Darling? (8 page)

“No,” he said, suddenly, with an effort. “No.”

Tears sprang up as if he’d slapped her. She was late already, and to be late without the insulin … Mama would be furious, she’d cry that she had no one to count on, she was alone in all the world, she asked only one little thing of Lanie and even that much Lanie couldn’t do. Then she’d get dressed in one of the suits she bought when she was job hunting and sweep down St. George Street looking so commanding people would step out of her way, pick up the prescription, and collapse in angry sobs at home. Or worse, she’d refuse to go and slip into sugar lethargy so Lane had to call the ambulance again.

“Doug
lets
me,” she repeated angrily. She felt like a lost child among the high bright aisles. She wouldn’t cry though, in front of him or anyone—a pharmacist, was anything duller? She mastered herself with an iron effort, drawing herself up to dismiss him before he dismissed her, when he gave in just as surprisingly as he had balked a second before.

“Okay,” he said, sullen. Silence had accomplished this—she of all people should have known that into a silence all fears are drawn. He looked left and right, but there was only an old woman combing the shelves for some ancient powder or liniment. “Okay, this one time.”

She laid the bills on the counter—was he impressed she should carry so much?—thanked him stiffly, and left with the drug, the precious ingredient that must be added to Mama to keep her safe and calm. She had pulled it off, she was Lanie the magnificent, and all the way up Highland Avenue she imagined herself in the eye of a camera, starring in one happy scene after another: Lanie’s report is returned with an A; Lanie skips rope with her friends; Lanie breezes home clutching her books to her heart, stopping in the pharmacy, crossing at the light, waving to the bus driver who smiles paternally down over her … These were scenes her mother could live on, and she could invent them endlessly, it was like having a magical power.

The arms remained crossed, to keep the bad thoughts—of Sylvie and Arlita, and clumsiness, and dirtiness, from wrecking the picture. Seeing Mr. Lathrop in the courtyard, Lanie decided to go around through the alley: he had smiled at her once, in the elevator, where most people gazed over her head as if they were blind to everything beneath their chins. She’d been bringing Casper down for his walk, and he’d said, “I used to have an English setter. They’re a nice breed—eager, affectionate—just right for a girl like you.”
A girl like you?
How would he know what she was like, when she herself couldn’t say? But she’d felt something glowing inside her, something that said: Look, look at me. “A … fifth grader? Unless I miss my guess … and I’ll say a good student, too, quiet, but independent, loves her doggie there” (she realized she had been stroking Casper’s head as these words fell, like blessings, on hers) “and … the Spice Girls, and … chocolate chip cookies?” Here they reached the lobby, but as he turned for the laundry room, he said, “And, she blushes!” as if this were the proof of her perfection. Since then she had, of course, avoided him; she lived on this memory, and if she discovered he’d forgotten her, she might not be able to bear it.

He saw her, though, before she could get away. “There she is and just when I need her,” he said. “What do you think?” He held out two packs of seedlings. “Should I put them all together higgledy-piggledy like this?”

He was planting flowers in the forlorn square of grass in front of the building—the
courtyard,
the super called it, the building being named Hampton Court, which had provoked gales of laughter from Mama when they first moved in. Why not the Landfill Arms? she’d asked, and when she took Lanie to school the first time she spoke the words
Hampton Court
with a hint of careless snobbery, the way you might say
The Dakota,
and flashed Lanie a secret smile. She was going to finish up her degree, find a job, and then who knew? Uncle Buddy was going to help her, and he
knew
people, the kind who can speak a word in your favor and change your whole life. Lanie would see: in a few months their Hampton Court period would be over and the day they shook her father off would count as the happiest day of their lives.

And she’d bustled around making the apartment pretty. Her husband was gone and with him all her troubles, and everything must be fresh and bright for the new life. The diabetes that had seemed a crippling burden shrank to a minor annoyance and she swiped the needle into her thigh each morning with a giddy machismo. “God never gives anyone more than he can bear,” she said. She had started going to church again—she believed in everything; her husband had carried all the world’s ills away with him. One evening she’d danced the Charleston to the ticker-tape maracas on
Wall Street Week.
“The sky’s the limit, my blossom!” she said, and to Lanie’s amazement she—who had sworn she would never, ever marry again, never have to do with a man—began planning a wedding for Lanie, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with tall white candles and bridesmaids in red velvet and a wreath of roses on her head.

That image, of all of them, remained, though it was three years now since they moved to Hampton Court, and any idea of a job had long since been abandoned—to lose the Medicaid without a really good salary and insurance—it wasn’t worth it. No,
she
would never let
her
daughter become one of those creatures who wore her latchkey around her neck; she intended to be there for Lanie. And there she was waiting, at three o’clock—she was avid, greedy to hear every minute of Lanie’s day.

Late as she was, though, Lanie stopped to look into the flowers—they floated over their stems with a crazy brilliance, rose pink, butter yellow, tangerine. Poor Mr. Lathrop—planting a garden in this parched spot was the kind of thing he’d do, cheerful but doomed. He was gaunt and gray-cheeked, with an expression of morose intensity, his eyes popping out slightly as if no matter where he looked he was always staring at the same sad thing, and he seemed to be always alone, but his walk was quick and fluid and somehow hopeful; whenever Lanie saw him she imagined he was on his way to someplace exciting. Once he had gotten into the elevator carrying a Chinese dinner in one hand and a bunch of red tulips in the other, but it wasn’t for guests, he said—he just liked to do everything right once in a while.

“Ummm,” she said, drawing it out, relishing the attention. “I like them all together.”

“Higgledy-piggledy it is then,” he said, and she laughed, because she could see he hoped she would, and he started singing and dancing a high silly step, throwing his arms and legs out so wildly she felt embarrassed for him.

“Oh, the higgledy-piggledies give her the giggledies,” he sang. “When the higgledy-piggledies give her the giggledies, I do the jiggledy, piggledy ho!”

It was something you might do for a three-year-old, but he was trying to please her, so she kept laughing.

“Will they grow?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“Some flowers do better in poor soil,” he told her. “Portulacas, nasturtiums … the less they have, the more they bloom. You can eat the nasturtiums, they’re peppery—want to try one?”

This seemed like taking candy from a stranger, and she shook her head but could hardly croak out the
no
—wouldn’t it be madness when someone was kind to you, to turn him away? He folded the flower and pushed it into her half-open mouth with a finger. It felt like velvet and tasted like perfume, but she chewed and swallowed it and smiled at him, thinking she might absorb something of him this way.

“Here,” he said, picking three more—“Take some home. They’re good in a salad, too.”

*   *   *

Mama was sitting on her bed, holding a finger-stick blood-sample kit and crying.

“Where
were
you?” she asked. She had that awful, familiar expression; the smallest thing could send her spiraling down—she was frightened, heartbroken, suspicious, and she needed to account for these feelings, to find some way to explain them. When she was mad even Casper felt it—now he lay with his chin on the rug, looking balefully up at Lanie as if he blamed her, too.

“At the pharmacy.”

“For forty-five minutes?”

“I stayed after school to jump rope with Arlita and Sylvie.… We lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not, you’re
not
sorry!” Mama said. “You don’t care—you’re having a good time with your friends and you don’t care, that’s all. And I’m here all alone, and I can’t, I can’t…” She held the lancet poised over her finger but couldn’t bring herself to stab it.

“Here, let me,” Lanie said. “I’m good at this, Ma, remember?” She took the hand tight so Mama couldn’t squirm away, and pricked it, caught the welling drop, folded the poor finger gently back into the hand. Why it had to be, that someone who so feared the needle should have diabetes … The Greeks would have thought it a punishment, and Mama let out a wild sob as if Lanie were Nemesis herself.

“It’s way up, Ma,” she said, going for the insulin.

“I try so hard, Lanie,” Mama said. This was the cruellest thing—she seemed to think Lane had the power to cure her, that if only she was good enough Lanie would take the curse away. Thank God for the needle gun—they’d got it with the Medicaid. It went so fast, at first Mama said it was painless, though after a few months she’d seemed to feel the shots again even worse than before.

“Arm or leg?” Lanie asked.

“Leg,” her mother said, resigning herself. Lanie grabbed her thigh hard to squeeze out the feeling, pressed the gun to the skin, pulled the trigger. Nothing ever sounded so fast, so certain as that needle. She didn’t suppose she would mind it as Ma did—she was not going to mind things, she was going to live a bold life. When she went for a shot at school the nurses always said how brave she was. And when the others mocked her she turned her face away—they were young, that was all, they didn’t know who they were talking to. Let them laugh—Uncle Bud knew people at NBC, he was going to get her a screen test for the soaps. The image of herself, dirty, her ear sticking out through her lank hair, pushed itself into her mind, but she slammed the door on it. They would soon be enlightened, her classmates, the people who should have been her friends—she would be leaving the likes of them behind.

The ordeal over, Mama relaxed a little, though she was still wary. “I
did
go out,” she said, defending herself against the unspoken complaint. “I got you something … but now I suppose you had a snack on the way home.”

There, set out on the table with a glass of milk, was a cupcake with an inch of sugar frosting piped out to look like pink and yellow roses. The note beside the plate read, “For the rose of my heart. Happy Summer Vacation.” Sweets. Mama wanted Lanie to have everything, and she knew the exact shape of everything—the outline of the void in her own life.

“It’s beautiful,” Lanie said, with just the right feeling, she thought. The cake was no better than the nasturtium though; it was all sugar and no taste, and the thought of Mama going through all her careful rituals, showering, making up her face, checking the mirror a hundred times all for the sake of a trip across the street to buy a cupcake, and then waiting, waiting for Lane to come home and see … It stuck in her throat, but she ate every bite.

“Beautiful like my beautiful girl,” her mother said, smoothing Lanie’s hair and kissing the top of her head before she sank woozily into the couch. “Would you bring me a little glass of wine, honey? I think it might help my head.”

“Is it okay?” Lanie asked, because it wasn’t—wine was no better than cake—the sugar burned up her veins like acid, made her head ache so that light had to be filtered, noise muffled, all of life muted, recast in pastel. Lanie had the nasturtiums in her pocket; she wanted both to show them off and to keep them a secret—they were so bright she felt they might hurt Mama’s eyes.

“Of course it’s okay,” Mama said, irritated again. Lanie was so officious, full of rules like a horrible little nurses’ aide, she knew. A little wine, what harm could it do? Lanie poured as little as she dared.

“Would you like to have Arlita over sometime—?” Mama asked suddenly. “Maybe to spend the night?”

This, from someone who fled into her room when she so much as heard footsteps in the hall, was a heroic offer. She wanted to make amends—she so desperately wanted to be a good mother. She’d have done anything for Lanie if only she could.

“Oh, Arlita’s going to camp,” Lane said lightly. “But, thank you, it’s a great idea. Maybe in August after she gets back.” She took Casper’s leash down from its hook, and he jumped up and charged toward her, paws on her shoulders to lick her face, nearly knocking her down. Mama smiled tenderly at the picture before her, and the knot in Lanie’s chest loosened: the planets were back in their proper orbits, the summer was stretching ahead, anything was possible, anything at all.

*   *   *

She waited until Mama was in bed—seven-thirty—to run the bath, so she wouldn’t have to explain anything. She usually took showers and not many of those—Mama washed so often Lane had
bathing
filed under
madness
in her mind. Once she was immersed, though, she wanted to stay there forever. Telling a story of herself like the stories of fashion models (“for breakfast she has only strawberries and the purest spring water … such delicate beauty must be nourished by perfect comfort and soothing ritual”) until it verged into the story of a young goddess (“washed in the waters of the Aegean, she returned to the island of Cythera where the spirits fed her a salad of flowers to restore her strength before her pilgrimage to Delphi was to begin…”), she lay back and felt herself dissolving—all that wrought-up tenseness that Mama hated in her seemed to melt away. She had to scrub fiercely, but when it was done there she was, glowing pale as the statue of a goddess, and there seemed something so tender and poignant in her body that Zeus would surely flash down from the heavens and carry her away.

By the time she was dressed again it was eight-thirty, but what is eight-thirty on the longest night of the year, when you are pale as a goddess and Uncle Bud is going to get you a job at NBC? “Come on, Casper,” she whispered. “Let’s go down and see the flowers.” She could feel him shivering with excitement as she clipped the leash on—it reminded her never to be so eager—it would be awful if people knew how much one wanted them.