by Sue Miller
There was a five-and-dime in Alamosa, a J. C. Penney’s, a Sears Roebuck. I’d make the rounds, buying cheap doodads and makeup in one or the other store, but mostly I bought candy. Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, sacks of malted milk balls, Three Musketeers. I gorged on them all afternoon, ate until I felt sick, stuffing the paper wrappers into my pockets. Sometimes I went for walks in the residential streets, staring at the tiny bungalows and careful yards, sprinklers arcing rainbows over the trimmed green. The second Saturday I found the town library, an imposing granite building with wide stairs leading in. I spent the afternoon in its cool reading room, listening to the ticking of the fluorescent bulbs overhead and reading back issues of Saturday Evening Post, Photoplay, Modern Screen.
At five-thirty, I’d go to meet my grandparents at Pete Rock’s café. I tried to be a little late, because I didn’t want to get there first and have to take a booth by myself. I was surprised each time when I saw them sitting there, at how like each other they looked. Both were small and trim, with iron-gray hair. Both had sharp noses; both wore glasses. But my grandmother wore a gold chain attached to the stems of her glasses. Gold, studded with fake pearls at regular intervals. It was like the announcement of some ambition he didn’t share.
Our dinners at Pete Rock’s were the only times my grandmother seemed to feel any pressure to keep a real conversation going. She’d begin by assuming my curiosity about something in their lives. The second Saturday she told me about how my father had run away one winter. He’d headed east, and got as far as Pennsylvania before pangs of conscience about how my grandfather would manage in planting season overtook him, and he boarded a train back home. “Sat at that kitchen table and bawled like a baby,” she said. I tried to imagine my slightly balding, paunchy and dignified father bawling. It was impossible. “I couldn’t figure out a way to tell him it was all right. I never saw a kid work as hard as he did that season, like he had to make it all up to us. It was the year after that that your granddad had his first attack.” She sighed. “Of course, one good thing to come out of it all: once he stopped farming it cleared the way for your own daddy to leave again. For good.” Her eyes behind their bifocals looked watery and distant. “And I guess that’s just what he needed to do to grow up to be rich like he is.”
One night my grandmother shooed me out of the kitchen after the dishes were done. She said she had things to do, but I suspected she just wanted to be alone, not to have to try even the sporadic attempts at conversation which marked off pieces of the silence we occupied together. I was going to go sit on the front porch, but I could hear the slow squeak of the swing and I knew my grandfather was out there. Instead, I wandered into the parlor. I had been in this room two or three times since my arrival. My grandparents sometimes sat in it in the afternoon or evening to listen to the radio, but that seemed to be its only function.
There was a small upright piano set in front of the fireplace. A Methodist hymnal and a thick book titled Beloved American Songs sat on top of it. I flipped up the keyboard cover and idly struck a chord or two. The piano was badly out of tune. I found that somehow reassuring. I sat down and picked up the Methodist hymnal. Using lots of loud pedal to cover any mistakes, I played “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” It had been more than a year since I’d played anything. Next I turned to “Nearer My God to Thee,” and played it through slowly, melodramatically, three times. The last time, I could hear my grandmother’s high-pitched, fretful voice join in from the kitchen. “Still all my song shay-ull be,” she sang in the same flat accent which I barely noticed now in her speech, but which seemed almost comical to me as she sang the hymn.
When I stopped, there was silence in the house. Not even the swing on the porch sounded.
I flipped through the book hurriedly, and began “Love Divine All Loves Excelling.” My grandmother knew all the verses almost perfectly, slipping only briefly here and there into “da da, dee dah.” I did an amen at the end of this one, and when I looked up, she was standing in the doorway.
“You know your granddaddy’s favorite,” she said, nearly whispering. “It’s ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’” I found it quickly. As I began playing the tune, she disappeared back into the kitchen. From the front porch came a loud groaning noise which I realized was my grandfather’s singing.
I played for over an hour, dipping into Beloved American Songs at the end for “Aura Lee” and “Whistle a Happy Tune.”
I hadn’t played since the move to Chicago, when, by tacit agreement with my mother, we hadn’t looked for a new teacher. When I’d practiced in Schenectady before we left, the painful concentration was visible on my mother’s face as she passed in and out of the room. She was listening for, but unable to hear, I knew, the quality in my playing that made it deficient, that had made my teacher suggest I not go to music camp again. My playing, competent as it was, could give her no pleasure.
When I got up from the piano and went back to the kitchen, my grandmother was sitting at the table with a glass of iced tea in front of her. The ice cubes had already shriveled in the heat into pellets that resembled mothballs. She smiled at me. “That was awfully pretty, hon,” she said. “I surely enjoyed it.”
“Thanks, Gram,” I said.
“You should always keep up with your playing,” she told me. “It’ll be a gift to your children.”
“Yes, ma’m,” I said.
“I used to play a few tunes myself, but I let it go, and now I’ve just forgotten it all. But you, now. Don’t you let that happen to you.”
“No, ma’m,” I said, and went to the bathroom to get ready for bed.
I had trouble falling asleep. It seemed to me that in their responses to my music lay some mysterious and profound difference between my mother’s and my father’s families. It was more complicated than the tension in one family about achievement, and the lack of it in the other. And it wasn’t just that my mother and her family knew what was fine and that my Grandmother Dora didn’t; although that too seemed true to me. But as I lay in my lumpy narrow bed, the same sweaty sheets on it that had been on it the first night of my visit, I realized I was dreading leaving my grandparents’ farm to go home, to go East, where I was surrounded by love, by protestations of love; but love conditional on so much: on being good, whatever that meant; on doing well; on making the family proud. The demands themselves, I realized, were often the clearest expression of the love.
Here the love had been harder to feel, because of my experience with my mother’s family, but now I thought I understood where it resided. I had played a hymn that evening whose words my grandmother had quaveringly sung in the kitchen—“O, Love, That Will Not Let Me Go”—and that phrase ran over and over in my mind. That was the trouble with my mother’s family. I thought of how my father’s parents did let go, of my grandmother saying what a good thing it was my father could get away from the farm. This letting go seemed exciting to me suddenly, where before a part of my mind had connected it to the dirty sheets I slept on, to the boring, slightly nauseous long afternoons reading Modern Screen and eating candy in the public library, to what had seemed the unnatural, inhuman silence between my grandparents. Now I saw it as a sign of love, a freer love than I had thought possible, a love I decided that night that I chose for myself.
Every night for the remainder of the visit, I played the piano for my grandparents. By day I huddled in my hot room, I wandered the empty countryside or sat reading and drinking lemonade on the front porch swing; and by night I filled the air with the tinny thump thump of bad music, my freely given, unjudged gift of love to them.
It changed nothing. The next year I spent again sitting in darkened rooms while boys who didn’t care for me, whom I didn’t care about, rubbed me and rubbed against me because I couldn’t find a way to tell them no. And sometimes I thought of hurting myself again. But then I’d think of Colorado, of my silent grandparents, the dry, pure air, the sunlight rippling off the creek onto the cotton-woods; and I’d feel that there was a way ou
t for me, a reprieve.
But when my father wrote his parents the next spring to say I’d like to come again, my grandmother responded with a letter written in pencil on onionskin paper. I remember the faint rustle it made as my mother spread it out on the kitchen table. She read it aloud with bitter satisfaction—she hadn’t gotten over the state of my clothes on my return from the visit there. They surely had enjoyed their time with me, my grandmother wrote. “But we’re not as young as we used to be, and it was hard for us to put ourselves out that much for the girl. Perhaps when she’s a bit older and can take better care of herself we can have her again, but til then Grandaddy and I both feel it would be a mistake for us.” The letter went on for a while, and my mother read it all, slowly, but I didn’t hear any more of it. When she was done, she pushed it towards me across the table. I had no impulse even to look at it. It wasn’t just that the summer itself had been cancelled, or that my grandparents seemed to be rejecting me; but that some larger, nameless escape, an escape from myself, was being cut off.
Looking at me, my mother seemed suddenly to realize that she’d caused me unnecessary pain by reading the letter aloud. She stood up, embarrassed, and began to move around the kitchen uselessly, chattering about alternative plans.
That spring I let three different boys go all the way. The first time we were standing up in someone’s back hallway, amid plastic buckets and oversized boxes of Tide and Spic ‘n Span. Leaning against the wall next to me like an overblown dandelion was a mildew-smelling, dried-out mophead. The two other times we were in cars parked a block or two from the parties we were still technically attending. That summer, alone among the younger cousins at camp, I decided and convinced my parents, through long logical letters, and ardent pleading once my mother had arrived, that I wanted to go to a different school, a girl’s school, when I got back to Chicago. By fall, miraculously, my father had arranged it.
When I got home, I took my record player and my stack of 45s up to the attic and set them down next to the box with the stuffed animals, the piggy banks, the music boxes, the dolls.
CHAPTER THREE
IT TOOK ME MORE THAN A MONTH to get the apartment unpacked and comfortable for me and Molly, but sometime in late September or early October I sat down, as my mother had requested me to, and wrote everyone.
“Writing everyone” had a special meaning in my mother’s family. Straight through the misery of the divorce with Brian, of watching him move buoyantly forward into his new life while I made arrangements for our more marginal existence, straight through all the monitoring and correcting of Molly’s confusion about what was going to happen to her, I’d continued to receive triumphant news of my mother’s family—news of my countless cousins and the fruition of their lives—on the family grapevine. Catherine was in France on a Fulbright, loving it. Douggie had had his first poem published in The New Yorker and was teaching expository writing at the University of Arizona. Lettie’s husband Al had the number one epidemiological position with the Ford Foundation in Pakistan. It was basically the parents, my mother’s siblings, strutting their kids’ stuff. And knowing that anything I claimed or did would become part of this epistolary competition had made me pull away slowly over the years from all of them, but especially from my mother.
Although perhaps this is a little suspect. For if I’d had news, if my life had been the trajectory to success some of my cousins’ lives seemed at that time to be, might I not have stayed in closer touch? Perhaps some of what I claimed as independence had to do with a sense of comparative failure. After all, the last real feather in my mother’s cap had been Molly’s birth. After that there was silence, and before that, for some years, there was just the marriage, only Brian’s achievement.
But what I was aware of in not communicating was a growing sense of freedom, a sense of actively extracting myself from what I thought of as their sticky grip, their insistence that whatever else we might be, we were first of all members of the tribe. Now, with a kind of rageful pity for my mother, who could not abandon them, for whom their judgments would always rank more permanent and scarring and important than anything the world or God could mete out, I wrote to her sisters and brothers, to the aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, claiming my failure as my own, and thereby, I suppose, helping my mother dissociate herself slightly from it.
In the last two or three years, a few younger cousins have divorced also, some more messily than I. I confess to having taken a certain pleasure in this. Several others have failed at work or relationships in ways that their earlier successes made impossible to imagine. One, Agatha, was picked up in New York recently for prostitution and possession of a controlled substance. My clearest memories of her were as a young child in Maine having her diapers changed. She was late to be toilet-trained, early to talk. “P.U.,” she’d say, as her mother, my Aunt Rain, unpinned her. “Big stinky.” Once my grandfather, birdwatching through binoculars on the front porch at a little distance from the daybed she was being changed on, turned to Rain and suggested quietly that any child old enough to comment on the size and odor of her stools was old enough to be out of diapers. After that Aunt Rain took her away when she needed changing.
At any rate, if any of my letters are extant now, they are like shards from another culture, relics of a time when a failure as banal as divorce could still seem important to the family. Or maybe all they say is that my mother was the oldest child in a large family, and I her only offspring and hope for worldly achievement in their eyes; and that I failed her.
Dear Aunt Weezie and Uncle Hal, I wrote. I’m sorry to have been out of touch for so long and now to be writing you bad news.
Dear Grandfather and Grandmother, I wrote, It’s hard for me to have to tell you this, but Brian and I have decided to get divorced.
Dear Aunt Rain and Uncle Tom, I wrote.
Dear Uncle Orrie and Aunt Cass.
There was a way, I have to admit it, in which I didn’t mind writing them all. In which I felt that some ritual of freeing myself—literally writing them off—was being enacted as I sat at the dining room table with the box of thick white stationery I’d bought to do the job. I had regrets about a few of them—especially my silent, loving grandmother. But for the most part, it seemed the final liberating act in the drama of disentanglement I felt I’d been playing out with them all my life. It took me nearly a week of evenings to finish.
The dining room, where I sat to work—and my bedroom as well—looked out over the train tracks headed for suburbia from Porter Square. When the commuter cars or occasional freight train lumbered past below us, the whole building shook gently. Liquid tilted back and forth in containers, pictures and mirrors swung slightly on their hooks, as though we were feeling the aftershock of a distant earthquake. We had gotten used to it quickly enough, though Molly had sometimes waked at night in the first week or two. Our conversation would stop and then pick up again half a minute later as though the noisy interval hadn’t existed. It made the apartment cheap, so I couldn’t afford to mind.
Above me as I wrote the letters, the crystal chandelier suspended over the table, legacy from the ancient sisters who’d lived in the apartment before us, tinkled gently with the trains too, like the sound of ice in a tall clear summer’s drink. I’d met one of these women when I’d come with the real estate man to look at the apartment. She was plump with yellow-white hair and a low, looping bosom which hung down over her belt in front. “Oh, a piano teacher!” she said. “How lovely. How I wish I could stay and be a little fly on the wall. I’ve always adored music.” They were moving into “retirement homes,” the dealer told me when we left.
From them too we’d inherited the elaborate dark wallpaper in each room. I’d painted Molly’s room and my own right away, but partly because of my own laziness and partly because Molly liked what she called the pictures on the wall, I got no further. For months that fall and winter, the cans of paint, the roller and stiffened brushes sat on a square of newspaper in a corner
of the hall, while over our lives presided the repeated figures in the paper: in the dining room, a curtseying woman sinking into her ballooning skirt while again and again a man in riding clothes presented her with a bouquet of bright flowers, now all faded to pastels. The living room had little Oriental figures in a vast stylized landscape, and the dark hall was thick with tropical palms and bamboo.
Those letter-writing evenings were the first ones in which I simply occupied the apartment, instead of unpacking or stripping wallpaper or painting—the first evenings it seemed fully mine. As the intervals between the commuter trains grew longer and longer, and my pen drew out my sad story on the fine white paper, I was sometimes able to feel a quiet kind of joy and pleasure even in the shabbiness which surrounded me. Brian and I had begun the upward purchasing spiral together. We’d spent whole weekends, a tiny Molly whimpering in a backpack, comparison shopping for a tastefully neutral Haitian cotton couch, for stereo components, for china. This time around, I’d made my purchases hastily at yard sales and junk stores. I had a rickety Windsor chair with a stained floral pattern on its cushions, a secondhand couch with Victorian aspirations. The dining room table itself, where I sat to work, was enormous, with ornately carved legs. It was painted bright red, but had chipped and peeled through here and there to show previous coats of white and brilliant blue. Sometimes this multitude of colors cheered me.
At other times, though, the opposite feeling would overwhelm me. A turn of phrase in one of the letters and the sense of absolute solitude once Molly was asleep would trigger in me, very much against my will, tears of purest, crystalline self-pity. Over that week or so I felt the way people traveling alone for the first time are said to feel, so absolute was the swing between the sense of joyous competence and bitterest loneliness.
But then the letters were gone and my life seemed slowly to begin again. There were the piano students, and then a new job, a change to full-time day care for Molly. After an interval of several weeks, a month, I began to get responses. Only a few—I’d purposely constructed the letters so no one would feel he had to answer. Most were short, conventional expressions of regret, substantially lifted in style from the condolence letter. My Uncle Orrie, an awkward, kind man, asked me to let him know if I needed a loan at any time. It wasn’t until late in October that I heard from my grandparents—from my grandfather actually. He invited us to join them for Thanksgiving. There was something in the proprietary condescension of his letter that rankled me and I decided I would go. I would go as a divorcée, to defiantly represent failure in that nest of accomplishment. What he actually said was, “Your grandmother and I admire the way you are dealing with the new set of limitations the life you have chosen imposes on you. How your Molly will deal with them, remains, of course, to be seen, but we will hope for the best for her. We would welcome you both at our table at Thanksgiving this year.”