Somebody Else’s Kids (14 page)

All the fun of the season gave me enormous pleasure and not until January did I ever realize how glad I was to get back to ordinariness. The kids and I did all the usual Christmas things. We bought a tree from an eighty-year-old man who still cut his own and hawked them from a corner of the shopping center parking lot. Choosing the biggest, fattest, bushiest tree we could find, I stuffed it into the hatch of my tiny car and the four of us rode back to school with pine needles and the intoxicating green smell of the forest. We strung popcorn and cranberries until our fingers were stained red; we sang Christmas carols until I, at least, was hoarse; we baked gingerbread cookies while Tomaso regaled us with his own version of
The Gingerbread Man
. The magic of the season wrapped itself around us. For a brief time we shared sheer, undiluted joy. Then came Christmas break, ten days of vacation.

Joe and I had a party. I was planning to leave for Montana two days before Christmas, and so the preceding Friday night we held a large but informal party for all our friends. Not much of a partygoer, much less a partygiver, I had been a little intimidated by the guest list of forty. But here, as in so many other situations, Joe was confident. He ordered the food, the candles, the wine, the extra chairs, arranged the furniture and borrowed additional tableware. I got to do all the unfolding, the setting up, the cutting of eight pounds of cheese.

Despite my misgivings, the party turned out to be a warm, cheery affair with lots of Tom and Jerry, and half a dozen kinds of cookies on the buffet, compliments of Joe’s sister in Massachusetts. The cat climbed on the table and nibbled the cheese. Josh Greenberg danced the hora and Joe taught everyone Christmas greetings in French. I was left with a glowing, almost nostalgic feeling, unable to remember any time when things had ever gone badly.

On the following day Joe came over to help me clean up. After we emptied the ashtrays into the garbage, scraped all the bits of food out of the carpet and washed a small nation’s worth of dishes, we settled down in the living room to wrap Christmas gifts. Joe had brought over his presents, all of which seemed to be huge and unwieldy, and made a tower of them in the middle of the floor. We tumbled them onto the carpet between us and hauled out rolls of wrapping paper, ribbon and cellophane tape.

I had put up a tree. Normally I was not much one for decorating, I think perhaps because I got too much of it at school. Joe, however, had insisted we have a tree for the party, and he had bought one and a box of lights and brought it over for me to set up.

Now, the next afternoon, he turned the tree lights on, turned off the overhead light and stoked up the fire in the fireplace. Darkness had come early with a snowstorm, shrouding us in that deep, purple, winter-twilight color. I was aglow with the same mellow feeling the party had given me the night before. Joe was full of funny little stories and he would pause, gift half-encircled by paper, one hand poised to pull off tape, and tell them to me. The firelight was captured in his eyes and it made them dark and shiny. How very good he looked to me. Especially when he laughed. I thought that consciously and it made me feel happy.

“I liked the party,” he said after a lull in the conversation.

“Yes, so did I.”

“I think everyone had a good time, don’t you?”

“Mmm-hmm.” I could not get a ribbon tied right and most of my attention was on that.

“Even Gary Stennett had a good time, I think,” Joe said. “Don’t you think he did? He looked like it to me.”

“He was drunk, Joe.”

“Well, yes, but he was having a good time.”

“Yes, that’s probably true.”

“It wasn’t so bad as you thought it would be, was it?”

“What do you mean? I didn’t think it would be bad.”

He smiled. “I mean, I know the party was for me. I know that isn’t the way you like to entertain. I just want you to know I liked it. And I think it went well.
I
had a good time.”

I returned the smile. “Me too.”

Another pause in the conversation. A small one. We were eating tortilla chips left over from the night before. I could hear Joe crunching. If I had been doing anything less mindless than gift wrapping, I doubt I would have noticed, but since my mind was in no way occupied, I felt the munchy silence. I looked up. Joe was watching me. Again I saw his laughing, shiny eyes. I bent back over my box.

“Tor?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s get married.”

I had been unrolling a very noisy roll of paper, great big old Santa Clauses all over it. Maybe I had not heard him right. “Huh?”

“Let’s get married.”

That time I knew I had heard. I rocked back on my heels. “What did you say, Joe?” I asked just once more to make sure there was no mistake.

“I said, I want to marry you.”

Bang.

He could have slapped me. That would not have shocked me more. We had never, never discussed even the remote possibility of marriage. Truthfully, it had never crossed my mind. At this point in my life I was not ready to marry, a fact I had told Joe. There had not been any indication to me that he thought our relationship would go beyond where it currently was. But apparently I did not have a good idea of where it had managed to get to.

The silence was substantial. Joe’s eyes were on me and all I remembered was looking beyond his shoulder to the window and seeing the deep blue darkness outside.

“I want this to continue,” he said, his voice gentle. “Nights like this, like last night. I want us to be this way all the time. This is good, Tor. I want to share my life with you.”

I was still without words. So much was in my head, but none of it broke through to the surface.

Joe watched me. The stillness in the room stretched out to make us universes apart. I wanted to say yes to him. Right then and there, and more than I would have ever believed possible, I wanted to say yes. But I knew I was not ready. Not now, not yet. Sometimes I feared I never would be.

And not with Joe. Even as I sat there, I knew that immediately. I always had. Not only were Joe and I different in so many fundamental ways, but we were also so much alike. Both of us were restless, outspoken, driven individuals. We could never make it together long, not on a daily basis. We’d kill each other first. As I watched him in the firelight, I knew that when the time came for me, if it ever did, the man could not be Joe, no matter how much here in the winter darkness I wished it to be.

Joe sat waiting, a half-wrapped gift in his hands. Tenderly he leaned across the paper and package between us, put his hand on my face and kissed me. I could feel the sturdy warmth of his fingers on my cheek, the crushing pliancy of his lips, and was very aware of it. I did want to marry him. Just for once, I wanted to be like everyone else. But the matter was so complicated, so much more than the witches and dinosaurs of my childhood. The complexity brought me to tears.

Joe sat back. “You don’t need to answer now. If you need time to think, that’s okay. I understand.”

I could not stop the tears.

He watched me intently. The fire crackled and a spark flew out over the screen. Joe stretched a toe to crush it into the carpet. My fingers and my palms and the backs of my hands were wet. Finally I had to get a tissue.

“It’s your kids, isn’t it?” Joe asked as I came back into the room with a box of Kleenex. He caught me unawares. The children had been the last thing on my mind.

I shook my head.

“It’s those damn kids of yours. I’ll never be able to compete, will I?” His voice was still soft.

“Joe, the kids have nothing to do with this –”

“You’re married to that job. I don’t know why I fight it so.”

“Joe, you’re wrong. This issue has nothing to do with my work. I wasn’t even thinking of it. I just need to sort things out. I mean, this
is
kind of sudden.”

An edge had come to both our voices. I could tell he was becoming angry and I had no idea how to prevent it, short of agreeing to marry him. The thought of ruining this idyllic afternoon with an argument hurt almost as much as the more serious issue at hand.

“I’m not wrong,” he said. “That job is part of every issue for you, Torey. And someday you’re going to have to decide which is more important to you because no man is ever going to want to share his life with half an insane asylum.”

More than ever, I knew the end was coming for Joe and me.

He looked away to the fire momentarily before turning back to me. “For you, that work is more than just a job. It’s a love affair. I’d have no objections to your working or to your finding fulfillment in whatever career you wanted, but I can never be just a paramour.”

“You don’t understand,” I protested.

“Don’t give me that shit, kid. I understand. Better than you do, I think. And what I’m saying plainly is that there just cannot be the three of us in bed together any longer.”

“The three of us?”

“Yes. You, me and your job.”

“Joe, there aren’t three of us. Only two. That’s all part of me.”

We argued. It was a low-volume argument for us, but I think the intensity of it kept it that way. We were both too afraid to let it get out of hand. In the end Joe left. He kicked the wrapping paper out of the way, stomped over to the closet and pulled on his jacket. Shutting the door softly behind him, he left me in the ruins of our Saturday afternoon.

Again, I wept. Softly. In the low light of a fire in embers and a lighted Christmas tree, I let the tears come to soothe away the injustices of both dreams and reality.

Joe returned. It was about 10:30 that evening. I had just gotten out of the shower and was sorting through things in the linen closet to put away clean towels. He opened the door and came quietly down the hallway.

“Look, Tor, I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

He had a sad smile for things never to be recovered. “I guess I knew we’d never make it. We never would. I just had to try, that’s all. You understand, yes? I asked because I had to know I tried.”

I nodded and managed a smile myself.

“No hard feelings?”

“No hard feelings.” I opened my mouth to say more but nothing came out. Joe was standing perhaps ten feet down the hallway from me, his gloves in his hands, his dark hair dusted with new-fallen snow. Neither of us spoke. We had gone beyond the simplicity of words.

J
anuary came in full of surprises.

The first was Claudia, who became my fourth student in the afternoons. She appeared the first day following Christmas vacation with little more warning from Birk Jones than he had given me on Tomaso.

Claudia was twelve, Birk told me. She was atypical of my kids. An honors student from a parochial school on the far side of town, she had been a quiet, well-behaved sixth-grader. She came from an upper-class family; her father was a dentist and her mother an art instructor at the community college. To Birk’s knowledge, Claudia had always been a good kid with no history of trouble or school problems. Except, of course, for one thing. She was pregnant.

“
Pregnant!
” I had screeched over the phone at Birk. What in heaven’s name was he thinking of? The mere thought unnerved me. Over the years Birk and I had worked together he had sent me psychotics, garbage-eaters, screamers, fighters, inmates and one kid who had been armless, legless and had a hole in his head. I thought I had seen them all. But I guess I hadn’t. I had no idea what I was going to do with the girl.

Unfortunately, neither did Birk. Until Christmas no one had known Claudia was pregnant. To a family not expecting pregnancy, she had managed to explain away quite a lot. When the truth was finally revealed following a trip to the doctor, Claudia was immediately withdrawn from the rolls of the private Catholic school she attended. In our district there were no educational programs available for pregnant girls. In fact there were not any anywhere in our part of the state. In desperation, Birk had placed Claudia half-days with high school students at the Career Center to learn baby care and vocational skills. My class was chosen as the likeliest place for Claudia to complete her academic requirements for passing sixth grade.

Not to worry, Birk said again and again to me on the phone. She would be no problem. The former school was sending all her books and work over; I needed to do virtually no planning for her. She was a very nice girl, he assured me, very quiet, very mannerly – absolutely no problem. All that was necessary was for her to attend school where she would not be noticeable.

It made my room sound like a hideout.

“Okay?” Birk asked.

Pause.

“Okay?”

Pause. “Okay.”

The hard part for me was not so much Claudia herself but rather explaining her presence to the other children.

“
Pregnant!
” Tomaso shrieked in the very same tone of voice I had used with Birk. “You mean she’s going to have a baby in here?”

Before I could clarify, Lori broke in. “A
baby
? I thought you said she was a kid like us.”

“She’s twelve,” I said.

“But that’s still a kid, isn’t it?” Lori asked.

Tomaso’s eyes were wide. “Oh Torey,” he said with great seriousness, “maybe we better not have Lori and Boo around while we talk about this. They’re too young.”