by Sue Miller
She even makes herself imagine Elizabeth, where she would have been, phoning Cam, how she would have felt. She thinks of Larry and Emily and the children somewhere else in the house, Elizabeth hearing them, Elizabeth wanting to be safely with them again. Elizabeth choosing Jessica as the way to get what she wanted.
And Jessica, so eager to help, to be part of it. Jessica waiting outside for Cam to come. Lottie sees it, she makes herself see it all: Jessica on the dark lawn, the headlights, the girl lifted up, falling back. Lottie’s hands gripping the wheel jerk convulsively; she cries out and hits the horn by mistake. Its honking sounds faint, distant, under the noise of the rushing car, and Lottie presses it now, again and again, thinking of Cam, of Jessica; thinking of herself and Jack and Evelyn and Ryan.
When she stops, her heart is racing, her tooth is pulsing agonizingly to its beat. The fertile green fields roll by outside, and she listens to her own ragged breathing and wipes the tears that are sliding down her cheeks. She can’t tell, anymore, why she’s crying: grief, pain, exhaustion, the otherworldiness of the drug state she’s in, her fear of what’s to come. Whatever. She’s undone by it, by all of it.
She needs to blow her nose too, and has nothing to do it with. Absurdly, this adds to her sorrow. Sniffling, wiping at her face with her bare hands, she drives on and on, with the sun rising slowly behind her in the east, flooding the world around her with pale light.
Lottie does return, as she left, to an oldies station. It’s all she can get in Indiana, and she leaves it on as she passes the steel mills, then as she descends into the city, crosses it – long after the point when the music and lyrics are swallowed by static; because she can’t hear it anymore: she’s lost in her pain. In Indiana she had actually pulled off the road, stopped the car and bent over, desperately feeling on the floor and under the seat, under both seats, for the little bit of Percocet that had broken off when she bit it the evening before.
In the city, instead of going home, she drives directly to her dentist’s office on the near North Side. There are two people reading magazines in the waiting room, two people who look up as Lottie comes in, and then, startled, keep looking at her – at her rumpled, slept-in clothes, at her smeared, swollen face, at her halting walk, the result of stiffness after the long drive.
When she opens her mouth to explain herself to the receptionist, she begins to weep, and this works better than anything else could have. The receptionist, a Wagnerian blonde who has – today as always in Lottie’s experience – an impeccable thick mask of makeup on, rises magnificently from her desk, comes around to Lottie, and engulfs her. She sweeps her directly into an exam room. Within less than a minute the dentist is there. Lottie opens her mouth and points. He reaches in with several instruments and adds to her agony momentarily. She groans, screeches, and then, with a searing jolt, the filling is off. Her mouth fills instantly with salty fluid. She is crying still, but in such relief, such happiness!
‘What a mess, Lottie,’ the dentist says. She can’t answer.
‘Open wide,’ he says. He applies cotton wadding. He pulls it back out, stained. He holds it up in his tweezers. ‘This is your life, eh?’
Lottie laughs. This is why she comes to this dentist.
The receptionist – Georgia is her name, Lottie remembers now – comes in with a damp washcloth. Gratefully Lottie accepts it. She covers her face and wipes it thoroughly. She is talking now, talking and laughing in shaky joy, trying to explain about the tooth, the trip. ‘God, what a relief!’ she says finally. ‘I can’t believe it. I feel as ecstatic as I did when I gave birth.’
The dentist is busy with instruments on his little tray table. ‘This is going to cost you almost as much too,’ he answers.
It’s midafternoon when she gets home. There’s no car in the driveway, and the house is still when the door swings in. She calls. No one answers. And then Bader appears around the corner from the living room, his hindquarters swinging recklessly for a creature as arthritic as he is, his mouth hung open in joy. He has trouble even walking toward her, he’s so happy. He tries to jump up on her, and Lottie quickly squats to spare him. He’s beside himself, licking her face, turning in circles. Trying, as she anthropomorphizes it, to offer her the equivalent of an embrace. In the end, he’s too excited; he simply falls over with a gentle thud.
‘That’s right, lovey,’ Lottie says, and she holds him down, dropping to her knees. She pats him for a long time, speaking gently to him, scratching his ears, rubbing his muzzle.
As soon as she rises, though, he scrambles up too, his long nails scratching on the stone of the foyer. He pants as he follows her through the house. She calls once again at the foot of the stairs. Jack’s at work, of course. Megan must be at school. Or with friends.
She goes into the kitchen, takes a banana from a bowl of fruit, and eats it quickly. Her mouth is still numb on the right side. She pours herself a glass of orange juice, then has another banana. The kitchen is messy, she notes. There are dishes in the sink. The counter by the toaster is sprinkled with crumbs. Two pizza boxes bent in half are leaned against the trash can. I’ll do it later, she thinks. Just a little rest, and then I’ll do it.
Before she goes upstairs, she gives Bader a dog biscuit to distract him, but when she turns at the landing, he’s followed her to the stairway. He’s looking up at her, bereft.
In the shower, Lottie hears him start to howl. Even so, she stands under the warm spray for a long time. She shampoos her hair, she soaps herself thoroughly, massaging herself slowly with the washcloth — her aching legs, her swollen feet. When she gets out, he’s still at it. Aroooo, the mad call of dog love. Wrapped in a towel, she goes to the top of the stairwell and looks down. He’s heard her and stopped. He’s looking back up at her.
‘Stop it, Bader,’ she says ‘I know you have, but stop it anyway.’ He looks away in shame and lies down slowly.
Lottie goes back to the bedroom. She dries off, puts on a T-shirt and some bikini pants, and gets in bed.
Bader starts again. For a while she lies there, thinking he’ll stop, drifting every now and then into the near sleep of strange images — the unfolding dark road, Jessica floating up and back, her mother’s empty face, Ryan, injured. Bader does stop briefly once or twice. But then, slowly at first – a tentative pain – and then more wholeheartedly, in all-out yearning, he starts again.
Lottie gets up. Frantically she snatches the bedspread from the bed, drags it trailing behind her to the stairs and down. The old dog is standing up. His tail slowly begins to swing as he sees he’s done it, he’s brought her back to him. She strides by him, heads for the living room. She flops down on the couch and sloppily yanks the bedspread this way and that to cover herself.
Bader has followed her in. He noses her once or twice. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m sleeping.’ But she has to sit up once more to throw the pillows off the back of the couch, and then to arrange the bedspread again.
Finally she falls into a deep sleep on the couch. And Bader, content at last, lies down exactly below her, as close as he can get to her on the floor, resting his head on one of the pillows she’s discarded.
And that’s the way Jack finds them when he comes home from work.
CHAPTER XV
It’s three days before the arrival of all their sons home from graduate school and college for the Christmas vacation, and Lottie is outside early this morning, walking Bader. She has been waking early for the last several days, with lists of things to do to get ready for the holidays taking shape in her mind; though once she’s up and starts to write them down, the lists are always surprisingly short. Certainly not worth waking at five-thirty or six o’clock for.
It’s just nervousness, she thinks. She’s anxious about how it will all go. She feels responsible.
It’s snowed heavily the night before, and the city seems especially hushed under the white blanket. No one has shoveled the sidewalks yet, so Lottie and Bader are out on the plowed street. He has stiffly prec
eded her down their own snowy driveway, awkwardly lifting his paws with each step to try to keep them dry. And he’s ahead of her now, here and there marking the snow heaped up against the cars with an unsteady, short spurt.
He stops suddenly, nosing a dark shape in the street. Lottie, getting closer, can see that it’s a cat, that it’s dead. She bends and yanks Bader away by the collar. He tries to return, but she scolds him and he shuffles off, his head drooping in a weary acceptance of blame.
Lottie stands helpless in the street for a moment, looking down at the animal. It’s been hit by a car, clearly, but it’s unmarked. It’s a pale orange. Its mouth and eyes are open in the surprise of death, and Lottie can see its pointed, perfect white teeth. It’s got a plastic flea collar on. It’s someone’s pet. She bends over, grabs the cat’s tail, and pulls it to the edge of the plowed street, against a snowbank. At least it won’t get hit again here, and maybe its owner will be able to find it and claim it. Its body is completely frozen, stiff as a piece of wood.
She trudges after Bader, her bare feet cold in her fur-lined boots, a long coat on over her nightgown. Her breath plumes from her nose, and she can feel the cold pinch the flesh of her nostrils. There’s no one else out at this hour. Behind their vast white lawns the houses seem remote and small, almost like miniatures. Doll houses.
Her own house is still eerie with sleep when they return. Lottie can hear and notice, as she never does in the daytime, the hum and tick of all the machines that keep them alive and comfortable. She hangs her coat on the coat tree and pries her cold, wet boots off. Bader’s nails click on the polished floor ahead of her, leading her to the kitchen. In its murk, she changes the water in his dish and gets him a dog biscuit from the shelf in the broom closet. Then she goes back into the hall and slowly climbs the carpeted stairs to the bedroom.
Jack’s flesh shudders when she touches him, but she pulls herself close under the covers, presses herself against his furnaced skin.
‘God! Returned from the Antarctic,’ he says.
‘Bader and I.’
‘Mmm. Just don’t put your hands on me.’
‘But that’s what I want to do.’
‘Well.’ He turns. ‘With surgical precision, then.’
They each shift a bit toward the other. ‘Lovely hand warmer,’ she says.
‘Should have had one with you on your walk.’
‘I like it attached.’
He opens his eyes. ‘What time is it? Do we have time?’
As if in answer, they hear Megan, the slam of the bathroom door down the hall.
‘There it is, the cold shower in person,’ she says.
Jack laughs. ‘The saltpeter in the mashed potatoes.’
After a minute she says, ‘Do you know someone around with an orange cat?’
‘No. Why?’
‘There’s one outside. Dead. Hit by a car.’
‘Oh. Too bad.’ He’s looking at her, and suddenly his eyes change. ‘No wonder you’re up here trying to seduce me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re the only person I know for whom death is an aphrodisiac.’
She slaps him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Not fair.’ She sits up, throwing the covers back. ‘It probably is for everyone else too. Just I admit it.’ She gets up, puts her robe on this time, her slippers, and pads silently across the room, the dark hall, and down the stairs to fix breakfast.
She is thinking about what Jack said. He has pointed out the pattern to her: that she met him indirectly as a result of her cancer, that Evelyn’s death gave him to her at last, that Jessica’s death brought her back. They’ve talked about all of it, occasionally even joked about it, as they just did. But Lottie isn’t entirely comfortable with the jokes yet.
She turns on the kitchen lights. She puts on water for coffee and sets the table. She brings a carton of orange juice, a loaf of raisin bread, the butter and jam, and a bowl of fruit to the table. All this is for Jack and herself. Megan won’t eat anything. She claims now to find the thought of food before noon appalling. She sits with them because Jack makes her, but all she has is coffee, black.
Megan is somewhat easier with Lottie now, but this is partly because she’s withdrawn from Jack. She’s done with him, it seems, as Ryan is done with Lottie. But Megan needs to have her departure noticed. She’s making trouble. She’s fallen in love with a man several years older then herself, who plays guitar in some kind of rock band – though the other instruments in this band are a cello and a trombone, which raises questions of the band’s viability for Lottie. Megan is refusing to apply to colleges because it’s her plan to go on the road with the band next year. She and Jack have fought almost daily for several months about this. Now she’s angry because she’s discovered that if she does go on the road, Jack won’t give her any money. All she’s asking for, she said the night before in a tone that held unfathomable contempt for his rigidity, is whatever allowance he’d give her if she were at college. What is his problem?
This discussion took place in the living room. Lottie had stood up and left when it started to get rancorous – nearly right away – but she could still hear their voices from the kitchen.
‘It’s in the nature of some experiences that you pay for them yourself,’ Jack said. His voice sounded calm and reasonable, but Lottie knew he was deeply upset. He wasn’t used to fighting with Megan. He would probably never get used to it. And then she would be gone.
‘Why? Why is it’ – and here Megan changed her tone to mock her father – ‘in the nature of some experiences?’
‘Because it is. Because a family-supported rebellion is a thoroughly half-assed thing.’
Lottie shut the door as Megan started to yell. And standing there in the kitchen, Lottie thought of two things simultaneously. First, that her experience the summer before – the experience that had brought her back to Jack – had been paid for by everyone but herself. By Jessica, by Cameron and Elizabeth. Even by Ryan. And second, that she felt a kind of dark, shameful glee at these fights between Jack and Megan, at his discovery that Megan could be difficult for him too. She concentrated on the first thing. She began to speculate on it as she went about her business in the kitchen, waiting until they were through fighting to emerge.
Lottie never takes part in these discussions. Mindful of Megan’s having said she doesn’t want another mother, she lets Jack handle all of it. At night, in bed, he talks to her about it, though, and she comments and commiserates. He has been through a stage when he really thought Megan would come around, that he could just insist and she’d finally do what he wanted her to do. Now he’s mostly resigned. He still struggles with her, hard, but really, he’s simply waiting for her to leave. In part, so she can come back to him sometime later.
They’re both waiting for her to leave, then; and Lottie feels some relief that Jack has joined her in this. It seems a turning into their life together. And who can say for certain whether Megan began to pull away so hard because she sensed their turn to each other? Or whether they began to turn to their life together because Megan began to pull away? It has happened. It is happening.
They’ve talked, actually, of selling the house. Not next year – the kids will probably still be coming home en masse, as they are for Christmas this year. But maybe a year or two after that. It’s possible, of course, that they won’t in the end. But their daydreaming about it from time to time has made Lottie feel easier about the house too. It isn’t what has to be anymore.
In any case, whether they move or not, they’re going to be alone soon. Megan may or may not go to college, she may or may not be on the road, but she will leave, eagerly and bitterly. And Lottie, as it turns out, will apparently be the least important factor in that decision. Sometimes, actually, Megan allies herself with Lottie now. She’ll turn to her occasionally in the midst of some argument and say, ‘Why does he have to always be right? I mean, why do you put up with it?’
They will be alone.
Althou
gh it’s also true that Lottie’s begun again to go on the road a bit herself, researching a new book she’s started. It’s about emergency room medicine.
She decided on this project over the day and a half she was in Cambridge when she went to retrieve her belongings. She flew out in mid-August, only a few weeks after Jessica died and she’d come back to Jack. She stayed in a fancy hotel in Cambridge for the one night she was there. She couldn’t bear the thought of staying at her mother’s again, and as it turned out, that wouldn’t have been possible anyway. The bed was gone. The rooms were completely empty. Cam had cleared everything out of the house except for her stuff and Richard Lester’s room. As Lottie walked through the bare spaces, every noise she made – footfall, breathing – seemed amplified. Cam had left her clothes in their neat piles upstairs, and he’d set her papers down carefully on the floor of the dining room. He’d reclaimed his own books, Lottie noted, but there were eight or ten of hers still here – ones she’d brought out from Chicago, as well as the ones she’d purchased over the weeks of the summer.
Lottie had a liquor box with her, and now she sat down on the bare floor in the dining room and began to go through the stacks of papers in preparation for packing them up. Here were her notes on Donne’s poems, on Turgenev’s stories. Here was the napkin with the comment about exhibitionism she’d jotted down in front of Elizabeth so long ago. Here was a scribble she’d made early in the summer on the paucity of twentieth-century love stories. Wonder why not? she had noted. It still orders our lives – amidst all this chaos, machinery. Abandoment. Casual betrayal.
Sitting there on the floor with this paper in her hand, Lottie realized abruptly that she wouldn’t do this article, that she had nothing clear to say about this topic. She set the paper down. To do it right, she’d have to be able to write fiction; because what loves offers, she thought, is a narrative thread. It gives things a beginning, a middle, and – as Twain had seen so clearly – an end. And Lottie had neither the ability nor the wish to write a story.