by Sue Miller
I remember one night her getting up (and that seemed to be the only symptom of possible trouble—that her sleep became sometimes disturbed, she appeared slightly more frequently at my bedside than before Leo came). Leo and I had been making love, and it’s possible that the noise disturbed her. He had come into me from behind, and I was up on my hands and knees pushing back against him, when I heard her shuffle in the hallway. I stilled myself, and that stopped his motion. Together we lowered ourselves, and as the bedroom door swung open, I turned towards the little halting figure. She came and stood by the bed, her face inches from mine, recarved, narrowed to maturity in the dark. She was having a bad dream, she said. Her voice was thin with terror. I held the covers up to welcome her, and she clambered in and lay down next to me. Though Leo wasn’t very deep in me, I was wet, and he could easily move gently, slowly, in and out of me. I asked Molly about her dream. I held her in the curve of my upper body and smelled the damp sweetness of her hair and skin. She explained to me how she’d been playing a game when Jerome, another crazy man at day care, came and took all her toys away. She’d started a different game, and he did it again. “Every time, he did that, Mumma,” she said, a vibrato shaking her tiny voice.
I started to talk to her about what would happen in her waking life if Jerome did that. We speculated about which teachers would help her; I got her to imitate what they might say to bad Jerome. Her voice got dreamier, the intervals between confidences longer. Leo moved sometimes, and then lay still. I can remember feeling a sense of completion, as though I had everything I wanted held close, held inside me; as though I had finally found a way to have everything. We seemed fused, the three of us, all the boundaries between us dissolved; and I felt the medium for that. In my sleepiness I thought of myself as simply a way for Leo and Molly and me to be together, as clear, translucent. I drifted off.
Towards dawn I woke and carried Molly to her bed. When I came back, I opened the tattered shade to let the pale light flood the room. The sky was still purplish blue, whitening at its rim, to the east. The first commuter train ratcheted past, its fluorescent windows flickering like the frames of an old movie running too slowly, shots of a few groggy commuters swaying within. Leo stirred. I crossed to the bed, moved over him, kissing his face.
“Let’s make love,” I said.
“Too sleepy,” he whispered, but his voice seemed to fill the room.
“I’ll do the work.” I swung over him on my hands and knees and lowered my body to brush against him. By the time my face and mouth moved against his cock in the bluish light, he was hard.
In the morning when I awoke, he was gone, clattering happily in the kitchen with Molly. When I came into the room she turned to greet me. She stood on a chair at the table, wearing her seersucker football pajamas, the pants caught in the crease of her butt. With a long wooden spoon she was stirring the orange juice.
“Me and Leo thought you were never getting up, Mom,” she crowed.
I went to her. When I bent to kiss her good morning, my tongue touched the little ridges my teeth had made on the insides of my lips when I sucked Leo off.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, and the dream of music still infused my life with a sense of limitless possibility, my Aunt Babe enlisted me to row her around the lake at my grandparents’ camp one evening. It must have been late in the summer: the evening was dusky, the sky purplish, pricked with stars as we pushed off; even though the aunts’ voices, the chiming clatter of dishes still rang out with after-dinner exuberance.
Babe was going to fish. She alone among the aunts had rod, reel, tackle box. She brought it all along. As soon as we got out far enough, she dropped her line overboard and let it out slowly, listening intently to the ticking of the reel over the water.
I was sensibly dressed against the night’s chill: blue jeans, two sweaters. In the stern, Babe’s bare legs winked white as she turned this way and that, adjusting the rod, bracing it to troll behind us. A big sweatshirt covered her shorts, and she wore no shoes. Finally she sat still, her knees hugged to her chest, and looked over the stern at the little rippling wake that formed with my every pull of the oars. Lights had begun to come on in the houses across the lake, and from the cove I’d rowed us into, the voices in that faraway world reached us as clearly as the voices of our parents, grandparents, cousins. From some distant radio or phonograph, brassy band music swelled and faded over the thick dark water.
Babe lifted her head and shivered. For a moment she sat staring across the dark lake at the spot the music seemed to come from. Then she bent her head and gently kissed first one, then the other of her bare knees. She shuddered again and pulled her sweatshirt over them. Never, even later in her most overt wildness, did she seem more aberrant to me, more separated from what I understood my family to be, than in that moment of tenderness to her own body.
For somehow the worldly Calvinism that my grandfather brought with him from his background came to me transmuted, feminized into a fear of things of the flesh. And the agent for this, oddly, was music. For while I made music I was innocent, still my mother’s daughter. And it was in the terrifying void that music’s departure from my life created that my idea of my sexuality grew. It was with the regretful sense of having failed my mother that I initially embraced my sense of myself sexually: if I could not be great, I could be female. In the changes in my body, the dirty blood that stiffened the crotch of my underwear, the uncaring interest of high school boys, I heard the fainter and fainter music of who I might have been, finally as distant and unreachable as the band music over water. My mother, maybe even sensing the strained negative equations in my head, pulled back from this adolescent side of me, now never touched me, never praised me. Her conversations seemed to be a series of admonitions against the flesh: Was I wearing a girdle? A bra? Must I sit with my legs crossed like that? Wear such short skirts?
Years later, during the period of the women’s movement when solidarity between the generations was stressed, she took to confiding in me briefly. I was still married: her posture was as one sufferer to another. She half-pridefully complained of my father’s ardor. She hinted that the reason she’d had only one child was to please him, that he’d not liked her sexually when she was pregnant. It made me remember all the signs of their passion that I’d pushed away from consciousness as a child: the locked bedroom door, his fingers pushing under sleeves, hems, to touch her flesh, his attentiveness to her moods, the odd sounds that had half-waked me one night in a shared motel room.
Too late for me. Mixed with the feeling which equated being sexual with not being serious was the conviction that incarnation, even having flesh, was a form of mortification. When we sang in Sunday school, “Let sense be numb, let flesh retire,” it had the force of prayer for me, though it was only the flesh’s tumult and confusion I wished away, never its pleasure; for I didn’t know it could bring pleasure, so caught up was I in its other meanings in my life.
After my mother talked to me though, I thought again about Babe, about my grandparents, about her family. I saw that there were, in fact, the indications of tremendous sexual vitality in all of them, that the only truly aberrant thing about Babe was her flagrance. Nevertheless, because of the timing of the loss of music in my life, because of my confusion about what had happened to Babe in Paris, because of my repugnance for my mother’s physicality (which was based itself on jealous passion for my father), I had misread all the signals. But it did me no good to know this.
Brian was the son of a Methodist minister. By the time I met him I’d slept with six or seven men in college, in the same joyless, guilt-ridden way I’d had sex in high school, though sometimes I’d feel a preliminary sensual stirring before we actually began screwing. What he seemed to offer me was a kind of moral safety net. As soon as we’d slept together he began talking about fidelity, loyalty, marriage. In that context I became more responsive to him. I liked him, understood him. He was as stern, as judgmental with himself as I was with
myself. I thought that I would slowly, with his solicitousness, his loyalty as a support, become a more and more passionate person. And though from the start, certain similarities between us repulsed me—his fussiness, his prudery, his humorless tendency to make a moral issue of everything—certain others made me like him, feel infinitely tender towards him. I was initially more relaxed with him sexually than I’d ever been before. But then I saw that he couldn’t change me, that we were too alike, really, to lift the other out of himself.
I was unprepared for Leo, for my own responsiveness to him; for the sense I had that while most lost in myself, most trapped in the flesh I had to wear, I moved so absolutely away from myself, so close to someone else. It seemed undeserved, and part of me all along was uneasy with it. So, just as I was eager, relieved, to find ways separate from my satisfaction of satisfying him, I embraced the disaster, the sense of punishment I felt when I discovered I was pregnant. Ah yes, here was the price that needed to be paid for happiness.
I knew it nearly right away, just as I’d known with Molly long before I missed my period. My breasts and belly swelled; I quickly put on nearly eight pounds nibbling away at a delicate nausea which hung over me every morning like a light fog. I didn’t tell Leo, though, until I’d had the test done.
It was June, an unexpectedly hot day. He came over about eight, after I’d put Molly to bed. He was working hard, trying to get ready for a show he was having in New York the next month. I was wearing a loose dress, one of the few that fit me anymore. I led him back to the kitchen. I was still washing dishes. He got a beer out of the refrigerator. He stood in the open kitchen doorway for a few minutes, looking out over the porches on the neighboring triple-decker and the young couple from next door working in their vegetable garden. Then he turned and started to tell me about a friend who’d won a fellowship, listing the varieties of ways he wanted to kill him. I moved my hands around in the warm water.
“You talk as if there’s only so much room at the top,” I said. I fished a mug out of the water. Molly and Brian had given it to me for Christmas the year before. MOM it said on it.
Leo walked back to the table and sat down. “Precisely,” he said. “And that prick, that fatuous asshole is in my way.”
I was silent. I rinsed the mug, and reached for the utensils under the scummy suds.
After a moment he said, “What did you do today?”
I was glad my back was to him, that I didn’t have to be responsible for the way my face looked. “I found out that I was pregnant.”
There was silence behind me. I tried not to imagine what he looked like. Carefully I scrubbed egg off the tines of a fork. His chair scraped. He came behind me, put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to him. I held my hands, dripping, useless, in front of me. His face was gentle and sad. “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked at me, looked for some response. I think there wasn’t one. He pulled me against his chest. I turned my head to the side and looked at the things sitting on the counter. A red coffee can, crackers in wax paper, a tin of Nestlé’s Quik. He was stroking my back. “I’m so sorry,” he said again.
“Why?” I asked.
He stopped rubbing me, pulled back a little to look at me.
“Why?” he asked. He was frowning.
“Yeah. Why are you so sorry?” I could hear the edge in my voice.
He shook his head, shrugged. “That you’re pregnant. That it’ll be hard.”
“Having an abortion, you mean.”
“Yes,” he said. He pulled me against him again. Where my hands had rested on it, his work shirt was spotted.
After a minute I said, “So that’s that.”
“What?” he asked.
“I’m getting an abortion.”
He said nothing, but I could feel his body tense slightly.
In a minute, when my body still hadn’t responded to his holding me, he stopped rubbing me and stepped back. He wasn’t looking at me. “Is there some option you see?” he asked.
“Well, there’s the obvious one.”
“Having it.”
“Yes, having it,” I said. Outside a train rattled. The dishes in the rack tinkled delicately against each other. In fact, I hadn’t seen it as an option. All day as I’d gone through my routines, running three rats, three colossally stupid rats; working with Laura and then Mr. Nakagawa on their pieces; stopping at the Xerox place to pick up invitations to my students’ upcoming recital; picking up Molly at day care—all day I had thought about an abortion, only that. The baby seemed real, a little Molly—though I knew it was more like a fish, a seahorse now—and I thought of it being removed from my body. And I’d wondered about the practical aspects: what kind of place I’d go to to have it done, whether my insurance would cover it. Still I was irrationally offended at Leo’s assumption, at his not even having asked me what I wanted to do. I was picking a fight.
He cleared his throat, stepped to the table and picked up his beer bottle, drank. Then he shook his head. “No. I don’t. I don’t see it as an option.”
“Why not?” I said.
He shook his head and stood mute a minute. “It isn’t just you, or me, or us,” he finally said. “Though I don’t think we’re ready to take that step. It’s more . . .”
“What?”
He shrugged. “I’m just not anxious to have any kid. There’s a way in which I see it as a form of self-indulgence, really. I mean, I don’t think of life as being all that grand a proposition, I guess.”
I turned back to the sink and dropped my hands into the hot water. My fingers closed over a plate, and I held it, shut my eyes. After a minute I heard him walk around the table and sit down again.
“What about Molly?” I asked quietly.
“What about Molly?” I could hear irritation in his voice. Suddenly I purely hated him.
“You think my loving her, my taking care of her, is a kind of self-indulgence?” I was seized by a convulsion of self-pity, an image of my life as a series of selfless chores undertaken entirely on behalf of others. I could feel tears prick my eyes.
Leo sighed. “Jesus, Anna. Do we have to do this?”
I whirled around. Droplets of water arced in front of me, were gone. “Don’t you be so fucking contemptuous of me,” I burst out. “You’re the one who started making judgmental remarks.”
“I didn’t aim them at you.”
“Is there another person in the room who’s had a child? Who’s been that self-indulgent?”
We stared at each other a long moment. I could hear my breath rasp, the wind stirring the trees outside.
“Anna, I was talking in the abstract . . .”
“But you see the connection, I hope. Or maybe now I’m being paranoid!” Though part of me knew my hysteria was self-willed, I also really wanted to ride it beyond some boundary, to let it set me free. And I was close. I was about to be able to sob, to throw things. But Leo bowed his head and didn’t answer for a while. When he spoke, his voice was soft, controlled. “Anna,” he said. “I love Molly. I love her too. And I like the way you’re a mother. It’s really part of what attracts me to you. But I love Molly because she’s here.” He looked up at me. “That’s different from the impulse to have a kid, isn’t it?”
I picked up the dish towel from the counter and dried my arms. I went and stood in the doorway. Below, the couple was gone, but not finished. A rake, a spade lay angled awkwardly in the black rectangle where green was pushing up in neat rows. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Behind me he expelled air. I turned. He tilted his chair back, lifted his bottle. “Want a beer?” he asked.
“Sure.” I sat down and he brought me a beer. My throat was dry with the impulse to tears, but the cold beer cut at it, cleared away its ache. My eyes stung now with tears from that near-pain. Like Molly with beer. Leo sat down opposite me.
“I know we can’t do it,” I said to him. “I don’t even really want to. But then also, I do. And it scares me, I guess, what it might mean ab
out you and me that we know, that we know so quickly that we don’t want to.”
“Why should it?”
“Because it cuts at all my fantasies.”
He nodded, then frowned. “But the facts must cut at them too.”
“What facts?”
“The simplest facts about you and me. That we’ve known each other for all of . . . what? Two months? That we’re both broke. That we’re both incredibly busy and strung out. That there’s nothing clear about where we’ll be or what we’ll be doing even a year from now.”
“What do you mean?”
He drank from his bottle, then set it on the table in front of him, began to peel the label. “Well, at some point, I’m going to have to move to New York. That’s pretty clear.”
“I hadn’t realized that.”
“Anna.” He looked at me with his dark eyes. “I’ve talked to you about it a dozen times.” And he had, I realized. But it had seemed a distant dream to me. I hadn’t thought it pulled at him in an immediate way. Perhaps he’d even half-deliberately presented it to me with that sense of remoteness in order not to pop the bubble of transparent happiness that floated us. Hadn’t he used the words someday? maybe? Or had I just interpolated them as he was talking?
“Because of your work?”
He nodded. “Yeah. You know, finally, Boston’s kind of an outpost. And after you’ve done a certain group of galleries or shows, there’s no place left to go. I mean, I’ve been at the M.F.A., the Rose, DeCordova, the I.C.A. Now what?” He shrugged and ripped the tinned paper from the dark green bottle. I watched his hands as I liked to watch them while he worked, or when he was touching me.
“When will you go?” I asked.