Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “What’s on?” she said.

  “I don’t know. This is just ending.”

  The watched the ads silently. Wonder Bread. Spic and Span. Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia.

  “What’s regularity?” Sarah asked.

  “When you’re regular. You know, not weird.”

  She looked at him a moment, weighing it. She was the prettiest of the three little girls. She had big, steady brown eyes, which rested on him now, trying to read him. “Not the truth,” she said sternly.

  He shrugged, took a pillow, and swung it into her lap. Her legs and upper body folded together around it. Then she relaxed, and they watched again. It was a news program. Sarah left the pillow on her lap.

  After a minute she said, “I didn’t tell.”

  “Didn’t tell what?”

  “I didn’t tell on you.”

  He looked at her. She held the pillow and watched the screen, unblinking. “Who cares?” Mack said, and relaxed in his corner. “It doesn’t even matter.”

  The program was about Vietnam. Anguished, the announcer called it. His voice was deep, serious; it boomed evenly on about protests against the government. Suddenly there was a fire on the screen and people standing around watching it. In the flames you could see a shape, motionless. The cutout of a body. But no, the announcer was saying it was a person, a Buddhist monk. He was immolating himself, the announcer said.

  “What’s immolating?” Sarah asked.

  “Burn,” Mack answered, watching the flames, the still figure, the people not doing anything about it.

  “Eeeuu,” Sarah said. She was almost leaning on Mack.

  “No kidding,” he answered. Sarah lifted her hand and started twirling a strand of hair. Without looking at her, Mack reached over and gently pulled her arm down. How would it feel, he wondered, to care so much about something that you’d be willing to die for it? No: not to die necessarily; but to have pain. The worse pain, the pain of burning. The flame was guttering, dwindling now around the blackened monk, but he hadn’t moved. The picture cut away. Still photos of the country’s leader, his wife.

  Mack was remembering the time when Randall burned himself. They were having a huge bonfire. Three or four of them—the bigger boys on the block—had worked for hours raking the pile of leaves together. Mr. Rosenberg was in charge. All the mothers gave them bags of marshmallows. They didn’t start until after dark, and the flames rose fragrant and magical and made the children’s faces look as though they were glowing from within. Randall had put his hand right in, before anyone could stop him. He took it out almost immediately, but he didn’t cry or scream or anything. If Mack and Liddie hadn’t seen it, no one would have known until later—until they saw the raw flesh, the blisters—that it had happened. When Mack asked his father about it afterward, his father said that Randall did feel the pain at one level. But that his psychological makeup meant that he’d retreated from his body, from reality, so that he didn’t react as we did.

  Maybe the Buddhists retreated like that, Mack thought. He felt Sarah’s hot weight on his arm, her head and shoulders resting against him. They watched.

  Mack told his mother he didn’t know what time he’d be home, and went up the street to Al’s house. Together they walked through the rain down Fifty-seventh Street to Steinway’s. Tucker Franklin was meeting them there. They didn’t much like Tucker—not even girls liked him, although he might have been the best-looking boy in class. But his clothes were too expensive, he smiled too much: he was slimy. Still, he was one of the few boys who had his own car, so they went out with him a lot.

  Mack’s friends were all sixteen or seventeen. They all had their licenses. Sometimes on Saturday nights all they did was drive, carloads of them. They drove all over the city. Someone would have heard of a place downtown where they had good fried shrimp to take out. They’d drive there, pass the greasy cartons and the little cups of hot sauce back and forth in the car. Someone else heard that if you went down by the planetarium parking lot and just walked around, you could watch people doing it in their cars. You could tell which ones to look at, too, because the cars rocked a little with the fucking motion. They drove to girls’ houses, to parties they heard about in South Shore or the North Side. Someone knew about a place that sold beer with no ID, a bar in the ghetto that served anyone. They crashed slumber parties, they dropped in where someone’s girlfriend was baby-sitting. They had music on the radio, they yelled out the windows at girls walking in threes and fours, at other cars full of boys.

  They were all good boys. They were all applying to college. They were all on teams, they made A’s and B’s, they sometimes had girlfriends. But what they liked to do most of all on Saturday night was drive around. When Mack was dating Sharon Fine, he had missed it. He had felt left out when Al or Terry or Soletski had talked about what they’d done without him.

  Tonight they sat for a long time in the booths by the windows at Steinway’s, drinking Cokes and waiting for someone good to walk by. But the steady drizzle meant there wasn’t much life on the street. A group of three girls came in and sat with them awhile, pushed into a tangled, exciting intimacy because the booth was meant for only four people. But they were pre-freshmen, too young, and when they asked the boys to come to a party they knew about, the boys were suddenly contemptuous and mean to them, and they left.

  Finally they went with Tucker to a party in South Shore; but they didn’t stay long. Too many girls they didn’t know. They stopped on the way back at a drive-in on Stony Island for hamburgers and French fries. Then they dropped into the Tropical Hut to see if anyone they knew was there, but the witch in pancake makeup who ran the place gave them a hard time. “Are you going to order anything, boys?” she asked about twenty times. “If you’re not going to order anything, you’ll have to leave.”

  Now it was nearly eleven. There was nothing to do. Mack felt the kind of restlessness that once or twice recently had gotten him into a fight. They were driving along the Midway—the wide grassy band dividing Hyde Park from Woodlawn—on the wrong side, the Woodlawn side, when Tucker remembered that Kathy Wood lived over here. They made noises, crude remarks. Mack held his fists in front of his chest and said in falsetto, “Kathy Wood. You bet she would!”

  Kathy Wood had huge breasts. She wore tight sweaters so that everyone could see them. But even though everyone talked about her—about her tits—no one ever asked her out. She wasn’t pretty, she wore too much makeup, she was too quiet, and her breasts were too big, freakishly big. It would be like taking out a spass. You wouldn’t do it.

  Now Tucker was saying she had a crush on him, that she had written him a note a couple of weeks earlier. He said he bet he could get her to show them her tits. A dollar each.

  They sat in the car while Tucker ran up the long, glistening walk and rang her bell. After a moment, the door opened and he disappeared. He was gone awhile, and they got restless. Terry needed to pee. Mack began a narrative describing what was happening between Tucker and Kathy, in a syrupy French accent borrowed from Charles Boyer. Terry got out of the car, finally, and disappeared around the side of Kathy’s house.

  When the door opened, Mack stopped talking. He watched Tucker come back down the walk. Tucker was smiling. They rolled down the windows and looked out into the light rain at him.

  He leaned against the car. “C’mon,” he said. “I think this will work out. She’s alone.”

  This, it turned out, was not quite the case. She was baby-sitting for a younger sister, who was asleep upstairs, and when they all came stomping in—wiping the wet off their feet with clumsy thuds, talking loudly—she was nervous, she kept telling them to keep it quiet. She led them downstairs through the regular part of the basement—a washer and dryer, stacks of paint cans, a huge cast-iron furnace like the one Mack tended at home—to a rec room with one fluorescent bulb floating in a metal reflector above the Ping-Pong table. The other half of the room slid away into darkness.

  Mack was restless and excited. S
omething was going to happen! He began to sort through a stack of forty-fives in the darkest corner of the room, squinting over each label, pretending not to listen to Tucker working on Kathy. (“Listen, we all talk about you all the time. No joke. Half the guys in the junior class are crazy to take you out. I’m not kidding.”)

  Mack put on a few records. Soletski and Terry had started to play Ping-Pong. Al began hitting a punching bag in rhythm to the music. There was enough noise so that you couldn’t really hear Tucker except when a record stopped. He was sitting next to Kathy on the couch, talking to her earnestly and sincerely. Abruptly, though, he came over to Mack. He remembered he might have some beers in the trunk, and he asked Mack if he’d go out and check. “I’d go myself, but …” He gestured behind him. “You know.”

  “Your servant, your humble servant,” Mack said, backing away toward the door and bowing to Tucker over and over.

  It was black and wet outside. The rain had softened, and the air smelled clean. For a moment Mack had the impulse to leave, just to walk home alone in the wet spring night. He stood for a long time under the little overhang by the front door, thinking about it. Then he walked out to Tucker’s car. Rolled into corners of the trunk, just as Tucker thought, were seven Black Labels. Mack gathered them up awkwardly and slammed the trunk shut on the empty, echoing street. He felt around in the glove compartment and found a church key. He went back into the house, down to the ugly basement.

  Tucker was dancing with Kathy now, his hands working her back. She seemed lost in pleasure, but when she saw Mack hand the first beer can to Al, she jerked away from Tucker. “Oh, my God!” she said. “Oh, you guys! God, you’ve got to remember to take the cans with you when you go. Oh, if my parents thought I’d been drinking … Oh, my God.” Mack saw that she wasn’t wearing the layer of makeup she usually had on in school. It made her look younger, more normal. He turned away from her and gave a can to Soletski.

  Tucker had followed her. He folded his arms around her again, talking all the while. “What do you think we are, idiots? No one will ever know. Don’t worry about it. C’mon. No one’s leaving anything behind.”

  They danced some more. When the record stopped, Mack put another one on quickly. He selected a stack of them, all slow ones. After three or four songs, Tucker and Kathy stayed locked together even on the breaks while the next record dropped. Mack was watching from the couch, sipping his tepid beer slowly. Tucker’s hands had begun to slide up and down Kathy’s sides, along her waist and breasts. Mack had a little hard-on, watching. In the break after “You Belong to Me,” before the next record dropped, he could hear Tucker asking Kathy to unhook her bra. “I just want to feel you without this thing,” he said. His hand was resting on her tight blue sweater where the strip of her bra cut visibly into the flesh of her back. “C’mon. I mean, what will it hurt? I won’t try to touch them, I promise. I just want to feel you.”

  She seemed to be objecting, but coyly, flirtatiously; and then the music started up again. When Kathy had her back to Mack, Tucker grinned at him over her shoulder. But his lips never stopped moving by her ear.

  All the boys were grinning now. They didn’t meet each other’s eyes, and everyone was busy doing something, but they were all grinning. And each time the record stopped, there was a frozen kind of attentiveness in the air while they tried to hear Tucker’s murmuring voice.

  Tucker and Kathy had been dancing for half an hour or so, when suddenly he said loudly, “How bout cutting that light, you guys?”

  Kathy was smiling, her eyes shut.

  She’d agreed to something! Mack felt a pitiless contempt for her. He got up and reached for the light pull.

  But Soletski was playing Ping-Pong with Al now, and he said he wanted to go to twenty-one. Mack didn’t want to seem too eager anyway, and so he sat back down and waited through two more records. They all listened to the music, to the pock of the ball, and smiled crazily at each other. Finally it was Soletski who turned the light off. He came and sat next to Mack on the couch.

  It still wasn’t completely dark. The door to the other part of the basement was open, and there was a bare bulb lighting that space. A strange parallelogram of light fell into the rec room. Mack could see Tucker and Kathy, but not Al, who was somewhere in the back of the room, in the dark. Terry had come over to the couch now too. Tucker slowly moved Kathy to just outside the slice of light. After a few minutes, she reached up behind her—her elbows looked like wings—and fumbling through her sweater, she unhooked her bra. Tucker’s hands lifted to her sides, pulled at the sweater from there, trying to release her breasts. Finally you could see the boing of one as it flopped out under the soft wool, even bigger than it was in the bra. Tucker said “Oh!” so loudly you could hear him over the music. He flattened Kathy against his chest and arched against her.

  On the couch they all sat, staring. Tucker danced with her a long while. Mack changed the stack twice. In the end Tucker had stopped moving his feet. He was just swaying. He had Kathy turned with her side to them. They could all see his busy hands sliding along the covered breast. Mack could hear Tucker talking, telling her how good she felt. Mack wanted to touch himself, but he was embarrassed to. The music stopped and started, over and over, and they all watched Tucker’s hand, and the band of white skin that slowly widened between her pants and her sweater.

  Kathy was holding tight around Tucker’s neck now. Her hips moved slowly against him. Tucker’s hand slid under the edge of the sweater. They watched her gut suck in, heard her inhale. His hand moved up. You could see it under the sweater resting on her breast, squeezing, letting go. Mack tried to imagine what it must feel like. Sharon Fine hadn’t let him go this far. Tucker’s hand was moving faster now; it was as though he were milking her tit. The sweater had pushed up on his arm, and Mack saw glimpses of the breast, huge and fat and white—bluish, almost—sliding around under his fingers.

  Then Tucker just pushed the sweater up—he just did it!—and there it was. Mack stared at the nipple. Tucker’s hand came back to it, quickly, but very gently now. He was letting them see. Soletski made a noise, and then the music stopped again. They could hear Tucker’s voice, muffled behind her arms. “C’mon, sure. Let me look.” She murmured. “Oh, please. C’mon. I know they’re so great. Just let me look.” But she was holding tight, as though she’d never let go.

  Mack was frantically adding two or three records to the stack, starting the machine all over, looking back and forth as much as he could at Tucker’s fingers and the fat white thing pushing out between them.

  When the music set them in motion, Tucker’s fingers began again. He pulled the nipple out, made it longer. “Jesus!” Terry whispered. It was as though Tucker heard this. He began doing stunts. He held the nipple at them, wiggled it back and forth, poked his finger far into its pinkish tip. He pretended to squirt it in their direction. They couldn’t believe it. Mack ached. He could feel Soletski or Terry moving, the rhythm of the couch. Tucker was really talking now: “Oh, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Just let us look. These guys too. They’re my friends. They want to see. Nah. No one’ll tell. Just for one second.”

  And then her head pulled back, she turned to the three of them on the couch. She actually sort of smiled at them, as though she were a person, as though they might be expected to like her. Then, as she buried her head against Tucker’s shoulder, she turned her body away from him, open to them. One of Tucker’s hands held her head down on his shoulder, the other moved across her exposed chest, lifted both breasts.

  Suddenly she spun back against him, embraced him again. Tucker began kissing her, holding her butt and nearly lifting her up as he jerked into her. Her breasts squished flat. Mack couldn’t see them anymore. He realized that his mouth was open, his throat dry. Then there was no music, and he could hear the breathing in the room.

  After a few moments Tucker straightened up a little, pulled her sweater down. He lifted his hands and loosened her arms from around his neck. He stepped away from
her, into the light.

  She squinted at him and then looked over to the couch. It was as though she had just waked from a nap; it reminded Mack of his sisters. Her eyes were puffy, her hair frazzled. Her sweater was ruckled strangely above her breasts, on account of the pushed-up bra.

  “Well, ah,” Tucker said. His voice was loud and casual. “I guess we better go now.” He was backing up.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “My parents won’t be home till real late.”

  “Yeah, but I have a—uh—” He looked at his watch. “A twelve-thirty curfew.”

  The guys on the couch were getting up. They edged ahead of Tucker to the open door. Al emerged from the darkness. No one was talking but Tucker. “I’d like to stay. I’d really like to, Kathy. But—” He spread his hands. “I got this curfew.” His grin was dopey, helpless.

  Mack was at the door. He looked back once at Kathy’s face in the funny light. Ahead of him he heard Soletski and Terry running up the stairs. They were starting to laugh. Al pushed from behind him and followed them. As Mack started up, Tucker was coming out the rec room door, almost walking backward. Kathy followed him. Tucker was close to laughter; Mack could hear it in his voice.

  “But listen,” he was saying. “I’ll see you in school Monday, right?”

  Mack was nearly running now too, but he stopped at the top of the stairs to look down once more. Kathy’s face was lifted up at them; she understood now what had happened. If they stayed they could watch her cry. Tucker was actually pushing past Mack, his voice cracking. “Thanks a lot,” he said, he brayed, and snorts of laughter erupted from him as he ran for the front door, open to the wet black night.