After This (19 page)

 

pray, waiting for his turn. Just one spare, he used to say. Not even a
strike. You don’t have to make me good, he used to tell God. “Just
average.” He looked at her and laughed. She laughed, too, mostly
because it was the middle of the morning and she was supposed to be
in school and she wasn’t. She was sitting beside her brother in his car.
He raised his arm and pointed and then quickly returned his hand to
the steering wheel. “That’s where we used to go for our polio shots,
when we were little. And then they changed it to those little sugar
cubes.”

 

“Oh,” she said.

 

“I guess they worked,” he said. He looked at her. “I’ve never had
polio, have you?”

 

She laughed, not exactly certain it was a joke. “No,” she said.

 

He put the turn signal on again and once more pulled out into the
road. It was a familiar route, the one that led from the church or the
school to home, but it was made strange and new by the fact that it
was mid-morning and she should have been in school, by the fact that
she was alone with her brother, in his car, and they were driving even
more slowly than she could walk. They passed the playing field at the
back of the school, beside the cemetery. Without a word, the two of
them turned their heads to watch it go by. The grass was balding and
the fence behind home plate was bent and torn. There was still
something of summer’s dust over the whole thing although the leaves
on the trees at the far end were yellow and red. They turned again,
down another street, this one lined with houses like their own. Lawns
and driveways and sidewalks. Jacob named the friends who lived in
some of them—Louie, Kevin Malloy, Ted Fish. He told her a story
about one Halloween. He turned again. Lori Ballinger’s house. Michael
took her to the prom. Bobby Kent’s house. Bobby cried in sixth grade
when people wouldn’t stop calling him Clark. He turned again. Now
they were off the familiar

 

route to church and school and she began to suspect once again that
he was taking her to the dentist.

 

“Did you ever see this house?” he asked her and once more raised
his hand from the steering wheel. She looked. A house like all the
others but as they passed she saw that the bushes beneath the front
windows were scattered with garden gnomes, maybe a dozen of them.
And then that the front steps were full of ceramic animals—dogs,
geese, rabbits. And then, as they passed, that the garage door was
painted with a huge, colorful portrait of the Blessed Mother,
surrounded by stars and rainbows. “Not sure what’s going on there,”
he said.

 

She said, “It’s pretty.”

 

They passed a woman pushing a baby carriage. Lawns with
sprinklers going. He reached to turn on the radio. He said, “Don’t let
me hear you listening to anybody but the Good Guys while I’m gone.”

 

She said, “I won’t,” and remembered for the first time that last
night before she went to bed her mother had said that when she got
home from school today Jacob would be gone off to the army. Like
their father had done.

 

He turned again, the signal making a ticking sound, and she
recognized the street once more. They were nearly home. “Do me a
favor,” he said. “Scoot down.” She looked at him, unsure. “Scoot
down,” he said, more urgently. He put his hand on the top of her head,
over her beanie, and pushed her a little. The terry-cloth cover slid with
her. He did not increase his speed. “Just in case Mom’s looking out the
window,” he said.

 

All she could see were the tops of the trees and the blue sky, but
she knew they were passing their house, the driveway and the lawn,
the white shingles and the dark red trim, the sheer white curtains in
the front window and the drapes upstairs, in their parents’ room.
She knew her brother had turned and was looking at their house over
the top of her head. It was like a dream of passing her own house and
not turning in. There was a slow song on the radio and the
tick tick tick
of the turn signal seemed to mar it somehow. Jacob looked down at
her over the rolled-up sleeve of his arm. Her beanie had come down
over her forehead and she had buried her chin in her chest. He glanced
back at the street and then reached out to touch her thin elbow.
“Okay,” he said, softly. “Sit up again.” But the terry-cloth cover was
slipping under her and it was more of a struggle than she would have
imagined. She wiggled and pressed her palms against the seat and
raised her legs and pulled at her skirt. Her saddle shoes flashed black
and white beneath the dashboard. He watched her, his eyes going back
and forth from the windshield. “Jeepers,” he said, finally, when she
had settled herself, pushed the beanie to the back of her head. “A little
spastic there,” he said, and although he was smiling, not teasing, she
pouted at him anyway, for saying spastic. He reached out again and
put his palm on her head.

 

They drove on, through an intersection and up a hill and then
around the front of the high school with its long row of gray doors.
Past the football field and the tennis courts, then, turning again, back
among houses that over here were all single-story with long front
lawns. He gave names to only a few of them. He was mostly listening
to the music, only occasionally, softly, singing along. His sleeves were
rolled up and his arms looked strong to her, although his hands,
fingers and nails, were pale and thin, like her own. He said, “This can
be Michael’s car when he gets home from school, Thanksgiving and
Christmas. But Dad’s got to go out and turn the engine over every
other day or so. Remind him.”

 

She said okay. They were driving back down the hill. She could
see the wiry spire stuck on top of St. Gabriel’s round roof. There was
the stubble of a beard on her brother’s cheek and his hair brushed the
collar of his shirt. She was beginning to feel the first

 

pinpricks of doubt, or guilt. The morning was growing long. The sun
was now hot through the windshield. She was supposed to be in
school. Surely it was not her first memory of her older brother—he
had once helped her make a bus for dolls out of a cardboard box and
pushed it across the living-room carpet, from bus stop to bus stop—
but it was, perhaps, the first memory in which she saw him distinctly,
on his own, apart from their house and their family, separate. He took
his hands from the steering wheel one at a time and rubbed the palms
against his jeans. He glanced at her again. “Got me a ticket for an
aeroplane,” he said, and grinned, but stopped at a light at the next
intersection, he leaned his head back and blew air at the cloth ceiling.
He closed his eyes and for a moment she was afraid that he had
forgotten about her completely. But then the car behind them beeped
to get them going again. “Hold your horses,” he said, his eyes on the
rearview mirror. There was a brown scapular, a small picture of the
Sacred Heart, dangling from it. They were now passing the far side of
the church and her school, the cemetery and the gray incinerators.

 

“I don’t want to get yelled at,” she told him.

 

He nodded slowly, as if she had said much more and he was
slowly, bit by bit, agreeing with it all. He pulled into the parking lot
beside the church and walked her only to the door of her school. He
pushed the door open for her and she walked under his arm, from the
heavy autumn sun to the cool shadows of the hallway. The entire
school was reciting the prayers before lunch—Sister Rose’s voice on
the PA sounding from every classroom, the children’s collective voice
following along—Our Father and Hail Mary and Bless us, O Lord, and
these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty . . .
She walked along the shining linoleum, down the stairs, and pulled
back with a start as she began to turn into the wrong classroom. By
the time she found her own, the prayers were over and the children
were reaching under their desks for their

 

lunch boxes. When she saw Mrs. Walters’s powdered face, smiling at
her, she began to cry, all unaccountably until she felt the woman’s
hand stroking her head and realized that somewhere along the way
she had lost her beanie. In the parking lot where they played during
recess, she recruited a pair of friends to help her search for it, but with
no luck, although one of them spotted Jacob, coming through one of
the doors of the church and called to Clare. She looked up just in time
to see him leave.
L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
, on the plane, his first flight, he leaned his
head against the window and tried to distinguish the streets and
highways and parks below, looking for the thrill of spotting something
familiar. He looked for the church and the school, certain they would
be his surest landmarks: the roof of St. Gabriel’s, from up here, would
indeed look like a flying saucer. The school and the gym made

identi
fiable, from up here, by the way they jogged around Mr. Krause’s
store. But the plane was banking already and wisps of cloud touched
the rising wing. He could not get his bearings. Down below, there
were green yards and long gray roads and more baseball diamonds
than he would have imagined. There were the blue ovals of backyard
pools. There was the Unisphere and then the stadium and then the
spires of the city, a glimpse of limitless ocean before the plane banked
again and the clouds took over. He sat back. He was aware of an
obligation to say something to the woman beside him—she was a
smallish woman, older than the girls he knew, younger than his
mother, she was already reading a paperback—but he was uncertain of
the protocol. Where you headed, maybe. Or, Good book? Fly much?
He was leaving home for the first time and already he saw how ill
equipped he was, how unready. He could not make conversation with
strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps
the first thing required of him in his new life. He touched his seat belt.
Put his hands in his lap. He closed his eyes and thought to pray but all
petition was undermined by Jesus’ superior prayer, on the night before
his death: Your will, not mine. Jacob wanted only to say, Take care of
me. Give me a break. The change of light in the cabin made him open
his eyes again. The plane had cleared the clouds—they now ran like a
great white field just below the wing, they were touched with gold—
and the sky was a solid blue. “Incredible,” Jacob said, and the woman
beside him put down her book and leaned forward, their shoulders
brushing, her hair smelling fresh, like green leaves. He had a memory
of the scent of green willow leaves on yellow, pliant stems, small
starbursts of blood on his palms. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said.

I
N
J
UNE
, Susan Persichetti found a job at the Woolworth’s in the
mall—the cosmetics counter, which was fun and gave her a chance
every once in a while to slip a lipstick or a bottle of nail polish into her

 

purse. She had to wear a smock, a pale blue polyester thing, all the

 

employees did, and by early August she was bringing it home and

 

putting it on over her clothes in her bedroom before she went

 

downstairs and out past her parents to work.

 

Her room was in the attic, the long, dormered space that had been

 

left unfinished by the builder (although he did provide the center-hall

 

staircase that led to it), and paneled and plumbed rather inexpertly by

 

her father and Tony while he was still in high school. She’d borrowed

 

the room while Tony was in the army and now that he had left home—

 

for good, it seemed—the space was hers alone, but it still retained the

 

dark scent and insurmountable dreariness of a boy’s room: oak

 

paneling and brown shag carpet and a wooden toilet seat in the

 

bathroom. She didn’t mind. She had even kept a couple of her

 

brother’s old posters on the far wall.

 

Putting her smock on over her clothes, she skipped down the

 

stairs, her car keys in her hand, and cried, “Going,” to her parents,

 

who would always look up from the couch or the table or the

 

television and then—if they were in the same room—look at each

 

other to confirm how they both understood that this summer’s quick
glimpses of their teenage daughter breezing in and out the door were
mere prelude to her leaving them for college in another year. And then
for the rest of her life. But the look they exchanged acknowledged, too,
how pleasant it was to know that for her, stepping off into her life,
there would not be the quicksand that had met Tony: the army, the
war, the year away in which the child they had known was lost, utterly
drawn down, sucked under by the troubled, angry, silent young man
he had become.

 

“Drive safely!” they cried back. Or, “Be careful!”—cheerfully,
because girl children went off but they also returned, bringing
grandchildren and their own solicitousness to their parents’ old age.
Sometimes her father would begin to sing, teasing her, “I found a
million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

 

It was amazing, she learned, what you could find out. There was
no sense looking under A in the phone book, for instance, you should
look under W instead: Women’s Health. Women’s Medicine. (Woman
itself sounding in their mouths like a newly coined word—not ladies,
not girls anymore, but women.) Information filtered down from a
college-age friend of a co-worker at Woolworth’s that one of the clinics
in the city was in the same building that held a famous hair salon
everyone at school was talking about going to. She called the clinic
from a pay phone. She needed proof of age and three hundred dollars
and if she hadn’t had a pregnancy test yet, they would do one there.
Also someone to accompany her home.

 

She wasn’t eighteen but she could use Annie Keane’s phony birth
certificate and driver’s license, the one she used to get into bars.
Although Annie had hazel eyes and hers were brown, they were both
five foot five or so and slim. Annie said she’d come with her, too, so no
need to call the boy—”The Jackass” was how Susan now referred to
him—who had stopped calling her himself early in July. There was
only the matter of the money.