by Sue Miller
Her father never again spoke about her “trailing along” with them, though it was clear he was annoyed by it. But this was his way. It was the way of many of the parents on their block, in their world. They explained their positions clearly and left the choices up to their children. Aside from curfews established for their safety, there were few rules in the children’s lives. They were allowed enormous freedom, once it was clear to their parents that they understood the risks and problems in their options.
Nina took a kind of dark pleasure in being the focus of the tension between her father and her brother. She felt vied over by the most important people in her life. She wasn’t clever enough then to see that if Mack hadn’t chosen her he would easily have found any number of other issues to struggle over with David. It was only later, remembering, that she realized that Mack had announced his position about the new shape of their family in any number of ways since his return.
He seemed unable, for instance, to tolerate the gentle solicitude that marked their parents’ new relations with each other.
“Did you sleep well?” Lainey would ask David.
“Very well, thanks,” he’d say. “And you?”
“Pretty good,” she’d say.
“Not me,” Mack would intrude, his voice just slightly too loud. “I made one mistake after another.”
He called the family “the expurgated version”; he called David “the wandering gentile,” “the prodigal dad.” It seemed to Nina that he was using her father’s own weapons—humor, sarcasm—and turning them against him. And it worked. David couldn’t respond. It would have been impossible to call Mack’s bluff or to choose to take offense, because all of this was so perfect an imitation of David’s own style, of what he’d been doing to all of them for years.
But Mack didn’t bring Nina along only because it annoyed David. It was just at the beginning of that period in the sixties when a reverence for childhood, for childlike innocence, began to flower. Suddenly you weren’t supposed to be cool anymore; you were supposed to be goofy, charmingly wacky, unselfconsciously eccentric. And through sheer naïveté Nina still had some of those qualities, those qualities Mack admired and wanted for himself.
And it was partly for this reason that he wanted to turn her on, to teach her how to smoke dope. Because it was also that time when people who’d discovered marijuana had a kind of proselytizing passion about it. They believed in it. They thought if everyone used it, it would bring peace and joy to the world. That the war would end. And he seemed to think that if Nina used it, she’d never have to grow out of her childhood, in some sense. That the quality he saw in Nina and saw himself as having lost would have been saved in her if she discovered another way of thinking about life early enough.
He’d offered it to her even that first night when they went to the Clark, but because she would have had to smoke it—and she didn’t know how to smoke—Nina turned it down. Sometimes, though, as they drove around on various adventures after that, the boys would pass a joint back and forth in the car, and Nina could feel herself getting a little dizzy from the smoke, slipping into a kind of strange associative way of thinking. They’d grin at each other then and try to keep her talking. It wasn’t until nearly midsummer, though, that they actually succeeded in getting her high.
It was a night when Nina’s parents were going out for the evening to a dinner party, leaving her alone in the house—Mary and Sarah were away at camp, and Mack had said he’d be in charge of his own supper. To Nina, they looked youthful and happy as they went down the front steps into the pale summer evening. Lainey had lost a lot of weight just before and after her father moved back in, and they were built remarkably like each other again, both tall and slim and dark. They could have been brother and sister.
Nina called good night to them from the front porch. After they’d turned down the block, out of sight, she went back in and shut the door. The front hall smelled of her mother’s perfume, a wonderful complicated aroma, sweet and dark. Nina went up to their room and found the bottle sitting out on Lainey’s bureau. Tabac Blonde. Nina knew this stuff had the quality of holy water for her mother. You couldn’t get it in the United States. Lainey had a college friend who lived in Paris send her a bottle once a year. Nonetheless, Nina unstoppered it, touched the glass stem to her neck once on each side. Instantly she felt transformed, sexual. She opened her mother’s drawer and rummaged through her makeup. Lainey never threw any of it away, so there was a huge assortment of greasy eye shadows, rouges, stubby bright lipsticks. Nina spread everything out in front of her on the bureau and began to try one, then another. Berry Blue eye shadow. Then Misty Gray over that. Candy Plum lipstick. She penciled moles here and there. She spit into the little tray of mascara and brushed the gummy stuff on her lashes.
Below her, she heard the front door open. There were voices—male—and the door slammed shut. It was Mack and company. Their feet bumped heavily in the hall and the living room. Suddenly her image in the mirror changed. What had seemed glamorous to her only seconds before looked cartoonish and idiotic. She headed quickly down the hall to the bathroom to wash her face.
“Is that you, Nina?” Mack called up. As she passed she could see him standing at the bottom of the stairs, his big hand nearly covering the top of the newel post.
“Yeah. I’ll be down in a minute.” Nina locked the bathroom door and washed her face carefully, leaving a faint trace of lipstick but cleaning off the moles, the goop from her eyes. She brushed her teeth. Music started from downstairs, the powerful voice of a black woman begging over and over to be rescued.
Nina came down into the pulsing beat. They had the volume turned so loud that you could hear a nasal vibration in the air, as if all the glass, all the metal, the house owned were singing along. They were back in the kitchen, shouting at each other. Nina went to the doorway and stood watching them for a moment. Mack was stirring something in a big pot on the stove. Al stood dazed, smiling, in the back doorway. Rob McKinnock sat at the table with his eyes shut, his mouth moving inaudibly with the music. She could smell her mother’s perfume on herself under the soap. “Take me, baby, Hold me, baby,” the black voices sang urgently. The back door was open, and the light in the room changed suddenly as the wind shifted the leaves on the mulberry tree. The air touched her face, it moved her hair slightly. Let my life stay like this forever, she thought. And she stepped into the room.
They were stoned, more stoned than she’d ever seen them before. It took Al a few moments to make sense of why she was there. Mack was making spaghetti for supper, and they’d brought her brownies, brownies cooked with grass, to turn her on. There was a sense of ceremonial generosity as they peeled the tinfoil back off the pan and showed her the bruised-looking cakes.
Nina sat down at the kitchen table and ate two or three of them while the boys smiled idiotically, benevolently, and cooked their dinner. Then the music had changed, the hornlike voice of Otis Redding was rocking the house. They ate spaghetti, sprinkled, too, with a little grass. Nina was beginning to feel strange. When they all cleared the table, she noticed that it took the plates a long time to slide into the sink, and that two of them broke neatly into perfect halves. This seemed utterly remarkable to her, though when she tried to speak of it to Rob, she said something else.
In the dining room and living room they danced, the three of them and Nina, with the music all around them. Time seemed to stand still, then to rush forward. When Nina closed her eyes, she felt the music was part of her, that she didn’t have to think about moving—it was inevitable, the music told her how to, she’d been there, doing it, an infinitely long time. After a while the windows were dark, and then it occurred to someone to turn on the lights. They danced some more: the Stones, the Supremes, Junior Walker.
Sometime after that, they were suddenly up in Nina’s room, all of them, peeling the wallpaper in memory of Randall. Mack was the one who said it, again and again: “Do this in remembrance of me,” and they all pulled the long s
trips down. It seemed so clear; later Nina could remember the sense of beautiful logic as the paper came off in patches and strips and the horrible wrecked walls were visible again. She felt Randall then, among them; she was stunned by the odd beauty of the walls with the multiple layers of pattern and paint. It was solemn and right. It seemed the only meaningful ceremony of goodbye she’d been allowed to have for her brother. She cried, and Mack held her, his face changed to grief, too, by her tears.
And then they were in the basement, giggling, getting the bicycles out, all the different sizes. When they came up out of the bulkhead, the air was dark and cool, and it silenced them. They each got on a bike and started pedaling. Nina looked back at the house as they left—the windows all burning brightly, the door flung open. She thought how beautiful it was. Home, she said, her lips carefully shaping the word. She was startled by her voice in the silent night.
They pedaled for a long time in the black air. They were in a row, at the edge of traffic, and the headlights moved across the boys’ pumping legs ahead of her. She watched them all going up and down, up and down, and there was some confusion about whose legs they were, though it helped her to touch her own, to feel that they were the bare ones. Someone was laughing, and the impulse washed over her too: their foolish legs, the joke of all of them doing this in a row.
But when they went through the black tunnel under the Outer Drive, the air changed, it was suddenly cold and damp. Nina’s lungs hurt, and she was afraid the air was too cold in them. She was trying to hold her breath.
At the Point, the only noise was the swish and suck of water against the rocks. The lake heaved slowly, massively, gleaming in the moonlight with the silvery schools of dead alewives that had washed to shore in huge numbers that year. Nina sat with her back firmly against the granite pilings, convinced that this way the water couldn’t get her, couldn’t pull her in. The boys stripped down quickly. They were silver in the moonlight too. They dove in and disappeared under the magic iridescent mass of alewives. They waited to come up until they were out beyond the fish, too far for Nina to see them. And even though she could hear their voices out there, their laughter, she was also sure they were in the fish, that they were dead too. She held her cool knees close for safety, so she wouldn’t slip away into the silvery water, and she began to cry again.
When they came back they pulled her up into their midst. They huddled close to her, wet, naked, to comfort her. They were all talking at once, too fast for Nina to understand them. Their bodies were cold, pressing against her. “I thought you were dead,” she said. She was touching their bumped, glistening flesh as they jittered around her. Then they were holding her, rocking her, the way you do a child you’ve trapped in a circle game. Nina let them, she let herself stagger against them, she let their bodies rub together. Al danced away, holding his penis out, calling to her that he wasn’t dead and lifting it, waving it as proof. Nina laughed at him, at his flat wet hair, his jiggly penis, and then he pressed into the close ring again, and they were all laughing and moving against her. She could feel their cold, strong bodies, she could feel the kisses of their soft, floppy penises on her legs. She could hardly breathe, she was so excited, so happy. She wanted this dance never to end.
She was too tired to pedal back, so they left her bike and she sat on the crossbar in front of Mack. She was dizzy and sleepy, swaying gently from side to side with the rhythm of his pedaling. But when they got home and she stepped off, she felt as alien as you do after a long boat ride—heavy and earthbound—and she knew that it was nearly over, that she was coming back.
She went into the house and up the stairs. When she turned on the light in her room, her father grunted once, raised his hands to cover his face, and then sat up on her bed, swinging his feet down to the floor. The room was a shambles. Nina’s fingers lifted to her mouth, involuntarily. She and her father looked at each other a long moment. Then Nina looked down. Between them, on the floor, were strips of the flowery wallpaper—here a rose, there a bird’s opened wing.
Her father’s voice said, “Is there an explanation for this? Nina?”
Nina looked at him again. His pale eyes seemed to cut through her, his mouth was a tight line. The overhead light made his high domed forehead gleam.
Nina wanted to take the blame but to share it too, to escape. She was appalled and terrified. “We all did it,” she said, and realized that this was her own, her true voice, that it seemed to be saying exactly what she intended.
“You and … ?”
It took her a moment to remember. “Mack and Rob and Al.”
“I don’t suppose you can tell me why.”
She shook her head. Nothing could explain this. Then it came back to her. “We did it on account of Randall.”
“I see,” he said. His composed face tightened even more, but at the same time his shoulders shifted forward. He looked defeated. Nina saw then how much power they had over him. She felt a sudden pity for him.
After a few seconds, or a minute, he asked, “Where is he now?”
“Randall?” she asked. And then she knew that was wrong. “Mack?”
“Yes.”
“Outside.”
He nodded. His expression hadn’t changed. “And whose idea was this?” He gestured at the room. “Who, exactly, was the dim bulb?”
“I think Mack. But I’m not sure.”
Her father stood slowly. He was still dressed, though he’d taken off his shoes, his jacket and tie. He stepped noiselessly toward her in his socks, and she stood facing him, tensed for anything: To be hit, though her father had never hit her. To be screamed at. To be wiped from the earth’s surface.
“Let’s go,” he said. He took her arm, and she felt alive again. She turned, and he held her by the elbow as they walked down the hall, down the unbearably loud, groaning stairs. The windows were all glowing with a soft gray light, a light that seemed holy and judgmental to Nina.
Nina and her father stood together in the open doorway. Muted colors had begun to live in what they saw. The sky was almost pink, an oyster color. Rob lay on his back next to his fallen bicycle on the gray-green grass of the square, and his soft giggling noise floated across to them, along with the repeated metal squeal of one of the other bikes. Mack and Al circled around him like circus performers, pedaling slowly. Mack’s face was tilted up in a kind of blind ecstasy, opened and closed at the same time. Nina could feel her father’s cool grip tighten on her skin as they watched him going around and around and around.
“You are responsible for this too, Nina,” her father said to her suddenly. And though later she realized that he’d meant just the events of the evening, the state of the house, when she spoke then she was looking only at her brother, at the chemical innocence on his face, feeling a sense of kinship and protection deeper than blood. “I know,” she said. “I am.”
And then her father let go of her and stepped forward to call the boys in.
PART TWO
Chapter 13
When you read about families like ours, where one member is very ill—special, they’re sometimes called now—you discover that often when the problem is removed—because the ill person is sent away, or dies, or gets cured—someone else in the family takes on that role. And maybe that’s all it was: that after Randall left, there was suddenly room for Mack and me to go crazy, to be as mad, as bad, as we wanted.
On the other hand, maybe we were really only angry at my father for leaving us, acting out, as he would say. Or it could have been just that it was the sixties and there was a perfect congruence between the time—which heaped its praise on acting out—and our lives. Or maybe it was a result of living in Hyde Park, where being troubled or in trouble was equated with being sensitive and bright, where the high premium put on eccentricity drove half the people my age then and later into a kind of wasteful extravagance of personality. But perhaps it was all more elemental than that—hormones only, singing in our blood, driving us to wildness.
But
whatever the immediate circumstance, the need, there was also—for me anyway, but I suspect for Mack too—the exciting sense of inevitability, of stepping toward a waiting fate that was part of who we were. We did go crazy, we were bad; and suddenly the balance in our family shifted, the dividing line moved. Where before there had been “the extras” and then the others—the giants—with Randall in their center, now the line was drawn between those who were seemingly normal, happy, proceeding well, and then Mack and me, who suddenly were something else. And of course, somehow inevitably connected to us in our wildness, our craziness, was my mother.
This might have been when I was nine or ten years old: Mary and Sarah and I came out late to play. It was almost dark, and we could see that most of the other kids had already gone home. As I went down the front steps, the few who were left out there, running and whirling on the black grass in the square, looked sprightly and otherworldly. They made me think of an illustration in a picture book of mine—a dancing circle of elves and fairies in the moonlight—and I was stopped still for a moment on the steps by the power of the similarity.
Then I heard voices behind me and, turning, saw my mother and Mrs. Gordon on the swing, nearly invisible in the deep twilight of the porch. Their cigarettes were bright soft beacons that swayed with the swing’s slow motion. Mary and Sarah were already crossing the grass to the game, being transformed into the magical anonymity of the other children by distance and darkness. I let them disappear. I sat down at the bottom of the porch stairs. I took one of my shoes off and pretended to hunt for a pebble in it, while I listened to the women behind me. The slow squeak of the swing provided rhythm, the cries of the children a kind of music. I stuck my hand inside my sneaker and sat there.
For a few minutes I couldn’t understand what they were talking about—some news of Mrs. Gordon’s that my mother thought was wonderful and Mrs. Gordon wasn’t so sure about. Then Mrs. Gordon said, “I’ll tell you what it is with me.” Her voice was gravelly, loud. “With me, it’s simply that I’m not sure I can bear to do it again.”