Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Mack.” Lainey turned and frowned at him.

  Randall stepped into the kitchen and shambled stiffly to his place, looking at no one, an awkward little machine. Lainey took his plate to him and set it down. She lifted his hand to his spoon and helped him grip it. The others all watched attentively, even Mary. Sometimes this moment didn’t work, something in it didn’t satisfy Randall’s sense of how things should be, and he threw food, or hit Lainey, or just sat and screamed in protest. But this morning he was obedient. He scooped at the eggs, lifted the spoon to his mouth.

  Suddenly Mack cried out, “Ugh!” as though Randall’s betrayal were the last straw. He flung his body back in his chair.

  “Mack,” Lainey said. She hurried around the table and knelt by his chair again. He had turned to face the wall at her approach, so she was talking to his thin, wiry back. “Mack, Randall has to eat. Life goes on, sweetie. We have to eat.” She touched his back, but he arched away and she let her hand drop. “Grandma would want us to eat, and be happy, and remember her with pleasure, remember the good things. And you know what I remember, Mack?” She waited a moment, but he made no response. “I remember how Grandma loved to cook, loved to fix special treats. And whenever anyone was upset, that was her way, to fix something good to eat, something comforting.” There was silence in the room, except for Randall, who was obliviously shoveling food into his mouth.

  Lainey was intensely aware of David behind her, getting himself coffee, watching, listening. “I understand that you might feel too upset now, Mackie, to eat. But it’s fine for Randall or Liddie or any of the others to want to. You shouldn’t blame them for that. And it will be perfectly all right for you to eat when you feel hungry again. And later on, maybe at school, if you feel like laughing and having fun, even, that’s all right too. Grandma wouldn’t want our life to stop because she died. She wants us all to go on and be happy.” She felt perilously close to tears again herself. “Mack,” she said in a pleading voice.

  David spoke from behind her. “It’s like in your book, Mack, when the loyal subjects say, ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ Remember that?”

  After a pause, Mack’s head slowly bobbed.

  Lainey had felt her body relax when she heard David’s voice. Now she stood up and stepped back from the table. She watched them all, feeling far away from them, a stranger.

  “It’s the same thing with us when someone dies. Someone we love and admire. We have to grieve, we have to mourn. But our loyalty is to life. Life needs us, and we need to go on. Being happy and well and whole and strong is part of our loyalty to life, but also partly how we honor the dead.”

  Lainey had turned and was watching Randall. He’d stopped eating as David spoke and was slowly rocking his spoon from side to side a few inches from his eyes, his head swaying steadily back and forth with the motion of the light’s repeated trip across the spoon’s gleaming surface. She had a quick memory of the silver bubbles leaking from his face—Mack’s face?—in her dream. Somehow, Lainey felt, what David was saying wasn’t quite the same thing she’d been trying to tell Mack.

  Chapter 3

  June 1954

  Lainey stood at the kitchen window in her father’s house, her hands in the soapy dishwater. She was watching her brothers outside whack the brightly colored balls over her parents’ neat lawn. It was late in the afternoon, and they were playing croquet, casting long black shadows across the grass. Lainey’s father and her sister-in-law, Myra, had driven to church to see about flowers for the service the next day. Lainey was finishing the lunch dishes. The sound of her brothers’ laughter washed in through the screen with the odor of the rusty metal and the smell of the sweet damp grass. They were happy to be together, she realized, in spite of their mother’s death. All they needed to feel like boys again was to return to their parents’ house, to each other.

  She leaned forward to look at Paul, who had tucked his beer bottle in his hip pocket to take his shot. He shifted his weight slightly, and the bright orange ball leapt away from his feet. Suddenly, as though he felt her gaze on him, he turned to the house. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he looked for a long moment into the shadows where she was. Then he called, “Come out, Lainey!”

  Pete turned his head too, and Sam looked up, befuddled in the sunlight, trying to find her. “And bring more beers,” Sam yelled.

  “In a minute,” she called back, and bent again over the tepid water.

  It wasn’t, she thought, that they were callous, or indifferent to their sorrow either. It was just as David had described it to Mack: their pleasure in life, in being together, was like a form of grieving; their laughter could turn in a matter of seconds to tears. Such a thing had happened last night at dinner. As Lainey and Myra were setting the table, using the chipped, second-best china, with ivy leaves twining around the edges, Lainey could hear her brothers talking in the living room, that deep rumble you could nearly feel through the floor, and then the loud bursts of laughter, Sam’s rising clearest above the others. Even as they took their places around the table, they were joking together about the hierarchy in seating arrangements—which place was whose, what that meant. Laughing, they pulled out the old Windsor chairs and sat down. Then a silence fell, the old chairs creaked and sighed as they shifted their weight. Lainey’s father cleared his throat and began a grace. “O Lord,” he said quietly, in that intimate normal voice he always used in prayer at home. “Comfort us all in our loss tonight. Give us the strength, the courage, to believe she is with You, to remember, even in our sorrow, the joyous promise of our eternal home.” He paused, and his breathing faltered. Lainey heard around the table their shuddering inhalations, their snuffling. When her father spoke again, his voice was softer. “We are grateful to you for having brought us all together again, as a family, to grieve the one who is no longer among us.” There was a long silence. “Bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service.” His voice had broken with the amen, and Lainey had kept her head bowed an extra moment to give him, to give all of them, a chance to recover before she looked at their faces. But when she lifted her head, it was they who were looking at her, waiting, she could see, for her tears. She had felt ashamed then of her dry eyes and was aware of a sense of disjuncture, the sense she had now, too, looking out, of being different from them.

  In part it was the chores, she thought. From the moment she walked in the door, there had been things crying out to be done—crying out to be done by her and her sister-in-law, Myra, the two women. And the chores were the same as at home. Food, clothing, schedules. They were in charge now. Now that her mother was dead. Watching her brothers playing on the green lawn, she suddenly envied them their freedom, what seemed their youth. She and Myra were like two old women among them. Like turtles, Lainey thought, dragging home with them wherever they went. She felt her own stiffness, her own unbending hard shell as she moved around doing her mother’s chores—now her chores.

  She set the last dish in the drainer and let the water out of the sink. She dried her hands. She had taken her engagement and wedding rings off and set them in a chipped blue saucer on the windowsill. Now she slipped them back on and paused for a moment to look at her hands. They were large, big-knuckled, and Lainey wasn’t particularly good with them. She had learned as a girl to knit, to sew, and she’d enjoyed those activities later, mostly as a way to keep her mother company; but she rarely did that kind of work on her own. Nothing she made ever turned out quite the way she’d envisioned it. After years of pulling the lumpy, misshapen sweaters over her children’s heads, of wearing dresses that pinched at the armholes, that hung as unevenly as flags at the hemline, she’d simply given up. She fisted her hands. She looked at the faint yellowing, like faded bruises, on her smoking fingers, and suddenly she felt ungainly, slothful, as she had so often in her mother’s presence as a girl. Her mother, of course, had never been without some project for her hands, and her involvement with this work had given her a wise, almost abstracted air when you talked
with her. David had once told Lainey that there were moments when her mother had affected him the way his analyst had, because of that slightly preoccupied, remote quality to her as she sat and listened. “You think you can tell her anything,” he said. Lainey had wondered then what David might have said to her mother about their private life, about their marriage, that he had never articulated to her.

  She opened the refrigerator. Her brothers had made a beer run earlier in the day, and the dark bottles were stashed everywhere in and around the dozen or so chicken and tuna casseroles, coffee cakes, jellied salads, and cookie tins that jammed the shelves. These offerings had been sitting all over the kitchen and dining room when Lainey arrived, brought by the women of the parish. Lainey and Myra hadn’t had to cook yet, though they’d all been here two days. Lainey extracted four bottles, one for herself too, and slammed the heavy door shut with her foot. A little wind of cold air puffed out and lifted the sweaty hair from her face. The bottles burned cold against her flesh, wet through her shirt. She stepped across the kitchen and grabbed the opener from where Pete had left it on the counter. Then she crossed the back porch and went out into the yard.

  A rich meadowy odor rose from the lawn. It had rained steadily all morning and into the early afternoon. Now the sun was lifting a faint smoke up through the grass, as though there were a fire burning somewhere deep in the earth. The flowers in her mother’s garden were bent over from the weight of the jeweled water on their blossoms.

  The house sat on a hill overlooking unused fields choked with devil’s paintbrush and daisies, with stiff blue lupine. Below her, at the foot of the driveway, Lainey could see her nephews, Sam’s sons, riding bikes. Patty, her niece, was apparently a traffic guard or a policewoman. When her arm went up, they stopped in a noisy swirl of gravel.

  “A mirage,” Sam cried when he saw her. “A walking oa-sis.” He fell to his knees and grabbed his throat. The other two stopped playing and applauded her approach. Sam was the oldest. He had been drinking steadily since he arrived, though he never seemed quite drunk. Lainey couldn’t tell—she hadn’t spent more than a few hours at a time with him in years—whether this was out of habit or grief. Sam was a school psychologist. He worked with’ adolescents. And in spite of his paunch and his thinning hair, he seemed to Lainey now more oddly like an adolescent himself than he’d ever been in his youth.

  Myra was his wife. Lainey noticed that she had an air of patient, amused tolerance with Sam; as though he were one of the children. And he called her “Mommy.” When Sam had first embraced Lainey in the driveway outside the house the afternoon she arrived, he’d murmured, “Mommy and the kids are here too,” gesturing behind him; and for a fraction of a second, Lainey felt a shock of confusion. But when she looked up behind him, it was, of course, Myra’s big frame that loomed vague as a ghost behind the rusty screening of the back door.

  Now Sam called for a time-out from the game, and they moved to the Adirondack chairs that sat weathering at the edge of the flat lawn. Lainey looked around at her big sweating brothers. They were barefoot, and the cuffs of their pants were darkened and greened from the wet grass. Pete was telling them an anecdote about their mother, and how she’d barely bothered to get angry one time when she’d caught him sneaking in at dawn. He began to describe her as he’d encountered her in the hallway—groggy with sleep but nonetheless amused at his efforts to pretend he was up early, strolling around the house for pleasure. Lainey thought abruptly of her own impatience as a mother, of the countless times she’d lost her temper with her children, the times she’d slapped them or wept, the terror she could sometimes see convulsing their faces at her enraged approach. She felt a shame like nausea sweep through her. How had her mother done it? “Galoots,” she had good-naturedly called Lainey’s brothers. “Hooligans.” When they bothered her, she’d swipe at the air around her to make them disappear as though they were so many irritating flies. “Out of my sight, you great hooligans,” she’d say in the midst of one of the endless string of chores that occupied her. “Out of my kitchen.” “Out of my garden.” Her mother had been at her most flirtatious and charming with them as they got older. It was clear she took pleasure in being a small pretty woman among the big admiring men she’d made.

  Sometimes, as a child, Lainey had felt lost in her family. Outsize too, like her brothers, she had no femininity as they’d all learned to define it from their mother’s delicacy. Her legs were varicosed with purplish bruises, and behind them a fading history of older wounds in pale green and yellow—things she’d bumped into, stumbled over, fallen on, dropped on herself. Her nails were chewed down to where the flesh was rosy and insubstantial, a veil drawn over her blood. It made others wince to look at her hands. For years her neck seemed disproportionately long, and she had the air of having to think consciously about how to carry her head on it. And she had no sense of humor. Her brothers would tease her lightly, affectionately, and she would only stare, flushed and thick-witted. In bed at night she thought of light, charming answers.

  When she was small, she was allowed to “carouse,” as her mother called it, with her brothers, and these were the childhood memories that brought Lainey the most pleasure. Her brothers guaranteed her popularity. She was part of baseball games, allowed as many strikes as it took till she connected. They took her ice-skating, one of them holding each of her mittened hands, pulling her along at dizzying speed as they raced past her wobbling friends around the edge of the flooded town common. She went swimming with them at the quarry, where no other girls went, and they all thoughtlessly jumped around naked in front of her. They taught her to drive the car before she was twelve. One of her brothers’ great pleasures was to sit in the back seat, all three of them, with their feet dangling over the edge of the front, and direct their sister through the quiet streets of Pawtucket, past the houses of girls they admired. Sometimes one of them would rest his feet on her head. She wore her heavy crown with pride as she concentrated fiercely on shifting, steering, braking. When ordered to, she would honk the foggy bass of the horn at someone they recognized. Once, coming home from one of these jaunts, she had driven partially through the back wall of the garage, forgetting for a moment where the brake was. Pete had taken the blame with their father, had endured the punishment—made worse because their father suspected he must have been drinking to do such a thing.

  But then, slowly, Lainey had felt the jaws of her destiny close around her. Her mother was its agent, its enforcer, though it seemed to Lainey that there was sometimes a note of compassionate apology as she laid down the new rules. No longer could Lainey go out with the boys at night—they were going places “not suitable” for her. She couldn’t wear pants. Ladies didn’t. She couldn’t play in the empty lot with the neighborhood children anymore. And it was Lainey herself who realized she didn’t want to go to the quarry again, she didn’t want to see the startling white of those clefted buttocks, the dangle of brownish flesh in front amid the fur. Slowly all of that part of her childhood began to seem impossible, a distant dream, something that had happened to another version of herself, in another place and another time.

  She began a series of lessons: deportment, dancing, piano, bridge. And she began to impose on herself a private religious discipline, stricter than anything her father or Mrs. Dana, her Sunday school teacher, would have dreamed of. Every evening, alone in her room, she examined her behavior of the day for hypocrisy or pride. She had small painful penances for these sins: pebbles in her shoes, ordered numbers of pricks with a straight pin. To rid herself of earthly desires, she gave away her favorite doll and a cloisonné brooch that Aunt Lalie had brought her from China. Occasionally she hit herself across the thighs with a wire hanger. It was during this period that she dreamed of training for the ministry, but her father spoke mockingly of this ambition on her part, and she slowly realized there was something of overweening pride in it, and something almost comical to others. No, it was Paul who was encouraged in this direction, Paul whom both parents d
efined as having the ability to have a vocation—this in spite of his only average grades and his relentless and passionate interest in what her parents called “the gals.” And Lainey had made accepting this a part of her discipline, a punishment for prideful thoughts.

  Now, telling his tale, Pete’s voice cracked. He broke off and shook his head. “Some lady,” he said. “Some lady.” Sam wiped at his eyes.

  They all sat in an awkward silence for a moment. To end it, Lainey said, “It looks like the guy with the yellow ball is having his troubles today.” They looked over at the grass. The jots of bright blue and orange winked near the far end of the court. The yellow ball was at half court, near the almost invisible middle wicket.

  “Yeah, that’s mine,” Pete said. “It’s the beer talking.”

  “No, no, no, no. Don’t let the beer talk,” Sam said earnestly. “You talk to the beer, the beer does not talk to you.”

  Paul stood up and stretched. “Okay, enough palaver,” he said, looking down at the rest of them. He was the leanest, the trimmest, of Lainey’s brothers. “This jawing is just a strategy—I see it now—to avoid getting thoroughly trounced. C’mon, up. I want to win this and get it over with.”

  Moving more slowly, the two bigger men heaved themselves out of the deep chairs. “Lainey, gonna play?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Have you got room?”

  “Of course there’s room,” Sam said. “The only question is how to bring you in. Maybe should we all start over?” he asked the others.

  “No, let’s give her some free shots to catch up,” Pete said. “Say … five of them?”

  “That seems like a lot,” Lainey said. She was lifting the red ball from the bottom of the channel in the croquet stand.

  “What the hay,” Sam said. “You’re a girl, right?”