by Sue Miller
“Yes, you do,” he said. “Yes you do.” He took her hand and they walked. At the Museum of Science and Industry, Nina said she was cold, so they went in. They walked back to Main Street, the reconstructed nineteenth-century village. The photographer in his handlebar mustache and derby hat was there, standing outside his studio, trying to drum up business. He called to them, and Philip offered to pay for a picture. In the antique car, they fooled around. She took the driver’s seat, but he pushed her out. Finally they settled on a pose—very formal, very Victorian and upright, his hand resting on her shoulder.
As they waited for the print, they walked slowly up and down the timeless fake street. Nina felt completely happy. She would have gladly stayed here, in this world, forever. But the photographer stepped out and waved to them. It was ready.
When Nina held the picture and looked at it, she was appalled at the image of herself. That stringy hair? That skinny long neck? She lost her nerve. She was silent as they headed out the doors, down Fifty-seventh Street again. Silently, too, they walked under the IC, past the entwined hearts, the graphic drawings, the amazing suggestions. When they got to the corner of Harper, they stopped. Philip touched her shoulder. “I’ll see you, Nina,” he said gently. “I’ll see you around.”
She lifted her face to him, hoping the tears from the cold were making her eyes beautiful, hoping he’d kiss her once more. But he just smiled at her and then turned and crossed the street.
For more than a week, Nina couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do her homework. She snapped at Mary, she fought with her father over her right to use the car. At canteen after school, she got into an argument with Stephanie, who said that Philip was a tease, that he hadn’t cared in any particular way for Nina, that he had just wanted the whole cast to fall in love with him. “If you don’t eat more than that,” her mother said, “you’ll shrivel to nothing before our eyes. Your hair will fall out.”
One afternoon she followed a couple down Fifty-fifth Street. They’d attracted her by the way they walked, brushing against each other with every step; and the way they looked at each other, with a kind of intensity Nina felt she would never have in her life. When they stopped to look in a store window, their bodies kept up a kind of conversation too, by touching constantly. Though it was cold, the woman wore no hat on her head, and her hair, which was long and blond, blew wildly around. Once, when she turned to say something to the man as they waited to cross a street, a long strand of it whipped forward across her face in the wind, and he reached over tenderly and lifted it back, as though he were lifting a veil. Nina recorded every touch, every gesture, and used it to feed her misery.
The next day she was walking past Gordon’s when she saw Philip in the back, drinking coffee in a booth with a woman. She went inside and stood by the doorway, watching, until the waitress came over and said, “We don’t seat you. You can just plop down wherever you like.” Nina turned and went home.
On Saturday morning, she woke up knowing she had to try again. He was wrong, he would see. And there was nothing for her to lose anyway. She got dressed and applied her makeup carefully. She walked quickly through the icy streets to his apartment building on Blackstone and climbed the narrow stairs. It all looked different in the day. She could hear the life behind the other doors she passed.
No one answered her knock, so she sat on the top step of his landing to wait. When she heard the door open far below her and someone start up, her breathing tightened, as though she were the one mounting the steps. But then she saw the figure two stories down, weighted with a grocery bag, moving slowly. It was a woman. As she turned to mount the last flight, she stopped and looked up. Nina was getting up to move out of her way.
“You waiting for someone?” the woman asked. She was bundled up, a wool hat pulled low on her forehead, a scarf covering her chin. You couldn’t tell what she looked like, whether she was pretty or not.
“Yes. Philip. He must have been delayed, I guess.”
“Yeah.” The woman passed Nina and went to the other door on the landing. She bit off one mitten, juggled the bulky grocery bag while she fished, barefingered, in her shoulder bag for the keys. Just before she unlocked the door, she pulled the mitten from her mouth and asked, “You from the Goodman?”
“No; U of C,” Nina said.
“Oh. The Crucible stuff.”
“Yeah; I was in it,” Nina said.
“Well, I hope he shows up soon.” The girl went in and shut the door.
Nina sat down. After a few minutes, the girl’s door opened. Her coat was off, and she was in socks. Her hair was matted and full of static electricity. Her cheeks and nose were still red from the cold. She was heavy, stocky.
“Look, I’ve got a key to his place. You know, in case of an emergency or whatnot. It’s silly for you to sit out here. I’ll let you in. If he gets mad, send him over and he can yell at me.”
“Thanks,” Nina said, unbending again. She rubbed the bones in her butt. “He should be here any minute.”
The girl worked the key and swung the door open. As Nina stepped into his apartment, Philip’s neighbor shook her head. “God,” she said. “Every time I look in here, it makes me think I ought to sand my floors too.”
Nina looked down. The floors were nearly white, brightly reflective. She hadn’t noticed before. “Yeah,” she said. “Well, thanks.”
“S’okay,” the girl said as she shut the door behind herself.
Nina stood and looked around. Everything was neat, bare, orderly. She was shocked at how small it was. With people in it, it had seemed bigger. She crossed to the tiny kitchen. The window in the back door looked out over a wide porch, which circled around behind all the other apartments on this floor of the building. She vaguely remembered, the night of the party, that this door had been opened finally, to cool everyone off. That she had stepped out onto the porch at one point with damp sweaty hair that had stiffened instantly in the cold.
She opened the refrigerator. The bottom two shelves were still packed with beer, and there were several partly drunk jugs of wine on the top shelf. Nina got a glass from the dish drainer and poured it full of white wine. She paced the two other rooms of the apartment, sipping, picking things up; reading, looking at the photos tacked to the walls. They were mostly from theatrical productions, but there were three or four of Philip with friends, women sometimes; and there were two of him with what clearly was his family—another young man, who looked very much like him, and his smiling parents. It was spring somewhere. There was a lilac bush in bloom behind them.
The evidence of this full life scared Nina. She could feel the nervous energy that had gotten her here slipping away. She poured another glass of wine and drank it off quickly, like medicine, standing at the kitchen sink. Then she washed the glass and set it where it had been in the drainer. She went into the bathroom and rubbed toothpaste over her teeth with a finger, scratched it onto her tongue. She reapplied her eye makeup and went back into Philip’s bedroom.
An open, broken straw basket on the floor held his dirty clothes. Nina looked at them. Jeans, socks, Jockey underwear. Jockeys. She was glad. She and Stephanie had talked at length about men’s underwear, about how peculiar boxer shorts were. She sat down at Philip’s desk. The radiator banged once, and she jumped. Then it banged again, continuously, a machine-gun sound, and she relaxed. She looked at the papers around her. She read Philip’s notes to himself. Friday: Desitin. Order lights and tape recorder. Appointment with Dean. On a torn scrap of paper was the name Lizzie and a phone number. Nina wadded this and put it in her pocket.
When she heard someone coming up the stairs, she went into the central room. She placed herself in the middle of the bright white floor, in a square of sunlight. The key slid into the lock, the door opened. He was alone. He looked startled and beautiful, and Nina was so happy she stepped toward him and began to laugh.
They made love in the bed, in the kitchen with Nina sitting on the counter. They made love standing up, Nina back
ed against the wall. They made love in the tub with the water slapping over the edges the way it had in childhood when she and Mary slid together. They made love with Nina bent forward over the desk, her weight resting on all the papers and notes, and she read Philip’s words as he slid in and out of her.
Nina came over mostly in the afternoons, afternoons she was supposed to be working on the yearbook, afternoons she had formerly spent sprawled on the bed in Stephanie’s room or gossiping with the girls at canteen. She didn’t miss any of that, her old life. And there was suddenly nothing to say to anyone in that world anyway. All she thought of, all that mattered, was being with Philip, making love with him; and there was nothing she could safely have told anyone about that. Sometimes she caught Stephanie staring at her, or someone else, and she realized she was seeing them as the enemy. She would be scared momentarily: could they tell? could they somehow see that she wasn’t a virgin anymore? that she was being fucked for hours, several times a week? But her parents and her sister seemed completely oblivious, and she always decided, in the end, that she must be hiding it well.
There were no curtains or shades in Philip’s apartment. When she first arrived, the afternoon light flooded the little rooms and made Nina selfconscious—their flesh was so exposed, their skin so white, so white and then so purplish. Their nakedness so intense. She joked about it once by tenting his cock with her long, dark hair, hiding it while she touched it. But as the shadows grew deeper in the little rooms, Nina relaxed. And when it was almost dark, then she liked to look at him, to hold his penis near her face and ask him how this felt, how that felt. And to have him look at her. She was most eager, most careless of herself, as the afternoon drew to its dark close, and that excited Philip too. Often she had to ask him to stop, to remind him that she needed to be home for supper.
They made love perhaps only a dozen times in all, but each time it was for hours, over and over. Each time they promised each other this was it, the only time, then the last time, just this once more. They made love until the sheet was soaking wet, until Nina was swollen nearly shut, until her legs shook when she stood up and her mouth was puffy and raw inside.
Nina was eager for instructions, desperate to please him more than anyone ever had. “What haven’t you done?” she would ask. “What would you like?” She never came, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to make him yearn for her, to do whatever he wanted so he’d love her. She had chosen him, and it was inconceivable to her that he didn’t love her, wasn’t going to love her—that she couldn’t make this happen.
He wanted to please her too. He spent what seemed like hours lying between her legs, licking, playing with her gently. It was a revelation to Nina to be looked at, to be desired there too. To see that doing these things—pushing his fingers into her, into her ass, moving his face slowly on her—were things he liked, were things that made him hard again; but still she didn’t come. She was always thinking too much about making him want her, about getting the power over him she had let him have over her.
Once, he washed her before she left, so she wouldn’t smell “like a come factory,” he said. And as she bent this way and that, opening herself to the warm cloth, to his stroking, she could see that he was getting hard again; and she knelt down and sucked him for the little juice left. When she was done, he lifted the washcloth—it was cool now—and gently stroked her mouth too.
She came home with damp hair, her face chapped and dreamy, and sat at the dinner table, benevolent and remote, conjuring sexual images as Mary and Sarah chattered, as the plates were passed up and down the table, as her parents frowned at her and exchanged long looks with each other.
And then she was late. She didn’t know how late at first, because she’d never kept track of these things. But finally she remembered: she had been having her period the night Stephanie had a sleepover—she’d had to go to the bathroom two or three times to change the pad, and someone had commented sarcastically on her bladder size. She checked the calendar and saw that it had been almost seven weeks since then.
She couldn’t tell Philip. A few days before, he’d vowed once again that they had to stop seeing each other. He was too old for her, he was ruining her life. And she’d promised not to call or come over for two weeks anyway, although she had been sure when she agreed that he would call her before then. But besides that, the first time they made love he’d stopped just before he’d entered her and said, “You’re protected, aren’t you?” and she had said yes because she couldn’t have endured it if he’d stopped. Because she couldn’t get pregnant if they did it just this once, which was all they were going to do.
For the first few days she was terrified. Sitting in class, she sometimes felt dizzy, sometimes broke out into a cold sweat at the thought of all she was about to lose. But then, slowly, it became a story to Nina, she saw clearly how it could happen, she had the pictures in her mind: she would go away, she would live in an apartment a little like Philip’s, but with higher ceilings and curtains of a light white fabric. A bowl of bright oranges would sit on the table. There would be pictures and photographs on the walls. She would have the baby alone. This would be easy. She had recently read an article in one of her mother’s Ladies’ Home Journals called “Childbirth Without the Agony,” in which a woman described her natural labor as being hard work but painless. Philip would miss her desperately, and when she returned to finish high school, beautiful again—a mother with his child—he would marry her, just as Mr. Avery had married Leslie Rogoff.
And so began the plan, the suitcase stored in a locker at the Greyhound terminal, the allowance and baby-sitting money drawn out of the bank, the note to her parents taped on the inside of her closet door.
She left on a Friday, so she could say she was spending the night at Stephanie’s house. That way it would be late afternoon on Saturday anyway before they would miss her, before they would find out it was a lie. As she walked toward Fifty-ninth Street, she kept thinking that this was the last time she’d walk past the Bakers’, past the Masurs’, past the long triangular empty lot at the end of the block. The IC was packed with commuters heading downtown for work, but Nina pushed through them, close to the windows on the Harper Avenue side of the train. She saw her house flash by for the last time too. Her throat felt swollen.
The bus was only half full. Even so, a young man in a pea coat and sailor’s hat asked Nina if the seat next to her was taken. She smiled at him but told him that she wanted to sleep, that she’d like to keep it for herself for now.
The bus moved slowly out of Chicago, through the blocks of blasted, burned-out ghetto, past the hellish smokestacks of Gary, onto the blank snowy interstate beyond that. The road was edged with darkened plowed ridges of old snow that looked as though they’d been there forever. Nina felt a powerful, frightened sense of exile she tried to push under. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. But every time she opened them again it was the same: the wide empty fields a luminous gray under the gray sky, sometimes a few black trees or a weathering farmhouse sitting in desolate solitude, or a truck or a car in the distance along some parallel two-lane highway. She thought of herself as moving out of life, as entering this timeless landscape, and she was scared.
In Indiana the bus pulled off the highway, the turn indicator clicking loudly. The driver parked and stood up to announce a thirty-minute rest stop.
Inside the cafeteria, the sailor carried his tray to her table and sat down opposite her. The lies came easily, Nina was surprised. She was visiting Ohio State to see if she wanted to go there. Her brother went there and liked it. The sailor wasn’t listening very hard anyway. He was just waiting for his turn to talk. He was going home from Great Lakes for a last visit before he was shipped out. His sister was meeting him—maybe they could give Nina a ride; did she have a ride?
Yes, she said, she did.
They were sitting at a wooden table, maple, with a thick plastic finish. The coffee was weak, yet somehow acidic too. Nina didn’t usually
drink coffee, and she had put two, then three packets of Coffee-mate into it, until what was in her cup was a gummy pale grayish-brown. The sailor was young—younger than Philip. Younger than Mack too. Maybe only a year or two older than Nina was. They talked about the food, about their fellow passengers, scattered as far apart from each other as possible in the large, ugly room. His neck and lower jaw were thickly covered in painful-looking pustules, some of them scabbed or honey-crusted. He grinned at her and asked again about the ride. No, she said. She was sure her brother was meeting her. Even if he was a little late, he’d show up.
Someone walked quickly by the window, collar up, hurrying against the cold. The snow was blowing lightly sideways. It was hard to tell whether it was actually falling or just lifted by the wind from the surface of the whited landscape around them. When they went back out into it, following the bus driver, trailing like schoolchildren on an educational expedition, Nina imagined herself as looking like that huddled person—anonymous, sexless, helpless. Stuck in it.
The sailor sat next to her. He had a lot to say. Nina was struck by this. After they graduated from high school, perhaps, it happened: they realized that their stories were the ones that counted, and all those columns in Seventeen, in Mademoiselle, about getting them to talk became obsolete and pointless. Nina smiled and nodded, how interesting, and thought of all the secrets he didn’t know: that she was pregnant, that she was running away, that there was no brother, no place to stay, no future at Ohio State. He had taken the little information she’d given and constructed his own perfectly sufficient version of her life. Just as Philip had; because really, he never knew the most important things: her father’s leaving and coming back, Randall, the sharp divisions in the family. To him, she had been a lucky girl, a girl with educated, gifted parents who’d given her every opportunity.
But hadn’t everyone, always, done this to her? Who had cared to know her really, to ask what she felt, how she suffered? What did it mean, after all, when her father called them “the little pitchers of health”? when her mother called them her babes, her perfect babes? Nina felt a quick vindictive pleasure in the secret mess she was making of her life. It made her smile sweetly at the sailor, and he leaned forward, closer to her.