Baby of the Family Read online

  “We know you’ve been struggling with drinking,” Judy said, her credulous eyes magnified behind the lenses. “We wanted to help you, hold you through the process of healing. But it’s no longer fair to the children. You’ve already been drinking today, haven’t you?”

  Susan stormed away from the school, covering every ounce of embarrassment with the veneer of rage. She felt her childhood desolation rearing its head. She’d begun the morning with vodka straight, as she thought no one could detect the scent of it. But through her seething, she considered that perhaps this was a blessing. Now was her time to go after her dreams.

  * * *

  —

  Susan Scribner continued her life on Bethune Street, but it would be hard to say it wasn’t disrupted. Although she hadn’t fully explained what happened at the Community School, her parents begged her to come back to California. Her nephews were growing old enough to miss her now. But 1981 came and went, and Susan subsisted in New York. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, give up the bone-deep feeling that important things were coming to her. Larry, a manager of the Village Vanguard, hooked her up with a gig as a “background actress” for television, mostly on police procedurals. Every few weeks she’d spend a long and cold day walking back and forth across one city block, being told to stop looking at the camera. This brought in just enough to pay for her rent-controlled apartment. But Bethune Street was changing. Some abandoned town houses across from her building were being demolished, and rumor had it they would be replaced by a condominium development.

  Three months passed of her just barely getting by from her acting gigs and the small checks that her mother snuck from her father and mailed to her. She hadn’t paid April’s rent yet, and it was the eleventh. At three thirty in the morning, she’d gotten home from a man’s rented room at the Chelsea Hotel—a tall and blond hippie who was at the end of his two-month stay in New York, about to hit the road again to continue finding himself. At home, Susan watched as the roach colony scattered across the counter when she turned on the light. On her square kitchen table sat a strawberry-vanilla cake from Rosie’s Bakery in Irvine, which her mother had airmailed to her. The next day was her twenty-eighth birthday. The card read, “Another happy year for our city girl.”

  A tall stack of books sat on her wood floor, but she hadn’t picked one up in months. She lay in bed, staring out the front window, then kept staring. When the metal alarm clock read 4:52, light began to break through the clouded sky and she could make out a water tower in the distance. Faraway sirens screamed. Then the sound was right outside her building: in and out, a panicked shrieking. She smelled smoke. Through the open window a fireman in a yellow suit stood spraying a hose on the roof of a building two doors away. There was a clatter, then a banging downstairs in her own building. Then: bang bang bang. A deep voice declaring: “Fire department! Everyone must evacuate. Evacuate the building immediately!” The voice repeated itself in crescendo. Then the scrapes of doors opening, the high-pitched barking of dogs abruptly woken. Through the door, voices traveled, all of them complaining. Italian grandfathers, young mothers speaking Spanish, the husband of that cool married couple.

  Splayed on her threadbare sheet in ratty underwear and the white camisole she’d gone out in, Susan didn’t move. Smoke seeped through her open window now. The din of her neighbors disappeared altogether. She coughed; the smoke was everywhere. It was as if she were paralyzed. She did not get up.

  Had it been two hours or ten minutes? Would the fireman on the other roof be the last person she ever saw? Her apartment door began to jerk: someone was kicking it from the hallway. But the man who pushed his way in was not the rubber-coated fireman she’d expected. Standing in her kitchen was Anthony, her neighbor the pimp. Soon he stood over her bed, tall and thin as a greyhound. The only word that escaped her was a whining no. But he scooped her up in two arms and carried her like a bride through the stairwell and out the iron exit door to the roof.

  Anthony lay Susan down on the cool black stucco, where she sat up but didn’t thank him. She wasn’t wearing a bra or pants. A morning breeze had kicked itself up; it was cool and sweet on all her limbs.

  Anthony smiled sheepishly. “We got to move it from here. Firemen cleared the whole place.” The two of them hopped over the one-foot gap between the buildings, and did it again, making their way onto the third roof. Then they sat on the curved slope, each person’s legs outstretched. It was unseasonably warm for an April morning. They were safe as they watched the sun rise orange, turning the sky blue, lighting up the city.

  Anthony took out a flat brown wallet, which had a tightly rolled joint in the crook of it. They passed it back and forth, letting the thick smoke curl out of the corner of their mouths. Anthony didn’t touch her anywhere, or try to kiss her. She told him about California, and he in turn told her about growing up in the housing projects that lined the river on the east side of Manhattan. Then he offered her some life advice. “You need to find a new place, cariño. A place you’ll want to run out of when the shit lights on fire.”

  Susan’s eyes seeped with moisture, but she was too stoned to cry. He was right. But the vision of what her life would be if she returned to her family in Orange County strangled all the breath out of her. She could not go backward. She needed a chance to swing something in her direction, push her into a new place. It was pure chance that Nick Carraway had moved in next door to Jay Gatsby in West Egg. Perhaps this veritable stranger saving her life was the first event that would lift herself out of this dark chapter on Bethune Street.

  Indeed chance struck again, three weeks later, when Susan discovered that she was pregnant. Sitting on the edge of the tub in her disintegrating pink-tiled bathroom, she held a glass test tube in two hands above the closed toilet lid. She’d bought the at-home pregnancy test kit that morning, and after placing three drops of urine in the test tube, she had let it sit in its holder for two hours. Now, the evidence was clear: a rust-red ring in the middle of the tube pronounced that her body was in the midst of an “active pregnancy.” She didn’t worry about which of the three possible men was the father. She didn’t pause to consider if this was what she wanted; instead, Susan knew—her whole being knew—that this red ring was just what she needed.

  10

  After Shelley returned from her interview with Mr. Kamal, she had stood, briefly, in the first-floor parlor and stared at the disabled couch. She didn’t like to spend time on the first floor, not with that ghostly image of her father lurking in his chair. The kitchen was on the first floor as well, but she preferred to collect her yogurt container and her tin of tuna fish and go upstairs. She did just that after returning from the interview, and upstairs she called her mother’s cell phone, as was her custom every day since returning home. The call went right to the still-full voice mail, as it did every day. Then Ms. Scribner’s voice floated into Shelley’s head: Is my baby dead? Shelley’s chest constricted. As air caught in her lungs, she shook her head and hands, physically pushing out the thoughts, banishing them into their boxes and kicking them away. Her mother was fine; Nick was fine. He was, she was sure, just holed up with a girl somewhere, trying to piss off his mother. She sat cross-legged on Biddy’s bed and peeled the foil from the yogurt. Bad things don’t happen all at once like that.

  Mr. Kamal called her house phone at nine that night, to confirm the next day’s meeting. He called her again, at seven thirty in the morning to decree: “Today at eleven, you will read me the newspaper.” She lay in a swirled mass of bedsheets, wondering, Was this odd behavior? Surely it had to be, but then, Shelley had never worked as an amanuensis before.

  At ten thirty, the April cold filtered through her coat as she crossed over the mud-bordered paths of Central Park. She was coughing by the time she reached the Grisham, but she was on time. Nodding to the doorman and making her way into the elevator, Mr. Kamal’s bellow echoed within her—I couldn’t be a rapist. Unbidden, the words Mom, Mom, Mom raced
through her mind. As she rose through the floors, she pictured her mother’s pale and pointed face. The numbers lit up one by one: 10, 11, 12. Shelley could simply depress the L button and be returned to the lobby and delivered out of the building. Her encounter with Mr. Kamal could become just another secret and strange event of her life, like the time she stole the crotchless green silk body-stocking from the top drawer in Zoë’s parents’ bedroom. That lingerie was probably still crumpled up in the back of Shelley’s closet. No one ever asked about it, and she’d never had to say a word.

  The elevator doors pinged open: there he was. Shelley felt a hot sting in the corner of her eyes. He looked just the same as yesterday, in another set of khakis and a different, pressed melon-colored shirt. Mr. Kamal’s hands were on his hips and his head bent forward slightly, displaying patches of scalp amid curly tufts. When he spoke, he seemed to grow larger.

  “You are on time,” he intoned. “Follow me to the library.” The authority in his voice was reassuring.

  A high-pitched croak issued from Shelley’s throat. He turned his back to her and shuffled across the darkened foyer, hands poised at his hips.

  Shelley struggled to unbuckle her boots and scramble after him. They passed through the ornate dining room, and this time she noticed a smaller gallery room that came off it, lined with cabinets containing different-shape glasses for varying wines and aperitifs. The glasses clinked with each of Mr. Kamal’s steps. Nothing had been touched since yesterday. When they were almost to the library he said, “Did you bathe in the past hour?”

  Was he speaking to her? They had nearly reached the room where they would be contained together, just the two of them. She produced a breathy sound that resembled a titter. Perhaps she’d misheard. “I got ready an hour ago,” she mumbled, just in case she’d heard him correctly.

  Shelley had made an effort to look nice for her first real day of work. She’d run mango softening cream through her hair and pulled on green cargos and an embroidered tunic. She wasn’t stylish in the least, but despite never having been inside a gym without being forced, she always looked healthy. She had inherited the Whitby height, but she was mousy brown, and uncontrollably hippy. Yet her entire life, her friends and their parents, drama teachers, and the occasional shopgirl at Gap had been telling her bluntly, “You’re beautiful.” As a child, these statements were so awkward that they often made her cry. But the frequency with which she received this comment had, at least partially, convinced her of the fact. And since puberty, she’d had an inkling that her figure was somehow comforting to men, as if they wanted to pour themselves into the spaces between her bigness and her smallness. As she stood in the doorway she wondered how much of her shape Mr. Kamal could sense.

  The book-lined library was awash in late-morning light. “You will sit in the chinoiserie-patterned chair,” Mr. Kamal commanded as he dropped down into a high-backed leather armchair. Shelley’s shoulders relaxed. Rapist still reverberated in her mind, but it could be drowned out by facts: someone had told him what the pattern on the chair was. He must have other people around him here. A person was cooking his meals, turning radios on and off, picking up wet towels off the floor. Then Shelley realized a scent was overtaking the apartment. Freshly brewed coffee, with a tangy touch—spearmint or tobacco. Could Mr. Kamal have a family? She took her seat and genuinely smiled. All these nerves, and for what? There was probably a striking and distinguished wife lurking behind the weighted doors. Undoubtedly the wife wore designer clothes under a sumptuous silk headscarf. Perhaps a troupe of British-inflected young boys would come marching in after school, wearing navy blazers with gold buttons. No, Mr. Kamal was old: his sons would be grown and live in their own penthouses a few blocks away, their brown skin permanently crisped on the bows of sailboats during sun-speckled college days. They would wear their navy blazers to financial-management firms now, lunching with distinguished, disabled Daddy at least once a week.

  To Shelley’s right was the Greek-drama section of the library. Her eyes skimmed the spines: Aeschylus, Euripides. Mr. Kamal proclaimed with emphasis, “I haven’t looked at one bit of the paper today.” Now Shelley smirked at him, like her regular old self. She was beginning to understand this odd yet intriguing man’s rhythms. The paper lay on a tea table between the two chairs. Mr. Kamal added, “We will have to see what you can handle. Begin on the front page.”

  She took a deep breath and began to read. He had an orderly process to getting through the paper. She started on the front page and read every headline, then began every piece. If he didn’t like it he would shout: “No!”

  The first time he yelled she had surged in her seat, then froze, waiting for him to apologize. But when the apology never came, she moved on to the next article. She was used to not being coddled. She was fine; her mother had barely said a kind word to her in the past decade. Soon she discovered a pattern in Mr. Kamal’s “reading.” After a paragraph or two, he usually ordered: “Cut to the jump!” and Shelley would have to skip to the continuation of the story in the middle of the paper. If she fumbled with the sheets, or took too long to find page A13, he would shout it again: “Cut to the jump!”

  Reading the paper took longer than Shelley could have guessed. It was strange, sitting alone with another person for that long. Occasionally when Mr. Kamal shouted no, her own mind would jump to the chant Mom, Mom, Mom. She’d spent nearly four years of college without considering her mother very much at all, yet now she longed to touch the ends of the woman’s gray-streaked hair, to curl up on the bottom of the hard mattress on Strong Place while her mother slept. As Mr. Kamal yelled, she reminded herself that this was just a temporary gig. How many days of this would it take to restock on fruit juice and crackers and then to fix the couch? She and Mr. Kamal had yet to discuss her rate.

  Every forty minutes or so he put his palm in the air and uttered a firm “Enough!” Then he dropped his head forward in silence, his breath steady as a metronome. The first time this happened Shelley nearly burst into laughter. Was he a narcoleptic? Was she being paid to sit alone in a room with a sleeping man? His shoulders slumped forward and his brow knit, as if he was presenting his comb-over to her. Then it crossed her mind that he could be testing her, seeing how she would react. She became convinced he was a game player, consistently making the first move. His steady breath became louder, belabored, and she stared at him until a foreign feeling overtook her. Was this empathy? Perhaps his commands, his yelling bravado, perhaps that attitude was actually a thin cover for a person who needed help but sincerely did not want to need it. She was conflicted: Was he deceptively strong or surreptitiously weak?

  When she couldn’t look at him any longer, she examined the carpet and wondered what exactly it was that Mr. Kamal could see. Was her shape an orange blur to him, like a heat sensor? Perhaps his visions were charcoal and gray, one-dimensional moving lines, a depthless unending plane. After three or four minutes Mr. Kamal would sniff himself awake, make no apologies, and command Shelley: “Continue.” She was able to raise her eyes and jump right back into reading.

  When they had exhausted every section of the New York Times, Mr. Kamal rang a small silver bell that rested on a round table behind him. Shelley shifted in her seat, and Mr. Kamal said, “Tell me, where is it that you are from?”

  “Here,” she answered. “I grew up on the West Side. And I, uh, live there again now.”

  “Your parents are academics, I assume,” he said, as if their conversation the prior day had never occurred. But before she could answer this, the thud of feet on hardwood floor sounded from the hallway. Another person! The heavy door creaked, and in came a large-busted woman. Shelley found herself grinning like an idiot. The woman carried a tray with a teapot, one teacup, and a plate with four blond cookies. She towered over both Shelley and Mr. Kamal, picked up the paper with one hand, and set the tray down with the other.

  “Four Tahiti biscuits today, sir.”

 
Mr. Kamal made a swiping motion through the air to dismiss her, and she left the room.

  His two hands crept along the outer edge of the tea table, then cupped the small blue-and-white-patterned teapot with both hands. He found the handle with his right hand, then his left skimmed over the wood tabletop until it hit the side of the empty cup. His left thumb wagged in the air until it knocked into the handle of the teacup, and he finally grasped it fully.

  Shelley’s jaw ached from holding a forced smile while reading. “Would you like me to pour—”

  “Quiet!”

  She didn’t jump at all at his command this time. Perhaps the yelling was a sign of respect, or an indication he thought she could handle his brusque nature. She was beginning to understand him.

  A shaky stream of tea cascaded into the cup. The scent of hibiscus filled the room. He drank with loud slurps, then munched, biting off small sections of cookie at a time and chewing with his mouth half-open. Yellow crumbs trickled down the front of his oxford. He ate like a child, helpless, covering his body with food. He offered her nothing.

  If he wanted silence, Shelley could give it to him. She was a goddamn pro. Many of the kids she grew up with went off to boarding schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and by the time they were in their second and first forms they came back to the city for the weekends, bringing more kids with them, from Chicago or Texas. They would rent out a room at the St. Marks Hotel or the New Yorker at Penn Station, and pick up three cases of beer. When the boys were just fucking her, it was easy. She wasn’t sure why she did it—for entertainment, she guessed. Or for relief. It was like waitressing: after a while she felt nothing and her mind went blank. She’d kept herself totally silent and fixated on the beige paint chipping from the crown molding, and would only feel a few brief presses of a boy’s weight on her sternum. These boys were never part of the host of people reminding her of her beauty. Instead, they were dismissive of her comfort and desires, just as her mother was. During the act, Shelley would notice the friction of the synthetic bedspread, the after-stench of his early-morning hockey practice, the even perforations of acne on his shoulders. The boys didn’t say much, but they saw her and physically gripped her. Afterward, she would feel better. One night, within two and half hours, she did three different boys from Choate.