by Sue Miller
“We don’t need those, Daddy,” she said.
In his pain, David’s eyes had filled. Mary saw the change in his face and took a step backward. She looked frightened. “Nina said,” she defended herself. And then she ran away.
“Cute,” the woman on the bench with him said. There was a professional appraising tone to her voice. “Yours?”
“Yes,” he said. He looked at her. Nobody’s mother. She was teenaged, an angry blistering acne scarring her face. She held a movie magazine open on her lap.
“I’m baby-sitting, myself,” she said. “My sister’s kids. Those two.”
Now David had to follow her pointing finger to the group of children by the slide. “Ah, yes.”
She waited.
“Cute,” he said.
The girl sighed. “I don’t know how she does it,” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“I mean, all day, every day.”
“No,” David said.
“But at least they grow up in the end and move away.”
When he didn’t answer, she lifted her magazine. David settled back again and closed his eyes. He ran his tongue over his lip. It felt puffy.
“But then it just begins all over again—you know what I mean?”
David opened his eyes. “Yes, I suppose I do.” He was trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.
The girl was frowning. “I just hope I don’t settle for that.”
After a moment he said, “You want something better.”
“Of course. Didn’t you? When you were young?”
“I can’t remember,” he said. He closed his eyes again and listened to her turn a page. Someone walked by, singing a tuneless song: “… but my real name is Mis-ter Earl.”
When he rose to go, the girl looked up. She smiled. “It was nice talking to you,” she said.
David saw that without the acne, she might be pretty. He felt a sudden tender pity for her. “Yes,” he said. “Nice talking to you too.”
The Tot Lot was crowded now. It rang with wails and excited cries. He had to cross nearly all the way over to Nina and Mary and Sarah before he got their attention. But they came running over to him quickly and followed him out the open gates, down Fifty-seventh. Just as they got to the car, though, they heard—then turned and saw, approaching from the other direction—a Good Humor truck.
“Ice cream,” Nina said reverently. She turned to David. “Can we? Please, please, Daddy?” She was taking tiny jumps in her excitement.
Mary immediately began to echo her.
David had barely said okay when they squealed and started to run toward the truck.
David picked Sarah up and they walked back the half block to where the other two were standing, the first ones in line. The truck had pulled to the curb in front of the Tot Lot, its chimes ringing out “Pop Goes the Weasel!” As soon as David was close enough to hear her, Nina started begging for various special treats whose pictures dotted the truck’s side in fading decals, but David was firm. They all had to have the same thing, because they needed to hurry and pick up Randall. And he would choose it so they wouldn’t have to have a long discussion. She consented to an ice cream bar. David stood at the window and asked the man for three, paid him the three dimes. He unwrapped all of them for the girls and handed them out.
They walked slowly back down the sidewalk ahead of him, the two younger ones weaving a little, they were so intensely concentrated on the ice cream. They had stopped talking entirely, and now they drifted away from each other, as though each wished to be solitary in her pleasure. Nina reached the car first and stood leaning against it, carefully angling her wooden stick so the ice cream wouldn’t drip on her.
David looked at his watch, imagined Randall standing with his tutor in the foyer of her apartment building, waiting for them. He had slowed down to Sarah’s pace, and she was barely moving. Ice cream dripped steadily onto the front of her pink coveralls.
“Come on, Sarey Berry,” he said. “Let’s walk a little here.” He took several long strides ahead of her to set an example.
She looked up, took a few obedient, jerky running steps, and the ice cream dropped off her stick into the dirt. By the time David reached her, she had squatted and started to raise it in her hand to her mouth. It was coated with grit.
David grabbed her wrist—it was tiny in his hand—and shook it. The ice cream plopped again to the ground. He lifted her up, away from it, and began to explain to her as he carried her toward the car. But her eyes had rounded immediately in disbelief, her lower lip jutted, and now she began to cry. The two other girls looked up as he approached, and kept on eating. David had begun a chant of explanation—about the dirt, about how bad it was for Sarah—but the little girl wasn’t listening. And when she saw Nina’s ice cream and Mary’s, her body arced away from his in rage and she shrieked wildly.
“Poor Sarah,” Nina said with exaggerated pity. “She doesn’t understand.”
“Right,” David said. “When she’s as big as you, she will.”
“Poor Sarah,” Mary echoed, and she took the last bite of her ice cream bar.
Sarah, hearing the sympathy, wailed louder, collapsed huddled against David’s chest.
“Yeah,” Nina said. “When she’s big, then we can explain everything.”
David was enfolding Sarah. He felt her sticky hands on his neck, the hiccuping sobs that racked her body. Now she wailed again with so inconsolable a sorrow that it seemed she’d been born understanding pain.
David felt some deep answering grief in himself, some accumulation of his own misery. He turned his face away from the eyes of the other two girls. Gently he held his smallest, his most unknowing child. “Oh, Sarah, my love,” he murmured, holding tightly to her tiny, compact body, comforting her for this little loss—but thinking of all the loss, all the inescapable sorrow and loss that would visit her, that would visit all of them, over and over in life.
The following Monday, before his first private patient arrived, David called Marie Lomassi on the ward at the hospital and asked her to meet him late that afternoon for a drink. His hands, he noted with mild amusement, were trembling slightly as he dialed the numbers.
Through the few months he slept with Marie, they met in a dark basement apartment she shared with another nurse. The first time she brought him there, she poured each of them a glass of syrupy sherry and disappeared into the bathroom. David sat on a worn sofa for a few minutes, sipping at the awful drink. Then he got up and paced through the three odd rooms of the apartment. There was a doll on the neatly made narrow bed in the room Marie had indicated was hers, a large doll with a wide ruffled skirt made of ribbons the color of the satin edging on Randall’s blanket. A doll. David felt heartsick, laughable. He wondered if there was a way he could leave without insulting Marie.
But he didn’t leave. He drank the sherry, he followed Marie to her room and watched her move the doll from the bed. And when he lay down next to her and felt the shocking push of her strong young body against his own, he was struck with such a sense of grief, of loss, along with his intense desire, that his eyes filled with tears. And though Marie Lomassi was much smaller than he was, though she was startled by his emotion, still she held him as you would a little child, until his breathing grew regular again. Until, with some embarrassment, they could begin.
Chapter 6
December 1963
Nina and her younger sisters were sitting in the third-floor bedroom. Nina was looking out at the snow, her forehead pressed against the cold glass. An early snow—it was only December tenth—but it was sticking, piling up thick and fast, a blanket on their neighbors’ garage roof, a narrow vein of white on every uplifted black branch of the wet mulberry tree below her. On the other side of the wide plain of the railroad tracks it flew over and over, like a plague of moths, through the circles of light glaring in a bright row from the Illinois Central Hospital roof.
“There’s nothing to do,” Mary said. Her voice
was whiny. She was lying on her bed, across the narrow strip of bare painted floor from Nina’s. “Pineapple beds” the girls called them, because sitting on top of each of the four wooden posts there was a carved stylized pineapple. Mack called them grenades.
Nina turned back into the room, where everything looked suddenly worn and messy. She felt intensely aware of the brownish water stains on the striped wallpaper, of the burned spots on the lampshade, of the piles of clean clothes waiting to be put away, of the nicked, ugly furniture. They were trapped up here, trapped because it was the night of Mother’s annual big party, and everyone on the first floor was busy getting ready. The invitations had said from seven to nine, only it always lasted later, and they got to sit on the stairs and watch. But it wouldn’t begin for an hour yet, and they’d been sent up here to get them out of the way.
Mary and Sarah were looking over at her expectantly. Nina felt a band of irritation squeeze her insides at their dependence, but she tried to ignore it. She said, “We could do The Movies.” This was a game she’d invented the summer before. It was really just spying, looking in the lighted windows of their neighbors after dark. But there was something special about the difference between the coolish twilight where she and her sisters stood clustered on those summer evenings and the hot lighted world of the houses they peered into, which thrilled them.
Once, in a drenching gray rain, they’d watched a man in the first-floor apartment across the square pull a splinter from his wife’s bare toe, an ordinary act. But the scene in the kitchen had seemed to Nina as potent and magical as the diorama of the doctor with his patient on display at the Museum of Science and Industry—the man and woman were so nearly motionless, so concentrated and intent, she on her pain, he on the needle he probed with. And Nina had felt so utterly separate from them, so shut out, shivering in the cold rain, standing on the rocking garbage can she’d pulled up under the window. She was startled to see a drop of bright blood roll down into the crack between the woman’s toes, startled at this evidence that the figures were real. When the man finished, he held the toe and squeezed it. Then, looking intently at the woman’s face, he slowly lifted her foot to his mouth and began to lick it. Nina and her sisters had laughed so hard at this that they had to jump down from the window and huddle against the grimy wall in the downpour so they wouldn’t be noticed. And when they climbed back up, just a minute or two afterward, the couple was gone from the room. Nina felt almost as if she had imagined it all.
Now she had a quick vision of the way things would look spying in from the snowy world—the bright boxes of yellow light, with silent figures mouthing silent words, everyday life made mysterious and magical because they would be looking at it from the white outside.
“Let’s,” she said firmly. She didn’t wait for them to agree, just got up and started out of the room. More often than not this worked; Mary and Sarah followed without arguing. This time too. As Nina started down the stairs, she heard Mary’s excited voice rise behind her, planning it, telling Sarah which houses they ought to try.
Then Mack’s voice called from behind the closed door of his room, across the third-floor landing from theirs. He said, “Hold it, you guys.”
Mary called back, “What for? You’re not the boss.” Nina had stopped halfway down the stairs. She was watching Mack’s door. Hanging on the center raised panel was a wooden plaque with a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker. Under it were the words GENIUS AT WORK.
They could hear Mack coming toward the door. “Oh, oh, oh, wat iss ziss I hear?” he was saying. Suddenly he yanked the door open. “I em nott zee boss?” He grabbed Mary by her sweater. “Says who, mein liddle pippensqueeker?”
“Cut it out, Mackie.” She squirmed against his grip. Suddenly, without warning, he let her go. She staggered back, slammed against the stair rail with a hard noise. Tears instantly filled her eyes. “You did that on purpose,” she said. “I’m telling.”
“Try another one,” he said in his own voice. He grinned and shut the door, hard.
Mary’s face had twisted up in her effort not to cry.
Sarah kicked Mack’s door. Nobody home. “You’re a dummy, Mack,” she yelled. Sarah could say whatever she wanted. She was the baby.
A diabolical laugh floated out.
“I even like Randall better than you,” Sarah called up loudly as she started down after Nina.
“Sarah!” Nina was genuinely shocked.
“Well, it’s the truth,” Sarah said. “I do.” But her voice was small. She was frightened she’d said it.
When Mary reached the foot of the attic stairs, she turned and shouted up, “Mack is an idiot!” and slammed the door shut. You could hear little chips of paint fall.
After a moment, their father’s voice rose, accusatory, from the first floor. “Who’s that slamming doors?”
They were silent, making scared faces at one another, half grinning too.
“Whoever it is, cut it out. Take it out on each other, if you must.” His footsteps went back into the living room. They looked at each other. Nina laughed. It was so exactly the opposite of what their mother would say.
They waited a minute and went down to the front hall and began to struggle with stiff woolen leggings, with coats, with the mittens on strings that jammed up in your sleeves. Nina could see down the hall to the kitchen, where Liddie moved back and forth. She and Mother were talking. Dishes clattered. Liddie had gone away to college the fall before last, and now when she came home it was as though she brought her own weather into the house. The arguing, the bitterness between their parents, which silenced the rest of them and made them feel ashamed, had no effect on her. Mother said she was like “a breath of fresh air,” and that seemed literally true to Nina. Her long curly blond hair blew back in knotted streamers when she moved. Her short dresses swung against her body. She was light and quick. Even her speaking voice had a musical sound—and Mother never laughed more than when Liddie was working by her side. Daddy called Liddie “the escapee,” but it seemed to Nina he must have called her this before she left too, that he was talking about some quality Liddie had—had always had—of belonging more to the world out there than to their family.
Later, when they were ready for bed, Mother was going to let Liddie bring them up a tray of party food: the tiniest sandwiches, miniature hot dogs—it seemed weird for grownups—and they’d sit in Daddy’s study and Liddie would sing for them or tell them a story while they dressed their Barbie dolls, all three the same, from Grampa Green. (“Original,” Daddy had said when Sarah unwrapped the second one. And when Nina unwrapped the third, Mother said to him, “Not a word from you, please. I mean it. He’s an old man, he’s all alone, and it’s amazing he even manages to get presents to them. Not one word, s’il vous plaît!”)
Sarah had begun to whimper. “I can’t do this, Neen.” She had her red rubber boots partway on, but they wouldn’t pull up over the heels of her shoes.
Nina bent in front of her sister. “Push,” she said, gripping the top of one of the boots. Sarah did, holding Nina’s shoulders for support, but the boot wouldn’t budge. “The goddamn thing,” Nina said. It made her want to hit something.
Sarah sniggered.
“Liddie!” Nina yelled. “Come and help us with these boots. We can’t.”
Liddie called back from the kitchen, “Just stamp. I’m busy,” as though she were one of the adults.
Sarah shouted, “Mine are bendy. Stamps don’t work.”
And then their father came out from the living room. “May I be of assistance?” He bowed from the waist slightly, unsmiling—a butler, a tall, slender prince. He was wearing his suit pants and a striped shirt with a tie, but he hadn’t put his jacket on yet.
“Yeah. Me,” Sarah said. She sat down on the floor and held her feet up. Her boots were sticking off at clown angles.
David bent over, gripped one of them and pushed. Randall came into the doorway behind him, waiting. He looked like Mack, Nina thought, but his face w
as dreamy, smooth somehow, as though you’d taken Mack’s face and wiped off all his intelligence and personality. As Nina watched him, he began inserting his fingers one by one deep into his mouth. She looked away. Once she’d seen him make himself gag doing this.
David pushed, and Sarah slid back to the wall. “Brace yourself, pet,” he said. Sarah lay flat and set her hands over her head against the baseboard. Nina’s father pushed again. “Are these new shoes with old boots?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “They’re from last year.”
“I thought I recognized a syndrome,” he said. He held Sarah’s foot between his thighs and eased the boot from side to side. Slowly it slid on. “Other one,” he commanded, and she lifted her other foot. She looked dazed and distracted, lying on her back, like a baby being changed. Like Randall, Nina thought. Sarah’s leg collapsed against their father’s thighs. “Help me, Sarah,” he said, a little irritated. And he yanked her knee into stiffness.
When he finished with Sarah, he lifted her up and turned to Mary, who was standing behind him. Nina’s boots had gone on easily. She was just waiting for the others. “I’d like nothing better than to join you girls,” Daddy was saying. “The well-packed snowball was once a specialty of mine.”
“We’re not having a snowball fight,” Mary said. Nina had been looking out at the snow, but she turned and made a hard face at Mary. The Movies were a secret. Nina wasn’t sure why this had to be. Some of it was just to make it more exciting, more dramatic. But in some way, too, it seemed to Nina a revenge against her parents for all that they kept secret from her, for everything she couldn’t understand about their lives.
But their father hadn’t noticed anything. He was tying Mary’s scarf under her chin. “That was in my youth, though,” he said. “Before I became burdened with all you children, all thousand and twelve of you.”
Sarah laughed and swung her loose mitten against his back. “There’s only six,” she said.
“Isn’t that what I said?” he asked. Then he crossed to the front door. He opened it, and they all stood silent before the transformation of their ordinary world. Their father said, “Ah, the winter landscape, urban version.” His voice was light, mocking as ever, but to Nina, his face looked sad and yearning.