by Sue Miller
Now something did shift in Duncan’s face—a sudden sharpened attentiveness. His gaze had moved though, away from Gracie. Looking up to follow it, Mark saw Eva in the opened doorway to the house. Eva, and Daisy and Theo. Gracie must have felt his gaze move too, because she had turned around.
“Eva!” she cried out, getting up. “Late to your own party, aren’t you ashamed. Hey, Daze. Hey, Theo, cutie-pie.”
And then they were all standing, lining up, shifting positions, everyone kissing and embracing Eva and the children. Mark waited his turn. He held Eva first. She was wearing a black backless sundress, and her flesh was cool and silky under his fingers. He hugged Daisy. As he pressed her against himself, he was aware, abruptly, of the push of her breasts against his chest. When had that happened? He had to resist looking at her as she stepped back. Instead he picked up Theo and swirled him around.
But he watched Daisy, particularly a little later, as she helped Gracie and Maria bring the food out. She was wearing a gauzy, billowy shirt, maybe Indian, over baggy khaki shorts with many pockets that reached almost to her knees. You could see her bra through the shirt, a skimpy, mostly symbolic garment. She seemed more self-conscious, more self-aware, than she usually was. Did that come with these changes in her body? Once she looked up to find his eyes on her, and she blushed. Blushing was new for Daisy, he thought.
Earlier, Maria had been asking her what she was up to this summer, and she spoke, shyly it seemed, about her job in Eva’s bookstore. They were all attentive, even Duncan, and that seemed to overwhelm her, being the center of attention. Color rose to her cheeks as she answered their questions. He noticed she sank back in what seemed relief when the conversation moved on, when Maria and then Gracie began to talk about their first jobs, Maria’s in a drive-in, on roller skates, Gracie’s as an au pair in Winnetka for a wealthy family. She’d eaten with the cook, in the kitchen, she said. She’d never understood anything about class in America before. She said, “I thought my title was au pére, actually—for the father.” She raised her eyebrows and grinned. “I thought this for very good reasons, I’d like you all to know.”
At some point during all this, Mark saw Duncan reach over and turn Daisy’s glass right side up, then fill it with wine and push it toward her. It seemed a gracious gesture, a welcoming of her as a quasi-adult, someone with experiences like the ones they could all remember. He was sorry he hadn’t thought to do it himself.
They ate, and as they ate, the sky turned gold and pink, and then quickly a darker and darker blue. It became inky, he thought. There was a kind of intimacy in the candlelight now, in the way it made a circle of their faces in the surrounding dark.
When they finished the first course, but before Duncan set off the fireworks, there was an elaborate ritual they observed every year: the tranquilizing of the dog, an old spaniel named Miranda—she was terrified of the noise of the explosions. As Gracie held the dog’s jaws apart and dropped the pill in, they all raised their glasses and toasted her: “Miranda! Here’s to Miranda!” Mark watched Gracie’s sure hands stroke Miranda’s throat until she swallowed.
Gracie asked Theo to be in charge of letting them know when Miranda was groggy. He went to sit next to her on the floor by the table, dropping from Mark’s view. “But what is groggy?” he asked, his voice floating up.
“Sleepy. Out of it,” Daisy said.
“Loagy,” Duncan offered. He’d put on rimless glasses that reflected the candlelight.
“Thank you, my darling,” said Gracie, “for offering a uselessly-more-obscure-than-the-original-word synonym.”
“What is loagy?” Theo’s voice asked, and Mark watched as Eva’s slow smile changed her face.
The third or fourth time Theo reported Miranda as groggy, saying the word importantly, Gracie confirmed that this time she was, yes indeed, recognizably groggy, and Duncan got up and walked out to the edge of the vineyard. Watching him move away, the laborious heaving up and then falling of each step, Mark thought—he was sure they were all thinking—of the damage done to him. He stepped farther and farther into the night, and finally he was just a pale shape moving around out there.
Suddenly there was the singing of a rising rocket and the sky lighted up—white first, and then in successive falling, expanding sprays, blue, and green, and deep red. Theo leaned back in Eva’s lap with his thumb in his mouth, his face turned to heaven. But they were all rapt for five minutes or so as the artificial thunder echoed across the valley floor and the colors radiated in gorgeous, spilling, liquid cascades of light. Miranda lay uncaring and woozy at Gracie’s feet, lifting her head occasionally with a slow, rocking, swinging motion, as though it were too heavy for her neck. She looked, as Daisy pointed out, like one of those plaster animals with suspended bobble heads some people set in the rear windows of their cars. The sulphuric smell of the gunpowder floated over the table.
When it was over, they sat for a few minutes. In the silence they heard coyotes howling back and forth across the valley. Duncan had joined them, to applause led by Eva. The talk was more desultory than before. Why fireworks were so magical. Remembered July Fourths. Childhood. Theo’s eyes had closed. Daisy’s glass was empty, and Mark, this time, reached over and filled it.
After a while, they went inside, into the surprisingly bright domestic light. Eva took Theo to the guest room to put him down to sleep, while the rest of them cleared dishes and cleaned up in the kitchen. When Eva reappeared, Gracie divided them into teams for Charades.
Gracie insisted on this annually, and organized them, though she didn’t play herself. She was, as Duncan called her, the boss. She even assigned them their words.
Mark and Eva were on the same team, with Fletcher. Their word was confidence. They went back into the kitchen to confer on the short skits or scenes they would act out for each syllable, and then for the whole word. As it worked out, all three of them were in the skits for the separate syllables, using costumes and props from a wicker box full of old clothes and junk Gracie kept especially for parties and children’s visits. But for the word itself, Eva and Mark stood up alone, side by side.
“Whole word,” Eva announced. Then she turned to him and said, “I have something to tell you, but you mustn’t tell another soul.”
“Last thing on my mind,” he said.
She stood on tiptoes and he bent down. She whispered to him for a few minutes, just nonsense syllables. But her breath was warm on his face, in his ear, and he was suddenly aroused and sad. Still, when she stepped back and said, “Now, you won’t tell anyone, will you?” he answered, as he was supposed to, “You can trust me, absolutely.” The others got it in two and a half minutes.
Then Mark and Eva and Fletcher sat down, and it was the other team’s turn—Duncan and Daisy and Maria. They gathered in the kitchen, and in the lapses of conversation in the living room, Mark could hear their voices planning their skits. He listened for Daisy. She made only an occasional contribution.
Finally, Duncan and Maria emerged to do the first syllable. They stood, facing each other, and Duncan told Maria a series of knock-knock jokes. After each one, she turned to the audience with a confused look and said, “I just don’t get it.” After a flurry of guesses, Fletcher came up with the answer: “dumb.”
The second syllable involved Duncan and Maria calling to Daisy, who was offstage in the kitchen, “Come on, we’re late, let’s go!” and Daisy answering, “Just a sec.” They were irritated, clearly parents who had to wait for this daughter often. They called again and Duncan checked his watch. After a few more repeats, when Daisy called out “Just a sec,” he said, “This is a lot longer than that. A lot longer. Maybe sixty times longer.”
Eva guessed “minute.”
Maria signaled shorter—shorter word. “Min!” Eva called, and Duncan nodded. “Min!” she said. “Dumb. Min.”
For the whole word, Duncan came out alone and bowed. Something about the way he carried himself made Mark realize how extraordinarily handsome he must ha
ve been once. He was still good-looking enough, though the accident and age had harrowed him. He slowly got down on all fours. Daisy and Maria were backstage in the kitchen with the box of props—you could hear them laughing—and with some boots they’d asked for.
“Just a sec,” Daisy called. She laughed. “Just a sec for real this time.” Her voice was lighter, more giddy, than he remembered ever having heard it.
After a few more minutes, she came out. She flung her arms wide. “Ta-da!” she said. She was wearing an old black bathing suit that must once have been Gracie’s. It was too big for her, and she’d held it in at the waist with a tight belt studded with rhine-stones. She had on dark red lipstick and the pair of scuffed brown boots Gracie had found for her, which struck her midcalf. Her thighs seemed endless and muscular. Her eyes were ringed with black. She carried a ruler.
She walked over to Duncan and stood behind him. She lifted one leg, set her foot on his back, and smacked the ruler on her own open palm. “Speak!” she commanded in a guttural, mock-German voice: schpik!
Duncan lifted his head and barked several times, mournfully.
“Oh, that’s way too easy,” Fletcher said. “ ‘Domination.’ Dumb, Min, Nation.”
Daisy smiled and lifted her foot off Duncan, dropping out of character abruptly as she stepped back. Duncan rose up to his knees and lifted his hands in mock resignation.
Mark had looked at Eva when Daisy first walked out. He’d seen that she was as startled as he was by their daughter’s appearance. He looked at her again now and saw that her lips were primmed and tight, her nostrils pink. She was angry. But at whom? At Daisy? At Duncan? Somehow Mark felt she might be angry at him, but he couldn’t think why.
But now Gracie was standing up and herding them outside again to wait for the cake. Daisy was about to follow them, still in her costume, but Gracie caught her. “You better change, honey. It’s hard on these old geezers to have you wandering around like that.”
“Woof,” said Duncan at the door, grinning at Gracie and Daisy.
Daisy went back to the kitchen, and they trailed out into the darkness, where the candles jumped and flickered in their glass bells on the table. The air was lighter, cooler, than it had been all day.
Mark was behind Eva. She sat down next to Duncan at the table, turned her fierce face to him, and said, “Whose idea was that?”
Duncan’s lips curved slightly. “Oh my dear, clearly what you mean to say is ‘Whose bad idea was that?’ ”
“You bet I do.”
There was a silence. Duncan shrugged. “We were playing a game,” he explained, his diction as pronounced as though he were speaking to a child.
Eva turned to Maria. “How could you let her?” she asked.
Maria said, “I suppose because I had no idea she’d look like that.”
Eva let out a dismissive pffft of air.
“Oh, Eva,” Maria said, cajoling. “I thought it was a kind of joke, one we’d get and she wouldn’t. No harm done, really.”
Mark said, “Come on, Eva, don’t spoil your party.”
She turned to him. “You don’t think that was distasteful? You don’t think it was a betrayal of Daisy, really?”
“You just don’t like the idea that she’s growing up,” Duncan said. “That she’s sexual. And that’s too completely banal, Eva. The budding child, the jealous mom. How unworthy of you.” He was actually smiling, unafraid of Eva’s rage.
She turned to Duncan and said, “You don’t know anything about Daisy.”
His lip lifted. “She’s probably got a few secrets from you too, darling.”
Mark looked up and saw his daughter crossing the lighted living room, nearly at the open doorway “Daze!” he said, a little too loudly.
The others looked around. She was wearing her gauzy shirt again, and the baggy khaki shorts she’d had on before. But she was barefoot and she hadn’t removed the garish lipstick or the black eyeshadow. As she approached the candlelit table, he was actually more startled by her appearance now than he’d been when she was in costume. It was as if she’d not changed back all the way, as if some aspect of the character she’d acted had lingered in her. And in this light, he saw how beautiful she was going to be, with her stern elongated face. As elegant as a Modigliani.
She sat down just as Gracie appeared at the doorway, the glowing cake a warm light under her big generous face as she approached them. She began to sing “Happy Birthday,” and they joined in. Mark was sitting next to Duncan, and it seemed to him that even singing, the man could imbue his words with sarcasm.
But the singing, the cake, and Gracie’s and Daisy’s arrivals had moved them on—the ugly moment of Eva’s anger was forgotten by the time she blew the candles out. While they ate dessert, Fletcher and Maria were talking about their intention to see A Fish Called Wanda, and then they were all speaking of John Cleese—was he the funniest man alive?—and speculating as to which of the Monty Python actors would survive independently the longest.
Mark saw Daisy refill her own wineglass. He leaned over, “How much have you had to drink, Daze?”
She looked at him, levelly. She’d eaten most of her lipstick off with the ice cream and cake, but he was aware of a changed consciousness about her on his part.
“If you can’t tell how much I’ve had, what does it matter?”
Was it a joke? Was it hostile? Mark couldn’t tell. Was it only a question? He looked away, then back. He said, “You’re turning into a real smart-ass, aren’t you?”
Something cool and slightly tough happened to her face. She smiled at him and then turned away.
Gracie and Maria had brought Eva’s presents outside, and she opened them one by one in the slow, gracious way she had, commenting even on the papers they were wrapped in, the funny or sweet cards. They were mostly kitchen items—everyone knew she liked to cook. A pudding mold, a fancy device for slicing vegetables. But Gracie had given her the painted basket, and Mark had gone back to the same store, alone, and bought her an antique necklace of jet beads. She exclaimed over everything, but it seemed to him she was especially warm about the beads. She put them on immediately at any rate, and turned to the table, her face lifted. “How do I look?” she asked flirtatiously, and Mark was in the chorus answering, beautiful, wonderful, fabulous. And she did, he thought.
A candle guttered and went out. “Oh, that’s my cue,” Eva said. “It’s late, and I should get Theo home.”
She stood and thanked them all again, thanked Gracie especially. Hugged her. They were all standing now. Maria began to gather Eva’s presents. Daisy and Fletcher were clearing. Eva had gone into the house.
She came back into the living room with Theo, his dead weight draped over her upper body and shoulder, his bottom sitting on her arm. He whimpered as she came into the light, and turned his face into her neck.
“I’ll put the presents in the car,” Maria said.
“No, let Daisy,” Eva answered. “I need her anyway. We’ve got to get going.”
But Daisy was in the kitchen, helping, so Maria and Mark together carried the presents out, along with a big chunk of cake Gracie had wrapped in tin foil for Eva to take home.
When she’d settled Theo in the backseat, Eva got behind the wheel.
Mark shut her door and stood leaning on it, looking down at her. “Why don’t I bring Daisy home in a bit?” he said. “I’d like the time with her.”
Eva looked at him a moment. Could she tell that he was using Daisy as a way to come to her house? That what he wanted was time with her, Eva, time which might be possible if he brought Daisy home?
“Okay,” she said. Her voice was tired. “But not too long. We get up at the same old time as usual tomorrow.”
“No, we’ll just get the cleanup launched.”
In the truck ten minutes later, Daisy was unusually voluble. She was explaining the Latin roots of the words they’d acted out. Latin-root words were good for Charades because they divided up wonderfully, she was tel
ling him. She loved Latin-root words. “Even though you’re not supposed to.”
“And that would be because …?”
“Oh, they’re too long, too elaborate and formal. Simpler words are more elegant. This is what they say,” she pronounced, heavily, and her hands lifted, her fingers curved to make quotation marks.
“You got me,” he said. “Words, turds, in my book.”
“Well, we know about you and books.”
He laughed. “Ah, Daisy, sad but true.”
“Maybe I’ll be a writer,” she said. “Famous, of course.” She laughed quickly, and then made a face: how absurd, how pretentious.
“I’d read your books,” he said. “Every word.”
“I like to write,” she said, suddenly serious. “I’m good at it.” A little silence fell between them. Mark was watching the glowing red taillights ahead of him. It made him think of the nights he’d followed Amy home, the slow fever rising in him at the thought of what they would do together, what they were about to do. He remembered catching up with her at the door, slamming into her, carrying her back to the bed. He remembered her legs, their grip around his hips.
He did that while he was married to Eva, while he loved Eva. What a useless fuck he was, finally. There was no chance Eva would take him back. None.
Daisy was talking about writing. About how hard it was most of the time, finding the right words. But how every now and then it felt like a gift, like something that just happened, that she just knew. And then it seemed she was reciting a poem about that. Or something ordered and rhythmic that connected to the idea.
When she was silent again, Mark said, “Is that you? Your words?” They’d stopped at the intersection entering St. Helena.
“Pphhhh!” she laughed. “I wish. It’s Emily Dickinson, Dad.”