Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

Mack was the last one out. He ran too, but not fast enough. Before he was outside he could hear her crying start in the basement, an involuntary sharp wail, as though she were in pain, as though she had burned herself.

  In the car they were noisy—laughing, talking about her boobs, about how bitchin’ cool Tucker was. Mack got in and they peeled out, the tires squealing. He looked back at the open front door. For a moment he felt bad that he hadn’t shut it behind him. It wasn’t a safe neighborhood, and she might not come up from the basement for a while.

  The radio was on; they were all talking at once. Everyone got his wallet out, and they began an elaborate, laughing exchange of ones, fives, to pay Tucker off. “Want to know the best part?” Tucker asked as they drove down Fifty-ninth Street. “The best part is, we left the beer cans!” They were hysterical, Mack too, laughing, whumping each other till they cried.

  Tucker did have a curfew, it turned out. He dropped Mack and Al at Blackstone, and they walked home, hardly speaking, suddenly. The water-weighted air floated in garish clouds under the high streetlamps. No one else was on the street.

  “Did you feel sorry for her?” Mack asked after a minute. Al was his best friend.

  “Kind of. Not right then. But afterward. Tucker is …” His voice trailed off.

  “Yeah,” Mack said. “He’s an asshole. But we did it too—you know what I mean?”

  “Well, it’s not the same, though,” Al said.

  “I don’t know. We watched, didn’t we? Maybe we’re worse, actually. We paid him money to do it for us.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not.” Al was shaking his head. “It’s not the same.” They were almost at Harper Avenue.

  “Well, maybe not,” Mack said. “Listen, are you hungry or anything? Want to go back to the Tropical Hut?”

  “Nah,” Al said. “What? Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mack said. “I just don’t feel like …” He raised his shoulders. “I don’t know. You’re not hungry?”

  “No. And I got to get home anyway. There’s not enough time. My deadline’s one. We’d barely get there and I’d have to …”

  “Yeah,” Mack said.

  “I would otherwise.”

  “Yeah,” Mack said, and raised his hand slightly at his hip as he turned into the square.

  Al stood watching him for a few seconds. Then he called out, “It’s not the same, Mack.” Mack kept walking.

  The houses were dark around the square, except for the Graysons porch light. There was a glow from the rear of Mack’s house, though. The kitchen. Mack went down the side walk to the backyard to see who was awake.

  His mother, alone tonight, was sitting at the table, reading under the wall lamp. The light over her head made her dark hair look white. Next to her, cigarette smoke rose straight, then cirrussed in some little wind. She was wearing her old red bathrobe. She was utterly still, as she never was during the day. Mack felt like a spy, as though he were seeing something private, something it was wrong to look at. This was how she looked when she thought she was alone, when she thought no one was watching her. She turned a page, reached for the cigarette and pulled on it, sat in the cloud she released.

  All of a sudden her head lifted, she swung it to look at the kitchen doorway. She must hear something, Mack thought. Then, after a few seconds, she slowly turned to the window: she was staring straight out to where he stood in the side yard, though he was sure she couldn’t see him. But Mack felt as though they were looking right into each other’s hearts, as though there were no glass between them. Mack felt somehow that she’d been watching him with this deep gaze all night, that she had known, had always known, what he was doing. Without blaming him, she saw who he was, how he was. His throat ached.

  Her head bent down again. In a moment she turned the page. Some part of him wanted to call out to her.

  He backed up slowly, his eyes steady on her still form. He stopped when he touched the fence. For a minute he stood leaning against it. He felt a sense of desperation, of trapped yearning for something nameless, something he couldn’t have guessed at. Then he turned and climbed the fence, dropped silently onto the weedy embankment, and scrambled up.

  It was a different world up here, with strange bluish lights high overhead. His childhood was full of myths about this world. About live rails, attempted suicides. Maimings. There were ten or twelve sets of tracks going north and south on the wide rise. Mack walked south for a while, not looking at the dark houses, at the familiar backyards of the street. He picked up a couple of rocks. He threw one across the shiny rails, trying to skip it over them as though they were still water.

  Behind him, far away, he heard a train. He turned and saw the distant headlight growing larger three tracks over. He stepped back, out of the way, to the edge of the embankment. The wild metal shriek came closer, screamed down at him. It was probably the last of the scheduled commuter trains from downtown, the noisiest of the trains that ran past their house.

  Suddenly it was there. The wind of its passing slapped against Mack; the noise was all around him. The wide yellow squares of light flipped by, dizzyingly fast. He saw one set of head and shoulders in the first car through the glass; none in the second. His arm was cocked. As the last car screamed past, he threw it forward with all his strength, and the stone rocketed into the glass, splintering it, multiplying light into the car.

  Chapter 8

  August 1964

  Nina was playing the piano, forced to do thirty minutes directly before her lesson, because her mother had discovered she’d practiced only twice this week. The metronome nagged, and she arched her fingers and worked through her piece mechanically and softly. It was the Moonlight Sonata. Normally she played it emotionally, giving it a feverish, melodramatic quality. Sometimes she could bring herself to tears this way, and this weeping—over Beethoven, over beauty—made her feel purified, lifted her out of everything she thought of as ordinary and difficult in her life.

  Today, though, she wasn’t even listening to how it sounded. She paid no attention, either, to the noise of her sisters at play with the other children on the square—their shouts filtered through the dusty, paint-dotted screen in the dining room. Today she was eavesdropping, trying to hear what Retta and her mother were saying in the kitchen. A moment ago she had heard Retta tell her mother she had bought a gun.

  Lainey’s voice had been instantly anguished. “A gun!” she cried. Then she paused, and when she spoke again, it was a lament. “A gun, Retta. Oh, why?” Through their voices came the thump of the iron. It was Retta’s laundry day, and the house smelled of heated cloth and bleach.

  “For company,” Retta answered. She was never intimidated by Lainey’s sorrow. “Jus to keep me company.”

  Lainey’s voice went up and down for a while—Nina could hear only a phrase or two—and Retta answered her. Nina started playing a scale so she wouldn’t have to think about the music. No one would ever notice anyway. It was so hypocritical—her mother just wanted the practice time. She never even listened to what Nina was playing. This was because Liddie had the musical gifts; everyone knew it. Nina had wanted lessons at first, and even now she loved the music. But no one encouraged her, no one wanted to hear it, because they were used to Liddie’s real ability. When her father asked her about her lessons, which he did sometimes—especially if he’d recently made out a check to her teacher—his question was, “Still thumping away on the old pianner, Nina?” And she would have to answer as though she, too, knew how foolish it was: “Yep.”

  Recently Mary also had been discovered to have a gift—Mary, whom Nina had always seen as simply an echo to her own voice, the agent of her imagination. Now she was enrolled in advanced science classes, and Nina had begun to be scared about herself. How was she ever to be special, to be great, without some gift too?

  She heard he mother say sharply and clearly, “Are you telling me that gun is in this house?”

  “Don’t get all bothered,” Retta said. “I’ve got it put away. A
in’t nobody goin’ to find that gun.”

  “I don’t like it, Retta. What if one of the children … ?”

  “I told you don’t worry. Now don’t worry.”

  There was silence for a moment. Probably her mother was smoking, blowing twin streams from her nostrils. Sometimes she let thick sheets of smoke rise from her mouth and enter her nose. Nina and her sisters called that waves. When their mother did it, they said she was making waves. “And how!” Liddie had said when they used this term in front of her.

  “Besides,” Nina’s mother said suddenly, “what’s the point?”

  “The point is”—and Retta smacked the iron down for emphasis—“let somebody try takin’ my money off me again.”

  “Oh, Retta, you wouldn’t be capable of such a thing. Shooting someone?”

  “You bet I would,” Retta said.

  “I don’t believe it,” Nina’s mother said quickly.

  “You don’t need to,” Retta said. “But the next time some boy so high on drugs he don’t know what he’s doin’ says, ‘Gimme your money,’ he’s gonna believe.”

  “Oh, Retta, you’re breaking my heart.”

  “Girl, your heart is bound to be broken. You want to believe the world is not a bad place, and the world is a bad place, so your heart is gonna be broke. Time and time again. I can’t be sorry for you.”

  Retta often spoke this way to Lainey. She was the only one who did, and Nina always felt a little frightened by it. But Lainey never got angry, never fought with Retta about this tone, as she would have if one of the children had tried it. “I’m here to tell you,” Retta would pronounce, and Lainey would listen to her tell whatever it was. Listen with what seemed like respect and curiosity. “Time you grew up,” she’d tell Lainey if she expressed disbelief about something Retta felt was plainly the bitter truth. And almost all Retta’s truths were bitter.

  But Nina sensed that Retta admired her mother too. She defended her to the children. “That woman,” she’d say, and shake her head in awe. Lainey often napped during the days when Retta was in the house, and if they made too much noise, Retta was on them like a fury, bursting without knocking into Nina and Mary’s room or a playroom they’d made in the basement. She was a skinny woman, with yellowy-brown skin and a pronounced underbite that made her look angry anyway, and when she frowned at them and scolded, she was just plain ugly. “Here, don’t you know your mother been up all night with that Randall? And you makin’ all this noise? Well, don’t.”

  At their house Retta wore strange costumes to work in—stained dresses, or shirts that didn’t fit. She rolled her stockings down like thick anklets arid slipped into big men’s shoes. But she wasn’t just their Retta. She arrived a different person, wearing a suit usually, an elegant veiled hat. And Nina had once seen her moving slowly down Fifty-seventh Street, her high heels giving her walk a gentle sashay. She was smoking a lazy cigarette and looking like a movie star, if Negroes could be movie stars. Nina had remembered her full name then, so amazing on the Christmas card envelope where she’d seen it that she’d had to ask her mother, “Who the heck is this—Florette DeLacey?”

  But the truth was, Retta didn’t need to scold them very often anymore. The girls were careful of their mother since their father had left. They’d been frightened into it, for it had been awful, especially at first.

  In the days right after their father moved out, whatever semblance of order their lives had had collapsed completely. Lainey functioned only around Randall. The rest of them were left to fend for themselves. They would go in to wake Lainey when they got home from school. Her eyes would be swollen from weeping, her voice thick. “What time is it?” she’d ask. And if it wasn’t close to Randall’s drop-off time, she’d burrow deeper into the covers, into her misery. “Look, why don’t you chickadees get a little money from my purse and head to the store for a snack. Whatever you like this time. And bring me some coffee. Hills Brothers drip grind. Be sure it says drip. It’s no good to me unless it’s good and drippy.” Directing them to her purse, her white arm would rise from under the covers in the shade-drawn twilight of her room and point, vaguely, away, away.

  At first they took only what they needed, and they tried to buy things they thought of as healthy—hot dogs, Velveeta, frozen pot pies, or TV dinners. But when they realized that she didn’t care, she didn’t even notice what they were doing, their purchases changed. They would take five dollars, ten dollars, and buy whatever they wanted—Sara Lee cream cheese cakes, big bags of Fritos, Twinkies, bottles of Coke—things she would never have allowed in the house. For three days running at one point, Mary ate nothing but Choco-mallows, and Lainey didn’t even know it. Months later, Nina found a coffee cake they’d hidden in the playroom, blackened and pulsing with the motion of greedy ants. Her rush of nausea seemed connected to the memory of that frightening time, and she threw the pan into the darkest corner of the basement in revulsion.

  It was Mack who finally took charge, Mack who was changed because of all this. His meanness lost its gaiety and took on a purposive quality. He began to tell them when to fix meals, what to buy. He made them cook and clean up. Once, he grabbed Mary and started to choke her. She thought it was a game and began to scream and struggle, laughing in his grip. But then he stopped and held out the dingy beads of dirt and sweat that had rubbed off in his hands. “See that?” he said. “It’s disgusting. Tonight you take a bath.”

  Nina remembered once coming downstairs—he’d yelled up to her room, told her to get to the kitchen and fix hamburgers—and hearing his voice in the second-floor hallway. It was so gentle, so persuasive, that for a moment she thought it was her father talking, her father as she’d heard him only every now and then—with patients, or when one of them was hurt. But when she looked, it was Mack, tall and skinny, slouched in the doorway of their mother’s darkened room. He was telling her she needed to get up, Randall would be back soon. “And we’ve got dinner going for you,” he said, as gently as a lover.

  And somehow, it seemed as though all alone he did it. He woke her up, he brought her back to life. And though her withdrawal had lasted only a few weeks, it had the endless, fascinating, and repetitive quality of nightmare when Nina recollected it.

  That part was over; but for months longer they would wake several times a week to a new noise in the house—their mother, talking on the telephone in their father’s study, her voice strident, hysterical, a series of obscene accusations about their father and other women. Nina sometimes wept to hear her use the same words the boys used at school—-fuck, screw, asshole—words Nina understood only in the general sense: they were dirty, they were bad.

  Once, just once, their father’s voice was there in the night too, summoned by—what?—their mother’s threats, her rage? He was shouting back at her, the same words. He yelled the names of people he’d slept with, people he’d fucked. Some of them Nina didn’t know, but some were mothers on the block. He said Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Masur had slept with other people too. When her mother started to cry, he told her she was just pretending she hadn’t known, he told her she must have known. “You willed yourself not to see it, the same way you’ve willed everything else around here, all this goddamned perfection. The whole thing was a lie,” Nina heard him say. “The pretty family with the pretty autistic boy and all the perfect children. All to make you feel all right about yourself.” His voice thrilled with meanness. Nina was standing outside her bedroom, on the third-floor landing. She had thought, when she first heard his voice, that she’d go down and make them stop.

  “Oh, liar! liar! liar!” Mother shrieked. “It’s you—you who believe in perfection, who want everyone perfect, everyone cured, fixed with your … psychiatric crap. Fix yourself, then! Make yourself able to love. To love where everything isn’t perfect!”

  Suddenly Mack was on the dark landing with Nina, white and flat as a cutout figure in his pj’s. “What are you doing out here?” he whispered sharply.

  He answered himself: “Y
ou’re listening in.” His voice was disgusted. He came over to her and pushed her toward her room, a sharp push, like punching her. “Get back in there, or you’ll be sorry.”

  Nina ran and shut her door, and then the voices were just energy below her, alternating for what seemed like hours in their jubilant viciousness.

  A few months later, Nina had asked Mack if these stories were true, if their father had had love affairs with other women. It was after Lainey was better and the scary part was over. Mack said he didn’t know about before, but there were sometimes women now at their father’s apartment.

  “What are they like?” Nina was standing in the doorway to Mack’s room. He was working at his desk, doing math. The sheets were full of numbers and funny symbols she couldn’t believe she would ever understand. He looked up.

  “What do you mean, what are they like? What a dumb question. You mean, are they like zebras, are they like gargoyles, are they … ?”

  “I mean, are they like … Mums?”

  “They’re women.” He shrugged. “They have tits and stuff like that. Is that like Mums? Is that what you want to know?”

  Nina wasn’t sure what she wanted to know. She turned to go back to her room. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  But it did matter. It did. Because Nina had always imagined that her parents might divorce each other. And then what she had dreamed of, she realized, was that Mother and Randall would move out, and the rest of them would live together in peace—a peace Nina would radiate in the house. The fighting would all be over, and she would take care of everyone. So there was some sense in which these other women had usurped her place as much as they’d usurped Lainey’s; and Nina’s heart was hardened against her father because of it. Since he had moved out, she felt, for the first time, a sense of being female, of being like her mother. Sometimes, traipsing around with oblivious Mary and Sarah in the days just after he’d gone, stuffing herself with sugary treats from the store, she would think of her mother weeping in her darkened room, and she would yearn for the right to that same extravagant grief.