Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “I’m just curious.” The car moved down the dark street, past Al’s house, the Rosenbergs’, the Murphys’, all the families that lived together. Mack was aware, suddenly, of holding his breath, the way he had as a child when they drove past cemeteries.

  At the square, his father pulled over and cut the engine. He turned, with his hand along the back of the seat, and faced Mack. His smooth, handsome face was kind and concerned. “You seem angry. Have you anything you want to say?” he asked.

  Liddie looked over at Mack too.

  Mack slid to the door. “Are you going to marry her?”

  His father laughed. “What a question!” he said.

  “Ask me then,” Mack said, opening the door. “Ask me when you decide to marry her.” He stepped out and slammed the door.

  No one was awake in the house, and Liddie didn’t come inside for another ten or fifteen minutes. As he roamed frantically through its quiet, Mack knew they were sitting in the dark car, his father and sister, and talking about him—as though he were the crazy one, as though he were disturbed.

  Mack had hit Nina in the back, partly because he could see that she was expecting it.

  His mother had had to wake him to be in charge this morning. It was ten-thirty, and he’d been drifting in and out of a deep, dream-filled sleep for what felt like hours when she bent over him. He opened his eyes and stared blankly up at her for a moment. Her voice was gentle and loving in a way Mack could hardly stand anymore—he was seventeen—and he’d barked, “Okay, I’m not deaf,” as though she’d been screaming at him.

  When he came downstairs, his hair still rumpled from sleep, his face scarred with the print of the folds on his pillow, the little girls were launched into their day, a swirl of projects usually organized by Nina and bought hook, line, and sinker by the younger two. They ignored him. That was fine with Mack. Being in charge mostly meant making sure Randall didn’t hurt himself or wreck anything, but even so, Mack felt burdened by it, resentful. It seemed directly connected to his father’s departure, to that absence it appeared he felt more acutely than anyone else.

  While he grumpily ate Cheerios and cleaned up after himself, he paid no attention to the noise of the girls in the dining room—someone thumping away on the piano, squeals, arguments about what came next in some dance they were creating. But he leaned in when he was about to turn the TV on and told them to quiet down.

  They did for a few minutes. Slowly, though, they forgot about him and got noisier again. This time Mack yelled. “Shut up! We’re watching in here.” Randall didn’t look up, but the girls piped down. Briefly.

  The third time, he went in. “Did you hear me?” he asked. There was pure meanness in his voice. He could feel how nearly out of control he was. The two littler ones froze and watched him with stupid, scared faces, but Nina had been playing the piano, and in defiance, she kept on. She wasn’t even looking his way, but her fingers made mistakes, her back was arched in readiness, and he could see on her face that she knew he was going to hit her. His punch made a noise that opened her mouth, that sounded like a burp when it came out.

  When his mother came home, Mack made the long trip out to the curb three times to get the groceries. By the time he was back with the last load, Mary and Sarah were in the kitchen with her, and he knew by the excitement in their faces when they looked over at him that they’d told. His mother was lifting the food out of sacks on the kitchen table, sorting it into piles. She didn’t meet his eye.

  He opened a bag of Hydrox cookies and took a handful. “Am I off?” he asked her, his mouth full.

  “Yes. Randall’s in the living room?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He’s watching TV.”

  “Well, that’s it, then,” she said. Now she looked wearily at Mack. He stared back defiantly, and she looked away, began pulling more groceries out of the bags. She wasn’t going to say anything. It seemed worse. Once recently, she had actually spanked him, wailing, “What am I going to do about you? What am I going to do?” Mack didn’t know how to react, and so he had laughed at the ineffectuality of the blows through his chinos and all the junk in his back pockets. He was taller than his mother too, and that had made it somehow more comical, more awful. When he laughed, she had turned away sharply, making a strange, guttural cry.

  “What time is Dad coming?” he asked her now, trying to get her attention, wanting her to get mad, to care about him, to get it over with.

  “I don’t know. You made that arrangement,” she reminded him. “Here, Maresy, put this stuff on the shelf in the pantry.” She shoved a brightly colored collection of canned goods over to his sister.

  “One,” he answered himself.

  “One o’clock?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you should try to eat before then. That’s hard work.”

  Mack and his father were going to take down the storm windows and put the screens on. It was April, and for several weeks now he’d been free of the nighttime chore of starting the furnace.

  “What’s for lunch?”

  “You mean, besides cookies?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He took a few more.

  “I don’t know yet. Soup, I guess. Soup and English muffins, let’s say.” She crossed to the counter with an armful of baking things—flour, cornmeal, sugar, bags of chocolate chips.

  “What kind of soup?”

  “What would you like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cream of mushroom, then,” she said, returning.

  “Ugh,” he said.

  “Oh, Mack!” she cried, and slammed the boxes of Bisquick and cake mix together. The girls watched, little teasing smiles animating their faces. He was asking for it.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  Her face tightened, then relaxed. She shook her head. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ll call you when lunch is ready.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be hungry,” he said.

  “Lovey, it makes not one bit of difference to me whether you’re hungry or not,” she said. Her voice was trembling.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said, genuinely wounded, and left the room.

  His father came promptly at one but spent a long time shut in the kitchen with his mother before he called Mack down. His father would be the one talking to him, then. Mack lay on his bed and stared at the sloping attic ceiling. He could imagine what his mother was saying: “I’m at my wit’s end.” She would be smoking, drinking coffee. “I’m at the end of my rope.” “I can’t do a thing with him.” They were the phrases his grandmother had used long ago, only with her they were a kind of joke, because she wasn’t ever at her wit’s end. Mack’s mother often was, especially since his father had moved out.

  His father’s voice called up from the second floor. “Mack!”

  He got up from his unmade bed and crossed to open the door. “Yeah?”

  “I’m ready to roll with these screens. You all set?”

  “Yeah,” Mack said. He came down the stairs two at a time.

  It was mild and damp outside, everything the monotonous faded gray-brown of an early midwest spring. Their noises were magnified in the still, wet air. Mack helped his father set up the big wooden extension ladder in the backyard. They rested it just below Mack’s third-floor window. Then he went back into the house—upstairs, into his own room again. The air felt stale after the heavy moisture outside.

  His father was at the window, his head and shoulders floating there like a nightmare. Mack opened the inside window, pushed the stiffened hooks holding the storm window out of their eyes, tapped the frame out. Now he leaned forward, gripped the heavy storm window, and pushed up, taking most of its weight on his extended arms as they lifted it together off the prongs over the window frame. He had the thought, suddenly, that if he pushed out now on the window, his father would fall backward to the ground and die.

  “Okay, I’ve got it,” his father said. He gripped the storm window, swung it carefully to one side of the la
dder, and started slowly down. He held the window angled awkwardly out, away from the ladder.

  Mack watched him from above, the top of his head getting smaller and smaller. He looked at the whitish patch on his father’s head where the hair had thinned and his skull showed. You couldn’t see this in everyday life, and Mack hadn’t realized how much hair he had lost back there.

  His father came up more quickly, carrying one of the screens. Together they hooked it on the prongs over the window. Then, as his father started down again, Mack turned the rusted wing nuts on the screen’s latches.

  Mack went back down through the house. His mother was flopped on the living room couch, reading, and the girls were at the dining room table with Randall, hard at work with crayons and paper. Outside, he helped his father move the ladder to the next window. Then he climbed back up the stairs, this time into Nina and Mary’s room. Their beds were still unmade too, and the wrinkled sheets exuded their sweet, sweaty smell. Mack crossed to the window and waited until his father appeared on the other side of the glass again, and then they went once more through their slow routine.

  As he and his father worked their way around the house, Mack made this trip over and over. He was in every room of the house for a while, and in the long waits while his father went up and down the ladder—he didn’t want Mack doing this; it was too dangerous—Mack looked around him, as he almost never did. The girls’ rooms both looked the same, every surface littered with dolls, drawings, incompleted projects and activities. Their beds were all a rumple of sheets, like his own, and there were dishes scattered here and there, waiting to be carried down to the kitchen. Liddie’s room was the only neat one in the house, just as it was when she was home. Her bed was crisply made, her clothes put away. Tacked on her wall were magazine photographs of her heroes—James Dean, Maria Callas, Marlon Brando.

  Randall’s room was nearly bare. His bed was a mattress on the floor, to prevent momentum when he rocked at night. There was one shelf of his odd “toys,” no curtains, no pillows. The wallpaper was peeled in long strips where he’d gone wild. On the mattress, neatly spread out, was the red blanket he’d had for years. When you sat for him, the only way to get him to sleep was to cover him entirely with it and tuck it in tightly on all four sides around him. Sometimes his erection stuck up like a tent pole in the middle of the blanket and made the little girls giggle if they were helping.

  Mack didn’t really look at his mother’s room, just waited by the windows for his father. He knew exactly what was here anyway, exactly the way the bottles, the combs, the silver-backed brush and mirror, the few pieces of family jewelry, were spread out on her dresser; exactly what pictures dotted the walls—his grandparents, his uncles’ children, his sisters and himself and Randall at various stages of growth. He even knew what clothes were hanging in her closet and what they smelled like, for it was in the back of her closet, on some useless shelves, that he had hidden as a little boy when he wanted her to come seeking him, to hold him. And everything was the same as it had been in his childhood, as though from some early stage on she hadn’t had the energy to buy things or change things, to try to make things nice. She had even kept the big bed she and his father used to sleep in together. The unused pillows were neatly stacked on his side, as though she was hoping he might come back any night.

  As they moved from window to window, Mack had a sense of being neither in nor out, but somehow both places at once; a sense of being with his father but seeing him half the time only through a glass, crazily. He felt preoccupied, weird. His arms ached from the weight of the storms, his fingers were stiff from turning the rusted wing nuts. He was dreamy and confused and nearly dizzy from the work; and so, even though he’d warned himself earlier to get ready, even though he’d known it was coming sometime, he was startled when his father turned to him and said: “Let’s take a break before we put these away, Mack. I want to talk to you.” They were outside. His father sat down on the back-porch stairs.

  Mack didn’t answer. He stepped away from his father and picked up a few stones, started chucking them at the train embankment.

  His father spoke to his back. “Your mother tells me you’ve been hard on the kiddies.”

  Mack aimed carefully and plocked the stone off the trunk of the silver maple.

  “Well?”

  There was an edge of impatience in his father’s voice. Mack smiled. “They’re hard on me.”

  “They’re half your age.”

  “Yeah, but there’s three of them. If you add them together, they’re twice my age.”

  “Let’s stick to the matter at hand, shall we?”

  Mack was silent. He aimed now at the rail along the top of the embankment.

  “Would you like to tell me what happened?”

  “No. I wouldn’t like to.”

  “Well then, will you please tell me what happened?”

  Mack threw again at the rail. “I was trying to watch TV.”

  “And?”

  “And they kept making noise.”

  “And?”

  “And I told them to stop, and they didn’t, so I hit Nina.”

  “Why Nina?”

  Mack hit the swing set this time. “She was the one playing the piano. She’s the biggest. She gives me a pain.”

  “Stop throwing those stones!”

  Mack stopped, frozen.

  “And get over here.”

  He turned and walked over by his father. He stood a few feet in front of him, looking down. He wished his father would stand up. He didn’t like this angle, this vision of his thinning hair, his gleaming skull under it.

  “Now look, son. Everyone around here’s under a lot of strain right now. No one has a lot of resilience. The edges are frayed.”

  “That’s not my fault,” Mack said.

  “No, it’s not. Quite the opposite, I know. But you have a choice about how to respond to that. You can make it better, or you can make it worse. It’s up to you really. And I’d like you to think about it. To think hard about it. That choice.” There was a long pause.

  “Somehow, Mack …” His father stopped. Then started again. He had made his voice gentle and reasonable. “You’re the oldest one home now, Mack. The way you handle things sets an example for the rest. I’d like you to be asking a bit more of yourself.”

  All of a sudden, Mack felt he might cry. When he finally spoke, his voice was high-pitched. He sounded like a little boy. “How would you know what I’m asking of myself?” He meant this, but he was gratified, too, to see the way his father’s face looked, suddenly soft and sorrowful.

  “I can’t know,” his father said gently. “I can’t know unless you talk to me about it.”

  “I can’t talk to you about it.”

  His father looked down at where his hands dangled useless between his knees. Then up at Mack again. “Well, would you like to talk to someone else?”

  Mack looked away, sharply. He knew what was coming. “What do you mean?”

  “I could arrange for you to see someone—a psychiatrist whose business it is to make it easy for adolescents to talk about what’s bothering them.” Mack stood motionless, looking off through the misty air at the row of empty backyards—the Frawleys’, the Gordons’, Mrs. Dodge’s. “It strikes me that it might be helpful to you to have such a person in your life, to help you understand why you lose control of yourself.”

  “I don’t lose control.”

  “Well, what would you call it, then?”

  Mack spun and looked directly at his father. “I make the wrong choice.”

  His father’s face changed; closed, suddenly. “Perhaps you need to get control of that, then,” he said.

  His father was angry, but he wouldn’t say so. It drove Mack nuts. His mother at least knew she was mad when she was. She yelled, she hit. She even threw stuff sometimes. His father just talked.

  Now he was saying, “It’d be one thing, Mack, if you were like Randall, if there were something wrong with you. But yo
u’re not. You know very well what’s going on around here, how difficult a time it is for everyone. But you persist in this kind of unhelpful—”

  Mack couldn’t stand this. “But I am like Randall!” he cried. He began to rock from foot to foot in front of his father, his head swinging, an ecstatic smile on his face. He cried out, “I am like Randall! I’m just like him. See? I am Randall.” He began to chant rhythmically, “I am Randall, I am Randall.”

  For a moment his father sat speechless. He was tongue-tied, this imitation was so perfect, so unexpectedly cruel. Then he stood up. “That is enough!” he shouted.

  But Mack couldn’t stop, though his face was fearful now. Maybe his father would hit him. But his father just stood there, watching Mack dance. Then at the dining room window he saw the girls, attracted by his father’s loud voice. They were staring at him too, they could tell instantly who he was imitating, and their mouths made O’s of surprise. Mack danced a minute more. Then he slowed, stopped. He turned away from all of them. He wanted to do something; he wanted something awful, something violent, to happen.

  After a moment his father said to him softly, “I just don’t know what to say to you, Macklin.”

  “Then don’t say anything,” Mack said furiously. His father sat down again, but Mack continued to stand. A few raindrops had started to fall. The girls, all but Nina, drifted back into the darkness of the house. A train ratcheted by, screaming.

  Mack knew his father would say something. He always had something to say. Mack stood waiting, as tense as Nina at the piano when she was expecting him to hit her this morning. His eyes slid to his father and caught him staring back, his face full of helplessness. Mack looked quickly away.

  When his father got up without speaking and began to carry one of the storm windows down the open bulkhead into the basement, Mack felt as shocked, as uncertain of what to do next, as he had the night his father moved out.

  *

  Late that afternoon, Mack sat watching TV again. It was pouring outside—silver sheets of rain sliding down the window—and nearly dark. The table was set for dinner, and the smell of roast beef permeated the air. There was the sound of conversation, of music on the radio from the kitchen. Sarah came to the living room doorway, gripped it, and swung in and out for a moment. Then she broke free and ran over to the couch, where Mack was sitting. She landed on her knees the first time, then flipped over and was sitting next to him.