by Sue Miller
Finally Nina couldn’t stand it anymore. “Mother!” she said.
Lainey started, as though she’d forgotten Nina was there. She looked over at her daughter guiltily, waiting like a child to be told what she was doing wrong. She was barefoot, wearing an old shirt and shorts that had grown too big for her in the last few weeks.
“Stop it. Stop it!” Nina couldn’t think what it was she needed to say to her mother. If Lainey had been a smaller woman she might have taken her by the shoulders and shaken her. “Just stop it,” she said.
Lainey set everything down. “I can’t,” she said and gulped. And then she left the room.
But of course she did. She stopped, though for a long time she still got up in the night regularly, as though Randall were waking her. Nina imagined her wakefulness as being like the pain that amputees report in a phantom limb. In the morning, though, when they all trooped downstairs, she’d be gone, back in bed, and whatever the traces might have been of her agony were picked up. David would fix breakfast. After their silent mornings in his absence, with Lainey shuffling sleepily back and forth from the counter to the table, smoking, drinking coffee, it was hard for Nina to get used to her father’s energy, to his questions, his jokes. Often he’d sing, one of his absurd songs: “The pope, he leads a jolly life—jolly life.”
But for the most part, all this was merely the stage on which Nina’s life was acted out. Actually she barely saw them, rarely thought about them. And this in itself was new for her, an exciting change: she felt free of them at last, in some sense. In her earlier memories they were always the ones on center stage, the ones she could recall most clearly. The Nina that watched them barely existed for herself. She was just a way of seeing them, a way of looking. She couldn’t remember what she had looked like, looking. But years later, when she thought back on this period of her life, they were the ones she could barely remember. It was Nina, Nina whom she saw. Their lives, their doings, were blurry and unclear.
And so what seemed of greatest importance to her during these three or four months when so much was happening to them was that she inherited Randall’s room.
Prior to this she had always shared a room with Mary. It seemed to her that Mary’s asthmatic breathing had been part of her dreams from her earliest memory, that speaking to Mary in the dark was a way of thinking, and Mary’s replies were like part of her own consciousness. But Nina was tired of Mary now, of Mary and Sarah both. She’d grown four or five inches in the last year, and that great surge in height seemed symptomatic to her of the distance she felt she’d traveled from them. When Lainey offered her Randall’s room, she leapt at the opportunity. For days she sorted through her possessions in preparation for the move, throwing away or giving to Mary or Sarah all those embarrassing remnants of her own immaturity—dolls, Cray-Pas, dress-up clothes. Keeping only those things that spoke of the new life she planned for herself.
Together Lainey and Nina had chosen a feminine, very delicate paper to cover Randall’s scarred walls—a cream-colored background, with birds flying among blue and yellow flowers. Lainey hired a painter-paperer to do the room, an old man named Mr. Money. He called Nina “Princess.”
All this seemed magical to Nina: Mr. Money’s name, his apparent adoration of her, the emergence of the room from its nightmare form to conventional and, to Nina, completely satisfactory prettiness. From somewhere Lainey had found for her a kidney-shaped dressing table with a threefold mirror. It was unlike any of the other pieces of furniture in the house. Everything else was from Lainey’s family, or else only functional, simple utilitarian. This had a flower-printed skirt and a little upholstered stool to match it. It seemed a remarkable concession on Lainey’s part to something Nina was confident was visibly emerging in herself. After she moved downstairs she would sit in the indented waist of the table for hours, looking at herself from every angle, with every conceivable hairdo. Me, her life sang, and she believed it. Me, me. So it wasn’t until Mack came home from college that she thought very hard or seriously about the changes that had taken place in their lives together.
Lainey had written to Mack, had been trying to call him for days to find out his exam schedule, to find out how he was getting home; but he hadn’t responded, hadn’t called back. Then one evening as Nina and Lainey and Mary were in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, there was a noise over the clatter of dishes and the running water. They all turned, and Lainey was suddenly in motion. It was Mack, grinning in the doorway. He was rumpled, with several days’ growth of dark beard shadowing his face. His hair seemed shockingly long to Nina. It was still that time when you took someone for a girl if he didn’t have his hair trimmed with clippers on the sides, and Mack’s came down nearly to his collar.
In Mack’s absence her memory of him was always shaped by the way Randall looked, by that angelic vacancy, the queer childlike haircuts. It was as though in her mind she always saw Mack under a superimposed image of Randall. So she was very startled now to see this large, dark man, full of energy and personality. Startled, too, to see the power of the embrace he gave Lainey—when his arms went around her, her heels lifted off the floor.
For several seconds after the embrace ended, Lainey stood exclaiming with her back to Mary and Nina. Until she turned to them, Nina couldn’t see that she was again weeping openly in that curiously unselfconscious way. “Look, look who’s here!” she’ cried, as though they couldn’t see him, as though he didn’t exist, until she pointed him out. She crossed the kitchen to the back door. “David!” she started to call. “Mack’s here! Macklin’s home.” Her hands didn’t even lift to clear her flooded face.
When he held her, Mack’s beard scratched Nina’s cheek, he smelled of sweat and funk, and she was aware of her breasts being squashed against his wide flat chest. Her heart seemed to be banging loosely in her rib cage. When she stepped back from him she couldn’t look at him. She felt a heat like shame rise to her face.
But then her parents came back in, and Sarah, and she could disappear into the folds of family, into that familiar hubbub of people bumping into each other, speaking, moving with a kind of comfortable unconsciousness of each other.
While Mack showered and shaved, while Lainey fixed him something to eat, Nina went to her room to get her camera. She set it on the dressing table for a minute and sat down. She leaned forward. The shimmery silver of the old mirror was flecked and streaked behind the glass, and she looked hard into this softened version of her face for what it might reveal about herself, her secret thoughts, to someone else. Then, suddenly, she sat back. She picked up her camera and lifted it to her face, looking through the viewfinder into the glass at the hidden girl looking back at her from behind her camera.
She was just emerging from her new bedroom when Mack stepped out of the bathroom, holding a towel wrapped around his waist. He stopped when he saw her, then walked down the hall toward her.
“Your room now?” he asked, smiling.
“Yes,” she said, and stood aside.
He rested in the doorway, surveying it. She felt somehow a growing sense of awkwardness. She wasn’t sure if it had to do with the prettified room or with Mack’s body, large and wet and nearly naked, standing so close to her. He gave off a soapy-smelling damp heat that seemed to surround her. She looked down at his feet, noted that hair curled on his big toes, on the tops of his high white arches.
“Some transformation,” he said.
“I know,” she answered.
Mack had always been Nina’s favorite. There was a kind of inevitability to this. Mary and Sarah were younger, too much like her; Liddie was too old, she left home too early; Randall was autistic. Mack was the only one left, in a sense. But also, he was male, he was powerful. He reminded Nina of her father. Those were the logical reasons, but finally even they didn’t explain the importance to Nina of his attention and approval, the wrenching pain she felt each time circumstances reminded her of how inconsequential her life, her existence, was to him. There was some yea
rning affinity she was always aware of whenever he drew near to her world. Even as a little girl, through all the summer nights they had played their endless round of games in the square or on the street—Spud, Sardines, Hide-and-Seek, Red Rover, Statues—when the big boys descended, it was always exciting. They frightened the littlest ones, they paid the girls to take down their pants, they whipped everyone with the naked wiry branch from the tree of heaven. They forced the girls to eat things they told them were poisonous. And yet the children would have followed them anywhere; they loved them for the excitement, the sense of evil, of danger, they carried with them. For Nina, Mack carried all that, and then more.
And the summer after her father returned, Mack began once more to do things with Nina occasionally. To include her. They were odd adventures, meant in some sense again just to fill time until one of his friends arrived—he seemed incapable of solitude, of reading or even just being alone in his room.
He never actually asked her to do these things, though. For the most part, everything seemed just to evolve, to happen. Once, they sneaked into the freight elevator of an expensive apartment building on Dorchester and spent a half hour or so sitting on the roof, their backs propped against a chimney, looking at the black stripe of the lake against the lighter evening sky. Mack was talking, a disordered monologue Nina had to make a concerted effort to understand, about “purity,” how hard it was to have it in this world, how you had to struggle for it in yourself. When she looked over at him in the glowing air, she was startled and moved to see that his eyes were swollen with gleaming tears.
Another evening they went to a playground together. Later Nina was sure that he was stoned that night too, but again she didn’t realize it then. She was aware, though, of something selfconscious in her own pleasure, something slightly false; but also something exhilarating that made her push that recognition away, that made her tilt her head back and laugh with almost pure delight as he pushed her on the iron whirligig and then jumped up to join her.
But probably this would have been the extent of his interest in her that summer—he would have swooped down occasionally into her life out of boredom, out of idle affection or curiosity about her, and then pulled back into this own world—if David hadn’t found his attention to Nina objectionable.
They were all still sitting at the table in the dining room, though everyone was through eating. Lainey had had Mr. Money repaper this room recently too, perhaps in celebration of David’s return, and Nina thought maybe it was on account of this that they had all been behaving with a kind of stunned propriety. But maybe it was just the newness of having David back, or Mack home from college, that caused the politeness; and the magazine elegance of the room had nothing to do with it. In any case, it seemed a little false to Nina, after their years of odd meals served anywhere in the house; it seemed like playacting. But it was also pleasurable, just as the pretense of childish innocence in the playground with Mack had been pleasurable.
Mack was talking. The windows were open—had been open since mid-June in deference to Chicago’s steady summer heat—and a little layer of grit sat on all the sills in testament to that. A commuter train rocketed past outside, and they all froze momentarily, sat like a tableau of American family life, mid-sixties. And for those few seconds, Nina felt that quick sense of heightened awareness and self-awareness that stops your heart periodically through adolescence, that promises you you’ll understand life if you remember this moment, freeze it under clear glass, look at it unblinkingly over and over. “Yes!” her heart said with a sudden whump, and she consciously made herself record the details: At each end of the table her parents sit, Lainey’s face open and eager in love as she waits for Mack to continue; David’s composed, minimal smile revealing nothing of what he thinks. The evening sun slopes sideways outside the tall windows—yellows the air, touches the trees—and the room is full of a reflected greenish light. Mary’s and Sarah’s faces across the table are lifted to Nina and Mack, together on their side; Nina feels connected to him, she feels a sense of tender pity for them. Of love. Of love for them all, as they are at this moment. Of love even for the old familiar dishes on the table, the way her own hands lie curled next to them, the way the trellised arbor on the new wallpaper encircles them all in a false, pretty world.
Then the train was gone and Mack started talking again. Nina couldn’t even hear what he was talking about, so concentrated was her need to record the context, the feeling. But in a few minutes he got up, and the spell was broken. They all began to push their chairs back and reach for plates, glasses, silverware.
Mack, bending over the table, turned to Nina. His long hair fell forward across one cheek. “We’re going to the Clark tonight, Neen. W. C. Fields. Want to come along?”
She was already saying yes, unwrapping this gift in her mind, imagining the events of the evening to come, when David, unmoving yet in his position at the head of the table, said, “I don’t think Nina needs to trail along for that one, Mack.”
Mack seemed to uncoil slowly up into a standing position. “I didn’t say trail along. She won’t trail along. I asked her to come with me.”
“Mack,” Lainey said, and then she smiled uselessly, pathetically, at him.
“Well, come on, Mom. What does that mean, trail along? He’s always doing that, that weird sarcasm. It’s like … a fucking trick or something.”
Nina’s father was smiling now. “I’m right here, Mack,” he said. “You can address yourself to me.”
Mack stood, not looking at anyone for a moment. Nina’s eyes met her sisters’ across the table. Theirs were scared and excited. She realized that they’d all been waiting, they’d all known this moment was going to come. Even the happiness of the few seconds before this, she saw suddenly, was made potent and worth noticing by the inevitability of this moment’s arrival.
“Why can’t I go?” she asked abruptly. And then she felt it: she’d chosen sides! She gripped the back of her chair.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t,” her father said. “I’m only asking Mack to think about the situation.”
“Look,” Mack said. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Why you’re making such a big deal out of it. God.”
“I’m not,” David said. “But it’s my responsibility to look out for the best interests of everyone in this family, and this isn’t in Nina’s best interest. In my opinion.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Oh, come on, Mack. There’s no need for all this righteous indignation. You’re nineteen. I’m just not so sure that a fourteen-year-old is the appropriate partner for you in your adventures.”
Simultaneously Nina protested. “I’m fifteen,” and Mack said, “We’re going to a W. C. Fields movie, for Christ’s sake.”
“Please don’t say that, Mack,” Lainey said.
He turned quickly to her. “For Christ’s sake?”
“Yes. I’d just rather you didn’t.” This was a tic of Lainey’s, born of religious feeling. It had nothing to do with foul language. It was an era when they’d all begun to swear violently. The world had. Fuck, shit, asshole: they used these words freely, often in front of their parents too. And David and Lainey no longer objected, except sometimes for a pinched look on their faces, as though they’d smelled or tasted something not right. But the idle use of God or Christ still wounded Lainey.
Mack shook his head. “We must live in the only house in the nation where it’s more acceptable to say shit than to take the name of the Lord in vain.”
Lainey smiled. “‘If the foo shits,’” she said.
Mack laughed, and for a few seconds Nina thought that her mother had brought them all through it, that the moment was over.
But her father was standing up now, and he said, “Listen, Mack. All I’m asking you to do is just think about his little romance you’re conducting. It’s like Catcher in the Rye. Pretty great for Holden, but maybe not so fair to Phoebe.”
Nina hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye. She did
n’t understand her father’s reference. But the word romance caught her breath and made her blush, made her happy and embarrassed.
“All I’m asking you to do is examine your motivation,” he continued. “Think about it.”
“I don’t need to examine my motivation,” Mack said. “There’s no reason Nina shouldn’t go.” And then he said in a mean voice, “I don’t know what your trouble is, but it’s your trouble. It’s got nothing to do with reality, man, nothing at all.”
“Mack,” Lainey said. Her tone was pleading. It asked, Don’t wreck this, don’t spoil this, for me. For us. There was a long silence in the room, maybe as long as the silence when the train passed.
“Look,” Mack announced coolly. “I’m taking Nina with me. If she wants to go.”
“Oh, I do!” Nina said. She looked to her mother for support, but Lainey wouldn’t meet her eye.
“Of course she does,” David said. “That’s my point.”
“But I can, can’t I?”
No one would look at Nina.
“Naturally it’s your choice, Nina,” David said coolly. “As long as you’re home by eleven.”
Willing herself unaware of the tension in the room, Nina carted several loads of dishes to the kitchen and then went up to her room to get ready. She was struck by the smell of fresh paint as she entered it, a smell that had made her joyous and hopeful for weeks, that called up for her the pleasure she saw on Mr. Money’s face whenever he called her “Princess.” And that night, as she got ready to go out with her brother, she was thinking that she’d crossed some threshold, that she’d stepped away from her sisters into some new world that Mack was the owner of. That from now on it would all be different.
*
They did go to the Clark that night, Al and Soletski and Mack and Nina, and she disappointed them all by not understanding what was funny about W. C. Fields. And after this, Mack began to ask her along more frequently. She went out with them five or six times before it all blew up, but her memory later gave it back to her expanded, repeated over and over.