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Snow fell
in Florida, in October, and not in the north¾deep
in the south, in West Palm Beach, where we still live. Children played in
the snow, and alligators froze to death, and the air conditioning men
earned their first heating money in years. The sky turned black, as with
rain, then blue again as the snow fell, then gray, a dreary Indiana sky,
except for us the gray sky was a novelty, a circus show, and we wrapped
ourselves in sweaters and windbreakers and put blankets around our
shoulders, and went outside and looked up.
That evening a man broke into our house. The neighborhood had
been changing for some time, and Danny¾my
husband¾refused
to move because we couldn’t afford it. The children shared the bed
upstairs, huddled together for warmth, exhausted from throwing snowballs,
and¾thank
God¾making
no sound. My mother slept in her bedroom downstairs, in the room adjacent
to the living room, where the robber confronted us. He was white and
clean-shaven, with wide rows of carnivore teeth, and he waved a knife and
said he wanted money. Danny told him to take what he wanted and leave. The
man threw Danny to the ground and stuck the knife through his back, then
locked him in the closet. Then he raped me on the floor while holding the
knife to my throat, and I stayed quiet as I could, and prayed that my
mother and my children would sleep safely and that the robber would leave
soon. I did not pray for my own life.
My mother had heard the commotion. When he finished with me,
he looked up and saw my mother sitting on the couch, her hands folded in
her lap. “I have money and a car,” she said. “I will take you where you
want to go.”
“Get on the floor,” he said to me. I was already on the floor.
“Turn over on your stomach.” I did. “If you get up off this floor before
you count to a hundred-thousand, or if you call the police, I will kill
her,” he said, pointing toward my mother. He put the tip of the knife to
her back. He turned off the heat to the house, and on the way out to her
car, he took her on a detour and cut the phone line outside.
The children slept through it all.
There are no
snow-shoveling trucks in West Palm Beach. A thin layer of white covered
the roads, and people mostly avoided driving. My mother drove the robber
to the interstate. He had all her money¾forty
dollars¾in
his pocket. “Which way?” she said. “North,” he said. He turned the knife
over in his hands, where she could see it.
She drove past the Palm Beach Mall, past 45th
Street, past Northlake, and not far from Donald Ross Road she noticed the
needle of the gas gauge edging toward empty. “We need gas,” she said.
“Drive,” he said. “After Jupiter there's nowhere to stop for thirty
miles,” she said. “We'll run out.”
He thought this over for awhile. “Get off there,” he said, at
the Indiantown Road exit, the last place to stop. When she had pulled into
a self-service island, he said, “Get out and pump.”
“I don't know how,” she said.
“Pump the gas, bitch,” he said. She could tell he was scared.
“My husband always pumped it,” she said, “and now my
son-in-law does. I don’t know how. You’ll have to do it.”
He showed her the knife again, and then he opened the car
door. My mother¾my
arthritic mother¾swung
her legs up from the brake pedal and over the gear shift and kicked the
robber with the whole weight of her body. His forward momentum¾he
was already moving in that direction when she kicked him¾worked
to her advantage. He toppled forward, and she somehow swung her body back
and engaged the clutch and left him there, in the snow, and by then the
Haitian family next door¾the
ones who had changed the neighborhood¾had
come to Danny’s aid and mine, and alerted authorities, who apprehended the
robber an hour later.
The
newspapers rightly declared my mother a hero, but she was a reluctant one,
with nightmares that did not abate for a full year. We managed to gloss
over the more grisly details when talking with the children about the
break-in, and they¾too
young to understand that the angel of death had passed by our door and yet
we were spared¾sloshed
in what was left of the snow with the other neighborhood children the next
day. We bought two Rottweilers and a German shepherd. The police and our
pastor tried to get me into counseling¾the
rape¾and
I did require some medical attention and the company of friends, but for
awhile I mostly felt relief¾the
children were safe.
Danny, though, he couldn’t get over what had happened. The
stabbing had pierced and collapsed a lung, and in the brutality of the
attack two of his ribs and a collarbone had been fractured. But in time
these things healed. His supervisors at the plant¾he
is a tool-and-die maker¾gave
him a month of personal leave, at full pay, but when the leave expired he
did not return to work. Day after day he sat in a green plastic chair on
the back porch and watched the dogs play and sat very still, looking very
much like the old men at the trailer park next door who spend their
afternoons watching the cars go by.
After Thanksgiving I took a job as a Christmas elf at a mall
department store. I did not tell anyone; presents would need bought; bills
would need paid. Little children needed escorted to Santa's lap, and I led
them there, in my itchy green felt elf suit. The motions and the words
were repetitive, and I found that, after awhile, my body and lips could
move and talk independently of me, and so¾in
the midst of the Christmas shopping crowds, and while holding the hands of
small children and attending to Santa Claus¾I
found my way into a profoundly lonely space, in the quiet recesses of my
own mind. The emptiness there was surprising as the October snow.
I had a
fling with jolly St. Nick¾the
Tuesday-through-Thursday Santa, a kindly old fat widower named Bob. He
asked me if I was married. I said no. He asked me to drinks. I said yes.
We drove separate cars to an ale house downtown, one I knew to
be frequented by attorneys and mortgage brokers and insurance salesmen,
one where none of Danny’s friends would drink. We nursed a couple of beers
each and closed the place talking, mostly about his late wife and his
children and his love for the kennel club downtown. He hardly ever wagered
on the dogs; he admired them for their long, lithe bodies. He was
contemplating adopting a greyhound but worried that his bachelor's
apartment might be too confining for an animal built to run. I leaned over
and kissed him. His mouth tasted bitter and stale. He touched my face. In
the dark of the bar I traced the lines of age across his cheek with my
finger. We kissed again. I went home with him and momentarily felt like
the emptiness might go away, but it did not. He could tell. In the morning
he stroked my hair with his hand and said, "I’m not what you need, dear."
On the way home I pulled the car off to the side of the road
and cried for the first time since the break-in.
Christmas Eve the sun beat down upon the pavement, and the Atlantic Ocean
brought warm, humid winds. I took the children to the beach, and they
built sand castles and ran half-naked into the waves, oblivious to my
concerns about the undertow. Last Christmas, at this beach, a shark had
bitten a surfboard clean in half and left the surfer¾a
teenage girl¾alone.
She called her mother from a pay phone, relieved to have been spared, and
told her mother that she loved her. On the way home her Jeep was
sideswiped by a tractor-trailer, and it rolled down an embankment, and she
died from blunt head trauma. The world is full of random tragedies like
these, and they may come from anywhere, at any time.
As I was thinking about these things my six-year-old daughter
raced her four-year-old brother into the water, and she went too deep, too
fast, and a wave broke above her head, and she disappeared below. I chased
after her, but she emerged before I reached her, and laughed, and I saw
that she had lost her top¾her
first bikini top. It washed up on the shore, fifty feet down the beach,
and my son retrieved it and carried it back to us.
That night we all went to a Christmas Eve service at church¾they
call it a Hanging of the Greens service. The sanctuary was decorated with
white lights and golden garlands and a massive green tree that rose thirty
feet from behind the pulpit, its uppermost bough extending nearly to the
skylight, and topped with the star of Bethlehem. We sang Christmas carols
and listened to readings from the Gospel of Luke¾shepherds
keeping watch by night and no room in the inn¾and
men sweated in their summer coats and families sat together, children with
parents, which is not the custom of our congregation. Danny was very
quiet, but it did him good, I thought, to be out among people. We had all
been given candles at the beginning of the service, and at the benediction
the sanctuary lights were extinguished, and a single flame was passed from
the altar to the front row, and then¾candle-to-candle,
person-to-person¾around
the entire sanctuary, until the whole room was illumined in the soft,
flickering glow. We sang “Away in a Manger,” and Danny reached for my hand
with his. He stared straight ahead, his face impassive, not singing. I
could feel the meter of his heart in his fingers.
Christmas morning we did the best we could¾presents
under the tree, children unwrapping furiously, apple cider,
picture-taking, cheery words, a honey-glazed ham and mistletoe¾but
by noon we were watching college football pre-game shows on television
with too much interest, and we are not a family particularly devoted to
football.
The next day my mother announced she would be moving away
after the New Year, to live with her sister in Owensboro, Kentucky. I
asked her why, why now, and she said it was time for a change, time to
look for a new life and stop living for the one she had lived before, the
one that was gone now and had been gone for too many years.
Danny took to long walks, through the neighborhood and into
the alleys behind the strip malls that lined Okeechobee Road. He carried a
golf club, a nine-iron, for protection, and had begun to cultivate a
haggard, unapproachable persona. His beard had grown long and shaggy, and
his clothes hung loose in the places where he used to fill them amply. He
wore a hat advertising a stock car racing driver and a leading brand of
motor oil. He returned home in the afternoons with things he found in the
alleys¾empty
glass bottles, discarded bicycle tires, a battered mannequin¾and
he piled them in the backyard and never looked at them again. By the end
of January a small hill of alley garbage had obscured most of our
backyard. The dogs loved to play on it, and I tried to keep the children
away, fearing a bad fall onto something unforgiving, or a dirty hypodermic
needle hidden in a roll of shag carpet. By February the hill had become a
mountain visible from above the backyard fence, and when for a Valentine's
Day gift Danny bought me an aging pickup truck (financed at a loan-shark
rate) I contemplated leaving him. We had a loud, abusive fight in the
front yard¾I
could see neighbors peeking at us through window blinds and didn't care
one bit¾that
ended with me throwing the wooden porch rocking chair through the front
window and Danny slicing his arm lengthwise on a shard of glass trying to
retrieve the chair.
That pickup truck was not for me, not really. Danny used it to
gather material from all over, as far north as Port St. Lucie, as far west
as Belle Glade and Pahokee, and even a few trips south to Fort Lauderdale
and Miami. The junk pile spilled into the front yard, and then onto the
roof. Geometric shapes were emerging, and color schemes. Danny declared
himself an artist and became involved in a very public legal dispute with
the zoning commission about what he had by now titled Living Sculpture
for a Dying Planet. The zoning commissioners, playing hardball, called
in the health inspector and child protective services, and made
allegations of neglect and abuse. By this time I had taken two jobs¾working
the mail room at a law office days and hostessing at a restaurant weekend
evenings¾and
I was growing tired of financing his increasingly erratic behavior, and
also just plain tired. Then one Saturday, as inexplicably as he had
started, Danny began to load truckloads of junk into the pickup and haul
it to the landfill west of town. He worked all day, and when the neighbors
saw him, they came with their trucks, too, and helped, glad to be rid of
the eyesore, and by five o’clock all the debris had been taken away, and
bare patches of yard, where grass had been deprived of sunlight, were all
that remained of my husband's trash sculpture.
That
evening I went into my husband's bedroom¾I
had been sleeping on the couch for months¾and
asked him to make love, something we had not done since the robbery, and
the rape. “Are you sure?” he said, and I said I was, and we embraced and
held each other for a long time before taking off any clothes. He found it
difficult to look into my eyes, so I waited until he could¾I
rubbed his back and shoulders, and he rubbed mine, and we spent some time
just touching our fingertips together. “I didn’t stop him,” he said, then:
“I couldn’t. I let him do that to you. It’s my fault.” The same thought
had occurred to me in weak moments, although I did not say it¾it
was unfair and untrue¾and
in the end I did not blame him for it. I ran my finger along the scar on
his back, now receding as new skin replaced old, although it would never
disappear entirely. “What’s done is done,” I said. I thought I should say
it was not his fault, but I could tell he wanted to take responsibility
for what had happened, that maybe if he could have done something to
prevent the attack, he could learn from his mistakes and keep anything bad
from ever happening to us again. “Can you forgive me?” he said. “I already
have,” I said. And then he lay down on top of me, and there were no
skyrockets in flight, no tender words, no trembling hands¾just
workmanlike, ordinary, matter-of-fact sex, of the kind enjoyed by husbands
and wives every day of the year. And it felt good, and it felt right.
Danny
went back to work after that, and made tool-and-die, and the children grew
and became adults and now have children of their own, and the memory of
those fragile six months has grown dimmer for me, and if the children
remember they do not speak much of it. All they will say is that once,
when they were young, snow fell in Florida, in October, and for awhile
things were different, and then before long things were back to normal,
and life continued, and people are resilient, and things change, and there
is no accounting for any of it. |
