by Sue Miller
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound casual.
Babe stood up and stepped out of her shorts and underpants. The big shirt covered her to mid-thigh. She unbuttoned it ceremoniously, top to bottom, and took it off. Then undid her bra and let it drop. I was silent, embarrassed and aroused. Babe was beautiful. She had been beautiful even at my age, but now she looked like a woman to me. If her waist had thickened at all, it was just slightly, but a kind of heaviness seemed to pull her belly lower so it had a curve downward, and her thick fleecy hair seemed tucked underneath it. But her breasts were what most stirred me. They were still smallish, but they seemed fat, and the nipples were flat and wide as poker chips. She looked down at herself with satisfaction, and began, unself-consciously, to explain the sequence of changes she was going through. I remember she held one breast fondly and set two fingers gently across the pale disc in the center as she talked. If Norman Rockwell had ever gone in for the mildly erotic, he might have found a subject in us: Babe, beautiful anyway, and now lush, standing in a pool of discarded clothing, representing a womanhood I felt was impossible for me; and me, all acute angles, caught on the edge of pubescence, gaping at her in amazement. She smiled at me.
“Do you want to feel?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what I wanted. She stepped towards me, reaching for my paralyzed hands, and raised them to her breasts. Her skin was softer even than it looked. My skinny brown hands, laced with tiny white scratches from the blueberry bushes, the nails clipped short out of habit for piano practice, seemed hard, male, by contrast with her silken perfection. Her voice was excited, telling me—what? I can’t remember. She moved my hands down her waist, then to her abdomen. I felt her fur brush against my fingertips, dry, and yet soft. As soon as she loosened her grip on me, I pulled my hands back.
When we returned, my grandmother uncharacteristically kissed Babe to thank her for the berries. She cooked them in pancakes for everyone the next morning, and suddenly the whole family, with their blue teeth, seemed part of Babe’s secret to me. Except my grandfather. His breakfast was invariable, grapefruit and poached egg on whole-wheat toast, and his smile stayed impeccably his own.
Less than a week later, Babe left, abruptly and tearfully, for Europe, accompanied by Aunt Rain. I rowed them across, facing my grandfather in the stern of the boat. He was to drive them to the train station in town. They each had only a small suitcase, but my grandmother was going to ship Babe’s things to her later. As we walked up the path to the road where the car was parked, my grandfather pointed out places where it was growing over and suggested I bring the scythe with me when I rowed back to pick him up again.
Babe hugged me hard, and kissed me once, on the mouth, as though it were Richard she was saying good-bye to, not her niece. I noticed I was taller than she, and the taste of her tears stayed in my mouth until I swallowed. I waved to the retreating car until all I could see was the dust settling behind it.
That fall we moved to Chicago; and through the months of getting used to a new place, a new world, I waited for news of Babe’s baby. From the family came reports of her adventures in Europe. She was doing well in school in Switzerland. She had enjoyed learning to ski in the Alps. She stayed with friends of the family in Paris at Christmas. She sent me a card from Paris. It showed the Madonna and child on the front—the child a fat, real, mischievous boy, penis and all. Inside it said “Noel.” She had written on the back: “Life goes on, Europe isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be, but the wine is wonderful, and I go through the days here agreeably, as I’m supposed to, a Jack o’ Lantern’s grin carved on my face. Keep up the good fight. Love, Babe.”
In the spring, striving to sound casual, I finally asked, “Mother, was Aunt Babe ever going to have a baby?” She was sewing, and she looked up for a minute over the edge of her glasses. Her mouth pulled tight, and then she smiled.
“Of course not, dear. Aunt Babe’s never even been married. You knew that.”
I recall that I blushed uncomfortably. My mother looked at me sharply, but then turned back to her sewing, and nothing more was ever said.
My life went on also. My body changed in some of the ways Babe had promised, though it took me a long time to grow as comfortable in it as she would have had me be. But Babe and her life began to seem less a model to me than a cautionary tale. She seemed to shun most family gatherings for a while. On those infrequent occasions through my teens and the early years of my marriage when I did see her, she was usually fortified by a fair amount of booze and a new man. For a while after college she had a job in an art gallery in New York, and later at the Whitney Museum. Over the years, as I drifted away more from the family, Babe had apparently gradually effected a gingerly reconciliation. In fact her death occurred at a family party celebrating my grandparents’ fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.
She drowned. She was drunk, which wasn’t unusual for her, and she and Uncle Orrie were rowing home together in the dark from the family picnic. She objected to the way he rowed. “My God, Orrie, look at you, batting at the water in that half-assed way,” she had said. “Jesus, put a little life into it. I could swim home faster than this.”
Orrie told me that she sat still for a minute after this, and the only sound was of the oars slipping in and out of the black water. Then she stood up, kicked off her shoes, and dove in.
The boat rocked violently after she sprang off. Orrie thought he might have jerked his hand off the oar to pull back from her splash; or maybe the rocking itself bounced the oar out of the oarlock and his hand. It slid off into the water at any rate, and he spent several minutes retrieving it. My aunt floated on her back near the boat briefly, and he said he spoke sharply to her, told her she was “a damn fool or some such thing.” She laughed at him and blew an arc of water up into the moonlight, “a great jet” he called it, then rolled over and swam off. By the time he got the oar back into the oarlock, he could barely hear her in the distance. He tried to row in her direction. He said he would row for a few strokes, pulling hard for speed, then coast and listen for her. By the third or fourth interval he knew he’d lost her. All he could hear was the gentle rush of water against the bow of the coasting boat. He rowed around in wide circles in the moonlight for a while, and then he had to row home and tell my grandparents. They found her two days later.
The rowboat wasn’t used until three days after that, Orrie said, when my grandparents headed into town to retrieve her ashes. As my grandfather carefully handed my grandmother in, she spotted Babe’s Papagallo shoes in the stern of the boat where she’d kicked them off before her dive. At this my grandmother—who’d taken it all “like a brick, a real brick” in my uncle’s words—became hysterical. She began to scream rhythmically, steady bursts of sound. When my grandfather tried to loosen her hands from the edge of the boat, she hit him several times. She broke his glasses. Dr. Burns had to be summoned from his cottage across the lake to administer a sedative. “My baby, my baby,” she whimpered, until she fell into her chemical sleep.
Orrie told me all this, compulsively told everyone who would listen all this, at the memorial service a week later. I hadn’t been at the family picnic, but I had made it a point to come to the service.
We had lined up by generations in the church, my mother and aunts in the row in front of me and the other cousins. I could watch my grandparents sharing a hymnal in the front row, the one ahead of my mother. It seemed a reminder of our mortality, this arrangement; the blond and jet black of my row giving way to the gray of our parents, and then to the yellowish white of Grandmother and Grandfather and the two extant great-aunts. My grandfather’s voice sang out bravely and joyously the words to the hymn. My grandmother, I noticed, did not sing at all. The eulogy was short and somewhat impersonal, focusing on the untimely nature of Babe’s passing instead of saying anything about who she was.
My mother and her sisters seemed to be crying occasionally in the church, but in the car on the way to the family luncheon, Mother expressed what
seemed like resentment over my grandmother’s grief for Babe. “After all,” she said, “it isn’t as though Babe were the one who did anything for her or Daddy all these years.”
For a little while, there was a kind of deliberate sobriety to the luncheon, but shortly after the fruit cup the aunts began to chatter, and my cousins to compare house purchases, pregnancies, and recipes. Only Orrie, sitting on my right, who couldn’t stop telling his awful story over and over; and Grandmother, stony at the end of the table, seemed affected.
I was the first to leave; I had to catch the afternoon plane home. I went around the table, whispering good-byes to those who might be hurt if I didn’t—my mother, grandfather, and the aunts; then I stopped at my grandmother’s chair, and knelt next to her. She swung her head slowly towards me like someone hearing a distant call. I realized she was still strongly sedated.
“Gram?” I said. “It’s Anna. I came to say good-bye to you. I have to go.” I spoke clearly and slowly.
She reached out and touched my face in a kind of recognition. “Say good-bye,” she repeated.
“Yes, I have to go. I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. But I wanted just to come, to remember Babe today.” She kept nodding her assent.
“Edith,” she said mournfully.
“Yes, Edith. I was so sorry, Gram.” She nodded.
“I’m going now, Gram. Good-bye.” She stopped nodding as I leaned forward to kiss her. Her hand clutched at mine. Her grip was bony and tight.
“Don’t go,” she whispered.
“I’d like to stay, Gram, but my plane . . .”
“Don’t leave me.” I looked at her face. It stayed inexpressive, but tears sat waiting in her eyes. Impulsively I put my free arm around her and held her. “I can stay just a minute, Gram,” I said, patting her back.
She whispered in my ear, “Don’t leave me alone.”
Her body felt empty but for the frame of bones. I held her until her hand loosened its grip on mine. When I leaned back away from her, her face was completely blank again. I kissed her cheek. “Goodbye, Gram.”
I sat alone on the plane. I ordered a drink but even before it arrived I had begun to cry. The stewardess was concerned, asked me if I was all right. I assured her I would be, I had just been to a funeral. As I sipped the drink and stared out into the blank sky, I realized that I had never before heard anyone in the family call Babe by her christened name.
It was the fall after Babe’s abrupt departure from camp, the fall she spent in Europe, that we moved to Chicago; and because the balance of power between my parents shifted, I noticed its existence for the first time. My father had taken a job as vice president of a can manufacturing company. It was a step up for him, and much more money for us. The moving men swarmed through the stucco Schenectady house, their loud voices echoing in rooms where I’d never heard anyone speak above a polite conversational level. They carted away all the visible signs of our life there from the large, sunny rooms. I remember standing in the room that had been mine. Where pictures from my childhood had hung on the wall—a Degas print, the cow jumping over the moon—the green striped wallpaper was lighter, unmuted by age and the soot the coal furnace had blown gently over us all those winters. The room seemed enormous. In the driveway, my mother directed my father with the suitcases: which would go near the top so she could get at it on the trip, which could be buried deeply. From my window I could see her foreshortened figure moving in and out of the garage, the part on her blond head as sharply defined as if someone had taken a ruler and pencil and drawn it.
I looked once more a he barren space I’d lived in. For three or four years I hadn’t had anyone over to play, despite my mother’s frequent inquiries about whether there wasn’t some nice girl I’d like to invite. Now, standing in my empty room, I made promises to myself about how it would be in Chicago. I would be popular, I would be outgoing. I would never let anyone know that I had played the piano, how hard I had studied. I would have a record player in my room, and my friends would come over and we would lie on my bed and talk about records and boys. I would paint my toenails pink. I would tease my hair. Over the murmur of my mother’s voice, my father’s occasional response outside, I pressed my hands against my nearly flat chest and promised myself transformation. “I will, I will,” I whispered, I swore. My voice hissed surprisingly loud in the hollow space.
The ride to Chicago took just over two days. As the landscape grew flatter, stretched itself lazily out, my father seemed to expand. I had never heard him talk so much. He didn’t address me. I was, I think, never very real to him, and certainly not at that time. But to my mother he talked endlessly, continuously. He explained the new job to her. He reminisced about his boyhood, further west than we were now. And as he talked and she sat, silent, massive, and blond, I could see, finally, why he’d wanted her. He cared so intensely about her smallest response. The withholding cool quality which I hated her for on his behalf was the very thing he played to, the thing which spurred him on. I sat in a corner of the back seat and felt like an intruder while my father wooed my mother. She was quieter than usual, and I recognized in her silence my own fear of what was coming, my own steeling myself to make it work as I wanted it to. I remember thinking abruptly as I looked at her profile—which was examining the Indiana cornfields as though she could master the very terrain by will power—I remember thinking that I was like her, more like her than I was like him.
The episode which is clearest to me from the trip happened in a little town in Ohio, a town of surprising beauty, of wide lawns and big frame houses painted white. Blackish elms, all of which must be dead by now, arched over the town, dappling it. We were driving slowly, more than conscientious about the speed limit, and an older, dented green sedan pulled out beside us to pass. From the window on the passenger side leaned a dark, beautiful woman, laughing. Her hair was black and full and blew back across her face and open mouth. She held a baby out over the road, a tiny boy. The woman’s hands tightly circled his waist. He was naked except for an undershirt, his legs curled up to his fat belly as though he were squatting. His eyes squinted shut against the wind. He was urinating, and the drops danced horizontally out behind him like glistening jewels suspended in the air. Just as the car swung in front of us, she pulled him in.
My father’s laugh was loud, a bright bark. He sounded boyish and carefree. He had to hit the wheel several times to gain control of himself. My mother’s lips tightened as she looked over at him, as though seeing a side of him she hadn’t known about before.
We spent both nights in motels, and I shared a room with my parents. I had never done this before, and I loved everything about it: the tiny perfumed bars of soap, the immaculate strip of white paper across the toilet. I got to stay up as late as my parents and watch television, although the reception both nights was snowy and irregular. When the only station we could get played “The Star-Spangled Banner”—a vague, distant flag flapping and flapping in the white-speckled box—my mother would get up and turn the set off, and then the lights. We all said good night to each other, making a joke of it by repeating it several times over. I had never felt so strongly the sense that we were a family.
The third day, in the afternoon, we drove through the stinking smoky mills of Gary, and up over the skyway bridge into Chicago. Through the brownish haze, the city loomed over the lake far to the right. I had the sense of arriving somewhere rough and exciting and turbulent. I’d read Sherwood Anderson then, a little Willa Cather. I knew what Chicago was to them, and I swore again it would be such an escape, such a way out of my life’s prairie for me.
The house on Woodlawn wasn’t as distinctive architecturally as the house in Schenectady had been. From the outside, in fact, the dark bricks made it look gloomy, boxy. But inside, it was larger and far more elegant. My mother set about decorating it with a passion which finally seemed to obliterate me from her consciousness. My room was done first, and with the least planning. Basically she tried to reproduce as closely as
possible the room I’d had before. When she was finished, I found an empty packing box in one of the unused rooms, and I shoved into it all the things—my dolls, my piggy banks, even several of the pictures from the walls—which might remind me of my other life. When I asked if I could store the box in the attic, she stared at me a moment. She bent over the box and slowly explored its contents, her hands lingering especially on the dolls. Then she turned her head away from me and said yes. It was like a kind of giving up.
She was under strain too, and probably grateful to turn over the running of my life to me. I had, after all, failed her at being extraordinary; probably I could manage being a perfectly ordinary teenager on my own. She, in the meantime, was having to learn a new set of rules for her life. I remember feeling unfamiliar moments of sympathy for her during this period. Once or twice I came home from school and found her sitting in the enormous kitchen, writing to one of her sisters or her mother, and I could tell she’d been crying. She’d jump up to fix me the after-school snack, but with apologetic haste instead of the self-satisfied certitude in her correct mothering that usually made me unable to eat more than a few bites. Now I’d want to eat and eat, to show her there were things which she did as well in this new world as she’d done in the old.
As for me, although things weren’t evolving exactly as I’d planned them, they were much better than they’d been in New York. I was, at any rate, accepted. I dressed right. I did just well enough in class to seem smart, but I resisted the impulses I had to satisfy the teachers, to please them. I had made the mistake in my other life of thinking that the grownups’ satisfaction with me could help me in any fundamental way. Here that would not happen. And though I still didn’t know what to say around the others, I found myself oddly comfortable not trying very hard.
And then changes in my body transformed my relations with the world. My breasts grew, suddenly and thoroughly, between October and about February. In the bathroom, if I stood on the toilet and leaned to the right, I could bring my chest in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. While the tub filled with water and the steam floated in the room, I would hang out in the air and survey my lopsided breasts—lopsided because of the angle I had to lean at to see them at all. It was like watching balloons slowly fill with water, watching them first assume a shape, then a weight. By day, I strapped them into a viselike bra which utterly distorted their shape and kept them from moving in any way independently of my body. Any girl who had breasts in that era had these same regimented, improbably high little icons on her chest. It was as though we all shared that gene.