by Sue Miller
“It’s not, it’s not the best. It’s not the best for me.”
Sometimes she’d cry. Sometimes she wrecked her room, clearing the shelves of all the toys I’d carefully set across them. I’d sit in the living room, listening to the destruction and steeling myself for the further tantrum that would result when I went in to stop her. Sometimes she hit me. Often she wet her bed, woke screaming in the night, needed help going into a friend’s house to play. When I tried to talk about it to Brian and Brenda, they’d say no, it never happened at home. She was easy there, sunny, a good little girl. She loved school, loved visiting friends. And so occasionally I thought of Muth, thought of calling him, thought of starting up all the questions, the pretending again.
But slowly Molly began to seem better, more used to the different rhythm of what we could have together. Though she was never at ease when we parted and still occasionally had nightmares, the extreme behavior diminished; and I was glad I hadn’t done anything about it. Because what I had wanted most during those months of her misery, I realized, was not to make some use of it, but to banish it.
And I also realized that what my experience, our experience, with the lawyers, the social workers, the psychiatrist, had left me with more than anything else was the desire never to have to turn my life out to anyone again. Now, as Molly began to seem more and more all right, it sometimes seemed to me that the most terrible part of the experience we’d been through had been that forced intimacy—oh, legal, I knew! legal—with Muth, with Payne, with Fine, with Judge Sullivan, even with the guards who had wandered in and out of the room carrying papers and coffee and watching us all impassively. By summer Molly was, with me too, usually a good little girl, and I was glad to have to take no action.
But sometimes it filled me with shame and a kind of grief that we had asked from her, and she had achieved, at her age, such mastery over her sorrow. Once, early in the summer, we were in a drugstore together and we saw a display of pacifiers, ranging from tiny stubby ones for a baby’s mouth to the elongated nipples Molly had used before she finally gave them up. The plastic discs connected to them were bright, cheerful colors: pink, blue, yellow. Molly stopped in front of them.
“Pacifiers, Mom,” she said.
“Yes,” I answered. I was buying toothpaste and aspirin. “Funny, aren’t they?”
“Can I get one?” she asked, after a moment.
I went to her. She looked up at me. “You want a pacifier, Molly?” I asked softly.
She nodded.
“Why?”
“It would just help me, Mom.” She frowned, making a little line in her forehead. She jiggled her hands vaguely in front of her, as though trying to get at something unnameable. “It makes me not so nervous.”
I looked at her, then squatted in front of her. “If you’re nervous, maybe it would be better to talk about it.”
She looked down, away from me. “I can’t talk about it, Mom. I just want to suck on a pacifier.”
“I don’t think so, honey. I don’t think that’s a good idea for someone as big as you. They’re really for much littler kids.”
She turned away from me and walked into another aisle of the store. In her posture—the weighted shoulders, the lowered head—was a tired acceptance that made her look, momentarily, nearly middle-aged, that made me ache for all she couldn’t say.
The job I had gotten was full-time at Georgetown University, but I could do a little of the work at home, and I played around with that to take off early to be with Molly on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I worked in the special scholarship office. There were hundreds of these scholarships, endowed by cultural organizations, churches, individuals. They were in honor of musicians, sanitation engineers, beloved dead sons who had played the trumpet, wives who had kept beautiful gardens, who had always wanted to write poetry. They were established to promote Polish identity, Jewish solidarity, interracial understanding, the study of reproduction in certain one-celled animals, clog dancing, macramé. Some of them were for amounts as low as five hundred dollars a year, some as high as full tuition plus room and board. My job was to investigate people applying to be sure they were, indeed, qualified; to do publicity for those awards no one ever applied for; to rank applicants; and to write letters to the endowers and donors explaining to them who the students were who’d won, and why they were so particularly well-suited to have gotten the awards, how their lives were going to be changed because of them. I had to do this without ever meeting the students, just by looking at their folders. This had been, in fact, the test for the job. It was my skill at doing this, at inventing lives to write about on the basis of some statistics and the student’s application, that got me the job.
My supervisor was a massive black woman named Mrs. Dellabovey, whose lips were as curved and full, and painted as pink, as the sugared roses on a wedding cake. She called me darling at the first interview, and she loved my letters. She always read them, even though she didn’t have to. “You wouldn’t know it was the same boy,” she’d say wonderingly, leaning over my desk. Or: “Lord, I wish I could send this to her mama. Give her something to be proud of at long last.”
After I’d been on the job for a few months, Mrs. Dellabovey suggested I’d advance myself faster if I could type better. And I wanted to advance myself, I discovered. I wanted more money. My life was different now, with Molly, and I wanted to be able to do things with her, take her on outings, buy her things, that I’d never been interested in before. And my expenses in Washington were high. I’d had to buy new clothes to work in, the rent was nearly twice what I’d paid in Cambridge, I ate out more, went out more, because I didn’t like being at home alone. I enrolled in night typing classes at an adult education center.
I was a quick learner. It seemed a bit like playing the piano in some ways. In fact, during this period and occasionally afterwards, when I didn’t have my piano with me, and I was doing more and more typing at work, I often had dreams which confused the two. So that in my dreams I’d be tapping the typewriter, thinking of words, and music would come out. Or I’d be playing the piano, but the keys would be slightly indented, there’d be a letter printed on each one.
I dated occasionally: a sixtyish retired businessman from my typing class; a graduate student who’d won the Emily Brattsdorf scholarship for the study of early instruments. But I didn’t want to get involved, didn’t want to have sex, so after a while they didn’t call anymore.
Every now and then Leo telephoned, or I telephoned him. Sometimes it was late at night and one or the other of us had had too much to drink; but it was just as likely to be a crisp wintry Saturday morning, with only coffee firing the impulse and the air outside my windows clear and white. His voice always lifted my heart, and for the first few minutes of each call we talked eagerly: what was happening? how was work? Molly? teaching? news of fellowships? grants? Ursula?
But then we’d bump up against the yearning, the impossibility. “I miss you,” one of us would say.
“I miss you too.”
And then there’d be a long silence. Sometimes one of us would ask, “Are you seeing anyone?” One would ask, “Are you sleeping with anyone?”
Leo occasionally wondered if I’d come up for a weekend, a couple of days. I told him no every time. Then slowly, politely, we’d extract ourselves from the conversation.
After he moved to New York, in the summer, I agreed to go up there, to “do the town,” he said. “It’ll be different not to be ghost-ridden,” he told me. “I miss you.”
And I thought it might work. But then, lying in bed the night before, I imagined how it would be to touch him, to make love. I knew I wouldn’t be able to, and that in spite of everything he said, that was what he really wanted. The morning I was to have flown up, I called and told him I couldn’t.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me why.”
“I just can’t make it work between us.”
“You know that without trying.”
“Yes.�
��
“Tell me how you know that, Anna.”
I tried to compose my answer. He waited. Somewhere, on some distant other line, I could hear a faint conversation between two women. “Because when I think of you, I think . . . my thoughts are full of, all the old feelings. But then when I imagine, touching you, lying in bed . . . I can’t.”
“I see,” he said.
“Are you seeing someone else?” he asked, after a minute.
“That’s not it,” I said.
“But are you?”
“Aren’t you?” I asked.
Silence. Then, “Sure.”
“And does that make a difference to you?” I asked. “Didn’t you still want to see me?”
“I can see that eventually it might make a difference. Couldn’t it for you?”
“Not anyone I’m seeing now,” I said. “And I can’t imagine it really. But it’s possible, I suppose. But that’s not it, for me.”
“Look, Anna,” he said after a minute. “Why don’t we just do each other a favor? Why don’t we not talk anymore, not call. This is just . . . This is really messing me up. I can’t be your friend on the phone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” he said, and hung up.
After that, I only called him once more, drunk, after the first time I’d slept with someone else. It was a friend of Everett and Renata’s. They had invited me down to dinner to meet him, and when the meal and the evening were over, he wound his way up the twisting back staircase with me. I was above him on the stairs, and his hands cupped my buttocks from underneath as we went up. We were too drunk and in too much of a hurry even to pull out the couch. When I woke at three, he was gone. What I remembered about it was crying, and how much I’d wanted it before then. I had seen him only as a shape moving over me in the light from the hall. Now the door still stood open, the yellow light fell on me alone. I got up, wrapping the afghan from the couch around me, went to the phone and dialed Leo’s number, then shut the door. I was still sticky and wet between my legs. I smelled the soapy odor of sperm as I slid to the floor, my back against the wall, my bare legs sticking out in front of me. In the dark in my apartment, Leo answered. When I heard his voice, I began to cry again. Afterwards I couldn’t remember what he had said, but his voice was gentle and he stayed on the telephone with me until I’d stopped, until I told him I could sleep now.
About four days later, I got a short letter from him, asking me to try not to do that again; telling me that he needed to hold onto his ultimatum—either it was possible for us to see each other again, or he didn’t want to be in touch at all; though of course he wished for me “everything good, everything you want to have.”
Now I read about him sometimes, in little articles in New York papers, or in art magazines. Or Ursula, who stays in touch with him, will tell me some bit of news: he’s had a new show, he’s gone to Europe for six months, he’s bought a loft. These are always offered in an offhand way, usually while she’s cooking, or doing some chore which keeps her back turned to me. I comment politely, I am happy for him, as though he were some distant relative, one of my accomplished cousins.
After I’d lived in Washington for about a year and a half, Brian called me one night to say that he and Brenda were moving back to Boston. Brenda was pregnant, he said, four months pregnant; and she wanted to work part-time after the baby was born. The Boston office would be willing to make that possible. The Washington office could not.
How soon were they moving? I asked him.
They were looking for a house now, he said, and would probably move up within three or four months.
I thanked him for giving me notice, hung up, and called Ursula. I couldn’t reach her for several days. When I finally did, she told me she’d been at a feminist conference presenting her work. She’d been jeered off the platform, she said, as a male-identified woman; but this had resulted in enormous press attention—she’d appeared on two talk shows—and lots of publicity both for her and her book on female infanticide, due out in a few months. I didn’t ask what she’d been wearing when the feminists threw her out.
She was excited that I was moving back, and within a few weeks, she’d found me an apartment near hers which would be available in June. It was the first floor of an old Victorian house, and though the two bedrooms were jerry-rigged out of a little study and a glassed-in sunporch, there was ample space in the large living room and dining room for the piano.
“That’s your priority, not mine,” I said.
“It ought to be yours. Ever since you stopped playing, you’ve been depressed.”
I was about to point out that I’d stopped playing when I’d lost Molly and Leo, but then it occurred to me that there might be other, more complicated connections between those events that Ursula would point out to me that I didn’t want to hear.
And so I moved up to Cambridge again in June and music came back into my life. The piano had been treated with a certain lack of reverence by the little boys; the tuner found a Steiff mouse under the wires, and pennies and gum wedged between the keys. But I did find it a comfort to be able to play again. In the fall, I called one of the amateur groups I’d made music with before Molly was born, and time and sitters became a problem, and now I meet with them several times a month. I don’t give lessons anymore—I have a full-time job in the admissions office at Wellesley—but I love the shared pleasure of making music.
And, as my Grandmother Gray promised me, it’s a gift to my child. When Molly walked into the Cambridge apartment for the first time, she looked around and said, “Here’s that old piano!” as though she’d been missing something the whole time about me, about our life together, something she hadn’t been able, until this moment, to identify. When I played for her that evening, she got out all her “costumes”—old clothes of mine—and danced and twirled until long past her bedtime, insisting, each time I stopped, on just one more.
The long absence of music from my life, and my pleasure in its return, have made me think a good deal about what it’s meant to me, how it’s shaped me to play as I do: adequately, but not really well.
When I was young and went to the music camp, I remember envying the other musicians their passionate connection to their instruments, instruments that seemed part of their bodies, that responded to their breath, their weight. I hated my note-by-note connection with the massive machinery of the piano, and knew, even as I touched the keys, that I was failing, that this new, harder teacher was finding my playing empty, mechanical.
“How do you hear this phrase, Anna? In your head, I mean. Sing it to me,” she would say. Beyond her, among the dark trees out the window, the other young musicians walked, carrying their instruments with them.
“I don’t hear it till I play it,” I answered.
“Wrong, wrong!” she declared passionately. “You must hear it. First there is the music, then the playing.” She had a thick Eastern European accent. She seemed to come from a life, a way of feeling, utterly foreign to me.
“I can’t,” I would say, as I said over and over that summer. “I can’t.”
But, I would think, if only I played a different instrument, maybe I could hear it in my head first.
When it was decided that I needn’t push myself anymore, that I could get on with growing up to be normal—a wife, a mother, an unaccomplished person—I sometimes blamed my mother for picking the wrong instrument for me, an instrument which was like an obstacle between me and the music. I remembered struggling and struggling that summer for a true legato. “Think of the violin,” my teacher would say. And I thought of the violin, and hated her, hated myself, hated my music, hated my mother.
It was only later that I understood that no instrument could have made me able to be what I couldn’t be, could have transformed me into a truly musical person. And now it seems to me that I am suited to the disciplined distance of the piano as I would have been to no other instrument. That other instruments require a kind of connect
ion and exposure I’m incapable of.
Do these things have meaning in what’s become of my life?
I don’t know. Molly is seven now, a different child from who she might have been if she’d stayed with me. Muth, my old lawyer, has told me that when she reaches adolescence, she can choose for herself where she wants to go, that she could come to me then if she wanted. But I try not to think about that. Brenda is pregnant again, and Molly is part of a family there. She loves being a big sister, she loves them—Brian and Brenda and Elizabeth, the baby. And sometimes when I imagine how it must be—the order, the deep pleasure in what happens predictably, each day, the healing beauty of everything that is commonplace—I yearn again myself to be in a family.
For a while in the confusion of the move back to Cambridge, I had out an old photograph album from my childhood. Most of the pictures were of the summers in Maine. Molly wanted to look at it with me one night, and so we sat on the couch together and I pointed out my cousins and aunts and me as a little girl over and over. The uncles, whom I could remember standing always in a clustered group taking these pictures, were rarely themselves captured on film. Instead the aunts and cousins squatted, picking blueberries. The cousins stood, skinny and ungainly in their dripping bathing suits on one of the flat rocks that studded our inlet. We bent together holding brushes and cans, painting the bottom of an overturned boat. We paraded across the clearing in the middle of the cabins, performing a play written by one of us, practiced behind the canvas curtains at one end of the porch on rainy days.
“Why don’t you ever take me to this place?” Molly asked. “I like this.”
“It’s not there anymore,” I told her.
And though for me this had been the case for a long time, now it was also true for the rest of the family. My grandfather had died the winter before, my second winter in Washington; and the sisters had decided that my grandmother, lost in grief and old age, didn’t need to make the long trip up to camp anymore. Orrie had sold the place, and they were using the money to pay for nursing care in the Connecticut house.