Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  He was shocked at the skillful imitation. He said quickly, “I’ve even grown a little tired of it then.” This was true too. The pounding emphasis on the forbidden words sometimes did seem merely silly to him.

  But now she was smiling, hungry to hurt him too. “Well, let me say then that I’ve grown a little tired of what passes for a hard-on with you.” They’d both drunk a lot.

  For a long time he couldn’t think of a response. Then he said, “Perhaps it’s just a generational thing.” He was trying to make light of it, trying to bring them back to a place where something might be retrievable between them.

  But she wanted this; her face was unusually animated. She said carefully, “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s that I’m out here, in the real world, the world that’s changing. And you’re just fucking around with it, fucking with ideas about change. Do you give one shit, really, about Laing or Norman O. Brown or any of those guys? They’re just ideas to play with for you. To me, to us, they’re real.” She had stood up. She crossed the room and planted herself in front of him. “I’ve changed my life, David. I’ve made me who I am. And you’re still so fucking hung up. You’re still married, for God’s sake. You don’t even know how to make yourself free.” She tilted her head and smiled at him. “Fuck you,” she said lightly. “Watch my ugly face now.” She leaned forward and thrust her face at him. “Fuck you. Fuck your family.”

  He had left that night, but that hadn’t ended it. She’d called him about a week later, her voice slurring on the telephone. She was weeping. She said she’d been at a party, she’d smoked too much, drunk too much. That she’d gone into a back bedroom and had sex with several people—“Maybe three or four, I don’t know”—and now she needed him.

  It was raining. He couldn’t catch his breath as he started to drive. He wanted to fuck her, to hit her; he felt a deep excitement in this trashy drama. He was driving fast down Fifty-fifth Street, and he ran a red light. He saw the pedestrian just in time and swerved, his brakes squealing. He came to a halt sideways in the intersection.

  The man stood and pounded David’s car in his rage. He was wearing a poncho; his face was lost in the black hole of the hood. He was like a nightmare, a death figure from a Bergman movie. His angry breath frosted in the dripping air. David sat inert and watched him as he came around to the door by the driver’s seat and kicked it several times before he disappeared into the dark downpour.

  Cars were honking. David started the engine and pulled over to the side of the street. For a long time he sat there gripping the wheel, his heart pounding, and wondered how he could have allowed this to happen to him. Finally he turned the car around and headed back to his apartment. His door still bore the dents the man had kicked in it.

  Now he heard a distant thump: Randall. He moved quickly and silently down the hall. He shut Lainey’s door, wincing at the hard click of the catching lock, and opened Randall’s, fumbled on the wall for the light switch.

  Randall was on his hands and knees, rocking, groaning. His mattress had skidded drunkenly out into the room. He looked like a mad shipwrecked survivor on his raft.

  David began to speak, softly, almost crooning. He crouched and touched the boy’s back, and smelled the pungent odor of urine. He felt the bunched and corded sheets under Randall. Wet. Cold. He slid his arm around his son, under his armpit, and lifted him to a standing position. The boy shuddered, whinnying, but he didn’t resist. Maybe, David thought, because he’d gotten used to a man taking care of him, with Bob. David led him down the hall to the bathroom, speaking softly, slowly, the whole while.

  In the bathroom’s bright light, he pulled Randall’s damp pajama bottoms down, unbuttoned the top, trying not to look at the heavy swing of the boy’s penis, the dark patch of hair around it.

  Blinking, his face wrenched closed against the light, Randall lurched to the toilet and sat down. He pushed his penis between his legs and then bent over to watch it. David heard the hesitant spurt, then the driving flow. He turned away. He hadn’t seen Mack naked in years, but how different he would feel, he realized. How proud, even aroused a little, he might be by the vision of Mack’s maleness. With Randall, there was only something sad, repugnant. He thought of what Lainey had said about the girls, about their sense of what being male meant. He looked back at Randall. There was a light beard griming his jawbone, and David wondered, irrelevantly, who shaved him.

  The flow of urine into the toilet slowed, stopped. Randall was still hunched over, though. Now his belly tightened, and he grunted.

  David knew he should stay, that the boy would need wiping; but some instinct for privacy—probably his own, if he were honest, more than his son’s—made him leave. He went back to Randall’s room and stripped the bed. A corner of the red blanket was damp too, but he decided not to risk the noise of a tantrum by taking that away. He left the sheet, the rubber pad, the pillowcase in a wadded heap by the stairs, where he’d dropped Randall’s pajamas. He got clean bedding from the linen closet and tossed it onto the mattress. He found dry pajamas in Randall’s drawer.

  He went back down the hall. Randall was still on the toilet, his arm was still wedged down between his legs, but he had relaxed, he sat quietly. The rich stink of his bowels rose around him. David shut the door and stepped forward into it.

  “Okay, let’s try this,” he said. He unwound some toilet paper, wadded it, and held it out to Randall. The boy seemed to wake. He took it, arched his back, and reached around behind himself to wipe, slowly and carefully. “Good boy,” David whispered. “Good job.” Three times David wadded the toilet paper. Three times Randall wiped at himself as laboriously as a little child just learning how. All the while, David whispered his praises.

  Then he helped Randall on with his dry pajamas and they returned down the narrow dark hallway to Randall’s room. David quickly sailed the rubber pad, then the sheets, onto the mattress and pushed it back against the wall. “Here you go, come on,” he said, squatting, patting the mattress. Randall stood and stared just beyond David as though he hadn’t heard him.

  “Here we go,” David whispered in singsong voice, feeling some desperation. He stroked the bed. Randall didn’t move. David stood and picked up the red blanket. “Here we go,” he said. “Lie down.” He waved the blanket, like a deranged matador, as Randall knelt, then awkwardly flipped over onto his back.

  David’s hands were trembling as he tucked the blanket in. He knew for the sake of ritual that more was expected—a song, or for him to lie down too. But he felt incapable of any more patience or tenderness. And it wasn’t that he was angry at Randall or blamed him. In so many ways he was the same sweet animal-child he’d always been. His clubbed penis, his beard, his pubic hair, all were like terrible accidents that had happened to him.

  And to David were the denial of the hope he didn’t know until that moment he’d still entertained: the hope that his son could change. An autistic boy, a beautiful autistic boy, is one thing. An autistic man, another. And this had happened in his absence, this final crushing aspect of the bad luck, the accident that was Randall. With shaking hands he carefully locked Randall’s door again.

  He scooped up the urine-soaked bedding and went downstairs through the silent house. Again he felt the sense he’d had earlier of doing this in Lainey’s place, perhaps even on her behalf. There was something calming about this. He descended the second set of steps now, to the basement laundry, made over after Sarah’s birth, at Retta’s insistence. The light was fluorescently bright when he turned it on, and the appliances gleamed meanly. The bright boxes of soap and bleach stood in a neat row on a shelf on the wall.

  It was as he carelessly, Lainey-like, began to shove the damp sheets into the washer that he felt how blameless he held her, and stopped, astonished.

  And then was not astonished. Then he felt that he’d known this for a long time, without realizing it: he had known that this was luck too. Just luck. That Randa
ll’s illness was only bad luck, fate. He’d known that Lainey hadn’t caused it, he’d known that he was wrong, had been wrong, to think so. The years seemed to roll by in his mind as he looked for the moment when he must have seen it first; and couldn’t find it.

  The light above him ticked and flickered, brought him back to life, to time. When he began again to push the sheet into the washer, he wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there, frozen, but he was conscious now of a deep exhaustion. His hands, his arms, felt heavy and clumsy. And when he turned to go back up the stairs, his whole body seemed to be moving heavily, as though he’d taken on some burden.

  When he came up to the kitchen, she was there, summoned, he thought irrationally, by the power of his emotion. He heard her as though from a distance offering to make coffee or to fix him another drink. She said she’d waked up when he was tending Randall, but didn’t get up because she thought it might make him somehow worse. When she turned to the sink, he saw that on the bandage she wore there was blood. She was talking steadily, but he could barely hear her. He was startled when she set a glass in front of him, when she sat down opposite him at the table.

  He sipped at the drink. The cold shocked him, and he set his glass down too quickly. A little liquid slopped on the table.

  “Thank you for doing all that,” Lainey said. His face must have looked puzzled, because she added, “With Randall, I mean. I know it’s not pleasant.”

  From somewhere he heard his own voice. It sounded creaky, old. “There’s no need for thanks. It’s as much my job as yours.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve done too little of it.”

  “Well, I’m grateful anyway.”

  “I should look at your wound. Your cut.”

  Her arm went up and patted the gauze cap. “Why? It feels all right.” Her cheeks were flushed from sleep, her hair messy.

  “There’s blood on the bandage. It must have opened again.”

  “Oh.” She felt around. “Not much, though. It’s not wet or anything.”

  “Still, I’ll check it.”

  “Well, first things first. Let’s finish these, why don’t we?”

  Silently they sat and drank. After a few minutes, David felt the sense of disorientation diminish; he felt returned, somehow, to himself. He looked up at the wall next to him, at the pictures again.

  Lainey followed his eyes. She said, “I know it’s crazy.”

  “What’s crazy?”

  “Two annunciations.”

  He was about to say, “That’s the least of it,” hoping she’d laugh, when she continued.

  “It’s just that they’re both so beautiful, but in such different ways. See? The Fra Angelico is classic and peaceful. The angel comes, and Mary’s so … unruffled, so accepting.” She moved her face closer to the little images, squinting. “But Botticelli. He’s got all this motion, right from the angel to her. The angel rushes in, and his air moves her too, all in one line. It seems sexual, as though she really is being made pregnant. And she’s turning away too, see? It’s as though some part of her is wanting to run. Not to have to do it.”

  “‘If this cup may not pass from me.’ To quote Adlai.”

  She looked over, and now she did laugh. “Well, yes. Lord, I bet he wishes he’d never said that.” Her face sobered. “But I love both interpretations. Or I’m intrigued by them.”

  “I vote for Botticelli,” David said, after a moment.

  “Do you? Interesting. But you were always more sympathetic to ambivalence than to certitude. Or belief anyway.”

  He was startled. “Was I?”

  “Oh, yes! Didn’t you know that?”

  “Apparently not.”

  She had turned and was frowning at the postcards again. Then she sat back and looked at all the pictures, as though trying to make sense of them together.

  “Lainey,” he said. And was surprised at the tenderness in his tone. He couldn’t remember when he’d spoken to her this way.

  She turned to him, and her face widened eagerly to hear whatever he would say to her.

  His voice was as loving and gentle as though he were proposing marriage. “Lainey, we need to talk about sending Randall away.”

  Her face didn’t change, but tears brimmed, glittering, on her lower lids. “Yes,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.

  Chapter 12

  Spring-Summer 1966

  The spring David came back to the family seemed to last forever. Long before anything blossomed or turned green, the air was ready for it. The university students ambled down the streets, arm in arm, slowed as much by the weather as by love. At breakfast the kitchen door was always thrown open, and the gentle wind sighed around everyone, reaching into all the cold corners of the house, seizing their paper napkins, ruffling the magazine pictures tacked on the wall. Everywhere, people talked about it—how warm, how sunny, how unlikely—as they never did about the more remarkable terrible weather Chicago usually had. They seemed nearly dismayed by their collective good fortune. At school, the kids in Nina’s classes sat lost, staring out the open windows at the greening world, often not knowing what to answer when one of them was called on.

  If she’d been thinking about it, Nina might have seen the long spell of tender weather as a blessing, a benediction on them all, on their new life as a family. But to her the weather, her father, these were backdrop only. Nina was almost fifteen, and she was going through one of those stages that come in adolescence when you think you can change everything about yourself, you can will your life to be different from that time on. She could barely see the events in the world of weather or in her parents’ lives, she was so blinded by those taking place inside her. Later she would try to remember the day her father came back, as she could remember—would remember forever, she was sure—the night he left. And she couldn’t.

  They did talk about it. Their mother sat them down in the living room—picked up for the occasion, Nina noted—and stammered like a young girl as she broke the news. Their father took them out to dinner at Morton’s to answer any questions they might have. There was ample psychological preparation. But the day of his return was foggy in her memory. He began coming over to dinner more, staying on into the long, warm evenings. But it seemed to her that she simply didn’t notice—perhaps didn’t want to notice, or have to think about—when he spent the night again. When the door to her mother’s bedroom was shut to them all once more. The main differences in their lives, anyway, were that they had to be neater and that their mother seemed happier, but nervous, as though something might go wrong at any moment.

  And Randall was sent away. Whether this happened before or after her father moved in, Nina couldn’t say later, but she remembered the general coincidence in timing—though both parents insisted this had been decided separately, that one had nothing to do with the other. But Randall’s departure was the event outside her own life that Nina remembered most clearly from those months.

  He was sent to a school in Connecticut, a school Lainey had known about and been in contact with for several years through her autism correspondence. There were only minimal preparations necessary. His few possessions were packed into a dark brown duffel bag like the ones Mary and Sarah always took with them to camp, and he got a haircut—a terrible haircut. He was at the mercy of the barber anyway, since he had no ideas to announce—or any way of announcing them—about how he wanted to look. And he moved constantly in his fear of the scissors, so that he always wound up with various gaping stripes of white flesh showing through his dark hair. But this haircut seemed to Nina uniquely brutal, unkind. He was, after all, still beautiful sometimes, in a nearly spiritual way. And this one robbed him of that utterly. It made him only physical, and therefore ugly. She thought he looked faintly like a thug.

  Nina cried when he left with her parents for the airport—because he was smiling and placid that day, because in his haircut and new clothes, the pants worn just slightly higher at the waist than a normal person would have worn them, he looked like a chil
d. She cried because she hadn’t paid him any attention in weeks, years, except to get angry at him for messing something up or for eating sloppily. She cried because he seemed like a trusting, cheerful pet who’s being taken to the pound and understands nothing of that.

  He was holding Lainey’s hand as they stepped out into the soft spring air, and he barked joyfully at the sound of a train rattling past.

  “Yes, train,” Lainey said, and they walked together down the long path to the curb. He was taller than she was, but he still walked like a four-year-old, and when he saw the car he let go of her hand and ran toward it, excited to be going for a ride.

  Nina was in charge of the house while her parents were away, but she didn’t do any of the things her mother had asked her to do. Twice they were all late to school because she hadn’t set the alarm. They sat up watching television until one or two every night. And she never cooked. Not once. Instead she used the emergency money Lainey had left, and they ate out—once at the Tropical Hut, once at the Medici, a coffeehouse around the corner. And she bought packaged baked goods—Twinkies, cupcakes, stale little pies wrapped in cellophane—which they all snacked on at odd times. Nina had worked up a story to tell Lainey to explain all this, a lie that might even make her mother feel guilty, about burning her hand. But Lainey never asked.

  She seemed stunned. For several days after their return, her eyes would fill up and spill over at odd moments. She would wipe the tears away and go on with her chores as though this were merely a physical phenomenon, like a hiccup or a sneeze, that had nothing to do with what she was feeling. Nina hated this. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted her mother to make her grief more ceremonial or more private; but in any case, this kind of bizarre, unexplained incontinence was unbearable to her. Once she was in the kitchen, setting the table, while her mother walked back and forth between the sink and the stove, making the usual racket with dishes and pots and pans, her eyes and nose streaming freely.