—Nothing cooking, I said, remembering the impeccable way in which Alice had turned away those Ray-Bans at the farmers’ market.
He moved his face frighteningly close to mine. His beard had the stink of meat.
—Yeah? he said.
—We’re having a conversation.
He bit his lower lip.
—You want me to get you some more beers so you can continue your conversation?
—No, thank you. We’re leaving soon.
He rested his hand on Eleanor’s thigh to better balance himself as he squared his leather chest to me.
I used the side of my palm to karate-chop his arm off her leg, and even though he was big, he toppled.
—What the fuck!
He rose quickly, embarrassedly, ragefully.
—Fuckin bitch, he said.
I felt protective of Eleanor, of the secret she’d been telling me, and of the baby inside of me. I grabbed her hand and we began to walk away. He was about to follow, but there were so many men out there, some with their burly women, mullets and studs and dust. Half of them were witnesses. The other half would have egged him on if he’d bent me over and tried to fuck me.
We drove off through the mountains, under the trees that cast a feathered shade on the road.
—That was really… You’re really strong, Eleanor said.
I said nothing. I could feel her eyes on me as I stared at the road. Big Sky once told me I was the best female driver he’d ever known. I’d taken a dumb pride in that.
—I want to tell you something, I wanted to tell you from the beginning. I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t feel that bad. About all that happened.
—What do you mean?
—You weren’t the first person my dad cheated with.
—What?
—I mean, you were the last. And I guess he liked you the most. But there was also another girl. From his last job. She was, like, twenty. I caught them in the house. They were fucking in my parents’ bed and Robbie was in the crib. He was, like, two months old. And I was fifteen. And. My dad asked me not to tell my mom. He cried and begged me not to tell my mom. And the fucking worst part of it was that I was attracted to the girl. It was the first time I was attracted to anyone ever. I found them when she was on her back and my dad was, you know, eating her out. And I was attracted to her. Her body was perfect. I guess that’s not the worst part. I guess the worst part is that I didn’t tell my mom.
* * *
BACK AT MY HOUSE WE drank a bottle and a half of the good wine on which I’d spent an entire day’s paycheck. I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of Vic’s head between a young girl’s legs. A twenty-year-old girl with a perfect body. I had never been in his house. No matter how many men I fucked in the time I knew him, and no matter how little I wanted to fuck him and how I stopped fucking him very early into knowing him, I could not believe he’d lied to me. That he’d told me I was the first and the only. That I’d believed him.
But there was Eleanor on my couch, a girl who had lived through a scourge brought upon her by her parents, just as I had. Like the mother I would become, I stopped thinking of myself. I looked at her on the couch. Her bare feet pulled up beneath her legs, the little feet I imagined in her mother’s mouth when she was an infant. My mother told me once that she’d put my feet in her mouth when they first passed me to her. Part of her wanted to eat me, she said, and put me back in her tummy.
After the wine hit, Eleanor began to cry. I’d never cried from wine. I didn’t understand why people did. She cried about Robbie, about how much she missed him. I took her in my arms. It was the first time we’d touched that way. Heaving, she moved in to my chest. She placed one hand across my belly. I held her tightly and rocked her like a child. She placed her cheek against my breasts, which were fuller with pregnancy. They were so plump and risen that I hadn’t worn a bra in weeks.
I let her cheek stay there. I let her brush her lips against my nipple, the most imperceptible of touches, but clear all the same. I knew what it was to miss the breast of a mother.
29
WHEN I WAS FIVE AND misbehaving, my mother would threaten me. I had this toy stroller for a baby doll and it didn’t matter to me if there was a doll in there or not, I only needed the stroller and I loved to wheel it around and I wanted to go everywhere with it. The seat was soft nylon with little bunnies holding balloons, plus blocks and bows and baby rattles and pacifiers, all the sweet gumdrop stuff of babyhood. And when I was being bad, when I was refusing to put on the correct shoes or refusing to brush my hair or refusing to eat my Swiss chard, my mother would brandish the stroller, she would raise it high up above her head like she was going to bring it crashing down on my crown, and she would thunder, I’m going to give this thing away! I’m going to give it to Rosanna’s daughter! Or she would say she was going to leave it outside on the street for one of the kids who walked down our block with their pit bull to take. The idea was that the baby stroller would go to someone less fortunate, some little girl, unlike me, who was not so lucky to have such a vaunted piece of plastic.
I tried to see the evening that followed my day at the Top of the World without hindsight. I tried for much of my life to isolate it as its own memory, just one night in time, another dinner. But that’s proved impossible. It was the last night of my life. Just as breakfast that morning was my last cereal in milk. Just as the trip to Italy the year before was the last good summer I would ever know.
My mother made pastina. Something we had when there was not enough time for a real dinner. But also the thing that was made when I was sick or when I needed something soothing, like a pacifier.
It was evident that their talk had not gone well. The quiet was colossal. Outside the sun beat down on the sticks and the trampled grass. I could see the rock that I liked to sit on at the end of the gravel drive, gleaming with heat. I wanted the sun to go down. I wanted that day to be over and to fall asleep so I could wake up from the events that had transpired. But the truth is I was so connected to my parents that what was severed between them was a larger weight on my mind than what had happened to me in the tall man’s cold house. I’d been abused, of course. But you couldn’t call it violent. At no point had I been grabbed against my will or shoved into a car. I bore no marks, not even the red marks on a wrist that often showed up when I was younger and my mother yanked me off the floor of a supermarket.
While my mother cooked and washed up, my father sat on a butterfly chair on the patio. He smoked a cigarette with his legs crossed languidly. When my father was on his feet he was always moving, his hands working screwdrivers, doorknobs, polishing the grilles of cars. But when he sat down, he fully sat, his flesh softening into all the ovals of his bones. My mother, on the other hand, barely sat. My memories of dinnertime are of my father and me at the table and my mother rinsing plates before we were even halfway through. I suppose she did sit in restaurants.
That night it was no different. When the pastina was ready, my father and I sat down at the pine dining table. There was a side of chopped spinach with butter. My mother was not good with vegetables. They were always dark and limp. As we ate, she Windexed the shelves of the refrigerator. My father looked at me with a pasted-on smile. He was always smiling at me, even in the wake of misery. Tenderly, he moved some hair off my face. I winced a little, the touch of a man suddenly meaning something other than what it always had. Beyond the screen door the summer evening vibrated with bugs.