Love Invents Us (6 page)

Benjie crouched in front of the dresser, his little thing dangling between his ankles. He held up a few pairs of his mother’s baggy white underpants, more like my panties than a grown woman’s, I thought, and then he put them back in the drawer. I certainly wasn’t going to make fun of his mother’s underwear, but if that was all we were going to find, I’d go back to the magazine and he could call me when he was tired. He held up a little plastic shield.

“Athletic cup,” he said, putting it in front to show me how it worked. “My dad used to wear it for rugby.”

I started looking around on my own. If I waited for Benjie, we’d never get to any good stuff. I stuck my hand under the bed, and then I got down on my knees. Under the bed and back of the closet had been the best places so far. I didn’t like going into basements, certainly not for the split garden hoses, rusty skates, and used tires that everyone kept.

There was nothing under the bed, but in the back of the closet there were shoe boxes half filled with curling photographs. I let Benjie rummage in the underwear drawers. The pictures were of Mrs. Stone.

She was naked, kneeling in one, on her hands and knees in the others, looking back at the camera with a stupid smile. Her long hair hung over one shoulder, and her rear end was dark with pimples and little creases and hairs. The whole thing was worse than her paintings. I put the photos back in the box and the box back behind Mr. Stone’s winter boots.

“Let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”

“Look at this. It’s Greta.”

I hated it when kids called their parents by their first names, like they were other kids.

She is skinny and tall in the photo, taller than she looks now. Maybe it’s because her skirt is so short and her hair is short too, with bangs sticking out in three directions. She’s wearing shoes with no socks, but it doesn’t look like summer; she’s wearing a boy’s jacket, her hands stuck in the pockets.

“Where is that?” It’s obviously not America.

“Prague. That’s in Czechoslovakia. They speak Czech. My mother speaks Czech.”

“Do you?”

“A little. Not really. She looks weird.”

“Yeah.” I looked at the picture again. I knew what she was thinking as if I were standing there myself, my hands in her pockets, our fingers wedged together in the torn lining. She is trying not to cry. Everyone wants her to be happy now, and she’s trying.

“It’s late, Benj. You’re supposed to be in bed.”

“You’re invisible.”

“I am not fucking invisible and it’s ten-thirty. Come on, put the picture back.”

He jumped on the bed, bouncing like a trampoline expert, knees bent, arms parallel to the mat, thing flapping up and down in a blur.

“Come and get me,
milacku.”

“What’s that?” I began circling the bed. I wanted to grab him, but I didn’t want to smush my face against his thing or his butt.

“Milacku
, sweetie pie.
Milacku
, sweetie pie.
Mam te rad
. I love you.
Mam te rad. Dobrounots
. Good night.
Dobrounots
. Good night, good doughnuts.”

He kept singing the words and repeating them until the English and Czech ran together and I couldn’t understand anything. The bed was creaking loudly, rocking on the short wooden legs.

“Benjie, get off the bed.”

“Say the f-word again.”

“Get off the bed. I’m sorry I used bad language.”

He started screaming. “Say it. Say the f-word.”

“Okay, stop it. Jesus. Get off the fucking bed. Okay? Get
off the fucking bed and give me the fucking picture. Your parents will never fucking hire me again if they come home at eleven and find you wandering around the fucking house butt-naked. Okay?”

By the third “fucking” he stopped bouncing, and then he just sat on the end of the bed, waving the photo at me like a little grey flag. I took it out of his hand and put it back in the black leather wallet he’d found it in.

“Where’d you get the wallet?”

He shrugged.

“Come
on
. You can’t go looking through people’s stuff and leave it all over the place.” Lessons in Rudimentary Snooping.

“In the thing there.” He pointed to the nightstand.

I wasn’t a genius, but at nine I knew the word for “nightstand.” Of course, because of my mother, I also knew “escritoire,” “armoire,” and more about Chippendale Chinese than most people.

I slid the picture out, looking again at her face, skinny little scared face with a big fake smile. I put the wallet back in the drawer, laying a pencil stub across it to make it look normally messy.

I was getting used to Benjie being naked. I didn’t even care when he left the bathroom door open while he brushed his teeth and peed.

I pulled the covers over him.

“Sit with me,” he said. “I’m scared of the dark.”

“Come on,” I said. I wanted to watch TV.

“I am. You have to sit with me. Max does when she’s not here.”

“Usually it’s your father?” I liked the idea of Mr. Stone’s being a great father.

“No. Her. Because she’s here. You know, she sleeps in here.” He pointed to the twin bed on the other side of the room.

“Your mother sleeps in here?”

“Yeah. Is that weird?”

“No. Maybe she sleeps in here because you’re scared of the dark. To keep you company.”

“Maybe,” he said, and he yawned.

“You can fall asleep now, you’re all right. Good night, Benjie.”

“Dobrounots, milacku.”

“Dobrounots
, you doughnut.”

“L
et’s have a look-see at that right hand,” Mrs. Hill said, eyes on the ceiling.

“Vivian said absolutely no more pork rinds.”

I was fifteen, and in our two years we had one ambulance ride, two angina attacks, and more than a few sponge baths between us. After
Pride and Prejudice
, we alternated between the tabloids and the poetry of Mr. Paul Dunbar.

“Do you see Vivian on the premises?”

“Come on, Mrs. Hill, it’s not good for you.” There was no other adult I could talk to like that. My mother never did anything that wasn’t good for her, my father’s arteries were of no interest to me, and Mr. Stone, who knew something about everything, made it clear that we could talk about me but not about him.

“Who dropped you off? I heard a car door.” Mrs. Hill liked to think that her hearing was extra sharp to make up for her eyesight.

“Mr. Stone.” Very proud.

“Who’s that?”

“He’s my English teacher this year.”

“Why’s he dropping you off here?”

Mrs. Hill was always faintly accusatory. I shrugged, which I knew she couldn’t see but would feel, and started peeling carrots.

“Elizabeth, am I talking to myself? Are you in some kind of trouble at school?”

“No, I’m not. I imagine he dropped me off here because I was going here.” I spoke very slowly and clearly, to show her how stupid she was being.

“How old a man is this Mr. Who?”

“Mr. Stone. How should I know? Old. Do you want these carrots pureed or in circles, to go with peas or something?”

“He drives you home a lot?”

I sliced the carrots into inedible oversized chunks and went into her bedroom to gather up the laundry. She would sit and wait for me to come back. Her legs hurt too much for her to follow me around pestering me.

“Has your mother met him?”

Not on a bet.

“Your legs are getting long.”

I shrugged again.

“You stopped wearing your glasses. How come?”

“Contacts.” I loved my contacts. I loved the sharp world and I loved my eyes, edged in black eyeliner. I had scratched my corneas twice because I couldn’t bear to take the lenses out, except to sleep.

Mr. Stone dropped me off on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and after that, I tried to shut the car door softly, grabbing it with both hands to keep it from slamming, and as soon as I walked
through the door Mrs. Hill would say, “Fool,” as though she were speaking to someone else.

Charlotte Macklin was the school social worker, and if she had heard Mrs. Hill, she would have felt better about me, She thought no one gave a damn that I spent all my study halls in Mr. Stone’s office and was frequently seen getting into his car after school. Mrs. Macklin knew, even if no one else did, that although it did not violate any school rule, it undermined morale for students and teachers to see a ninth-grade girl sitting behind the desk of the English department chairman, sipping coffee out of his thermos, showing her boot bottoms to the passing world. Mr. Stone had already heard from her, but I didn’t know that then. Mrs. Macklin looked at me knowingly as I skated past, her pale blue eyes narrow with concern, her handkerchief twisting into damp white loops. She sent me three notes, inviting me to a self-esteem group, to a girls-with-divorcing-parents group, and finally to a one-on-one interview to discuss my goals and expectations for high school. I declined, and she called me out of algebra, showing that she had not read my school records all that carefully. She asked how I was feeling about my parents’ divorce and I said fine. She said she’d noticed that I preferred to have my lunch in Mr. Stone’s office rather than in the cafeteria and I said that was true. We eyed each other for five minutes, and she sent me back to class. I told Mr. Stone about it, and his face got really red, which meant trouble for Mrs. Macklin. Mr. Stone and the principal were old friends and Mrs. Macklin was nobody.

By the end of May my parents were legally divorced. My mother took on a secretary, a yoga teacher, and a bottle-green
MG. She was already talking about where I would go to college. She’d had enough.

My father moved further out on the Island, to a cottage in Sag Harbor, and came by for oddly formal, oddly pleasant visits. We gave up on eating out together after trolling up and down Northern Boulevard in his Oldsmobile, looking for a place to get to know each other, silently fishing broccoli out of broccoli and beef, anchovies out of Caesar salad, and raisins out of rice pudding, and discovering that this was what we had in common. He’d knock on the door and come in with bags of Chinese food or gargantuan deli sandwiches, so fat the white paper unwrapped by itself as he laid them down, crumbling slices of pastrami and corned beef falling out the sides, shining heaps of pink meat, enough for another meal. My mother had never liked cooking, but the kitchen was her domain, and it didn’t occur to us to eat in there or to put our big Polish paws all over the glass dining room table. The living room was out; I didn’t mind smears of Ba Tampte Kosher Mustard on the four-hundred-year-old Turkish prayer rugs, but even estranged, my father wouldn’t have it. We: ate in the TV room, surrounded by enough food for six people, and when my mother walked past she shook her head, smiling politely, as if my father were an extravagant, ultimately unacceptable suitor, as I guess he was.

He stopped wearing the navy blazers and light grey pants he’d always worn to make himself look like a German-barely-Jewish-almost-a-Warburg financial adviser instead of an accountant from Pustelnik by way of Brooklyn. He stopped wearing the ties my mother bought him every year, red silk prints of stirrups and foxes and unicorns. Now he wore denim
shirts and cotton pants that weren’t jeans but were nothing my mother would have approved, and soft, goosey brown loafers, and he began every conversation telling me how great the air was in the Hamptons. He didn’t touch me much, but when he did, I didn’t flinch. When I was eight, we’d bumped into each other naked outside my parents’ bathroom, and as he gently pulled me off him I cried out at his trembling, helpless sac; I felt so sorry for him, appalled that that dangling, chickenish mess was the true future of boys. He was friendlier, away from my mother. She was the same. No warmer (I saw mothers put their hands to their children’s cheeks for no reason and wondered how you got a mother who did that), no cuddlier (not that I wanted cuddling now), no more interested in my life as her daughter than she’d ever been. My poor father belonged somewhere else, not the somewhere else that was right for me, certainly not the somewhere else of the narrow, balconied brownstones and stark glass apartment buildings that seemed right for my mother.

After he left, my mother put the moo goo gai pan and the shrimp in garlic sauce in plastic tubs and said, “Another shiksa in your father’s life? I daresay
she
won’t have to convert.”

Mr. Stone still picked me up after school most days. I was pretty sure I’d stopped growing; I pressed my knees one way and my feet the other just to sit almost comfortably in the VW’s front seat. I rode with my hands tucked between my legs. I put on lip gloss in his visor mirror. Comic book remnants and paper cups and cigarette packs covered my sneakers. One Tuesday afternoon, at the second light, I said what I’d been wanting to say since February vacation.

“I think it’d be nice if you met Mrs. Hill. I think she’d like to meet you. She used to teach, I think.”

“Really.”

“She said she did. Here, don’t forget, it’s the next one on the left.”

Mr. Stone said, out the window, “You know, I grew up in a place a lot like this. Mostly white, though—my God, look at those.” He pointed to twin blue-shuttered houses with orderly twin gardens and bitty porches, each with two chairs and a small plastic table set with four tall pink glasses and matching pitchers. “You smell that? That’s the smell of the South, right there. Mint, dirt, and cornstarch.”

I led him in, describing our progress so Mrs. Hill wouldn’t be surprised and pissy.

“We’re here, Mrs. Hill. I brought Mr. Stone, my English teacher. He thought he’d stop by and say hi.”

Mr. Stone didn’t look like he appreciated being shanghaied into the middle of Mrs. Hill’s blue brocade living room set. Mrs. Hill looked right at him, which was like turning her back.

“Welcome, Mr. Stone. Elizabeth’s famous English teacher. Honey, why don’t you make us some tea?”

I just stood there until Mrs. Hill flapped her hands a couple of times like I was a loose chicken, and then I backed out, watching Mr. Stone. He smiled at Mrs. Hill and flapped a hand too. I listened on the other side of the kitchen door, which was so thin I could hear Mrs. Hill sighing and Mr. Stone sighing back.