by Sara Dillon
Oh, my dear, he is magnificent!
Sometimes Miles waited for me down the street from Madame Celeste’s house, and he would drive me back home at dusk.
There were even days when Daddy would follow us in his car, a Maverick, the cheapest car he could get. Perhaps he’d been put up to trailing us by Gramma, as I can’t think that Daddy would make much of a detective. If Miles and I drove out of town, we would leave Daddy behind; at some point I would turn around, and Daddy would not be following us any more.
Miles talked often of moving to the country, and as the winter turned to mud season, he began to take me for drives to towns all over northern Vermont. These were places I knew already and loved, so it was easy and natural to drive with him. As luck would have it, he had sold his grandmother’s huge Cadillac and bought a zippy green MG. He hinted that he was asking me to join him in the country for some kind of new life, though he never said it in quite that way. We always visited a town as though we were shopping for a place to live.
Miles became less and less able to face the class; his clothes were sloppier. He passed out mimeographed sheets of paper from which he read aloud to us: The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. He leaned against the classroom wall. Le coeur a ses raisons.
And in the early spring, that time in Vermont of endless mud and no warmth in the sun, he left Alma and Little Miles.
He moved to an apartment overlooking the wide valley that contained the city’s principal dump. This fact made him laugh, of course. He told me that Little Miles was taking it badly, that Alma was worried, and that at some point he might have to go back home.
In the afternoon, I would wait for him in his rented place, high up as if on stilts, its ugly furniture included in the price, and no piano.
I think I started to want to leave Miles then. I didn’t like the cheap kitchen, or watching out the window for his car to come up the unfamiliar and depressing street.
Within a couple of months, he did go back to Alma, but after that he sometimes stayed at the houses of teachers he was friendly with, on sofas and in extra rooms and breezeways. He occasionally stayed with an unmarried woman teacher named Liza, considered to be a “hot ticket,” and probably in love with Miles. He told me about landing in on people unexpectedly. It was too chaotic for me.
I liked my brass bed; maybe I was selfish. I was tired of Gramma acting like I was fighting to the death for Miles, because I wasn’t. I wanted to escape from Miles; I was afraid he would try and keep me, but for no actual purpose, just to keep me.
Once on a Sunday morning at dawn, I heard a tapping on my bedroom window. I got up and looked out, and there was Miles holding a black bicycle, looking exhausted, standing on the frozen lawn, laughing. He stayed clowning on the lawn and then took off up the street. No one but me ever knew that he had been there.
Hello.
Catherine?
Where are you?
Does it sound strange?
It’s very noisy.
I’m at a party. In a closet.
You shouldn’t call me at home. They’re all here.
Someone’s playing Jesus Christ Superstar on the stereo. You know, I was thinking, that Mary Magdalene had a hell of a voice.
Every chance she got, Gramma would start talking about Miles Bradford. She sat helplessly, pathetically, on a chair, repeating that my sister, my brother, were mortified and humiliated because of me. As Miles and I drove out of town in his new MG, I still now and then saw Daddy following behind us, unwillingly it seemed; hoping never to catch up with us. As before, he would invariably give up and turn back. We drove aimlessly to Montpelier, to Waterbury, not to scenic places but to the grittier towns where we could walk around and hold hands. Sometimes we stopped in rest areas to look at each other, even to kiss.
——
As spring came on, Miles came to class looking as if he’d just rolled out of bed. The spring light seemed not to suit him. When he met me in the hallway, he would make a gesture of biting the air, biting at something he couldn’t reach, falling forward to get it, then he would laugh and turn me around quickly and steer us in the other direction.
And I began to plan my escape from Miles.
Miles never used expressions having to do with time, forever and so on; he never discussed staying together or being together. But then again he never spoke as if we would not, as if I would go anywhere else or have another phase of things. But for my part, I became preoccupied with how I could leave him.
I had two more years of high school. It was oppressive, frightening to think of seeing Miles in the hallways, going back and forth to his house for all that time. We couldn’t survive this change in the weather. I found him more threatening in the sun.
One afternoon he told me he wanted to bring me to a friend’s cabin, a crazy friend from his past. I can’t remember what this friend did—pottery or glass blowing, a couple of German Shepherds in the yard. I didn’t want to go; as a rule, I hate cabins in the woods, the flies, the mud, the lack of any vista, my fear of losing meadowlands. The visit was awkward and silly; I had nothing to say to his friend at all. He and Miles each had a beer, and we left the way we had come.
Miles and I went walking as far as the edge of the woods and entered a huge shimmering field. He put me up on his shoulders and walked down the hill as if into everything you could wish for or imagine. He danced in a wide arc, and I so loved him. We lay down on the rocks, those big Vermont rocks that poke up through the grassy fields, rocks that no farmer could ever get rid of. We shaded our eyes against the sun, and watched the trees, the branches moving, the clouds moving. Miles joked about it being a leafy cathedral, he could never lose any chance for a joke like that. Perhaps if he hadn’t been so insistent on laughing all the time, it would have been better; though at certain moments, of course, he wasn’t laughing.
Nevertheless, despite that day, I continued to plan how I would leave him.
I still went to Hyde Park on Sundays with my parents to see Aunt Olive; Daddy read the Sunday papers. In my own mind, I was already back with them, I had left Miles.
I don’t remember exactly how Miles ended up in our living room; I don’t know why Daddy finally got so riled he insisted Miles come over. Whether he had caught us together or whether Gramma egged him on, it’s dim in my mind. I just remember that very warm late spring evening, sitting in the living room, waiting for Miles to arrive. I remember his green sports car pulled up at the curb, how out of place it looked, how strange it was to see him get out in front of our house. I went to the door, as if to keep him out, to ward off something.
Daddy wasn’t good at being angry; I had scarcely ever seen him angry. He was incapable of being unkind, of making commands. He hated conflict, avoided it at all costs, and at a time like this was only trying to please my mother.
When Miles came in, I suppose Daddy said, What do you think you are doing? or What’s going on with all this? I remember Miles, dressed in a shirt with a button down collar, looking almost pleased to be there. I think he shook Daddy’s hand.
Mr. Darcy, I recall him saying, I love your daughter.
At this, my mother ran from the room, overcome. Daddy seemed to want to discuss it a bit, perhaps to show Miles the folly of the whole thing.
I love her, Miles repeated.
Daddy was excessively fair minded and uncritical. It was somewhat noble of Miles, after all, to put it that way, so plainly.
When Miles left—as it was clear nothing was going to be resolved then and there, that was obvious to everyone—I ran down the front path after him. Gramma reappeared to shout out the front door, Get back in here this minute! I stood on the front sidewalk, flapping my arms up and down, having no idea what to say or do. I didn’t care for one side of my life peering in at the other like this.
Good night, I imagine I said.
And Miles was laughing again.
I did leave Miles. I told him, No more. I told him I would leave him and that was it, with
no plans to be with him again, or stay in touch, or look each other up, or look into each other’s eyes, or write letters or talk. I was going.
He dropped me off at my piano lesson at Madame Celeste’s house. I was so rattled I couldn’t play at all. When I came out, I saw him parked up the street, waiting for me. We walked to a field overlooking the mountains, and sat under a tree.
Miles began to cry. He said he didn’t know what he would do, how he would go on. And I cried; I had never cried so much. I doubt I have ever cried so much since then.
Miles and I cried all through the afternoon, until the sun was low in the sky and it seemed strange to be there under a tree in the early evening. I could barely see. Miles drove me home. I felt as if I’d been ill for a long time.
I walked into the house and said, Don’t talk to me. I have told Mr. Bradford I’ll never see him again.
But Miles phoned that week and asked me to meet him in the garden of the Congregational Church. He was waiting for me, Little Milesy in tow. Miles handed me a letter and asked me to read it.
I pick up books and put them back. I lift up my arms and they are like dead weights. I don’t know what to do with myself. I am not listening to my son. Why don’t you come back to me, Catherine? You have to come back to me.
I was comforting Miles, but I was cruel. There was a cold streak in what I felt towards him. I told him it would be all right.
He would leave me alone for a few days and then begin phoning again.
What should I tell people? he would ask me, That I’ve lost my mind over a precocious high school student? And who do your parents want you to be with? A pimply-faced adolescent?
I listened, but I was letting Miles go, letting go the string of the kite, watching the boat of Miles leave the shore, and ever so carefully, I turned my back and began walking away from the shore, walking in a way that would avoid attracting attention.
When the phone rang at night, we would all stop and listen. But Miles drifted away from us.
Gramma was entirely different towards me since she knew that I had told Miles it was all finished. Why don’t you graduate from high school early? she suggested. Leave this all behind you as soon as you can.
She developed this idea over time; she wanted me to go to Ireland for a year, then come back and go to Daddy’s college, Saint Theo’s. Her cousin in East Galway, Brother Clement, would take care of me. They had written to each other on every religious and family occasion over the many years since they were very young. Their mothers had been sisters, and though my mother and Clement had never met face to face, each felt the other to be of the highest importance.
Will I write to Brother Clement about it? she asked persistently.
Miles drifted farther away. There was little danger that he would ever return.
But it’s true, I am still laughing at Miles Bradford’s jokes, decades later. I did see him again, over the course of the next few years; once when he followed me around and around the revolving door of a store, a chance meeting in winter.
Twenty-five years after I said goodbye to him, I saw a notice that Miles Bradford had died in France. I sat on Gramma’s sofa in her little house on Cape Cod, where she and Daddy had retired, and wept. It was a very Cape Cod evening; the black birds were singing in the scrubby pine trees. Daddy was long dead by then. She asked me what was wrong.
Miles Bradford, he has died, I told her.
Her face went pale and she lashed out, How can you cry for him? What do you think I’ve been through on my own all these years?
That made no sense, but it was plain I was not supposed to cry for Miles Bradford.
Rest area
Miles Bradford and I are hunched together in his little sports car. He is closer than close, his green jacket vivid and immediate. He shifts around to hold me. We look out the windshield, down across the hills, hills that used to have names but have lost them.
We are parked on the edge of the rest area, no one knows where we are. Miles wants to be with me in the little sports car, and I with him. It is wrong and it is right at the same time. Miles kisses me, and there is no kiss ever like that one. He holds me just comfortably close. I feel his jacket, his sweater, his tidy beard; his grey eyes are closed. There is a slight aftertaste of his cigarettes, but also the fresh air from the long, patient, anonymous hills in front of us. We kiss and we kiss. Our profiles are side by side as Miles puts his face into my hair and shares his breathing. We invented each other, and it worked.
Kids; 2006
It was Una who said that we were well past the stage of falling in love with the next person in line at 7-11.
Or, I might add, with someone coming up the stairs while we were coming down, as happened at the Budapest train station on that long ago trip, in 1989. The water engineer, Vincenzo, from Lago di Como, as a for instance. Not a thing more was going to happen to me, nothing of that kind, ever. I saw that so clearly as August began, as I started getting together the syllabi, the handouts, the updates from the BBC relevant to my subjects. I halfheartedly bought some clothes—though nothing ever fit me right—and hunkered down as if hurtling through space, in the direction of the welcome back faculty lunch. The Dean would talk about why we should really be seen as in the third tier, not the fourth; the salmon would be brought out in silver dishes, and I would stare at my feet with their slight suggestion of hammer toes, indication of an ancient genetic blip. In the worst-case scenario, the faculty would form into teams by table, to answer the Dean’s trivial pursuit type questions on a kind of bingo card. And there I would be, remembering myself in a white summer dress, all that time ago. I would think of summer as it had been on the Izu Peninsula, and of running along a summer road in Karuizawa. There were visions, urging me to save myself, not while there was still time, because I saw that in fact there was no more time. Simply to save myself, with no expectation of any restoration.
And then, two or three weeks later, I left.
Una always made fun of the many letters I wrote to everyone, going back decades. She would drag out the box and read aloud from letters sent in 1978, 1984, 1989, and for each one she would say, Fast forward! Because I wrote the same thing, more or less, year after year—how I was just about to turn everything around and remake everything. And so on. But more recently, I didn’t write letters any more, to anyone. I had nothing more to analyze; this was it, and had long been it.
Meaning that at the very least, I could not sit down and write to her now. But I did want to explain that the real reason, the true and undeniable reason for coming to Greensboro was that I thought I had earned it, and was content not to ask for anything else. Only please, no more about the Supreme Court’s docket. It was, as I said, a simple kind of a bargain.
But clearly, I would not fall in love with anyone coming through the door of The Stars and Moon Bookshop in Stannard, where I finally found a job that made a little bit of sense. There was the tactile pleasure of putting books that I knew away, in order, each one giving me a kind of timeless little smile in the process. I wish I could say that in my second week of employment, a slightly portly sixty something gentleman from Greece who had been hiding out in the Northeast Kingdom, mainly to paint, as well as to recover from several tragic losses, came through the door and we found each other in that unimaginably out of the way place.
But I have already said that nothing will ever happen to me again, or so it seems. At least nothing stupid will ever happen, as the cessation is categorical and absolute. I will not give out my phone number to friendly, even attractive customers of the shop, agree to lunch with the manager of the health food coop, or any other of a large number of possible doings all characterized by overwhelming stupidity.
Madina started the third grade at the local elementary school. She was an adaptable child, able to have chums anywhere, and except for her great jealousy of Emmet the interloper, she was more or less happy. I didn’t bring work home any more, or bark at them to hurry and dress. All that had gone; the night te
aching, the student evaluations, the fuming at not being understood. For God’s sake, of course I wasn’t understood.
At night we would hug all together before bed, and I would read stories too young for Madina and too old for Emmet, but they were both pleased that the books were not just right for either.
I looked at their clever, eager faces and thought, This is the only thing I’ve done that was more or less what I wanted. I would have defended them against everything, died for them in a heartbeat. I thought of how courageous they were, of the days and nights in those child care homes in Central Asia, so hot in the summer, and amazingly cold in winter, the long boring afternoons and the nights sleeping in a miniature bed, just one of many in the rows of little beds.
Tell Madina that you are sorry and that you love her.
Sorry, Dina. Lally wuv you.
I love you, too, Emmet, Madina said, sounding a little blasé.
Say that you will love each other forever, I said.
Luv ever.
I’ll love you forever, too.
I found a family day care for Emmet in Stannard near the bookstore. The director was divorced with two children of her own. She had tried to fix up her house to look like a school, with bees and kittens festooned everywhere. Emmet was pretty eager to run in and grab hold of all the unfamiliar toys. He was good with other children; not aggressive or grumpy. He just wanted to make things go, to build tall towers. After he went to sleep at night, I would find patterns throughout the house—where he had put two yellow blocks, for instance, in every big truck and one green block in every small truck.
It hadn’t been that long since his adoption, and I wanted to make sure he understood who Mommy was, that this wasn’t some roller coaster ride of random grown ups, so I would repeat over and again as we drove over to day care: Teachers are teachers and Mommy is Mommy. Teachers are our friends, but there is only one Mommy, and Mommy loves you more than anyone else in the whole world could.