Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  He had managed to save a few of them, and he remembered others—not always the exact words but the sense of them. It had astonished and moved him to feel how they loved him, how they reached out to him and wanted him to know it. Sometimes he wondered if the reason he’d ended up moving to Vermont, living so far away from his family, was that it made it easier to remember them that way—full of the urgent expression of love. His father especially. His letters had been so tender and regretful, so apologetic for the distance between them.

  And yet within a week of his return, it all seemed to dissipate. His father had asked him over dinner one night what he planned to do. When Mack answered, “I thought I’d let my hair grow,” he could see David’s jaw shift under his smooth flesh; and he’d thought of the letters abruptly, with a sense of deep loss.

  Two days later, he’d gotten the job at Kroch’s, selling this time. And he liked it—touching the books, talking to people. He had a picture of himself reading through the store, using his employee discount to begin his real education. He felt something like the same excitement he’d felt at the beginning of each semester for the first couple of years of college.

  But he found he couldn’t read. He’d bring things home and start them, but within just a page or two he’d have a sense of disorientation; the print would seem jumbled and senseless, and he’d be flooded by memories, by the thought of where he’d been, of how he almost hadn’t come back. He’d feel again, with a sense of sharp disjuncture and puzzlement, how frightened he’d been, how reduced, altered. It didn’t seem possible also to be this Macklin, beginning The Tempest, trying Lord Jim. Sometimes his heart would start pounding, his breath would shorten with the physical memory of his own fear. And he’d go downstairs and watch TV, whatever was on.

  A few months after he’d started work, he got a week off and made a trip east. He’d visited Randall in Connecticut, Nina and Liddie in New York. He’d gone to Cambridge, too, and talked to a dean at Harvard, who explained how easy it would be to reenroll. But then he’d come home and fallen again into his former pattern, work and then that welcome sleepy lethargy.

  He’d met Celeste at a party at the U of C. She was short, very fair, a little plump, with lips as full as the wax ones Mack’s sisters used to buy at the candy store. She had smallish, wonderfully blue eyes. A sexy baby face. She was getting a master’s degree in teaching, and she was the first person he’d met who didn’t look shocked when he said he’d been in Vietnam. He told her that, and she explained that she was from a tiny town in Vermont. That about a third of the guys she’d gone to high school with had ended up over there.

  He dated her through the spring, and when she went back to Shelbyville in July, he went too. They were married a year later. His parents came out for the wedding, and all his sisters drifted in from wherever they were. Celeste looked shorter, blonder than ever, standing among his slender, dark family. For a wedding present, his father offered to pay his tuition whenever he wanted to finish school, but Mack and Celeste asked instead for the money as a down payment on an old farmhouse near town they’d been dreaming of. Mack planned to spend the next few years working on it, while Celeste taught.

  He’d started off with an ambitious schedule, and for three or four months he kept to it. By the time the first maple leaves were turning pinkish red and Celeste reported to work at Shelbyville District High School, he had the plaster off and several rooms insulated on the first floor. They’d have their morning coffee in the partly done kitchen, the Indian-head pattern on the silver foil of the insulation like a strange nightmare kind of wallpaper around them.

  Sometime in the late fall, though, as the weather began to turn really cold, Mack stopped. Part of it was the car. He’d begun driving Celeste in to work and then coming back to town in the late afternoon to pick her up, “in case” he needed to have the car during the day. But then he started to hang around town for a while after he’d left her at school. He went to the hardware store or the record store. He stopped in Jack’s Variety for coffee and talk. He collected anecdotes to tell her from the shifting group of men who whiled away bits of time there. Sometimes he’d have lunch. He’d get home and stoke the stove, read the paper, and often get dinner started, before he had to get back in the car and drive to town to pick Celeste up.

  But in spite of his dwindling energy for the house project, he had more energy for lovemaking. And oddly, Celeste seemed to become more and more passive in the face of it. After they made love, she would often doze off, and he’d let her sleep awhile before he began moving over her again, trying something else. He felt in love with her body in a way he’d never been with anyone’s before. He felt safe and whole while they were making love. Sometimes he lay still for a long time with his cock inside her, not moving, not even thinking about coming.

  That second summer, when she was home all day, he’d worked hard again: he’d gotten Sheetrock up over the insulation, he’d sanded and painted the walls. But winter hit him that year with the same force, the same result as the year before; and this became their pattern, was their pattern for the four years they were married.

  One afternoon in the late fall of that last year together, they were lying still on their mattress, covered with a thick, ragged quilt Mack had found at an auction. Pumping over her minutes earlier, he had sensed her impatience, her remove. She’d turned away from him after he came, so that now he was lying against her back, with his chin resting on her shoulder. He moved his free hand around to the front of her sturdy body and gently covered one of her small, round breasts. She stirred enough to make it clear she didn’t want him to touch her. Then she said in a mean voice, “You know, Mack, sometimes I think your problem is your mother didn’t breast-feed you long enough.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. He had a sense of whirling dizziness, of a dangerous world opening wide in front of him. He tried to make his voice light. “I didn’t know you thought I had a problem,” he said.

  She flung herself over onto her back. “I think you need to get a job,” she said, not looking at him, just at the ceiling, dotted with wide sanded circles and stripes of joint compound. “I’d like you sometimes to be out of this house. I’d like to be able to be alone every now and then. Not to have to hide in the bathroom to get some time to myself.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Where is this coming from?”

  She threw the covers back and lurched up, scooping her clothes off the floor as she rose. He watched her body as she nearly ran from the room, the dimpling jiggle of her wide buttocks. The bathroom door slammed with a force that stirred the air over him seconds later.

  *

  Celeste moved out—“for a while,” they agreed—to a tiny apartment over Aubuchon’s Hardware in town. Mack got the bartending job, he insulated an upstairs bedroom, he started Sheetrocking the walls. Celeste came back for a couple of weeks, but then she said he was hovering. Couldn’t he just stay away from her, give her some space?

  She moved out again, to a little house near town she shared with another teacher. Mack got a second part-time job, as a reporter for the Shelbyville Post. His days were almost full. He covered town meetings, basketball tournaments, local fires. He slept with a few women. Celeste heard about it and came back again. They both cried, they both comforted each other. She took two sick days from school, and they were happy, making love a lot. They brought the mattress in by the woodstove, so they could lie naked in comfort.

  Then she told him she’d had several affairs too, one with another teacher, one with the divorced father of one of her students. They were sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table, sitting naked with blankets like shawls over their shoulders. She’d been drinking when she started talking about it, and she offered a few details, almost giggling. Mack had been drinking too, and he got up from his chair and hit her. It was pure impulse—he just wanted to stop her words, her mouth—but his hand had tightened into a fist just before impact, and he could hear that he’d hit her much too hard. She lurched
sideways and nearly fell off her chair. When she righted herself, he saw the redness, the swelling already starting on her cheek, next to her pretty eye.

  For a while after that, Mack lived in a commune halfway between Shelbyville and White River Junction. He liked the company; he liked driving up to the house at almost any time of the night and seeing one or two windows lighted, smelling coffee when he opened the door. There were two children in the commune, little boys four and seven, and Mack took them with him when he could to the games he covered. But it turned out that there were deep-running divisions in the house, ancient feuds he hadn’t known about when he joined them. About eight months after he moved in, they were down to three members. They had a meeting and decided they couldn’t afford to renew the lease.

  Mack moved back to Shelbyville, back to the farmhouse. He cleaned up the damage the mice had done, moved the bed into the other bedroom, asked for and got a raise at the Post. His divorce papers came through.

  A couple of nights later, Celeste drove up to the house. They made love, almost wordlessly, for a long time. She left before morning, and he hadn’t slept with anyone again until the poet.

  She had been older, Jewish, urban. She had made him remember all the smart girls he’d gone to high school with. She lived here, in Boston, and for a moment, lying on the grass by the river, Mack thought maybe he’d call her. But then he knew he shouldn’t. He knew he’d end up talking about Randall, about his death, trying to puzzle through his own feelings; and he didn’t want to hear anyone else’s observations about them. He looked over at the sunbather again.

  Abruptly he remembered the urge he’d have toward sex after someone he knew had died in Vietnam, so that late in his hitch he was regularly buying women when he could—he, who’d been sure when he first arrived that he’d never touch the pretty, pathetic little girls with their thick makeup and their crazy, mimetically learned obscenities. In the end he’d gotten good at bargaining them down, making them throw in variations for free. All to celebrate being alive. Fucking dirty on behalf of the dead. Maybe what he was feeling now was just that same randiness. Then, suddenly, at the thought of that word, the pun, he laughed out loud. The almost-naked woman’s eyes snapped open, found him. She frowned and watched him for a moment—was he a rapist? a killer?—but as soon as he began to gather up his trash, to stand, she drifted back into sunbaked sleepiness.

  Walking past her with the greasy papers in his hand, Mack had the impulse to bend down, to whisper something foul—or maybe just the word randy—to her. But he kept moving, up to the wire-mesh trash barrel.

  *

  There were still a few people sitting around at tables under the striped tent top at the Tenth Reunion luncheon, while the students cleaned up around them. Mack tried walking in, but a young woman at the gate stopped him.

  “Do you have your badge?” she asked.

  “I lost it,” Mack said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You can get another one at the Freshman Union, but I’m not allowed to let you in without it.”

  “But I’m in the class of ‘sixty-nine. Honest.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Mack looked over at the men. Most of them seemed heavier, older than himself, he thought. Infinitely more respectable anyway. Mack was wearing a worn T-shirt over jeans and sandals. These men had on sports jackets, the goofy hats, pressed shirts. Only here and there was there a pair of jeans, and those were neat, new. No one looked familiar. He turned back to the girl. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  She was pretty and young, in a loose smocked sundress. She looked frightened. She turned to see who was nearby to help her.

  “Look, it’s all right,” he said. “I won’t make trouble.”

  She had backed up a few steps, and now she looked at him dubiously.

  “You’re right; I didn’t pay my dues or whatever. I admit it. I was a dropout anyway.” He held his hands out, empty. “Before it was fashionable. You can tell by my uniform.” He gestured down at his worn jeans. “I just wanted to peer at them for a moment. My exclassmates.” Two men walked toward them, and Mack and the girl stepped apart simultaneously, as though they were all doing a kind of country reel and the reunion men were supposed to dance out between them. When they stepped back toward each other, they were both smiling, as though they’d shared that thought.

  “What class are you?” he asked her after a moment.

  “’Eighty. Next year is the big one for me,” she said. She had long straight hair. She wore no makeup, and her eyelashes and brows were almost white. She looked like a remnant of the sixties, a flower child.

  “And what comes then?” he asked. He slouched against the pillar on his side of the gate, comfortable.

  “Oh …” She changed her voice, to put quote marks around it: “Life.”

  “In one of its many forms.”

  She grinned. “Exactly.” She had a wonderful, wide smile.

  “Well, don’t be in any rush,” he said. “Before you know it, you’ll look like these guys.”

  She looked back at the few people left in the courtyard and then at him, critically. “You don’t,” she said.

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  She blushed and did a little mock curtsy. “You may.” Then: “What are you doing, in ‘life’?”

  “Well.” he paused and leaned forward to read her name tag. “Well, Sophia. I’m at a crossroads. And I’m not exactly sure what comes next.”

  “Kinda like me.”

  “Kinda like you. Only very different.”

  “Why should it be any different? I mean, isn’t everything that’s open to me just as open to you?”

  “Is everything open to you?”

  “I think so, yes.” Her face was very sober, suddenly. A child’s, full of expectation and solemn hope. He felt sorry for her.

  “Magic,” he said. “Then it is.”

  “And it isn’t for you?”

  “No. I’ve chosen a few things. And that … well… that shut some doors in my life.”

  “You mean like dropping out.”

  He laughed. “That was one anyway. That certainly got the old ball rolling.”

  A whole cluster of alumni passed between them. Someone was saying, “It was a veritable circus. I was embarrassed to be part of it.” Mack looked at the man. He was smoking a pipe. Who were these people? How had this happened to them—this weight they’d taken on—and not to Mack?

  “So,” Sophia said. “What are your options? What is … the crossroads?” He looked at her. She blushed a little. She was flirting.

  “Actually it might be more like a rotary.”

  Her laugh was a little too loud, a little shrill. When it stopped, they stood silent for a moment. Then Mack said, “Christ, I don’t know. I just can’t go on quite the way I have been. And …” He plunged: “My brother died. That might be the most important thing.”

  Her face sobered instantly. Death. She was impressed. Mack had known this would happen. All of it.

  “You mean recently?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Just now. I’m on my way to his funeral.”

  “But that’s terrible!” And when he didn’t respond: “What did he die of?”

  “An accident. Life, I guess. Bad timing. Bad luck.”

  “Oh, God, I’m really sorry.” She looked away for a moment, and then back at him, intensely. “Were you close?” she asked.

  Mack didn’t know what he was going to say; it just came out. “We were twins.”

  “God!”

  “Yeah. At one time, I thought I would have given my life for him.” Four or five more alumni, the last stragglers, passed between them. Her face remained there, waiting, looking only at him as the men filed out. So much sympathy. Mack was ashamed suddenly—of his lie, of his use of the truth. His tone was harsh when he spoke again. “Imagine my surprise when I found out that I’d rather live, that I didn’t want to die. For him, or for anyone. Imagine my … self-loathing.�
�� He put the same quotes around it with his voice that she’d put around life.

  Sophia’s face twisted in perplexity. She didn’t get his tone. She felt, perhaps, wounded by it. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. Her voice was cooler. Her expression had closed somehow. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand you.”

  “Don’t be sorry for that,” he said. He looked at her pretty, sad face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He’d been like a dark cloud drifting across her blue, blue sky. “But you’ve been … nice. To talk to me.” He held his hand out.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you.” Her voice was full of regret, and her hand in his was cool and strong.

  He’d gotten partway down the block when it occurred to him how he could use her. He swung around and walked quickly back. Her face lifted hopefully to him; but fell almost immediately when he said, “Look, Sophia, I need to get into my old room. Can you just get me into Adams House?”

  She waited nervously outside, on the stairway, in case anyone came. The paneled living room was the same, dark and airless. Two student trunks were shoved into the middle of the room, labeled and ready for summer storage. He pushed the door to his bedroom open. The furniture in here was arranged differently from the way it had been—the bureau was where Mack had had his desk. But the narrow bed still stretched out under the window, and when Mack lay down on it, the rooftops, the trees, the church spire were all still there against the sky, all just as they had been years before. He’d lain here that whole fall, essentially, looking up at this view, trying to figure out what he should do. It was hard now for him to remember the bottomless grief he felt, the sense of falseness in everything he did. Even going to meals was painful, sitting next to someone in the vast, elegant dining hall, smiling, acting pleasant. He’d seen a movie that fall, a Bergman movie, Persona. In it, Liv Ullmann played a woman incapacitated to the point of speechlessness by her sense of horror at the falsity of her everyday exchanges. Mack had wished he could be that crazy, that lost.