by Sue Miller
Her heart felt as though it were slowly tearing in her chest. She rested her hands on her moving belly and wept silently as she read. What she was looking at, she realized, was the account of the end of her marriage.
Chapter 10
June 1965
The italicized quote under Mack’s airbrushed, grinning picture in the yearbook said The Grass Is Always Greener. Mack’s first reaction when he opened the book to his page had been to worry about what his mother would say when she saw it. But it quickly became clear that she didn’t have even the beginnings of an idea of what it meant. The silver leatherette yearbook sat around in the living room and kitchen for a while, and he watched her leafing through it a few times. Once, he saw Nina and Sarah sitting on the couch, holding it between them on their laps. But no one ever said anything, and slowly he lost the nervousness that had stopped his heart the first time he saw the quote. The only ones who might have understood, he realized, were his father and Liddie, and neither of them was around to look at the yearbook.
He’d started smoking marijuana sometime in the fall. Soletski had some—reefer, he called it. Soletski hung around the blues clubs in the ghetto—he was trying to get good at blues guitar—and he’d bought it there. For a while their smoking had an exciting quality to it, had seemed wonderfully dangerous and alien just because of its association with those places, those rhythms. The first long hit of the stale-tasting smoke would call up for Mack the dim, cigarette-clouded interior of Pepper’s and that new music—pickup a cappella groups, visiting pros, bands full of old men with Delta accents so thick Mack just waited for their laughter to cue his own, helpless to understand them. The neighborhood was rough. Often they ran down the dark, littered sidewalks to the clubs, afraid of the rage their whiteness might trigger. But inside the bars a kind of country graciousness prevailed, bought by Soletski’s worshipful attention to the music and their own respectful politeness and youth.
Sometimes a black woman would ask Mack or Soletski to dance. These women were older—young women didn’t seem to hang around the blues clubs—and so there wasn’t any tension about it. The men sitting at the tables would call to the women and laugh as they danced with the white boys around the smoky floor. Mack, stoned, felt a kind of sexual benediction as he moved in this new way—minimal, syncopated, sexy.
At some point a little later, though, Tucker Franklin bought some grass from a friend in Winnetka. He said everyone there was smoking it. And suddenly a lot of kids had it. It was at parties. They smoked it while they drove around, they got together just to get stoned and listen to music or talk. Or to sit and stare at each other, thickheaded with revelations they couldn’t find words to share.
Among those who smoked grass there was a sense of having suddenly moved light-years away from their schoolmates and their families. They felt they understood the world differently, they knew their connection to one another, to music, to nature—even in gritty Chicago. Once, on a raw January day, Mack and Al had gone stoned to the Point. The lake was a blackened roil, and the waves battering the granite blocks at the promontory seemed purposefully violent. Mack had felt intimately injured by their power. He jumped down the tiered blocks of granite, stood on the lowest level, the walls of white rising in deafening menace above him, and shrieked his rage back.
It was sometime that same month that he started going to David’s apartment to smoke. He’d had the key since Christmas, when he’d found it in a white envelope with his name on it under a tree. The note explained that David wanted Mack to feel that the apartment was an alternate home, that he could go there anytime he felt like it. Mack had put the key on his ring with the others, but he didn’t intend ever to use it. From the start his visits to his father had been reluctant and difficult. Somehow—irrationally, he knew—they made him feel he was betraying his mother and Randall and his sisters. He had never gone over unless his father had specifically invited him. The key, he promised himself, changed nothing.
After the first semester of his senior year, though, Mack made the honor roll. One of the privileges for seniors on the honor roll was leaving campus when they didn’t have classes. As soon as Mack saw his grades and realized he’d made it, he thought of David’s empty apartment, of the freedom possible there.
The first time he tried it, he went alone, feeling conspicuous and strange walking down the long, empty blocks at midday. The apartment was large, dark and elegant, but underfumished. The stillness inside when Mack stood in the empty hallway made him uncomfortable. He heard voices outside, on the street. He went to the front of the apartment, to the glassed-in sun porch off the living room. He stood there and watched the black kids walking past, four or five of them, their voices mingling rhythmically. As Mack’s eyes followed them up Kimbark, he noticed coming toward them from the other direction a tall white man in a hat, a dark overcoat. Mack’s breath caught, even as he realized that the man was heavy and fair, nothing like his father.
He stood there a few minutes more, feeling the dark apartment at his back like a threatening and yet beckoning presence. Then he reasoned with himself: His father had given him the key. He meant Mack to be here alone, to use the apartment. If his father came in while he was here, he’d look up … he’d look up slowly. He’d be casual. He’d say, “Oh, hi, Dad. I had a break between classes and I felt like being alone.” He imagined his father’s still face animating quickly with pleasure. It was what he had wanted, after all. It was what he had fucking wanted, so the hell with him. Then Mack laughed out loud, because that made no sense. “The hell with him,” he said, and stepped back into the apartment from the glare of the sun room.
Mack walked aimlessly around the living room, picking up and putting down books, ashtrays. His father had bought new furniture, Danish modern. The spare pieces seemed uncomfortably small in the big, high-ceilinged rooms. He’d brought over a few things they’d had in the house too: some lamps, a framed signed letter of Freud’s, a large, comfortable wing chair with worn plaid upholstery that had come from his mother’s house in New Hampshire. It looked graceless and shabby next to the aerodynamic teak of the Scandinavian pieces.
In the corner by the fireplace was a small upright piano, new. This purchase of his father’s had been the most puzzling to Mack. And then the lessons! Mack crossed to it. Standing, he played a few bars of “Chopsticks.” The music seemed unbearably loud, and when he stopped, he felt the notes reverberate almost like an echo from the high ceiling, from the empty dark hallway leading back to the bedroom. He sat down on the bench and leafed through the music: Hanon, Czerny, “easy” sonatas of Beethoven, a book called Classics for Beginners. Mack was familiar with them all. They were the same exercise pieces he’d suffered with for years, that Nina had stumbled through after him. Once or twice his father had played or practiced while he was over, and the sight of him, hunched forward on the bench, frowning intently behind his glasses at the pages of notes—this had startled Mack and made him uncomfortable.
Now he stood up. On the mantel over the bare fireplace was a bunch of photographs of them, the kids. One by one, Mack examined them, as though they were people he sought to know. Most were the school portraits that everyone but Randall had to sit for annually—inane smiles, forced on your face by the photographer, who wouldn’t shoot until you bared your teeth. The cumulus clouds swirled in the egg-blue fake sky behind them all. Mary particularly, with her braces—even the rubber bands visible—looked awful.
But there were also a couple of more casual photographs, taken by Nina. One was a group portrait, shot in the dining room on Harper Avenue. As he stared at it, Mack remembered the occasion: Sarah’s birthday, this past December. They looked crazy in the picture, drunk. Their heads were tilted one way or another, their faces distorted by their exaggerated loud effort with the song. Sarah’s embarrassed grin was idiotic. Only Liddie, who’d learned to stay beautiful while she sang, and Randall, whose mouth was just slightly open and whose face was dreamy and sweet, didn’t look foolish. Mack
set the photo down.
He crossed to the kitchen, off the long living room and small dining nook. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and Mack felt a vague bitter pleasure at seeing them. His father had always been the neat one, had always been after all of them to be more orderly in their habits. It was true that the dishes were rinsed, were stacked tidily, but there must have been several days’ worth there.
And then it occurred to him that maybe his father had had guests, or a guest, the night before. Mack didn’t want to think about it. He knew his father dated, or whatever he called it. He’d actually tried, several times, to talk to Mack about it. But it was nothing Mack wanted to have to know about. Whenever his father brought it up, Mack felt a rising, nearly physical nervousness that made him tear things—labels, paper napkins, match-books—or drove him to sarcasm. His father had finally seemed to catch on. He rarely spoke about it to Mack anymore.
Now Mack came out of the living room and went down the hall. He stood in the doorway of his father’s bedroom. The bed was made, though casually. To Mack, the room looked cell-like and monastic. An old white-painted bureau that had held worn towels in the basement at the house was all there was besides the bed. And the bed was only a box spring and mattress in a metal frame. He thought of their rooms at home, crowded with furniture, decorated with travel posters, pictures clipped from magazines, photographs. All their beds were distinctive; they had names given them by their mother: “the Eastlake bed,” “the sleigh bed,” “the Amos Knowlton bed”—Mack’s—an iron affair with brass knobs that rattled if you jerked off too hard. Only Randall’s room was furnished this way, like his father’s. It was as though his father had left his personality behind, in their house, with them.
Mack stepped across the room and opened the closet. It too was neat. Even the shoes, with their wooden trees pushed in and snapped stiff, were lined up in a row. He shut the door and turned. On top of the bureau there was a photograph. He crossed to it and picked it up. It was the baby one of him with Liddie that had once sat on his father’s desk at home. They looked happy, normal.
Somehow it made Mack sad, seeing that picture taken in some other universe. Before he left the apartment, he carried it down the dark hall to the living room and set it with all the other phony shots on top of the mantel. In its place he brought back the blurry photograph Nina had done of all of them together, singing.
As he walked back to school down the icy streets, he thought of his father’s face when he saw the new photograph on his bureau. He imagined a brief puzzlement, then a shrugging acceptance—his father would think he must have chosen this arrangement, chosen it and then somehow forgotten it.
That was the first arrangement Mack did. Later, when he began to use the apartment regularly with friends to get stoned, the arrangements became part of it. They never left without changing something, always something so inconspicuous Mack’s father wouldn’t really notice, they hoped.
At first it was just Al and Mack. They shared a fourth period free, and combined with lunch, that gave them enough time to get to David’s, to smoke a joint or two, and to get back before fifth. While they smoked, they usually sat on the sun porch with the window cracked, so they wouldn’t leave the smell of dope in the apartment and so Mack could watch for David. But even then, even at the start, they would change something before they left. Once, they did the dishes, laughing hysterically over what seemed beyond irony, even, in this gesture. They stole small things: Six pills from a prescription bottle. One of every pair of brown socks. An unopened box of Domino sugar, which Mack threw into a dumpster on Fifty-seventh Street. An old necktie he knew his father hardly ever wore.
Sometimes Soletski came with them. And in March and April, Mack brought Annette Stahl over four or five times. The last time, they lay together on his father’s bed, tangled, imprisoned in their twisted clothes. Mack’s fly was unzipped, Annie’s blouse open, her bra shoved up like a thick white bandage around her throat. Mack had finally come, pressed against her leg. Afterward he wouldn’t let her straighten the covers. He thought of the rumpled bedspread and the drops of drying jism as that day’s arrangement.
David never said anything, never even asked Mack if he’d been there. Mack wondered, increasingly, if it was because the arrangements were so subtle that his father didn’t really notice; or if his father knew very well that Mack used the apartment, that he did the arrangements, but saw the two of them as engaged in some psychological contest about it.
Finally it was Mack who felt compelled to speak of it, he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t say he’d been coming over, though it had been several months since he’d started to. Instead he said he “thought he might” use David’s apartment, as though he were letting David know his future intentions. They were eating at Gordon’s. Nina and Mary and Sarah were there too. Mack sat across the booth from David and met his cool pale eyes as he explained the rules about seniors on the honor roll. He said he got tired of being in school all day, but there was no privacy at home—his mother or Retta or Bob was always there. “I think it might be very useful to me,” he said calmly.
After he’d finished talking, Mary began immediately to tell her father about how a science project of hers had won a school prize, how she might get to be in a fair “from the whole city, Daddy.” Mack felt a sudden shame. He realized that he’d sounded just like her, just as though he wanted his father’s approval too, for the honor roll; as though he’d wanted his father to be pleased about his off-campus privilege.
The weather warmed up slowly. One day, more stoned than usual, Mack took Soletski into his father’s room to show him the closet, the laughable neatness of it. Somehow they ended up making an arrangement of David’s clothes. They buttoned his shirts shut over hangers. They chose a tie for each one and carefully wrapped it, knotted it, around each collar. They picked a jacket to drape over each pair. They argued over their decisions, criticized each other’s taste, fell, laughing, on David’s bed. The pants were harder, but they finally hung them from hangers, which they hooked inside the front of each shirt. Under each man shape they placed a pair of the pronged shoes.
That night his father called. He told Mack that while he welcomed Mack’s using his apartment, and while he wanted to encourage him to continue to use it, he thought a ground rule perhaps needed to be—Mack smiled at the perhaps—that they respect each other’s privacy. That just as he wouldn’t have gone uninvited into Mack’s room at home or poked into his belongings, Mack was not to do that in his apartment.
“Okay,” Mack said agreeably.
“Doesn’t that seem reasonable to you?”
“Sure,” Mack said, keeping his voice as neutral as he possibly could.
But it didn’t matter anyway, because after that the weather got really nice and they pretty much stopped using his father’s apartment at all.
When they sent around the ticket-request form for graduation, Mack wrote 6 in the space for Number Requested.
Then it occurred to him that perhaps Liddie wouldn’t be back from Juilliard in time. He raised his hand and asked his homeroom teacher, Mme Boutin, if he could hold on to the form until he’d checked at home.
Madame was in the last stages of pregnancy. Everything made her tired. In a weary voice she read her instructions about the tickets aloud to Mack. “‘These forms will be collected and returned by three P.M. to the business office so that the ticket order can be returned by Friday.’” She looked up at Mack and shrugged. “What am I to do? I would like to allow this most reasonable request, but I cannot. It’s absurd, of course, but I simply cannot. You understand?”
Mack said he did, and when the forms were passed forward in his row, he added his to the pile.
Late that afternoon, while his mother was fixing dinner, he stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her. He was still a little stoned—he’d gone to the Point earlier and smoked a couple of joints with Al, watching the big, dirty waves slap slowly at the rock barricade. The motion had filled him wit
h such a sense of all that was rhythmic and benign in the world that now he didn’t feel any of the tension he usually felt around his mother when he was stoned—the fear that she’d notice his odd speech, or his eyes. It even occurred to him, vaguely, that in her repetitive motions, the same ones she performed day after day fixing meals, there was something as benign, as natural, as the way the waves threw themselves at the shore over and over.
“With bells on,” his mother was saying. “She wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She smiled, slamming a pot down—again? it seemed—on the stove.
He strained. “Liddie?” he asked.
“Herself,” his mother said, now crossing to the sink, reaching into it.
“So,” he said, gathering all his faculties. “Six tickets was right.” He felt such a sense of accomplishment at having produced this that he beamed foolishly
She turned to him, a motion that seemed to take forever. “Six?” She frowned. “Let’s see.” Her fingers went up, and Mack’s did too, involuntarily. Touching them, she counted. “Me, Randall, Neen, Marey and Sarey, Lid, and Dad. That’s seven, sweetie. You asked for six?”
“Well, Dad’s not coming, is he?”
“Honey, of course he is. Of course he most certainly is. Why wouldn’t he?”
Mack stood speechless. There were a million reasons—everything in their lives was the reason—but he couldn’t name one. He felt dizzy. He went and sat down at the kitchen table. Somehow this took a long while, and he had regained his composure by the time he’d accomplished it. He could see outside from here—the back door was open and all the leaves in the yard suddenly shimmered together in a long rush of wind. “It doesn’t matter,” he said finally.