Suzanne shivered with pleasure. The moment Molly finished and took her hands and the comb away, Suzanne wanted them back.
Suzanne chewed on her hair. She thought about Molly and she felt suddenly scared. What would she do when she saw Molly now? What would she say?
The baby began crying. Suzanne rolled over on her side. Gary didn’t expect her to go to the baby, did he? Not her first night. She waited, but she didn’t hear Gary, and the baby gradually calmed himself down.
And then she heard Gary’s voice. “Molly Goldman.”
She opened the door and peeked at him from around the corner. He was on the phone, leaning against the wall, in gray sweatpants and bare feet, in a faded black T-shirt. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Thank you.” Then he hung up the phone, turned, and saw her.
“Still critical,” he said quietly, and then turned and walked away from her.
Critical, Suzanne thought. Critical wasn’t like the phone call she had gotten at two in the morning when Lars had called to tell her Angela had died, his voice flat as a pane of glass. Suzanne had barely been living with Ivan for two years when the call came, and as soon as she heard she had started weeping on the phone. “Baby?” Ivan said, lifting up from bed, grabbing her to him. It was the first time she couldn’t feel him touching her. She couldn’t grab hold of his scent. She suddenly couldn’t remember how furiously she had left, how she had vowed to never come back. Instead, she remembered when she was six and had had an earache and Angela had picked her up, big girl that she was, and held her in her arms all night long. She remembered, too, long after she had run away, a day when she had been shopping at Macy’s and she had followed a woman through three different floors just because she looked like her mother, because the woman had turned and smiled at Suzanne for no reason at all.
Suzanne had cried to Lars so hard she couldn’t speak. “I—” she said. “I always meant to come back.”
“You don’t need to come,” Lars interrupted. “God. How you hurt her.”
“How I hurt her?”
“She was fine without you while she was alive. She’s fine without you now.” He was silent for a moment. “We all are.”
Two days later, Suzanne and Ivan had had to move to a cheaper apartment. She hadn’t called Lars ever again.
Suzanne turned from Gary and went back to bed, pulling the covers over her head. Critical was still alive.
Suzanne dreamed a baby was crying. She bolted awake. The house was quiet. She put her feet on the floor, and popped them back up with a shock. Jesus. Had Gary turned the heat back down again? Well, Gary was going to be at the hospital all day, and as soon as he left, she’d crank up the thermometer until the house felt like Florida.
Still, she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t more than a little unnerved about Gary not being here. What was it going to be like taking care of a baby? She remembered a client named Liza who had three little kids. “What’s it like?” Suzanne had once asked. Suzanne was just making conversation, trying to make Liza comfortable. She wasn’t even all that interested.
Liza had laughed at such a question. “Here’s your answer,” she said and then she suddenly grabbed Suzanne’s wrist, her hand a steel trap.
Suzanne, startled, had tried to pry Liza’s fingers from her, but Liza held on. “Cut it out,” Suzanne said.
“This is kids,” Liza had said with a smile. “Forget career, forget a life, forget a lover. This is it.”
Suzanne wrung her hand free, shaking circulation back into it. She waggled her fingers. “How do you not go nuts?”
Lisa had laughed. “Believe it or not, but when I feel the grip loosening up, that’s when I begin to feel crazy.”
But Suzanne didn’t get the appeal. She and Ivan had wanted to grow old together, but they had never wanted kids along for the ride.
“Can you see me as anyone’s father?” Ivan said. “I come home from gigs at three in the morning. I’m not going to want to deal with poop and spit-up. Kids tie you down. They sap the strength right out of you. They want everything. I mean, name one great rocker who has kids.”
Suzanne could name a bunch, but it was kind of a moot point, because she didn’t want kids, either. She hated it when clients didn’t even ask her, but just brought their kids along, expecting Suzanne to be all surprised and thrilled about it, to think they were the cutest things in the whole wide world. The babies cried and carried on, jangling her nerves, ruining her concentration. The kids grabbed for
her expensive Japanese scissors and spilled her homemade shampoos all over her floor.
Suzanne plucked up her clothes and dressed. She passed Gary’s bedroom. He wasn’t there. The patchwork comforter was thrown back on Gary’s side. A pillow was horizontal on Molly’s side, bunched to form a kind of body.
Gary was already in the kitchen, wearing the same faded flannel shirt and jeans, listlessly spooning cereal from a bowl. He looked even worse than he had the day before, like he hadn’t bathed yet or even tugged a comb through his hair.
Gary got up and put his dish in the sink. He handed her keys on a Daisy Duck chain. “House keys and car keys.” He yawned. “Oh, and good morning. I’m so tired I’m forgetting my manners.”
He dug into his pocket and gave her a handful of bills and a long folded-up piece of paper. “I made you a grocery list.”
“A list?” Suzanne liked roaming the aisles, throwing in whatever caught her eye, or whatever she thought she could afford. Suzanne hadn’t used a list in years, not since Angela had made her shop, leaving her lists so long they might have been a book. Suzanne had to buy all the groceries, even Angela’s embarrassing personal things like those huge boxes of sanitary pads or the special scented douche that Suzanne had to sometimes ask for. It made Suzanne want to die. She averted her head, hiding her face with her hair. She couldn’t make eye contact, and even though no one paid her the least bit of attention she still burned with shame. There were always more items than there was money for them, too, but Angela didn’t care. She’d raise hell if Suzanne so much as forgot a single thing. She’d make her go right back and get them. “I don’t have time for this,” Angela warned her.
“I’ll call you if there’s any news,” Gary said.
As soon as Gary left, Suzanne decided to get some news of her own. Good news. The first good news was to crank the heat up. The second was to have a cigarette.
Then she headed straight for Molly and Gary’s bedroom and began to snoop. She wanted to know what she was in for, and she knew you could tell a lot about a person by their stuff. Everything meant something. Everything told a tale. She had snooped on all her boyfriends, except for Ivan, because she had been fool enough to think she knew everything about him. Maybe if she had snooped, things might have turned out differently.
She picked up Molly’s hairbrush, a soft bristled brush she could have told Molly was the exact wrong kind for Molly’s hair. Suzanne rummaged through the dresser drawer. She pulled open the top drawer. There wasn’t much interesting. A sewing kit. A baby book she pulled out only because it was open, some of the words highlighted in yellow.
Congratulations! Your baby’s beautiful, now what about you? To look and feel your post-baby best, start getting back in shape as soon as you can! Flex your feet in the hospital bed. Make circles with your arms. And think about sit-ups as soon as your doctor okays them!
Oh, Jesus. Suzanne shut the book and looked at the title. Surprise, You’re a mom! Right. Big surprise, Suzanne thought, tucking it back in the drawer.
She went to the dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. There was a big blue box and she pulled it out and opened it.
Her breath stopped. The locket Ivan had given her. A bright silvery heart, as big as the real thing. So heavy it used to bang against her chest when she walked, and when she finally took her clothes off at night, sometimes she’d find a faint blue bruise on her chest where the locket had bumped against her. How had Molly gotten it? Suzanne went crazy when she couldn’t find it. She had hurled clothing out of her drawers and her closets. She had retraced her steps until she was so exhausted she couldn’t walk straight anymore.
Suzanne lifted up the thick chain. She slid the locket over her head. I’ll never take it off, she had told Ivan. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever given her. She had been terrified to tell Ivan she had lost it, and when she had, weeping, he had merely shrugged and kissed her. “Oh, you’re always losing something,” he said. She had thought he was wonderful, being understanding like that, but she should have
known what that shrug meant. She should have realized that the something she was losing wasn’t just the locket.
She clicked the locket open. His image struck her, like a slap. And there her face was, too, young and beautiful, and so stupid, it was a crime.
Suzanne clicked the locket shut. How had Molly gotten this? And why had she kept it? Suzanne didn’t think Molly even knew Ivan. At least not really. Ivan had only come to the house once or twice, and then it was just to get Suzanne or to drop her off—and all of it was as quickly as possible because Suzanne didn’t want to spend a minute at home she didn’t have to. And then after a while, Suzanne was with Ivan all the time and she had stopped coming home altogether. She had stopped caring what might happen if the laundry didn’t get done, if the groceries weren’t bought and put away, if Molly were alone in the house.
The first time Suzanne saw Ivan, she had been fifteen years old. It was a bright, shiny hot summer day, and Molly and Angela were at the dentist. Suzanne had two loads of laundry to do and the kitchen floor to mop, but as far as Suzanne could see, she really had the whole day to herself and she was going to make the best of it. She could get home before Angela and Molly did and splash water on the floor. She could say the washer was on the fritz again, buy herself some time.
She had put on her shortest cutoffs. She had tied a red kerchief around her chest like a halter top, and spritzed herself with Angela’s perfume, and slathered on sun block because she liked her pale skin. She stared anxiously at herself, wondering if she was really pretty, the way all the boys were suddenly telling her. No one had ever told her she was pretty before they moved to New Jersey, but now, to her astonishment, boys followed her all over school and cars beeped when she walked down the street. She kept thinking this was like some great gift, this beauty, that she could use it so she wouldn’t be lonely, but to her surprise, the other girls treated her with distrust or with coolness, as if she were competition they couldn’t afford to be too friendly with. The boys saw her glossy hair, her luminous skin, but they didn’t see her. They never asked her what she thought or what scared her
or what she might want more than anything in the world, and every time she tried to talk about any of it, the boy she was with would get all glassy-eyed. “Shhh. Don’t talk,” they always said and then they’d kiss her and touch her, and tug her close, and Suzanne would feel more alone and lost than she ever had in her entire life.
She hightailed it to the park, where some bands were playing. Everyone was going to be there, and by the time she got there, they were. The whole field was dotted with blankets, swarming with kids and mosquitoes. Guys were prowling around, their shirts off, their feet bare. Frisbees, like kamikazes, whizzed dangerously close to Suzanne’s head. Everything smelled of suntan lotion and sweat.
Suzanne stretched like a cat. She flipped her hair back and tugged it forward back over her shoulders. She recognized a few faces, and someone even waved at her, but she kept to herself. The band playing now wasn’t so hot. They got off the stage to a smattering of applause. She was thinking she might sit down, or maybe she’d go get herself a soda. Or maybe she’d just find someone with some spare sun block because it was getting so hot she almost couldn’t stand it, when suddenly a voice boomed out, “Let’s hear it now, one more time, for Ivan Troon and The Touch!” The world exploded. A wave of people stormed the stage. Girls began screaming. An ankle bracelet zipped by Suzanne’s head. “Oh, my God, that’s him!” a girl shrieked.
Curious, Suzanne got closer. And there, on the stage, was the handsomest boy she had ever seen. He wore black sneakers and black jeans and a black T-shirt with a white dot right where his heart would be. His hair was a slide of black silk to his shoulders, his skin was sweet cream, and his eyes—my God, his eyes were this eerie electric blue she had never seen before and she couldn’t stop looking at them.
A tide of people moved and pushed against her. Hands waved in the air, feet stomped. Suzanne stood perfectly still.
The girls screamed again and Touch began playing and the handsomest boy Suzanne had ever seen began to sing, so that a jolt zipped through Suzanne. She felt as if he were singing right to her, telling her something important. “Surrounded by people, and lonely as glass—” he wailed, and a tremor ran through Suzanne. She tried to move closer, so she
could see him better. So she could hear more. “Don’t you ever feel like the wind is in your soul?” he sang. He leaped up and slid back across the stage; he threw his head forward and back, tossing that glorious hair. Suzanne couldn’t take her eyes off him and if anyone had told her that you couldn’t fall in love at first sight, she would have told them they were nuts, because that was exactly what was happening to her.
The girls behind her pushed her another step forward, and then another, until she was in the front lines, and then suddenly, the boy’s blue eyes shone on her like a spotlight. There was just him and her. She could no longer hear the music, she could no longer feel all the kids trying to crowd her out of their way.
The music snapped off. The boy dropped down to a crouch and sprang back up, his hair flicking back. The crowd screamed “More! More!” Someone shrieked out, “Ivan! Ivan! I love you, Ivan!” and then the emcee came out and waved his hands. “See ya next week!” he called. “That was Ivan Troon and The Touch!”
The band began packing up. The kids dispersed, and for a moment Suzanne just stood there, the spell breaking up all around her, just like shattered glass. Things felt ordinary again. Boring. She noticed her arm was jeweled with mosquito bites that itched. She had a sunburn, sun block or no sun block. Her white sneakers were scuffed with dirt. Maybe she had just imagined him singling her out. Maybe his eyes weren’t that great. Maybe his hair was ordinary. Just because someone sang something that got to you, didn’t mean they really felt it themselves. She sighed, turning away, when suddenly she heard, “Hey, there! You with the long black hair!” It was a voice full of Texas, and she turned to see the boy and all the miracle of him came right back at her. He smiled, making her feel bathed in light. “Ivan Troon,” he said. “So, you need a lift?”
She got into his blue Chevy. It smelled of cigarettes and had a tiny plastic key ring that said TOUCH ME hanging from the rearview mirror. She started to lift her hand toward it and then let it flop back down
on her knee. He looked at her and smiled, as if he knew something she didn’t, and then he dug in his pocket, pulling out a rumpled pack of Luckies. He tapped two out, put them both in his mouth, lit them, and then handed one to her. “It killed me when I saw this in an old movie,” he told her.
Suzanne pretended she knew what movie he was talking about. She didn’t watch movies much anymore, and she had never had a cigarette in her whole life. Had never wanted one, really, preferring sugary candy and salty snacks, if you wanted to know the truth. But the cigarette in her mouth had been in his mouth just seconds before. It seemed as intimate as a kiss, and she sipped in a breath of smoke. Her lungs crackled like paper. They burned. She coughed, nearly spitting the cigarette out, and felt instantly mortified.
Ivan laughed. “Not your brand, huh? Sorry.”
He drew the smoke deeply in, watching her, even as he drove, which made her a little nervous. His hair kept sliding into his face, but he never once pushed it back with his hands. Instead, he tilted his head up, as if he were contemplating the stars, let it fall away all on its own. He had a scent to him, too—pine, she thought—and it was making her feel so crazy she didn’t know what to do.
And then he began to sing. “Struck down by you,” he crooned. His voice was clear and full of feeling and she could have listened to it forever. He glanced at her sideways, grinning, waiting. “Struck! Down!” he abruptly wailed, throwing his hands up dramatically, startling her, so she inadvertently jumped. She blushed. He thinks he’s the cock of the walk, Suzanne thought, but it didn’t make her like him one bit less. It didn’t change anything.
“That’s so pretty.”
“You like it?” He beamed. “I wrote it.” He made a right turn. “Maybe I wrote it for you.”
“Me? You don’t even know me.”
“That’s what you think.”
“What do you mean? How do you know me?”
“You haven’t seen me around school?” His gaze washed over her. “I’ve sure seen you.”
She looked at him, confused. “You go to my school?”
“I go to the Voc,” he said defensively. “Transferred in a month ago from Dallas.”
She nodded. The Vocational School. A whole separate building set back from the school. Fifty kids at a time, just about all of them guys. She had heard the stories. Everyone said the Voc was for kids who were too stupid to attend the regular school, the remedial programs. Everyone said the Voc was for kids who were misfits. She was like everyone else. She walked past the Voc on her way to school, past the kids hanging outside when the weather was good, working on cars, wiping their hands on their greasy coveralls. They could wire your whole house if they felt like it. They could take apart a whole car and put it together again. She didn’t give any of them a moment’s thought. Not until now.
She gave Ivan a sidelong glance. He wrote songs. He had a clear beautiful voice that could break your heart just to listen to it. No one in a million years could ever call him a misfit. No one could ever call him stupid.
“So, you didn’t see me?” he repeated.
She shook her head.
“Well, my very first day, I saw you. Right in front of the regular school. Surrounded by guys.”
Suzanne flushed.
“I knew none of them was worth your little finger. I knew none of them understood anything about you.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I’m an artist. An artist watches things. He observes.” Ivan tapped his head. “I saw you, so completely beautiful I was getting a heart attack just looking at you. But there was something shy about you, too. Something unsure. The way you were standing. And none of those guys was noticing. They were just getting louder and louder, when really, they should have shut up for a minute. They should have given you a little silence. A little respect.”
Suzanne blinked at him. She thought of all those guys, flirting with her, cracking lame jokes, laughing too loud, flirting so hard it was a
wonder they didn’t explode in front of her. Ivan pointed a finger at her. “You—” he sang, his voice rolling up. “Strike me dow-own!” He grinned and put his hands back on the wheel. “This song, ‘Strike Me Down.’ It was like a dream the way it came to me. I was just sitting there thinking about you and the words just spilled out. Like you were my muse or something.”
“I bet you have lots of muses.” She felt ridiculous as soon as she said it. It was like saying, I bet you say that to all the girls, but his face was serious.
“No. I don’t,” he said simply. He frowned. “A lot of people don’t even understand about music. They don’t get it. Like my parents. They’ve never been to one of my gigs. Not one. When I ask, my father says”—Ivan made his voice deep and gravelly—“‘Get an A on something, then I’ll be impressed. Get into the real high school, not the goddamned Voc.’ Like I was stupid. He doesn’t get it that the main reason I go to the Voc isn’t because I can’t cut it in regular school, but because a musician’s life can be unpredictable. Maybe there are years I’ll want to take a break, just let the creative juices percolate a little. And you got to do something. And Jesus, everyone needs mechanics. You can always work, and you can work anywhere. Not that I’ll ever have to. But to treat me like I’m nothing—”
“You’re not nothing,” Suzanne said so fervently she surprised herself a little.
“And my mom—all I hear from her is she can’t come because she’s busy—but busy doing what? Shopping for more clothes? Playing bridge and eating party mix?”
“That sounds like my mom,” Suzanne said quietly. “Not the bridge or the shopping, but I mean I could be exploding in flames and she would still be looking for her good earrings to go out. The only things she knows about me is how I do the laundry, how I take care of the house and my sister.”
Ivan looked over at Suzanne. He held her gaze. “See?” he said, quietly. “We’re more alike than either of us could ever know. It’s like fate, you and me.”
By the time he pulled up in front of Suzanne’s house, he knew all
he needed to know about her. That Suzanne didn’t have a boyfriend and wasn’t allowed, under any circumstances, to date. That she liked him. And that they would start seeing each other every chance they both got.
Ivan courted her. Every day he managed to sneak from the vocational school into her high school and leave a love note poking out of her locker. All she had to do was see that wedge of white and her legs turned to jelly. Her breath stopped. His notes sounded like songs to her. You’re like a wild bird in my heart. I’m missing you like a long, lonely river. She wasn’t sure what half of the notes really meant, but she carried all of them in her purse and sometimes all she had to do was touch the paper to feel a thrill. He poured out his heart and he not only liked it when she poured out hers to him, he expected it.
He waited for her after her classes. Walking down the corridor with Ivan was like being with a god. Kids parted to let them pass. They stared admiringly. They acted like Suzanne was something they couldn’t ever hope to aspire to.
He always had money in his pocket from doing gigs. He bought her things. A soft red angora sweater. A book of poetry wrapped in tissue, and better than that, he wrote her love songs. “I told you you were my muse and I meant it,” he told her. “We’re both going to be famous.” He swung a rope of her hair. “I can see it now,” he said. “My first album cover.” He let go of her hair and looked dreamily into space. “Best. That’s what I want to call it—something simple, you know? Something people can hook on to for a review—like Best is the best. Or Pneumonia. Like once you catch it, you never get cured! And on the cover—” He grinned at her. His eyes gleamed. “You. Your beautiful face.” He touched her cheek, making her shiver. “Just a head shot, with your black hair hanging down, and then in each of your pupils, clear as day, will be my face. Me in you. Get it?”
Suzanne nodded. He could have told her that he was putting a plucked chicken on the album cover and she would have thought it was wonderful. She couldn’t visualize the album cover the way he
could. All she could think of was, Me, he wants me on the cover, and to her, that seemed like everything.
He sang the songs about her at the gigs where he played, the school dances, the sweet sixteens kids hired him to play at, and he always brought Suzanne, whether she was invited or not—and usually, she wasn’t. It was always the same thing. Girls swarming around him, screaming, carrying on, throwing their bracelets at him, their car keys, and sometimes their panties, and there was Suzanne perfectly still in the thick of it. And Ivan singing his love songs right to her, for all the world to see.
The first time they made love was in the field behind the high school, hours after school had shut down. Ivan bought a soft blue blanket and a bottle of wine. He brought along a tape player and clicked it on, and there was his voice singing to her. “I would have brought my guitar but even I can’t do two things at once,” he apologized. “Hope that’s okay.” He treated Suzanne like a piece of fine silk, lowering her onto the blanket, slowly taking off her clothes. He knew it was her first time. When she was naked, shivering and embarrassed, he shook his head, admiring. “I have never seen anything so goddamned beautiful in my whole life,” he said. “And that’s a fact.” Behind him, on the tape recorder, his voice crooned, “My life is you, you, you—” and Suzanne shut her eyes.
“Okay?” he said. “Is this okay?” He kept asking her questions as he touched her breasts, as he slid her pants down over her thin hips, but she wished he would just be quiet, that he would just hold her. She had heard enough about sex to know the first time wasn’t supposed to be so hot, and she hadn’t expected much, and she hadn’t really cared, because all that mattered was that she was with Ivan. He took his time. He pushed into her. “Me in you,” he whispered, and before she had time to think whether she liked this or didn’t like this, Ivan rolled off her, flopping on the ground beside her. It was way faster than she had expected, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. She snuck a peek at his face, wondering if he was disappointed, if it hadn’t been any good for him. His eyes were moist, and she sat up, alarmed. It hadn’t been a good thing. She had been too clumsy.
She hadn’t known the right moves. Maybe she should have moaned more or something. Been more encouraging. “Did I do something wrong?” she said, and he shook his head, swiped at his eyes.
“You’re a song. The most damned important song of my whole life.”
Then he reached up for her, and pulled her to him, and the tape recorder suddenly clicked off so all you could hear was a whir.
Ivan made something happen to her mind and she couldn’t control it. She forgot everyone and everything but him. She came home and heard Molly weeping in her room, and for a moment her heart ached. She headed for the room to see what was wrong, before her heart hardened. Was her sister’s happiness always going to be her responsibility? Didn’t she deserve some fun herself? She was finding her own way; why couldn’t Molly make friends or find a boy or simply rely on herself instead of Suzanne? Suzanne pivoted and left the house.
She didn’t go to class, but stood outside, waiting to see Ivan. She forgot to get the dry cleaning, including an important business suit Angela needed for work the next day. She forgot that she was supposed to pick up Molly’s prescription after school. Instead, she waited until Angela and Molly were out of the house, and then she called Ivan to come over and as soon as he stepped in the house, they were taking each other’s clothes off, they were heading for her room.
“Where have you been?” Angela screamed at Suzanne when she came back to the house at four in the morning, Suzanne’s mouth all swollen from kissing Ivan, her clothes rumpled from taking them off and putting them on again. “What is wrong with you?” Angela shouted when she came home to find the house looking like a cyclone had swept through it, no groceries in the cupboards, no dinner made, because this time, it was Molly who forgot. “What is going on here?” Angela shouted. But Suzanne knew that the answer wasn’t what, but who, and that there was nothing she or anyone could do about it. “The school called me about you,” Angela accused her. She was angry that she had to take time off work to go talk to Suzanne’s principal
because Suzanne had skipped so many classes. She was even more furious when she had to go to Woolworth’s to talk the manager out of pressing charges because Suzanne had shoplifted ten dollars’ worth of gold-tone earrings because she had been thinking about Ivan so hard, about how lucky she was, that she had walked past the register, the money fisted in her hand, and no matter how Suzanne had explained it to the store, they hadn’t believed her for a minute. “Why can’t you be good like your sister?” Angela raved.
Their fights got worse and worse. It wasn’t about her taking care of Molly anymore, who was nearly thirteen now and certainly able to take care of herself. Suzanne knew it wasn’t even about her taking care of the house, which Molly was starting to do anyway. It was about all those people looking down on Angela again, thinking she wasn’t handling things well. It was about Angela having to cancel important dates with Lars because she had to stay at home and make sure Suzanne was going to be there, too. And it made Angela furious.
“Shoplifting!” She struck Suzanne on the shoulder. “Skipping school!” She whacked at her again, hitting Suzanne’s arm. “Do you think I kill myself so you can screw up?”
“All you care about is you!” Suzanne shouted. Angela lifted a hand to strike her again and, cowering, Suzanne grabbed her mother’s wrist. “Don’t hit me!” she cried and Angela struck her again.
Suzanne whipped around, bumping right into Molly, pasted by the doorway, acting as if she were drowning in misery and trying to pull Suzanne down with her. Suzanne couldn’t look at her. Molly was smart enough to get all As in school, let her be smart enough to figure her own way out of the house. Suzanne headed for the door. She wasn’t going to be pulled down. Not anymore. She had had enough. “Suzanne, don’t go,” Molly cried.
“Yes, go,” Angela said, her voice steely. “And when you’re eighteen, you go for good. Because I’ve had it.” She looked at her raised hand as if she was just noticing it, and then lowered it.
Suzanne turned and walked out the door, slamming it behind her. She walked all the way to the Giant Eagle and the pay phone, where
she called Ivan, weeping so hard she could hardly catch her breath. “Oh, man,” Ivan said.
“I can’t go back there!” Suzanne sobbed. “I can’t take it another minute!”
Ivan was so quiet for a moment she was terrified he might have hung up. But then he sighed. “Don’t you worry, I have a plan,” Ivan told her, and two days later, she and Ivan left for California and their future together, and neither one of them, especially Suzanne, looked back even once.
They rented a tiny studio outside of La Jolla, where she had grown up. The beach was just a block away, but Suzanne never got there. She had to work every day, even weekends, as a cashier at the local suprette, just to pay the rent and buy groceries, just so Ivan could practice with the new band he had put together, Pneumonia.
And then it felt like she had a second job. She tried so hard to cook meals for Ivan on just about no money, to decorate the apartment with curtains from Woolworth’s. She washed and ironed his clothes and picked fresh flowers from the window box on the bottom floor when no one was looking and put them in a glass on the table. It wasn’t like the way it had been with Angela, when she was forced to clean and cook. She wanted to do this. She wanted Ivan to see what a good wife she’d make. She wanted him to marry her.
She couldn’t wait for him to get home. She fussed in the kitchen, stir-frying canned crabmeat and packaged noodles. She had even set the table with a lively paper cloth that she had gotten with her discount at the suprette, but when Ivan walked in, he didn’t look at the bright blue cloth or the dishes. Suzanne thought the apartment smelled wonderful and spicy, but he just rolled his eyes. “A lot of work for something that’s done in ten minutes,” he told her. He went right to his guitar and plunked down on the sofa and started playing that stupid Joni Mitchell song she hated. “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall—” he sang, looking at her meaningfully, making her
wince. And when she set out the meal, he picked at it, and the first time the phone rang, he jumped up and was on the phone talking to a band member for so long that by the time he came back, his dinner was too cold to finish, and only Suzanne seemed to care.
She tried. She’d point out happily married couples, the way they held hands on the street, the way they looked at each other. “So? You need to be married for that?” Ivan shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s—it’s the next step. The next level.” Suzanne hated herself for how desperate she sounded.
“Look. You’re my forever,” Ivan told her. “But marriage. Oh, man, that’s the kiss of death for love. I ought to know. I lived with my parents long enough.”
But Suzanne couldn’t stop wanting marriage. It was something real. Something permanent. It told the world something good about you, that someone loved you enough to let everyone know it. And what else did she have? The rare times she called home, Molly seemed guarded to her, or too needy, like she expected Suzanne to come rescue her, when Suzanne was doing all she could to rescue herself. And Angela was impossible—even Angela’s invitation to her ridiculous marriage to Lars was offered with the hope that Suzanne could start to behave. Behave. Like she was twelve years old or something.
Suzanne waited until she couldn’t wait anymore. She went out and spent half the food money on a bare black minidress and fresh flowers. She lit scented candles all over the apartment. She put on some low, jazzy music she knew Ivan liked. She tucked one of the flowers behind one ear, and when he walked in the apartment, startled, she got down on her knees, smiling up at him as playfully as she could. “My, my, my,” he said. “What have we here?” He bent to kiss her. He reached for the ties at the back of her dress, but she took his hand, stopping him. She stroked his fingers and took a deep breath. “Marry me,” she said.
She didn’t know what she was thinking. Maybe that he’d laugh. Maybe that he’d tease her. Maybe that he’d actually say yes. But Ivan stiffened. He grabbed her shoulders and jerked her to her feet. His mouth got mean. “Don’t push it. You hear me?”
She stepped back from him, reeling. She could still feel his fingers on her skin.
“I love you and I’m never getting married. That’s all you have to know. Those two things. And this. I don’t change my mind.” He walked through the candlelit apartment, knocking over one of the candles, and grabbed his guitar and went into the other room. She picked up the candle and sat on the couch, unable to move. She could hear him playing, one song, and then two, and then he came out, acting as if everything was back to normal. As if nothing important had happened. “Let’s have some lights around here,” he said more cheerfully, and flicked on the switch.
“Come on, Suzanne, I want to play you something I just wrote.” She sat down on the couch beside him while he sang, but she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t hear a single note. All she could think about was the future. She told herself that maybe he’d feel differently when life wasn’t such a struggle, when he made it big and things weren’t so rushed. Ivan stopped playing and put one hand on her leg. He looked at her. “What a pretty tune,” she said.
He leaned forward and kissed her tenderly.
One Friday, Pneumonia was playing a small club called the Ozone Parade for the midnight show. Suzanne was curled up on the sofa with a hot water bottle on her belly for her period cramps and didn’t want to go. “Baby, you have to go,” Ivan said. “I need you to be there! You know if I don’t see you there, I can’t play right. I have to sing to you.”
Suzanne burrowed deeper into the couch.
“Come on. You’re my inspiration! I can’t do this without you!” He sat down on the couch with her and tickled her under the chin. “Suz-anne,” he sang. “Pretty little Suz-anne!”
She got up. She smiled weakly. “That’s my love,” Ivan said happily.
She’d take a few aspirin. Have a drink. She’d get through the evening.
Eleven-thirty and the Ozone Parade was packed and dark. The noise, never mind the bodies, could knock you right down. Suzanne had been to the Ozone Parade a few times before and each time she vowed it was her last. She didn’t know what it was, what had changed for her. She used to love going to the clubs in high school. She loved everything about it. The pulsing noise, the damp heat of all the bodies, the blare of the music, and the haze of smoke. The way you’d stay out all night and then go get french fries at the all-night diners at four in the morning. Now, all of it just made her think how tired she was going to be going to work in the morning. She used to love bands, too. Musicians. It seemed so exciting back in New Jersey. But she didn’t love the other guys in Pneumonia. They drank too much and didn’t talk about anything except music and when they came to the apartment, they made a big mess, using the floor as an ashtray, treating Suzanne like she was their slave, like all she was good for was bringing out iced tea or more beer or looking good. All of them seemed to have a different girlfriend every week. “Why else go into rock and roll?” Stan, the bass player, leered. He twanged a chord. “Sex and drugs and rock and roll!” It made Suzanne feel creepy, and she always looked at Ivan to see if he was laughing. She always felt relieved when he wasn’t.
A cramp shot through Suzanne. She rubbed her stomach. Ivan leaned over and kissed her. “I’m going backstage. Stand where I can see you, honey.”
He left her. Whose bright idea was it not to have tables or chairs or even standing room? What was so great about this dingy space? The walls were gray cement block, the floor scuffed linoleum. There wasn’t room to dance, let alone to stand. There wasn’t air. She wanted silence, the couch, her hot water bottle, and two more Midol. She pressed against the wall. Already, she was sweating. The music they had piped in was so loud, her ears were starting to ring.
A woman in a black apron snarled something at Suzanne and then disappeared. Everyone was moving around, drinking beers, shouting at one another. A woman in a short, tight red dress stepped hard on Suzanne’s instep, making her yelp. A guy in jeans and a T-shirt that said FUCKING A tapped his cigarette ash on Suzanne’s forearm. How was she going to last?
Pneumonia didn’t come on until quarter to one, and by that time Suzanne was ready to scream. It had taken her half an hour just to get to the ladies’ room, where two girls were snorting coke in the one free stall and wouldn’t get out, even when Suzanne begged them. “I have my period!” she said, and the girls laughed. “Tough break,” said one. A woman finally came out of the other stall and Suzanne fled into it. The toilet paper was gone. There was pee all over the seat and on the floor. The door didn’t work and she had to hold it shut with one free hand. She peed and changed her tampon and when she went to wash her hands there were four blond hairs spread across the sink. She pushed her way out again.
Kids swarmed toward the stage, jostling Suzanne, who swore. “Hey! Where’s Tod?” screamed the boy next to Suzanne. Suzanne looked at him. The band Ivan had put together used to be called Tod, after its lead singer, who left to go to school back east. “Tod!” the boy screamed. “Where’s fucking Tod?”
Pneumonia played three songs, and then four, and all around her, the crowd got noisier and noisier. Ivan locked eyes with Suzanne. He sang to her. “You suck!” screamed a voice by her ear, making her flinch back, and then a beer can whizzed by, hitting Ivan on the thigh. He looked stunned. His voice faltered. He looked away from Suzanne. He kept playing.
“Man, know what Pneumonia’s singer needs?” a boy breathed against Suzanne’s ear. She tried to move away.
“A dose of antibiotics to wipe him out!” He laughed, chortling. He put one hand on Suzanne’s shoulder in a too-chummy way, and she jerked away from him.
She suddenly felt sick. Ivan sounded good to her, the way he had
always sounded good to her. In New Jersey, everyone had treated him with a kind of reverence. But this wasn’t New Jersey.
Pneumonia played for a half hour and then abruptly stopped, jangling a final chord, punching their fists up toward the ceiling. The crowd shouted and stamped their feet. Suzanne tried to move, but everything seemed a tight tangle of legs and arms and by the time she managed to push her way backstage, she was exhausted. Her T-shirt was pasted to her back with sweat. Her cramps had dulled, but she felt sticky and wet and uncomfortable. “Excuse me,” she said, and the girl in front of her glared at her. Suzanne was too tired for this. Too crampy. “Move,” Suzanne ordered in a new hard voice and the girl stepped aside. Suzanne pushed her way into the back room and as soon as she did she knew something had happened.
The other band members of Pneumonia were whooping and giving each other high fives. A guy she didn’t know, who seemed older than everybody else, in a black T-shirt and jeans and silver glasses, was clapping the drummer on the back. Ivan was by himself in a corner, angrily packing up his guitar, while the bass player was intently talking to him. “Hey, man, what do you want me to do? What would you do? I said I was sorry—”
Ivan snapped the guitar case shut. “Fuck you. Fuck all of you.”
Suzanne looked from Ivan to the bass player, who gave her a helpless look, who lifted up his hands.
Suzanne looked at Ivan. He didn’t say a word to her, but stormed out the back room. Suzanne knew Ivan enough to wait until he was ready to speak. She followed him through the club, struggling to keep up. She walked with him onto the street, and as soon as they were outside, he began to walk faster and faster. Finally, she grabbed his arm. “Ivan! What’s wrong?”
He stopped. She threw her arms about him. “You were great!” she cried. “You were so fabulous!” He stepped back from her, glaring, furious.
“Who was that guy? What was going on back there?” she asked.
“Oh, that guy? That slimy little toad? You noticed him? A & R guy. Just happened to be in the club. Heard we were great,” Ivan said bitterly. “Only one little problem. He wants all the band except for me.
“What? How can that be?”
“Says he sees a real future for them, that they could go far. Just not with me.”
Suzanne tried desperately to think of something to say. “But it’s your band.”
“Right, Suzanne. Good thinking.”
“You’re too good for them anyway,” she blurted.
He glared at her. “What? Why’d you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t really think so.”
“I do think so! You’re really good!”
“Good,” he said flatly. “Just not great. That’s what you think, right? That’s what everyone thinks.”
“I didn’t say that!” she pleaded, but he glared at her and then she saw the hopeless flicker in his eyes. She tried to grab his arm, but he wrenched it away.
After that, it was as if something had changed and she was powerless to do anything about it. He practiced more and more, but it seemed to make him angrier and angrier. He’d throw the guitar down and storm out. She’d wake at three in the morning to find him strumming it in the living room, looking so fierce and determined and sad that she’d go sit beside him and listen, even though she was exhausted. She rested her head against his back. “You want to talk?” she said, but he kept playing and she grew more and more silent. She didn’t care whether he could play the comb, let alone the guitar. It didn’t change the way she felt about him.
Money began to get tighter and tighter and they had to move three times in one year. Each place was cheaper—and worse than the next. They had roaches and mice and once Suzanne saw a rat running down into one of the burners, which scared her so much she couldn’t go near the stove for a week. The walls were so paper thin she could
hear it when the next-door neighbor sneezed. Worse, Ivan had to get a job, working as a mechanic at a local shop.
She tried to come up with solutions, and everything she said to Ivan sounded dumb. “Maybe I can work two jobs,” she said. “Get something at night. Maybe I can go back to school. I’ve been thinking maybe I’d like to do something with hair.”
“Hair? Oh, that sounds exciting.”
“I do the other girls’ hair at work. People seem to think I have a talent.”
He looked at her as if she had two heads. “For hair,” he said. He shook his head. “How are you going to go to school? On what money, Suzanne?”
“Well, can’t you work more hours, too?”
Ivan looked at her as if she had struck him. “Sure, Suzanne, what a good idea. Then I won’t be able to practice at all.”
She bit her lip. “All you need is one break.”
He walked to the kitchen table and picked up some of the bills. “Yeah. A break,” he said. “Look at this light bill. How hard is it, Suzanne, to turn out a light when you leave a room?” He walked from the room, clicking off the light, to show her, leaving her, alone and shocked, in the dark. She wasn’t sure what to do, and then suddenly he came back in and grabbed her.
“I love you so fucking much and I am so fucking sorry,” he said. He held her head in his hands, he kissed her mouth, her chin. “I know I can do this,” he told her. “You just watch me.”
She started working double shifts at the suprette. She was so wrung-out at the end of the day that she never wanted to see a cash register again. Her feet killed her. Her mind felt dead. People treated her like an idiot. One woman was so annoyed at the way Suzanne was packing the groceries, she grabbed the paper bag from Suzanne and began packing it herself. “Eggs do not go on top,” she informed Suzanne coolly. “I would think you’d know that.”
The man who came next sighed loudly at Suzanne when she gave
him his change. “You gave me all pennies. Don’t you know what a quarter is?” The man looked at the person standing behind him and rolled his eyes. “This place gets worse and worse.”
Suzanne wanted to scream, to tear off the awful blue smock they made her wear and just walk out of there, and she would have, if she and Ivan hadn’t needed the money so desperately. So instead, she smiled. She was polite. She kept her mouth firmly shut. And she soothed herself by thinking about a different sort of future. She kept thinking more and more about going to Beauty Culture School. And the more she thought about it, the more excited she became. The suprette aisles receded. She didn’t see the irritation in her customers’ faces. No, she saw a gleaming salon, heads of glossy hair, a secretary who had to book Suzanne’s appointments months in advance because that was how in demand Suzanne was. “No one does it like you do,” her customers would rave.
That night when she got home, she tried to talk to Ivan about going to school. “I think we could swing it,” she told Ivan. “We could take out a loan—” and then Ivan cut her off with a thrum of guitar chords. He banged his hand against the bridge of his guitar. “Oh, hair, that’s really interesting,” he said.
He got his jacket and went out without her. “I just need to be alone for a bit,” he said. “Don’t take it personally.”
In a million different ways, she tried not to. She lay on the couch, running through the channels of the TV, and she thought of the other girls at the suprette. One girl’s boyfriend had smacked her because she had dared to flirt with another boy. Another girl’s boyfriend never told her he loved her. The girls at the suprette all complained, they all swapped horror stories and joked that they were just slaves to love. “You never say anything bad about your Ivan,” one girl said to Suzanne admiringly. “You’re so lucky.” And Suzanne dipped her head down just so the girl couldn’t see how unsure Suzanne really felt, how the real reason she didn’t say anything bad about him was because it would just end up making her feel worse.
He loves me, she told herself. It’s just a bad time. Suzanne clicked onto another station. An old sitcom from the fifties. The laugh track
blared. She watched the sitcom and an old movie and then just before it was over, Ivan came home. “Hey, you’re up!” he said, pleased, and she stretched and got up and kissed him. His breath smelled like wine, but he kept kissing her. He rolled her to the floor with him. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,” he said, and then he not only told her how much he loved her, he showed her. All the rest of the night. And when he fell asleep, and she was still up, she lay with his arm wrapped about her and she made lists in her head to reassure herself.
He still wanted her. He still wrote songs for her. He held her when she was lonely. He held her the terrible night Lars called to tell her Angela had died. He was there beside her holding her hand when Molly called wanting to visit and Suzanne turned her away because who knew what a third person might do to the mix. Right now, he was so there. How could anything be wrong? She wouldn’t let it.
She didn’t think anything of his behavior until he began coming home later and later, more and more, and then suddenly it was three in the morning and there she was alone in a cold apartment listening to the man next door arguing with his wife.
Those nights, she went looking for him, hating herself. She found him playing his music in the park, only a few young girls around him, and Suzanne recognized the look on all those young girls’ faces, she knew it wasn’t the music they were hungering for. And she saw the look on his face. He was playing all right. And to an audience. His face was dancing with light. And when he saw her, he acted as if she were interrupting. He blew out a breath. He thrummed a chord. “Let’s call it a night,” he said. He put his guitar away. The other girls gave Suzanne sly, measured looks, and Ivan didn’t bother to introduce Suzanne to any of them.
He was silent the whole walk back, though she tried to talk to him. “You sounded good out there,” she said, and he nodded and dug his hands deeper into his pockets. “Maybe you should start playing outside more. Free concerts in the park—” she said lamely, and his mouth tightened.
“Think you can be a little more condescending, Suzanne?” he said.
As soon as they got back into the apartment, he started packing
his things. She put one hand on his back, and he moved away from her. “It’s no good anymore,” he told her. “I’m going to sublet Del Bronco’s pad for a while.”
She blinked at him. “Who?”
He shot her a disgusted look. “See that? That’s just what I mean about you. You don’t even know the people in my life anymore. God. We used to talk and talk, Suzanne. But now you don’t even know what I’m about.” He zipped the suitcase shut. “I need to be able to concentrate on my music. To focus.”
“But I let you concentrate! And I want to talk! We can still talk!” She reached to touch him. “It’s just a matter of time before you get something! You’re so talented only an idiot couldn’t see it!”
He looked at her. Never had she seen his eyes so flat. “You bore me,” he said.
After he left, she went insane. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t go to work. She called in sick and stayed in bed with the covers over her head. She kept expecting him to come back, to show up, just like that. And when he didn’t, she got the phone book and looked up the address for D. Bronco. She could go there. She could bring him back. You know me, she could say to him. We know each other. We can make this work. She was rummaging around on the pile of laundry on the floor for something clean to wear when buried under a T-shirt, she found a brand-new pack of his guitar strings. She held it up, astonished. Didn’t that mean something that he had left them here? Wasn’t it true that there were no accidents, that everything was somehow meant to happen?
She dressed as carefully as she ever had in her life. In things he had bought her, the angora sweater, a pale rose-colored skirt, turquoise earrings shaped like tiny hearts. She went to his apartment. The front door was broken. It let her right in. She walked up two flights and stood outside his door, her heart thumping. She heard music playing. He was singing something and she leaned against the door. “Black hair to heaven,” he sang. She touched her own hair, feeling a heady pulse of relief. He couldn’t get her out of his mind any more than she could get him out of hers. And oh. He sounded
good. Real good. As good as she had ever heard him. She shut her eyes, trembling. She knocked, and he opened the door, beautiful and laughing, and then just as she started to laugh, too, she saw the woman sitting cross-legged on his couch, a woman with long black hair like hers, in a short skirt, smiling at Suzanne like nothing in the world was wrong.
Suzanne froze. “Suzanne,” he said and she swore for a moment, he looked sad. Or at least she wanted to think so. And then the girl who looked like her laughed, a low steady peal like a roller coaster, and Suzanne pivoted, and ran back down the stairs, throwing the guitar strings onto the dirty pavement.
Suzanne fingered the locket. She remembered how she used to feel wearing it, like love could protect her. Family love. True love. She was smarter now. She felt jittery and angry and sad, which might feel worse, but at least it was real. You bore me, Ivan had said. She tasted metal in her mouth. Abruptly she took off the locket and shoved it back in the box, along with the sweater. She pushed the box back in the drawer and closed it. End of story.
She had to get out of the house. Gary had told her to go shopping. Well, that’s what she’d do. She just wished she didn’t have to take the baby with her.
He was stirring when she went into his room. He blinked up at her, as if he were waiting. “Chop chop. Time to go.” She bent to him. He blew a glistening bubble of saliva at her. She lifted him up carefully. She checked his diaper, which was dry, thank God, and put a fuzzy coat over him. And got him into the stroller, wrapping a blanket about him. What had Gary told her to pack for him? She couldn’t remember. A bottle maybe, his pacifier to keep him quiet. She grabbed a bottle from the refrigerator. It wouldn’t kill him to have it cold. She took the keys and money and then glanced outside. Gray and cold and all she had was her thin coat.
She rummaged in the hall closet. There wasn’t much here. A blue cloth coat that wasn’t much better than hers. And this puffy orange
down thing with a hood. She glanced out the window again and pulled out the down parka and put it on.
She felt like a baby rhino. Feathers kept escaping, floating about her like snow. Well, tough. At least she’d be warm.
The streets were empty. She forged ahead, the stroller jerking on the bumpy sidewalk. Gary had told her the supermarket was only a short walk, but already it felt like she had gone a mile. Next time he wanted her to shop, he’d better leave her the car. It was so freezing, she pulled on the ugly hood and tied it tight. Any moment she expected the baby to do something she would be unprepared for, but every time she came around the front of the stroller to check on him, he blinked at her placidly.
There it was. The Thrift-T-Mart. As soon as she got inside, she realized she had left the list Gary had left her. She tried to remember what it was she was supposed to get. The baby made a babbling sound. “You want to tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for?” she said.
She’d go aisle to aisle. She’d figure it out. She bought cheese and cookies and cigarettes. She went to the baby aisle, which seemed like a foreign country to her. There were five different brands of diapers in six different sizes. Ready-made and powder formula. Nipples and pacifiers. Her mind went suddenly blank. What had Gary said to get? She frowned, perplexed. She felt suddenly exhausted. She took the Simulac, and then headed to the bread aisle where things were more familiar.
The groceries fit nicely in the bottom of the stroller, but it made it harder to wheel the thing. Halfway home, she felt hungry, and she pulled out the cheese and wolfed a few slices. It was the kind of makeshift dinner she had had many times before in California. She was used to it.
The baby was sleeping and Suzanne was lazily thumbing through a magazine when Gary came home. It was just after seven, and he looked exhausted and tense. Too late for me to go to the hospital tonight, anyway, she thought. She couldn’t help feeling relieved.
“How’s Molly?” she asked.
He shrugged. “The same.”
He picked up some of the baby’s toys and put them in the toy bin in the corner. He stopped, as if he were considering something, and then he abruptly went to the thermostat, frowned, and turned it down, but he didn’t say anything to Suzanne, and then he went into the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator open and then close. “Suzanne?”
She put the magazine down and went into the kitchen. He was leaning against the counter, facing her. “You didn’t have a chance to go shopping?”
“I shopped.”
“There’s no milk. No fruit.” He looked in the cabinets. “You didn’t buy pasta?” He turned to her, irritated. “Did you get formula?”
“Sure did.”
He looked around and then suddenly picked up the Simulac on the counter and his frown deepened. “I told you Alimentum. He’s allergic to Simulac.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Suzanne said.
“Because I told you.” He looked at her. “Did you get diapers?”
She stayed perfectly still. Oh, damn. Diapers. She knew she had forgotten something.
Gary turned and wearily pulled his jacket back on. “Fine,” he said, annoyed. “I’ll get them. I might as well get the other stuff we need.” His mouth tightened. “I know we have eggs and cheese. Could you make us a cheese omelet? A salad, do you think?”
Fuck you, she thought. Who was he to make her feel stupid? Ordering me around. She wasn’t even that hungry. “Sure,” she said. At least she didn’t have to go out again. She waited until he was gone, then turned the thermostat up and broke eggs into a bowl. She tore the cheese apart with her fingers and dropped it into the bowl. It’s not my fault. I went shopping, I’m taking care of a baby, I’m doing this. She felt like crying. She angrily ripped at the lettuce.
He came back in a slightly better mood. The salad was made, the eggs and cheese were sizzling into a mess in the pan. As he unloaded the groceries, he seemed to be giving her a kind of tour. Get this kind of milk. Don’t get this kind of bread. Otis likes this. I like that. Fine.
Good. She’d remember. Just stop ordering her around as if she were a slave. Just stop treating her as if she were stupid. That didn’t seem too much to ask.
They ate in silence.
The next day, Gary gave her the car to drive to the hospital, and the whole time she was driving, all she could think about was how easy it might be to keep going, past one exit and then the next. She could be clear up to Canada before Gary realized she was gone. But then what? It hammered into her head. Then what? Well, Gary’s car was kind of a junk heap. It made an odd knocking sound and the brakes pulled. It’d probably never get anywhere anyway. She turned up the radio, blasting it. Oh, good, she liked this song coming on. She’d think of something.
As soon as Suzanne stepped into the hospital, she nearly turned around. People were either grinning like lunatics or looking like they’d lost their best friends. Make a left at the elevator, Gary had told her, and she did, and there was the SICU. Suzanne stalled, looking around, not sure what to do. Gary had told her that Molly was in bad shape, that she wouldn’t hear or see her, but it was still important to talk to her anyway. But what could Suzanne say? I would have called but you didn’t seem to want me to.
A nurse appeared, a blonde with a ponytail. “Yes?”
“I’m Molly Goldman’s sister.”
“Oh, yes, Gary told me.” She touched Suzanne’s shoulder. “She’s over there. By the window.”
Suzanne suddenly couldn’t breathe. She stared. She turned to look at the nurse, to tell her there must be some mistake. This woman couldn’t be Molly. This woman’s face was almost hidden by tubes. Her mouth, her nose, were filled with them. Machines whirred and clicked and green neon numbers flashed. Molly’s hair had been this bright shiny red, but this hair was faded, threaded with white. This skin was gray. This woman is dying. The force of the thought knocked into Suzanne so hard, she sank into the chair by her sister’s bed. She
had never imagined this. She had never seen this coming. It was a plane crash. A fall down an elevator shaft. “Molly, it’s me—Suzanne—Come on, Molly. You talk to me.” She ordered her around, the way she used to. “Let’s go. Now.” Molly eyes opened. They rolled upward and around and then the lids fluttered shut. Suzanne jerked back, terrified, and then burst into tears.
She had been so sure it wouldn’t be as bad as Gary had told her. And she was right. It was much worse.
Suzanne stayed for only an hour. She didn’t talk to Molly. She didn’t move from the hard plastic seat. She didn’t look up when a nurse came by to check one of Molly’s machines. When she walked out of the room, she walked like a ghost. When she came home that night, Gary was waiting for her in the living room, reading a magazine. He stood up and walked over to her and had both of his arms around her before she had even started to cry.
That night, Suzanne couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Molly, the way she had looked. It made her numb with terror. And she couldn’t stop thinking that she would have to go back to see her tomorrow. She kicked the covers off and bolted upright. TV. If it didn’t put her to sleep, as least she’d have something to concentrate on. She threw a robe about her but once she got to the living room, she turned the set on and then clicked it off again. Maybe food would settle her down. She made herself an egg but as soon as it was done, she threw it into the garbage. She got back into bed and stared at the ceiling. Next shopping trip, she was buying Nite-all.
Oh, God. Grocery shopping. Housekeeping for Molly all over again. People counting on you, wanting more and more, and no matter what you did, at times it wouldn’t be good enough. Sometimes you just had to make yourself botch it because there was just too much pressure. Too many little things to tend to. You had to give so much
of yourself, you risked being erased. And she wasn’t sure she could pay that price again.
In the morning, she couldn’t get up. She pulled the sheet over her head, shutting out the light, the sounds of the baby, all the noise Gary was making. She had had days like this after Ivan had left. She didn’t answer the door. She let the phone ring and ring.
All she could think about was Molly in the hospital bed.
There was a knock on the door. Go away, she thought, but the door opened and Gary poked his head in. “I’m leaving now.”
She nodded and didn’t move.”
“Can you get Otis?”
“I’m on it.” He took his sweet time shutting the door. She made a few sounds, as if she were getting up, but as soon as she heard the front door slam, she burrowed back in bed. Let the baby cry first. Then she’d get up for real.
All that day, she didn’t feel like doing anything. Luckily the baby slept late, and when he woke up, he seemed in a good mood. She fed him a cold bottle even though Gary had told her not to, and when he didn’t fuss, she nodded at him. “Good going,” she told him. She set him on a blanket in the middle of the floor, with a few rubber toys. “Amuse yourself. Be independent.” He gummed happily at a yellow duck.
When he slept, she slept, and she didn’t realize until Gary came back and gave her that pinched look that she was still in the same clothes she had slept in, that she had forgotten to do a wash and the baby had no more clean clothes left.
Suzanne had been living at the house for only three weeks, but Gary was starting to panic. He had made a serious mistake bringing Suzanne here. She was no help. He couldn’t count on her to do the simplest things. The laundry was never done, and when it was, the whites were streaked with pink because she never separated anything, his shirts shrunk or were dappled with bleach. And the house—the house was
a wreck. Dust swept across the floor like tumbleweeds. Cracker crumbs speckled the bathtub and soda cans were stacked in almost every room. This woman was inescapably messy. He found bits of Suzanne everywhere he looked: mascara wands in the kitchen, her socks in Otis’s stroller, who knew how they got there. Her long black hairs drifted onto the living-room chairs, onto the kitchen table. She used up all the gas in the car and didn’t bother to refill it.
And worse, she was always moping. He didn’t need that—and Otis didn’t need it, either. Hadn’t he read somewhere that babies mirrored the faces presented to them? Otis had enough to contend with with Molly not being there with him without seeing Suzanne’s sour face. Why couldn’t Suzanne behave? Why couldn’t she do what he himself did—put herself on automatic pilot, do what she had to just to get through the day? He was depressed, too, but he had Otis and Molly to think of. And so did she.
He hated that he had to bang on Suzanne’s door every morning to get her up, and even then, he wasn’t so sure that the minute he felt, she wouldn’t crawl right back to bed. Sometimes during the day, he’d go to a pay phone and call her. “I just wanted to ask if there was any mail.” He was lying. He wanted to make sure she was up and about. He wanted to see if he could hear Otis crying in the background. “Oh, and I forgot, could you add cheese to the grocery list?” They didn’t need cheese, but he thought it would nudge her memory, it would make her remember to go shopping. “Can do,” she always said, and her can dos always turned into didn’ts. More and more lately.
Gary was always exhausted. One evening, he was walking across the road, not thinking, when he heard a shriek of brakes, and he froze, staring at a blue car slamming to a stop. The driver, a woman in her twenties, flew out of the car, her hands waving in the air. “Oh, my God!” she screamed. “What if I hadn’t stopped?”
Frozen, Gary let himself be led to the sidewalk. A few people stopped, staring at him. “Why weren’t you looking?” she shouted, suddenly furious at him, her face full of blame. “What’s the matter with you?”
Gary sank onto a bench. Horrified, he gripped onto the wood. He felt the hammering of his heart, the raw scratch of his breath. “You’re not hurt, right?” the woman said. She studied him, and then turned, getting back into her car. “Next time, watch where you’re going!”
He heard the roar of her engine, the way she peeled out into the street again. He planted his hands on his knees and hunched forward, suddenly reeling with nausea. He lifted himself up, sucking in air, forcing himself to breathe normally, to calm. I can’t be killed, he thought in sudden amazement. I have to be all right. If I died, who would take care of Otis?
He got up, stricken. Suzanne was Otis’s next of kin. He’d be leaving Otis to Suzanne. I’m alone in this, he thought.
He’d have to do something. He’d have to be more careful. And he’d have to have a talk with Suzanne. He’d be calm, since she got so testy if he so much as asked her to wash a dish these days. He’d lie and tell her what a great job she was doing—on the whole. She’d have to rally. She’d have to be more help because the truth was, he couldn’t do this alone. And she was all he had.
But the night he decided to talk to her, he came home to find her sprawled on the sofa, quickly stubbing out a cigarette. Otis was lying on a blanket, in the same romper he had been wearing that morning when Gary left. “I asked you not to smoke in here.” Gary felt something boiling inside his stomach. He lifted up Otis. “He’s wet,” he accused. “How long has he been in this diaper?” Suzanne gave him a sullen face.
He took Otis into the bedroom to change him, grabbing for the blue plastic wipes box, flicking it open with a finger. Empty. “Suzanne!”
She came into the room, leaning against the door, her arms folded. Molly was right to have put Suzanne’s number in that acrylic puzzle. He had been the fool to break it open with a hammer.
“Where are the wipes?”
“They’re not there?”
“You’re here all day with a baby and you don’t know?”
Suzanne drew herself up. “Look, I have a lot to do around here—”
Otis began to wail and Gary hastily picked him up and rocked him. “I am so sick of this.”
“Fine. So am I.”
She was leaning against the doorway, sulking. It made something rush through him in fury. “And I’m sick of you! You were brought here to help, not to be another baby I have to take care of! What do you think is going on here? I can’t take care of everything myself! I need you! Otis needs you! And so does Molly!”
Suzanne snorted. “Molly doesn’t need me. Molly doesn’t even know I’m there.”
“Shut up! Don’t you say that! Don’t you ever say that!” Flustered, he carried Otis to the bathroom and wiped the baby off with a washcloth. He came back into the baby’s room and set Otis down, grabbing for a clean diaper. Otis screamed. “You’re upsetting Otis!”
“I’m upsetting him?” Her face tightened with anger. “This is hard for me, too, you know. Molly’s my sister. How do you think I feel?”
“You can’t just sit around here and be depressed!”
“Fine!” Suzanne whipped around. “I won’t.” She stormed out.
“Wait! Where are you going?” Otis began to wail again, his voice rising in pitch. Gary heard Suzanne slam the door of her room. He heard her opening and closing drawers. He was so scared she’d leave that he was frozen. What was he going to do now? What was any of them going to do? And then Otis began shrieking, but it was a different kind of shriek, one he had never heard before. Otis flailed in his arms. His face was red, coiled up. And suddenly Suzanne, her face white and scared, came into the room.
“What’s wrong with him?” she whispered.
Gary sat in the rocker. Otis screamed even louder. Gary put one hand on the baby’s head. “He’s not hot.” Otis shrieked and balled his hands into fists. Gary looked helplessly at Suzanne.
Suzanne warmed a bottle but when she tried to give it to the baby, he angrily batted it away. “Otis! Otis!” Gary called.
Otis stiffened and caught his breath and screamed.
“That does it. Something’s wrong!” Gary handed Otis to Suzanne and reached for the phone. “I’m calling the doctor.”
He was on the phone for only five minutes. “Colic.” He shook his head in disbelief. “He says it will pass.”
“How does he know without seeing him?”
“He said it’s common.”
“What causes it?”
“Nothing. They don’t know.”
“I don’t believe it,” Suzanne said. “There must be something we can do.”
Otis screamed and kicked against Suzanne.
“Gerta! Maybe Gerta knows.” He grabbed for the phone again. “Gerta?” he said. His voice was tight, desperate. He nodded at the phone.
“Oh. All right.” He looked defeated. “You’re sure.”
“What? What did she say?”
“She has never dealt with colicky babies. She told me that babies know better than to act that way with her.” He shook his head. He gave a half laugh.
“Give me a break. What else?”
“The baby—he—” Gary made his voice accented the way Gerta’s was. “The baby--he know his mother is ill and this is the way he pray for her.” Gary’s voice bubbled up. “She thinks Otis is praying for Molly!” He started laughing, doubling over. “This baby, he understand!” Gary laughed so hard he started to cough. Suzanne stared at him, and Otis shrieked and flailed and then, as abruptly as it started, he stopped laughing.
It was Suzanne’s idea to take the baby for a drive. The baby screamed and thrashed in Gary’s arms the whole way outside. “Sit in back with him,” Gary told Suzanne. She opened up the baby’s car seat and stepped aside while Gary fit him in. The baby’s arms beat like propellers against the seat. His shrieks were like a siren. This is how people
go nuts, Suzanne thought. Even with her fingers poked into her ears, she could still hear him.
Gary twisted in his seat and surveyed the two of them anxiously. “Go,” she said.
They were only a block away when the baby snuffled and suddenly stopped crying. Suzanne took her fingers out of her ears. Gary turned and stared at him and then stared at Suzanne in amazement. He stopped the car. His eyes met Suzanne’s. The baby’s eyes flew open. His face reddened and he began to wail. “All right, all right, you’re the boss—” Gary said, and started the car again.
He had gone only half a mile when Suzanne tapped him, pointing a finger toward the car seat. The baby was asleep.
“Let’s just drive.” Gary said. He wound around the same route over and over again. Suzanne didn’t mind. There was something hypnotic about being in the backseat. Then he started driving farther out, past the diners, the dance joints, the bowling alleys. She looked at everything from a dreamy distance, as if she had never lived here at all. “It’s still one big mall out here, isn’t it?” Suzanne said. “I never figured Molly would stay in New Jersey.” Suzanne shook her head. “At least she got out of Elizabeth.”
Gary turned the wheel. The baby’s mouth flopped open. “She wanted to stay in Elizabeth. Then we found our house here.”
“No way! She was miserable in Elizabeth!”
“Not when I met her.”
Gary fiddled with the dials. Surprise, oh, surprise, some good old down and dirty country blues, the kind she had listened to night after night. She used to wail along to it. Gary kept talking. She was barely listening to him. She couldn’t have cared less how he met Molly and fell in love, how they found the house—all that mind-numbing suburbia life story stuff that he was telling more for himself than for her.
“I sky-dived a few times.”
Suzanne sat up. This was halfway interesting. “You’re kidding. You?”
He half smiled. “Ah-ha, the truth comes out what you think about me.”
“Why’d you stop? You got scared?”
He shook his head. “Being scared was the point. I was testing myself. Trying to see if I could really do it. And I could. If I had money, I’d do it again.”
Gary kept talking, changing the subject now, and Suzanne began to listen to him with a little more interest. His shtick still was pretty boring, the usual stuff about college and travel, but every once in a while, like a bright jewel in the sand, he’d say something that surprised her out of her stupor——that he had learned to drive when he was a little kid. That he liked kung fu movies. And then she would start to listen a little harder to him.
It was four in the morning, they were both exhausted. “I guess we can go home now,” Gary said.
The baby was still sleeping when Gary parked the car. Suzanne quietly got him out of his car seat and out of the car, and as she was standing, she suddenly felt Gary beside her. “I’ll take him,” he said, and she felt his hand, broad and smooth, along her back, and as soon as he took it away, she circled both her arms about herself. She followed Gary into the house. “I can take it from here,” Gary whispered, leaving her standing alone in the living room.
By six in the morning, barely seconds after Gary left to go see Molly, the colic was back. Well, so what. Suzanne didn’t mind driving the baby around all day. He slept and she got to just go, she got to pick the music she wanted to blast, and she kept her cigarettes nice and handy on the seat beside her. Driving was the perfect excuse. She didn’t have to do the laundry or the shopping. Even Gary knew taking care of the baby’s colic was more important. The baby would sleep enough so she could haul him into a fast food joint with her so she could grab a burger and fries, eating quickly before he woke and started cranking up all over again. And then they’d go home and wait for Gary and he’d take over for an hour while she went to see Molly, and then before she knew it, she’d be back in the car and on the road.
She had to admit that she liked the night drives better than the day ones. She had always thought of herself as a night person, and maybe her idea of that wasn’t exactly riding inside of a car, but at least she was out.
Gary could drive like a pro when he wanted to, sliding in and out of lanes, speeding here and there. You had to admire driving like that. He talked and talked about a million different things, and he began to ask her questions. Not about her life with Molly, thank God. Nothing that would make her feel guilty or want to jump right out of the car. He asked her these weird questions, almost like school essays, or those dopey Reader’s Digest things: My Most Unforgettable Character, by Suzanne Goldman. “Tell me the worst customer you ever had,” Gary insisted.
Come on, she thought. But she found herself talking to him, telling him about the high-priced call girl who paid extra to have her pubic hair dyed, about the biker who wanted KILL FOR THRILL shaved into his hair. She had never talked about her work all that much to Ivan. She used to cut his hair, taking extra pains, making sure it looked good because she knew how important that was to him. But afterward, he’d get up and fuss with it. Once, she saw him nicking at the sides with a nail scissors. “A monkey could do what you do,” Ivan had once said. But Gary paid attention. He whooped and laughed and asked questions. He was such a good audience that he made her want to talk even more. He made her remember an eighty-year-old woman who wanted her hair spiked and punky, a kung fu teacher who kicked in her wall when she refused to take a free lesson instead of payment. Gary laughed and hit the steering wheel in appreciation.
“Hold on.” Gary pointed to a diner. “I’ll be right back.”
He wasn’t gone long, but when he came back, he had an ice cream cone and an ice cream sandwich. He handed her the cone, strawberry, her favorite.
“How did you know I liked strawberry?” she said.
“It’s the only ice cream you buy.”
She looked at him, checking to see if he was being sarcastic, but all he was doing was taking bites from his sandwich.
Gary drove, half paying attention, bopping one hand on the steering wheel to the music. Suzanne began to like best the times around three or four in the morning, when there was hardly anyone in the road, when it seemed like there was hardly anyone in the world except for them, sitting in the car, telling stories to each other and laughing. She could have driven all night then.
The baby had the colic for two weeks. And counting. And then one afternoon, when Suzanne was driving around, when she stopped to try to get a hamburger, the baby woke up and for the first time in a long while, the kid wasn’t crying. He blinked at her, as if he were awakening from a very long dream. “Well, if it isn’t Rip Van Baby,” Suzanne said. He was good in the stroller. He was good when she wheeled him into the diner, and good while she ate her burger and fries. He was so good she decided to go check out the record store next door, and he didn’t cry there either.
All that afternoon, Suzanne braced for the baby to start screaming again. She drove for an hour and then, as a kind of experiment, took him home. He yawned and batted his hands against her. She set him in his playpen and he cooed at his toys. And when Gary came home, the baby was calmly examining his toes, blinking up at Gary as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Gary crouched down beside the baby. “Does this mean what I think it means?” Gary looked at Suzanne.
“Well, hallelujah!” Suzanne said. But her voice sounded hollow to her, like the inside of a metal can.