Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “What were those words saying?” Sarah asked.

  “Mmm. Let’s see.” Liddie frowned. “It’s actually sort of foolish. It’s this very polite woman singing, saying thank you over and over, to this guy, her lover. She says she’s miserable when she’s apart from him, thanks. She used to drink to freedom, and he blessed the goddamned drink, thanks. And now she’s so blessed, she sinks on his heart. Thanks thanks thanks.”

  “That’s too polite for me,” Sarah said.

  “Well, that’s life,” Liddie answered. “In Strauss’s version anyway.” Now she stood up, leaving a gap among them on the couch, a cool patch on Nina’s side. “I’m heading down,” she said. “You want me to help you get this stuff to the landing?”

  “Yes. Help us,” Sarah said, sliding off the couch.

  The front stairs dropped from the second-floor hall for five steps, then had a landing, turned, and dropped for a second five steps to another landing, then turned and descended sideways into the front hall. There was a carved wooden panel along the side of this last flight, which faced the front door. It was the first thing you saw on entering the house. It had a bench worked into it, which was usually littered with the children’s stuff. As soon as you came in, you could tell who else was home by the books, the jackets, that lay on it. Tonight it was heaped with the coats of the guests.

  On a party night, the girls were allowed to come down as far as the first landing from the top to watch, that was the rule. If they come down farther or bothered their parents in any way, straight to bed.

  It took them two trips to assemble everything they needed on this landing. Liddie set their party plate in a corner a little distance away from the blankets and pillows and dolls. Then she said good night, and the three of them made what their mother called nests and settled in to watch the grownups below. From their allowed spot, the arched doorways off the front hall into the long living room and the dining room gave them a funny angle on the action. The grownups’ bodies were slightly foreshortened, the tops of their heads, which otherwise the children never saw, their most distinctive characteristics. They moved on and off stage as they appeared and then disappeared into the invisible corners of the softly lit rooms.

  They could see Liddie below. She was standing in the doorway with her back to them, talking to someone deeper in the living room. In a corner of the dining room, Mrs. Gordon and Mr. Hess were dancing, smooth and close. Sometimes she pulled her head back to smile or say something.

  “The hell you say,” someone said loudly in the living room, and the room burst with laughter. Their mother crossed into the hallway below them, back to the kitchen. Her lips were moving. She was talking to herself. Ugh, Nina thought. Embarrassing.

  Someone else was speaking: “… and I said, For Christ’s sake, this is Chicago—we are integrated.”

  After a while their mother was back, holding a tray of glasses that fizzed. They couldn’t hear her, and then suddenly she was arguing again. “I’m sorry,” she said in an unsorry voice. “That means-to-an-end stuff is crap. Crap,” she said. Her neck corded with feeling. The tray was tilted slightly now, and someone took it from her hands. Someone else laughed.

  Nina and Mary giggled too, a little scared. Their mother.

  Just when they were most comfortable, Mack came down the stairs. He pretended not to see them. He stepped on Nina’s back and Mary’s butt. “Oh, God,” he said, dancing on them in his heavy desert boots. “I must be going crazy. The ground is moving. It’s an earthquake; it’s … it’s the end of the world!” They squealed and protested and grabbed at his ankles, but he laughed at them and whirled away. He took the remaining short flights of stairs in one jump each. When he got downstairs and was putting on his jacket, Mary threw two olive pits at him.

  He went to the living room doorway to say good night. It transformed him, having to talk to the adults. He stood there awkwardly, his body hunched and nodding, as though their questions were snowballs he was avoiding. Someone asked him about college, and his voice cracked nervously with his answer.

  As he backed away front the doorway, their mother came out and stood in the hallway with him. “Have you seen this snow?” Her voice was shrill. She gestured at the front door. “Who’s driving?” Hectic color lit her face, and she looked young to Nina suddenly. Like a person, not just their mother. They couldn’t hear Mack’s answer, and then Mother said. “Okay. But no later, not a second later, than one o’clock.”

  “Got it,” he said, and opened the door.

  “But where are your boots?” Mother cried, stepping after him.

  “Mom,” he said, and shut the door quickly behind him.

  Their mother yanked the door back open. “One o’clock,” she yelled. “Or your name is mud.”

  Nina drowsed for a while. At one point their father, going in or out of the living room, spotted them. He came and sat for a moment on the landing and rubbed their backs. His hands were strong and cool on Nina, and she felt perfectly happy. “My nest of vipers,” he said before he left.

  Then Nina dreamed she was at the party too, but invisible, just watching, moving freely among the dancing, laughing couples. She was wearing some clothes from her Barbie doll, which miraculously fit her. But then they began to shrink, to change back to their real size, and as they did, Nina lost her magic, she became visible. Everyone turned to stare at her. She lurched awake. Her mouth was cottony. She sat up and ate some of the food from the tray Liddie had set in a corner of the landing.

  At some point Liddie and some of the adults Nina didn’t know very well must have left. She saw that the remaining group were the grownups she had been spying on all her life, her parents’ oldest friends. The talk was louder, drunker, than before, and mostly incomprehensible—therapy, mortgages, work. Mrs. Baker, who’d been a dancer once, came into the little open space between the dining room and the living room and demonstrated exercises to improve your flexibility and prevent back pain, while the invisible people in the living room whooped and applauded.

  Their mother’s voice got loud again from the living room. She was interrupting someone quieter. “Well, it wasn’t a disease with the ancient Greeks. We just say it’s a disease. We say almost everything is a disease. But that’s not a fact; it’s a judgment. Why don’t we just say it’s not. Let’s just say it’s not. What happens then?”

  She stood in the doorway now, stopped on her way to the kitchen with a bottle in each hand, gripping their necks as though she were about to juggle them. “Oh, happiness,” she said contemptuously. “We all know being heterosexual is the perfect guarantee of that, of course.” She disappeared back into the kitchen. In a minute Nina’s father appeared and started to follow her, but she came back below them, a different bottle in her hand; and then they were talking intensely, arguing—you could tell by their faces, pushed like threats at each other, though you couldn’t hear them.

  “Don’t …” Mother said shrilly, and yanked her elbow out of their father’s hand. Suddenly Dr. Baker was there, touching Mother’s back, talking to her. She turned and said into his face, “I’d adore it,” in another voice entirely. She held the bottle to their father without even looking at him again, so he had to take it. Then she and Dr. Baker moved in a smooth way, not dancing but getting ready to, into the dining room.

  By now Nina had lost all sense of what the time was. Sarah and Mary had fallen asleep for good, and she was herself groggy from cigarette smoke and being up so late.

  Below, their father appeared, with Mrs. Baker. He was facing her, holding her wrist. He led her into the front part of the hallway. His voice was very private, as though they were telling secrets. “A little moment, a nice little tête-à-tête,” he said, stumbling slightly as he stepped backward. Nina thought he was saying tit, and she eased herself up slightly. Mrs. Baker laughed and let their father pull her forward to the bench. They sat, perched awkwardly on the heaped-up coats. Nina’s father’s voice murmured gently, tenderly. All Nina could see through the rail
ings were their heads and shoulders. Her father’s head was bent toward Mrs. Baker. His face seemed to have been opened, made young, as he talked to her. Then he leaned closer, and his face was lost behind the spun gold that frizzed around her head. He was kissing her!

  Nina lay still and felt Mary’s breath hot on her shoulder and neck. It seemed to her that her heart was slowly crumpling like tinfoil into something small and hard and shiny in her chest.

  For a long time their father was bent in toward Mrs. Baker. His head made slow movements, adjustments. His arm had slid around her, he shifted her slightly this way and that. A faint moan rose from one of them.

  Then Mrs. Baker pulled her head back. Nina could see her father’s face again. His mouth was open, and he looked sleepy. Suddenly Mrs. Baker stood up. She stepped across the hall to the door, then turned around. “We can’t do this anymore, David,” she said, looking across at him. But Nina could see her face; it was as pink as it had been when she’d just come in from the cold, and she was smiling tenderly. Nina’s father said something she couldn’t hear, and Mrs. Baker stepped forward as though she would touch him. “That was so long ago,” she said in a pleading voice.

  And then Nina saw her mother, almost at the same moment Mrs. Baker did. There was a quick motion in the hall, one that seemed to connect her mother and Mrs. Baker but left them standing just as they had been. Her father must have seen it too, for he turned, a second or two later, to see where it had started.

  And there was Nina’s mother, standing so still, a sudden burst of laughter like a wall behind her. They all seemed frozen, looking back and forth at each other. Then Nina’s mother said in a trembly voice, “Pay me no mind,” and she went back quickly to the kitchen.

  Nina’s father got up. Coats and scarves slid to the floor. He looked stupidly down at them. He didn’t seem to know what to do. He turned toward Mrs. Baker; he raised his hands and seemed to say something. She nodded, and he followed Nina’s mother out to the kitchen. Mrs. Baker turned and looked out the window in the front door. She was hugging herself.

  Nina lay still as a mouse. She was listening, through the din, for her parents, for the familiar, almost reassuring sound of their arguing. Mrs. Baker, standing so still in the front hall looking out at the snow, seemed to be listening too. But all you could hear were the music and the loud voices in the living room.

  Then Mrs. Baker spun around and began moving quickly in the hall, digging under the coats, kicking at the boots. Nina saw her face, popping red, glazed with tears. She angrily slung a long scarf in two different directions around her head, flattening her halo of hair, transforming herself utterly. She threw a coat on over her shoulders, and then, carrying her boots, she left the house, abruptly, silently.

  Nina waited. It seemed she might have slept. The Gordons came into the hall, put on coats, and left. There was quieter conversation, only one couple moving in the darkened dining room to music. Then she heard her father’s voice, almost natural, joking, in the living room. She sat up, rigid. Mary’s head hit the blanketed landing with a little whump! but she didn’t wake, just puckered her face for a moment. Her father was saying good night; it seemed he was leaving. Yes, he was “called out,” he said.

  He came into the hall and with what seemed to Nina like one continuous motion lifted his coat from the hook on the wall and swung the front door open. He stepped quickly out into the night, pulling the door carefully shut behind him.

  And that was that. He shut the door and he was gone. Nina remembered wanting to call to him just before the door shut, she remembered she’d had something she needed to say, though she couldn’t recollect later what it was. But she was as frozen as we are in dreams when we need to do something but we don’t know what. And then she lay down again, she lay very still on the landing, thinking her father would come back, he must come back; someone needed to carry her sleeping sisters to their beds.

  Sometime much later her mother bent and waked her. Her face was puffy, her voice was gentle, terrible in its tenderness. She was already scooping up Sarah, and Mack stood behind her, with Mary flopped like an oversized doll on his shoulder. Nina didn’t ask any questions. She got up and followed Mack up the attic stairs, pausing twice behind him when he staggered a little under Mary’s weight.

  She sat on her pineapple bed and watched Mack lower Mary gently onto hers. He was transformed, his face in the dark was smooth and scary: a different person from the carefree, mean Mack who had walked across their nest and bodies a few hours earlier. He touched her head before he left too, and it was this gesture, more than anything else, that made Nina understand her father was gone for good, that made her cry when she curled up under the cold covers.

  And though later, of course, Nina saw the apartment her father got for himself—though she sometimes even spent the night—still, when she thought of him during those years he lived away from them, the picture she had in her mind was of her father wandering alone in a world made immense and blank by the snow, a little dark shadow in the distance against a whited ground, looking in at the bright lights that made the other lives, even her life, seem so dramatic, so full of mysterious meaning.

  Chapter 7

  April 1964

  Mack sat in his pajamas in the living room, staring at the television. Randall was kneeling on the floor in front of the set, but he wasn’t watching Wile E. Coyote fall off cliffs, get smacked by trucks, scorched by dynamite. Instead he was playing with a toy Nina had invented for him a few days before, a string tied onto a stick. He bobbed the stick up and down, up and down, and imitated with his head the swaying dip and catch of the string behind it.

  The house was silent except for the explosions and screams on the TV. The little girls had locked themselves in upstairs because Mack had been mean to them. He was in charge, baby-sitting. His father had been gone for almost five months, and his mother was out, doing the weekly grocery shopping.

  Mack knew he was going to get it when she came home. One of the little girls was bound to tell. His mother would yell at him, or cry, or say she needed to be able to count on him. Or just look more tired.

  She had looked awful this morning.

  Randall had waked in the night. Mack had heard him through the air duct that snaked up behind the walls. He was rocking on his mattress, chanting, the steady whump of his head on plaster a gentle shudder in the house. After a few minutes, their mother’s muted voice, more tender than it ever was in daily life, rose into Mack’s room too. Slowly the rocking, the strange singing, stopped. Then her voice sank away, and Mack knew they’d gone to the kitchen, where his mother would drink coffee or bourbon, depending on some decision she made about the hour; and the two of them would sit together at the table, doing a puzzle, or drawing, or—if she was too tired—just staring idly with a similar blankness until the house came to life.

  Mack had lain there a long time, listening to the house’s odd night noises. Then he was touching himself, getting hard. He tried to think about Sharon Fine, who’d been his girlfriend until she moved away a few months earlier. They had spent the last few nights before she left dry-humping on the back seat of his mother’s car, and the memory of that—of the smell of the car’s interior, the touch of Sharon’s flesh, the hard rise of her pubic bone as he pushed and rubbed against it—usually worked to rouse him. But tonight it was difficult to recall Sharon, to recall how she’d looked or felt. It seemed as if she’d been gone forever. Instead he had a sudden image of his younger sisters’ bodies, the shocking bald V, deeply split, under the slope of their bellies. They sometimes played a game they called Bumping Bottoms in Nina and Mary’s room, and Mack had watched them occasionally from the dark of the hallway outside. They kept their dresses on but had their underpants off, and they’d jump around, laughing and screaming and lifting their skirts to that sudden vision, trying to press against each other.

  He’d begun to stroke himself to a regular rhythm, when out of the blue he thought of Randall—Randall with his pants down, w
himpering, pulling at his penis violently—the purpled thing, half erect, flopping from side to side. Mack stopped. It made it all seem too weird. He rolled over on his side.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about it—about screwing, about girls. And then he remembered the last time he’d gone over to his father’s. Liddie had been there too, home for spring break. When they arrived, his father was standing in the hallway saying goodbye to a woman, a woman much younger than his mother, a woman wearing black, all black. Black stockings, a black skirt, a black turtleneck shirt. Her hair was black too, and her eyes were dark, circled with black pencil. Only her skin was a bled white, shocking in contrast to everything else. She’d left a few minutes after Mack and Liddie came in, but Mack had watched his father in the hall with her. He saw his father’s hand, white and spread out—it looked strangely like a starfish to Mack—rest on the woman’s black breast a moment.

  During the meal at his father’s, Liddie had been gay, she’d talked with almost frantic energy about her school. She told anecdotes about the house too, about their mother, all in a mocking tone that made Mack uneasy; but he was glad to have her making noise, because he had nothing to say. As Liddie and his father laughed together at the table, Mack felt like an outsider, like a child forced to sit with parents whose concerns, whose interests, are incomprehensible to him.

  His father drove them home. Liddie sat with him in the front seat and moved the dial quickly from station to station. Just as they turned onto Harper Avenue, Mack’s father asked, “What did you think of Beth?” For a second Mack couldn’t imagine who his father was talking about. Beth? Who was Beth?

  Liddie answered. “She seemed okay. I mean, she was there for about two seconds, Dads.”

  “Uhmmm,” their father said. “And you, Mack?” His head lifted to see Mack in the rearview mirror.

  “What does it matter what I think?” Mack asked furiously.