by Sue Miller
But Theo, more loving, less angry perhaps than Daisy, seems to have flourished in his own way with Eva, even if he is a private soul.
Once though, in an e-mail he sends around to all of them, he writes that a folklore course he’s taking has made him remember the stories they used to tell him around the dining room table.
I don’t really remember the stories per se.
(Theo is fond of Latin words, which endears him to Daisy: quid est, lacunae, ipso facto, passim—these stud his e-mails.)
Maybe occasionally an image. A threatening old woman, an animal that helps a lost child. Mostly what I remember is that they all had happy endings. Were they from folklore? Were they old tales? Or did you make them up just for me?
Daisy writes back.
They were created for you of course, you schnauzer. John started it when you were maybe a little over two. You were usually the main character—didn’t you notice that? Never Hansel and Gretel, just fucking Hansel. Sometimes you were the superhero, rescuing yourself—the subtext here being brave, competent Theo. Sometimes you were rescued by kindly forces: “Yes, Theo, the world IS a good place.” Anyway, always, always, always, the happy ending—though because we passed them around, because we each got to tell a part of the story, sometimes Emily or I would try to subvert things—set it up so you wouldn’t make it back from the cave, or escape the wicked witch or the dark forest. But the grown-ups, natch, always made sure you did. I envied you, occasionally, being the center of all that loving invention.
Daisy’s own letters mock her life—this is her way of presenting both the bad and the good things that happen to her.
I finally realized that Rob was more in love with his dog than he was with me. Though to call this creature a dog is misleading. A small demented horse who happened to have canine teeth he really enjoyed showing off is more like it. I had to arm myself with steak bones when we had a date. Twice the dog bit me.
Nipped me, Rob said.
At any rate, his teeth broke a barrier I like to keep between myself and the world. I drew the line: the dog or me.
Well, there are some people who when they draw the line are left standing there with only the line to keep them company. That’s the story here. Good-bye, Rob. For a while I felt a certain tristesse whenever I opened my purse and the faint odor of raw meat floated up to greet me, but it passed.
And more recently:
A part, guys! in the new play at the Court Theatre. Small, yes, but noticeable. I’m a memory, really, a dream woman who gets to step forward off and on through the action and remind the main character of another aspect of himself and his life. She’s maybe a little too good, a little too idealized (well, she’s a pill, really), but I’m going to try to make her as salty as I can. I hope maybe one or two of you can come and exclaim about my excellence in this role at some point during the run.
I didn’t, by the way, get Phebe at the Shakespeare Theater. The guy cast as her suitor was shorter than me by a mile or two. For a while I think they were pondering the joke of that, the joke I’ve so often and so painfully lived through offstage—huge me, shrimpy him—but in the end they said, “Nope, but try us again.” Which you may be sure I will.
Mark doesn’t write. He calls. Mostly he calls from his cell phone while he’s driving around. They are all used to the fuzzy static that comes and goes, to the sudden absolute silence on the line. They can imagine the terrain that blocks the signal. They hang up and they don’t wait for another call right away—that’s not his style. It will come in three days, or a week, with no sense of urgency. When they ask how he is, he says, “Same old, same old.” It’s their lives he’s calling about. He wants them to talk to him.
Listening to himself, Mark sometimes thinks of his mother saying to him once that she was content. Not happy, but content. He wonders if that’s what he means when he says “Same old.” Content.
But then one of his kids makes him laugh on the phone, or tells him something that surprises or pleases him; or he catches the smell of smoke from the burning vines drifting across the fields in January; or he takes a turn in the road and sees, spread out below him, the vineyards in spring, vibrant with the soft green leaves opening in the rows, with the pure, cold yellow of the mustard flowers; and he is flooded with happiness. Same old, same old: happiness.
THEY ALSO don’t write, of course. Certain things stay private. When Emily’s husband, Ted, moves out for three weeks, she falls silent. She feels that to mention it will make it more real, more permanent than it is, and she is holding herself in a state of almost unbearable tension, insisting to herself that it isn’t real, it isn’t true, it won’t last.
And it doesn’t—he comes back—and she writes again, about the shifts in her body during this second pregnancy, about maybe moving to a larger house after the baby is born.
When Eva has a small lump removed from her breast, she writes to none of them about it. Gracie is the only one she tells. After a year has passed and things still look clean, she finally tells Elliott, and they go out for a celebratory dinner.
She’s continued to see Elliott all these years. Twice they have broken up, when he decided to date someone else—for a long time he wanted to get married again, which Eva had told him was out of the question for her. But they have come back together each time, and now that Theo has left home, he often spends the night, though rarely two nights in a row.
She doesn’t write either of starting to attend church again. This is in part because it’s an experiment for her—will it seem in any way relevant? will she feel anything? And then, as she goes on attending, as her attendance becomes regular, it’s because she doesn’t know exactly what this means or how to explain it, and she doesn’t want them to think of it in certain ways: as a born-again experience, as a revelation, as a consolation for herself now that she’s alone.
Gradually though, references to her involvement in the church’s activities, to events in the Christian calendar, creep into her e-mails, so that her children, almost without remarking it to themselves or each other, come to understand her as a believer. Perhaps even to misremember her as someone who was always a believer.
Daisy never mentions her abortion, or the depression, the sense of the uselessness of life, which followed it. She never mentions, either, the several years of therapy with Dr. Gerard—except to Mark, who pays for it; and even then, all she says by way of explanation to him is, “Apparently I’ve got some chickens coming home to roost.”
“These wouldn’t be chickens I know, would they?” he asks.
“It wouldn’t make any difference whether you did or didn’t,” she says.
“Ah! Touché,” he says. The cell phone connection fizzes a little.
“I’ll pay you back eventually!” she says, more loudly.
“You better not,” he says.
“Why better not?” she asks.
“Because. Because I’m paying you back, sweetheart.”
MARK DOESN’T CALL and doesn’t call about getting married, and by the time he does, it’s so close to his wedding date that Daisy isn’t sure she can make it. She has to ask the director at the Shakespeare Theatre to rearrange the rehearsal schedule—she’s playing Miranda in The Tempest. But it’s early in the process; they’re still sitting around working over their lines, so the director tells her okay, she can be away for a long weekend, they’ll arrange things around her.
It’s January, seventeen degrees out in Chicago when Daisy leaves, and the sight of the green hills as the plane comes in to land in San Francisco is more beautiful than she remembered.
Mark meets her in the baggage area, and they walk through the airport to the garage together. Daisy is happy to walk next to him. She knows they are a striking pair. It was only after she’d come to live with him that she realized that he was the one in the family whom she resembled—that she had his long, narrow face, so different from Emily and Eva. That she had the same wide-set light eyes, the strong nose and brows, the high forehe
ad. She had come to think that she too was handsome. Not pretty, but handsome.
They stop in at Eva’s to say hello to her and Theo, and to Emily and her family, all of whom are staying in the big house. They make their plans for the weekend. Tonight, they decide, Emily and Daisy will have dinner together, by themselves.
At Mark’s house, Daisy unpacks and changes into jeans. Kathy, Mark’s wife-to-be, comes over—Daisy has met her only once before, a tall funny woman who does publicity for a winery—and they talk, easily. At six, Emily comes for her and they drive into Calistoga, to the All Seasons Café.
Emily and Daisy haven’t drawn any closer as they’ve gotten older. They’re still too different, still headed in more or less opposite directions in life. But tonight they speak directly about that, about the different ways they grew up, about their parents. Emily talks about how being a parent herself has given her a whole new perspective on Mark and Eva. As she talks, her hands are in constant motion, down to stroke her immense belly, up to touch her own face or to move gesturally around her shoulders, as if calling attention to her prettiness, her animation. Daisy, who has learned to love her own capacity for stillness as an actress, can’t help thinking of the cheerleading motions Emily practiced over and over in high school. Boom chicka boom.
But now Emily’s asking what it was like to have Mark as a father, something she never really experienced.
Daisy tells her about the way they struggled with each other. “I think we were more or less growing up together,” she says. “There was this one night, I remember, where he got so mad at me for something I’d done and he said something like, ‘And until you can learn to fuckin’ respect me, you are fuckin’ grounded!’ Which struck me as so funny, so incongruous, that I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. And he did too, and he said, ‘That’s not what the dad says, is it?’ and I said to him, ‘Oh, that’s what you were after? Dad-ness?’ ”
Emily was grinning.
“I was still grounded, I want you to know.” Daisy looks past Emily to a couple walking past outside. It’s raining, and they’re huddled against it. “He really tried,” she says, thinking of Mark in those days. “He tried, and I tried. It was as though we both knew it was a kind of last chance for us.”
“What do you mean?” Emily asks.
“Oh, who knows?” Daisy smiles. “I’m just being theatrical. As is my wont.”
The next night, the night before the wedding, the whole family, Eva and Theo, Emily and Ted and Gideon, and Mark and Kathy along with her two sons, both in their twenties, all go out for a festive meal together at Tra Vigne. Afterward, after their prolonged good-byes outside in the parking lot, Daisy goes home alone with her father one last time. As they are saying good night, standing in the living room, she grins at him and says, “Some bachelor party, Dad.”
He smiles back, shaking his head. His hair is gray now, and he keeps it cut very short—“the bullet look,” Daisy calls it—which makes him look different from the handsome cowboy he used to resemble. “My life has been the bachelor party,” he says.
THE WEDDING will be at Kathy’s house, and the only people invited are the group that gathered for dinner—family. Not friends, and certainly not Gracie and Duncan. Mark has explained this to Daisy on the telephone ahead of time, to reassure her. And Daisy has been relieved to hear this, though it makes her wonder, as visits home often have, how it would feel to see Duncan again, to be in a room with him, to speak with him. Coming home only rarely through college and even less afterward, and always staying with Mark when she did, she has managed to avoid seeing Duncan for almost a decade now—and it seems she will this time too.
But Eva has wanted Daisy “sitting at my table at least once,” she says, and has planned a brunch for everyone but the bride and groom for Sunday morning, before the wedding. And when Daisy walks in, she sees Gracie down the long hall framed in the kitchen doorway. Gracie sees her too. She gives a loud whoop and charges Daisy. It’s a little like being tackled, Daisy thinks; though Gracie seems smaller than she used to be. Smaller but plumper.
Now she steps back and openly appraises Daisy, even as Daisy is taking her in; and of course is thinking simultaneously of Duncan, who must be waiting in the kitchen with the others.
Daisy has dressed up for this occasion, as they will all go directly from Eva’s to the wedding. She’s wearing a red dress with long sleeves, high-necked and simple, but beautifully fitted. When she tried out for Miranda, she made an effort to tone down all that was strong and powerful in her appearance, so she looks softened today, prettier than she usually does. Her eyebrows are plucked into a thin line and lightened. She’s wearing blush in the middle of her cheeks to fatten them. She’s had her hair highlighted. She likes this way of looking, for the moment. This disguise.
And Gracie does too. Her wide fleshy face opens in appreciation of Daisy. “You are fabulous!” Gracie pronounces in her booming voice.
“Same to you,” Daisy says, and laughs.
Gracie takes her hand and leads her back to the kitchen. It’s jammed with people, and for a few minutes Daisy is able to ignore the small, trim man with white hair who stands on the other side of the island and watches her, his face still, his dark eyes expressionless.
Finally, though, she has to acknowledge him. She steps toward him, her hand out, and he raises his hand, shakes hers formally. “Good to see you,” she says, and he nods.
“Yes,” he says. He is the only man in the room wearing a suit, a suit of a beautiful, subtly striped fabric. Bespoke, Daisy thinks.
“Oh come on, Duncan,” Gracie says. “Work up a little more enthusiasm for this absolute babe.”
He turns to his wife. “Enthusiasm has never been my forte.” He pronounces it correctly of course: fort.
Daisy smiles and takes the opportunity to move away, over to hug Eva, to pour herself a mimosa.
There are ten of them around the table, and Daisy is glad for the sheer numbers, for the buffer they provide between her and Duncan. She has maneuvered herself between Gracie and Kathy’s older son, Kevin. Duncan is across the table from her, on Eva’s right hand. Looking at him from time to time, Daisy sometimes catches him looking back, his face unreadable. He seems frail, she thinks; she noticed how much more pronounced his limp was when he walked to the dining room. But the frailty is something separate from that, and it seems characteristic of someone much older than he is now—and, of course, she knows his age: sixty-seven.
He still feels compelled to weigh in with his opinion from time to time—on the Democratic primaries, on Michael Jackson’s face—but no one here is under his spell any longer. Or maybe it’s simply that his age has changed the way these pronouncements are received. In any case, no one pays much attention to him—they’re too busy talking about their own lives, about what comes next for all of them.
Emily has center stage for a while, describing a house they’re thinking of buying, discussing mortgage rates and real estate. Gracie asks Daisy about work, and she talks about her role, about Miranda, about how even though she’s an important character to the play, it’s not a large part. “But she’s so incredibly difficult to act,” Daisy says. “Because she’s grown up on this enchanted island with no one else but her father and this … monster, really. And so she’s astounded, she’s amazed, when other humans arrive. And you have to get that—her innocence, her amazement—without making her seem stupid.” She runs a finger around the edge of her mother’s familiar plate, its bumpy rim. “And I have to say, she has—I have—one of the greatest lines in Shakespeare. And one of the hardest, because it’s so familiar. It’s ‘O brave new world, to have such people in it.’ ” She opens her hands. “I mean, how do you say it, and make it new? Make people really hear it, instead of the book title, or whatever.”
“You know, I’d forgotten that’s where that title came from,” Eva says. “Shame on me.” This last is so typical of Eva that Daisy smiles at her, and is rewarded by that warm smile back.
&nb
sp; And now Kevin is asking her how she gets by, how she makes a living. He has asked this of Ted too, and Emily. He will graduate this June and he needs ideas.
Daisy laughs. “You know those cheesy circulars that fall out of the Sunday paper? where bright young things are standing around casually in their underwear, looking as sexless as they can while also being half naked?” He nods. She gestures at herself with her thumb. “That’s me. Underwear queen of Marshall Field’s. Underwear, and voice-overs, and a little bit of hand modeling. Stuff like that.”
After this the conversation fractures, multiplies. Gracie wants a recipe from Eva. Gideon is fussing, he doesn’t want to stay in the high chair, and Emily and Ted are deciding whether he has to. Through the noise, Daisy hears the voice directed at her.
“Where would one get one of those circulars?” Duncan asks.
She looks at him. He is smiling, a smile that’s like a parody of the way he used to smile at her in his studio, a kind of stagy lasciviousness.
“Oh for Christ’s sweet sake, Duncan,” Gracie says, offended and indulgent at once.
“What?” he says, a vast feigned innocence on his face. He turns to Daisy. “Can’t an old man let a young woman know how lovely he finds her?”
Daisy stares levelly back. Her voice is flat and cold when she speaks. “No, I don’t think so,” she says.