The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  I wasn’t looking at Brian when he spoke. I’d turned my head towards my window so Molly couldn’t see the quick tears which stung my eyes. But his voice was gentle and loving, just right. “No,” he said. “I can still love Mom even though she and I don’t want to live together anymore. And you can still love her, even though you’re being with me for a few days. You can always love us both.”

  Molly didn’t answer, and I didn’t dare look at her. After a moment, I touched Brian’s shoulder to thank him, and he nodded and began to talk to her about the bridge we were going over: what river ran under it, how they’d built it. She responded brightly, as though she too were relieved for the moment to have passed. Through the rest of the drive up, she chattered happily with Brian, and when I leaned into her window to kiss her good-bye, she made loud smacking noises with her mouth against my cheeks and lips. I walked quickly into the house so I wouldn’t have to watch the car pull away, the familiar shape of Brian’s head and shoulders on the driver’s side, and the squared-off top of the car seat standing for Molly in all her vulnerability and confusion.

  The house I was staying in, an odd vertical warren of rooms on a twisting street in Marblehead, belonged to a couple who’d been friends of both Brian’s and mine. John was a lawyer too, had been in law school with Brian, actually; and Charlene owned and ran an expensive little shop in Marblehead, a shop full of tasteful hand crafted goods. Brian and I had often driven together up to their house for dinner, sometimes bringing Molly and putting her to sleep on their big bed. Steadily swimming in her dreams, she would slowly work her way across it, so we had to check on her frequently.

  John and Charlene were away for the weekend—they rented a share in a country place—and the little house was intimidating in its silence, its sense of abandonment. It wasn’t the same sensation at all that I’d felt walking into the rented cottage in East Shelton. There, almost all clues to the owners’ personalities had been carefully removed. A few odd hints remained—the records for example—but for the most part what they’d left behind were the bare necessities. Here, John and Charlene were everywhere present, but not, and I felt more constrained in their absence than I would have if they’d been there, taking up real space, moving among their possessions. The next morning I noticed that I woke up in almost exactly the same position I’d fallen asleep in, and that I was perched on the very edge of the king-sized bed, as though they were both also in it.

  Slowly over the weekend, though, I began to explore their life. Shamelessly I opened bureau drawers and medicine cabinets. I picked up and examined the photographs which sat everywhere. I pawed through the little heaps of objects set around carelessly in saucers and baskets—odd coins, stubs, pills, jewelry, notes, lists. I looked through books, noting which ones were his, which hers, reading the marginal comments. I stopped short of reading their mail, though it seemed like hair-splitting at that point.

  Part of it was boredom, part prurience. But in addition, Brian and I had decided that it would be easiest on Molly for me to abandon the apartment to him each time he came up to visit her; and I had the sense of his being able to look at me in my absence as I was looking at Charlene and John. Though I’d barely unpacked at that point, I knew I would slowly begin to claim the ugly apartment with the objects I chose, with possessions which also possessed me. What would I tell him, what secrets would I give away that I hardly knew I had?

  I discovered, for instance, that Charlene had both a diaphragm and a stack of cheerful yellow birth control pills on discs. What did it mean? That she had an irrational terror of pregnancy and used both? That she had used one but switched to the other? And what was she using this weekend, having left all this behind? Or were they not making love? Or were they madly making love, but using nothing, trying to get pregnant?

  It wasn’t until midday on Sunday that I finally steeled myself to call my parents. I’m not sure why I hadn’t told them earlier. Part of it was certainly the distance I kept from them generally, but part was something more, some specific reluctance and shame which had to do with the meaning of my family to me. Listening to Sammy Brower’s diatribe had given me at least a partial sense of what I’d been avoiding, but it wasn’t until I heard the willed cheerfulness of my mother’s voice on the phone that I understood how difficult it was going to be. It was as if some part of her knew that I’d called with bad news, and she felt that if she just made enough noise, stayed buoyant enough, she could float through, perhaps even prevent me from announcing it.

  While she waited for my father to get on the extension, she began to tell me about redecorating their bedroom. She described in careful detail the choices among papers, and what was right and wrong about each. In the midst of this discussion, I heard the click on the line which meant that my father was listening now too, but he didn’t interrupt her and she didn’t acknowledge him until she’d finished her presentation. Then she announced, as though I wouldn’t have known it otherwise, “I think Daddy’s here now, too.”

  “Hello, Anna,” he said, on cue.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  “Well, darling,” my mother said. “What’s up?”

  I had rehearsed the lines, and alternate lines too, over and over in front of the mirror. Even so, I was surprised at how stark, how bald they sounded.

  “Well, I’m afraid that my news is bad,” I said. A brief pause, but not long enough for them to start imagining anyone’s death. “Brian and I have decided to get a divorce.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me that!” my mother cried, and burst into tears. My father said nothing, but after a moment I could hear him clearing his throat. He was always incapacitated by my mother’s tears. I waited for a minute or so, until my mother had calmed herself slightly, and then began to present them with the details. Brian had, in fact, already transferred to Washington. Molly would be with me, and see him several times a month, and for holidays and summer vacations. She seemed to be managing all right. I had a new, less expensive apartment.

  Slowly my mother began to be drawn in. Details were what she liked, were what made her comfortable. She asked questions about the new apartment—how much space, what furniture I had for it. I kept comforting her, assuring her that everything would be all right, was all right; and meanwhile, some part of me was standing at a distance and noting how ass-backwards it all seemed. Shouldn’t she be comforting me?

  In the middle of a discussion of how the movers had hoisted the piano in, my father interrupted. “I hope he’s going to do the right thing by you and Molly,” he said.

  For a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  “You mean Brian,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You mean money?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “He’ll have a bundle one of these days, and you ought to see some of it.”

  “I think we have a fair agreement,” I said.

  There was a brief silence. Then he said, “You know best,” as if wiping his hands of the whole affair. I felt stung, and yet regretful. His tone was hurt, and I realized that he had been offering love in the only way he knew. I felt a yearning towards him, a momentary impulse to lie, to say there were things I didn’t understand, needed his help with. But my mother pushed in again to smooth things over.

  “Daddy’s just worried about you, darling,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Anna, it’s not your fault,” she said. But I couldn’t help feeling it was. Not just the divorce, but the thousand small misunderstandings out of which my relations with them were made.

  “I know,” I said again. I was remembering a visit I’d made to them when I was about six months pregnant with Molly. There was no special reason for it except that I hadn’t seen them in nearly a year. Most of my students were on summer vacation, and Brian was going to be away on business for a week, so I flew to Chicago for a long weekend.

  I slept in my old bedroom, On the last day of the visit, I wok
e early, needing to pee. When I slid back into bed, I lay looking around at the pretty, figured wallpaper, the pale pink curtains, and felt gratefully how much had changed in my life since I would wake in high school feeling trapped by my body, my circumstances, by what my parents seemed to want to make of me. The baby, who I was sure then was a boy, swam and flopped freely inside me, and I lay still and made resolutions about how differently I would raise him from the way I’d been raised. Then I fell asleep again and didn’t wake until late in the morning.

  I went down to breakfast at around eleven-thirty or so, wearing my summer nightgown and an old bathrobe that wouldn’t shut over my belly. On my way across the dining room, I stopped in front of the picture window to watch my father in a corner of the yard. He held enormous pruning clippers in his hand and was slowly and carefully decimating the lilac bushes which separated my parents’ property from their neighbors’. Suddenly there was a flash of motion above me and a loud bang. I started, and then looked outside. On the patio lay a bird, stunned. A grackle. I went to the door and stepped outside. The slate patio was cold and damp under my feet. I bent over the bird. Its wings beat the ground at my approach, and then it stilled. One wing was hanging limply off its body. It fluttered its good wing again, moving about a foot over the ground; then collapsed, its small bright eyes seeming to watch me. I stood up. I remembered feeling a sense of vulnerability and fragility because of the pregnancy. Normally I wasn’t squeamish in the least, but I wanted someone else to manage this. I wanted my father. “Daddy,” I called. “Daddy.”

  He crossed the yard to me, carrying the clippers. I pointed to the bird, flopping again across the slate. Wordlessly he disappeared into the shed and came back carrying a snow shovel. He raised it over his head and brought it down onto the bird. I turned away quickly, but I could hear the dull thumps, and under them, the repeated click of the bird’s bill against the metal. Three, four times he raised the shovel and brought it down. When he stopped, I turned to him. He looked quickly down at my belly and then away, a flicker of disgust having momentarily touched his face. I looked down too as I tried to pull the bathrobe shut. My belly protruded in the diaphanous nightgown, the extroverted navel like an obscene gesture. It was the only time during my pregnancy that I felt grotesque or unattractive.

  Now my mother’s voice interrupted the long silence on the phone. It was edging towards tears again. She said, “I just don’t know how I can write about this to anyone.”

  Here was where we’d been heading all along, I thought. “I think I can manage that, Mother,” I said. I could hear the coldness in my tone, the way you can on the telephone.

  “Oh, if you would, darling,” she said. “I’d appreciate it so much. If you could just write to everyone.”

  “No, that’s fine,” I said.

  For a few minutes more, we made the smallest of talk, and then we said good-bye.

  “We love you, darling,” she said brightly.

  “I know,” I said. “Me too,” and then I heard one click, another, and the phone began to buzz quietly in my hand.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MY FAMILY HISTORY is neatly bisected by geography. When I was fourteen, we moved to Chicago, and after that nothing was the same. For all of us—my father, my mother, and me—the world was made new. But only for my father was the change unambiguously positive.

  Up until then, we had lived our lives clamped in the grip of my mother’s family. We saw them frequently; we spent summers at my grandparents’ camp in Maine, and we often traveled to their Connecticut house at Christmas or Easter or for someone’s birthday. My mother talked to her sisters or her mother on the telephone several times a week. Even as a young child, I could tell when one of them was on the other end of the line. My mother’s voice was different; it thickened with pleasure.

  They were a handsome, high-strung group, my mother’s family, full of nicknames and even elaborations on nicknames. The only son, my uncle, had been christened Frank Junior. But because of his lugubrious personality, as a boy he was called Eeyore. That eventually became Or, which grew back again into Orrie. Uncle Orrie. The youngest aunt was Edith, but she was “the baby” while she grew up, and this shortened easily to Babe. My mother was Bunny, and the two middle sisters were Rain and Weezie, for Lorraine and Louise.

  They were all dominated by my grandfather. He was, in my earliest memory, tall and muscular with abundant white hair and black eyebrows curling wildly in all directions, the same combination then as later of expansiveness and pure authority. His parents had been immigrants from Scotland. They had wanted, expected, the world for him. As a young man, he had patented a wear-resisting heel for shoes. He sold the patent to B. F. Goodrich when he was twenty-seven, and after that his work consisted solely of learning to make money from money. Each of his daughters had, in turn, married a man of great business promise, but somehow each one, my father included, got stuck as a middle-level executive, none so gloriously successful as my grandfather.

  My grandmother seemed overwhelmed in their company. In the few remaining family pictures of her alone, before the children were born, she is a radiant debutante, a smiling, confident bride. But as I recall her she is mostly just a silent presence: a cool hand on my forehead through a feverish night, or someone to make intercession with Grandfather over a minor infraction of the rules; but of herself, inexpressive. She was the one I loved the most as a child, though; the only one, in fact, I was aware of feeling love for, though at the time I would have asserted, automatically, that I loved them all. But even then, loving her pulled at me in some way I was only barely conscious of. It made me feel uncomfortable, guilty.

  As a group, my mother’s family held a kind of invisible standard up to all its members’ lives and ambitions. All the family bonds translated, finally, into appraisal, a push for achievement. For me, this centered on the piano. I took lessons for years, starting when I was five—my mother thought I might have it in me to be a professional musician—and I remember that I used to associate even the names of the composers with my grandfather.

  “Who are you working on now?” he’d ask, and then nod and repeat the names I told him. “Ah, good, Chopin. Mozart, Schumann, excellent, excellent.” As a young child I thought that he might be old enough to know those people. And though now it seems clear that he was just glad to have me playing the works of artists whose names he recognized, when I was eleven and twelve I assumed there was some scale in his mind, some order of importance among their works, their names, which was inaccessible to me, but which he understood and was measuring my ability against.

  After we moved to Chicago and I began to listen to rock and roll, I had a sense, at first guilty, then exhilarated, of moving across some barrier, beyond the pale. The names from this world—the Danleers, the Solitaires, the Delfonics—these names had no connections with my past. These were names I could purely claim.

  I had a stack of records that I used to play in my room some evenings before I began my homework. There was a special record player just for the tiny 45s, with a thick phallus for a spindle, a technology entirely separate from the one which existed for the classical music my parents listened to on 78s or 33s. I would pile the spindle with the music of white boys imitating black boys, black boys imitating white boys. As the records dropped, as I segued from Elvis to Chuck Berry to the Miracles, I would stand in front of the mirror and lip-sync the lyrics. Sometimes I danced.

  Once my mother stopped in my open doorway to watch me dancing. I knew she was there and I wanted to stop, or to close the door. But to do either would have been to acknowledge my self-consciousness, to acknowledge the power she had over me, over my life. Even though I didn’t look directly at her, I knew how she appeared as she watched me: frowning slightly over whatever chore she was performing, in her arms a stack of laundry or sewing or fresh towels—one of her responsibilities which, unlike me, made her happy. We’d abandoned the dream of the piano at that time, and I think we were both confused about what would take
its place in my life and between us. For years everything had been shaped around the discipline of practice imposed by her, accepted by me. While I danced that night, I felt I was announcing some change in myself connected with all that, although I couldn’t have said what it was. I danced more wildly than I ever would have with a boy. The record was something by Jerry Lee Lewis. It went on and on, and I gyrated and whirled to its beat. Finally it ended. I stood panting in the pretty room my mother had decorated for me. The arm of the record player lifted noisily, ground over to its resting pad, clicked off. We looked at each other. She was holding a stack of my father’s shirts. My breath rang in my ears. I licked my dry lips. “I hate to see you move like that,” my mother said, and left.

  Before the move to Chicago, I spent every childhood summer with my mother’s family at my grandparents’ summer home—really what used to be called a camp—which consisted of several buildings on the far shore of an inland lake in Maine. The road ended on the near side, so the first people to arrive at camp in June had to bushwhack their way around the lake, open the shed, and lower the leaky rowboats into the water; then return for the boxes and trunks and whining, disheveled children. Subsequent arrivals would park and honk their horns, one long, three short. There was always some eager cousin waiting to row across and fetch them.

  My grandparents’ summer home had no electricity, no running water, no telephone. We used only canoes or rowboats for transportation. There was an unspoken contempt for those weekend families across the lake, whose clusters of electric lights twinkled merrily at us after dark while we huddled around kerosene lamps; who polluted the lake with motorboats, and had names on their cabins like Bide-A-Wee or Cee-the-Vue. In the last decade or so, because they are old now and made more uncomfortable by the camp’s inconvenience, my grandparents have paid to have electric wires run around and bought a small power boat. But then it was pristine, Edenic.