The Last Romantics

Noni worried that Joe would lack a strong male presence in his life, and that worry eclipsed all others. Her inquiries returned the name of a baseball coach, Marty Roach, who was famous in Bexley. For twenty-three years he’d taught young boys the nature of teamwork and the beauty of a well-thrown ball. His office, Noni had heard, was festooned with birthday cards sent by former players, men now, who had moved on to cities and careers but harbored an enduring affection for old Coach Marty. This was what Noni wanted. Someone who would endure for Joe.

“Looks like the roster’s already full,” the man on the phone told her. “But for you, Mrs. Skinner, we can fit one more.”

Noni brought us all to that first practice. The team met at the Bexley High School playing field, which was rough, chewed-up grass bordered to the north by a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence lay thick scrub, densely packed bushes, brambles, and spindly pines that eventually thickened and stretched into the forest that covered Packensatt Peak, the closest thing to a mountain that Bexley could claim. High-school kids liked to jump the fence and wander into this wilderness to smoke and drink and light fires and have faltering, unforgettable sex. Noni looked across the field to the tangled trees and saw a defensive line holding steady against an encroaching disorder.

On the field a dozen boys stood in a row, a loose knot of fathers beside them. The air smelled of wet leaves and sweetness from the mulch that sat in huge piles around the field’s southern perimeter, spring preparation for later plantings. Off to the side was Marty Roach. Maybe it was the suggestion of the surname, but I had never before seen a man who so closely resembled an insect. He was short and stocky, with burly shoulders, a dark, ample mustache, and large meat-hook hands. Sparse black hair striped the white dome of his scalp, and I thought that at any moment antennae would sprout from his forehead. He looked designed to survive in hardy conditions, to find forgotten crumbs in a clean kitchen. Noni shook his hand uneasily.

“Hiya, Joe,” he said, leaning down to look my brother in the eye. “Ready to play?” He inclined his head toward the row of boys.

Joe nodded once and stepped away from Noni, took his place in line.

“Now, boys,” Marty said, stretching his arms out wide. “Today is our first day as a team. We are all learning our roles. As teammates you will come to rely on one another. You will come to know one another like brothers.” Coach Marty paused. “But for today let’s just have some fun.”

We sat in the stands with Noni and watched as boys threw balls to their fathers with loose, inelegant gestures. Marty stood alone with Joe and showed him how to hold a bat, swing evenly from the waist, trap a ball within the webbed leather of his glove. After a spell the boys divided into teams and began to scrimmage. Joe positioned himself in center field, just behind second base, where he looked both in the thick of it and dismally alone. Poor Joe, I thought. He stepped from one foot to the other, rubbed his nose, took off his hat and put it on again. The other players laughed or talked or waved to their fathers. Oh, poor Joe.

Batters took their turns at the plate. There were futile swings, dropped bats, tears. Finally a round-bellied blond stepped up. He was short but powerful, clearly experienced. A father lobbed a gentle pitch, the boy swung hard, and—crack—the ball arced forward into the field. And then, all at once, it was Joe like a toy on a spring who came up high to catch the ball. The force of the ball hitting Joe’s glove—whomp—took me by surprise.

The blond boy pulled up from running, a look of shock and dismay on his face.

“Wow! Great catch!” Marty called to Joe.

We clapped wildly, my sisters and Noni and I. Joe gave us a small wave. He smiled. Beside me on the bleachers, I felt Noni expand in the way of a hungry lung filling at last with air. She waved back at Joe.

* * *

AFTER BASEBALL BEGAN for Joe, one worry relaxed but others rose up to replace it.

Sometimes after dinner I heard Noni muttering. “One thing at a time,” she would say. “One thing. One thing.”

The casseroles stopped appearing on our doorstep. Our teachers stopped asking how we were holding up and gazing at us with grave, kindly faces. I slept soundly now. Joe and Renee, too. Only Caroline still suffered nightmares, terrifying dreams of darkness and a child with evil eyes. But after a spell, we became accustomed to Caroline’s bad dreams, and so it seemed, in a way, a return to normalcy.

One thing at a time. One thing.

Sometimes Noni yelled and threw objects at the wall—pencils and books and staplers. Papers littered the kitchen table and the study and Noni’s bedroom. At night Noni worried over a big gray calculator. We wandered in and kissed her and asked her to put us to bed, but she would say, “In a minute, just give me a minute,” and so we put ourselves to bed. We fell asleep atop the covers to the sound of Noni punching numbers with a jagged index finger, sharp and insistent.

Three months after our father died, we moved from our yellow house to a gray one-story ranch six miles away. This house had no stairs or swing set or much of a backyard, only a strip of gravel and a rectangle of sparse, yellowed grass that backed against a tall wooden fence. In the front yard sat a single tree, a large, humbling locust that threw a rough blanket of shade over the house. We loved our yellow house and cried more bitterly for this loss than we had for our father.

“We have no money,” Noni explained. “I’m sorry. Your daddy never told me we were out of money.”

It was June when we moved. School was out. Low-relief mounds of mosquito bites marked my legs, red and itchy and bleeding from my attentions. On that sticky, heavy day, we all rode with Noni in the long front seat of the U-Haul. Joe sat closest to the window, and he alone craned his neck to watch the yellow house disappear behind us.

We helped Noni unpack the towels and sheets, the plates and silverware, our summer clothes, our books. Renee and Caroline would now share a room. Joe was down the hall, closest to the bathroom. I would sleep in a small, tucked-away space that had a low ceiling and no windows. Our old things looked wrong in the new rooms. At any moment I expected someone—our father perhaps—to pop out from behind a door and say Surprise! or What a hoot!, which were things our father used to say.

For dinner that first night, we sat on the couch and ate spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Accidentally we had arranged ourselves by age: Renee beside Caroline beside Joe beside me. I was wearing my nightgown, a short one, and the nubby orange upholstery itched against the backs of my thighs. The skin around our mouths was stained pink from the tomato sauce.

“Kids,” Noni said. She was standing in front of the couch. Unpacked boxes lined the walls. In the kitchen dirty dishes filled the sink.

“Yes?” said Renee.

“Kids,” Noni said again. “I’m feeling tired. Very tired.” Her hair hung lank around her face, her eyes gazed out from deep inside her head. The bones around her neck were thin and pronounced. They looked delicate, easy to break.

“I need some rest,” Noni said. “Okay?” She gazed from one of us to the other, her eyebrows up.

Caroline, Joe, and I all turned to Renee: she was the eldest, she was the one who knew how to answer our mother.

“Don’t worry, Noni,” said Renee. “I can do it.”

Noni nodded once as though something had been decided. She bent to each of us and hugged us, kissed us on our heads. There was a tickle of hair against my cheek, and then she disappeared down the long, dark hall to her bedroom.

Our mother did not emerge for three days. Then six. Then four. Then six again. This continued. Occasionally she would appear to cook dinner. Or ask us about our day. Or preside over a cut knee, a sunburned shoulder, a snotty nose. But primarily she rested in her room, door closed, curtains drawn, lights off. A bubble of darkened quiet that we feared to disrupt. How long did it last? Renee later claimed three years, give or take. Joe put it closer to two. When we were older, we called this period “the Pause,” but back then we had no words to describe it. We pretended that it was okay. This was temporary, we told ourselves. We must wait for Noni to finish resting. We must wait patiently for her to return.

Chapter 2

THAT FIRST SUMMER we went feral. Joe and I became wild things, twigs in our hair, skin brown and dirty and scraped. Renee and Caroline tried to remain more respectable, more mature, but they, too, bore the marks of neglect and adventure. The house was never clean. We pulled what we needed from the cardboard boxes but did not unpack them fully. We played games, built forts, constructed castles that stayed up for days and then scattered underfoot as we played indoor tag or wrestled or fought. We slept in the clothes we wore all day, we did not brush our teeth, we bathed only when we began to smell ourselves or when Renee stripped off our clothes, pushed us under the shower, and turned on the tap. We ate food with our hands straight from the refrigerator or from the box of groceries that arrived every Friday, delivered by the stock boy, Jimmy, from the Bexley corner store. The food we received was odd or close to spoiling—leftovers, we came to see, unsellable. Charity. We were often hungry. We were always barefoot.

Joe and I explored our new neighborhood: only six miles from our old house, but it felt foreign. Another state, another country. There were people with brown skin, head scarves, tattoos. The houses were small, and domestic life spilled from windows and doors in ways that would have been unthinkable in our old neighborhood. In front yards men sat on beach chairs and drank from dull brown bottles. Women yelled at their children, who ran naked through a flicking sprinkler. A teenage girl blew smoke in practiced rings up toward the summer sky.

In twenty years Bexley would be deemed a commuter town and new expensive homes, new box stores, would arrive, but in 1981 it was small, forgotten, besieged by inflation and unemployment. On Bexley’s east side sat an abandoned mill where industrial furniture was once made for colleges and hospitals. Decades before, the company brought in workers from the city, settled them in cheap houses outfitted with the company’s own cheap wares. Now the mill stood empty, brooding, a sprawling, static octopus with graffitied tentacles of red brick and cracked windows and one tall, grimy smokestack for a head. All around the perimeter were scattered raw wooden boards, chairs with stuffing torn from seat cushions, tables with splintered stumps instead of legs.

Before the Pause, Noni often drove past the building, and always I would gaze at it with the fear and delight of a cowardly voyeur. During the Pause, Noni no longer drove, and so we had no occasion to pass the factory. But sometimes in bed at night, I imagined it: moonlight hitting the broken windowpanes, rats and cats and raccoons nosing through the interior, biting one another, fighting, scratching the furniture, defecating in empty rooms. I imagined a busy darkness, a dismantling that must be carried out under cover of night. The mysteries of the factory seemed to me similar to the mystery of Noni. Inside, invisible forces were at work, and they were full of a secret rage.

Our friends receded that summer. We couldn’t walk to the old neighborhood. Noni had instructed us to use the telephone only for emergencies. And besides, it soon became clear that our friends had returned to their normal lives, lives where groceries must be bought, dinners cooked, television shows watched, where loved ones were bothersome but healthy and alive. We reminded them of the constant threat of calamity. How quickly it could all go to pieces.

* * *

ON THE MORNING of my fifth birthday, Noni emerged to bake me a cake. We all watched as she lined up the ingredients on the kitchen counter: an ancient tin of baking powder, a wrapped square of hardened brown sugar. We did not volunteer to help. It seemed too risky. To us our mother was an exotic animal, a gazelle perhaps, that might startle if we moved too fast, spoke too loudly.

There was the soft drop of the sifted flour, the crack of the eggs, the steady buzz of the mixer, and then—ping—out of the oven came the cake, all golden and puffed up like my own private sun. We each ate a thick slab of cake, Noni, too, and then she kissed me and walked again down the hall, the thready hem of her bathrobe skimming the floor.

She closed the door to her bedroom.

I burst into tears.

Renee, Caroline, and Joe exchanged looks. Caroline hid a smile with her hand.

“Fiona,” Renee said, “Joe’s got a surprise.”

Out the front door Joe disappeared, and when he returned, in his arms was a small rabbit. It struggled with kicking surges to escape, but Joe held it close to his chest.

“Happy Birthday, Fi,” he said.

My heart surged with excitement as Joe brought the rabbit to me. Gently he placed it into my arms. I stroked its soft fur, its beating heart a rapid tapping against my palm. The fur was black and gray, except for white around the rabbit’s eyes and on its stomach. The rabbit looked very scared, but Joe talked in a slow voice and I used my softest hands, my gentlest touch.

“Where did she come from?” I asked.

Joe whispered, “A secret.”

Outside in the backyard, Joe helped me set up an enclosure of sorts with some broken-down boxes for a fence, a wooden crate propped on its side for shelter, and one cereal bowl for water, another for food. I named the rabbit Celeste after the elephant queen in the Babar books.

Every morning I fed my rabbit carrots and wilted lettuce and the small green apples that fell from the trees in the park. Celeste was not a delicate eater. Her nose moved together with her mouth in a grasping motion, and the food vanished quickly. I loved the quick motion of her eyes. I loved her long legs with their loping, circular movement like she was riding a bicycle. I loved her smell of musk and clean, fresh grass and even the dry, perfectly shaped pellets of dung that sat in tidy piles around her pen.

Joe loved Celeste, too. For weeks we studied her. We determined what she liked best to eat, where she most enjoyed a scratch, when she was most amenable to a cuddle, and when she preferred to play. Joe liked to feed her long blades of grass, the ends disappearing smoothly into her mouth as though she slurped spaghetti.

We doted on Celeste for one month, maybe two, and then she vanished. When I arrived one morning to feed her as I always did, her pen was empty. It was August, the days slow to start, humidity thick as fudge. Joe helped me search the bushes in the yard and took me down the street, calling “Celeste! Celeste!” until the dew burned off and we were both sweaty, pink-faced, still wearing our pajamas.

I wept as Joe carried me home.

“Fiona, listen,” Joe said. “Celeste had to go back to live with her rabbit brothers and sisters.” He set me down in the front yard. My tears had wet his pajama top. Stripes of snot glistened on his shoulder.

“Really?” I said. I hadn’t considered this possibility.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘reproduce like rabbits’?” said Joe. “All rabbits have so many brothers and sisters! The most of any species.” Joe was eight and wise in every single way.

I stopped crying. I believed my brother. All at once I felt ashamed for keeping Celeste imprisoned for so many weeks. I was glad that now she had returned home. It would be a terrible thing, I thought, to be separated from your siblings.

* * *

MY GRIEF FOR Celeste lasted exactly five days. Then Joe brought me to the pond.

It was another hot, sticky morning, and I lay on the couch reading War of the Worlds and imagining where I would hide from an alien invasion. I was a precocious and prolific reader, often stealing Renee’s books or ones from the cardboard boxes we had yet to unpack, generally preferring to exist within my own made-up world rather than the real one that surrounded me.

“Come here,” Joe said, standing in the doorway. “I want to show you something.”

I narrowed my eyes, examining his face, and then put the book down.

He led me along the sidewalk, through a neighbor’s backyard, over a low fence, and down a steep, wooded hill. The going was rough—no real path, heavy vegetation, and fallen tree trunks. Shifting spots of sun played with my eyes, and I tripped and fell. Joe helped me up, then swung me onto his shoulders, and I rode like this down the hill, ducking sharp branches, holding tight with my legs around his shoulders, my arms around his neck.

Finally the woods thinned, and Joe lifted me down. Before us was a shallow, sun-speckled brook that twisted through the trees.

“Ta-da!” Joe said, as though he were a magician and this his finest trick. It was cool here, calm, the water talking quietly to itself, the fizz of dragonflies and the airy whine of mosquitoes.

“Let’s stay,” I said.

For the next few hours, we played on the rocks beside the brook. We did not speak. We threw stones. We crouched and watched the spindly-legged water bugs skitter across the surface. We fashioned fishing poles from sticks and bits of long grass tied to the ends, but we had no bait and the quick, darting minnows ignored our efforts, instead flashing silver as they poked and picked algae from the rocks like housewives choosing melons. We walked downstream, the brook widening as it went. The sound of rushing water grew louder, and then the woods cleared and before us shimmered a small green pond set like a jewel amid the trees and the long cattails. On the far side was a dam with water rushing beyond it in turbulent free fall.

Duck grass and bunches of loosestrife grew along the perimeter, lily pads, too, with their hand-size leaves and stiff flowers like divination rods. There was a low grassy bank, perfect for sitting, and a small beach area of gray sand and pebbles. No one else was here, but I saw evidence of activity: a battered little rowboat overturned on the grass, a crushed soda can, a few orange cigarette butts, one marked with the dull red of lipstick. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

“Joe!” I called. “Can we go in?”

Joe didn’t answer, just pulled off his shirt and jumped from the bank into the water. I stripped off my sundress and tiptoed across the sand. My feet, ankles, knees, thighs entered the water, and the cold advanced with an excruciating certainty that was lovely and painful all at once. Beyond the narrow strip of sand, the bottom of the pond was thick with mud and slime. I felt it squirt between my toes, my feet sinking deeper with each step. The cold clutched at my hips, my stomach, my bare chest, and it was only then I remembered that I could not swim.

My feet lost their grip on the slippery bottom. My head slid under smoothly, silently. My mind registered only surprise: at the cold, at the heavy silence, at the quality of the underwater light—green and glancing gold—and the fine algae that drifted like mossy snowflakes in the water. I waved my arms, and the algae spun crazily, an explosion of green particles unburdened by gravity. In the distance I made out the bulging eyes and long, spiked mustache of a catfish.

I wanted to stay here. It was beautiful and strange in a way that the gray house and our new life were not. That life was only strange, only coarse and dirty. Underwater in the pond was the first time I felt wonder.

And then Joe’s strong hand gripped my shoulder and he hauled me up out of the gold and out of the wonder. I inhaled, and the cold water invaded me. I thought I’d swallowed a minnow, a whole school of minnows, and their sharp silver bodies cut deeply into the interior spaces of my nose and chest.

“Fiona!” Joe cried. I coughed and sputtered as Joe pulled me onto the grass. I lay on the bank heaving and then vomited in one satisfying, emptying gasp.

The look on Joe’s face was terrible. “Fi, are you okay? I’m so sorry. This was so stupid. So stupid. Noni never taught you to swim, did she?” He hit his forehead with his hand.

“I’m okay.” My voice was a rough croak. I cleared it and repeated, “Joe, I’m okay.” It felt odd, me reassuring Joe who so often reassured me. The pain in my chest expanded at the sight of my brother in such distress. “Joe, you saved me,” I said.

Joe had already started to grow into himself. In one short season, he’d become a standout on his Little League team. His hands were huge, his feet huge, too, his shoulders skinny and boyish but broad, his waist narrow. He was shaped like a kite trailing streamers of pond water as he stood above me. He looked at me with his dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, and his face transformed into a sort of relief.

“Save you?” he said. “I guess I did.” And Joe smiled.

* * *

THAT SUMMER JOE taught me how to swim. Every day we walked to the pond with towels and swimsuits and sandwiches. We started slowly, Joe’s hands on the small of my back, my arms circling, legs kicking up a flurry of water as I struggled to suspend myself. It took one week, and then I was floating on my back without assistance, my arms outstretched like the points of a star, hair spread around me.

“Next, dog-paddle,” Joe directed, and I knew that he was proud of me. I was not a quick study. I did not take easily to physical activity and was disposed to fall back on complaints of a sprained ankle, a shortness of breath.

One of the many miracles of the pond was that here, in the water, my physical self disappeared. The feeling was delicious. As I tilted my head back atop the surface of the water, a cold rushing filled my ears and I became weightless. This was a sensation I would remember some twenty years later, when I at last would lose the weight that since childhood had circled my body like a sleeping python. Unencumbered is the word I would use in poems to describe it. And also: Untethered. Unrestricted. Expansive. Free. I felt it first in the pond with Joe beside me in the water.

Renee soon turned suspicious. “Where are you guys going?” she asked one morning. She walked to Joe and sniffed his hair. “You smell fishy,” she said.

Renee and Caroline spent their days primarily indoors in front of the fan, where it was cool. They braided each other’s hair and made papier-mâché bowls and beads and masks by wrapping gluey strips of newspaper around the various items they wished to replicate. When they were tired of making things, they watched The Brady Bunch or The A-Team on rerun or sometimes a program that showed a man painting oil landscapes, his voice so calm that it stupefied them. They learned from this man nothing about painting, only that it was possible to spend your entire day in a sort of daze, half awake, half asleep, and at the end of it to feel jumpy and restless but entirely worn out from heat and boredom.

Renee sniffed Joe’s hair again. “Take us,” she said.

Joe and I led our sisters down the road, down the steep hill, along the bank of the brook through the woods until we reached the pond. The day was very hot, and the mere sight of the dark water cooled me off. The rushing sound operated as a hush on us all. Maples and slender birches arched over the pond. The current was weak and nearly invisible. Over the dam the water spilled like a silver cloth pulled through a wringer.

Renee let out a whistle. “Awesome,” she said.

Immediately I resented the presence of my sisters. This was our place, mine and Joe’s, and their intrusion altered the feel of it. Caroline wore a bikini and spread her towel in a sprinkling of sun. Renee began to patrol the bank in search of frogs. Yesterday I’d seen a large one, a bullfrog with a call like a rock dropping down a well, but I didn’t tell Renee. I let her search.

“Fi, let’s practice swimming,” said Joe. I scowled at him, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his face said, This is still our place. We can share with the others, it doesn’t change what we have found.