Keeping Secrets (10 page)

But she did love her. Oh, Lord, yes, how she loved the child. Though it was hard for her to reach out to her now that Emma was getting bigger. For Rosalie didn’t really know about touching people, even Emma, once they got to the stage where they could hug and touch back. They scared her sometimes, Emma’s grasping little hands. The child liked to touch, to pet things, to ask questions; she was constantly reaching out, as if she wanted to take the whole world into her hands and her eyes and her mouth. Rosalie had never seen a child so hungry, hungry for
everything
, in her whole life.

* * *

Still shaking with anger at Rosalie’s words, Jake sat at the kitchen table stirring canned milk into his coffee. He tasted it and made a face. The cloying taste was disgusting, but canned milk was a rule of the house. Rosalie thought cream a needless expense. He sighed and stirred some more.

In the past four, almost five years, there were many things Jake had come to dislike about his life in West Cypress, and when Rosalie nagged at him, like she had just done, all of his displeasure tumbled like a house of cards built on a poker table downtown at the Ritz.

For one thing, he hated the food Rosalie piled on his plate every day: squash, peas, beans, okra. And greens, all kinds of greens, turnip, mustard, collard, things he’d never heard of, cooked into a slimy mess with pork fat. His mother, Riva, would never have allowed such things in her back door.

The weather was sticky and hot like a damp blanket from May until October. Though summers in New York had been no picnic, there was the respite of the beach. You needed a boat to enjoy the Coupitaw. The Fines didn’t have a boat.

God, it was so hot today. The little fan turning slowly in the store never hit him often enough for the sweat to dry. This afternoon he had to mow the yard, and his perspiration would pour until his clothes were soaked and he was faint.

Another thing, he would tell Ruth if she were here, he didn’t understand about Southerners. They were supposed to be so polite, but they laughed at his accent, teased him about being a Yankee, while at the same time they pretended not to notice his stutter. But he knew they did—behind those nicey-nice smiles. They just waited to laugh about that until they got out the door.

He especially hated Sundays, putting on a tie and going with Rosalie to the West Cypress Baptist Church. All that malarkey about Jesus—what did he care? Didn’t Rosalie understand that he was a Jew?

“It’s a small town, Jake. People will talk about you if you don’t go to church, and they won’t come in the store. Besides, think about Emma.”

Riva would have had plenty to say about that too.

“If the Baptists are so good,” he asked Rosalie, “how come Deacon Ledbetter is always trying to cheat you on the bills from his feed store?”

“Hush, Jake.” It wasn’t nice to talk about things like that. Hooey. Hooey, that’s what Christianity was. Rosalie said he had to go for Emma, so he went. But he hated it.

He hated it almost as much as working in the store every day, being left alone to talk to salesmen about things he didn’t understand, to try to figure up bills and answer the phone and take deliveries and cut meat and deal with customers to whom he was supposed to be nice. He couldn’t even make out what some of them were saying, they talked with so much mush in their mouths. And
they
couldn’t understand
him
! Hooey!

“Be polite, Jake,” Rosalie was always telling him, sometimes saying it in front of them, making him feel ashamed. He didn’t understand their ways. They were all so slow, and talked so much, on and on about nothing. All that talking, that wasn’t business. If they had to go to New York and order a sandwich in a deli, where you stood in line, said what you wanted, “Turkey on rye, Russian dressing, coffee regular,” then paid for it and got out in a hurry, they would have all starved to death. How could he be polite to people who made him so impatient?

He was fidgety, too, with the rent houses, Ro’d just bought another one, she was always fixing up. He didn’t know how to hammer nails, lay linoleum, hang wallpaper. Rosalie did. She liked it, let her do it. He didn’t want any part of it. When he finished in the store, he wanted to relax, read a detective novel, look at the pictures of faraway places in
The National Geographic
. Rosalie told him he was lazy. He didn’t know, maybe he was. But he knew for sure that he was all thumbs with a hammer, and hammering was the last thing on his mind.

He missed his family too, the big parties at Ruth’s or Rhoda’s, not that they’d always gotten along, but eventually everyone would kiss and make up. He missed the tables of good food and the rye whiskey and, later, poker with the boys. He missed Ruth’s easy laugh, her teasing him, always making him smile. “Jakey, Jakey,” she’d say, rubbing the top of his head, bald since he was twenty-two. Sometimes they’d all get dressed up sharp and go into the city, do the clubs, listen to the music and dance. Or there was Coney Island in the summer with the rides, the parachute jump, the boardwalk, the beach with all the family and their friends. There was no one who knew him like that here, who could tease him and make him laugh. There was no drinking, at least not family drinking, just a few to have a good time. No clubs, no dancing, no beach. They knew only a few people who came into the store. And then there was her family. Her sister Janey wasn’t too bad, but like all of them she was a Baptist, living in mortal fear of having a good time. They’d rather argue and fight, like they did almost every time that he and Rosalie went to where her mother, Virgie, now lived, on a farm fifty miles away in Pearl Bank next door to her daughter Nancy. After a Sunday dinner of fried chicken they’d gather in the tiny living room and bring up grudges and pick at old scabs until they ran again, the blood mixed with the sisters’ tears. Jake couldn’t ever remember a Sunday afternoon that they’d left there without Rosalie snuffling into a handkerchief half the way back to West Cypress.

Jake stayed pretty close to home, except for the occasional evening he walked into town to play dominoes at the Ritz Bar. He would call Rosalie when he was through, and she and Emma would drive down in the gray Chevrolet and get him.

That was another thing, he’d never learned to drive. He hadn’t had to in the East, and now it was too late. He’d tried, but Rosalie’s poking at him to do this and do that while he was trying to watch the traffic made him too nervous. He’d given up. Not that there was much of anywhere to go. Nor much fun to be had. Not even
that
kind of fun.

Jake shut his eyes. He didn’t think about that anymore, because if he did, it made him want to throw up.

The milk began to curdle in his stomach then, as he couldn’t help remembering that night.

“No,” Rosalie had said to him in those three days they’d courted after he and Emma had first arrived from New York.

That was fine. He hadn’t wanted to rush her. After all, it
was
a marriage of convenience. She’d come to him in her own time. But the days and weeks and months had passed, and then one night he gathered all the courage that his need had constructed, like water building behind a dike, and reached out a hand.

She jerked away. “No!”

“But, Rosalie.”

“No!”

“I’ll be careful.” He could be, if she were a virgin. Was Rosalie a virgin? He didn’t know. And he’d bought condoms. They were underneath his handkerchiefs in his dresser drawer.

“No.”

He couldn’t talk to her about it. Whatever would he say?

So he let the time slip past. Rosalie treated Emma like her own. Why, it was practically as if she
were
her own, as if he’d come to believe the lie. He couldn’t leave his baby, and he couldn’t take her away, not now, not once Emma had a home.

The months turned into years. Emma was two, three, four. And then the night had come that he hated to think about, the night he’d tried once more. Only once more.

He’d been to the Ritz to play dominoes, and though he didn’t drink at all anymore, that one night he did. Mr. Vance was celebrating his birthday, treating everyone to beers.

“Come on, Jake,” they’d urged him.

“No.” He shook his head.

“Come on, be a sport.”

He always felt so separate. Why not? He reached for the beer. Why not have a sip or two and step inside?

He’d had three—or four, he’d lost track. It had been so long, the alcohol went straight to his head.

He decided to walk home that night; wobbling a little here, floating a little there, he convinced himself that this night would be different. Rosalie would be waiting for him wearing a flirtatious smile and little else.

She was asleep. He edged himself onto the bed and laid his hand over her breast.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was stiletto sharp. She sat straight up, instantly awake.

“Ro…I…th-th-th….” He couldn’t get it out.

“You thought what? You got yourself all drunked up,” for she could smell the alcohol, “and came home with
that
on your mind?”

Jake jumped out of bed, that hand which had grazed her breast now holding his belly as if her words had stabbed him, which they had. He barreled out the door, barely making it to the backyard, where he doubled over. An almost-naked man in boxer shorts, he vomited into the grass. He heaved the beer and the shame over and over until there was nothing left. Then he sat in the wooden swing he’d hung for Emma from a green iron frame and pushed himself back and forth. The tears ran down his face, and he let them flow unobstructed from his chin. When he pushed off with his feet again, the tears flew in silver arcs into the night.

He thought of catching his tears in Rosalie’s watering can and throwing them in her face. He thought of bundling up Emma in the night, going back north to his sister Ruth’s house. But when he was standing on Ruth’s doorstep, how would he explain? Then he thought of every hurtful thing that anyone had ever done to him. He cried and swung and cried some more. Finally exhausted, he curled into a ball in the swing and fell asleep.

He awoke at dawn. The Cloutiers’ yellow tomcat had jumped up on the arm of the swing and was staring him in the face.

“Go way,” he growled.

The cat licked its whiskers, then his toes. It tickled, but he couldn’t laugh, for he remembered where he was and why. He was still alive, he found, even if he didn’t want to be.

He tried to sit up. At first his limbs were so stiff and frozen, he couldn’t. Slowly he warmed them, stretching like the cat. Then, not knowing what else to do, he got up and went inside and took a bath. He didn’t speak to Rosalie for almost a month after that, but eventually his hurt and need, flowing along like the river of his days, smoothed out.

No, he didn’t think about it much anymore. And, in a way maybe Rosalie was right. There could be that slip. There was always that chance, that a condom would break, and another child would be born. And look where that had ended, Helen lying dead on the floor.

But sex made Emma too, Jake, a voice whispered. Emma too. Yes, Emma, the only thing in the world that made him smile.

Darling Emma with her yellow curls, posing for the camera in her dancing costumes, holding out her little pink skirt and cocking one hip to the side. She was so pretty—and so smart. Already she talked a mile a minute. With that Southern accent, she reminded him of Helen, though he would never tell Rosalie that.

“She sounds just like you,” he said instead. He couldn’t get over Emma. Not even in school yet and already she was talking about things sometimes he didn’t understand. He was growing shy with her. Who was this child, chattering to herself in mirrors, talking with customers in the store, understanding what they wanted from him before he did?

Did that brightness come from Helen? But then, he had to admit Rosalie had done her part, was a good mother, so proud. She stayed up late into the night sewing for her, making little pleated dresses, silvery tutus for her dancing classes. “Dresses like I never had,” Ro said. She read story after story to her, day after day, as soon as Emma was old enough to listen. At four she could read for herself. Now his Emma at five and a half read almost as well as he could. Yes, Rosalie had kept her half of the bargain, even though sometimes she was brusque with Emma. Well, that was her way. That was his way, too, now that he thought about it. Why did the two of them have such a hard time opening their mouths and arms and just letting soft words and caresses flow out? If only I could, he thought, if only I could relax my tongue, let the words flow like honey.

“Jake, are you coming back in the store?” Rosalie, hands on her hips, filled the doorway.

He hated it when she stood there talking to him as if he were a child. He didn’t answer.

“Jake, I’m talking to you.”

Well, of course she was.

“Are you going to answer me?”

Her voice had grown more shrill, and then its sound narrowed into a little sliver of pain that hurt Jake’s heart. She didn’t love him. She’d never held him. She never would. Oh, Helen, why did you leave me? What am I doing here?

“No! Goddammit! I’m not going to answer you!”

The words burst out of him. He wouldn’t, either. He could be silent for days, for weeks, for months, when he wanted to. Rosalie might think herself a clever horse trader, but he’d teach her to be careful what she bargained for.