Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Mummy!” Sarah said. “We didn’t see you. It’s like you were hiding in the dark.”

  Nina and Mary went into the house, still arguing, but Sarah came and sat next to Lainey. She began an account of her day, something she often did. She was still comfortable being Lainey’s little girl. While she talked, she bounced the swing energetically.

  Then Bob called down that Randall was ready to say good night. Lainey and Sarah came in, shutting the front door behind themselves. Lainey slowly climbed the stairs. At the top, she stood for a moment in front of the doorway to David’s study, Bob’s room now. “Shall I shut the door?” she asked. The girls were on the first floor. They had turned on the sound track to My Fair Lady. “It’s awfully loud if you’re trying to work.”

  He had looked up from the table he was sitting at. “Yes, thanks,” he said, and smiled his adoring smile at her.

  Lainey went to Randall’s room. He was in bed, completely covered with his worn red blanket. The satin binding had frayed to gleaming tatters around its edge. He was crooning to himself. Lainey slid under the covers beside him. His face was barely visible in the pinkish twilight under here. Both of his hands were at his crotch.

  Lainey lay perfectly still next to him. At one time she had talked to him under his blanket. But sometime after he’d started puberty he cried out when she had begun talking, and then, when she didn’t stop right away, his face convulsed, he leaned forward and bit her on the shoulder, breaking the skin. Now he tolerated her presence as long as she didn’t speak.

  He breathed with his mouth open. His breath fell moist on Lainey’s face under the tented covers. It smelled sweetish and minty. What would Freud say to this? she wondered. Mom as bedmate. Encouraging Oedipal feelings. Sick. But what was the difference with Randall? If he’d ever had one Oedipal feeling about her, she’d have wept for joy. But Randall lived safe from neurosis. He’d escaped Freud. Sometimes she found herself wishing, even hoping, that he’d connect his masturbating under the covers to her presence, that he’d try to touch her or look at her. But those impulses came on him autistically too. Once she’d found him alone in the backyard on a raw March day with his pants around his knees, yanking at himself and looking cold and scared. And several times, one of the girls had yelled, “He’s doing it again, Mom,” and she’d found him with that same dazed look, flailing away at the upright arm of his penis in the living room or the front hall, or wherever the feeling had come on him. Then she would lead him gently upstairs to privacy. Sometimes, if he resisted, she went up and brought his blanket down to him, wrapped it around him like a cloak. It calmed him down, soothed him, told him where she was taking him, and he consented, then, to go.

  After five or ten minutes, Lainey kissed Randall’s cheek and slid out from under the covers. Carefully she tucked his blanket back in. The room was dark, but in the hall light you could see where the walls were shredded, the paper peeled down to various depths in different places. She lowered the two crumpled shades in case he was still sleeping when the sun came up. In the doorway she looked back. His hands were working under the bedcover; it trembled and jumped. She looked away. His shelf of strange uninviting toys stood, the only object in the room besides the mattress, the bureau. Bob had arranged them carefully, in rows, as he did every night. She remembered, abruptly, the way his face had looked when she showed him Randall’s room, the active revulsion in it. He, who hadn’t blanched when he was Randall, who’d moved comfortably through the mess downstairs, was as silent and shocked when she showed him this wrecked room as if she were revealing instruments of torture.

  “I think you’ll understand the ways his room makes sense after you’ve worked with him a little,” Lainey had said.

  “Yes, of course,” Bob said, but his tone had insisted never.

  Lainey shut Randall’s door and locked it.

  She went downstairs, past the racket the girls were making and into the kitchen. Her glass had been washed and set in the rack, pristine, a chastisement to her. Nina, probably. She crossed to the pantry for another glass and some ice, ran a little water into it, and then poured bourbon in until it was the honey color she liked.

  From the drawer under the sink she pulled out a dented pot and its lid, then turned the fire on under it. She fetched oil from the cupboard and a jar of popping corn. The kernels hit the pan like rain on a copper roof.

  Sometimes Lainey went for several days fixing meals for the children—meals bloody with meat, wet with vegetables—but herself nibbling, eating only a little canned soup in addition to her starchy pleasures: nuts, crackers, popcorn. Finally she’d wake one morning and feel dizzy. She’d take extra iron pills, left over from when Nina was anemic. She’d eat only eggs and salads for a few days.

  A minute after the popping began, Sarah appeared in the doorway. “We want some too, Mama. Double batch!”

  “Say please, at least,” Lainey yelled, but she was gone.

  Lainey pulled out the big yellow bread bowl and poured the first batch into it. Then she began another, bigger one. When both were done, she cradled the big bowl against her body and picked up her bourbon with the other hand. The girls didn’t notice her as she went by. They’d lugged the hall mirror into the living room and had it propped in front of the fireplace. They stood in a row in front of it, practicing gestures they’d worked out to the song “Get Me to the Church on Time.” Lainey grabbed her ice pack and went silently up the stairs. When she reached the second landing, she shouted, “I’ve got the popcorn up here if anybody wants it.”

  Sarah squealed and came out of the living room, but Mary called her back. “No, dummy. We’ve got to finish if you want to do this with us.”

  Then Nina stepped to the foot of the stairs and shouted in a businesslike way, “We’ll be up in a few minutes, Ma.”

  “Fine,” Lainey said. “It’s all the same to me.” She padded barefoot down the hall to her room. In bed, she settled back comfortably and began to read.

  But when they burst in ten minutes or so later, she gladly set her book down and made room for them on the bed. Nina sat at the foot, no closer, facing Lainey, and insisted that handfuls be passed to her. But Sarah snuggled against her mother, and Mary perched cross-legged by her hip. Inspired by the song, they were talking about whether Liddie would marry Gregory. He had impressed the two little girls by walking on his hands across the square the summer before.

  “I hope she does,” Sarah said. “He’s cruel.”

  “It’s cool, stupid,” Mary said. “She thought it was cruel,” she reported to Nina contemptuously, as though Nina hadn’t heard.

  “What are we talking about here?” Lainey said. “Liddie barely knows this man. Besides none of you girls should get married till you’re thirty anyway. That’s going to be the rule in this house. No weddings till you’re almost middle-aged. Liddie especially, if she wants to do something with that voice. As well she might.”

  “But you weren’t thirty, Ma,” Sarah said.

  Lainey took another handful and sighed. “You see exactly where marrying young got me. Here I sit, a fat elderly lady with so many kids she doesn’t know what to do. Some days I barely get out of bed, as you may have noticed. A great slug of a woman. I was ruined by”—she raised her glass—“booze and kids and too much early passion. And your father. Who’s now off pretending to be thirty again himself.”

  Nina was looking at her, and their eyes met. Nina didn’t even smile. Lainey could make the other girls giggle and squirm when she talked like this. Their memories were short. They forgot how it had been after David left—Lainey’s rage, the darkened room. But Nina’s gaze was steady and knowing, her dark eyes sober.

  Lainey looked at Sarah. “No. I say no. Forget it, you girls. Don’t saddle yourself with just one. Play the field! I’m sure it’ll be years before Liddie marries anyone.”

  “Daddy’s a lot older than thirty,” Sarah said.

  “You’re not kidding,” Lainey answered.

  “He’s even got
gray hairs.”

  “That’s not the half of it, dearie. But I say, if he can get away with it, let him. If I could, I would.”

  “I think Liddie will marry Gregory,” Nina said suddenly. Her voice was challenging, and she watched Lainey.

  “Well, what makes you think that, Neen?”

  “I think she loves him.”

  “Oh, love,” Lainey said in a weary voice. “Sure, she may love him. But she’ll love others too. Love’s not so hard to find. And Liddie can find it even where it isn’t. A dowser for love is Lid.”

  “But I think she specially loves him.” Nina’s voice was insistent.

  Lainey stopped and looked hard at her. “What makes you say so, honey?”

  Nina shrugged. She looked uncomfortable and confused. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just think so.”

  “Well, she could. She may,” Lainey said. “It’s just I’ve seen our Liddie at work before and I recognize certain elements of her style. But of course, you could be right, Neen.”

  Suddenly Nina got up.

  “Don’t go, honeybunch. You’re probably right. Really. I don’t mean to sound so … so callous. That was horrid. It really was. I offer you my apology.”

  Nina stopped at the door. “I’m just getting my camera.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting my new camera. I can’t understand anything in the instructions. I want you to look at it.”

  “Oh, good Lord, I can’t work a camera.”

  “But you can figure out the instructions, maybe,” Nina yelled back.

  “Well, bring me a towel, then,” Lainey shouted. “I can’t touch it with these butter fingers.”

  They sat in silence a minute, eating.

  “Is that where that word comes from, Ma?” Mary asked.

  “What word, sweetie?”

  “Butterfingers. When you can’t touch stuff, you know? You’re … spassy or something? Does it mean your fingers are slippery as butter?”

  “Honey, don’t say spassy. What an awful word.”

  “Well, but you know what I mean,” Mary said.

  “Hmm. Yes, I bet that is where it comes from, actually. Only this time it’s absolutely, literally true.”

  Nina came back, carrying the camera, a booklet of instructions, and a bath towel.

  Lainey wiped her hands on the towel. David had recently given Nina the camera, a fancy new one. Nina had been taking pictures for about a year, getting better and better. This summer she was going to stay home and take a course in photography at the Art Institute. This was because she hadn’t wanted to go to camp with the little girls. She’d insisted on something different for herself this year. “I’m too old for that, Mother,” she said. “I can’t go on doing exactly what Sarah and Mary are doing forever.”

  Now Lainey waggled her fingers at Nina, and Nina handed her the booklet.

  Nina stepped back, stood against the bureau, and looked at them, at the room, through the viewer. Her head swung with the camera.

  Lainey put the booklet down and watched Nina. After a moment, she said, “Look at Nina, making us get little and unimportant in her magic lens.”

  Nina grinned behind the camera. “It’s true. You’re shrimps. A million miles away.”

  “Well, come back here, petunia, and show me what you don’t get,” Lainey said.

  Nina came over and sat on the edge of the bed. She and Lainey started going through the diagrams in the booklet, locating knobs.

  Mary and Sarah had begun to talk to each other about the camp, wondering what the other girls would be like, who they’d get for counselors, whether they’d be put together. Lainey looked up and reminded them that they were going the next day for the shots the camp required.

  “Shots again?” Sarah cried. “We had them last year.”

  “Not all of them,” Lainey answered. “Time for boosters.”

  “I can’t stand it,” Mary said. “The way your skin feels, so full, like it’s going to explode.”

  “Yeah,” Nina said. “And Dr. Peabody is such a liar. He says, This will pinch.’ And then he jams that twelve-foot needle into your bone, practically.”

  “Don’t talk that way, Neenee,” Lainey said. “You’ll scare Sarey.”

  “Do we have to, Mom?” Mary whined.

  “Don’t be boring, please,” Lainey said. “Don’t waste your energy complaining about something like this, something that has to be. Besides, you should be grateful. You should be saying”—she made her voice ecstatic—“Oh, shoot me, Doc, shoot me!”

  The little girls looked at each other and giggled.

  “No. Truly,” Lainey said. “Because look at Robert Chapin.” This was a young man down the street, cork-screwed helplessly into a wheelchair, pushed everywhere by a dour, fat black woman who never spoke. “When he was little, there wasn’t a shot. You could die of polio. You had to worry about it all the time. In the summers, you couldn’t go to the beach or even to a public place for a picnic. It was dreadful. It was so hot, and there we were, just cooped up together, getting on each other’s nerves. Why, when Liddie and Mack were small, I had to keep them locked in the backyard in the summer so they wouldn’t catch it. I spent hours—hours, I promise you—boiling dishes and sterilizing things the year Randall was little.” Her voice caught.

  Nina was watching her with a blank, unsympathetic face. “You’re exaggerating, Mother,” she said.

  Lainey swung to look at her. She could feel the tears smarting in her eyes. “What?” she said.

  Nina was instantly frightened, and it made her defiant. “You’re exaggerating,” she said again.

  “Oh, I see. Thank you,” Lainey said. Her face pulled into bitter lines. “And just how would you know this?”

  The little girls sat up straighter.

  Nina looked back. “I can just tell. I can tell when you exaggerate.”

  “Oh, can you, my sweet judge. How very helpful to have you around, then. You can tell, can you?” Lainey’s voice was hard.

  “Yes,” Nina said.

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell me—to tell us all—tell us how you know so very much about it all,” Lainey said.

  Mary put her hand on Nina’s arm. Nina looked at Mary. Stop it, Mary’s face said. Let it go.

  Lainey saw the look, saw Mary’s hand. She was suddenly deeply ashamed of herself. She closed her eyes and listened to the frightened silence in the room. “Lord,” she said softly, and looked at them. “I’m afraid I’ve had it,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nina. I’ll help you with your camera in the morning, but you kidlets better skedaddle now.”

  Slowly the two little girls slid off the bed. “Can we have the rest of the popcorn, Ma?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes, take it,” Lainey said. “Take it. Just get out of here.” And before they were at the door, she had flicked off the bedside lamp.

  Lainey lay in the dark. She rolled the last mouthful of bourbon around in her mouth. She thought of Nina’s scared, defiant face. She pushed her head back into the pillow. She rocked it back and forth. “Ugh!” she cried out softly. “Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.” Her clenched fists struck at her thighs with each animal noise. She tried to make herself think of a time when she had been thoughtlessly good; innocent. When she had liked herself.

  She could not. Instead she was suddenly remembering again the year of the polio scare, when they’d begun the tests of Randall, when he was two. She remembered David and the pediatrician, the two men talking together in those resonant, professional tones Lainey hated. She’d felt that she and Randall were nearly invisible to them as they discussed his fate.

  Over the months that followed, David had seemed to Lainey to put a great distance between himself and Randall, and her too. And then in October, when they began the tests, David produced the notebook he’d been keeping since Randall’s second birthday. Lainey was incredulous. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wondered too, hadn’t made observations. In fact, some of David’s observations were from her. But th
at he could have compiled them in this clinical way, could have looked at their beautiful little boy and noted him as R in a book like those he used for patient records, shocked her.

  Her immediate response had been desperately sexual. She had turned to him feverishly, trying to reengage him with herself, trying to pull him to her perspective through making love. Trying to make him love Randall again, using her body. And though mechanically everything had worked, she could feel that somehow David was absent. It increased her sense of urgency, and for weeks they made love every night, even when Lainey was exhausted.

  In January, she told David she was pregnant. He was appalled. He said he could arrange an abortion. She refused. He reminded her they’d wanted only three children.

  “I want this one,” she said.

  “It won’t change anything,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. But he didn’t answer, and she didn’t ask again. And slowly their lovemaking stopped altogether.

  Now she was remembering clearly one summer evening—it must have been only a week or two before Nina was born—when David came home from work unexpectedly early. She was sitting on the steps off the kitchen, Randy next to her. Macklin and Liddie were bickering in the yard. They’d been irritable all day, wanting to see friends, wanting to go somewhere. She had pulled them apart time and time again, had enforced extra rest periods in separate rooms, had hit out at Liddie, the older, twice. Finally she had reached some point of not caring, not seeing anymore. While she sat on the steps, they began really to fight, scratching at each other, biting, crying. Lainey simply watched, as dull and tranced as Randall next to her. She didn’t hear David come up behind her, she didn’t feel his presence as he stood, shocked, in the doorway. Swiftly, decisively, he stepped around her, his shoe grazing her hip slightly, and went to separate the miserable children. When he turned to look back at her, crouched, holding a squalling child huddled against his body in each arm, she saw a pure cold hatred for her flickering in his face.

  It was only a day or two after this that she read the notebook he had been keeping about Randall. She hadn’t planned to. She’d run out of cigarettes and gone to look in his desk drawer for an extra pack, when her hand touched something at the back of the drawer. Instantly she knew what it was. She pulled it out and opened it. The children were all napping, the house was utterly still. She sat in the desk chair with David’s things laid out in front of her and went through the terrible chronicle. Only gradually did she become aware of the change in focus from Randall to her. Toward the end of the notebook, though, the pages, were dotted everywhere with capital L’s. L: Lainey. L: herself. L: the patient.