by Sue Miller
“No, no one has the same memories of me that you have.”
She smiled. Then she pulled her chin in and pursed her mouth, a disbelieving face. She said, “So, you have never made love to anyone else.”
“Certainly not the way I’ve made love to you.”
She laughed, and turned in her seat to face the dashboard again.
After a few minutes, she said, “I would like to know all the different ways you’ve made love to all the different women you’ve made love with.”
“Too bad.”
“You’ll never tell me?” She was smiling, teasing.
“Nope.”
She yawned and tilted her seat farther back. “Only Americans say ‘nope.’”
“Of course. It’s an Americanism.”
They rode in silence for a while. “Do you feel like doing something tomorrow?” she asked. “Maybe it would be good to go out somewhere.”
“Mmm. I’ve got a couple of things I have to read. But one’s a revision, so it won’t take all that long.”
“I thought we could go to the cinema, maybe. And then dinner?”
He looked over at her. She looked very . . . particular, he would have said. She’d pulled her hair back and pinned it into a careless kind of chignon when they got in the car. It made the strong lines of her face—her nose, her large heavy-lidded eyes—seem more prominent. He had never been with a woman he found as beautiful. He said, “Only Frenchies say ‘cinema.’”
“That’s simply not true.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “Elegant people the world over say cinema.”
“Nope. Not in the U. S. of A.,” he said. “Mooovies.”
She swatted him lightly on the arm and settled deeper into her seat, wiggling her butt a little— as if getting comfortable on a nest, he thought. They rode in the sound of the onrushing car for a few minutes. She said, “I’m going to sleep, I think. Whether I wish to, or not.”
“Good.” A light rain began to dot the windshield. He turned the wipers on. The view smeared momentarily, then opened again.
After a long moment of silence, she said, “I thought Annie was odd about the ashes.”
“How so?”
She made a face, thinking. After a moment, she said, “Efficient. Oddly efficient, at least momentarily.”
He thought of Annie’s face, turning to look at him when Jeanne stepped toward him and held him. The open sympathy stamped on it, the shared pain. “Well, I think they were—they are—the least important part of everything to her.”
“Mmm.”
“She’s very feeling. I’ve always found her so. She’s much more—tenderhearted, really, than Frieda. Or maybe just more available, emotionally. “ He was remembering how often he had talked to Annie in the afternoons when he got home from high school. Graham would still be at the store, Annie always at the back of the house at that time of day, fixing dinner.
Where was Sarah in this picture? He couldn’t remember. Not there. Or if there, quiet. Irrelevant to him at that age, in any case.
Now he was thinking of one particular afternoon when he’d come to talk to Annie about a beautiful girl, a senior named Lucinda Graver who’d taken him up briefly when he was a sophomore—maybe in amusement at the unlikely situation she was creating: the sophisticated upperclasswoman, the cute but uninitiated underclassman. He had wanted to tell Annie about his feelings for Lucinda, about his anger at Frieda, who had refused to give him permission to go to a party Lucinda was having at her suburban home—refused unless she could speak to Lucinda’s parents about how the party would be supervised.
He had said she couldn’t do this, embarrass him in this way.
She said that in that case, she couldn’t consent to his going.
He was furious with her. No one else’s parents cared, he told her.
He had hated the smugness in her voice when she said, “Well, I do.”
What he had wanted in coming over today was to try to get Annie to take his side, to plead his case to Frieda. Now, as an adult, he could imagine her dilemma, threading her way carefully between his rage and Frieda’s rules. He had said to Annie, “I know you don’t believe it, but I love her. I really love her.”
“Of course I believe it,” Annie said. She had set down whatever she was doing when he came in, calling her name from the front door. She had sat across from him at the table.
He’d pushed it. “I want to be with her, forever.” He’d imagined this, he was recollecting now. He’d driven around then in the poorer parts of Cambridge, picturing himself living with Lucinda—living with her there, in that crummy apartment building—he could get a job, they’d be able to afford it. Or there, in that tiny falling-down house. They could manage somehow, he’d been sure. They’d be together, alone together. And images of sex, which they hadn’t quite had, would descend on him and make him moan aloud.
“Of course I understand that completely,” Annie had said to him all those years ago. “It’s part of why this . . . party, or whatever it is . . .”
“It’s a party,” he’d said impatiently.
“Right. And that’s why—because you love her so much—it’s why it’s just so unimportant in the great scheme of things. You have”—and here she’d lifted her arm and moved it in a wide arc—“world enough, and time.”
A phrase that actually comforted him in the moment. He had remembered it later, all of it, when he came across the Marvell poem in college. He’d laughed aloud then, thinking of the way Annie had reversed the meaning of the thing, with the dreamy, expansive way she’d said the words. A trick, really.
But it turned out that none of this really mattered anyway, because Lucinda suddenly began sitting at lunch with another student, a boarding student this time. Like her.
A senior, like her.
When Lucas confronted Lucinda late one afternoon after a soccer game (November, the dark iron gray of the sky at five thirty before he caught the 6:10 train home, the air raw, the sting of his knee where he’d fallen and skidded on the wet grass during the game, their breath clouding the air between them), she said she was sorry, but she happened to be in love with him, with Eliot. When Lucas started to cry, she said—he could remember it still, the revulsion in her face—“God, Lucas! Get a grip.”
“Well, I suppose I can believe that,” Jeanne said now.
“Hmm?”
“That she is. More feeling, as you say. Though Frieda too is very sad right now.”
“She is. Of course she is.”
“Not so much, of course. She’s often seemed so . . . reserved, to me. You can’t tell what it is that she’s thinking of. Sometimes I think even she doesn’t know. For example, when I told her she would not scatter the ashes with us and she was so angry with me, she wouldn’t admit that.”
“I thought you said she did.”
“No, she didn’t. She was angry, and I knew she was, but she wouldn’t say that to me. I had to be the one to say it—that I knew she was angry—before she would acknowledge it. And even then, she wouldn’t speak of it to me.”
“She . . . she just has trouble, with her feelings.”
He saw his mother in his mind’s eye, tall and bony, unfailingly kind, but cut off from him until it was too late by the unreachable sorrow that had seemed to him a permanent part of who she was.
(When he’d come up to Cambridge to tell her he was going to marry Jeanne, she had spoken to him, finally, but glancingly, about her regrets.
It was late. They’d gone out to dinner—his treat—and they were sitting in the living room of the apartment. Out of the blue she had said, “Here’s my advice to you,” and he thought, Oh, shit.
“Just don’t leave anything on the table.”
He had almost laughed out loud at this slangy language, straight from poker, coming from his tall, dorky mother. She looked like Olive Oyl. She had on multicolored striped socks, he noted then, and shoes with thick, rubbery soles. Who wore such things?
“What’s that supposed
to mean?” he’d asked.
“You have to work for what you want, that’s all.” And after a moment, “In marriage.”
“And you did?” He was surprised by his own sharp tone, surprised that even in his happiness with Jeanne, he could still react with this old, familiar anger to his mother.
“I didn’t. That’s my point. I didn’t fight for what I wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
He wanted to hear her say it, that her pain was her own fault. But she stopped then. Her face changed. She said, “Oh, nothing really. It would be unseemly for me to be offering anyone else advice about marriage, so I won’t.”)
“You were so sad,” Jeanne said.
“When?”
“Well, about the ashes, for one thing.”
“Yeah, I was.” He looked over at her. “Because it seemed sad to me. It seemed awful.” He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “That . . . large-spirited person, so big, in every way. Reduced? To white . . . grit? To a few shitty bits of bone?”
Her hand came over and rested on his thigh. His vision was blurred with tears. His throat hurt.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Do you need a tissue?” she asked. He didn’t answer.
“I have one.” She lifted her body slightly and reached over into the back seat for her purse. She got out a Kleenex, handed it to him.
“Thanks,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”
“You know, I will miss him too.” When Lucas didn’t answer, she said softly: “I’m so glad you had him for your father.” She reached over and touched his leg again. “It will make you a good father, too.”
She smiled at him. “A good daddy.” She said this in her perfect American accent, the one she could call up easily at any time, the one she used for the voiceovers, for the ads, sometimes for a part, if she was supposed to be playing an American. She also used it occasionally at social gatherings, mostly when she didn’t like the people she was talking to.
He had been amazed by this the first time he heard it. She was transformed for him, a different Jeanne, a woman he didn’t know, not the woman he was falling in love with. It had excited him, actually, just as the new body she was beginning to have now excited him. He had asked her to keep talking that way after they got back to his apartment—to talk that way to him while they made love.
And she’d started to. But then, when he began to move inside her, she stopped.
“Where’d you go, Jeanne?” he’d whispered, making his own accent broad, midwestern, the way he’d said “movies.”
“Je suis ici,” she breathed.
“Yes,” he said, rocking in her slowly, his elbows on either side of her head, her knees touching his shoulders.
“Oui,” she answered softly. Or he thought she answered. But she was starting to come then, and afterward it occurred to him that it might have been just a noise of pleasure she was making on account of that.
23
When her mother came back from Frieda’s, she seemed distraught to Sarah, her sorrow renewed, or deepened somehow. She had clearly been crying—her eyes were reddened, the lids swollen. For a moment Sarah felt a twist of jealousy: her mother had shared her sorrow with Frieda in a way she hadn’t, or wouldn’t, with her own daughter. It felt too familiar, this exclusion from the world of the grown-ups, and for a moment the old resentment of that touched her again.
But after all, she told herself, Annie must feel easier mourning with Frieda—someone her own age. Frieda, who had perhaps loved Graham in some of the same ways Annie did. (She had asked Frieda about this once, when she was still young enough to be insensitive to the pain it might cause Frieda. This was in the period when she was closest to Frieda, when she occasionally spent a weekend night at Frieda’s house, baking or doing a picture puzzle before watching Saturday Night Live, which Frieda called “our favorite.” She couldn’t remember how she’d phrased her question, but what she wanted to know was whether Frieda’s relationship with Graham was as private, as much a secret, as her parents’ relationship seemed to her.
Frieda had laughed, and said she didn’t think so. “We were younger, you know. We were awfully young.” Frieda’s face had looked sad in a way that made Sarah aware of how long ago it had been. Anyway, Frieda had said then, love was always different. What she had said exactly—and Sarah never forgot this—was “Love isn’t just what two people have together, it’s what two people make together, so of course, it’s never the same.”)
After Sarah had fixed her mother another cup of coffee, after her mother had drunk it—slowly, not talking much—she set it in its saucer and said, “You know, I think I’m just going to go back up to Vermont.” She looked across the table at Sarah. She was frowning, anxious-looking, as though Sarah might not give her permission. As though she were someone who had permission to give, which startled Sarah. “Do you mind, sweetie? I really need to be alone, I think.”
“You don’t need to go all the way to Vermont to be alone, Mom. God, I’ll go. I can change my flight. It’s not a big deal. I mean, this is your house. You ought to be able to be as alone as you want right here.”
They argued it back and forth, but finally Annie convinced Sarah that she actually wanted to be in Vermont, in exactly that place. That she wanted the more complete aloneness of the country, the cottage. “Plus, you’re not obliged to do anything up there,” she said. “You can just sit outside and look at the water, or the trees, and not feel you’re wallowing. No, no, no, no: you’re in nature.” She rolled her eyes dramatically for Sarah. “You’re noticing things.” Her voice exaggerated the words, and she smiled at her daughter, at her own little joke.
While her mother went upstairs to pack, Sarah made her a sandwich and wrapped a few of the cookies left over from the party. Annie came back down and set a small, overnight-size bag on the table.
“That’s all you need?” Sarah asked. Something about it seemed pathetic to her. Her mother, so reduced.
“Yeah,” Annie said. “I have a couple of changes of clothes up there.” She put the sandwich and cookies in at the top of the bag. “Daddy does too, actually.”
“Oh,” Sarah said. “Still?” She should have offered to help with that while they were all up there, she was thinking.
“Yes,” Annie said. “I haven’t done a single chore there this year.” She laughed, humorlessly. “Not even put the screens in this summer.”
“But it’s not worth it now, is it? The screens, I mean.”
“No. No, I won’t do anything until next year.”
“And maybe next year Lucas or I could help you,” Sarah said. “You need to ask, Mom. We want to be useful to you.”
Annie looked over at her, and Sarah watched her face soften, some tension or sorrow easing. “You are,” she said. “You always are. Even just your being here now is a help.”
They walked together down to the curb, talking about the party: how well it had gone, the various people who had come and what they’d said to one or the other of them. Sarah was aware of her mother’s slow responses, of her own busy chatter. She said, “God, that Rosemary what’s-her-name took it hard, didn’t she?”
“Oh?” Annie said. She turned away from Sarah to open the passenger door on the old Citroën and toss her bag in.
“Oh, yeah.” Sarah nodded. “She was starting to get weepy at the bookstore, I noticed. And then at the house, she had to go upstairs at some point—I saw her actually fleeing the room.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Annie said, her voice somehow cooler than Sarah would have expected.
“Yeah. Did you know her well? You and Daddy?”
“Well, pretty well,” Annie said. “He might have known her a little better than I did.”
Sarah nodded. After a moment, she said, “It’s just, you know, he was so important to people. It feels good to know that, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Annie said.
They stood there awkwardly for a
moment. It had started to sprinkle lightly. Finally Sarah said, “So, the party didn’t help, it seems like.” She had put her hand gently on her mother’s arm.
“No, it didn’t. It sort of . . . brought it all back, I suppose.”
It occurred to Sarah that she’d never seen her mother look so tired, not even right after Graham had died. Then there had seemed to be a kind of a fuel of disbelief that fed her, that gave her a strange fragile energy. “Well, for me too,” she said to her mother. “But I thought it was a lovely . . . send-off, I guess you’d say.”
“Oh, it was! You and Lucas did a wonderful job.”
“And Jeanne, don’t forget. And Bill and Peter and Erica.”
“Yes. All of you. I’m very grateful.”
“And you, Mom.” Sarah put her hand to her mother’s cheek for a moment. “Here at the house. You did too. It was just lovely. I felt he was . . . Well, he would have been pleased. He would have loved it.”
“Yes, I think he would have. All of it.” She smiled at Sarah. (“The most joyless smile I’ve ever seen,” Sarah said to Thomas later.) She reached her arms up to Sarah and they hugged, the tall daughter and the small, slender mother. Then Annie went to the other side of her absurd old car and got in. Sarah stood watching, waving, until the van went around the corner at the end of the street and disappeared behind the huge oak tree there. She turned then and walked slowly back up the driveway, lifting her face to feel the light rain on it. She opened the gate and stepped up to the house.
Her old house. She came into the living room and sat down, looking around consciously for the first time in a long while at this space she’d grown up in, surrounded by books and records and CDs and paintings and photographs and odd things that had pleased one or the other of her parents over the years. There on the shelving running along one wall was the beautiful but unusably delicate bowl her father had given her mother because of its color—a blue so pale it was like the sky just before dawn. A collection of tiny shells was spread out next to it, pink or flecked or pearly. They’d gathered them together and separately over the years from various beaches they’d walked on. In front of Sarah, on the trunk they used as a coffee table, was an ornate silver platter, given to her great-grandparents on the occasion of his retirement as the pastor of a church in Minneapolis. The bookshelves from floor to ceiling on two walls of the room sagged in the middle with the weight of the books, some tucked in horizontally along the tops of the ones that stood in rows.