If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (14 page)

“What, no street corner tonight?” My mother came out on the back porch, shaking the dry mop over the porch railing.

“Nope,” I said, chomping on a nonpareil. I felt safe, knowing she wouldn’t start in on me with her friends due to arrive any minute. “Liz is coming over, we’re gonna just hang out, take it easy.”

“Let me have a cigarette,” she said, leaning against the railing. On my eighteenth birthday she had given me permission to smoke because she was tired of me stinking up the bathroom with hair spray to hide the smell; that drove my father crazy. She didn’t smoke much herself, only when she played mah-jongg or canasta. But sometimes, when I came home late and she was sitting in the kitchen doing the crossword puzzle, we’d have a cigarette together and talk about things. Her voice always sounded younger then, especially when she put her hands over her mouth so that the sound of her laughter wouldn’t wake my brother or my father.

My mother lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, leaning against the porch railing, gazing up at the sky. I lit one, too, to be sociable, even though I’d just had one.

“What’s with Liz lately?” she asked me. “She sounded upset when she called before. What is she, having boyfriend trouble?”

I sighed. “Kind of,” I said.

“The trouble with you girls is, you make everything too easy for these boys,” she said. “Make them work a little, then they won’t treat you like a pair of old shoes.”

“Mom—”

“I know, I know, the mothers, we never know anything,” she said. “You wonder why I get so upset with you running down to that corner every night. I want you to expect more out of life, not less. But who
knows,” she said, the smoke from her cigarette curling above her head like a gauzy crown, “maybe it’s our fault as much as yours. If we had more to give you, you’d expect more. You do the best you can, but sometimes it’s not enough.”

I looked at my mother, surprised. She always talked like we were better than other people we knew, certainly than the people I hung out with. But there were things we didn’t have; my father refused to buy anything on credit because he’d grown up poor and seen too many repossessions. Our television was black-and-white, and we had a washing machine, but not a dryer. I liked hanging my jeans over the porch railing and letting them dry there; they always smelled like the sun. Billy once told me that I had the best-smelling clothes of any girl he knew. But if I told that to my mother, she’d only ask me why Billy knew that in the first place, and how close was he getting to my clothes anyway, that he could smell them so good.

“Where are you?” my mother asked. She sounded annoyed. “Have you even heard one word I’ve said?”

“I was just thinking how I like the way my jeans smell from hanging on the porch in the sun,” I told her.

“What on earth made you think of that?” she asked.

“Only that if we had a clothes dryer they wouldn’t smell as good,” I said. “I’d kind of miss it.”

My mother looked at me for a long moment. Then she smiled. “Next you’ll want me to hunt up Grandma’s old washboard and do the washing out here instead of throwing the clothes in the machine,” she said, laughing. She came over and hugged me close, something she rarely did anymore. I hugged her back, and felt tears pushing up against my eyelids.

“You’re such a good girl, such a good kid,” she whispered against my hair. “I only want the best for you, can you see that? You think all I do is carp and criticize, but I only want the best.”

“I know,” I whispered back. My mother held me for a moment longer,
then kissed the side of my head and pushed herself away. “Go back to your book,” she said, and went into the house, closing the screen door softly behind her.

•   •   •

A
bout twenty minutes later, I heard the doorbell over the sound of my mother and her friends chattering. Then Liz came banging through the screen door, her mouth stuffed with Almond Joy miniatures. The air was filled with the sound of cicadas and the voices of some kids playing stickball in the street.

Liz said, around a mouthful of chocolate, “Man, you know I love your mother, but why does she always sound, like, angry?”

“You’re just feeling sensitive,” I said, but I knew it was true. My mother was the youngest of four kids. My grandparents hadn’t wanted her; they were poor and lived in one of those old-timey tenements on the Lower East Side and my grandfather worked three jobs and was going to night school to learn English when he could fit it in. In those days, they believed that a bumpy trolley-car ride would bring on a miscarriage; my grandmother rode the trolley as much as she could afford to, but it didn’t work. For her first year, my mother slept in the bottom drawer of my grandparents’ dresser as there was no room or money for more beds. Maybe the reason she yelled at us so much was because, despite the odds, she’d managed to make her way into the world, and she wanted everyone to know she was here to stay.

“Where’s Nanny?” I asked Liz.

Liz sat down in the beach chair opposite me. “Nanny bailed because she thinks I’m going to hell and she will, too, if she comes along for the ride.”

“Oh, she did not—”

“Yeah, she did.” Liz sighed. “She said there’s some christening she has to go to tomorrow, her mother’s dragging them all into the city.”

I wondered about this. I’d thought it odd that Nanny hadn’t returned my call from yesterday, because we usually spoke daily and now there was all this going on. I guessed she was thinking she’d see me tonight and we’d talk then.

“Well, you know how it is with family stuff, and Mrs. Devlin—”

“Katie.” Liz shook her head like I was an idiot. “Tomorrow’s Thursday. You ever hear of a christening taking place on a Thursday? You ever hear of a christening that gave everyone, like, one day’s notice?”

The night smelled heavily of honeysuckle. Liz got up and walked over to the porch railing. She stood there, gazing down at my mother’s tomato plants. She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she said, “I think—I think there’s something wrong with me, man. I mean, really, I—” She broke off, looked up at the darkening sky. “I mean, when I found out, when I knew for sure? Before I told anyone? I was, like, so happy. I—I really thought, right, I really thought that we’d have a wedding on the beach, that he’d be the manager of my father’s dealership. That I’d be buying hanging crystals from Heads Up for the baby’s room, all that shit.” She shook her head. “We call you the space shot, you live in your head so much, but I’m the one living on cloud fucking nine.”

The light of day was dying, slowly, leaving inky smudges in the sky. I wanted to walk over and put my arms around her, but Liz never liked being touched; she shrugged off embraces, even on her birthday, was the first to scream, “Lezzie!” if you even laid a hand on her arm. I leaned back and lit a cigarette.

“I thought maybe if I told my mother,” Liz said. I sat up and stared at her. Mrs. McGann was the same age as the rest of our parents but she seemed older. Her hair was iron gray and she never visited Antoine’s on Main because, she said, if God had meant for your hair to stay the same color all your life, he would have made it so. Mr. and Mrs. McGann went to mass every morning, not just on Sundays. They believed in everything the Church said. They believed that the Holy Communion wafer was the body of Jesus. I saw Mrs. McGann’s face one Sunday as she walked back
from taking Communion up on the altar. I had never seen her smile that way before. She looked—transported. She looked like she was in a much better world than the one the rest of us lived in.

“I thought maybe if I told my mother,” Liz said, “she’d see it my way, you know, help me have the baby. I mean, let’s face it, she’d much rather I had the baby than—than this.” She blew ragged smoke rings out over the garden. “And then I thought, what am I, nuts? She’d rather I was dead. She’d rather I was dead than having a baby with no husband, than—than any of it.”

“Liz,” I said.

“Don’t ‘Liz’ me, you know it’s true.” Liz leaned forward on the railing, away from me. I couldn’t see her face. “She’d ship me off someplace for sure, some home for unwed mothers in fucking Nebraska or someplace, as far away as possible, make me put it up for adoption, then make me come home and go to church with her every morning and wear a big scarlet ‘A’ for asshole every day around the house. I’d never hear the end of it.” She lit another cigarette, and, even from where I was sitting, I could see her hands shaking. She threw the match into the air so that it would land below us, in the tomatoes and lettuce and green peppers. Every night before dinner, I would go down to the garden and pick vegetables for the salad. I liked the smell of things growing in the earth.

“That’s what would happen, all right,” Liz was saying, her voice bitter. “My parents would love Jesus no matter what he did, but they would never love me again. They send money to save the innocent babies in the Congo, but they would never love their unmarried daughter’s baby.” She shook her head back and forth. I didn’t say anything. I knew Liz’s parents. I knew what she said was true. “I can just see my mother’s face. My father—hey, he hardly knows I’m around now, right? I mean, if I told him? Like, tried to force Cory into a—a shotgun situation, some shit like that?” She snorted. “My father would blame me. I bet you my next paycheck that’s what would happen. And Cory, it’s like he wasn’t even worried about that. Wasn’t even worried that I might tell my father, that he
would—because he knows, right? He sees it every day, the way my father treats me. You’ve seen him, the way he acts. And once this happened, it’s like I wouldn’t even exist. And my mother, that look on her face—”

“Liz,” I said. “Liz, come on, man. You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? You loved someone, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Says the virgin,” she said, sighing. She came over and sat down next to me on the chaise. We sat like that for a while, listening to my mother’s friends laughing, the clink of coffee cups, forks scraping the last little bits of Sara Lee chocolate layer cake from their plates. Liz’s head was bent so far down it was almost touching the floor. I had to lean forward to hear what she was saying.

“I need to know you’re with me, Katie,” she said. “I mean, I thought you were going to be the one to bag out in the first place.”

“Liz—”

“I’ve heard you say it! ‘If abortion was around, I wouldn’t be here today.’ I’ve heard you say it a hundred times.”

“I never said it a hundred—”

“Katie, I know you,” she whispered fiercely. “You’re so fucking dramatic—”

“I’m so fucking dramatic?” I said, thinking of the crown of roses, the red velvet wedding dress.

“In your head, you’re more dramatic than the rest of us,” she whispered. “What happens when we get there? What if you’re sitting around waiting and you start thinking it’s you I’m killing and not—”

“Stop it!” I whispered, just as fierce. “Shut the fuck up right now or I’ll—”

“I need to know,” she said savagely. “I need to know if you’re with me, because if you’re not, it’s cool, no, really, man, it is; I can do this by myself, but you have to tell me now. I don’t want to feel all safe when I go to sleep tonight and then find out that I’m—” Her head dropped lower, her hair spilling over the porch floor.

I lit another cigarette. Wherever my mother was now, the one who’d given me up so I could have a better life, she hadn’t been in the smokers’ bathroom at school that day when Barbara Malone began yanking the hair from my scalp like a deranged warrior, or jumped on Barbara’s back, threatening to dunk her head in a toilet bowl if she didn’t leave me alone. But Liz had. It was Liz who lit my first cigarette, brought me down to Comanche Street, gave me a place to belong. I started to say something, but stopped when I saw her face. It was contorted, her lips quivering, her eyes dry but darting wildly, as if seeking shelter. I took hold of her hands, held them hard against my heart.

“I’m here, man,” I said. “I’m here, I swear. I swear on my mother’s life.”

Liz nodded, then gently removed her hands from mine. After a while she whispered, “To think I wanted him to marry me.” She covered her face with her hands, and the sound of her sobbing was drowned out by the crashing of tiles against the kitchen table, the triumphant cry of “Mah-jongg!” by one of my mother’s friends.

The Next Morning

Liz insisted we take the 7:27 bus; the few of our friends’ parents who worked in the city, including my father, took the 7:55 train that left from the same station, so we’d miss having to run into any of them. No one else we knew got up that early except the surfers and they’d be in the ocean, not at the bus station. She wanted to check into the motel and get her bearings before heading over to the doctor’s place. We had the address but no phone number; the doctor refused to speak to her clients on the phone. “We can pretend it’s like a vacation,” Liz said. I agreed, even though it wasn’t like we were going to Aruba or someplace. Silverwood was only about two hours away, one of the arty beach towns where painters and writers supposedly had summer places.

There was a thin streamer of gold against the sky as we walked out to the buses after buying our tickets. I paused for a minute to look at the sky, thinking, when you lived by the water, even the bus station could look beautiful in the early morning light.

“Well, well, look who’s here,” I heard, and turned to see Mitch, leaning on a trash dumpster while he tried to light a cigarette. He was wearing his military-issue sunglasses.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Liz whispered, panicked. “I thought he never left Comanche Street.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked Mitch. My voice sounded loud in my own ears.

He exhaled and began hobbling over to where we were standing. Away from Comanche Street, he looked taller, straighter, his cane making him seem more distinguished, even though the closer he got, you could smell the booze and sweat.

“Had a rough night,” he said, his voice sounding like crunched gravel. “Couldn’t get to sleep even after the bar closed; fucking birds were on the ledge outside, sounded like they were in the room, for chrissake. I’m due for a visit to the VA hospital to stock my meds and make sure I’m still alive, so instead of killing a whole damn day I’ll only kill a whole damn morning, can you dig it? At least the Goddamned train is air-conditioned. But the real question is, where are you two fine beauties off to at this time of the morning? And what’s with the funereal garb?”