by Sue Miller
Babe, the oldest of us and our leader, acted as though none of this could have anything to do with her. She actually reached forward and poured herself a cup of coffee—she didn’t even drink coffee!—to signal her innocence. The rest of us, though, slunk quietly away to confer, to decide who would have the dangerous assignment of returning the paperweights to their shelf. I couldn’t remember who had done it, though I knew I hadn’t. I was always only an accomplice in other people’s daring schemes.
“It’s simply that we may have it in our power,” my grandfather was saying now, “to help you—her, really—at this difficult stage in her life, and yours. We’d be remiss not to offer out of some artificially heightened sense of delicacy, as I’m sure you see.”
I turned back to him, and though I had an answer ready, in my shrinking soul I felt like a twelve-year-old, a ten-year-old, a seven-year-old again. “What I’m not sure I see, Grandfather, is why you think Molly needs help, just what kind of help it is you think she needs.”
He looked startled, as if the answer to this should have been self-evident and he wasn’t prepared to have to make an explanation. Then his face fell back into its familiar deep lines of self-composure. “Well, for an example,” he said. “Day care. That she should have to be in day care. She’s not, after all, the child of factory workers.”
“Neither are most of the other kids she’s in day care with,” I answered. And then I was furious with myself. This was hardly the defense to offer. But one of my grandfather’s strong suits was making arguments take place on the terms he constructed.
He raised his hand. “But you see my point,” he said calmly. “There’s no reason why she should suffer because of the decisions you’ve made about your life. Because of your . . . perspective, let us say, on suffering.”
“Grandfather, she’s not suffering. I’m not suffering.”
He was silent a moment, looking out the window at the darkening day. Then, as though he hadn’t heard me at all, he said, “Let me tell you what you learn through suffering. You learn to be an animal, a brute, a . . . pig. You learn cruelty. You learn how to take what you need from anyone weaker. That’s all. That’s all. There’s nothing grand about suffering.” He shook his head.
“I’m not suffering,” I said again, loudly. “I haven’t ever really suffered. I doubt if I even have the capacity, so well have you all raised me.”
He looked at me sharply. “If that’s true, which I doubt, then I’m glad for you. Glad.” There was anger in his voice.
“And Molly’s not suffering either,” I said.
“She’s not suffering,” he repeated, a tiny ironic smile touching the corners of his mouth.
“Well, of course she has suffered,” I began, near exasperation. “There’s been a lot of pain for her and I’m not sure she’s understood all the time what was going on, but . . .”
He interrupted. “Then why add the strain of day care to her burden? Your grandmother and I would like to make, perhaps, a monthly contribution to your income, the money to be set aside for someone to come into your home and care for Molly there.”
“She’d be bored stiff,” I said flatly. And then, again feeling sidetracked, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No. I really have enough money, and that’s not the way I want to care for her, anyway. And I just don’t want it.” My voice was rising, and I took a moment to get it under control. “Thank you,” I said. “I really don’t feel that would be helpful.”
He stared at me for a moment under his curling eyebrows. As a child I had been frightened of those eyebrows. They were like the devil’s eyebrows, I thought. They seemed to me to reveal some deep truth about him that belied the courtliness of his manner.
“It seems to me,” he said slowly, “that you suffer from romantic ideas about poverty. There’s no romance in poverty. None whatsoever. And even if you must insist on it for yourself, it’s nothing short of criminal for you to inflict it on your daughter.”
“It’s not poverty I care about, Grandfather. And Brian’s helping us anyway. We’re hardly poor. It’s independence. It’s being my own person.”
“Being your own person,” he repeated, the famous smile slightly lifting the lower part of his face.
“Yes,” I said.
“And in order to do this, you give up everything you’ve been good at, everything you’ve shown promise in, to take care of mice. . . .”
“Rats,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” he said. He shook his head, smiling, at me. “Rats, then,” he said, and his smile broadened and he continued to shake his head.
I felt shaken with rage, with the impulse to throw something, a paperweight, at him.
“I think we’ve finished this conversation,” I said. I started to turn towards the door.
“Anna.” His voice was sharp. I turned back. He had his sternest face on. “I won’t make this offer again,” he said. “But it will stand, and I want you to think about it, about everything I’ve said to you.”
I looked at him a moment, and then left the room. My entire rib cage shook with every heartbeat.
As I came out into the huge central hallway, I stepped into a noisy game of Nerf football. Michael, Ivy and Pete, the bass player in the band, were playing with Molly. Two other of Michael’s friends sat on the stairs watching. Faintly I smelled marijuana.
Molly was wild, shrieking, trying to grab the ball from first one, then another of the kids. They would pass it low, at her level, and scoop it away from her just as she was about to reach it. “Mine, mine,” she was yelling as she danced around. I tried to watch for a moment to be sure she was genuinely enjoying herself, but then I heard my grandfather’s study door open behind me and I went into the living room.
Some of the aunts and uncles were sitting around in the chairs near the fireplace. The noise from the game made real conversation impossible, but there was clearly a post-prandial, desultory quality to this gathering anyway. Someone would offer a comment, on the weather or the current activities of an absent member of the family; one or two others would add information or answer (“Yes, but just thank your lucky stars you’re not in Utah right now. Did you read about that snow?” “I wouldn’t mind being in Utah if I had my skis.” “The eternal jock.”); and then another easy silence would fall. Through it all we could hear Michael’s running commentary on the game, Molly’s wild cries for punctuation: “He passes to Ivy, Ivy has it, she’s got it. But Molly tries to grab it. She may have it folks, she may have it now; but Ivy hands off to Pete! He drops back to pass. And here comes Molly again, you can’t keep her down, she just will not quit. . . .”
My grandfather had poured himself a glass of brandy or liqueur and had sat down on the opposite side of the room from me, next to my Uncle Orrie. They began to talk, seriously and intensely, probably about money. I was sitting next to Bob’s wife, Marie, who was telling me about the trip to China she and Bob were planning. My grandfather fastidiously avoided looking in my direction. This was the treatment for intransigent children and grandchildren; it would last until he had his way. For years it had dominated his children’s lives and the grandchildren’s summers. After a while, a silence fell between me and Marie, and I stared across the room at the old man, feeling the anger I’d felt in his study rise again. Fuck him, I thought furiously. Just fuck him.
Abruptly, as if echoing my thoughts, Molly’s strained voice cried out clearly in the hallway, “Fuck out, fuck out, you crocodile!” and she burst into loud tears.
There was a moment of silence among the group in the living room before I gathered my wits to go out to her. As I was rising, Orrie broke it by leaning forward and saying, “Someone should tell her, Anna, it’s fuck off.” Everyone laughed nervously; I smiled at Orrie and went out to the hall. Michael was squatting next to Molly, touching her shoulder, but she turned her back to him and stood resolutely solitary in her sorrow, wailing. He looked up at me guiltily. “Jeez, I’m sorry Anna. I didn’t know . . .”
“I
t’s O.K.,” I said, squatting and taking her in my arms. “She’s just had a long day, and no nap. Don’t worry about it.” I picked Molly up and sat with her on the wide staircase until she had calmed down. She looked awful. Her wispy hair stuck up here and there in a food-stiffened spike; she’d spilled something on her dress. Her nose was running from crying, and hectic red dotted her cheeks. My grubby grubby Molly. When she’d stopped crying, I took her into the bathroom and washed her face and hands with warm water. Then we went to get our coats and say good-bye. I found my grandmother in the kitchen, and kissed her. She followed us back out to the front hallway; but my grandfather wouldn’t look at me when I spoke to the group in the living room, and he didn’t get up from his chair when we left.
In the car, Molly and I talked quietly until I got on the Wilbur Cross Parkway. Then, with the steady highway rhythm, she fell soundly asleep. Before that, though, she told me she liked her grandmother—“She gave me only whip cream that I like”—but not that big dummy Michael.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you liked Michael for a while. That game he played with you looked like fun to me. But he was just too wild for you.”
She was perched in her tilted car seat like a queen in her litter, completely relaxed and swaying gently with the car’s motion. After a minute she said, “He was too wild for me. And he was a big dummy that I don’t like.”
I shrugged. “Well, c’est la vie,” I said.
“La vie,” she responded obediently.
I looked over at her and smiled. “You’re my funny bunny,” I said. Then, after a minute, I asked her, “Does Jeremy say ‘fuck out’? Who says ‘fuck out’ at day care?” Instantly I was ashamed of myself. It seemed to me my assumptions about day care were just like my grandfather’s, really. I wondered if he’d felt confirmed in his opinions by her outburst. Or perhaps he thought she was merely echoing the way I talked at home.
“Alex does,” she told me. Alex, another wild man. Whenever I’d seen him, he was wearing a Superman cape and moving fast. His mother told me he wore it even in bed.
“He says bad words, and the teachers don’t like it and he has to take time outs. He says ‘fucking shit’ to the teachers and they say, ‘I don’t like that, Alex.’ And once he put his egg that he had from his lunchbox in the bathroom in the hole for the water and turned it on and it made a big flood everywhere. But then Jackie said ‘shit’ too.” Jackie was the teacher.
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“I say ‘shit’ sometimes,” she said, in a dreamy voice. Headlights flicked by, though there was still pinkish light in the western sky behind us.
“Me too,” I said. “It’s not such an awful thing to say. But if it bothers your teachers, it’s probably better not to say it around them.”
“I don’t say it,” she said. “I hate time outs.”
“Did you have to take time out one time?” I asked after a minute.
“Only when I bit Tanya,” she said. “I didn’t say ‘shit.’”
“I didn’t know you bit Tanya,” I said.
“I didn’t,” she said. “But I was very very very very angry and I forgot.” And then she fell asleep.
I drove along for a while, listening to her breathing. When I started to feel sleepy, I turned on the radio. It was AM, and all I could find were talk shows, weirdos using talk-show jargon to express predigested views on sex, bond issues, the hostage crisis. Finally I found one I could bear, on automotive repair. You called in your car’s symptoms and the host told you what was probably wrong, whether you could fix it yourself or needed a pro. I didn’t mind so much listening to the pathology of automobiles, so I left it on. Besides, I thought maybe I could learn something. All the car’s noises made me uneasy since I didn’t know what caused them, whether they were normal or not. And I liked the mechanic’s cheerful voice. Happy man! to know that what he offered was something the world needed to have. After a while though, the talk about carburetors, emissions tests, became mere background too, blank comfort, like the little lights twinkling on the dash or the steady pulse of warm air from the heater. I thought about the long afternoon. In the end it seemed to me that I’d used Molly, both to hold myself away from what was going on and to feel myself part of it. Her pleasure sitting next to my grandmother, her rage at the end, seemed to be things she’d done for me; and I worried that I was too bound up with her. But then I reminded myself of the feeling I got when I forgot her for twenty minutes or an hour or an afternoon—the feeling that I was too separate from her. How could I love her without damaging her, I wondered. Not too much, not too little. Is there such a love?
I couldn’t wake her when we got home, so I carried her in. Our building was a brown triple-decker tucked behind a slightly more elegant gray one. A long asphalt sidewalk led back to it. Molly’s dead weight felt heavier than it really was, and I had to stop to catch my breath and rest my legs on each landing of the stair. When I swung our door open and the light sweet chemical smell of paint greeted me faintly, I had a sudden rush of familiarity with the apartment. For the first time since we moved in, I felt, as I carried her across the palm-studded hall to her room, that we were coming home.
CHAPTER FOUR
NOW BEGAN A PERIOD OF REAL EASE FOR US, of finally moving into our new life in Cambridge with some sense of ownership. It was the ugliest time of year for the part of town we lived in—winter. The few lindens on our street stood black and hopeless once their leaves had fallen, their brutally pruned limbs exposed in awkward V shapes around the looping telephone wires. The snow fell and stayed and turned black with car exhaust, carbuncled with dog shit. The vast potholed parking lot at the Porter Square shopping center grew dirty mountains of plowed snow at its periphery, down which the tough kids of the neighborhood slid on stolen garbage can lids or plastic trashbags. On our weekends together, Molly and I took long walks punctuated by stops in the various stores up and down Mass. Ave. I was struck with the ugliness of the low storefronts, the yellow brick, the peeling wood, the granite grown dirty. By contrast with the Back Bay, where Brian and I had lived, it was antiarchitectural, completely without beauty. But its very lack of distinction appealed to me, comforted me, just as my shabby furniture did. And more specifically, the terrain reminded me of Chicago, the bunched-up groups of small stores which studded Chicago neighborhoods, the boxlike frame houses—triple-deckers here—the lack of beauty which promised an opening, invited the imagination in a way polished red-brick Boston didn’t. It seemed both new and familiar, and I was excited by both aspects of it as we poked around the hardware stores, the laundromats, the five-and-dime, Sears.
Life during the week was hectic and full of chores. I had the piano students, the rats to run, meals, laundry, constant worries about money. But I also had long ritualized evenings with Molly. She painted or played with play dough while I did the dishes. Then there was a bath and a story, or sometimes we’d just sit in the rocking chair and listen to music. Once or twice a week, when I was too tired or she was too hungry to wait for me to fix dinner, I’d prepare popcorn and fruit and we’d eat curled up on the couch in the living room or on her bed instead of at the table. I usually went to bed only an hour or two after she did, but the time alone began to feel less like a burden. I began to think of myself, ironically, happily, as a divorcée.
I had thought frequently of Brian, I had missed him during the long fall. Sometimes I had an impulse to call him, to share some small event in Molly’s life or mine with him. I was used to him, I sometimes imagined his responses to things, they’d been part of my life for so long. Once or twice I actually moved towards the telephone with one of these impulses. But then I’d think of Brenda, of her waiting, watching, listening while he talked to me, of how distanced and polite his voice would be. And I would remember how it was when we actually did spend time together on his visits to Molly—awkward, formal. What I wanted from him—and I wanted it often that first year—was comfort, familiarity, and that wasn’t possible.
My room in the apartment was square and white and totally regular. Its bareness, after the purchased clutter of my life with Brian, pleased me. In it were a roll-away bed—a cast-off from the marriage—a white formica table, a white lamp. Exactly in the middle of the wall opposite the door was a window with a tattered green shade which leaked light weakly in the mornings. The floor was bare wood, cold to my feet in the winter months.
Even the inadvertent decorating I did—setting my purse or my earrings on the table at night—looked out of place in that room. And when I swung my legs out of bed in the mornings, they sometimes seemed immense and curved to me in the austere space, still brown with the faint tan left over from our days at the pond in East Shelton. I began in those mornings to look at my body, to discover it as though I’d never really seen it before. I’d watch my hands, my knees, the bones shifting under the tight skin, the freckles changing position on the skin with the bones’ motion. I touched my breasts, noticed, and noticed myself noticing, the contrast between the softly shaped tissue of my body and the boniness of my hand.
Molly had a stacking toy I’d given her for her birthday in November, a complicated arrangement of rods you could slide plastic discs onto to make different color patterns. Early in the morning I could hear the distant clicking of the plastic pieces through the closed door as she worked on a new design, sometimes her voice a murmuring accompaniment to the percussion. I would lie on my narrow bed, feeling the gentle rocking of the trains and watching the pattern of faint light moving across the wall by the door. In those mornings I began to touch myself. I felt what was at first a shapeless yearning in my body, and I learned to bring it to life. I would reach between my legs, separate the folds of my flesh. My own saliva on my fingertips would make me wet; and I came. I came again and again in those mornings, by myself, with my thoughts all my own. Afterwards, in the sudden peace and stillness of the blank room, I’d hear Molly clicking, her faraway high-pitched voice, signs that she hadn’t heard my private clamor.