by Sue Miller
They even talked a little – gingerly, carefully – about their growing up, their parents. Lottie told Elizabeth of the permanent silence that had fallen between her mother and herself, of the sense she’d had of being orphaned from very early on.
‘But it was precisely that that I envied you for,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I mean, I’m not saying I didn’t also think your life was difficult, because I did. But you were also so free. Everything I did was simply … miraculous to my parents, was their possession. I suppose it was partly after having all those boys, that I was unique, just a different kind of creature to them. But I couldn’t do a thing, not a thing, without its being held up and turned this way and that for the most minute and careful examination.’
‘Yeah, but the unexamined life is not worth living,’ Lottie said. And though she meant it as a joke, she felt it too, in a twinge of familiar pity for her old self. ‘Sad but true.’
When Elizabeth didn’t come, Lottie missed her. Were they friends, then? Lottie wouldn’t have said so, exactly. But on the days when Elizabeth didn’t show up, Lottie often stopped what she was doing anyway at about the time she usually arrived, and sat restlessly over her solitary coffee, daydreaming.
It forced her to acknowledge, finally, that she’d been using Elizabeth too. To be exact, that she adapted Elizabeth’s accounts to feed her own fantasies of Jack. To transform them, so that she often pictured herself and Jack doing the things Elizabeth told her she and Cameron had done. Alone in her mother’s room, she had imagined herself and Jack in the rainy passageway in Central Square – imagined the soaked clothing, the wet hair, the desperate need, the fogging pants of breath, the rough brick scraping her shoulder blades. Elizabeth’s story of herself and Cameron nearly getting caught by her oldest son making love downstairs in the living room became, in Lottie’s imagination, herself and Jack yanking themselves upright, hurriedly rearranging clothes, wiping stains, shoving underpants under the striped couch, as Megan returned from an evening out. For Cameron’s light, pressured, curiously expressionless voice saying that he hadn’t really been alive until Elizabeth returned to him – that she was the love of his life – Lottie substituted Jack’s hoarse one, promising her the same things as they, too, sat in a car and heard the drumming rain on its metal roof.
Several times a week Jack called, or Lottie called him. Though his voice never failed to thrill her, there was something awkward and unsatisfying about their conversations. They were too polite. Lottie concluded that both of them were probably afraid of confronting what was most central in their thoughts: the idea that somehow it might not all work out over time.
But all the while Lottie was struggling so unsuccessfully to talk to the real Jack on the phone, she was allowing her fantasies about him to grow ever more elaborate, ever more concrete, nourished by Elizabeth’s indiscretions. From time to time she thought about all this and was momentarily disturbed; and then she performed a kind of mental shrug. Really, what was the harm?
Because Lottie was used to giving herself permission to have fantasies – perhaps most women who have lived alone for long periods of time are. When Ryan was very small, the length of time between lovers would sometimes stretch to eight or ten months – occasionally longer – and her answer to this had been to conjure lovers in fantasies constructed around men she worked with or friends’ husbands, or even movie actors, singers. Her rule was that she couldn’t let the fantasy spill over into her life, she couldn’t get crushes, for God’s sake. But that as long as she was in control, she was free to use whomever, whatever she wished. So now she made no effort to stop herself either, without thinking about the damage she might be doing to what was, after all, her very real love.
One night, about two weeks or so after Elizabeth’s cookout, Lottie invited her and Cam over for dinner. Partly it was a polite wish to return Elizabeth’s invitation, but partly it was that Lottie was curious to see for herself how they behaved together, how they looked. She planned the dinner carefully and spent a good part of the afternoon in the kitchen.
Lottie was a fine cook when she felt like it. It was true that she had served Ryan oatmeal and fruit for dinner at least once a week when he was growing up, but that was because she didn’t feel like it all the time. Nothing was worth being claimed by, she felt, particularly not kitchen work.
Tonight she’d made a seafood stew, a lemon tart for dessert. She had to serve it, though, on her mother’s stained plastic plates, with her mismatched and bent utensils. When Ryan drifted into the kitchen, he stopped at the oddly set table and said, ‘Cute, Lottie. It’s like you’re playing house, or something.’
Elizabeth and Cameron arrived together, both with damp hair and the pinkish yet sleepy health of people who’ve spent the afternoon making love. Before dinner they all sat in the sagging chairs in the living room, the fan Lottie had bought in her first days here resting on the floor in their midst, turning its benign wire face from side to side as though listening politely to all of them. Alternately it rippled Elizabeth’s skirt, then Lottie’s, against their bare legs.
Elizabeth was bangled, she had on three or four beaded necklaces, one with a carved pendant. She was talking about the day camp she was sending little Emily to, the premium put on creativity, how Emily worried every day that what she made, or thought up, would be ordinary. ‘They have activities,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Dress-ups, for instance, is an activity.’
‘And it’s possible to be inferior at dress-ups?’ Lottie asked, incredulous.
‘Apparently so,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Robin Hood,’ said Cameron censoriously. ‘Dreary.’
Lottie grinned. ‘The Fairy Godmother,’ she offered. ‘How … banal.’
‘That’s how she feels, I’m afraid,’ Elizabeth said.
Lottie gave her opinion: children’s imaginations ought to be predictable and boring.
‘C’mon, Mom. You don’t think that,’ Ryan said.
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘It’s like the brain patterning that occurs through learning to crawl before you walk. There’s a need for it. Nobody wants a baby who rolls over, stands up, and begins to move like … Isadora Duncan.’
‘Charlotte,’ Cam was shaking his head and grinning at her. ‘This is what we call left field, I think.’
‘Poor Em,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She’s such a mope anyway. I thought camp would be fun, but this is just so hard for her.’
Ryan began talking about the YMCA day camp he went to in Chicago, how he learned mumblety-peg there and various kinds of pool. ‘It was like a program in gang-banging or something.’
‘Excuse me: gang-banging?’ Elizabeth said. ‘What a disgusting term.’
Lottie went out to the kitchen to get things ready. Ryan’s loud voice dominated from the other room, talking about his peculiar childhood. She was thinking of him as he’d been at Emily’s age. He’d loved to dress up, in fact. He’d had a collection of costumes he’d assembled out of odd bits of her old clothing, out of hats he made her buy for him at secondhand shops, out of cast-off jewelry of hers and ‘treasures’ he found put out in the trash up and down the streets of their neighborhood. The ideas came from various sources – films, illustrations in books, television programs, comics. He was in some ways a socially powerful kid: he’d get others to participate, to play complementary roles. Sir Gawain to his Sir Lancelot – wearing an old snoodlike hat of Lottie’s, a huge necklace worthy of Mr T, a ‘tunic’ made by cutting a hole in the middle of an old towel, a bejeweled belt holding it in place.
As she remembered it, though, most of their playtime had actually been spent in the planning stages. ‘I’ll come in and I’ll say, “Avant,” and then you say, “What is your name?” and I’ll say …’
‘No, first I come in and I say …’ It never got settled; and by the time it might have, they would have passed on to another universe, another interest – prisoners of war planning an escape, football heroes. Yes, Robin Hood. Such cheesy dreams, so passionately embraced. But Lotti
e understood it – that wish to create a world, to control every detail, to be in charge, always, of what was coming next. She shared every one of those impulses, she thought.
When everything was set in the kitchen, Lottie called, ‘Chow time,’ and they slowly meandered out, still talking. Lottie went back for the fan and set it on the kitchen counter. Through the meal it blew the hot kitchen air across their faces, lifting Elizabeth’s hair from her neck at slow regular intervals. They talked about food, about diets. Lottie described several of the more bizarre ones she’d discovered while doing her diet book. Elizabeth told them about a cooking school she’d gone to, briefly. Ryan complained about English food. It grew darker outside and Lottie lighted the candles.
Ryan was finished. He stood up. ‘I’m history,’ he said. ‘I’ll be late, I think, Ma. Don’t worry.’
She made a face, and he grinned at her and shook his head.
Lottie had caught Ryan with Jessica by this time, and she had to will herself not to think about what the rest of each evening would hold for him when he disappeared routinely at ten-thirty or eleven o’clock. In fact, she realized, she really had no idea. Two nights earlier, driving to the Square at around eleven-thirty to make a last-minute run for a book, she was waiting for the light to change at the Porter Square subway stop, when suddenly a group of kids she’d paid virtually no attention to, kids who’d been quietly seated on the circle of benches in that little urban park, jumped up yelling and sprang into a dancelike motion. They did a kind of elaborate do-si-do, their skinny legs kicking loosely around, and ended up, within about five seconds, each sitting opposite the place where he’d been sitting before. Ryan, she saw abruptly, was one of them, was bent over now with the rest of them, laughing; and when the light changed, Lottie drove on in such befuddlement about the innocence and humor of this, that within a block it seemed to her she must have imagined the whole scene.
Now the three adults pushed their chairs back and stretched out. For a while they sat at the littered table, talking and moving the empty plates and glasses around. Lottie noted that they’d drunk three bottles of wine among them, though she hadn’t had very much. Someone had been working fast. Suddenly Elizabeth pointed to the huge bright-orange canister sitting on the floor in a corner. ‘What is this immense, lethal-looking machine, Char? The hair dryer from hell?’
It was the steamer, Lottie told her. Rented for the weekend. Ryan had been doing the upstairs hall and the living room, stripping wallpaper. ‘I’ll finish tomorrow, if I have the stamina.’
‘But why don’t we work on it tonight?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Cam and I will help you. We should do something constructive with all this drunken energy.’
Lottie tried to put her off, mostly because she was tired after her own long day; but Elizabeth insisted, and in the end, they separated to change into work clothes, Cam going to Ryan’s room to find some of his, Lottie and Elizabeth heading upstairs.
Elizabeth began pulling off her clothes as she stepped into the room. Lottie was slower, embarrassed to be wearing no bra, especially when she saw Elizabeth’s underwear. It was silk, a sort of café-au-lait color, with creamy lace trim. The bra and underpants matched. Unthinkable to Lottie. She crouched, holding her own fat, small breasts, the one scarred white from surgery and the radioactive rods that had laced through it for the last treatment. Awkwardly she pulled out a baggy T-shirt and a paint-stained pair of white work pants with a elastic waist, and handed them up to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth even got dressed with sweeping, bold gestures, Lottie thought. She herself turned away, pulled her work clothes on quickly, hunched over with a schoolgirl’s embarrassment. When she looked back at Elizabeth, she laughed out loud. The pants and shirt were much too small, and Elizabeth looked gangly and preposterous, her midriff showing, the pants barely as long as pedal pushers on her. ‘Your dress-up,’ Lottie told her, ‘is not as good as mine.’
Elizabeth looked down and laughed too. Then she said, ‘If you’re not nice to me, I’ll tell Cam you’re teasing again.’
When they came downstairs, Lottie moved the steamer to the living room and fired it up. They took turns wielding the pad and scraping. Cameron brought the radio in, and they listened while they worked to Little Walter’s Time Machine, all the old rhythm and blues, the early black groups Lottie hadn’t even guessed at the existence of while she bought forty-fives by Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis.
There were three layers of wallpaper. The bottom one was probably original with the house – faded bouquets of flowers. Over that was a garish plaid, probably from the thirties. And on top of that was the wallpaper Lottie had grown up with, a sort of fake Pennsylvania Dutch motif, patched here and there where it had been torn or scratched. ‘This is like peeling back the layers of family history,’ she said, pulling off a long, satisfying strip.
‘Only you never get anywhere,’ Cam said. ‘Just down to this blank wall.’ His voice was, surprisingly, bitter. His face was turned away from her, but Lottie glanced at Elizabeth and saw that she was startled too. It made Lottie remember his loving-kindness to their mother and wonder at it again.
Elizabeth had taken off her jewelry upstairs and left it on Lottie’s bed. While Lottie was scraping above her on the stepladder, she looked down at Elizabeth’s hands. They were holding the steamer pad pressed against the wall just below her. Elizabeth’s head was thrown back – she was laughing at something Cameron had said – so she didn’t see Lottie’s face as Lottie took in the scars drawn across the insides of both wrists. Old scars, white, and maybe not that deep, not that serious. But an unexpected sign of her capacity for sorrow, for pain. Elizabeth! Lottie thought. And felt, for the first time, a sense of compassion for the other woman, of connection to her.
It was after two when they finished, and they sat in the nearly empty living room and had more wine to celebrate. Cameron was talking about the bookstore, about the difference betwen the used section and the new. ‘It actually works about the opposite of the way you’d romanticize it. Or the way I’d romanticized it anyhow. It isn’t wonderfully erudite, educated people who care about used books. On the contrary, by God. Because used books, finally, are collectible objects – like, let’s say, snuffboxes or walking sticks. As opposed to books as content – as ideas, language, story. Words, which is what people buy new books for. I mean, there are always a few people looking for an out-of-print book, or an old one, because they read it a long time ago and remember it and want to own it. Or because they need it for scholarly work or something. But most people upstairs just want to know what edition, what year, what binding, what endpapers – that kind of thing. The content is utterly immaterial. And the worst, of course, are the decorators. ‘What do you have seven feet of in deep maroon?’
‘“A kind of dried-bloody color, preferably,”’ Elizabeth trilled, and they looked at each other and smiled. It occurred to Lottie that they were in the process of working up some of those set pieces that couples who’ve been together a long time develop.
Richard Lester came in – from where? Lottie wondered; where did he go until this time every night? – and Cam insisted he join them. Lottie got him a little glass too and poured him the last of the wine. They made an odd party, sitting in the half-dark living room with their jelly glasses on the floor by each chair. Little Walter squawked and blew horns on the radio between songs. Cameron and Elizabeth and Lottie were drenched with sweat and steam. Their clothes stuck to them, along with bits of old wallpaper and clots of glue. Elizabeth’s makeup had steamed off, her hair was limp and straggling. All her elegance was gone, but she turned her charm on Richard anyway, and he seemed to expand in its bright light. He confided in them about the progress of his thesis, his job hunt. Lottie felt ashamed of all her small meannesses to him, the judgments she’d passed. And she clearly saw Elizabeth’s flirtatiousness not just as compulsive behavior, not necessarily as a way for her to get something, but as a gift too, a generous gift that she made to others.
A slow son
g came on, and Elizabeth cried out, ‘Oh, Little Anthony!’ She leaned forward in her chair abruptly and said, ‘Let’s dance,’ to Richard.
He flushed deeply, he tried to fuss and demur – small noises, murmurs and ticking in his throat. But in the meantime Cam had stood up and pulled Lottie to her feet. Now Elizabeth rose too and held out her hand to Richard. He struggled to heave himself up out of the chair. Cam reached down and jacked the volume up on the radio, and they all began to move slowly around the room. Cam felt strange to Lottie, so much closer to her own size than Jack. Cam and Elizabeth and Lottie sang loudly along with the lyrics. ‘… and tempt! the hand of Fate …’ Richard held Elizabeth out in a formal, ballroom posture and moved awkwardly, but his face was opened in a foolish, sweaty smile.
It only lasted for perhaps ten minutes – through two or three songs – before the music got fast again and they stopped. Cam turned the volume lower, and Richard stood painfully thanking them for the wine and excusing himself for several minutes before disappearing up the stairs. Cameron and Elizabeth said their good nights too. Just as they walked into the front hall and were about to leave, though, Rosie and the Originals came on, singing ‘Angel Baby.’ Cam said, ‘The last dance,’ and put his arms around Elizabeth. They glided back into the living room together, and Lottie trailed after them and leaned against the bare, damp-smelling plaster wall to watch. Elizabeth’s eyes were shut, Cam held her in the way they’d danced in high school, pinning one arm against her waist at the back, the other held low, along their legs. They seemed bolted together at the pelvis, and their upper bodies swayed with a rolling, sexual motion.
It was nearly three o’clock. Even in the dim, reflected light of the living room, they both looked tired, they looked their age. Elizabeth seemed a plain forty-fivish woman, carrying on her face, too, the scars of the things that had hurt her in life. But they moved smoothly together, they moved like the teenagers they’d been when they learned to move this way; and their worn faces were imprinted with such an intense pleasure that Lottie felt rising in herself a belief in their foolish happiness, a wistful hope that it might hold out against all the odds.