by Sue Miller
As I was picking up, I remembered the letter I’d been carrying since early afternoon. I went into the kitchen and fished the gallon jug of white wine out of the refrigerator. The only wine glasses in the house were little jelly jars. I filled one and carried it into the living room. I got the letter out of my purse and sat on the lumpy couch, the pale glass of wine set on its fat arm, to open the envelope.
It contained a short note from Brian’s lawyer and two copies of some last-minute changes we’d agreed to in the divorce settlement. The letter said that the court date had been set, unexpectedly, for the following Tuesday. I needed to sign the copies the lawyer had sent me in front of a notary public, and get them back in the mail special delivery in order to have them incorporated into the agreement.
It would mean a trip back into town early the next morning, that was all, to find a notary public before the post office’s Saturday closing time of noon. Even so, I was aware of a dragging sense of reluctance to confront the chore. But there was, of course, no question of not doing it. I reminded myself of how much of the burden of getting us divorced Brian had taken on himself. It was he who would have to appear in court on Tuesday to see it through.
Throughout the process of filing, my contact with lawyers had been absolutely minimal, at my request. And Brian and I, both impatient for the whole thing to be over, and guilty over our separate reasons for impatience, had worked out with almost no difficulty the details of pulling apart forever: I would have custody of Molly. Brian would send me a monthly check to pay for her upkeep, and, since he had so much more money than I—would always, we assumed, have so much more money than I—he would be responsible for all her major expenses as she grew up—schools, medical care and the like.
But for the first time in my life, I would support myself. I had insisted on it. I had to see a lawyer only once. He went over the terms with me to be sure I understood them. Everything had seemed as reasonable to me as the end of our marriage. The only thing not reasonable, not right, was that we had Molly, and now were tearing her world in two.
We had started thinking of divorce about a year earlier. Typically, it wasn’t any emotional crisis that precipitated the talk. Brian’s office was opening another branch in Washington and he wanted to go there. As he began to discuss the change, I realized I didn’t want to go with him. At first, I spoke of my work, but when we began to argue about it more seriously, and I confronted the reality of my work situation—I was a piano teacher, but I’d never had more than ten pupils at a time—I realized that that really wasn’t it at all. I just didn’t want to go with him. He seemed in every way peripheral to my life. I mentioned a separation, tentatively. He didn’t protest, said he’d think about it. I began to speak about feeling remote from him, feeling unhappy. We held hands and talked about trying harder. And for a period of time, we did try to force ourselves back into being married. But it seemed more and more artificial. And once we began also to talk about divorce, about the possibilities of a divorce, that talk, that arranging, seemed more liberating, more real than the talk about how often to make love, about who we might have over for dinner, about when we might have time for a family picnic. Each tentative confession of a feeling of distance by one of us brought a relieved parallel confession from the other. It began to seem exciting, as though at last we were going towards something in our marriage.
The careful friendly balance tilted abruptly just after we’d filed, around Christmas. At this time, Brian and I hadn’t even figured out how to live apart, except that I would take Molly. We’d been at a party for Brian’s firm and had both drunk a lot of eggnog. He volunteered to drive the babysitter home and I got undressed. I was happy, I remember. A light dry snow had been falling on the way home, transforming the world. The divorce seemed to me a fine, brave thing to do. I had a sense, a drunken irresponsible sense, of being about to begin my life, of moving beyond the claims of my own family, of Brian, into a passionate experiment, a claim on myself. Somehow, in this vision, I romanticized Molly into a sidekick, a companion, Robin to my Batman.
I wandered in my nightgown into the bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth. The bathroom was dark, and in the slanted light falling in from the bedroom, my face, to my own drunk eyes, seemed newly pretty, interesting, a stranger’s. I turned it this way and that, put a bright smile on it, pleased with myself. I began to brush my hair, and heard Brian coming in. I meandered back into the bedroom and sat crosslegged on the bed. After what seemed like an inordinately long stop in the kitchen, Brian walked slowly into the bedroom, a stricken look on his face. I was frightened suddenly. Molly, I thought, though I knew she was safe in her crib. I’d gone into her talcum-smelling room and listened to her even breathing when I’d come in from the party.
“What is it?” I said. I wanted to say “Don’t.”
Standing in the doorway, he began to cry. It was horrible, embarrassing, that raw unexpected sound in our tiny neat bedroom. Somehow, too, though I could see his tears, it seemed false to me.
“Oh, Jesus, Anna,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked again, more coldly this time. My moment of panic was gone.
He gained control of himself, wiped at his eyes. “I’ve wanted to tell you.” His face threatened to crumble again. He tilted it up towards the ceiling and bit his lip. “Oh God.”
“What?”
He looked at me, lifted his hands to me. “I’m going to get married again. When the divorce is final. I’m going to marry Brenda.”
I didn’t say anything. I thought of Brenda, her tidy asexuality. She was a partner at Brian’s firm and she had been at the party we’d just come from. When I’d asked her if she was going to Washington too, she’d blushed and said she supposed she might. She seemed suddenly shy to me, and I’d found that touching in her otherwise crisp, businesslike manner.
“It didn’t start. I want you to know, it didn’t start until after we’d agreed to split up. It’s important to me that you know that. Believe that.”
I started to brush my hair again.
“Do you believe me?”
I nodded.
He began to cry again.
“Please don’t do that,” I said. He looked at me, surprised at my tone. “You look so stupid,” I said. He turned away and went to stand by the window. Beyond him, the snow fell. I brushed my hair over and over, ferociously. “Brian and Brenda,” I said, finally, “It’s very cute.”
He turned toward me. “Don’t,” he whispered hoarsely.
I threw the hairbrush at him. It caught him in the forehead, just above the eyebrow, and his hands rose quickly, covered his pain-struck face. I thought, unexpectedly, of how his face looked when we made love, the same sudden wrench of agony at the end. I stood up and walked across the bed. Standing above him, I hit him several more times before he turned to me and pulled me down. He held me gently, sitting on the edge of the bed, as though I were a child. He was crying again. I understood that he thought I was angry because he’d hurt me, and I tried to cry too, but I couldn’t. I felt miles away from my body, from his sorrow. I was thinking all the wrong thoughts, I knew. I was thinking that now everyone would believe that this was why we were getting divorced. That our kind, careful separation would be public property, would be explained by this ugly twist. That I would seem what I wasn’t—an enraged, abandoned wife. I let Brian hold me and comfort me because of the pain he thought he was causing me, and felt nothing, felt like a woman I didn’t like. But it made palpable for me, finally, the unbridgeable distance between us, and I understood, as I hadn’t understood before, the real emotional necessity for the divorce.
We lay down together after a while, and when he stopped crying we started to talk in a loving way. I let him think I was nobler, more generous and forgiving than I was, because the alternative was to tell him how little it all mattered. I did feel a kind of jealousy of Brenda though. She had taken something I thought was securely mine, even though I wasn’t aware of wanting him anymore,
and I envied them both their feelings for each other, their passion. I asked him questions: how it had started, what he felt towards her, what they did together. In the dark, his whispery voice swelled with pleasure to be talking about her, to be telling me things she would have hated for me to know. But it was really not a betrayal. I was his oldest friend; he was glad to be able at last to share his happiness with me. And I was glad for him, in the end. “I’m not surprised, really,” I said, just before I fell asleep. “I mean, it seems only right that you should have wanted someone else.”
“Why?” he whispered.
“Well, the sex between us was always so . . . nothing. So terrible.” I didn’t think of this at the moment as a cruel remark. It seemed so self-evident, so true, that I was certain it would bring, like so many other confessions of the past months, pained agreement. This must be what he had felt all along too.
“I never thought so,” he said.
I was very sleepy, but not so much so that I couldn’t hear the pinched quality in his voice. I remember reaching out to touch his face in silent apology. Later I would wonder if he was not making me pay, in his unconscious way, for my unconscious cruelty then. And after this, we didn’t talk anymore; we were just waiting for the moment which would end it.
I sat with the wine and finished the glass. I’d been drinking a lot in these evenings alone after Molly went to bed. The owners of the cottage had a collection of 78 records that required constant monitoring and changing, and this and the wine had filled my evenings with mindless but true pleasure. I drank and listened to Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby”; to Nelson Eddy singing “When I Grow Too Old to Dream”; to Danny Kaye singing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts.” Who knew what tomorrow would bring, today having brought something as unlikely as this.
When I woke in the morning, the algal smell of Greely’s Pond and the light lapping of the water beginning to stir confused me momentarily; I couldn’t think where I was. But then I heard Molly moving around in her room across the hall, the plastic pads of her pajama feet sliding sibilantly on the wood, the low steady murmur of her voice as she talked to herself, sometimes taking on roles—“I told you not to do that, you dummy”—sometimes just commenting to herself about what she was doing. We had collected pine cones and needles, rocks and acorns to substitute for the toys left in packing boxes in the basement of the apartment in Cambridge, and she had built a whole variety of games around them. She was, then and later, the kind of child whose imagination transforms everything, who sometimes has trouble coming back to the reality of a situation, an object. As I lay there listening to her private play, I felt I was hearing the expression of her independence, the potential for her existence without me. Sometimes in those weeks alone with her, I had felt overwhelmed by her need to use me as playmate (though it was I who had structured it this way, who had romanticized our month together alone in the country). Hearing her that morning, so competent at imagining her own world, made me believe she would be all right, she would heal and recover from what Brian and I were doing to her.
After about half an hour, she came and got into bed with me. For a while she lay still next to me, believing me asleep. Occasionally I opened my eyes and sneaked a look at her. She was sucking her pacifier rhythmically and twisting a strand of thin hair around her finger again and again. Her eyes were steady and blank as she looked up at the ceiling. Finally she sighed, as though called by duty, and turned to me. I opened my eyes again. “I think it’s late enough for you now, Mumma,” she lisped through the thick nipple between her teeth. Her breath smelled sweet and rubbery.
“Then I’m pulling the plug,” I said. I hooked my finger through the ring on the pacifier. She tried to shut her mouth, to hold on, as she always did in this game, but she was smiling and couldn’t maintain the suction. I pulled against her mouth’s weak pull; the pacifier popped out.
Most mornings in the cottage, we had wandered around until late in our night clothes, sometimes even going for short walks on the soft bed of yellowish pine needles around the house before changing into bathing suits and drifting down to the edge of the pond for the morning’s play. Today, though, I hurried us through our routines. Breakfast at the speckled white table in the kitchen, bright orange juice in the little jelly jars, and Cheerios swimming in bluish milk. While Molly laboriously spooned them one by one into her mouth, I had a second cup of coffee. Then we went to her room to get her clothes. On the floor by her bed sat her sandals. Both were full of acorns, and they were surrounded by a ring of pine cones. Boats, she told me. People sailing in boats across the sea. I fetched plastic bowls from the kitchen, and we moved the acorns carefully into them, and got her dressed. She was glad to be going back into town so early. She had her own agenda: she wanted to do exactly what we’d done the day before. I promised her lunch at the Tip Top, and another trip to the park, but told her that first we had to do a special errand for me.
The postmistress named two notaries, Mr. Healey in town, and Mr. Franklin, on a road about ten miles out of East Shelton in the opposite direction from our cottage. We tried Healey first. His house was a large gray frame structure whose wide porch was littered with dried-out rockers. A wooden sign announcing rooms to let hung from an iron post in the front yard. Molly ran down the porch, setting each chair swinging stiffly, wildly back and forth. I tried the bell three or four times. It chimed loudly within, but the house was empty and dark. I gave up and sat next to Molly for a few minutes in the rockers, imagining we looked like two old ladies on the country porches of my youth. Then we got back into the Valiant and drove out to Mr. Franklin’s. It was a trailer, silver and pale green, propped up on cinder blocks. A fat woman with oiled-looking skin answered the door and told me she wasn’t sure when to expect Mr. Franklin. He’d left that morning before she was awake to go fishing. She was still wearing a bathrobe, elaborately ruffled around her neck, and she looked like some overblown but pretty flower. Her toenails, under the long skirt, were painted pink. Canned laughter from a television swelled out merrily behind her.
“You tried Healey, in town,” she said, frowning sympathetically.
“Yes.”
“What, he’s out too?”
“Yes, and I desperately need someone. I’ve got something that has to get in the mail by noon.” In the car Molly jumped up and down in the front seat. She was chanting something, and occasionally a note reached us on the stoop. Mrs. Franklin shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you, dearie,” she said. “Of course you could try Brower.”
“Brower? Is he another notary?”
“That’s right. No one likes to use him, but that’s what he is.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
She gave me directions which would take us back through town and miles past the turnoff to our rented cottage. I thanked her and walked over to the car. Before I got in, I called back, “How come people don’t like to use him?”
“Cats,” she yelled ambiguously, and went inside.
Molly was getting bored. ‘This is too much errands,” she said as I strapped her into her car seat. We stopped in town for an ice cream cone for her. It was ten by the clock in the drugstore. I began to worry about time, so I made her finish the cone in the car while I drove. She wasn’t able to eat it fast enough, though, and thick drops of ice cream rolled down over her clenched fingers and onto her legs. She began to whine. I pulled the car over onto the shoulder once and wiped her fingers and legs with the paper napkins I’d brought with us, but bits of them clung in cottony tufts to her still-sticky hands. When I swung out onto the road again, she began a fussy crying that seemed forced, deliberate to me. For a while I drove along, feeling a familiar hateful anger rise in me, the anger which occasionally tempted me to shake her, to hit her. Stop it, I willed. “Stop it, Molly,” I said.
“I can’t help it, Momma,” she said. “This is too sticky. I hate this sticky stuff,” and she went on with her hoked-up fussing.
When we came to the dirt dr
iveway to our cottage, I turned sharply and we bounced down it. At the bottom, without a word to her, I pulled the keys from the ignition and ran into the cottage. On her bed I found the pacifier. I picked it up and ran back down the long hall, through the steady hum of the kitchen appliances, into the sun-flecked stillness around the car. I opened the door on her side. When she spotted the pacifier, her fussing intensified momentarily. She sounded, really, like a baby. I inserted it. Her noise stopped. Her sticky hand reached up to start twirling her hair. I unbuckled the belt to her car seat.
“Now Miss Whiner,” I said. “Why don’t you climb over into the back seat and lie down while we finish this stupid errand?”
Wordlessly, with a boost from me, she clambered out and over to the back. She rolled down to the crack of the back seat and curled up, her cheeks pulling steadily on the pacifier, her eyes already glazed. I turned the car around and headed noisily up the drive again.
Brower’s place was easy to spot, as Mrs. Franklin had said it would be. It was a tiny white peeling farmhouse with a police cruiser parked prominently in the front yard. A hand-painted sign by his mailbox said Notary Public. When I shut off the engine and turned back to Molly, she was sound asleep. Dirty, sticky, her hair knotted where she had twisted it with ice-cream-coated fingers, she lay heaped on the back seat. I thought of waking her, carrying her in with me half-asleep and fussing, but decided not to. Instead I took my jacket and laid it over her body and bare legs. When I got out of the car, I shut my door quietly in order not to wake her.
There was an enormous brass knocker on Brower’s front door. I lifted it and struck it twice. After a minute, he opened the door. The pungent odor of cat wafted out from the house behind him. Several of the animals had followed me from the car to the house, meowing loudly, and they darted in when the door swung open.