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The Accident

 

 In Kitty's view, Tony and Carl had one of those incomprehensible male friendships. They did things together, many things, but they didn't talk much, not even about those things they did. In solemn silence, they'd watch dark, fecal fluids drain from cars into battered, rusting cans. Sailing together, the men were a tag team, one squat and burly, wrestling the wind and the sails, with the gulls screaming overhead, the other tall and wiry, mutely waiting his turn; when Tony finally spoke to Kitty on the dock, it would be with his morning voice which wouldn't catch at first, and he'd always have to repeat the first word or two. "Sorry -- sorry. Lost track of the time."

In the four months since Tony had brought Kitty and their son to Massachusetts, to the place where he had been raised, he'd spent most of his free time with Carl. They'd known each other since grade school. They were neighbors, classmates, and their fathers worked together on the same fishing trawler. They shared the same birth date, and later, the same draft number. After high school, Tony had left for college while Carl had married Lisa and joined their fathers at sea, but their friendship continued to flourish during Tony's summers home, away from Kitty. (Tony learned to sail then and taught Carl. What kind of a hobby was sailing for a fisherman, Kitty often wondered.)

Tony said he and Carl had begun to feel guilty for leaving their wives so much. From what Kitty could gather, Lisa had a life separate from Carl's consisting mostly of women from her aerobics class. Kitty had no friends yet in this new place, but, as she often told herself, she didn't mind being alone. Tony said he and Carl would have gotten the women together earlier, but neither of them thought Kitty and Lisa would have anything in common. (Kitty was a lawyer and Lisa a stitcher, but Kitty had a feeling that this was not why the men hesitated. Or at least not exactly why.) In any case, the fact that she had not met the wife of her husband's best friend was beginning to seem strange to Kitty, and would seem stranger still when she would have to admit to her mother that she had not yet met Lisa. Her mother had already asked once and would again. (She'd met Carl at Kitty's wedding, and had become curious about any woman who'd lie by his side.) Kitty did not like feeling strange, and so it was she who finally suggested that they invite Carl and Lisa to dinner.

While they were undressing for bed one evening, a week before the occasion, Kitty asked Tony if Lisa was attractive, partly because she thought men's opinions on female beauty amusing, and partly because she, like her mother, found Carl so unappealing -- tattoos, scars, and placid eyes that gave him a look of dumb ferocity. ("Porch light on, nobody home," her mother had said.)

"Well, I don't know." Tony pulled his undershirt over his head. He slept in his briefs. Kitty wondered what other men wore to bed -- married men, the men who didn't sleep in the nude. Her own father wore pajamas.

"She sure does get your attention. She's a foot taller than the women she works with. Those greenhorns must think she's from Mars."

Greenhorns: the word made Kitty think of a gangly novice cowboys, but in New Bedford it meant a recent arrivals from the Azores, people who dressed oddly and spoke only Portuguese. Tony's parents were Portuguese, but they were born in New Bedford, proud of not being "greenies," scornful of the recent arrivals.

"I think Lisa thinks she's pretty attractive, judging by the way she dresses. Carl thinks she's quite a piece."

They could hear thumping and infant sounds of contentment coming from their clothes closet. Jakey was in there, rooting around, sorting through his parents' shoes, tossing each one out after he had examined it. He was the first grandchild on both sides and had a bedroom full of toys, but he preferred his parents' closet with its bounty of shoes, belts, and pockets. It was a relief to Kitty to have him relatively quiet and in a contained space. "I never put valuables away when you and your sister were Jakey's age," Kitty's mother had said. "I just taught you the meaning of No." Jakey was gleefully deaf to No.

"So what's she like?" asked Kitty. Tony dodged a beaded white sandal flying from the closet.

"That's about it -- she's sexy and loud. Dropped out of high school in tenth grade. I myself prefer the classy, low-key types, as you know." She did indeed know. It was why they were married. That and her tendency to let inertia determine the course of matters. He laughed and slapped her on the buttocks while she pulled her nightgown over her head. Tony had said most of his friend's wives liked to go to clubs; she didn't, and she suspected him of bragging that he had a low-maintenance wife.

Kitty and Tony had invited Carl and Lisa over on a night a Red Sox game would be on television. Kitty didn't like to cook, but she figured she could serve something simple that they could eat in the yard before the game. Lisa liked baseball as much as the men. Kitty didn't, but the game would free her from much of the responsibility for maintaining the conversation. Tony and their guests would talk about baseball, and she'd listen, maybe ask a question or two in order to show that her silence did not arise from disdain.

Kitty and Tony waved from the front porch as the guests drove up. The woman who emerged from the sports car wasn't thirty, Kitty knew, but with her heavy make-up and sun-toughened skin, she looked older. Lisa's hair was bleached, frizzed by a bad perm, and cut very short. Her yellow tube top and matching pants were so tight Kitty could see her nipples and underpants outlined beneath. She wore a thick gold choker and so many bangles that she clattered as she climbed out of the low slung car. And she chewed gum. Kitty's mother would have called her cheap. Carl was broad, short-legged, and barrel-chested.

"They look like a poodle and a boxer," said Kitty. "I can't believe it." She thought a moment. "A standard poodle."

Lisa held a cigarette in one hand and threw the other arm around Tony, greeting him in a hoarse, tobacco-cured voice which sent the squirrels in the trees above them scattering. She turned smoothly to Kitty with no change of expression, as if Kitty were an extension of Tony and entitled to draw on all the good will Tony had earned. "I can't believe I finally get to see Kitty," Lisa said. "I've known Tony nearly as long as I've known Carl, but I just hear about you. Last month I even forgot that Tony was married and I told Carl I should fix Tony up with a friend of mine. Sue's real shy; she went to college for a year, but Carl goes, 'Jesus, Lisa, Tony's married, remember? He's got a kid.' I felt so stupid, honest to God."

They all laughed. Carl looked up at his wife with the baffled pleasure of the homely boy who had unaccountably persuaded the most popular girl in class to accompany him to the prom.

Kitty was relieved. Carl's wife was, as Tony put it, a talker. They'd sail through the evening with Lisa at the helm. Women -- girls -- like Lisa: she'd had known them all her life, Kitty thought. She'd fled them and then watched them in secret, admiring what had seemed to her their superior ability to navigate the shoals of childhood and adolescence. No doubt men would flirt with Lisa, teasing her, even touching her, ready to mean it if she wanted them to, granting her that not inconsiderable power. Lisa cocked her head, and knocked the ash from her cigarette. She'd know how far to go with men. Kitty remembered watching girls like her gather before the mirror in the wash room in junior high, practicing holding their cigarettes just that way, making them props for their flirtations. Clutching her books, Kitty had glanced in the free corner of the mirror, at her small, pale face. The girls hooded their eyes and mocked her -- when they noticed her at all. Later, behind the high school gym, before they were at last old enough to drop out of school, these same girls would poise their cigarettes just so and taunt the boys who clustered around them. "You only wish!" Kitty would hear them say, envying them their ease, which may or may not have come from their cigarettes.

Carl thrust a bottle of wine at Kitty. "I know you guys drink wine, but I only know beer. It wasn't cheap, so I guess it's good." Though Carl usually treated Kitty like a foreigner whose ways were odd and unfathomable, she never detected ill-will from him, and she was grateful for that.

Carl had seen their home before, but Lisa needed the tour. She pronounced the house cute. It was, but unlike her guest, Kitty did not consider this a point in its favor. "It has possibilities," the realtor had said when she caught Kitty looking disapprovingly at the plastic American eagle spreading its wings over the peeling aqua gingerbread. The eagle was gone now, but there was a pink, eagle-shaped space where it had been. The pink of new skin under a scabby knee. The house was smaller and more modest than she and Tony would have liked. The recession had affected their prospects, and even after graduate school -- a law degree for Kitty, an MBA for Tony -- they made less money than Tony's parents, a cook on a fishing boat and a stitcher in a union shop. Kitty gathered that Carl's house was far larger too, though Tony always made a point of telling her that Lisa's taste tended to the garish. It must be pretty bad if even Tony thought so.

"Have you guys decided to vinyl side it?" asked Carl. "Paint just don't hold up, now they took the lead out," he explained to Kitty.

"Kitty says paint will look better. The next cool week-end, okay?"

Carl nodded good-humoredly at the inescapable necessity of humoring wives in such matters.

"Ooo! What a nice rug!" gushed Lisa as they entered the cottage.

"It does kind of hit you between the eyes when you walk in," said Tony. It was deep-tufted, scarlet, not quite the shade of the three-masted schooners on the wallpaper.

"It's like the one we were looking at last week at Lucerne’s. Remember, honey?" Lisa said to Carl.

"There are beautiful oak floors underneath," Kitty pointed out. "We're going to have them refinished."

"Yeah? That’ll be nice," said Lisa.

Kitty watched her cross the parlor in two strides. Lisa made the house feel even smaller, with her long limbs and loud voice.

"Kitty's a furniture collector, Lisa,” said Carl. “She goes to auctions all the time. What do you call this stuff?"

"Oh, it's pretty eclectic. Art Deco. Some mission style, Shaker. The furniture will look better, be more of a focus, after the floors and walls are done." The pieces occupied the room like grim-faced nuns, stranded in a brothel, drawing their skirts about them.

“Look, Carl, the bed’s just like Nana’s,” said Lisa, leading them all into the master bedroom.

“It’s a sleigh bed,” said Kitty. “The real antique ones are worth a fortune now.”

Lisa stroked the curved footboard in what might have been appreciation, but Kitty suspected she was thinking, “Someone bought this bed.”

"That's the baby's room," said Tony, gesturing past the bathroom. Jakey was at Tony’s mother’s house. This was not their usual practice -- their son was always present when they entertained; he’d even sat at the table with Tony’s boss, but only a month had passed since Lisa’s miscarriage, and Tony thought it best if Jakey weren’t there. Kitty gathered Lisa had taken the loss hard. While still in the hospital, she’d had some kind of fit, according to Tony. She’d thrown her mother-in-law out of her room, and Carl, too.

They exited the kitchen door and trooped out to admire the back yard. The house may not have been much, Kitty told herself, but at least it backed into the green buffer that ran along 195. They were close enough to the harbor that sometimes you could smell the salt and hear the foghorn, she told the guests. (Really, it was only when the wind blew away from the ocean that you could smell the diesel fumes or hear the distant whine of the trucks.)

When the time came to serve the food, Lisa followed Kitty inside.

"Do you have any serving trays?" she asked.

"I don't know." Kitty hadn't thought about this. They’d always entertained in the kitchen before, and she hadn’t needed trays.

"How you plan to get the food outside?" Lisa asked as she searched Kitty's cabinets. Kitty was a little offended at the invasion, but she was also relieved that someone with more interest in the problem was taking charge.

"Look what I got," said Lisa triumphantly. She produced a large embossed tin tray from the back of the cabinet in which Kitty had temporarily stored items left by the previous owner of the house.

"It's beautiful," Lisa rasped, flicking off a couple of dead insects with the mauve enameled nail of a bejeweled finger.

Kitty thought not. A yard sale oddment was what it was.

Lisa washed the tray with a dishrag and proceeded to arrange the chicken wings in a spiral. "Any parsley?" she asked.

"Parsley?"

"For a garnish."

Kitty came back from the yard with the flat Italian kind. 

"You got a herb garden?" asked Lisa. She looked from the parsley to Kitty in wonderment. Herb gardens were a yuppie thing. This was not a yuppie town, Kitty had come to learn. Women bottle-fed their babies and bought their herbs and pasta dried.

Kitty rinsed the parsley and Lisa placed it on the tray, arranged so the stems all pointed in the direction of the spiral, her bracelets clicking while she worked.

Kitty was impressed. "I don't give presentation much thought," she said.

"So what do you do with the parsley?" asked Lisa.

"I put it in soups and stews."

Lisa said she never ate parsley.

Carl knew immediately whose handiwork the arrangement was. "Lisa, honey, that's Kitty's chicken," he said evenly, as if to a child who had appropriated someone else's red shovel.

"Lisa likes to arrange things, make them just so," Carl explained.

"But I get a little carried away, making flowers out of radishes, and the mashed potatoes get cold.” Lisa laughed, then looked over at Kitty inquiringly. Kitty knew that Lisa expected her to reciprocate with her own confession of domestic inadequacy, but she could not. Her faults -- even minor ones -- troubled her, and she could never bring herself to reveal them for the purpose of amusing others, even though she understood, vaguely, that this inability was itself evidence of a perhaps far more substantial flaw.

Kitty cooked the food, and Lisa arranged and served it, essentially presiding as hostess. This was fine with Kitty, but it didn't seem to Kitty that Lisa cared whether or not it was fine with her. Lisa strode back and forth fetching things from the house, her heels sinking into powdery soil of the browning August lawn. ("She's the kind of woman who wears heels with tight pants," Kitty imagined herself telling her mother.)

Kitty had bought ice cream for dessert. She’d planned on bringing all the jars of sauces and sprinkles outside so everyone could make their own sundaes, but while she was searching the pantry for the butterscotch sauce, Lisa had gotten out the crystal brandy snifters and had started putting a perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream in each one. Kitty opened the jars of chocolate, marshmallow, and caramel sauce, provided a spoon for each and stood back to watch her guest. With her slick, Kiss Me Mauve lips pursed in concentration, Lisa poured a thick line of chocolate evenly over each mound of ice cream. After doing the same with the other sauces, she stood back to examine the starlike designs she had created.

"I think the butterscotch and whipped cream would be too much, what do you think? But a cherry would go good."

Kitty had cherries, but the kind with stems, intended for the Manhattans Tony and his father drank together.

"Don't take the stems off," ordered Lisa. "I like them."

Kitty did too when she looked at them curving at various angles over the voluptuous mounds of ice cream in the elegant snifters, little ironic comments on the luscious excess beneath.

They all sat and admired Lisa's creations, even after they'd run out of things to say about them. Marlboros and Virginia Slims smoldered in the pewter cups put out by Lisa in lieu of ash trays. The smoke rose and disappeared into the darkness of the trees.

"Well, guys -- not much point in just looking at them,” said Lisa. “They're going to melt anyway. Eat."

 

 

Shortly after that first dinner party, Lisa finished a night school course and got a job as a data entry clerk in the office building next to Kitty's. From the window of her law office Kitty had a clear view of Purchase Street, and every day when she wasn't too busy, she would watch for Lisa's ten o'clock promenade to the peanut store to buy a lottery ticket. She was a striking figure: platinum-haired, buxom, nearly six feet tall, and usually wearing a dress so tight that she slithered like a mermaid. Kitty was not the only one who left her work aside at ten; up and down a two block area everyone stopped to gawk -- everyone: derelicts, prostitutes, and drug dealers, along with the social workers and lawyers who dealt with them. The attention and the silence would precede and follow Lisa by a dozen yards, like a carpet unrolling in front of her, then rolling up behind. New Bedford was mostly populated by Portuguese and Hispanics, and blond hair was, all by itself, enough to stop traffic. (Kitty attributed the unusual number of passes she’d gotten in New Bedford to her own blond hair.) Lisa was actually pretty under all that make-up, Kitty acknowledged, but that was not, she decided, why the men watched -- it was the very blatancy of the invitation she seemed to be issuing.

Kitty’s mother had impressed upon her the importance of feminine modesty, of not drawing attention to herself. Apparently Lisa hadn’t been told any such thing. She waved to the men on either side of the street as if she were on her maiden trip down the run-way as Miss America. “Yeah, right Joe!” Kitty heard her shout, through a closed window, two floors below. Lisa held three fingers high. “Read between the lines, sweetheart!” Joe and the other men laughed, and Lisa continued walking -- erect, queenly. Kitty knew there were mothers who would countenance such behavior, teach it even -- she met them every day; it was not unusual for such women to get into the kind of trouble which required the assistance of a criminal lawyer. But watching Lisa, she wondered: if being a lady, or whatever it was she, Kitty, was raised to be, meant following certain rules, did not being one imply another set, or did Lisa and women like her have to make themselves up?

Kitty had always done what she was told, had done it splendidly. She had begun to understand that her obedience was purposeful, was in anticipation of a future reward. She still did what Tony, her mother, anyone would ask, but no longer with a pleasurable sense of storing up credit. Nothing was what she expected, but what had she expected? There had been a time when she’d thought her passivity had been the cause of her restlessness; she resolved to grasp her life firmly. She chose a career, a house, a new refrigerator. All this activity had not had the intended effect. She was always rushing forward to meet -- what? It seemed as though life was never where she was, but had always just flown off, just as she arrived, breathless and expectant.

On the other hand, duty had little to do with her behavior toward Jakey. The depth of her feeling for her baby came as a complete surprise. She was the first woman in her family to have a career , and everyone in both families had expected her to be off-hand and scientific in her mothering. She was not. In the months following their son’s birth, Tony teased that she never went more than ten minutes without thinking of Jakey, and it was nearly true. She'd be sitting with a client, and suddenly she'd see her son’s soft, nearly boneless face, or hear his cry, or feel the warm, live weight of him in her arms, and milk would soak her breast pads. Women who sacrificed themselves for their children, who gave them the last bit of bread or jumped into churning waters -- they were not heroic. They were simply mothers.

However, Kitty was not pleased with the effect motherhood had had on her figure, and so she’d joined the YMCA. She tried to get to the six AM aerobics class, but it was hard to make it every morning, what with Jakey and her job; if she missed often enough to invite an attack of guilt, she would consider going to the evening work-out, but that was the class Lisa attended, and she had to weigh this fact against the guilt. Lisa took a hearty, back-thumping lot out of Kitty, and after a day at work filled with people -- desperate, angry people -- Kitty was hungry for solitude. Lisa was never alone, so Kitty succumbed to the temptation to duck her. Kitty didn’t think Lisa saw her, but she couldn’t be sure. She’d recently made a disquieting discovery about herself: she tended to assume that she went unnoticed by the people around her -- this in spite of the fact that she herself devoted a good deal of time to observing people. She thought of Jakey, who believed himself unseen when he hid his eyes, and motorists who picked their noses waiting for traffic lights to change. She was a little like that. She considered herself visible only if she greeted someone and thereby called herself into being in the sight of that other. Who knew what Lisa might have noticed? It always shocked Kitty that people saw her at all, when they mentioned spotting her at the theater, at the mall.

But if there might have been times when Lisa saw her slip away and said nothing, there were others when she would call after her, "How's it going, girl?" then grab Kitty, shaking her with exaggerated joviality. Beset, Kitty would struggle for a response. Lisa was the very image of every girl who had ever tormented her in junior high school. On the last such occasion, the ensuing silence seemed to fluster Lisa, and she abruptly asked to borrow the embossed platter.

 

 

For the second time Kitty stood on the porch and watched Lisa pull her long body out of the little red sports car. Kitty hadn't invited Lisa back to the cottage since the day they met. There had been a return dinner at Lisa's house -- everything beautifully presented, but the potatoes gluey and cold -- and an evening at the movies, but that was all. 

Lisa stopped to examine Kitty's house and yard. Kitty was satisfied with the changes that she and Tony had made, but she doubted Lisa approved. The working class frippery was gone -- the three ornate bird baths, the fake cupola on the garage, the plaster cats scampering up the side of the house. In the spot once occupied by a statue of Saint Joseph, Kitty had placed an Adirondack chair. It was uncomfortable, but its lines were just right.

Kitty was not pleased to be lending this platter she didn’t even like. She didn’t think it made sense to be either annoyed or embarrassed, but she was both, and this annoyed and embarrassed her even more. Lisa was especially loud and hearty on this occasion, and the more Kitty wanted her to leave, the louder and heartier Lisa became. She thanked Kitty effusively for the platter and complimented her on the hard wood floors which Kitty had not adorned with so much as a small scatter rug. They went back outside, Jakey toddling behind them.

When Kitty later came to think of the moments after the accident -- vivid, dreamlike, in a suspension of time -- it was partly in Lisa’s words to the police. She saw Jakey sprawled motionless in the street, the arm of his Red Sox jacket blackening with blood, and in the gutter by his fist, two cigarette butts, staining red. And she heard Lisa narrating, her coarse voice cracking with horror. She didn't see the accident. She heard a car speeding down the street. And a thump. Then she saw Jakey lying on the pavement. She was talking to his mother, to Kitty, arranging the return of a platter. No, she didn't see the accident, was surprised that the boy was not playing at their feet as he had been just a moment before.

Kitty bent over her unconscious son. He had hit his head on the curb, and inside his little warm-up jacket his arm was smashed, sickeningly flattened. Kitty searched his neck for the bird-like flutter there, and found it. "Don't die, Jakey, don't die, don't die," she whispered continually, afraid to stop for an intake of breath, as if her plea contained the power to keep him alive. It later amazed her that in a crisis she could instantly return to the magical thinking of childhood, but she did not think that then -- she busied herself keeping Jakey alive.

She sensed a group of neighbors a few feet away, could hear murmuring and exclamations of shock. Someone -- Kitty never knew who -- placed a blanket gently over Jakey, a green wool army blanket pulled hurriedly from the trunk of someone's car and smelling slightly of rubber and oil. She felt a warm hand on her shoulder for a moment, and something then lifted and fell in her, like a deep breath; her incantations grew slower and more measured -- the rhythm of a sleeper's pulse. 

Jakey regained consciousness in the ambulance, moaning piteously from behind his oxygen mask. Kitty crooned, “I’m here, Jakey, I’m here,” although he never called out for her. His small, dark eyes held terror, but they never connected with hers, as if he couldn’t hear her saying his name, as if he perhaps her voice was hidden under the scream of the siren. He flailed at the EMT who was trying to start an IV line in his uninjured arm; he even struggled to lift the smashed arm against the pressure of the other EMT. His wailing interwove with that of the siren, and as it gathered strength, it became a counterforce to the gagging fear that now swept upward within Kitty. The screaming was a pain she could bear and it pressed down on those she could not. Louder, she wanted to say. Louder. She wanted the wailing to become high, stark, and bright, brighter than anything else, searing, to hurt her ears, to let her too become a pure white scream.

Lisa met her at the hospital and stayed with her while Jakey was attended by one or another of the doctors. Apparently Lisa's plan was to remain until some family member appeared to advise and comfort Kitty, but they couldn't reach Tony, who had taken the day off to go hunting with Carl, and Kitty didn’t want anyone else, not even Tony’s mother. Kitty told Lisa to go home. She'd be all right.

“How can you be all right?” asked Lisa, her bracelets jangling as she gestured in the direction of the hospital room where Jakey lay, his arm bloody and crushed. Her hand fell on Kitty’s arm. Kitty shook her head, shrugged off the hand, and set to pacing from the door to the bank of windows. She felt entirely folded in on herself. Her mind focused on the movement of her legs, the dumb flexing of muscles, even the beating of her own heart when she held her arms tightly against her torso just so. She took refuge in her body and its ordinary and yet somehow unfamiliar workings. The humming of the fluorescent lights seemed to come from inside her own head, like a kind of tinnitus; far, far away there were gurneys crashing through doors and the urgent voices of those asked to attend other crises: faint radio waves, dim messages from another universe, one apparently no more hospitable than the one she knew.

A doctor whom they had talked to earlier reappeared and asked them to sit. Kitty thought of emergency room scenes on TV, of the words that always seemed to follow a doctor’s invitation to sit down. She unfolded.

"He's alive, isn't he? He's . . . "

"Yes, yes, of course," said the doctor, and with an odd kind of timing, he grasped one of her hands and squeezed it. He was foreign-looking, foreign-sounding, and his gesture seemed foreign too -- pulled from another context and inserted here, where some gesture was surely required.

"He's regained consciousness again, and you can see him. Neurologically, he seems to be in good shape, as far as we can tell. He has a moderate concussion, so he'll have to be watched, of course." He paused, and Kitty looked questioningly into his face, frightened again.

"About your son’s arm. There is much tissue damage.” He was still holding Kitty's hand.

“Doctor Frechette -- you met him? We agree on this, that there is too much damage. I regret to say that the arm cannot be saved."

"It can't be reattached, reconstructed?" she asked. Lisa looked her way -- she must have caught the slight quaver in her voice on the last word.

"It wasn't severed. There's too much tissue damage, as I have said."

Kitty nodded numbly.

"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Tavares. There's nothing we can do. I wish there were. So much I wish that. Is there anyone else we can call to be with you in addition to your friend here? Some member of your family?"

Kitty said no, there was no one, and she took back her hand.

The doctor looked helplessly at her and then at Lisa. It seemed to Kitty that he was waiting for her to tell him what to do, and she felt both burdened and touched by his awkwardness. She said nothing at all, and finding no place to rest her gaze, she closed her eyes. The doctor spoke, and Kitty followed him from word to word, as if they were crossing a bay on ice floes, but at the conclusion of each sentence, she found she that she had understood nothing -- the doctor had disappeared into the distance, there was no path discernible among the floes, and no land could be seen in any direction. When at last his voice stopped, Kitty opened her eyes, but the doctor was still there, and Lisa, too, and in a small room down the hall Jakey, her baby, lay, still broken beyond repair.

She stood now, and so the doctor and Lisa did too. He patted Kitty’s arm. Was that something you learned in medical school, to touch someone when you had to give them bad news, wondered Kitty. It seemed like a scripted gesture, made clumsy by the feelings behind it -- horror and compassion. The doctor was of indeterminate age, and Kitty couldn’t place his accent. She never saw him after that day. She would remember him forever: a small dark man, an emissary from the world of death and disaster. Lisa walked him to the door, and together they turned and regarded her -- with pity and proprietary concern, Kitty thought.

Kitty listened to the doctor’s footsteps recede; she had felt as if she were still in the ambulance, speeding -- she, the siren, and Jakey all screaming, but as the footsteps fell away, the screaming ceased, and the nausea that it had held in check welled up, and, simultaneously, a darkness arose in the distance, awaiting her; she continued to race, but now irresistibly in the direction of the darkness. Then Lisa stepped in front of her, and caught her by her shoulders, preventing her from hurtling forward.

"No . . ."

"I should never have . . ."

"No. Stop that right now. You're a good mother. This was an accident. You'd walk through fire for Jakey. I know that!"

"But I couldn't just watch him, could I?"

"No one watches a kid one hundred percent! You're not a robot!" Lisa’s voice was louder now, and she was shaking Kitty.

"Look at me, Kitty!" she shouted, and Kitty did, searching Lisa's face for hope that there was some place beyond the blasted one where she stood, and that she could alter the laws of physics and stand there.

"I'm being straight with you, Kitty," Lisa whispered now, as if aware of an audience of nurses at the doorway. "This is just the way things happen. Are you going to be mad at Jakey for running into the street? Huh? Are you?"

"He's just a baby . . ."

"Yeah, and kids do that, and you know what, you're just a woman! An ordinary woman!"

Kitty nodded.

"So you don't watch your kid like a hawk! So who do you think you are? Who, huh? Who?"

Kitty looked into Lisa’s eyes for the first time, and she could see Lisa soften behind her mask of make-up, and Kitty felt that it was her looking that had softened Lisa . She felt full of a sudden, wild hope.

"This is the last time you'll think what you’re thinking," Lisa began again. "Promise me. You're tough. Jakey needs a tough mother."

Kitty nodded again.

"This is the last time you'll think that." As much as it ever could, Lisa’s voice modulated with sympathy. "Promise?" She hugged Kitty to her, but so tightly that Kitty’s heels were lifted off the floor; when her soles touched again, she found herself standing in a different place.

 

* * *

 

Tony didn't blame Kitty for the accident. He even said he didn't. Jakey himself seemed to accept its consequences, and anyone who was with him for a significant amount of time tended to adopt his matter-of-fact attitude toward his prosthesis. Kitty came to the conclusion that he had not yet sufficiently formulated what he expected out of life to feel angry or cheated, though the hospital social worker insisted this wasn't true. The doctor warned her that he might grow fearful now, like a little Captain Hook, worried that a crocodile might reappear and take another bite out of his body. Instead, Jakey learned to ride a Big Wheel months before most children did.

In fact, he seemed delighted with his prosthesis. He'd sit in the grocery cart and proffer it to strangers for their inspection and admiration. "Hook," he would say with pride. Either they would fuss over him, or they would move away in embarrassment, glancing back. Jakey was always satisfied; both reactions were proof of the power of the Hook. The prosthesis had other advantages over a mere hand. It shone impressively in the sunlight, and it was very hard, insensitive to pain. It had smashed dishes, a window, the fish tank at the day care center. After the last incident, Kitty arrived at the center to find Jake propped regally on the couch in the office, the prosthesis cradled in his lap. When he spotted his mother, he brandished it and crowed. The enfant terrible was now the Lord of Destruction.

Kitty coped well. Everyone said so and it was true, she thought. They also spoke of how brave she was, and Kitty was not so sure that that was true. What did it mean, she was brave? She was Jakey's mother and she had done what she had to.

Gradually Jakey’s therapy took up less of Kitty’s time and she returned to her old schedule of exercising at the Y. The second week after her return, she spotted Lisa in the dressing room, alone for once. Kitty was certain this time that Lisa had not spotted her, but she did not try to slip away unnoticed; instead she stood a few feet away, waiting until Lisa looked up. Lisa seemed pleased to see her.

"How's it going?" she asked in her thick voice.

"Fine."

Awkwardness was not such a dreadful thing to Kitty now. Lisa laughed a little and nodded, as if she’d been thinking the same thing. Her shoes tied, she stood up. For a moment she seemed on the verge of coming over and slapping Kitty on the back, but she didn’t; Kitty supposed it might be that she thought of her as an invalid of some kind, too fragile for such treatment.

"You're looking good," said Lisa.

"You too."

"Aw, no. I don't have no make-up on. I found out you shouldn't wear it exercising and sweating. It's so steamy in here that I have to go home like this. I have to go to the market on the way home, too. It's scary, I tell you." She laughed ruefully.

She did look very different. Not so bright and hard. The eyeliner applied heavily under the eyes and extending out beyond the corners was what had given her a tough, sullen look, Kitty realized.

"You could stop at my house," -- Kitty lived nearby, Lisa some distance away -- "and cool off and have a soda."

"Naw. That's okay."

"I certainly owe you a soda. For everything."

Lisa accepted the invitation. She seemed flattered by it, but Kitty wondered if Lisa had accepted in part because she considered it unkind not to allow others to return a favor. Lisa was perhaps the sort of person who might think such a thing.

Lisa sat primly on Kitty’s pin-striped love seat, like a solemn little girl, hands in her lap, bare feet on the bare oak floor. She subscribed to a great many theories about health, diet, and beauty care, some of them contradictory. Kitty listened, pressing the cold can against the inside of her wrist to cool herself. It was a technique Lisa suggested, picked up from Regis and Kathy Lee. Kitty could not decide if Lisa were really different now, disarmed, missing something besides her make-up, or if she, Kitty, were less wary in the presence of the woman who, without false eyelashes and eyeliner, looked peeled and exposed.

Lisa said, "I remember having a friend named Lisa when I was little. When you're little, you become friends with a kid because of her name, or because she lives next door. Then when you're older, it's who wears make-up, who gets good grades, who likes to skip school to get drunk at Horseneck Beach." Lisa took a Virginia Slims from her pack. “Is Kitty a nickname? Are you Katherine? I figured. The guys always called me Babe.”

Kitty did not know this, but she had no trouble believing it.

“It started when I was in junior high. The guys were shorter, and they’d stare at my boobs. Now I understand that -- my boobs were at their eye level, but because of it I learned how to joke around with the guys. Maybe I’d get them laughing and they’d look somewhere besides my chest. Anyway, they started calling me Babe.” She took a drag of her cigarette.

Kitty imagined men calling out to Lisa in the darkness of the bars she and Carl frequented. "Hey, Babe, there's a seat for you right here." She was a babe -- there was no mistake about that. "Babe, Babe, Baby," Carl would murmur to her in the dark, his breath warm against her breast.

“Carl calls me Babe, too,” said Lisa. “I thought maybe having a baby... but I lost it.” She shrugged, as if the failed pregnancy were nature’s judgment on her. She was a Babe, and it might be presumptuous to press a claim to anything else. 

Lisa sucked some more on her cigarette and looked pensive. Kitty did not know what brought Lisa to confide in her, and she questioned her ability to respond appropriately. After a minute of silence, Lisa continued.

“Carl brought flowers to the hospital, but he brought his goddam mother, too.”

Kitty had met Carl’s mother, a Portuguese woman in widow’s weeds, proud of her suffering, who doted on her only son, her only child, Carl. Kitty could imagine her in Lisa’s hospital room, with kale soup and false solicitude, a gleam of triumph in her eyes.

“I know why men like me -- I’m big, sexy, and happy. Maybe I’m the ideal girlfriend, but not the ideal wife.”

After a lengthy silence, Lisa got up from the floor cushion and left; however, the following week Kitty surprised both herself and Lisa by inviting her again. Thereafter, without ever planning to or giving much thought to why she did so, Kitty asked Lisa to her house a couple of times every month. Lisa always said yes and stayed for twenty cautious minutes. It was difficult to talk, sometimes, what with Jakey making noise -- Kitty had gotten into the habit of unlatching one of the kitchen cabinets so he could play with her more expendable pots and pans whenever she had to turn her attention elsewhere. Lisa smoked, and sometimes, when the noise level allowed, she would talk. Kitty drank tea and listened. When their eyes met by accident, Lisa would look shyly away if Kitty did not look away first. They agreed on this limit, it seemed to Kitty. There was to be this and no more. But no less, as well. Kitty stared into her tea; Lisa looked though the smoke at the schooners on the wall, and after they were removed and the walls painted white, at nothing at all.

Kitty was hesitant to tell Tony about these visits. They embarrassed her a little; excepting the first, she couldn’t really explain them. She didn’t know how she’d feel if she were forced to too starkly frame them for a man who, for all his silences, was not very patient with the inarticulate. Everything that was, could be put into words, he seemed to think. It was just that few things were worth the effort. When she finally mentioned the visits at dinner one day, five months had passed since the first of them. Tony seemed surprised, but not to the point of inquiring further. He had a high curiosity threshold, Kitty knew. It took a great deal to churn up a question from below.

But Kitty’s mention of Lisa had stirred him to think of Lisa and Carl and to impart some information of his own: Lisa was running around on Carl.

"She's always had a roving eye," he said, fastening a bib around his squirming son. "It's gotten to where Carl can't stand it. She throws it in his face, doesn't bother covering her tracks anymore. Some guy calls the house and she just takes the phone call right there, doesn't pretend it's a wrong number even or anything like that. She comes home at eight and doesn't bother saying she's been working late." He shook his head.

"She's never breathed a word to me, of course. She seems the same as ever," Kitty said, checking her memory for the truth of this. Perhaps Lisa’s marriage was in trouble six months ago, before the start of their visits, and there had been no change for Kitty to notice. Tony seemed unclear on chronology too, on when Lisa’s behavior had altered. He told Kitty he had known for several weeks about his friend’s troubles, but he thought they had started some months before Carl’s first mention of them. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to press him for details.

"Carl's a good guy. He doesn't deserve this. And he’s got enough on his mind. He isn’t making the money our dads did fishing. The fish are gone." Tony cut Jake's meat while the boy waved a piece of garlic bread caught in the pincers of his prosthesis and gaily sang the jingle from a beer commercial.

"Are they going to get counseling?"

"Why would he want to do that?"

"To save their marriage."

"What's to save? He doesn't want to talk to her -- he wants her to shape up and act like a wife."

Kitty again considered Lisa's behavior over the last few months. It was not often that she and Tony had a discussion in which they both might contribute facts of value to the other, facts about something as important as the dissolution of a marriage. And here she had nothing to hand him but a platter of pork chops, cooling in their gravy. She wanted to be able to say to Tony, yes, now that you mention it, Lisa seemed a little edgy, or yes, she's been happier than usual lately. Or maybe that she acted like someone with a secret, or better yet, like someone who had given up having secrets. But she could recall nothing like that, nothing telling. Except for their first meeting, Lisa’s complaints about Carl seemed those of any wife -- his sloppiness, his tendency to forget significant dates. In fact, she seemed sanguine about some of the things which bothered Kitty in her own marriage. For instance, Lisa had told Kitty that women just talked more than men. It was a fact. She was not inclined to think of this as a problem. If you wanted to have a long heart-to-heart, you went to a woman, that’s all. With men, each of their few words weighed the same. Kitty imagined words hung heavily, one beside the other, like wet sheets on a clothes line, instead of blowing around, filling the air as they did for women. Lisa also informed her that men meant what they said quite literally, too. She had learned that long ago. If a man said, that he didn’t deserve you, it was a good idea to take him at his word; he was probably speaking the simple truth. If he also said that he wasn’t the marrying kind, he probably meant that too, and it was unwise for any woman, whether it be from pride or sympathy, to think that he didn’t. But Kitty thought none of this seemed relevant to Carl and Lisa’s failing marriage.

Kitty was not inclined to question Lisa about Carl. This would have been her preference if she’d been Lisa, though it occurred to her that Lisa might differ from her here. Lisa had grown less talkative of late. Most of their time together was passed in silence, smoke filling the air between them, Jakey banging pots in the background. Tony had told Kitty that one of her virtues was that she was easy to sit with in silence. While Kitty thought that she might have been happier if this wasn’t true, she suspected that it was. She could be counted on to have her own thoughts to entertain her. Perhaps Lisa liked this, found the silence soothing in the chaos of her life. Perhaps she liked being with someone who she suspected must have known about her and Carl, but who chose to be -- what? Discreet? Lisa herself never brought up her separation from Carl, so wasn’t it reasonable that she preferred not to discuss it? Kitty imagined Lisa’s aerobics friends noisily flogging her dead marriage until even Lisa grew tired. But what if she were wrong, what if Lisa expected Kitty to say something about her marriage, was waiting for her to?

Two weeks after Tony’s revelation about Carl’s marital problems, Kitty learned Carl had come home to find Lisa in bed with the aerobics instructor everyone had assumed was gay. According to Tony, she slammed the door behind him so loudly it set all the neighborhood dogs to barking. "She changed the locks and he had to beg to get his clothes. He called her up just to ask for his clothes, nothing else, and even then she gave him a hard time. Most guys would have wanted more than their clothes. I told him, ‘Jeez, Carl, she’s the one running around. Get a court order or something.’ But you know Carl."

The break-up was very bitter, and Kitty had to admit that Lisa's behavior was cruel. It was hard to put any other interpretation on it. Lisa would call Carl and taunt him. She'd tell his mother about their apparently desultory sex life. She'd refuse to turn over his guns and camping equipment, though she herself neither hunted nor camped.

Yet it came as a surprise to Kitty when Tony asked that she not see Lisa anymore, at least not at their home. Tony was driving at the time. With his profile to her, she could see his temple and jaw working.

"It’s not as if you two are close or have much in common,” he said. “On the other hand, Carl's my best friend and it's a question of loyalty. She's nothing but a tramp, Kitty."

Kitty couldn't disagree. "That's not the issue for me. She was good to me when Jake had his accident."

"So was I. So were a lot of people. So was Carl, for that matter, not that Carl was ever more than a blip on your screen."

A clicking sound issued from the back seat, which Kitty knew was Jake tapping his teeth lightly with his prosthesis.

"Carl is my best friend," he repeated. "And you’re my wife."

There was nothing much to say to that.

"I owe him my loyalty, Kitty. It's a question of loyalty."

 

 

Part of Kitty was inclined to humor Tony in at least one respect and meet Lisa away from their house. She could understand that he might not want in his home the woman who had wronged his best friend in such a public way, but Kitty's house was where the women always met, and Kitty was afraid Lisa would guess the reason for the change. Another part of Kitty did not want to humor Tony, although she had no idea why this was so. They never spoke of Carl and Lisa again, but she saw Lisa the following Thursday and she was sure Tony knew, though she wasn't sure how. Maybe Jakey said something; he was usually there, after all. It wasn't as if the meetings were secret. She wasn't hiding anything; she just didn't refer to their meetings any more. 

It was like a secret, though. Now Tony and Kitty argued more, always civilly and always about insignificant things. Their silences grew less easy. Jake would fill the dead air with chatter and endless mournful renditions of a Sesame Street Song, transposed to a minor key, and then abruptly stop, glancing anxiously from one parent to the other. Having had his fill of havoc, he was back in diapers, seeking his parents as they had been, the Lord of Destruction no more. It seemed to Kitty that the three of them were waiting, helplessly, for something to happen. The next thing. It could be anything at all, and it could come at any moment, from any direction..

She had thought for days about what she would say to Lisa, what she would ask. It seemed curious to her that the only truly intimate moment in her life had been with this woman. That it had not been with her genial, distant father, a man who was quite capable of forgetting for long periods that he even had children, was not surprising, nor with her mother, a woman who was disappointed in her grave, graceless little daughter, and so had simply pretended she was mothering some other child, leaving Kitty with a persistent feeling of being misplaced. But why not with Tony, who had gone from good-natured lust to wary respect? She had passionate moments of connection with Jakey, but he was just a boy, and it was hard to know what they meant, though she felt, obscurely, that she would be acting on them, too, in asking Lisa about Carl.

That Thursday Kitty watched Lisa stir Sweet 'n' Low into a cup of the Red Zinger she had introduced her to, a lit Virginia Slims in the other hand. Her fingernails were shocking pink with a thin white diagonal stripe on each one, and a chip diamond embedded in the nails of the index fingers. Jakey was fascinated by Lisa's nails. Kitty thought they looked a lot like the shields of the toy knights Jakey's uncle had given him; perhaps Jakey thought so too

"Are you okay these days?" asked Kitty, finally. There were the sworn loyalties, and there were the other kinds.

"You heard?" Lisa asked quietly. There was a delicacy to this, Kitty thought. Lisa’s silence about her marriage had not come from anxiety about Kitty’s response, or a desire to be coaxed to speak, or even, as Kitty had most feared, from hurt and puzzlement over not being asked. Lisa had said nothing because she would not impose on Kitty’s relationship with Tony or Tony’s with Carl. Kitty was sure of this. She did not remember ever being nearly so sure of anything before.

"Tony."

Lisa stubbed out her cigarette and spoke. “A couple months before I started coming here, something happened between me and Carl. We went to Stingers, like we always did, and I sat near Manny, flirting with him the way I always do.” Kitty could picture this. She also imagined Carl as having once been proud of Lisa’s gift for sexual repartee, proud that at the end of every evening she went home with him.

“Manny’s always been a little crazy, and he must have been drinking a while. Right there in the bar he grabs me and kisses me. I look over at Carl and he’s smiling into his goddam beer, and Manny goes back to his beer like I’m not there. It’s a new one and he’s got foam on his mustache that he just leaves there. He’s drunk, I figure. I can’t leave things like that, so I look at Carl to make sure he sees, then I grab Manny and kiss him back.”

Kitty imagined this too -- Manny’s startled, then responsive mouth, the bitter taste of the hops.

Lisa took out another cigarette and lit it.

“I wipe the foam off my face and half the bar is laughing. Carl is too, laughing like I’m just some whore in a bar acting like a fool, not like I’m his wife or nothing. Oh, no! Carl’s got those beady little eyes of that greenhorn mother of his, and in her eyes I’m nothing.”

Kitty saw Carl in that bar. Instead of exploding with rage, he grew denser and harder -- smaller too, until he was exactly the size of a Portuguese woman standing in a hospital doorway with a soup tureen in her hands.

“I shouldn’t have flirted with Manny, I know that, but I’m not sorry, either. I learned something.”

Lisa did not look at Kitty. Kitty did not think their eyes had truly met since that moment in the hospital; she believed now that they never would.

“It’s always better to know something than not know it,” said Lisa, getting up, sliding her long legs from under the coffee table.

"If he hadn't left when I told him to, I'd have killed him. Honest to God." She spoke sadly, without anger or guilt. 

Jakey emerged from the kitchen with the embossed tray. He showed his mother how it made a put-put-put noise when he drew his prosthesis across its shiny, pebbly surface. It was hard, beautiful, and nearly indestructible; he loved it.

"I just had it with Carl,” said Lisa. “I’ve mostly calmed down, but I was mad then, real mad.” She sighed deeply and stared at the pinkish tea bag sitting soggily on the marble table top. "I know why, too, but I could never explain it. Knowing and explaining are two different things."

She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, and then put it out, half smoked, in the stained pewter cup. As she got up to leave, Kitty moved the cup to the mantle, out of her small son’s reach, but she forgot it there, and the butts still lay in plain view when her husband came home.

 

 

Kitty had understood very early on that Tony did not want to be surprised by her, but she now hungered for surprises, so she made one herself and left him.

She knew that Tony attributed their divorce to Jake's accident. The divorce rate among the parents of handicapped children was high; Tony loved statistics, as if they explained as well as described the world, and he was happy to here assign them a predictive force. He was soon married again -- to a co-worker, a small, busy little woman who had always reminded Kitty of a Chihuahua. Kitty went on to other men and other silences, some benign, some not. She and Lisa still met, though less frequently and never for long. Their relationship was a tiny part of their lives, and it always seemed strange to Kitty that although the men who loved her rearranged their lives to accommodate that love, it couldn't compare to what she had once done for something that was less than friendship.

 

© 2003-2004 Virginia Rivard  All rights reserved.