by Sue Miller
Now she wonders what Ryan will say when they ask – and surely they will ask. She looks down at the table she’s standing next to. There’s a photograph in a silver frame of the baby, only hours old, it seems, wearing one of those white watch caps they put on them now right after birth. And there are two pictures of Ryan, one as a toddler, grave and concentrated on something above the camera, one in a baseball uniform at nine or ten. Lottie has never seen either picture before. It’s startling somehow. He is theirs too, Lottie thinks. He has a separate life with them.
When she comes out, Carol has switched the baby to the other breast. Lottie sits down again in one of the sun-faded director’s chairs.
‘You found it – good!’ Carol says. She smiles warmly at Lottie. She’s a pretty woman, tall and blond. Lottie has met her only twice before. She’s just beginning to be not-young-looking, to have smile lines – to appear, in repose, a little tired from some angles. Lottie guesses her to be in her early thirties now. She seemed a child to Lottie the first time they met. Afterward, in a moment alone with Derek, she had said, ‘What is it you’re trying to prove? That you’re immortal?’ She thought she’d been joking, but perhaps her voice was harder than she intended, or perhaps it was a joke he was tired of. ‘Oh, Lottie, give me a break,’ he’d said.
But Ryan likes Carol, and Lottie’s grateful for this. What’s more, she can understand why. What’s not to like? And she seems to have softened Derek over the years, mellowed him, which must make Ryan’s life easier too. Watching Derek now, sitting on the deck’s railing, holding forth, Lottie muses that he hasn’t changed much. He’s one of those tall, slender, precise-looking men who seem to stay young through orderliness, through sheer willpower. He must be fifty now, Lottie thinks. She remembers that his birthday is in December. She remembers a party she once had for him, a party from which he disappeared and didn’t return until the next morning.
He’s talking about a robbery, a mugging that occurred on the street only a few blocks from their house. ‘They guy did everything they told him – gave them his wallet, a ring, a jacket – and they beat him up anyway.’
‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ Carol says. ‘Lottie?’
Lottie looks over, startled. Carol’s holding a plate of crackers and cheese out to her. Lottie takes one. When she begins to chew, she’s aware, again, of the tooth. She winces, sets the rest of the cracker in her saucer, beside the cup.
Though the tale of the mugging was brought up as a cautionary note for Ryan, a warning about being careful on the street, Derek is expanding on it now, turning it in another direction. He’s talking about how the university is challenged by the encroachment of the ghetto. He says it’s never defined its connection to the town, and that’s contributed to social problems. Carol talks about Columbia, where she went to college. She rarely went out alone at night, she tells them. Ryan laughs and begins to relate a story about having fallen asleep on a lawn at Stanford one night and not waking up until the sky began to pale.
A long silence falls. Lottie senses they are waiting for her to leave so they can talk more personally. The door will shut, Derek will turn to Ryan and say, ‘So, good buddy, how are you?’ and their visit will truly begin. She looks at her watch and stands up. ‘I should be getting on the road,’ she says. ‘I’d like to be back before dark. My eyes, you know.’ She taps her cheek and smiles ruefully.
‘More carrots, Ma,’ Ryan says.
‘And speaking of carrots,’ says Carol, rising too. She slings the baby up to her shoulder. ‘Can’t I give you a snack or something for the road? You’ve eaten next to nothing. You must be starving.’
‘Oh no, thank you,’ Lottie says. ‘Actually – the truth is – I’ve got a tooth that’s bothering me. I just got a new filling, and I think it’s too big.’
‘Lottie and her teeth,’ says Derek, with grim satisfaction. There’s a pause that recognizes their long-ago intimacy.
‘Well, you know,’ Carol says, ‘I still have some great postpartum meds. Do you want a little painkiller, just in case? If it gets worse tonight, you won’t be able to get a dentist. You’ll be in trouble.’ She is frowning in genuine concern. Genevieve is reaching toward something behind Carol now, calling.
‘Oh no, it’ll be all right. I think.’
‘Are you sure? I mean, I got a whole bottle of something quite terrific, and I took just one or two. Please let me give you a couple. Even if you don’t use them, you’ll know you have them, and you won’t need to start panicking if it feels like it’s getting worse.’
‘Well … okay. Thank you, yes. Maybe that would be a good idea,’ Lottie says. Maybe I’ll take just a little nibble as soon as I get into the car, she thinks. Seat belt on, lock my door against the fabled mugger, nibble on some lovely drug.
Carol has handed the baby to Ryan. Now she disappears into the house. Ryan holds the baby up. She’s swimming in the air and his face is lifted to look at her. She squeals, she chews her fist, she drools on him.
‘Bull’s-eye!’ he says. ‘Bull’s-eye, you little twerp.’ He swings her against his side and wipes his cheek off. Derek stands watching him with a pleasure so naked Lottie looks away. She senses his wish to say something, that he would say something if she weren’t here. She bends down, picks up her purse, and starts back into the condo too. She’s stepping across the threshold when she hears Ryan say behind her, ‘She’s wet, Dad. Should I change her?’ There’s something excited about his question.
‘Sure; head upstairs. Carol will show you where her stuff is.’
And so it’s Lottie and Derek who go out the front door together and stand awkwardly in the semicircular drive. Their shoes bite and crunch on the gravel each time they shift their weight.
‘I’m sorry,’ Derek says. He gestures at the house. ‘I probably should have changed her myself. But I was pleased he asked, you understand. I’m sure he’ll only be a minute.’
‘Or two,’ Lottie says. ‘He’s never done it before, to my knowledge.’ Her tone is sharp, but he doesn’t appear to notice.
‘Well, Carol will help him.’
‘Yes,’ Lottie says.
After a moment, she tips her head back to take in the whole house. She’s about to comment on it, when he says, ‘It’s a great feeling, starting all this up again.’
Lottie glances over at him. He’s smiling at her confidentially. ‘I’m sure,’ Lottie answers.
‘It feels like an opportunity – I don’t know – I suppose to do it right this time.’
‘You can only do the best you can, anytime.’ Lottie’s aware of a quick, burning anger that comes through in her tone.
‘You know what I mean, Lottie. We screwed up, with Ryan.’
She turns away from him. ‘I’m proud of Ryan,’ she says. ‘Of how he turned out. Of who he is.’
‘Of course. I didn’t mean … I’m terribly proud too. Of him. And, really, of all you did in raising him. Maybe that’s my point. I had so little, really, to do with all that. Genevieve, she’s a new chance, a new start.’
As though you could sweep away what you’d been, what you’d done, Lottie thinks. All she says, though, is, ‘She is lovely.’
Derek leans back against her car, folds his arms. And then: ‘Do you and … is it Jack?’ Lottie nods. ‘Do you ever think of starting again? Another kid?’
Lottie is shocked by the question. She says, ‘It isn’t possible,’ in a cold, flat voice. Though it is possible, as far as she knows, just unthinkable. They’ve taken every precaution against it.
Carol appears, suddenly, on the front porch. ‘Oh, you’re out here!’ She’s breathless, smiling. ‘I went out back.’ She sweeps down the front steps. She’s barefoot, and Lottie crosses quickly to the foot of the front stairs so she won’t have to step out on the gravel. ‘I’ll tell Ryan. I’m not sure he knows you’re waiting for him.’
She extends her hand to Lottie. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Percocet. They’re very strong, really.’
Lottie reaches o
ut her hand and feels the heat of Carol’s as she drops the sticky pills into her palm. ‘Thank you,’ Lottie says. ‘I think I may, in fact, use one tonight.’
‘Oh, I’m glad to give you something,’ Carol says. ‘I’ll go in and send Ry down. Drive carefully,’ she flings back, already dashing into the house.
Lottie opens her purse and tucks the pills into the little zipper pocket inside.
Derek walks over to her. ‘I’m sorry, Lottie, to have been so … carelessly rude,’ he says.
‘Oh, it’s fine,’ Lottie says. ‘It’s not an issue. I mean, we wouldn’t have wanted to start over, as you put it, anyway. Just starting is complicated enough for us, thank you very much.’ She laughs. Let him think she’s being brave, putting the best face on it. Whatever. God, the nerve of the man!
‘Still, it was insensitive, at best. Please forgive me.’
‘Don’t be silly. Of course I do.’ But Lottie has kept her tone cool. They walk slowly, side by side, over the noisy gravel in the direction of Lottie’s car. Neither looks at the other. The silence lasts just too long.
Derek says, ‘Do you have a dentist in Cambridge?’
‘I’ll go to the guy I got to put the filling in. Maybe he can just file it down, or something.’
‘Well, it’s good you have the Percocet.’
‘Yes, I’m very grateful.’
The woman who’d been sunbathing out back emerges from around the side of the house, wearing a robe and carrying the chaise, folded up. She waves to Derek and goes up the porch steps. The door slowly closes behind her. ‘Apparently she’s never heard of cancer,’ Lottie says.
She’s only been trying to change the subject, to be funny, but Derek must hear it as snide; or else as a reference to her own illness. He lets a little audible puff of exasperated breath out from between his tightened lips. ‘I’ll get Ryan,’ he says. ‘I know you need to go, Lottie. It was good to see you.’ He extends his hand, and they shake.
But Ryan is already coming out the door, holding the baby, who now wears only a diaper and rubber pants over it. She sits, potbellied, swaying with every step Ryan takes, on his arm. He looks pleased with himself. He looks paternal, Lottie realizes.
Derek pauses in the doorway, lifts his arm slightly, and Lottie lifts her hand too, in farewell. He goes in.
She turns to Ryan, to Ryan and Genevieve. ‘I’m on my way, lovey,’ she says.
‘Okay, Mom. I’ll call you in, like, four or five days.’ He bends toward her.
She has to stretch over the baby to kiss his cheek, smelling the sweet talcy smell Genevieve exudes, the smell Ryan had as a baby too. Lottie touches the baby’s silky arm, as though she were touching Ryan then, she remembers it so well. ‘Sounds good,’ she says.
‘In Chicago, right?’ he asks. He looks sternly, perhaps apprehensively, at her.
‘Well, try there first. I’ll probably be there by then.’ She opens the car door. ‘And how will you come?’
He shrugs. ‘Bus, I guess. It’s the cheapest.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about the expense, honey.’
‘Oh, really? You’ll pay?’
‘Sure.’
‘All right! Great. A plane, then, for sure. I’ll see if they can get me up to Hartford.’
Lottie is sitting in the car. She is looking up at him, her tall blond son with the bald baby perched so naturally on his arm. He has jutted a housewifely hip out to support her. ‘You look nice with that baby,’ she says, and smiles. ‘It’s like gazing into the future.’
‘Me? With a baby? But I hear you have to have sex first, Mom.’
‘Yes.’ She laughs and closes the door. ‘Nasty sex. Born into sin, we are. Into sin, into death, as we know.’
He takes Genevieve’s little paw, then, and pretends to be dancing with her, spinning around once, twice. She squeals. He is asking her, ‘Were you born into sin, Genny, into sin and death?’ When he stops, she laughs, a short burble that is pronounced ‘Clegh.’
‘Understand, I’m in no rush to be a grandmother,’ Lottie says. ‘I just feel like one, looking at you.’
‘And I’m in no rush to make you one,’ he says. ‘As you might have known. But it’s worth remembering, Mom’ – he points at her – ‘that I’m in control of your life from now on. I make you be things: a motherin-law, a grandmother. A great-grandmother.’ He looks at the baby. ‘She is pretty cool, isn’t she?’ He puts his hand on her head – it covers her skull entirely – and strokes it gently.
‘At least pretty cool.’ Her voice is very cheerful, very final. She starts the engine. ‘Okay, darling,’ she says. ‘Have a wonderful time here, and try to forget everything that ever happened in Cambridge. And I’ll see you soon.’
Ryan reaches down and touches her arm.
She smiles up at him again and then backs out of the parking space. When she stops for one last look at them as she reaches the street, he is waving and talking to Genevieve, concentrated more on the baby than on Lottie’s leaving, and she feels a pang of completely muddled emotion that makes her eyes blurry, her throat dry. In her confusion, she drives for too long down Whitney Avenue. What’s more, she senses at the first corner that she has turned the wrong way. But she needs gas in any case, she sees. She can get instructions at a station and start again.
She begins a slow meander through residential streets, trying to guess where the commercial center of all this might be, where the gas stations are. Gradually the neighbourhood is perceptibly rougher. She’s at the edges of the ghetto, then in it. But Lottie is thinking of Ryan, Ryan with the baby. How right that seemed, how topsy-turvy that it was Derek’s child. And yet, of course, why shouldn’t it be?
She would have liked to hold Genevieve, she acknowledges to herself now. If it had been anyone else’s child but Derek’s, she might have asked to. She thinks again of his rude question about her having a baby, and feels once more her rage at it; then, oddly, at what he’s chosen in having Genevieve. It seems to her somehow a denial of responsibility for what is, for what he already has: Ryan.
But that’s not true, and she knows it. He has been completely reliable in his love for Ryan for some time now.
She thinks of what she said to Derek – that starting has been hard enough for her and Jack. That, anyway, was the truth. She thinks of Megan; and feels a flash of pain that makes her face pull tight. Megan is, after all, what she already has. She remembers the girl’s silence in therapy when Lottie asked her what she could be to her; she remembers the way she’d joked about that with Elizabeth. But what would Lottie have answered if Megan had asked that question?
On her right now, there is the sprawl of a blasted-looking project, squat and barrackslike. For a moment Lottie thinks the whole thing is empty, abandoned. There is cardboard here and there in a window, and there has been a fire in one of the buildings – black streaks rise on the brick above each boarded window. But then she sees children in a corner lot, little children, jumping and yelling, playing on a stack of discarded, dirty mattresses.
There’s a group of men on the corner ahead. She is going to ask them where she is, but they stare at her with such unreadable blankness as she approaches that she doesn’t; she drives on. She rolls up her window and switches on the air conditioner.
She comes out on to a wide street with stoplights, cars whizzing past. The street sign on the corner has been removed from its bracket. Lottie takes a right, arbitrarily. She passes several gas stations, but they are deserted. She looks at her watch. It’s six-thirty. Six-thirty Sunday night, and these streets have the deserted air of a postcolonial city. She passes a group of adolescent girls walking together. Even through the closed windows she can hear their raw, high voices.
The street is gentrifying slightly; showing, anyhow, signs of commercial life. There are stores – closed now, on Sunday evening, but viable-looking. Then a Dunkin’ Donuts, a Chevrolet lot. Lottie feels reassured. She sees, several blocks ahead, the bright primary colors of a gas station sign. She opens her w
indow again; the hot air strikes her arm and the side of her face. Her tooth hurts.
The man in the service station is elderly and soft-spoken. He slowly and carefully cleans Lottie’s windshield, and she feels a tender kind of gratitude to him. He tells her she’s drifted pretty far from the turnpike entrance. She’s closer to the Wilbur Cross Parkway here, if she just keeps going.
Lottie uses the ladies’ room nervously – the door won’t lock, and the walls are covered with the unreadable hieroglyphics of urban graffiti. There is no toilet paper. When she leaves the station, she follows the old man’s advice and continues down Dixwell Avenue. She passes between shopping malls on either side of the road. The lots are even now half full. Ugly vistas of commercial success, she thinks. Not much better to look at, finally, than the empty shells of failure in the ghetto.
Then she is thinking of Ryan again. She sees his swollen face and feels ashamed. How, after all, can she fault Derek for denial – for pretending – when she has apparently spent the summer in a kind of waking dream? Her mind goes back to the fight with Cameron, to the ecstatic and vicious release she felt pounding and slapping him. She remembers the nagging swirl of Elizabeth’s skirt in the edge of her vision, the way Cameron’s face had lifted in contempt for her and her life’s choices. She sees again the dark line of blood on the back of Ryan’s hand.
The green and white sign to the Wilbur Cross looms ahead, and she signals. She’s thinking of all this, and of how she’d yearned after what Elizabeth and Cameron seemed to have. Then she’s thinking of Jack – just of how he looks, then of the moment in the hotel when she felt such tenderness for his gangly nakedness. She flips her visor down against the bright, low sun. Her tooth is really hurting now. This qualifies as an out-and-out toothache. She pulls her bag over to her, fishes blindly in the zipper pocket, and pulls out a Percocet. She holds it up, visually records its size, and puts it between her front teeth. She bites down. A little piece crumbles off and lands on her lap or on the floor, but there’s a bitter tiny chunk in her mouth too. Lottie swims her tongue in her mouth until she’s generated enough saliva to swallow it. She holds the Percocet up again. She must have eaten about one third.