Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  Nina hadn’t wanted to do this particularly, but she had a friend this year, one of the popular girls, Stephanie Lombauer, and Stephanie had talked her into it. Nina hadn’t had a best friend before. She would have done almost anything Stephanie asked her to do. Each of them had sworn that if the other didn’t get a part she wouldn’t take one. But when the calls came that evening, both of them had been chosen. They talked on the phone for more than an hour about it.

  Philip was the producer of the play. Nina wasn’t sure what this meant, except that whenever there was a problem, Tony, their director, would call him from backstage or out in the empty theater and Philip would appear next to the director, clipboard in hand. He would frown and make notes while Tony talked—about the lights, about the props, about the sound system, about the costumes—and the next day the problem would be solved.

  Nina couldn’t take her eyes off Philip when he was around. He was tall, big-boned, with softly curling brown hair. He smiled a lot, a teasing, sly smile, and he was very attentive to all the women in the cast. Stephanie thought he looked like Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass.

  Tony was a short, slight, ugly man, with a British accent that occasionally lapsed. You could hear then that he was from someplace hard and gritty and without grace. He called Philip “my bonny prince.” He called the high school girls “the nymphets,” which made the other actors smirk or laugh. When he wanted them to scream, he’d cry out from the darkened auditorium, “Nymphets, s’il vous plaît!”

  Nina was playing Betty. She had five lines. As opening night approached and the rehearsals were more continuous, the full cast was asked to be present every night, and Nina and the other high school girls would bring their books along and sit studying backstage until they were needed. Five nights before the opening, she was slouched cross-legged on the floor in the hallway outside the dressing room, her back against the wall and a book on her lap. Philip came out and stood over her. She looked up, and her breath shortened. Then she looked down again, trying to concentrate on the swimming lines in front of her.

  His foot snaked under the book, tilted it against her chest. Nina looked at him. His head was bent sideways to read.

  “Ah, Latin! Working on … ?”

  “Declension of x nouns,” she whispered. “Pax, lux, those guys.”

  He had let the book fall flat, an apron across her opened lap. Nina reached up and unhooked the hair from behind her ears. Then, to disguise this gesture, she idly pulled a handful of it forward over her shoulder, began to separate it into strands, to braid it.

  Philip was watching the stage again, the actors moving and talking in the opened box of radiant light. “Okay,” he said suddenly, without looking down. “Decline … Ex-Lax.” His voice was low, hoarse, so he wouldn’t be heard onstage.

  Recklessly Nina plunged. “I’d rather not have any Ex-Lax, please,” she whispered.

  He looked down quickly and grinned. “Very well done. And so polite.”

  She shrugged. “I can be rude if I want.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear that.”

  “Get away from me with your fucking Ex-Lax,” she said.

  He laughed out loud and walked back into the dressing room. Nina’s hands holding her tangled braid were trembling.

  After that he called her “Mademoiselle X,” or “the X-girl,” and Nina was even more preoccupied with him. She and Stephanie talked for hours about him, analyzing every nuance of his behavior. When he had rested his hand on Nina’s back, was he trying to feel if she was wearing a bra? When he stood with his arm around the woman playing Abigail, did that mean he was her boyfriend?

  Stephanie said he was too old for Nina, that it would never work. In Stephanie’s pretty bedroom, Nina agreed. But when she was alone, she marshaled the evidence against Stephanie. The year before, one of the senior girls at U-High had married Mr. Avery, the English teacher, and dropped out of school. This year you saw her sometimes, pushing her baby carriage, looking suddenly a lot older than anyone who’d stayed in school. Also, Nina knew that her father had had younger women for girlfriends when he lived apart from them. And only a few weeks earlier, when Nina had gone down the street to the Gordon’s party to give her mother a message from Liddie in New York, Mr. Gordon had put his arm around Nina’s shoulders and pushed his face so close to hers that she could smell the booze, the aftershave. “Why don’t you stay awhile, Nina?” he said. “We need young blood at these tired old parties.” Nina had blushed and was beginning to try to think of a way to extract herself, but then Mrs. Gordon had yelled at him from across the room, “Hands to yourself, Hank,” and he’d laughed and moved away.

  It seemed to Nina that it might have been the kids who invented the boundaries between children and adults, not the other way around. Besides, Philip was probably not much older than Liddie; and wasn’t she still a kind of kid, after all?

  On opening night the attendance was sparse. Snow had been falling steadily all day, and the air rang with the scraping of metal plows. The applause after the final curtain seemed scattered, only polite. An air of depressed hush hung over the group Nina and Stephanie drove with to the cast party. But Nina was on the lap of the man who’d played her father, Reverend Parris. His arm circled her waist, and she was aware of his hard, muscular thighs under her bottom. It made her feel sexy and adult. The party was to be at Philip’s apartment, and she was excited about that too.

  When they all got out of the car, it took Nina a disoriented moment to realize where she was—on Blackstone, only a half mile or so from her own house. She’d baby-sat down the block from here.

  Philip was already home. The door to his apartment was open, and operatic music poured out and down the narrow, steep stairway as they all slowly thudded up. His apartment was small, two rooms open to each other and a tiny kitchen tucked in back. Philip was coming out from it as they entered. He embraced the two women in the cast, then gave Nina a light kiss on her cheek. When he stepped away from her to take someone’s coat, she saw Stephanie smiling at her.

  Nina moved over to her friend quickly. Together they walked into the front room. “My God, he kissed you!” Stephanie whispered. They stood close to each other in Philip’s bedroom—his bed took up half the space—and looked out the huge multipaned window, which faced onto Blackstone, as they talked and giggled. They were up higher than the streetlights, and from here the snow outside seemed to be floating rather than falling, making its way hesitantly into that world of light, sidewalks, people. Behind them the older actors and the stage crew were slowly filling the rooms, moving back into the kitchen for food and drinks, talking loudly. Nina and Stephanie sat down together on the windowsill to watch them and whisper to each other.

  Tony came up to them. He held two cans of beer. “Interested, my darlings?” he asked. He handed them over ceremoniously, like someone awarding diplomas. Nina was parched, thirsty from the screaming. She drank half the beer down almost at once. Someone had changed the music since they’d come in, and now it was ragtime, what her mother called “jiggledy-pop music.” They watched the apartment grow crowded, the grownups move among each other, and finished their beers. Stephanie dared Nina to get another. She stood up and made her way through the rooms. Only every fourth or fifth person was someone who’d actually been in the play. The music had changed again. Jefferson Airplane. A few people had started to dance in the middle room, bobbing up and down among the little groups of two and three standing around screaming at each other over the music. The smell of dope floated in the air.

  In the kitchen, Philip touched her shoulder, “Little Miss X,” he shouted into her ear. She could feel his breath on her neck, warm and damp, and her skin tightened under it. After she’d pulled the beers out of the refrigerator, she stood in the doorway to the middle room awhile before she started back for Stephanie, drinking her beer and hoping Philip would touch her again. But then she saw that he was dancing with the woman who’d played Abigail, wildly jumping up and down.


  Behind her, someone shouted, “Artie—what a jerk! He specializes in black girls. Likes it when they call him honkie.”

  “Sick.”

  Nina turned and saw the woman who’d played Sarah Good, Rikki something. She noticed Nina looking at her and held up the joint she was smoking. “Toke?” she yelled. Nina shook her head no. She moved into the middle room, into the heart of the music, and stood against the wall, next to a man she didn’t know.

  “I don’t even know what they were,” he was saying. “Some were red and some were little blue ones. But they sure made me happy. Nirvana.”

  Then Nina saw that Stephanie was dancing too, dancing with Tony. He had an absurd, ducklike motion. Suddenly she felt conspicuous. All alone. Slowly she threaded her way back through the moving mass of bodies to the bedroom. Someone had pushed all the coats to the back of Philip’s bed, and several couples were sprawled along its edge, talking. Nina sat on the windowsill again. The window was open now, and the cold air pumped over her butt and back, making her feel feverish. The woman sitting next to her said to someone Nina couldn’t see on her other side, “He told me I couldn’t use Eliot. Said Eliot was passé. Said I’d have to restructure the whole thesis. I said fuck this.”

  Nina finished her own beer and started on the one she’d gotten for Stephanie. When a man came out of the bathroom off the bedroom, Nina got up and went in. She was light-headed. She locked the door. It was an old-fashioned room, heavily tiled in white, with a black tile stripe around the upper edges. The walls above were painted a shiny orange-red. Nina peed for a long time. Over the roar of the flushing toilet and the steady whump of music from beyond the door, she looked at herself. She’d deliberately left on her stage makeup to look older—Stephanie had too—and her extravagant dark eyes startled her. Someone banged on the door. “Emergency!” a voice shouted, and there was laughter. Nina used the comb on the sink to rat her hair, and then she went back out, went and stood again in the doorway to the middle room.

  The music was Sam and Dave, “Hold On, I’m Coming.” Everyone in the room moved in concert, a waving mass, and many of them were singing along—shouting really. It made Nina want to laugh. She had almost finished Stephanie’s beer. She went to the tiny kitchen for another. Philip was there.

  “Aha!” he said. “I’ve got you.” He led her back to the dancing room. The floor was jammed, and they had to move close to each other. They bobbed up and down too, sometimes touching as they made the gentle fucking motion everyone else rocked to. Nina and Stephanie had practiced this together, all the moves, and Nina knew she was better than Stephanie, better than most people. She held the beer in one hand, sipping from it every now and then, and tried to think of what she would say—something bright, something sophisticated to keep him with her—when the music stopped.

  But when the sudden silence came and their bodies straightened, she only laughed. He put his arm casually around her shoulders and said, “You’re a mighty delicious girl, Nina.”

  Her mind went blank. She tipped the beer can up. Nothing. She swallowed anyway. She said, “I know.”

  I know. Stupid. She wanted to die. He danced two more numbers with her, and then he thanked her and moved away, just as Nina had known he would. Stupid, stupid.

  She floated at the edge of the rooms, had another beer—perhaps two beers? Stephanie found her, and they sat together again, but then Tony asked Nina to dance, and then someone else she didn’t know. She was happy for a while, moving without selfconsciousness in the swaying mass of bodies, but she kept hoping Philip would ask her again. She tried several times to catch his eyes, but he just grinned at her. When later she saw him lift the hair from Rikki’s neck and then bend forward and bite the pale flesh there, she felt foolish, even more stupid.

  At midnight, Stephanie found her, and they picked their coats out of the tangled mass on Philip’s bed and went downstairs. Stephanie’s mother was waiting in a car outside. She said nothing to them about the way they smelled, the way they walked.

  Nina was silent during the ride home. She felt that her heart was breaking. Almost as soon as she stepped out of the car and slammed the door, she began to cry. But she remembered to wave to the idling car when she reached her porch. She watched its glowing taillights move away, toward the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. Instead of going in then, though, she pushed the slatted strips of snow off the swing and sat down. Alone in the pale darkness of the snowy night, she cried and cried. And then she went to the porch railing and threw up over the side.

  The snow had stopped the next day. By noon the streets were plowed and salted down to the glistening asphalt, and the theater was crowded that night and for the next three shows. The adults in the cast freely made arrangements to go to Jimmy’s, to The Eagle, to The Courthouse, after each performance; but there was always some parent with a car waiting for the nymphets. Riding home each night with the other high school girls, all of them happy, giggling, Nina felt trapped and desperate, as hemmed in as she had felt years before by Mary and Sarah and the little world she made with them.

  On the last night of the show, after the curtain calls, after she’d changed into her own clothes, Nina went to look for Philip. She hadn’t told anyone she was going to do this, not even Stephanie. She was terrified. She found him giving instructions to the stagehands about breaking down the set. She knew he’d noticed her—he’d nodded once in her direction to signal he’d speak to her in a minute, she should wait. Nina stood obediently until they all said good night. Then Philip came over to her. He was standing in front of her. Nina took a deep breath and said, “I think I’m going to die if I don’t see you again.” Her voice was trembling.

  He looked at her for a long moment. She tried desperately to read his expression—repulsion? attraction? pity? She couldn’t tell. Like her father, like Mack, he had a still, almost blank face in repose.

  Finally he smiled gently and said, “Well, we can’t have that, can we?”

  He called, as he promised he would, a few days after the show closed. They met at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Harper and walked out to the Point. On the way, he told her about himself, that he’d grown up on a farm in Ohio, that he’d gone to Ohio State, the first person in his family to go to college. That he wanted to write plays, that he worked part-time at the Goodman Theater. Every detail was rich and fascinating to Nina. She imagined in pictures the context and the characters.

  Haltingly, she told him a little about herself too, what little there was that she thought might interest him. They came back by the Fifty-seventh Street beach. Philip began to skip stones over the leaden lake. Nina tried a few. She was better than he was. She felt relaxed with him, suddenly.

  “Okay,” he was saying. “That was just warming up. This one—this is really the contest that counts.”

  She beat him again, and they both laughed. She jumped up and down, with her hands clenched over her head. “The winnah!” she yelled. “The winnah!” He ran after her, grabbed her, and suddenly she was still. His arms were around her; he rested his chin on her head. And then he stepped back from her. His face was kind. “Nina,” he said. “You think you’ll die without me, but you won’t. There’ll be lots of men for you. Lots of men in love with you. I promise you that.”

  Nina felt slapped. She turned away and walked a little distance ahead of him.

  He came up just behind her. “What’s wrong?” he asked. He reached for her, put his hand on her shoulder, and she stopped. “Nina, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” He came and stood in front of her. The cold had whipped tears into both their eyes. He touched her cheeks, then leaned forward and kissed her. Nina willed her love up to her lips, willed him to feel it, to feel how much she cared for him. His mouth was so warm; his tongue ran over her lips and teeth. She thought she might swoon, and when he dropped his hands and stepped back from her, she actually did sway a little with the sudden motion of the cold wind.

  After a moment they both turned and began to walk along t
he beach again. She started talking to him, slowly and carefully. She’d thought all this through while she waited for today, waited for her chance to win him. “I know you’re much older than I am,” she said. “And you think you know all about love. Much more than I do. And maybe you do know about some parts. But you don’t know anything about me, about what I am, about what it could be with me. You’re all …” Nina couldn’t think of the word, and she stopped walking. Then she found it. “Sullied,” she said. He looked over at her, and she thought she saw the slightest smile play across his face. “It could be different with me,” she said angrily, fiercely.’ She hit his arm. “You’re just afraid to try.”

  Just then the air changed, shifted somehow. They both felt it and relaxed. They smiled at each other, and Philip started walking up the beach to the pedestrian bridge over the Outer Drive. When they got to the middle they stopped and leaned on the railing. The cars sucked and whizzed under them. Philip said, “It wouldn’t be fair, Nina. I’m just too old for you. I am. It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to try, that I’m not attracted to you. But it would be wrong.” Then suddenly he quoted a line from the play, a line spoken about Nina’s character, Betty. “‘The Devil is out and preying on her like a beast upon the flesh of the pure lamb.’” He grinned, but she didn’t respond. “I don’t want to feel that way,” he said gently. “I don’t want to prey on you. You see that, don’t you, Nina?”

  “No,” Nina said stubbornly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”