by Sue Miller
But when Will came home that night and she started to tell him, she suddenly thought of that face again. Not the dull face of the silent, heavy man she’d visited, but Randall’s face in youth—Randall’s, Mack’s, her brothers’, lost and sweet as they’d both been then in their different ways. She felt a quickening pity for them, for all of them—herself too—and she wept for the first time for the distance they’d all come from their past, and for the price they’d paid for that accomplishment.
Now she got up and headed for the kitchen. She was thinking about Will. He’d arranged for the car she was driving, an Audi, of all things. And he’d given her a couple of hundred dollars before she left. When she protested, he told her she could pay him back later but that it would be stupid, wrong, for her to have to worry about money for the next few days.
Will wanted to marry her. She knew that some of his concern, his kindness, at this moment had to do with that campaign. But some of it, too, was just who he was. As she got in the car and drove down the shaded winding streets to the Higgledy Piggledy in town, she thought of how it would be to be Will’s wife—to be taken care of, to drive in a car that smelled of leather, to have enough money, not to worry about how much groceries for the family would cost. To be able to weep openly to someone who you knew would want to comfort you. She had felt, when he held her, a kind of relief at having managed, with his help, what seemed like a normal response to her brother’s death. She’d even had a sort of picture in her mind’s eye of how they must have looked in their embrace. She was feeling real sorrow, she knew; but almost instantly a part of her was observing that sorrow also, seeing it as Will might. But that was her fault, she thought—that second step. That had nothing to do with him.
When she got back with her bags of groceries, there was another car parked in the driveway. She pulled in behind it over the crunching gravel, and Mary and her parents appeared as shadowy figures on the porch, then came out from behind the screen to greet her. As they stepped into the late-afternoon sun, their hands lifted in a peculiar pathetic synchrony to shield their eyes, and Nina started to reach next to her for her camera, forgetting for a moment that she didn’t have it with her. Then she stepped out onto the driveway with them, and they were taking turns holding her.
There was an odd collection of booze in the pantry—Kahlùa, Cherry Heering, half-and quarter-filled bottles of hard stuff, a silvery slice of vodka at the bottom of one. Nina had bought some beer and wine too, on her trip to town. But no one, she noticed, was really very interested in any of it, except for her. Mary had never indulged much, and her parents, now that she thought of it, had sipped slowly at wine on her last few visits home. Health concerns? Age? Would it make them judge her harshly?
Nina didn’t care. She’d bought ingredients for chili, and put herself in charge of dinner. She made sure her glass was full as she worked. Upstairs she could hear her mother running the vacuum. Her father had taken the telephone into the sun porch off the living room and was calling Chicago about patients and their medications. Mary was in the dining room. When Nina stepped forward she could see her there, hunched over her books on the table, her heels hooked on a rung of their grandfather’s chair, studying something—Nina thought she’d said the circulatory system. The house was calm and peaceful. Nina remembered suddenly a time in her childhood when she’d yearned for this kind of peace, imagined herself as she was here, at its heart, cooking for everyone, making it possible. It all seemed so sadly different now, herself most of all. She reached for her drink. The fat hissed as she flattened the meat in the pan.
No one was clear on whether they should wait for Mack and Sarah, who were driving down—Mack all the way from Vermont, with a stop in Boston to pick Sarah up. But finally Lainey insisted that they couldn’t any longer. It was dark, perhaps nine o’clock, and they’d shut all the windows a while before against the damp chill of the night air.
Nina was grateful for the decision. If she didn’t concentrate on focusing, a second image of whomever she was looking at—a twin! she thought—floated gently sideways and sat there too, chatting. She had poured herself a big glass of water, and she hoped that between the food and the liquid she’d sober up a little.
“Sorry to be such a mess,” she said loudly for perhaps the second or third time. They were at the table. They’d talked briefly about Randall, bumping up against his death and then veering away from it with a discussion of the residence: how good it was, how it wasn’t their fault.
Then somehow her father was remembering with Mary his decision to specialize in psychiatry. “It infuriated everyone I’d worked with,” he said. “They saw it as a real betrayal. Primarily, I think, because psychiatry was seen as passive and soft then. A way out of the hard work of true medicine. I felt very brave, very much the radical young man, defying them all.”
“Oh, you were!” Lainey cried.
“Gee, I feel just the opposite about it,” Mary said. “I mean, I’m no good at it, but when we were doing psychiatry, what I found so interesting and what scared me—what I really didn’t have the courage for, to be honest—was the lack of absoluteness. And to me, it takes much more courage to be functioning as a physician in that gray area, that sort of edge of what’s known, than …” She frowned and stopped a moment. “I mean, look, it’s perfectly easy when you have these three symptoms to say, ‘Aha, it’s this disease,’ and then you look up the medication and the course of treatment, and that’s that. But in psychiatry, those rules aren’t there. It’s just the physician and his intelligence, sometimes working even against the patient. I mean, defenses and so forth.” She shrugged. “It does seem brave.”
Nina had risen, and now she went to the kitchen to get another glass of water. She’d had the sense, suddenly, of being an outsider, the sense of how much they saw each other, these three, how comfortable they were together. A family. She stood alone at the sink with her finger in the bubbling rope of running water, waiting for it to get cold, and she thought of Will again, of how comfortable and easy her life with him seemed. Like that, she thought. Like a family. That was what it ought to be, wasn’t it? Supportive. Grownup. Peaceful. The voices in the dining room rose and fell, together and apart, gently. Someone laughed. Her father. She could have that.
When she came back to the table, Lainey was passing around photographs she’d culled from the albums at home. About half of them were shots Nina had taken, and she couldn’t help looking at them with a professional eye. She was pleased with the sense of composition, with the feel for what was complex, evocative, in a situation, which she’d had even then. Here was a shot of all of them by the Christmas tree in their ratty bathrobes, Randall behind the circle, his eyes seeing something else. And here a picture of the dining room, the table a mound of paper and books, Mary hunched over the piano—her elbows, her rounded back; and Randall standing as though transfixed by her music in a patch of light in front of the window. Here another of him at breakfast having a tantrum, his body blurred slightly in frantic motion. Sarah and Mary were at the table too, eating and smiling nervously.
“I didn’t realize,” she said, “how many pictures I took of Randall.”
“Didn’t you?” Lainey said. “Well, of course, I picked out a lot with him in them to bring along. But you were fascinated with him in that way. I used to think that you were trying to get some handle on him by taking his picture over and over. That you were trying to solve some mystery. Oh! Look at this!” Lainey held one out. “You girls, all three of you.” She was silent for a moment while Nina looked at it. “It’s amazing to me how alike you girls used to look.” Nina reached for her water, gulped it. “Now Nina looks the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday—you do! that wonderful haircut!—and Mary looks like a younger, darker Virginia Woolf.”
Mary wadded her paper napkin and threw it over at Nina. “You win again,” she said.
Her father cleared with Nina. Lainey had gone upstairs for something else.
“I don’t
know why I do this,” Nina said.
“Do what?”
“Drink till I’m stuporous and then have to work my way back.”
“Well, I suppose it keeps you busy.”
She looked over at him. His charming, small smile moved quickly over his face and was gone. She felt all her old affection for him in a drunken rush. “Out of harm’s way,” she answered.
“And it gives you something to do with your hands.”
“And my liver.”
He was rinsing the dishes in the sink. He turned the water off and looked at her. “If it really worries you, Nina, maybe you shouldn’t.” His face was serious and concerned, and Nina was suddenly offended.
She stood up straight. “It’s so easy, is it? To change yourself? To break a nasty habit?”
His pale eyes were unmoving on her. He had rolled up his sleeves to carry the dishes in, and his bare arms were shapely and corded. How handsome he was, she thought.
“Don’t you think there comes a time when all the elements support you?” he asked. “When you simply have enough separate reasons to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing?”
“And then you just clean up your act? Get your shit straight?”
“That’s been my experience.”
“You should know, I guess.” She tried to keep her voice light, teasing, but she could hear that she hadn’t quite succeeded.
His face looked tired, suddenly. He shook his head. “You know, Nina, I wouldn’t mind talking about any of this with you when you’re sober. Anytime.”
She turned away and scraped a platter into the trash barrel. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she wanted to say.
In the dining room, Lainey had a piece of paper lying in front of her on the table. She was explaining the order of the service to Mary. She looked up. “Nina, listen too,” she said. “I want to be sure you approve.”
Nina had started to stack their dinner plates up her arm, as she did when she was a waitress. “I approve,” she said.
“But it was absolutely our decision—well, ours and Paul’s—and I’d like to be sure all the rest of you are happy with it.”
Happy? “I’m happy with it,” Nina said. She lifted the last plate into place. It was magical, the way they sat there, all four of them.
After dessert and coffee, Mary came out to help wash, and Nina turned on the radio. An oldies station. Mary said, “It’s hard to feel anything about this, isn’t it? I mean, I was like twelve or something when he left.”
“How are the parents?” Nina asked.
“Same as ever. Mother weeps a lot. Dad doesn’t. But he’s very … silent about it, I guess. Anyhow, they both seem really at a loss too.”
“I wonder how recently they’d seen him,” Nina said.
“Well, I know Mom still flew out every month or so.”
“And Dad?”
“Less. But he did. I don’t think I’d seen him for maybe three years.”
On the radio, a man named Big Anthony from Bradford called up and wanted “Deep Purple” by Nino Tempo and April Stevens. The DJ honked a horn, and then the music started. Nina and Mary sang along. Then “Help!” came on, and Nina showed Mary the monkey. “Didn’t you do it?” she panted, punching the air. “Were you too young?”
They put the dry dishes on the kitchen table: a stack of creamy plates, the jingling silverware.
“Remember how Randall liked music?” Mary asked.
“Some music,” Nina said. “Some music he hated.”
“Did he?” Mary said. “See? I don’t remember that.”
“I don’t either,” Nina said. She was looking out the dark window to where she knew the ocean moved. “I don’t remember exactly. But some he did. Some he really hated.”
What she was seeing was Randall, howling suddenly when the arm dropped on a record he didn’t like—the first few notes identifiable to him, before there was melody or word. Long before Nina would have known what the music was. And once she had stepped into the living room and there he was, rocking from foot to foot, seemingly happy. He was holding one of his arms across his face with the other, so he could chew slowly on his sleeve. She had felt such a wave of disgust, of rage at him, that she would have hit him if she had had the nerve. Instead she stepped very close to him and began to sing “Au Clair de la Lune,” a song he hated. His mouth had ovaled in pain, his eyes had shut tight, and he began to whimper along with her, trying to ride over her noise.
There was a serving spoon missing when Nina put the silverware back in its box.
“Maybe it was missing before,” Mary said. “I wouldn’t worry.”
“No, I know I set it out.”
“Well, it’ll turn up. It’s no big deal.”
Mary said she would stay up—she needed to study, and she wanted to wait for Mack and Sarah. Their parents had gone to bed already—it was almost eleven—and Nina was feeling more and more tired as she sobered up. She left Mary alone in the living room, lying on the couch in the light of an old lamp with a parchment shade.
When she lay down, Nina was so exhausted that she was sure she’d cross over easily into dreamless sleep. But in the unfamiliar dark her thoughts began to swirl faster and faster, dancing over endless ugly scenes—a moment she’d pushed him too hard on the swing, hoping he’d fall; a time they’d locked him in a closet in a game and forgotten him. Her head swung back and forth on the pillow. Then, suddenly, she saw the serving spoon in her mind’s eye, sliding slowly off a plate with some leftover chili into the green trash bag under the sink.
She got up quickly and pulled on a nightgown. Downstairs, Mary had fallen asleep on the couch, with the heavy book open across her chest. It lifted up and down, up and down, with her slow breathing. Nina looked under the sink, but the green bag in the wastebasket was new, nearly empty. She turned on the outside light and stepped into the cool, thick air. The bag sat in an open, dented galvanized can next to the back-porch stairs. Nina pulled it out, sat down on the steps, and untied the knot that held it closed. It was in here, somewhere. She knew it. She looked down into tinfoil, the plastic trays the meat had come in, an empty vodka bottle, bits of chili, coffee grounds. Her heart failed her for a moment. But then in memory she saw the spoon again. It was here, buried treasure, she knew it was.
And when Mack and Sarah turned up the drive a little after midnight, this was the first thing they saw: Nina on the stoop under the diffused bright light as though on a tiny stage. Nina with her sleepy hair haloing her head, garbage strewn around her, tears running down her face; Nina with her arm plunged deep into the green bag, feeling around for what she’d lost.
Mack had arrived in Boston about noon, even though Sarah had said she wouldn’t get off work until much later. But he’d been restless in Vermont, cut off from grief by his distance from the family. He’d thought the sooner he was in motion, the sooner he might be able to feel something. And he thought, too, that it might be useful to visit Cambridge, to retrace his steps, to try to think his way back to the moment that had sliced his life in two all those years ago—a moment that he knew was connected in some way with his complicated feelings now about Randall and his death.
He’d forgotten it would be Reunion. He had to drive blocks from the Square to find a parking space, and as he walked back, he found himself increasingly among middle-aged men wearing matching hats and name badges, some drunk already. He saw that a few of them were wearing ’69 badges—his year!—and realized abruptly that this would have been his tenth reunion, that some of these men were people he’d been in college with. He began to look at the faces. They seemed fleshy and prosperous, complete strangers.
Mack felt uncomfortable. He went to Elsie’s and bought himself a roast beef sandwich and a raspberry lime rickey. He carried them down to the river. Behind him, in the courtyard of Eliot House, there was a tent. Alumni in pastel shirts—older, white-haired—were gathered under it. Their voices carried across Memorial Drive ov
er the noise of the traffic, a low, steady rumble. Mack went close to the water’s edge where the sloping bank blocked his view back, where the algal smell of the Charles and its slow rhythmic lap seemed to enclose him. There were sunbathers down here, and two young men playing Frisbee. Mack ate slowly and then lay back in the sun. He felt peaceful. He swung his head on the grass and looked in the other direction. Not ten feet from him lay a nearly naked young woman, her body gleaming with oil, her belly flat, her breasts flattened too on top, but pouched where they drooped gently down against her sides. As he watched, she turned restlessly and flopped onto her stomach, In a moment her elbows rose like wings above her back and she unhooked her top. Then slowly she lowered her arms again along her sides. Her eyes had never opened.
Mack turned away, propped himself on one elbow to look again at the Frisbee players. He hadn’t slept with a woman in four or five months, not since the poet after her reading at the local state college. She’d come into the bar he worked in, come in with some of the faculty. Mack knew them. He knew nearly everyone in town. They introduced her, and she stayed on after they left and then until he closed up. Before that there had been another gap between women of three or four months; and Mack knew this was the way it would go as long as he stayed in Shelbyville. Unless he wanted to start sleeping with married women, the wives of his customers.
He had moved to Vermont seven months after he got out of the service. He’d been living at home with his parents, trying to figure out where to go next and watching a lot of television. It was all wearing thin quickly, all the love and concern that had poured over the ocean to him when they thought he was in danger. He had felt, all that time in Vietnam, so scared that home had become a kind of icon, a religion. The idea of getting home had been what kept him going, and he saved their letters, folded in his pocket, until the ink wore off, the damp paper literally disintegrated. It was less the words he cared about than the notion of their having touched the paper too, of its having lain in all the familiar places—the kitchen table, the little desk in the living room. It made it seem possible that he could cross that distance too, that it was possible he could get back there.