Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Oh, I know,” said my mother. “It is so much work those first few years. But, Jane, lovey, then it’s done, isn’t it? Out of dipes, off to school …”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Mrs. Gordon said emphatically. “I don’t mind anything once they’re here. It’s just the goddamned labor.” Her cigarette flared orange as Halloween when she inhaled. “I dread it. I dread the thought of it. And all those hands up you.”

  My mother laughed sharply. “Well, yes, there’s certainly that,” she said. Then there was a thick silence. It seemed female to me—the slow-drifting cigarette smoke, the sense of heavy, physical companionship. When my father talked to his friends, there weren’t these long, rich silences full of meaning, full of another kind of communication.

  Mrs. Gordon spoke again. “I mean, I can’t imagine how you did it six times. What could you have been thinking of, Lainey? Six of them. God!” She laughed.

  For me, the air was suddenly thrumming over the beckoning cries of the game. This was it, then. The mothers were talking about us! About their children.

  “You must have been out of your mind,” Mrs. Gordon said.

  After a moment my mother said, “Well, in a way I suppose I was.” Her voice sounded hollow. I squinted over at the darkened porch, but I couldn’t see her face. It was lost in the shadows, in the funny angle up. “Quite mad, actually.”

  “Oh, God! I didn’t mean it that way,” Mrs. Gordon said.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” my mother said in a tired voice. Somebody moved a glass, and ice chimed. “But I was. That’s all.”

  I drew my hand out of my sweaty shoe and cupped it over my face. I breathed deeply the rubbery, familiar, comforting odor. My shoes, my feet, my hand.

  “Is that you, Neen?” my mother asked in a different voice.

  I bent to put my shoe on. “Yes.”

  “You’d better play before it gets too dark, sweetie. I’m calling you girls in at nine o’clock.”

  “It’ll be dark before nine o’clock,” I said, tying my shoe. I hated for my mother to use that tone of affection with me, especially when others were around. It seemed to me that she was trying to force me to join in pretending to Mrs. Gordon that the two of us were loving and close; and I felt swallowed whole by that notion. “It’s actually dark now.”

  “It’s not so smart to point that out,” said Mrs. Gordon, and she laughed again.

  I walked away without answering, I didn’t like Mrs. Gordon. I could hear my mother’s lowered voice say something, something about me; but then I was crossing the grass, onto the children’s terrain. The game, the shouts, swept me up. The bodies bumped around me. The puzzling world of the grownups fell away, and I forgot it nearly instantly.

  When I thought about it in the days afterward, though, what haunted me was nothing it might have revealed to a wiser listener about not having been planned—as with the nicknames, there seemed to be a pushing under until much later of any consciousness of that idea. Instead I seized on the notion that my mother was crazy when she had us. “In a way I suppose I was,” she had said; and when I recalled this, it seemed to me her tone had been flat and undeniably truthful, different from the voice that made extravagant claims in anger (“You are driving me out of my mind!”) or her occasional playful pretense to nuttiness. It seemed a statement of bald fact: She had been crazy. She had been mad. And we were her symptom, the shape of her madness.

  When I suggested this to her on that visit home a few years ago, explained to her the way I’d thought about it during those adolescent years, her face twisted up with anguish. We were sitting together on her porch in the almost-dark, and it was this coincidence, actually, that had brought it back to me—the memory of the other porch, the other twilight.

  “Oh, don’t say that to me, Nina,” she cried. “It breaks my heart to think you felt that way. If anything, you girls were my absolute cure.”

  I laughed then, and after a second she did too, I think purely in response to me. I doubt that she understood that what amused me was her automatic continuation of the metaphor: we were “the cure.” Madness, illness, cure. Sickness and health. This was natural language for us, the terms in which we understood life in my family—because of Randall, I suppose, and because of my father’s work.

  And yet—and I have come to see this only slowly—for my mother these metaphors were more complicated and had more layers than they did for the rest of us. Because illness—and madness too—were also affliction, suffering. And as such they had a spiritual element for her. Certainly she did think in terms of cure. She was no saint; she would have chosen health for Randall, for herself, and for all of us if she had had the choice. But she also thought in terms of acceptance and endurance. And that made her see much in life as a given, as something one would or would not learn from. I remember hearing her once, in one of the terrible arguments that grew more bitter in the months before my father left us, saying to him, “You think there’s some other Randall in there, locked inside this Randall, waiting to come out, to be born. But you’re wrong. He is who he is. He is our Randall. He’s the only one we even have a chance to love.”

  One of the reasons I was in the Midwest—one of the reasons it was such a bad time between me and my first husband—was that I’d had a miscarriage. I’d been in the fourth month of a pregnancy that was unplanned and, as Will put it, “inconvenient.” I found this word, which he repeated whenever we talked about the baby with friends—or even just casual acquaintances—repellent. It wasn’t that I had wanted a child. In fact, until I got pregnant, I hadn’t. But then almost immediately I’d felt, in addition to the sense of a door closing in my life, a kind of eager leap of my heart, a readiness to welcome this change, this new person, whoever it might be.

  But in any case, I lost the baby. Something began to go wrong early one hot evening in August. We were taking a nap, waiting for it to cool off enough to make dinner, when the pains started. I lay in the darkening room, watching Will breathe heavily in heat-stunned sleep, watching the light change on the brick surface of the apartment opposite, and when I knew the pains weren’t going to stop, I woke him. We took a cab to the hospital and they put me in a private labor room. Will had gone out for a few minutes to find a nurse and a bedpan, which I thought I needed, when the baby was born.

  Afterward the doctor told me that there were various anomalies. That was the word he used. He said he knew that it was difficult, and he was especially sorry I’d seen the baby—they tried to avoid that. But that often an early miscarriage like mine was Nature’s way of dealing with defective children. “You’ll be back to work, back to your old life, in a few days. And then there’s no reason why you and your husband can’t just go ahead and have a healthy, wonderful child.” I’d decided almost right away, though, to go to Chicago, sweet home Chicago, instead.

  While I was there, staying in my room at my mother’s apartment, I had trouble sleeping. Not falling asleep. Usually that came easily. But at three-thirty or four in the morning I’d wake abruptly and absolutely. Sometimes I simply never got back to sleep. Other times, it would take several hours, but slowly the gray light would seep into the room, touching first the white of the sheets, a nightgown draped over a chair; then making the whole room smaller and safer; and I would feel that welcome dizzying pull into irrational thought, timelessness, and know that I was dropping off again, escaping my life for a few more hours.

  Troubled by such sleeplessness at home, in my own apartment, I would have risen, put on music, worked. Will could sleep through anything. But in my mother’s guest room, I was always aware of her, worried that I might wake her if I got up. The one time I did—to heat some milk in the kitchen—she joined me after a few minutes. We sat together awhile, as I imagined she’d once sat with Randall in the night. We started talking about my father, and after a long silence I asked abruptly, “Tell me something. Did Dad have an affair with Tony? Years ago, I mean.”

  She looked sharply at me. “Why do you ask?”
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  “Because I think I remember that. But I’m not sure.”

  She took a sip of the warm milk. I’d fixed her a glass too. “Dad had a number of affairs at a certain period in our life together. Tony was one.” Her voice was flat. She was silent for a few moments. “But he’d always been attracted to her, I think. And it was his way of dealing with everything that had gone wrong. His way … of mending himself.”

  “What was yours?”

  “My … ?”

  “Your way of mending yourself.”

  She laughed, once, a single bitter cry, and then her mouth twisted. “Mine was not so efficacious. Or fun. I drank too much and had bad hysterics, which you may recall. I don’t know …” She frowned at me. “You children, maybe. Religion.”

  “Do you mind that he’s marrying Tony? I mean, that it’s Tony?”

  She shrugged, and swirled what was in her glass.

  “I mean, you must have been jealous then,” I pushed. “Doesn’t this make it all come back?”

  “I was jealous. Of course. That’s really why we separated that first time. I couldn’t stand it. Tolerating it. The others. But I was always jealous of your father. That was part of the problem. I think I always loved him so much more intensely than he loved me.”

  “Even at the start?”

  “Mmm. I think so. No. I know so.” She went to the sink and ran water into her empty glass. Then she turned around and leaned back, folded her arms. “I remember before we were married,” she said. Her voice was recollective, almost dreamy. “I was still teaching, fifth grade, and David and I had started to sleep together. And I was so overwhelmed, I so wanted to have him, that I used to pray for it. ‘Let him want me. Let him love me.’ That kind of thing. I’d imagine it, our lovemaking. In church, I mean. And I found that so … shocking, so disturbing—that all I could think of when I was praying was David, was sex—that I went to the minister.” She smiled. “That kind man. You don’t remember him, but I couldn’t have survived without him. Especially Randall. It was a loss to me, a tremendous loss, when he died. And then that callow buffoon who succeeded him.” She shook her head, looking stern for a moment. “But Dr. Norman was marvelous. I mean, here I was, this cow-eyed, moonstruck, whimpering thing, worrying so about the fastidiousness of my prayers. And yet he took me into his study and listened. So patiently, with such attention.”

  She stopped and looked at me, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing me at all.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “The minister. What did he say?”

  “Oh! Wonderful advice!” she said. “Basically he said that God understands. That he’s hardly surprised by the nature of earthly love. Human love. Even physical desire. That man’s love, woman’s love, is always earthbound anyway, even his love of God.” She came and sat across from me again. “He quoted Scripture. That beautiful passage from Paul: ‘For now I know in part, but then shall I know, even as also I am known.’ And he said that all earthly love is necessarily partial. Is like passion. And that God expects our love to be partial, partial in every sense. And to be flawed and selfish. But that if we come to him through it, even through that kind of love, we’ve still come to him. And even if we come to him by praying just for what we want, what counts in the end is that we’ve come. To Him.”

  “And you believe that?” I asked.

  “I believed it absolutely then. I believe it enough now.” She got up from the table, and I rose too, took my glass to the sink. She stopped at the door. “But now I also believe in a more Job-like God.”

  I looked over at her. “A punitive God?”

  “Oh, no, not necessarily. But a God who is just absolutely unknowable to us. Inexplicable and remote.”

  “Doesn’t sound very comforting.” Trailing after her, I started out of the room, down the hall.

  “It’s not. But that’s not so much what I’m looking for now anyway.”

  I watched her walk to the room. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants. Evidently she’d been sleeping in them. I’d noticed that since she was single again, she tended to fall into bed wearing whatever she’d had on all day, just as she’d often done in the earlier years my father lived away from us. She turned at her door and called good night to me, softly, as though there were children in the apartment she was afraid of waking.

  After that I stayed in my room when I was wakeful, so I wouldn’t get her up too. Occasionally I turned the light on and moved around the little space, rifling through the trunks. I read old letters, sorted through the images that had dotted the kitchen walls for years, unrolled old paintings of ours, the colors dried to a brilliant dust that clung to my hands.

  But often I just lay in the dark, waiting, longing for sleep. And then, unsolicited, all the memories would come rushing back—harm I’d caused, damage I’d done, pain I’d inflicted on other people. There’s a kind of egocentrism in this sort of nighttime self-blaming that borders on madness, I know, and it seems to be fed by the dark, the quiet, the lack of the corrective otherness of life, at this hour. I would see Randall’s wincing face as I hit him, Mary’s as I told her to go away, to get out, the baby’s face, tiny, gummed, and grayish on the bloodstained hospital sheet. And once, just as I was dropping off, I remembered a moment when I told Will I’d never loved him, and I imagined his pinched face as frozen and grainy—a mean photograph taken in a moment of revenge. When I woke I felt a kind of despair at what seemed compromised and ugly in every corner of my life.

  Once or twice I pulled the telephone into my room from the hall and called Will at that terrible hour. He was kind usually, patient. It was in his interest to be so, because he wanted me back. But it was in his nature too, and I knew that. The last time I called, he asked me when I might come “home.” For a moment I couldn’t think of an answer. I was lying in bed. The trunks and boxes were pushed untidily around, ranged in an unwelcoming disorder. I thought of all the emblems of my childhood lying jumbled in them, and the word home made me feel suddenly bereft.

  “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I honestly don’t.”

  “Well, then, do you have a clue as to how you’ll make this decision?”

  I could see Will—he’s very beautiful, a much more beautiful man than I ever thought I’d be involved with, much less marry. Even now that we’re no longer together, I sometimes remember how he looked with a kind of surprise at my own accomplishment. Before him I’d “specialized,” as my father called it, in eccentrics—artists, musicians, dropouts, returnees from communes and mental institutions—difficult men who dressed weirdly, who wore beads or cowboy boots or elaborately patched blue jeans, who did drugs and didn’t want to be “tied down.” I hadn’t wanted it either. I was well suited to my weirdos. But when the time came I’d married Will, who had disarmed me with what I took for his steadiness. And his beauty. I imagined him then in his pajamas, sitting up in our bed in the dark in the middle of the night, attentive and attractive, even at that hour. A part of me yearned just to give in, to go back. To be lying next to him, looking at him, smelling him. After all, what was I accomplishing here, what was I doing, hanging around on the fringes of my parents’ changing lives? But I said again, “I don’t know.” And then suddenly, seizing at straws, “I want to stay for my father’s wedding.”

  “So after that you’ll come home?”

  “I just don’t know,” I whispered.

  “What?” His voice was sharp with irritation. “I can’t hear you. You what?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll come home,” I said.

  Now he was silent. Finally he said, “Well, Nina, I wonder what the portents will be that will let you know. A full harvest? Snow before December?”

  “Will,” I pleaded.

  “Or are you waiting till you see the man dance with his wife?”

  “Be fair, Will,” I said.

  After a moment he said, “Just tell me this, then. Are we separated? Because I’m having trouble explaining this
to myself. Is this the beginning of the end of our marriage, or is this just a long visit home? Should I be dating?” He laughed harshly. “Should I be dating? Tell me what I ought to do about this.”

  “Can you wait?” I asked.

  “I can wait awhile,” he said. “If you tell me what I’m waiting for. If you tell me how long I have to wait, for a start.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “I feel awful too, you know. But I’ll try to figure it out. Next time I call you, I’ll try to have an answer.”

  There was a pause. I could hear a rustling noise at his end, and for a moment I wondered if there might be someone with him, lying next to him in our bed. From Lainey’s apartment came a deep, black silence.

  “I’ll look forward to that, Nina,” he said, and hung up.

  The next day I telephoned and made an appointment to see Dr. Dusek. Really just a social visit, I said to the answering service.

  I left plenty of time before my appointment and walked over slowly. It was October already, but the day was warm and breezy. The wind rattled the dry brown oak leaves still clinging to the trees in Jackson Park and skittered those that lay on the sidewalks and grass. When I finally turned onto Kimbark, I felt the same sinking reluctance I’d felt every time I turned this corner in adolescence; but at the same time my pulse and breathing quickened with that ancient excitement too.

  I wound my way slowly up the three flights of specially built, narrow stairs that went nowhere but to her office. The waiting room was the same, track lights and blond wood. There was a big framed Frankenthaler print on the wall, news and educational magazines arranged tidily on an end table. New chairs, though, I noticed, upholstered in bright colors. Then the door opened, and she leaned out. When she saw me, she stepped quickly forward, smiling. She held her hand out and gripped mine, her other hand patting my arm as she shook it, in a kind of reduced embrace. “Oh, Nina!” she said. “What a great pleasure! To see you.” She seemed smaller than she had in the past, a tiny, delicate woman with untidily pinned up gray hair. Deep wrinkles scored her face now, where before she’d had just lines, but otherwise she was unchanged. She was dressed as beautifully as ever, in a pale draped suit, and as she turned to lead me back into her office, I saw she teetered on the same kind of preposterously high, tarty heels she’d always worn. At the start of my therapy, this had fired a private contempt for her that I was determined to hold on to. The vanity! The idiocy! As though anyone would think she was anything but a middle-aged midget! Now I found it charming.