by Sue Miller
She thought of the question as no one had posed it to her. As John would have asked it: What is it, do you think, that you’d like to do with yourself this summer?
She thought of John, the last time she’d seen him, the morning of the day he died. She had been the last one to leave the house, which had suddenly fallen silent once the others were gone. When she carried her bike down from the back porch, John came out of the garage, which they’d made into an office for his business. He was wearing a light blue shirt, frayed wildly at the collar, and baggy khaki pants. His big white feet were bare. With his long, sloping jaw, his strawlike lashes, he seemed like a large, homely boy.
“Biking it again,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How come you don’t walk with Emily and her crew, you think?”
She had shrugged.
He came over and stood by the porch. “They’re nice enough to you, aren’t they?”
“They’re okay. They kind of ignore me, I guess. But I can’t talk about any of the stuff they’re into anyway, so that’s fine. The thing is, I’d rather just be alone.”
“You don’t want to be too alone, though.”
“I’m not, too alone.” At that point, this was true. She stayed late almost every day for one activity or another, and she was beginning to have a sense of who might be possible as a friend.
Suddenly John grinned. “Of course, you’re talking to a guy who spends his entire day by himself, buried in books. Which isn’t quite alone, but some would say, Daisy, that it looks like it. Looks suspiciously like it.” He tapped her handlebars with his freckled hand and stepped back. “Anyway, see you tonight,” he said. And Daisy pushed off and rode down the driveway.
She thought of the fact that she hadn’t looked back. She wished she had looked back. Though she knew it made no sense, she felt as though she had missed some signal, some private message he might have had for her that would have helped her through all this.
And, of course, the thought came to her from time to time that if she had looked back, if she’d called to him, if she’d taken up just a few more seconds of his time that morning, everything else in his day would have been off by just that much, and he wouldn’t have stepped into Main Street at the exact moment the car came around the corner.
She thought of her mother those few days later when they’d come back from Mark’s house, how everyone was so careful and loving around her, the way she’d said, “Oh my darling,” when they sat down to eat, as if John were still alive, as if he were there in the room but visible only to her.
What would she like to do with herself this summer?
Nothing. Zero. Nothing.
Chapter Five
EVA SITS IN THE CAR for a few minutes after she’s turned the engine off. It’s early evening, but it’s a mid-June evening, so the sun is still high above the hills around her, even at this hour. The face the mountains present is deeply shadowed though—almost black here and there where the pines are thickest. Something in the car ticks lightly, dying. Eva is looking at the house, her house—substantial, Victorian, every bit of ornate trim restored by her and John after they moved in, and the clapboard siding painted an historic pale pink. Its front windows are shuttered against the light, and it has a blind, blankened air.
She’s been gone from it for more than a week, taking Emily to visit her parents and then to the orientation that is to precede her trip to France. And though Eva started the trip eagerly, wanting to get away, she has finished it almost desperate to be home. At times during these eight days, she has yearned for home as you might yearn for the touch of a lover’s body.
Now that she’s here, though, looking up at the house from the car, she feels reluctant even to go in. She has the odd sense that this was not what she meant. Not this home.
But what other home is there?
The car is heating up slowly now, so she opens the driver’s-side door and steps out into the dry evening air. She retrieves her bag from the backseat and goes up the walk, surveying the plants and the lawn. Everything looks fine, except for the hose lying uncoiled in the front yard. She knows when she lifts it, the grass will be yellowed in a bright, serpentine line where the hose has lain. She mounts the porch stairs, the bag on its wheels banging up behind her.
When the front door swings open and she steps inside, she’s hit by the mustiness, the stale heat. She doesn’t want the air conditioner, though—she hates its hum, its sealed-in feeling—so she moves around quickly, opening the windows at the front and sides of the house. As she walks back and forth, she is almost overcome by the sense she has of seeing things anew—a sense that surprises her, her absence has been so short.
She thinks of the versions of itself the house contains in her memory, of her history with John in these spaces, all the changes they’d lived through. The house was a wreck when they brought it, and they had inhabited it through its messy transformation—the pulling down of the cheap, lowered ceiling panels; the rewiring and replumbing; the stripping of layers of old wallpaper; the replacing of windows; the renovating of the kitchen; the sanding and painting. They had come to know intimately all the possible varieties of dust, which inevitably made their way around the plastic sheeting they hung to keep them out, under the doors they sealed to block them in. They had lived, for months, in odd rooms of the house while other rooms were being worked on.
For a time, this room, the living room, was their bedroom. Standing in it now, she thinks of how it felt, waking on the mattress on the floor next to John, the sun pouring in—of course they had no shutters yet—the light grit that had settled in the night palpable on the mattress when she turned to see if he was awake too.
It is hard to connect that past to this room. It’s orderly and lovely. The ceilings are high, and the casings around the windows and doors and baseboards all have four or five curves articulating and reversing themselves where a newer house would have one, or two. Or none. The furniture, though some of it is old, has been re-covered with pale fabrics—California colors, as Eva thinks of them. On the walls are the contemporary paintings John collected, and a large N. C. Wyeth oil, an illustration for Treasure Island—two men fighting in a ship’s cabin under the light of a swinging lantern. Books are stacked here and there, some of them the books John was reading, or about to read, or just finished with at the time he died. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to remove these last reminders of what he loved, how he thought—though she’s packed his clothes in boxes and donated them to Goodwill, though she’s boxed his papers and stored them in the attic.
A breeze wafts through, smelling of rosemary, of jasmine.
She goes into the lavatory under the stairs and pees, then washes her hands and face. Lifting her head from the water, she looks at herself, hard. The eight days traveling have taken their toll. Her eyes are puffy; her face seems a little swollen. Even her clothes—the white blouse, the black linen slacks—seem tired, wrinkled, and stretched out of shape.
She leaves the blouse hanging out over the slacks and goes back to the kitchen to open the windows there, surveying the backyard as she does this—Theo’s expensive climbing structure over in the corner and the paving stones marking John’s path out to the garage. In front of the garage is the basketball net he and Daisy used to horse around at. She thinks of the noise of the ball on the cement, its reverberation on the backboard, the running commentary John kept up as they played. The way all of that drifted into the kitchen in the late afternoons and made her feel safe, encircled.
She sits down at the kitchen island. She can’t remember when she last came home to an empty house. To no one. Theo is at Gracie’s—he has been staying with her while Eva has been away, though of course he went to day care as usual. Daisy is with Mark. She’s been in charge of herself through Mark’s long workdays, but she will have been busy. She has started a job in the bookstore this summer, and she is supposed to have gone in daily to be trained by Eva’s assistant Callie. Eva had also asked her to
stop by the house each day, to water the plants and take the mail in. These chores she has clearly done, though not with any grace—there was the hose left uncoiled on the grass outside, and here’s the mail, more or less thrown onto the kitchen island. Eva starts to sort through it. Catalogues. Bills. A reminder that her subscription to The New Yorker is about to expire.
After a few minutes, she stops. The cross breeze shifts the few envelopes she’s torn, the pages of a catalogue or two. She doesn’t want to do this now. She gets a glass of water and stands at the sink, looking out, drinking. Each window here has six panes. In the lower three are the yard, and the trees hiding her neighbor’s yard. Above them, in the upper panes, the sky is turning a richer blue. “Cerulean,” she says out loud, and her voice startles her.
She goes back to the front hall and lugs her bag upstairs. Before she unpacks, she moves around opening the windows up here too, first in her own bedroom, next in Theo and Daisy’s rooms, then in Emily’s. She stands for a moment and looks around at Emily’s domain—Emily, off to meet the world this summer. The room is as neat and well organized as Emily is. The firstborn, Eva thinks. Like some nursery rhyme she can’t remember. Like herself. Emily has a bulletin board she’d requested, and on it is hung a calendar with the departure for France six days from now inscribed in thick red ink, three exclamation points after it.
Eva had said good-bye to her daughter this morning on the prep-school campus where she was having her weeklong orientation for the trip. She had driven slowly back through the lovely New England countryside to the interstate. There was no rush—she had ample time to catch her plane home. She had a little headache. They’d spent the night before in a New England country hotel nearby, one of those inns with rockers set out in a row all across the front porch. Sitting opposite Emily at dinner in the old-fashioned dining room, listening to her talk about going to college in the fall, about the plans she had, Eva felt old, and she drank too much. It was a feeling that had gathered, she realized, over the course of the trip. There’d been a culminating moment, near the end of it, sitting in the room with the other parents before their own orientation about their children’s trip abroad, when she looked around at all of them—respectable, well-dressed people in their forties. There was a man opposite her, leafing through the informational material they’d left out. Eva was fascinated by him, in a perverse way—he was so archetypical. He was wearing one of those expensive polo shirts and madras pants. Loafers with tassels. His face was broad, and dark with summer color, a nearly mahogany hue. A boat maybe, or hours and hours of tennis and golf. He was a man she might have married, she thought, if she’d stayed in the East, if she’d stayed an easterner. She’d had a flash of gratitude for her life—for the chance decisions that had taken her west, that had made her, if not a westerner, at least not someone who was recognizable, categorizable, in the way this man was. She thought of her marriages to two men, neither of whom gave off this self-satisfaction.
He turned to his wife now, a blonde in a pale pink sleeveless dress. She was reading a brochure. He touched her knee, and she looked up. It seemed a sweet gesture to Eva. It made her think of how she must look to him, to them—herself middle-aged, in her loose-fitting California clothes, her frazzled hair. How he must think of her: post-hippie, New Agey, a ditz.
And the thing was—here was her revelation—that it didn’t matter anyway. They didn’t matter. They were all just who they were, the backdrop to the lives about to be changed by the trip they were waiting to be educated about. They were the drivers, for God’s sake. The signers of checks. The wage earners. She had a sense, abruptly, of all of them—and now she looked around the room and took the others in too—of all of them as being simply in the service of the young.
Two nights earlier, at her parents’ house outside Hartford, the house she’d grown up in, she sat and listened at dinner while her parents, gracious to a fault as ever, had quizzed Emily about the colleges she’d looked at and why she’d chosen Wesleyan, about what the summer held for her, and what she could guess at or know about the life she wanted. She listened as Emily talked on and on, as though there were no reason why everyone should not be fascinated by her plans—and she realized that she, Eva, had no plans, no more ideas for herself.
She had tried to speak of this to her mother after Emily had excused herself, after her wisp of a father had withdrawn. They were sitting in the living room, by the empty fireplace. Everything was dark—the woodwork, the furniture, the old carpets. The house smelled old around them, and things had the threadbare air of the formerly elegant.
Skinny, flinty Martha Bennett had misunderstood her. She was drinking sherry, and she set her glass down sharply on the scarred coffee table. “For me the moment occurred when my mother died,” she said. She pronounced it muhthah. “I suppose I was about ten years older than you are now when that happened, and what I felt was that I’d arrived at the head of the line—that those ahead of me had stepped aside and now I could see clearly what was coming.” Her eyes swam, magnified to an odd intensity behind her thick glasses.
“No, but this is different,” Eva said. “It’s not about death. It’s about these younger lives. About their having so much … I suppose, adventure, ahead of them.”
Martha looked at her, hard. She smiled, not ungenerously. “As I said, dear. Death.”
But it wasn’t about death, Eva thinks now. She felt that after John died, that death was all that waited for her. But now she wants to go on. She knows that. That is something, surely. She does want to go on. She wants life. More. More of something. She doesn’t know what.
Sitting on Emily’s bed, she reminds herself—consciously makes herself remember—the way she felt after things had ended with Mark. It was worse, she tells herself. It was so much worse then. She had been young and broke and still helplessly, ragefully, in love with Mark. All she wanted was her own irretrievable past, was what he’d smashed up.
She was working for peanuts then, and living way up on that godforsaken hill. And every piece of furniture, every room, every picture on the wall reminded her of Mark. The bed she slept in alone, the sheets she used. Dishes they’d scrimped to buy together or found secondhand at yard sales. Her own clothes reminded her of Mark. A dress she had to wear regularly to work—since it was one of the few reasonable things she owned—was a dress he had loved because of the long row of tiny buttons down the front, the slow unfastening of which had become part of a teasing start to sex. There were nightgowns he’d given her, a blouse he liked her in because of its primness, because it made what he knew of her sexually such a secret between them.
Gracie was still working as a nurse then, and she’d often stop by after her shift, still wearing her work clothes, her thick white nurse’s shoes. Sometimes she spent the night, and they sat up late, drinking and talking about their lives, about men, telling stories from their past. Gracie thought Eva just needed to meet someone, needed to start going out, needed to begin to feel that something else, someone else was going to be possible. She wanted Eva to let herself be fixed up. Gracie was a person who liked to prescribe. Eva thought it came from her work. Or maybe she had chosen her work because she liked to prescribe.
Eva remembers that she’d pointed out Gracie’s own solitary life to her. She’d asked Gracie why it should be that she needed someone when Gracie didn’t.
“I’m different,” Gracie had said. They were in the living room, sitting opposite each other in the old, splayed chairs Eva and Mark had bought secondhand. The girls were long since in bed, though they’d had a dancing party for them before that, twirling them recklessly to an old Jerry Lee Lewis LP on the shiny wood floor that Mark had refinished himself the first summer they moved in.
“Why? You’re a woman. You’re alone too.”
Gracie had shrugged. She’d unpinned her hair when she arrived, and it fell over her shoulders, a thick blonde tumble that shifted now in the light when she moved. “I’m tougher than you are. And I don’t want to love
anyone, and you do.”
This had struck Eva as true about herself. It silenced her. She wanted love. To love.
“Besides that,” Gracie said after a moment, “I have guys. Dozens of them.” She made an expansive gesture with her hand, suggesting an array of men standing before her.
Eva drank some of her cheap wine. “Not that you love,” she said, as she set her glass down. “Not that you even date.”
“Well, but I touch them. I hold them. I’m well acquainted with their rigs.” Gracie’s grin was lopsided. “I joke around with guys all the time, sometimes while I’m holding on to their penises.” Her head tilted quizzically. “Their peni?” She laughed. “Anyway, it’s part of my job description.”
“But not a guy. Not a penis.”
“But I don’t want a guy. I want six. That’s the difference between us.”
Eva remembers too that on one of those nights, she’d felt suddenly ashamed for whining about her life. She’d apologized to Gracie for talking as though her lot was so hard. She knew it was nothing like the kind of hard Gracie had lived through in Vietnam: she had no right to complain.
Gracie looked startled. “That wasn’t hard.” She shook her head. “Those were the best times of my life.” Something in her friend’s face made Eva reach forward across the table where they were sitting to touch Gracie’s arm.
“No, really,” Gracie said. She smiled sadly. “I’ve never been as happy, as thrilled on a daily basis, as I was in Vietnam. I’ll never get over it really. What could come up to that?”
“For what?” Eva had asked.
“For … excitement. For drama.” Gracie’s big face seemed to light from within, recalling it. “For feeling utterly used up. For sex, for love.” She looked at Eva and frowned. “I wanted it never to stop. I should be ashamed.”