Skylight Confessions (3 page)

No matter how good the baby was, John had little patience for him. Diana assured Arlie that the men in their family were all like that when it came to children. That would change when Sam could throw a baseball, when he was old enough to be a son rather than a baby. Arlyn was easily convinced of things that she wanted to believe and her mother-in-law was so sure of herself that Arlyn assumed John's attitude would indeed change. But as Sam grew, John seemed even more annoyed by his presence. When the baby came down with chicken pox in his eighth month, for instance, John moved into a hotel. He could not bear to hear the whimpering, and he himself was at risk, having never had the disease. He stayed away for two weeks, phoning once a day, so distant he might have been millions of miles away rather than thirty blocks uptown.

It was then, alone in the darkened apartment, bathing the fretting baby in the kitchen sink with oatmeal and Aveeno to soothe his red, burning skin, that the bad thought first occurred to Arlyn. Maybe she'd made a mistake. Was it possible that on the night of her father's funeral she should have waited to see who was the next person to come down the street? She felt guilty and disloyal for thinking this, but once it had been imagined — this other man, this other life — she couldn't stop. At the park, on the street, she looked at men and thought,
Maybe it should have been
him. Maybe I have made a terrible error.

By the time Sam was two, she was quite sure she had. Her fate was out there somewhere, and she had wrongly stumbled into another woman's marriage, another woman's life. John was finished with graduate school and now worked at his father's firm, complaining about being the low man despite his talent, a junior partner called upon to do everyone's dirty work, never given the freedom to truly create. He was often gone, commuting in reverse, back and forth to the office in Connecticut, staying overnight at an old friend's in New Haven.

Arlyn was teaching Sam his ABCs. He was a quick learner. He studied her mouth as she made the letter sounds and didn't try himself until he could repeat each letter perfectly. Sam clung to Arlyn, never wanting to play with the other children in the park.

When his father came home, Sam refused to speak; he wouldn't show off his ABCs, wouldn't sing his little songs, wouldn't answer when John called his name. John had begun to wonder if they should have him looked at by a doctor. Something was wrong with the boy. Maybe he had a problem with his hearing or his vision.

But Arlyn knew John was mistaken. That wasn't the problem. She and Sam were in the wrong place with the wrong man; she knew it now, but how could she say it out loud? The wrongness of things had grown from a notion to the major fact of her life. She should have waited. She should have stayed where she was until she was truly sure of the future. She shouldn't have been so foolish, so hopeful, so young, so damn sure.

Every month or so, Arlyn took Sam on the train out to Long Island. Sam was refusing to eat anything but

peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, so Arlie always made several to bring along. Sam loved the train; he made choochoo noises and chattered all the way. Arlyn thought about recording him, and presenting John with the tape, saying,
So there! There's nothing
wrong with him. It's all you!
But she had the strange feeling that if John reversed his opinion and discovered that his son wasn't worthless, he might try to steal him in some way and cut her out of Sam's life, so Arlie never made that tape. She never encouraged John to spend more time with Sam. She kept her one bit of joy to herself.

When the train reached their station, they walked down the hill until the harbor and the ferry were in sight. On windy days there were whitecaps and the water hit against the wooden pilings. On clear days everything looked like glass, the blue sky and even bluer sound, and the hazy outline of Connecticut, so far away. There was another family living in Arlyn's old house. She and Sam would often stand on the corner and watch the new children play. A boy and a girl. They played kickball in the street and climbed up the maple tree and picked azalea buds when they bloomed and stuck the red and pink blossoms in their hair.

Sometimes the children's mother called them in for dinner.

When she came out to the porch, she would notice a red-haired woman and a toddler staring. The new owner of the house would then hurry her children inside; she'd stand behind the curtain, watching, making sure nothing funny was going on. A stalker or a kidnapper or something like that. But no, the strangers just stood there on the corner, even on cold, windy days. The red-haired woman wore an overcoat she'd had for years, thick, gray wool, very unstylish. The child was quiet, not one of those squirming, yowling types. A dark-haired serious boy and his loving mother.

Sometimes they'd be there for over an hour, the woman pointing out the catalpa trees, the sparrows, the streetlights, the porch, the little boy repeating the words. They laughed as though everything were a marvel in this run-down neighborhood. All common objects no normal person would bother to take note of, unless she was a woman who thought she'd made a terrible mistake, someone who came back again and again, hoping that if she just walked down the same street fate would whirl her backward in time until she was once more seventeen, when the future was something she had not yet stepped into, when it was just an idea, a moment, something that had not disappointed her yet.

MAY IN CONNECTICUT WAS LUSCIOUS, SO GREEN IT WAS like a waking dream. Oriole, mockingbird, mock orange, birdsong. In a glass house the green was everywhere. There was no need for carpets, only bare ash floors; no curtains, only the lilacs, the rhododendrons, and yard after yard of boxwood, a hedge of nubby velvet. They had come to live in the Glass Slipper after John's father had had a second heart attack and the older Moodys had moved to Florida. When William Moody passed, Diana stayed on there; the warm weather was better for her arthritis.

How odd that nearly two years later Arlyn still missed her mother-in-law. Someone who cared about her child. Someone who understood that a person living in a glass house could easily become obsessed with the oddest things: stones, birds mistaking windows for thin air, deer running into the sliding doors, hail, windstorms. Glass needed constant care, after all. Rain splatters, sticky sap, falling leaves, pollen. John had hired a service to wash the windows once a week. Arlyn always did it wrong, at least in John's opinion. There were smudges when she did the cleaning herself; she could not reach the tops of some windows even when she dragged out the longest ladder from the garage.

The window cleaner came in a truck marked
Snow Brothers.

Arlyn often watched — it was always the same man, short, stocky, serious about his work. She could not help wondering what had happened to the other Snow brother, if he'd died, or run away.

Arlyn wore her red hair twisted, put up with tortoiseshell combs. It was an old-fashioned style; she believed that her mother, who died when Arlie was a toddler, wore her hair this way. At twenty-four, Arlyn herself felt old. After she sent Sam off for the morning, walking him down the lane to the bus stop so he could go off to nursery school, she usually came back to the house and slipped into bed with her clothes on. Sometimes she didn't bother to take off her shoes, the old leather slippers her father had bought her, which were by now falling apart. She'd had them resoled twice, but the leather itself was shredding. Whenever she wore them she remembered that the entire time her father had been a ferryboat captain, nearly twenty years, he never stayed a single night in Connecticut.
It's a far-of country,
he would say of the place where she now lived.
Those people with wings keep them folded up,
under their suits and dresses, but at the right moment, just when they
need to fly, the wings unfurl and off they go. They never go down with the
ship — they lift off at the very last moment. When everyone else is
sinking into the sea, there they go, up to the clouds.

Wherever she went, Arlyn found herself searching for such people, in the treetops, at the market, on telephone poles. She felt light in some strange way; disconnected from roads and grass, from everything on earth. She herself would have chosen a raven's wings, deep blue-black feathers, shimmering and strong. Once she went up to the roof of the garage and stood there, feeling the wind, wishing that her father's stories were true. She closed her eyes until the urge to jump passed. She had to remind herself that her child would be getting off the school bus at two, that he'd expect her to be waiting, and that no matter how she felt inside she must be there, holding a bunch of lilacs she had picked as she walked down the lane.

Sam continued to surprise her with how special he was. Today, for instance, when she picked him up at the bus stop he said, "I hate school."

"No, you don't." Had she made him feel too special, as John often accused her of doing?

"Everyone has to stand in a straight line or we can't go to recess and I'm not everyone."

"Well, everyone is someone special," she told Sam.

"But the rules don't bother everyone."

"We all do things we don't want to do." Was this what she wanted her son to believe?

They walked home hand in hand.

"Daddy doesn't like me." They had reached the turn where the largest hedge of lilacs was. They could see the roof of the Glass Slipper. You had to know it was there to see it, otherwise you would look right through it into the clouds.

We could hide here,
Arlie wanted to say as they passed by the hedges.
We could never come out again. Not till our wings grew. Not till
we could fly away.

"Every daddy loves his little boy," Arlyn said.

Sam looked at her. He was only five and he trusted her, but now he didn't seem so sure. "Really?" he said.

Arlyn nodded. She certainly hoped so. When they walked up the driveway, Arlyn was thinking about how tired she was. All the while her father was sick she didn't sleep through the night and then when Sam was a baby she had sat up to watch over him. The exhaustion hadn't left her.

Every time she'd heard her father cough or moan she was on her feet, ready before he called for her. She knew her father loved her; he showed it in the way he looked at her when she brought him water, or his lunch tray, or a magazine to read aloud. She had always been certain of her father's love; the same wasn't true for Sam and his father.

Maybe tonight Arlyn would dream about her father and he would tell her what to do. Stay or fly away. Tell John what she truly wanted or go on as they had been, living separate lives under the same glass roof, pretending to be something they weren't, pretending that all little boys' daddies were too busy to care.

She and Sam continued down the drive until the Glass Slipper was right in front of them. All at once Arlie realized how much she hated it. It was a box, a cage, a trap that couldn't be pried open.
It's
not an easy place to live,
her mother-in-law had told Arlyn when she first moved in.
It seems to attract birds.
True enough, there on the steel-edged roof a cadre of blackbirds called wildly. Oh, they would surely make a mess. John would be able to see their shit and feathers from the living room whenever he looked up and he'd be furious. One more thing that was imperfect, just like Arlyn herself.

Arlyn guessed she would have to drag out the ladder so she could climb up and clean the glass, but then she saw something odd. A man with wings. One of the Connecticut people her father had spoken of. Such creatures were real after all. Arlie felt something quicken inside. The man on the roof was standing on one leg, like a stork. One of the Snow brothers, not the usual one, but the younger brother, flapping his coat thrown over his shoulders, scaring all the blackbirds away. He was tall and blond and young.

"Boo," he shouted. Scallops of sunlight fell across his face. "Get into the sky where you belong!"

Arlyn stood on the grass and applauded.

When the window washer turned to her he was so surprised to see a red-haired woman grinning at him, he nearly slipped on the glass. Then Arlyn would have seen if he really could fly, or if like any mortal man he would simply crash and splinter.

JOHN MOODY LEFT THE HOUSE AT SIX IN THE MORNING AND didn't come home again until seven thirty or eight in the evening, often missing dinner, just as often missing his son, whose bedtime was at eight. Not that Sam was necessarily asleep; after being tucked in, he often lay in bed, eyes wide open, listening to the sound of tires on the gravel when his father came home. John was usually in a foul temper at the end of the workweek, so Arlyn had a standing arrangement with Cynthia Gallagher, their new neighbor and Arlyn's new best friend, to come over on Fridays for drinks and dinner. Cynthia was having her own problems with her husband, Jack, whom she referred to as Jack Daniels, for all the drinking he did.

Arlyn had never had a best friend and she was giddy with the intimacy. Here was someone she could be real with.

"Oh, fuck it all," Cynthia was fond of saying when they went out shopping and something was particularly expensive and she wanted to encourage Arlyn to loosen up. Cynthia had delicate bone structure; she was attractive and dressed well, and she certainly knew how to curse and drink. "It we don't have a good time, who will?"

Cynthia had a way of cheering things up. She wore her brown hair straight to her shoulders and she looked young, even though she was several years older than Arlyn. Maybe it was the fact that Cynthia was free. She had no children, and had confided she didn't think Jack Daniels had it in him to produce any progeny, though he'd sworn he'd been to the doctor to be tested; he vowed that he was, as Cynthia put it, positively filthy with sperm.

Cynthia was daring and fun. She could snap John Moody out of a bad humor in an instant. "Get yourself a glass of wine and get out here," she'd call to him when he came home from work on Fridays, and he would. He'd actually join them on the patio and tell stories that had them laughing about his idiot clients whose main concern was often closet space rather than design. Watching John in the half-light of spring, with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, Arlyn remembered how she had felt the first time she saw him, back when he was lost and she was so dead set on finding him.