Better Times Page 4

  “Yes,” Rebecca said, wiggling her fork into her mound of mashed potatoes. “Yes, I think they did it.”

  Around town people were just as often identified by the characteristics of their houses as by their names. There was the couple rumored to be sleeping in separate beds; everyone called their place the “split level.” There was the local postman who kept several pickups, all grizzled with rust and parked along the street, which was openly referred to as the “cul-de-sac-of-shit.” On gracious days Rebecca lived in the “ivory tower.” On others she was the “uppity bitch with the turret.”

  The Demidovs lived in a nondescript house, blue with white shutters, boldly ordinary in hindsight. They were referred to simply as “the foreigners.” The nickname wasn’t meant to chafe. For many in the neighborhood the presence of such educated, adaptable immigrants was a source of pride. They were prepackaged exotic, unthreatening but still interesting, and they had a way of seeming curious about anyone they came across, a talent that now seemed deflective if not outright suspect. Everyone wanted to be liked by them. Now everyone was claiming they’d been on to them.

  Rebecca spent her afternoons at home, earning a negligible income by teaching piano lessons to neighborhood children. She stood behind them while they played, though very rarely did they achieve the fluidity to reach that description. Instead they banged on the keys like they were driving a square peg into a round hole. But she didn’t lament her pupils’ carelessness or brutality. None of them were being groomed; merely distracted for an hour.

  In the beginning she had made an effort to impart her limited wisdom to her students. Zora Demidov had been one of her first, though she showed little interest in the Mussorgsky Rebecca hoisted on her, preferring the plinking goosesteps of Satie. She had the sort of stiffness that might one day mellow into grace. But her talent quickly outgrew Rebecca’s capacities and she was shuffled off to a private tutor after only a month. Rebecca hadn’t had a student with her promise since, and these days she found her eyes wandering to the windows while the students played, her mind a spinning top.

  That’s why, a week after the arrest, she was the first to notice the car, a little black hump blocking the Demidovs’ driveway. That day saw the first autumn downpour, the pellets hurtling toward the earth, punching lace into the leaves, bursting on the ground in fat plops. Plastic police crossing tape snapped in the wind. Whoever was sitting inside the car wouldn’t come out. When Rebecca’s last student left, she lingered on the stoop, smoking a cigarette tucked in the tines of a plastic fork. It was a method she’d picked up to hide the habit from her mother and she had never discarded it. Not even after moving above the Mason-Dixon line, twenty hours away from her. The wipers slashed across the windshield but the face remained a pointillist mystery. After a few minutes of enduring Rebecca’s scrutiny, the car revved to life and drove off.

  “You look a little spooky, Mom,” Colin said at dinner that evening. He wore a black sweatshirt, zipped up to his Adam’s apple, hood raised, his features shrinking into its shadows; Rebecca didn’t think he looked particularly inviting himself. Then again, the person who greeted her in the mirror that morning had skin that was plowed-over pale, a stare as blank as quarters over the eyes of the dead. If by forty everyone has the face they deserve, Rebecca wanted a word with whoever was passing the judgments.

  “Do I?” she said. “Been talking to ghosts I guess.”

  “Did Dad call?”

  “No,” she said instinctively. It’d been a long while since Rebecca had picked up the phone to hear her ex-husband saying her name. Every time he did it was like a bandage being ripped off. Not a new hurt so much as a reminder that one had existed once.

  She often wondered if Colin missed his father. She’d been given sole custody, though she hadn’t asked for it. The only stipulation at all had been over the child support. He’d pay it only if she remained in town. “I don’t want you uprooting Colin now,” he’d said. But she knew the truth. He was punishing her, snaring her in a place he’d prevented her from understanding with a child she’d long ago lost while he moved in with his secretary in the city, a two-hour drive away.

  “How was school?” she asked, her favored remedy for lapses in conversation; she did it even in the summer.

  “I didn’t go.”

  “What?”

  “Just checking,” Colin smirked. “What’s going on outside?”

  “Nothing,” Rebecca said. From her seat at the table she could see through the parlor to the front window. That evening, the lights of passing cars had worked their way into her circuitry; even when she wasn’t looking she knew when they were coming. But the one she was hoping for hadn’t reappeared.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “How was school?”

  “Our history professor told us about Stalin sending prisoners to Siberia,” Colin said. “Do you think that’s where Zora’s parents will go?”

  “Stalin doesn’t send anyone anywhere anymore,” Rebecca said, pausing to blow billowing steam from her spoon. “What did Zora have to say about it?”

  “Nothing. She hasn’t been in class since they got locked up.”

  “Oh, right. Of course.” An image of Zora flashed through her mind, a tiny figure at a piano in a snowy field, her mittens dancing clumsily over the keys. “Anything else I should know?”

  “I think I’m joining the Army.”

  Rebecca laughed, a dry sound that discouraged merriment rather than inviting it. Her ex-husband once described it as an axe splitting wood. “Timber,” he used to yell in its wake.

  Her son had often told her of the myriad ways he might leave her. Rarely did it involve college, which was what she wanted him to do. Again, her mind returned to Zora, to the parents who bore her. Of all the reasons to have offspring, companionship was a poor one. But wasn’t doing it for appearance’s sake worse? And yet the Demidovs had raised the better child.

  “Can you even join the Army?” she asked. “Don’t you have a record now?”

  “There’s no record if you’re a witness.”

  A few weeks after the school year started, one of Colin’s friends had been arrested for taking a shit on the porch of Eusapia Kessler, an elderly woman who used a walker and lived across the street from them. When Rebecca picked Colin up from the juvenile facility, he seemed remorseful. But since then the incident had become a sticking point between them.

  “And what about Cami French?” Rebecca asked.

  “She’s not pressing charges,” Colin said as soup drooled from his spoon. “Neither is Camp Friendship.”

  “Let’s thank God for that.”

  “I don’t thank God for anything.”

  “Well, He only forgives so many times.”

  Colin pushed his chair back from the table. The felt discs attached to its feet made the movement fluid rather than forced. Then he set his dishes in the sink and stalked out the front door.

  These dinners had become the worst kind of compulsion, one performed in the service of some greater good that neither of them could clearly define anymore. It was no comfort knowing that every family surrounding them was enacting their own version of the same charade. There was not much to envy about the Demidovs now, but they had found a way to escape that fate.

  One night not long after her husband had moved out, Rebecca had gotten into her car and driven off while Colin was sleeping. She’d gotten as far as the exit for the turnpike, could almost make out ahead of her the shimmering industrial obesity of the city before turning back, compelled less by a duty she truly felt than one she was merely aware of. Besides, there was nowhere else for her to go; the person she had been before no longer existed, the places she had lived long since remolded by time. Still, more than once she had wondered what would have happened to the Rebeccas who continued on, what life they would be leading now, all the things they had felt and seen that she wasn’t brave enough to know. Now it was Colin who snuck out after dark.

  Rebecca didn’t enjoy grocery shopping
. She was always running into someone with an opinion and the contents of her cart too clearly crystallized the person she’d become: one who valued convenience over care, a maternal delinquent. She moved about with the metallic clank of a factory, her soup cans and macaroni boxes jumping in unison as she raced over the tile, hemmed in on all sides by baskets filled with bristling fists of broccoli, pallets of grapefruits and lemons that pulsed in the corner of her eye.

  On the way home she remembered: she’d neglected to get any groceries for Mrs. Kessler. It was a penance she’d taken on herself after what had happened, and Eusapia had wordlessly accepted it. But the store had set Rebecca on edge. In the driveway, with her car idling, she stuffed some of her purchases into a paper bag—potato chips, peanuts, frozen dinners, a bachelor’s sustenance instead of a meal. A preemptive shame crept up her cheeks as she made her way to the house, well kept by those Eusapia paid to care for it. Behind her back, people called her property “the Crypt.”

  Eusapia answered the door and stepped out onto the porch, one gimpy wheel on her walker making her path wobbly. Though the old woman was cagey with everyone, Rebecca suspected a more barbed wariness was reserved for her and, fearing puncture, she moved around Eusapia in a way that could easily be mistaken for disgust. Being around her always reminded Rebecca that it’d been too long since she’d called her mother. Then she was reminded that her mother was dead.

  “Hello, Rebecca,” Eusapia said, hurrying the words out of her mouth. Up close she had the sort of slack skin that looked ready to be picked up and stretched over somebody new. Her clothes stunk of shredded newspaper.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kessler,” Rebecca replied. “You’re looking well.”

  “I can’t see your teeth, Rebecca. I’ll have to assume you’re lying through them. Put that down, I’ll take it in.”

  Rebecca was already setting the bag on the ledge of the porch, well versed in the nuances of this farce, anticipating them in a way Eusapia might have found insulting if she cared. “You’re sure?” Rebecca asked, glancing upward.

  “Sure I’m sure,” Eusapia said. “I’ve half a mind to ask you to stop this nonsense and let me shop for myself!” She became very interested in something on her collar, brushing and fluffing it for so long that Rebecca wondered if she should just turn away when Eusapia said, “Where’s that Demidoff woman gone anyway?”

  “I think she’s gone home,” Rebecca said.

  “Home? Nonsense. I’ve seen that car parked out front. Nobody’s there.”

  “Home country, I meant. You’ve noticed the car too?”

  “Of course,” Eusapia said. “It was trying so hard not to be seen I couldn’t miss it.”

  “It’s funny, right?”

  They both inclined their heads slightly toward the yard across the street, neither wanting to be the one to turn in full. The car wasn’t there but someone had taped a small American flag to a stick and planted it on the edge of the lawn.

  “They were a strange lot, when you really think about it,” Eusapia said. “Remember how they turned little Nicki Seltzin away when she was selling Girl Scout cookies? Telling a six-year-old that they don’t support clubs that traffic commodities? I guess it’s not that surprising someone’s come sniffing around.”

  “I wonder who it could be,” Rebecca murmured. “Another spy?”

  Eusapia scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t spy on nobody. And they might as well be nobody now.”

  With that she turned back into her house and shut the door in Rebecca’s face, leaving the bag of groceries behind on the ledge untouched. It was still there when she went out for a cigarette the next morning.

  But Rebecca took little notice: the black car was in front of the Demidovs’ drive again. She watched as a woman emerged, dressed in a gray suit, her hair pulled into a tight, business-like bun. She took something from the trunk, a sign that she then began hammering into the front lawn. Coldwell Banker, it proclaimed in bright screaming bold. House for Sale. A few moments later the woman went inside and began pinning back the curtains. Rebecca slipped back inside, feeling foolish and dismayed.

  Not long after that the news well on the Demidovs began to dry up. The rest of the world, it seemed, was moving at a faster clip; there were catastrophic weather events to follow, diplomatic blunders to attend to. Even around the neighborhood people had found other things to talk about: a teacher’s alleged transgression with a student, the city council’s decision to remove a crucial stoplight downtown. Rebecca could feel herself growing more irrelevant every time she opened her mouth. What would be done with their furniture, their clothes? What about Zora’s things? Surely there were precious items she’d left behind, items whose significance no one else could possibly understand. And who would come to take their place? “I’m goddamn tired of talking about this,” Colin growled at the dinner table. But she couldn’t stop bringing them up.

  Finally she resorted to the synthetic clutches of the Internet, a world of gossips in invisibility cloaks. Rebecca scoured news sites and message boards for any mention of the family, but they were filled with nothing but empty speculation and petty arguments, confirming little more than the worst she’d already imagined. She was about to give up when she discovered a link to a video, described as a “Demidov Performance.”

  Rebecca clicked, watched the spinning white lines as it loaded, and was surprised to be greeted by a grand piano on the screen. Surprised, at least, until Zora entered, or a digitally diminutive version of her. She gave a somber bow to her unseen audience, then sat on the bench. She wore a strap to secure her glasses and Rebecca smiled in anticipatory recognition: when Zora played, she threw her head back in a sort of supplemental ecstasy, shaking it like an epileptic when a section required particular emphasis. The gesture didn’t seem to come from joy so much as hunger, a need to fit her form into something much bigger than herself. Rebecca couldn’t take her eyes off her. She was about to restart the video for the third time when the doorbell interrupted.

  The police were on her stoop. Their uniforms fit in all the wrong places. One was a short busty black woman, the other a white man whose arms were wreathed in tattoos. What did the kids call that these days? Both of them held Colin up by his elbows. He had the air of someone wanting to be seen, his stringy arms straining with the effort to puff up his chest. “Ma’am,” said the policeman, “is this your son?”

  “I suppose it is,” she replied. Sleeves. They called them sleeves. “Whose house did he desecrate this time?”

  “So he’s done this before?”

  “That depends. Was he the one shitting on the porch or was it one of his friends again?”

  “Ms. Speers,” the policewoman said, her drawl a potent mix of sullenness and apathy, “your son broke into the house next door. He’s being charged with destruction of property and resisting arrest.”

  One of Rebecca’s nails dug a divot in her finger. “You mean the Demidovs’?” she asked.

  “I mean the one that’s vacant.”

  “But you’re not arresting him?”

  “Only room for four in the cell,” the policewoman said, as her partner began unlocking the cuffs. “Someone’ll be by tomorrow. Then he can take a turn all by his lonesome.”

  Rebecca looked at Colin’s face for the first time and was startled to find victory on it. Not the victory of a child, full of glee and discovery, handling its newfound power like something easily broken. It was the taunting smirk of someone who had won the petty argument, was storing up ammunition for another stalemate. She was startled to recognize so clearly the old cruelties of a husband in a son, to realize just what they might have borne, and it reawakened an amniotic anger in her, one she hadn’t felt for many years, one she had almost forgotten feeling at all. Then he spoke: “Sorry, Becky.” She reached out and yanked him inside the house by his scruff.

  The howl he let loose was a violent, thrashing thing; it must have followed the police all the way to their car. “What’s wrong with you?
” he asked quietly after Rebecca closed the front door behind them. He had aged years in a moment, the infantile agony of seconds before replaced by a concern almost comic in its gravity, like a child drowning in the folds of his father’s suit. But something dark behind his eyes kept Rebecca from laughing.

  “Colin,” she said, careful to tailor her words to his tone. “What on earth were you thinking, going in there?”

  “Maybe I thought I would do something unforgiveable,” he said, his voice remaining as lethally measured as it had been before.

  “What does that mean? Did you take something from the house?” Rebecca asked, not knowing if the possibility appalled or excited her. She pictured some small family memento, some piece of government secrecy, rubbing shoulders with his sweatshirt pocket, aching to be detected. Or maybe it was something he slipped into a sleeve in his wallet, sandwiched between a driver’s license and an expired condom, still swaddled in its wrapping.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you think you live in this house?” He swept his arm across himself instead of the room. Rebecca flinched and then blushed, knowing she had just given something of herself away.

  “Of course I–

  “No,” he interrupted. “You stay here. That’s not the same thing. Do you have any idea what people say about you?”

  Of course she did. They said she was frigid, self-isolating, a snob, a rube. That she brought everything on herself. That she was by turns weak and spineless or had frightened off a good man. She knew all of these things. But she didn’t know her son did, much less that he seemed to agree.