Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  But then their mother got better. Like someone recovering from a fever, she appeared downstairs, pale, thinner, in her bathrobe, and they began to have real meals again. Slowly she came back to them in other ways too. And when she was finally able to yell at them once more, to be indignant over their sloth, their self-satisfaction, their unkindness, when they could catch each other’s eye and make faces about her, when she became someone they didn’t have to feel pity for any longer, then they all relaxed and became again who they were too. Only Mack seemed unable to return to them in that old, reckless way. But maybe he was just getting older, Nina thought. Maybe it didn’t really have anything to do with what had happened.

  And what seemed especially strange was that now that their father was gone, there was a kind of peace and freedom in the house. This new mood was different from what Nina had imagined they could have if their mother had left. There was still deep disorder like a stain everywhere. Mother still stayed up half the night and slept at odd hours during the day. And there were no rules. Mack drifted in and out of the house, focused on his own increasingly mysterious world. The girls were free to construct their own universe in the attic bedroom, in the playhouse in the basement, outside with the other kids on the block. But they all seemed to want this freedom, this giddy chaos. They all consented to a mutual relinquishment of the standards that seemed to have worn their mother down so. They ate standing up in the kitchen or on the couch in front of the TV. They were allowed to take trays up to their rooms. In any corner of the house you could find bowls encrusted with stiff specks of what had been soup or cereal, plates flecked with crumbs, glasses with hardened circles of milk or juice in the bottom.

  The dining room, the room Nina sat in now to practice, was the worst. They almost never used it for meals anymore. Instead the table was permanently laden with homework or projects: paper dolls, Mack’s cartoons, posters for school events, Lainey’s correspondence about autism and retardation. The nights before Retta came, Lainey would sweep down on the children, would rush through the rest of the house, picking things up. But the dining room, with its welter of ongoing activities, its piles of everyone’s belongings, its finger-smudged wallpaper, was impossible. Even Retta said so. She vacuumed it, twice a year she washed the windows, but otherwise she said she wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Even now Nina’s fingertips were slightly blackened from the gummed dust that had accumulated on the piano keys.

  They were embarrassed by the mess in front of others—a friend of Mary’s had wrinkled her nose as she came in the door and said, “Your house smells funny”—but the truth was, Lainey and the children loved this disorder. There was an element in it of defiance, of naughtiness. Once Nina had watched Mack pick up his plate as he started to leave the living room, then stop and deliberately set it down again. And it stayed there until the night before Retta came.

  About six months after their father moved out, Lainey hired a graduate student to help with Randall—she said she was too old to be toileting a fifteen-year-old boy—and now that Bob got Randall up and off to his ride in the morning, she often slept through breakfast. This meant that she had more energy for them. She sat with them in the evenings, helping with homework, reading, fixing snacks. Sometimes she played Ping-Pong in the basement with them, or Monopoly. She frequently won at Monopoly, and there was a hard glee in her voice that seemed out of character as she announced her exorbitant rents. Her properties were littered with hotels and houses. And she had a strange patter she kept up, remembered insults and threats from games she’d played in childhood with her older brothers. “Okay, short-pants,” she’d say to her daughters. “Prepare to meet your Maker.” Sarah often got teary and refused to play with her.

  Liddie was the only one who objected to this new regime. She came home from summer school, dropped both bags at the door to the living room, and announced, “My God, this place is a wreck.”

  A dull red burned up from their mother’s neck. “Retta’s coming tomorrow,” she said quickly, apologetically.

  “Not a moment too soon,” Liddie said.

  It was in hope of hearing more about her older sister that Nina had started to listen to Retta and her mother. They had been talking about Liddie, Liddie and her new boyfriend, earlier, when Nina was fixing herself a snack. She’d stood in the pantry, staring into the refrigerator, pretending to choose, and heard Lainey say, “She’s been home—what?—a week? ten days? Where’d she find him so quick? That’s what I’d like to know. I barely had a minute to talk to her, and now she’s off, and Lord knows what they’re up to.”

  Retta said, “Wasn’t her findin’ him. She be puttin’ it out, like a smell she got. That’s what happens, at that age. Don’t tell me you can’t remember.”

  “But I don’t even know his last name,” Lainey said. “‘This is Gregory.’ Gregory what? Gregory who?”

  Nina reached in for anything, an orange.

  “His last name,” Retta said, and laughed, a spike of contemptuous sound.

  Lainey laughed too, just for a minute. “Still,” she said then. “I worry about her.”

  “Go ahead,” Retta answered. “All you want.”

  Nina came into the kitchen from the pantry and saw her mother arch her dark brows at Retta to be quiet about this.

  Retta made a face. “Who you kiddin?” she said, and grinned at Nina.

  Now Nina started the Moonlight Sonata again. She was thinking of Liddie. She had waked in the night because she’d heard something funny outside. Whispers, voices. She lay still. Mary’s asthmatic breathing whirred from across the narrow space between their beds. Then Nina heard another sound, a deep gurgling from the open window, like the motion of slow water, but human. She sat up in bed. When Mary didn’t stir, she folded the covers back and went to the window. Below her she could see the mulberry arched dark and thick over the yard. Partly underneath its branches was the Frawleys’ garage. And on the roof where they climbed to hide sometimes when they played Sardines, there were two bodies tangled up, white against its tar-paper top through the leaves. Nina could see the man’s butt moving slowly back and forth, his flesh almost iridescent. His legs must have been in pants still, they disappeared below the thigh and became roof, leaves. Under him was Liddie; Nina could tell by her pale hair and light skirt. They were fanned out around her. She made a shape like the angel print you left in snow. Her wide-flung legs bicycled slowly in the air, stopping, backing up, racing again. And somehow, although she was the one who was pinned down, the one who looked cleft by the knife shape that must have been Gregory, it was she who was swimming free, whose movements seemed wild and glad through the trembling black mulberry leaves. Nina’s hand slid between her thighs, pushed the hard welted seam of her cotton pajamas into her crotch as she watched.

  She sat still on the window seat a long time. She sat until they lay quiet side by side, until they separated, until they climbed down from the roof. Until she heard the faint sounds of Liddie below on the second floor, the hum of water in the buried pipes as she washed herself.

  When she woke this morning, Nina wasn’t sure it had happened; it seemed so much like a dream she might have had. But when she put her pajamas in the dirty-clothes closet, there was Liddie’s pale blue skirt, crumpled in a heap. Nina lifted it up and looked at it. Across the back were smeared reddish stains, the blood of the mulberries Liddie had been lying on.

  “Has it been half an hour, Neens?” her mother called.

  “How should I know? You were supposed to keep track.”

  Her mother appeared in the doorway. “Well, we’d better say so,” she said. “It’s time to get going anyway.”

  Nina stopped playing. She caught the upright swinging arm of the metronome and hooked it under its catch. As she turned on the seat, she said, “I want to change, though, Mums.” They would drive right past Steinway’s, where the high school kids sat in booths drinking cherry Cokes and staring out at everyone who passed.

  Exasperation pinched Lainey�
��s face. “Why? You look perfectly all right. This is just a piano lesson, after all. Look at me.” And she gestured down at herself, at her canvas skirt, her sandals, her old shirt.

  Nina stared at her. “So what?” she said.

  Her mother looked at her a moment, seeming to measure something. Then she relented; Nina could see it in her face a second before she spoke. “All right. Hurry, though,” and she went back into the kitchen to smoke a last cigarette with Retta.

  Upstairs, in spite of the heat of the day, Nina put on a mint-green angora cardigan she’d bought with her allowance, put it on backward, and laboriously buttoned it down the back. In the second-floor bathroom she leaned toward the mirror and whitened her lips with a color called Pale Flesh. Then she drew a line in black on her upper eyelids, making a little tail, just as Liddie had taught her, at the outer corner of each eye.

  When she came into the kitchen, her mother looked at her, then leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette. She was frowning. Nina’s stomach tightened.

  “Lookin good,” Retta said quickly, as though to stop Nina’s mother before she could start.

  Inner heat pushed blood into Nina’s cheeks. “Thanks,” she said, without being able to meet Retta’s eyes.

  Her mother turned away quickly and said nothing.

  Chapter 9

  May 1965

  The benches were warm under Lainey’s legs, the worn, dry wood felt soft. She sat on the top row and leaned back onto the iron pipe that formed the frame for the stands. It was cool against her neck. Mary sat down next to her, unexpectedly close, and Lainey was conscious of a pleased rush of affection that released her from the irritation she’d been feeling for her daughter. She had arranged to have the afternoon off—Bob, the student she had hired to take care of Randall, was going to take him for a long walk after school—and she had planned to come to Mack’s baseball game alone. At the last minute, though, Mary begged to come with her, and Lainey relented. But Mary had taken so long to get ready that they’d missed several innings.

  Mack’s team was behind three to two, one of the kids standing around had told them before they climbed to their seats. Now they watched together as the first batter from Mack’s team, then the second, came up, friends of Mack’s who just this year had started looking like men instead of tall boys. But Lainey had trouble concentrating on the game. She was still too aware of the teenagers around her, listening to their conversations with a kind of abstract and benevolent distance. “What it is with me,” she heard a girl standing behind her say, “is that they have to be bigger than I am, and there’s only three boys in the tenth grade who are. So naturally I’m interested in juniors or seniors.” Mary had turned around to watch this girl as she spoke. When she swung back, she looked over at Lainey.

  “Mother,” she said.

  “What?”

  Mary said nothing, but her pretty face was stern. She was frowning downward.

  “What is it?” Lainey asked. She followed Mary’s eyes to her own lap, to where she had rucked her skirt up between her legs to feel the sun on her thighs. She was about to dismiss Mary’s fussiness, but then she looked at her daughter’s long legs, flat as planks in jeans, and she realized how immense, how grotesque, her own wide thighs must seem to Mary—white, and where they pushed against the hot bench, slightly stippled from within. Lainey’s mother, neat and trim, had never offered her the possibility of disgust at her sexuality; but in the presence of that delicate woman, Lainey had sometimes felt some of Mary’s revulsion at her own size, her own fleshiness—like an overlarge set of clothes she was forced to wear until she grew into it. Now, with a strange sense of pity for her daughter, she pulled the skirt back down over her knees.

  A third and then a fourth batter had come up, and there were two men on base. Suddenly Lainey saw something familiar in the player standing near home plate, a tall slender man with big-boned shoulders. “Oh, here’s Mack, Mary,” Lainey cried.

  “Shh, Mom,” Mary said, though when Lainey spoke she looked over to where Mack stood just outside the batter’s box, tapping his cleats with the bat. He seemed oblivious of the crowd, of them.

  “All right, Macklin,” Lainey yelled. He didn’t look up.

  Mary grinned into the air, embarrassed.

  Mack took his stance, his legs bent, his arms taut as he held the bat high over his right shoulder, twirling it in smaller and smaller circles. He had the perfect body for baseball, Lainey thought. Lean, but shapely and muscled. He looked so competent physically, in a way Lainey had never felt herself to be. His bat stilled as the pitch came in. Then it dropped. A ball. Mack relaxed, stood up, stepped out of the batter’s box.

  He was facing the stands now, and for a moment his eyes met hers. A slight smile flickered over his face. To Lainey, for that second, he was David. She was breathless and bent her head. When she looked up, he was back in the batter’s box, tensed again. The uniform showed his long calves, his muscled buttocks, to advantage. How strange it was, Lainey thought, that there were so many uniforms for men, so many ways for them to be anonymously handsome, glamorously part of something: some team, the army, the navy. Even medicine: those gods in white coats. There was a point floating at the edge of expression, some observation about this aspect of men’s lives, that she wanted to make, to make to Mary. She touched the girl’s shoulder and Mary leaned toward her. “Isn’t it interesting, honey,” she began, “how wonderful men look—” But then Mack uncoiled violently with a sharp crack, the ball sprang straight up, the catcher rose in a quick spiral, throwing off his mask, dancing, looking skyward.

  “Oh, goddammit! Goddammit!” Mary cried. She was half standing. “He’s got it.” And the ball dropped in a plumb line into the catcher’s fat glove.

  Mack flung the bat down in disgust. They watched him walk back to U-High’s bench, kicking at the ground.

  “Wonder if he’s doing okay today,” Lainey said.

  Below her, a girl with preposterously teased hair, a lacquered bubble on her head, looked back. “He had a hit. A double, I think.”

  The boy next to her, without turning, said, “Yeah, a double, and he walked.”

  “Thanks,” Lainey said.

  Through the next half inning, Mary sat restlessly. “I hate it when the other team’s up,” she said to Lainey. “You just don’t know anyone. It’s so goddamn boring.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t swear so much, Maresy,” Lainey said softly.

  There was a pinched silence. “Everyone else does it,” Mary said finally.

  Lainey made her voice light. “Why on earth would I want you to be like everyone else?”

  Mary had no answer, but the line of her shoulders was sullen. She turned her body slightly away from Lainey. After a moment she got up. “I’m going to walk around,” she said. She stepped smoothly off the edge of the stands, dropping the four feet or so to the ground. She flicked her ironed hair once and walked away.

  Between batters, Lainey watched Mary moving at the edges of the groups of older kids, trying to look indifferent. Sometimes someone spoke to her; probably someone who knew Mack, Lainey thought. And then her face seemed convulsed by eagerness; color rose to it as she struggled to seem older, to be cool. How pretty she was, Lainey thought, watching her from this distance. All three little girls, really. Seemingly untroubled, sunny, doing well in school. The pitchers/pictures of health. Though part of David’s nickname for them was, of course, an accusation against her—that she’d had them to prove that Randall wasn’t her fault, that she could make normal babies. And she knew that was at least to some degree true. Although Nina, Nina had really been an accident. She’d had the diaphragm in, but as soon as she woke in the morning and felt a kind of dull ache inside her, she knew it had got turned, it was resting the wrong way in her, and that there might be problems.

  But with Mary and Sarah she’d consciously decided to take the risk. She had thought, each of those times, that it didn’t seem worth it to stop David in order to put the diaphragm
in, when they hardly ever made love at all anymore. And each time, she couldn’t help hoping that somehow these bright, beautiful, normal babies would mend the rent in their marriage that had begun with Randall. But they hadn’t, of course. She’d been stupid to think they might. Each of them had, in fact, made it worse.

  Now she was remembering one night when Sarah was still quite small, when she’d asked David, then begged him, to make love to her. He’d heaved himself up from bed as soon as it was clear she would persist, as though to get out of the range of her touch. He’d turned on the bureau lamp and found a cigarette. While he smoked, he quietly, rationally explained his position to her, as though she were one of the children asking for an exception to some rule that he could not allow. He simply couldn’t feel desire for her now, he said. He thought it better not to pretend. Even getting into bed with her, lying beside her, made him feel bruised. Lainey had sat up in bed while he talked. Though she tried not to, she’d begun to weep, and her face, because she wouldn’t give herself over to it, grew rubbery and red and ugly: she could see herself in the bureau mirror.

  “At this point I associate it with Randall,” he said. “And with your getting pregnant over and over again.” He said perhaps it would get better in time. He hoped so. But he couldn’t help feeling exploited sexually, tricked. How was it possible to feel any real desire under these circumstances?

  She had yelled back, finally—anything to stop that calm voice!—that if he hadn’t blamed her for Randall in the first place, maybe she wouldn’t have felt so desperate, maybe she wouldn’t have needed to have all the children.

  There was a long silence in the room then. David had leaned forward to put the cigarette out, and his face was caught suddenly in the light above the open top of the lampshade. Harsh grooves leapt onto it, made him grotesque, then were erased as he leaned back into the shadows. “Well, there we have it,” he said. His voice was hoarse and fatigued. “The battle lines, rather neatly drawn.”