Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  As she stepped past him, she said, “You could come, Dads.”

  He turned to her. “I wish I could. But your brother and I”—he gestured back to where Randall still stood, eating his hand—“have a date in the bathroom. You’ll have to have fun for me, you three.” And he shut the door behind them.

  They stood on the front porch in silence. The snow was just a feeling, an invisible wet touch that made you blink your eyes, except where light tipped down from the windows onto it and gave it sudden swirling substance. The square was made new by the whiteness, by the gentle grayish light that was like a flat lid above them. The houses seemed small and bright, pretty toys lighted up, so many secret stories shut against the whited wind. They went down the stairs, into it.

  When Nina walked, her boots made a crunching sound biting the snow, a sound that seemed locked inside the hood of her snowsuit along with the racket of her breathing, and the whoosh—she was sure she could hear it—of her blood pulsing in her ears. They turned down the narrow path between their house and the Hayakawas’, next door. Nina led the way.

  They often spied on the Hayakawas. They were the most mysterious of their neighbors. Their children were off in college now, but even when they lived at home, they had never come out after school, they had never talked more than to say hello, they had never smiled except for the most fleeting, insincere grimaces of politeness. Mother had explained their isolation: they had been put in American prison camps during the Second World War. “To our eternal shame,” Mother said in the voice that didn’t allow argument. Nina and her sisters always hoped they would uncover the wonderful secret life that must lie under the blank polite exterior—to be put in prison! wouldn’t that make you strange?—but the Hayakawas led a scrupulously ordinary existence.

  The girls climbed laboriously up the Hayakawas’ slippery bulkhead door. They braced their boots on the outsize hinges so they wouldn’t slide down, and watched Mr. Hayakawa at the kitchen table. He was alone, reading the paper.

  Sarah was too short to have a good grip on the windowsill. When she let go, she dropped to her hands and knees and slid down the tilted door. At the bottom, she rolled over on her back in the snow and lay there looking up at the gray sky, her mouth open to catch the wet flakes, while Nina and Mary continued to spy. When Mrs. Hayakawa came into the room, Mr. Hayakawa didn’t even look up, and neither one seemed to speak to the other. A page of the newspaper lifted and turned, a big wing closing. Mrs. Hayakawa was at the sink with her back to them. Nothing. After a few more minutes, Mary squatted and skied down the bulkhead to Sarah. “Let’s go,” she whispered loudly. “They’re no good. They never are.” But Nina stood a minute more before she came down to her sisters; watched him turn another page, still drawn by the mystery of the way the Hayakawas lived, by the silence and peace between them.

  They tried a few more houses around the square, but there was nothing much happening. In a few of them, television sets were on, and there was something strange about the flickering blue light, about the blank stupidity on people’s faces while they watched, which the girls laughed at for a moment; but her sisters were beginning to be bored, Nina could tell.

  When they passed the Graysons’, though, they could faintly hear music pulsing through the walls of the house. They sneaked up onto the front porch. Inside, Deirdre Grayson, who was about Mack’s age, stood facing a hall mirror, singing silently with the music. When the song stopped, she moved even closer to the mirror and looked at herself. She pushed her nose first to one side and then the other, examining the flesh that hid in the crack by the curve of each nostril. Then she slowly lifted her arms behind her head. Her hair bent over them like a soft fabric. She turned her head one way, then another. She let her hair fall. Then she leaned toward the mirror until her lips touched the icy glass. “Look!” Mary whispered.

  “She is really weird,” Nina agreed. But she was uncomfortable. Alone in the bathroom, she’d done the same thing many times. She’d tried to imagine the cool, even pressure of the silvered glass as the touch of someone’s lips. Once she’d forgotten to wipe the damp print of her mouth off the mirror, and Mackie, who was next in the bathroom, had made fun of her.

  Turning, Nina saw three adult figures walking across the square toward their house. Guests. They shuffled like skaters on the snow, their identities lost in their winter shapelessness. They were talking, but their voices were muffled by the weather.

  Nina gasped, to make it more exciting, and told her sisters to run quickly—quickly!—down the Graysons’ front steps. The girls squatted low behind a hydrangea bush, the snow hissing on the papery dryness of the leftover blossoms. They watched the front door open, the guests disappear into the yellow light of their hall. Then the girls made their way along the neighbors’ front hedges to their own walk. They ran, crouching and awkward, until they were under the window at the side of the living room. There, Mary and Nina hoisted Sarah, her slick rubber feet in their mittened hands. She wobbled and clung to them, but finally she stood up, grabbing at the slippery sill, spilling crumbling light sheets of wet snow into Nina’s upheld face. They waited. “It’s the Gordons,” she whispered. Her voice was hard to hear. The hood of Nina’s woolen snowsuit scratched over her ears. “They’re coming over here!” Her legs seemed about to give. “No, now they’re sitting down, and Lid’s bringing in some stuff for them. She’s got her fancy dress on, that blue one.” Then she cried abruptly, “Down! Down!” She was squatting even as they lowered her, and Mary lost her balance and sat hard on the ground. Sarah staggered, almost falling on top of her. They laughed at each other. “They were almost there!” Sarah whispered excitedly.

  They stayed outside—trying the kitchen windows from the back porch, creeping onto the front porch when the coast was clear—until there were ten or fifteen guests in the house, until they were wet and cold. Then they went up and rang the bell.

  Their father’s face lifted with pleasure at the sight of them. “More beautiful ladies!” he said. “Come in, come in, my unexpected guests,” and they danced into the front hall, stamping their boots and jumping up and down to knock the snow off. David helped them get out of their gear, chatting with them as though they had been invited too, about the snow, about the people who’d already arrived.

  Stripped down to inside clothes, Nina skated on the wood floor in sock feet, hoping one of the grownups would notice her. She knew she looked prettier when her coloring was high—otherwise she was too dark, too somber. But no one did. They stood and sat in clusters of two or three, talking too loudly, everyone holding a glass, most of them smoking. The inside air was hot and still, and the women’s perfume made it exciting. She heard Mrs. Gordon’s laugh in the kitchen with her mother. Mr. Gordon was out here, hunched over a bowl of nuts, talking to a woman Nina didn’t know, a pretty round-faced woman with her hair twisted elaborately and pinned at the back of her head. Nina watched Mr. Gordon’s fingers working over the bowl, picking out just the cashews. If Nina did such a thing, her mother would cry out in disgust.

  Liddie came into the living room, brushing against Nina. “Move, bunny rabbit.” The air she stirred smelled of flowers behind her. She set down a tray with crackers and cheese. Mrs. Bennett grabbed her arm and started asking her questions about school. Liddie picked up a cracker. She began to talk in her beautiful voice. She was going to transfer, she explained, transfer to Julliard. Nina knew by now that this would make Mrs. Bennett listen to Liddie for a while. It made everyone listen. It was, as Liddie put it, “quite the achievement.” Nina moved over closer to Mr. Gordon.

  “It’s all a question of style,” the woman with him was saying. “JFK had it, but this guy, I can’t bear it. ‘Wang wang wang,’ when he talks,” she said, making her voice come out through her nose.

  Nina reached over and took two cashews, popped them quickly into her mouth. Mr. Gordon leaned forward and spread his hand over the bowl again. “Oh, come on, Judy,” he was saying. “Those are hardly the relevant criticisms. And
finally he just may prove to be the better man.”

  “Who cares?” the woman said, shrugging her shoulders. Nina turned to watch her intently. “I know …” She flattened her hand on her bosom. “You know; everyone knows: the world turns on sex appeal. That’s the course of history. And this guy …” She shook her head vigorously. “He just ain’t got that swing. I mean, those ears.”

  Mr. Gordon laughed. “You can’t make your sexual response the basis for your politics.” And he began to scold her, while she smoked and smiled at him.

  The saltiness turned liquid in Nina’s mouth, but she held the cashews there, not chewing for a while. She was wondering if swing was a kind of dirty word. Then she was thinking of President Kennedy’s funeral. They had stayed home from school to watch it, all of them silent in the living room, and her mother had cried when she saw the frisky horse with no rider, the empty boots turned backward.

  Suddenly her father’s hands were on her shoulders. He whirled her around, back to the hall. “Ah ah ah ah ah,” he was saying into her ear. “I spotted you.” She tilted into his warm body as she walked ahead of him. At the foot of the stairs, he smacked her behind lightly. “Now skedaddle, madame. I sent your gang of thuggees on ahead. You remember the deal.”

  Up two steps, Nina turned—she was just as tall as he was from up here, as though she were a grownup—and reached over to his shoulders. “Dad?” she began. She was starting to lean her weight against him, but she saw irritation tighten his face, and she rocked back.

  “Neens?” he answered. But then the bell rang. He went to the door, and Nina clung to the newel post and watched him greeting the Bakers, who lived down the street. Mrs. Baker’s hair rose around her head like glittery mesh. Melting flakes of snow were trapped in it; they caught the light and shone like jewels. After Dr. Baker went into the living room, Nina’s father reached up and started to brush them away, but Mrs. Baker stepped back and turned quickly to Nina. “How are you, Nina?” she asked. Her cheeks and nose were pink from the cold. “Have you tried the snow yet? It’s good packing.”

  “I know,” Nina answered. Mrs. Baker smiled at her and then followed her husband into the living room.

  When Nina’s father came back and stood in front of her again, he seemed distracted. Nina knew he was going to try to send her on her way. She lurched against him to get his attention. “Daddy, how come I always have to be treated like Mary and Sarah? I’m much more mature than they are. I could help, like Liddie does.”

  He looked thoughtful, and for a moment she imagined she might have a chance. “Please,” she said. But then she was aware, instantly, both that that had come out whiny, which he hated, and that he was listening to something in the noise behind him anyway, not considering her request at all. She hung her weight against him, petulant.

  “No, sweetie,” he said firmly. “A deal is a deal.”

  “A deal!” she said contemptuously. “I hate all deals. It wasn’t any deal. Ma just told us.”

  “Howsoever,” he said. He took her hands and lifted them, pushed her weight back onto her own feet. “If there were going to be briefs and charges and countercharges, they should have been filed before this, wouldn’t you say?” He was smiling at Nina now, and she saw that she’d never really had a chance. “And I should point out to you that Liddie’s been helping all day, that getting to be a hostess is connected to that. Whereas you’ve been out playing until nearly this very moment.”

  Nina felt the heat of shame. And he was right, that’s what made it worse. Playing. She hated Mary and Sarah. She hated herself.

  He smiled gently at her. “Now,” he said. “I want to see you flouncing up, please. Your inimitable disgusted flounce.”

  Nina turned and slowly mounted the stairs, keeping her back as straight as she could.

  “Nina,” he called when she was at the second landing. She turned. “Maybe next year,” he said in a private voice meant to make her feel better.

  “Oh, boy!” she accused, and tears roughened her voice. “Next year.” She ran up.

  “Nina,” he called again. She stopped and looked down at him.

  He smiled his slight, intimate smile. “It was, as always, a treat and a treasure to talk with you.”

  When Liddie came up with the plate of food, they were all in their nightgowns, in the study. Liddie had arranged the food carefully, as though they were important guests. In the center were little hot dogs, wrapped in the toasted dough that Mother whacked, raw and swelling white, out of cardboard tubes. Stuck through them were toothpicks in every color, a prickly rainbow. Around this was a circle of black olives, then one of green, then the hot pink of radishes cut like flowers, then Ritz crackers spread with a bright orange cheese. Liddie set it down on the table by the couch.

  “Mother wants to know have you said your prayers.” She rolled her eyes, and they all laughed at their mother, even though Mary and Sarah still believed such things as that God was in every bird, every insect, in Randall as well as in someone like Martin Luther King.

  “Yes,” Nina lied. It was partly true. She had sat still and quiet when Mary had done hers. She had watched her sister’s brow furrow, her fingers clench, as though you could get to God isometrically. But Nina didn’t pray anymore.

  She had until recently. She had prayed for years that Randall would get well so her parents would stop fighting—not even a selfish prayer!—but it had done no good. And when she heard that the president was shot, she had prayed he would live, and instead he had died. Hopeless and angry, she was attending confirmation classes now only because her mother insisted. They all had to be confirmed. After that they could choose whether or not to go to church. Nina knew already she would never go again. Even now during the services she just mouthed the confessions, the prayers, occasionally tearful at the isolation she felt in the rumble of voices all around her, her only consolation her shining integrity.

  “Would you like the report from below?” Liddie asked, squishing in among them on the raggedy couch. It was ripped all along what Sarah called “one sleeve,” an afternoon’s project of Randall’s. He’d swallowed some of the cloth, and Mother had yelled at Mack, who was supposed to be in charge, that she could never get a minute’s time off, never.

  “Look at it this way,” Daddy had said when she had told him that evening. “Now you don’t have to worry about getting him to eat dinner.”

  They were all in the kitchen, standing around or sitting at the table, and it was as though the room itself took a breath in, waiting for Mother’s response. Her face was still a moment, thoughtful, and then she laughed. And then they were all laughing. “All right,” she said. She was looking at their father in a way that seemed to shut them all out. “My master of the silver lining.”

  He had raised his glass to her. “My mistress of the dark cloud,” he said, and drank.

  “Oh, it’s true, I know it’s true,” she had answered, as their laughter died down.

  Now Nina pushed in next to Liddie. She smelled good; she always did.

  “The scene is: Dad’s flirting with all the ladies, or they’re all flirting with him, as usual. And Mother is arguing about politics with Mr. Gordon.”

  “Why does Ma always argue?” Mary asked earnestly.

  It was true, Nina knew. Their mother didn’t know how not to fight. She couldn’t take a joke, their father said. Everything mattered to her. And she fought with everyone, not just at home. She was always writing to her congressman, her senator, her alderman. She’d left one church and joined another because she got in a fight with the ministers over what was truly Christian. She’d embarrassed Nina at school by fighting at the PTA about whether the children should be divided into labeled reading groups. Nina had been an eagle then, the top group, and she had liked it. She’d been humiliated when her teacher said their groups couldn’t have names anymore because “some parents”—and here she’d raised her arched penciled eyebrows right at Nina—had “raised a ruckus.” Sometimes when Mother didn’t app
rove of what you’d done, she’d bring the whole weight of her personality down on you. She’d say she was “deeply ashamed” if you made fun of a classmate; “shocked beyond words” if you made a racial remark. If she caught you in a lie, even a white lie, she was capable of weeping over it.

  “What else can Mother do?” Liddie answered. “It’s just the way she is. Now, what would you like, a song or a story?”

  “A story,” Nina said quickly. Nina hated to listen to Liddie sing. Not that her voice wasn’t pretty. It was, Nina knew it was. But it wasn’t Liddie who sang. Somehow she changed, she became another person behind the music. Her voice was adult, foreign. Her posture changed, and she held her head alert, like a weapon. Her nostrils got bigger too, which made Nina most uncomfortable of all.

  “No, a song,” Mary said.

  “A song, a song,” Sarah cried. And then reached forward for a cracker.

  Nina felt betrayed. She watched Sarah pop the cracker in her mouth and start to chew. In this moment, Nina realized that her youngest sister was prettier than she was, than Mary was too. She felt a shimmer of hateful envy for her.

  “Okay, okay,” Liddie said. “Here goes.” Then she paused. “Are you ready?” she teased. “Are you set?”

  “Yes—we—are—ready!” Sarah yelled, bouncing on each word.

  Liddie laughed, and Nina, sitting so close to her, felt her breath. It was warm, and a little winy. It smelled a bit the way Mother’s did, but different, Nina thought.

  “Okay. Really. Here goes,” Liddie said. She took a deep breath in. And then it happened: her face changed. Nina looked down quickly at her own hands, trying to think of the beautiful full voice, of the foreign words, as coming from somewhere else, from a record.

  When she was finished, they sat for a moment in silence on the chewed sofa.