by Sue Miller
“It was,” she said in a soft voice. “It was especially you.”
“So that was your mother?” he asked now. “On the phone?”
“Yes.” Something funny must have happened to her face, because he said, “Oh, Sarah,” and reached for her again.
“No, it’s okay. I’m okay,” she said, breathing deeply, making herself stop. “It’s just . . . not real.”
And now, exhaling loudly, she lay back down. After a moment, he did too.
It was almost funny, she thought, lying next to him, both of them looking up at the ceiling—like two people who’ve known each other forever. Like an old married couple. Outside, on the street, the noise of traffic had picked up. She could hear her upstairs neighbor now, thumping around, getting ready for work.
She felt him turn toward her. “How is she doing?” he asked. “Your mother.”
“My mother.” She made a little noise, an attempt at a laugh. “My mother is always okay. That is the division of labor in my family. Or that was the division of labor. My mother holds it all in, my father lets it out.”
“Were you close to your parents? To him?”
“Oh, I adored him.” Now she turned to look at Thomas, grateful to him, he was trying so hard. “She did too. My mother. I can’t imagine her life now. Without him.” She pictured her mother, she saw her sitting alone at the big table by the windows, and felt an unaccustomed pull of pity for her.
“What . . . was he like?”
“Oh.” She smiled. “You could say . . . Rabelaisian. I think, in fact, it has been said of him. Certainly he was big, in every way. A lover of life. And kind. God, I would never have survived my adolescence without him. Without his kindness.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“My father.” She thought of him, she saw him at the same big table, talking, laughing. Making her mother laugh, too. “Well, he was just there. You know, I think he had such a terrible growing up himself that he was just grateful in the aftermath of that. Just glad. A glad person. But also he understood, he understood how some things are just . . . insolubly painful. You can’t make them better, you can’t make them turn out differently. And what he was good at, in the face of that, was offering a kind of . . . joyous sympathy. Or is it empathy? Anyway, he was just there, steady and warm. He made people happy, without even trying.”
He reached over, and stroked her hair. “I love the way you talk about him.”
“You would have loved him,” she said, fiercely now.
His hand stilled on her hair for a moment, and began again. “What was so terrible about his growing up?” he asked.
She smiled. “Most everything, I would say. Plus, I suppose, most of the things that were terrible—that are terrible—about anyone’s growing up.”
“Loneliness,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe loneliness.”
“Sexual desperation.”
She smiled, and he smiled back.
“Acne,” he offered.
“There could have been acne.”
“Unrequited love, probably,” he said after a moment.
“Sure.”
“But what about him in particular?”
Sarah moved closer to him and rested her head against his shoulder and chest. The sun had warmed his flesh. “Where to begin?” she said.
“I can wait,” he said.
She lay there for a moment. “Well, there was the father who ran away, abandoned the family. And was never seen again. And they already had no money, even before he left.” She sighed. “Then the mother who drank. And hit, apparently.”
“Ah.”
After a minute, he said, “And what about your mother? What’s she like? Not unkind, I’m sure.” He pulled his head back to look at her, and she smiled at him, at how beautiful she felt he was.
“Oh no, she is, very kind. But her kindness . . . it takes a different form. My mother . . . she wants to solve your problems. Or she wants you to solve your problems. She can’t . . . sit with you. In your misery. It’s too hard for her.” She changed her voice, made it brusque. “‘Let’s. Make. This. Better!’” She slapped her hand on the sheet covering her thighs with each word.
They lay still for a long moment.
“Good luck with this one,” she said in a small, pinched voice, and started to cry.
10
When Annie called, Frieda was playing the piano, an old upright someone had painted white at one time, now scratched and chipped here and there, the dark wood showing through. She had started to take lessons when she turned fifty-five, a birthday present to herself, as was the piano. By now she was working on pieces she actually enjoyed listening to. When the phone rang, she was practicing the left hand of a Mozart sonata, because, as her teacher said, she needed to make herself hear its music. It wasn’t just trailing around after the right hand, he said. It was singing its own song, too.
She was thinking of this teacher as she got up to go to the phone. He was elderly now, white-haired and slightly stooped, but at a younger age he’d played for years in a moderately distinguished local quartet. Once, when she didn’t understand what he wanted from her, he’d made an irritated noise and gestured for her to move, in his impatience actually pushing her farther down the bench with his body. He’d played the passage she was having difficulty with; and then, as if he couldn’t stop himself, he went on, playing the piece through until the end. When he was finished, he sat for a moment with his head tilted back as if still hearing the music, his hands lifted in their beautiful arc above the keys.
Then he looked at her and dropped his hands into his lap. “More or less like that,” he’d said, breaking the spell.
And though tears had been sitting in Frieda’s eyes before he spoke, she burst out laughing at the preposterousness of his suggestion, and after a second or two of what seemed like confusion on his part, he had laughed along with her.
So she was smiling as she picked up the phone and heard Annie’s small, exhausted voice announcing the impossible.
Of course, Frieda and Lucas had been invited to Graham’s wedding to Annie, held in Peter Aiello’s grand living room on Beacon Street. While they said their vows, you could see a light rain falling slantwise over the green of the Common. Frieda had wept through most of the ceremony, which she explained to Lucas as just a silly thing she was doing and to anyone else as pure sentimentality. “I can’t help it. It’s just what I do at weddings.” And while that was true—she did always weep at weddings, at the innocent hopefulness of weddings—she knew that these tears were more complicated than that, that she was weeping for the sense of a door shutting forever against her.
She and Graham had stayed close after their divorce. This was partly because of Lucas, but it was also because of the deep, unresolved attachment between them. A few times in the first year or so after she moved out, Graham had tried to talk about this with her, but she knew that what he really wanted was to discuss their perhaps getting back together, and that was not a possibility for Frieda. She felt it would be psychologically suicidal. She deflected these attempts on his part, then. Sometimes she even made a joke of them.
But once he started to have lovers again, he stopped trying to bring it up. This made things easier between them, but it also made Frieda sad.
Frieda did not have lovers in this period of her life, or for a long time afterward. She had a child to take care of, she had a part-time job, and she’d gone back to graduate school, in history. She couldn’t imagine, in those years, making the time for even a casual affair, her life felt so crazy to her.
But then along came Annie anyway, and that was that. There was no longer even the possibility of talk about her coming back together with Graham—though their affection for each other continued anyway, running under everything else that happened between them.
And one of the things that happened between them was Frieda’s increasing closeness with Annie, a surprise to all of them.
Frieda had met h
er, at Graham’s insistence, only a few months after he and Annie started living together. He wanted them all to be friends. Frieda could tell that Annie hadn’t liked this idea. She was awkward with Frieda at first, stiff. Later, when they were, in fact, friends, she talked about it with Frieda. “It just seemed too New Agey to me,” Annie said. “I suppose I thought it was . . . undignified in some way.” She had laughed then, almost apologetically.
Annie was dignified, Frieda could see that from the start. The perfectly oval, serious face. The dancer’s posture. Dark eyes. Dark hair, dark definitive eyebrows that registered her responses to everything. She pondered things, she took things seriously. And then, quickly, she would come to life, animated, delighted—at just seeing you, at a joke, at Graham’s arrival home. Frieda had liked that unexpected combination of elements in her, it was one of the things that impelled her forward, into their friendship.
But there were others. Both of their mothers descended slowly into Alzheimer’s disease at the same time, and over coffee, over glasses of wine, they exchanged horrible stories or hilarious ones about them—sometimes stories with both aspects intermingled, which seemed to Frieda the nature of that illness.
They told each other about their past lives. Annie talked about her first marriage, her chagrin over it. And Frieda discussed honestly her own marriage to Graham.
He had already told Annie about his infidelities—told her and taken the blame on himself for all of it.
“As well he might,” Annie had said to Frieda.
“Oh, well,” Frieda said. “It was the times too, of course.” They were sitting late one afternoon having beers in Frieda’s small apartment on Whittier Street—this was long before the neighborhood was gentrified, at a period when this corner of Cambridge was still full of graduate students and impoverished divorced women with children. Frieda had been surprised to find that she loved her life in this world.
“That’s no excuse,” Annie said.
“It sort of is, I think,” Frieda said. It was hot outside, and the fan behind Frieda blew her hair forward in an unattractive way each time it swung in her direction. “This was Cambridge, after all, and in those years it was essentially a sexual playground for grown-ups. Or people who thought they were grown-ups.” She laughed. “Like us. With some completely predictable results. What happened to our relationship—to our marriage—really being but one example.” She had rolled her eyes then, and Annie laughed. Then Frieda had sobered, frowned. “The thing is, I just wasn’t made that way. I tried to say that to Graham, many times over, but honestly, I don’t think he believed me, he was having such a very fine time himself.” She sat for a moment looking down at her hands. Remembering it, so clearly, she made a little noise, and then looked up at Annie, who was watching her intently. “In the end, I was just exhausted by it. I loved him, but I was so jealous all the time that I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand myself, mostly. I was a weepy mess, for years. So I left. Took Lucas. Shoved everything I owned into the car and drove away.” She shrugged. “And then he was a weepy mess. But in his case, it lasted for about two seconds.”
She made a rueful face. “In fact, I went on being a weepy mess, mourning him. After I’d left him, for god’s sake. For months. Maybe a year. Longer. God! Utter craziness. Because by that time, of course, he’d recovered and was a happy single guy at last, sampling from that big tray of female goodies passing themselves around.” She didn’t say—she probably didn’t need to: she saw Annie blush—that at first she’d seen Annie as just someone else on that tray.
The result of the closeness that had developed and deepened over the years between Annie and Frieda was that when Lucas went through a hateful period in early adolescence, when, for more than a year, Annie was the only person he would talk to reasonably, the relief that Frieda felt about this—that he had a resource in his suffering, and a resource she trusted—was immense.
This was probably also the reason that, when the time came, Annie in turn shared with Frieda her concerns about Sarah, about Sarah’s loneliness, about her size, about Annie’s own inability to help or comfort her; and Frieda, who understood something about the kind of pain Sarah was feeling from her own difficult growing up, was able to talk to Sarah about it. About some of it, anyway. More important, maybe, was able to befriend her.
For years they went together every Wednesday evening to a program at the Museum of Fine Arts called “Drawing in the Galleries.” Paper and pencils of every size were available, and charcoal. There was usually a live model, dressed or draped, or sometimes they were instructed to choose a sculpture or a painting to work from. This was something Frieda had done with Lucas for a while, but he’d grown tired of it. Sarah didn’t. Oh, eventually, when she began to have real homework, she could no longer manage the evenings; but until then she and Frieda would work quietly side by side. “This is tricky, isn’t it,” Frieda would say. “The way his fingers curve.”
“And he keeps moving them!” Sarah would whisper back.
“I love the way you shadowed her skirt,” Frieda would tell her. “Yours is better,” Sarah would say.
Afterward they always stopped in the café, where Frieda would have a glass of wine and Sarah was allowed to choose a dessert for herself. They spoke of school, or Sarah’s dancing, or her parents; and Frieda listened and thought how odd it was, the trade that she and Annie seemed to have made during these years. Lucas for Sarah, Sarah for Lucas. It comforted her, and if she were honest, it eased some of the jealousy she felt.
But through all this, even after the bond between Annie and Frieda was a settled, predictable part of their lives, what Frieda couldn’t help feeling was that Annie didn’t know—couldn’t know—the real Graham. And that she, Frieda, did. That she understood him in ways Annie would never be able to. After all, she had met him, fallen in love with him when he was homely, unbearded. She was a geeky girl, he a geeky boy, when they first went out together, when they married.
They were suited to each other. She did love him, and he loved her too, but she also felt he was as good as she would have. They were in the same league, was what she thought. What Annie didn’t know—couldn’t have known—what Frieda did know, was how the 1960s, the ’70s, had made Graham who he was now. Had made him sexy.
Oh, he’d always been passionate—about life, women, food, books, music, booze. But when he was homely, people didn’t find that as charming as they did later. Later, when all the changes in the rules came around. And for Graham, the beard, the full head of hair, the contact lenses, the sudden interest in elegant clothes. And the way all of those choices seemed to color everything he did or said. Seemed to change its meaning. Seemed to make him attractive.
Did make him attractive, Frieda understood that. Made him magnetic, even.
Which must have been what made Annie think that she and Graham were in the same league, that he deserved her. Only Frieda—Frieda and maybe some of his old friends—knew that if the beard came off, if the slight overbite were revealed, if you put him in his old clothes, then everything he did, everything he said, would be tonally altered.
No, without the transformation—what Frieda sometimes thought of as Graham’s disguise—Annie wouldn’t have been interested, Frieda was sure of it.
She thought that Graham understood this at some level too. That his worship of Annie was born of this, his sense of his extraordinary good fortune. His undeserved good luck.
And when, early on in his marriage to Annie, he confessed to Frieda that he’d been unfaithful to her with Linda Parkman, Frieda felt confirmed in this. She had a quick frisson of vengeful pleasure she could barely acknowledge to herself. Of course, for the infidelity itself; but then more deeply, more clearly, for the fact that he hadn’t told Annie about it.
And the reason he hadn’t told her? He couldn’t risk telling her. What Frieda knew was that there was this difference for him between her and Annie—that he’d always been honest with her, with Frieda, more deeply so than he could af
ford to be with Annie.
But she was Annie’s friend too. She was also angry with him on Annie’s behalf for that early infidelity; and maybe even more deeply angry with him on her own behalf once again for everything she’d lost all those years earlier. Sitting opposite him in her kitchen, full of the pain she thought she’d relinquished long ago, she wept. He’d reached his hand out to her then, but she turned away from his touch. He’d sat there uselessly for a few minutes, watching her slowly pull herself together.
After she’d stopped crying, he asked her if she thought he should tell Annie.
“No!” she had said, too loudly. “You’d relieve yourself at the price of her suffering. Why should she suffer? You suffer for a change.”
But oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the news of this—his infidelity with Linda Parkman—increased her pleasure in her friendship with Annie. She knew the shift had to do with her vague sense of having won something—what, she couldn’t have said. But whatever it was, it somehow evened the balance between her and Annie, it made everything easier.
Sometimes Frieda wondered how it would all play out over time, this complicated web of love and something else among the three of them—the five of them, if you counted Lucas and Sarah. She occasionally indulged the fantasy that Graham and Annie would take her in in her old age. Or perhaps, she thought, if Graham died first, she and Annie would live together, two old ladies, caring for each other. She could imagine this, the dinners together in the evenings, the visits from the children, the grandchildren.
And then there was the thought she rarely allowed herself, the one that came by itself, unbidden, from time to time, the one she pushed away as quickly as she could: What if Annie died first, and Frieda and Graham were the ones left behind? Would they come to live together again? Surely by then he would be changed. Surely by then—maybe even by now—it would be safe, he would be less libidinous. Maybe the passing of time had made a monogamous man of Graham.