Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  Tony saw me to the door. She thanked me for all my help, and then she hugged me too. I was struck by how small, how fragile she felt in my arms.

  “Mack’s upstairs, you know,” I told her. “Big Mack, that is.” He’d assigned himself this nickname to hide his pleasure when he heard what Mary and Peter had named the baby.

  “Yes. David said he’d tucked him in.”

  “I wondered who had,” I said. I thought of my father bending over Mack—bending over each of us when we were small, stroking back our hair with his smooth, gentle hands.

  “So much for your honeymoon,” I said.

  She laughed. “That’s certainly the last thing David and I need,” she said. And then, unexpectedly, color rose to her face, and she was silent. I had never seen Tony at a loss before, at the mercy of her emotions. I felt touched, and embarrassed too. We were both awkward as we said good night, and I was so caught in my confused emotions that I walked past five or six houses before I began to take anything in.

  But then I realized that the street was asleep anyway, most of the old familiar houses completely dark. As I passed the Masurs’, though, I saw that there was a dim light on somewhere deep on the first floor. They’d been at the wedding, along with Mr. Rosenberg and the Gordons, the Lees. Except for the ones who had died, Lainey was the only member of the old group who hadn’t come. When I got to the square, I stopped and looked at the whited lawn. It seemed so small compared to the way it loomed in my memory.

  On an impulse, I turned in and went down the path to our old house. I knew that a family with young children had bought it; Lainey had told me that. I had certainly peered in this direction each time I’d gone to Tony’s house to see my father. But I hadn’t wanted to walk in before, to get that close to it. Now, abruptly, our reign there seemed over, seemed like ancient history. And I felt like marking that sense of a time gone by. I was ready to look at what had become of it.

  There was a light on upstairs, in the largest bedroom, the bedroom that had always been my parents’. The shades were drawn, and the bare branches of the silver maple crisscrossed like stylized ink drawings in front of them. There was one other light, a spotlight in back. It shone brightly over a new deck, like Tony’s, which jutted prowlike off the kitchen. Everything else was dark.

  I walked along the side of the house into the yard. I stood for a while as far from the spotlight as I could get, my back against the fence that ran along the bottom of the embankment for the IC. I was shivering in the cold; my feet were wet. The snow hissed gently around me as it landed.

  When the light went off upstairs, I felt bolder. I went slowly across the yard, climbed the steps to the deck, and tried to peer in the glass doors to the kitchen. Our kitchen. I could see a table and chairs in the middle of the room. And as my eyes adjusted, I could see that the cabinets were new, a pale color, that the room was completely transformed. From where the pantry had been, I saw light. For a moment I thought it was a mirror, reflecting the door and the light over me. But then I realized that those were windows—that the pantry simply wasn’t there anymore, that the room was open on that side, too, to the snowy night. The dark cave that had been our kitchen, the seat of all our family drama, was gone. In the daytime this would be a bright, airy room. Pretty, I imagined.

  A train screamed past behind me. I stepped back, and suddenly the dim world inside the glass vanished and what I was looking at now on its surface was myself, myself revealed under this bright light. The wet snow had flattened my hair around my head. I looked bedraggled and even colder than I felt. It made me think of a story I’d read over and over as a child, Andersen’s “Little Match Girl.” I’d used it then to feed my own sense of being an outsider, an onlooker among my family: the little girl, shivering, dying in the cold, while inside there was warmth, life, drama. Now I saw abruptly that the theater was equally out here. That the figure who hovered on the other side of the glass, looking in, yearning, had her story, her drama, also—her beginning and middle and end. And that standing outside, looking on, offered no escape from the roll of events, from the steady pull of time.

  I looked hard at myself for what seemed like the first time in a long time. I’d borrowed a dress coat of Lainey’s because I had brought nothing with me I could wear over my clothes to the wedding. It was black and sleek, and in it I didn’t look like a girl, which was how I still thought of myself most of the time. My face was pretty, I think, but not with that open, eager expression a girl has. There was something sad in it. I saw that I’d changed, in spite of the way I had thought of myself, in spite of everything I’d done to stay safe from time—even when, as with my marriage to Will, I imagined I was plunging into its pressing stream. Looking at myself under the spotlight, I realized that that choice, too, had been a kind of retreat, just as Dr. Dusek had suggested. That it had always been the touch of the random that had changed me—the accident, the unwilled event, out of my control: therapy, or Randall’s death, or the loss of the baby. These were the things that had claimed me in spite of my best efforts, that had given my life a shape, a sense of forward motion. That had brought me here, this strangely forlorn woman looking back at herself under the falling snow, in someone else’s expensive clothes, outside someone else’s house.

  I went back to New York two days after the wedding. I felt as though whatever I’d come for had been somehow achieved. Or else that it didn’t matter anymore. I brought back with me several of the odd family pictures that had hung for years on the kitchen wall at home: the brittle, spotted magazine photograph of Freud and his wife; the two postcards of the annunciation; a photograph I’d taken once in youth of my brothers together, smiling, looking like twins. I hadn’t asked if I could have these things specifically. I’d just taken them. After all, Lainey had said to take whatever I liked. Naturally I’d chosen pictures, images. And I brought back several rolls of film I’d shot during my stay, including some pictures I’d taken of Mary while she was still pregnant.

  She had stopped work finally, the last week before she gave birth, and I spent a day with her helping her pass the time. After lunch she decided on impulse to take a bath. It was the only place she felt comfortable, she said. We talked of everything inconsequential as she lay back in the tub, her feet propped against the wall above the nickel faucet, her belly rising solid as an island out of the lapping water, white and immense and taut. I was sitting on the toilet seat. I had trouble not staring at her. I actually thought I saw, once or twice, the moving pressure of a tiny heel or fist pushing her flesh from within. My body hadn’t changed much with my pregnancy to anyone’s eye but my own; but in Mary’s packed roundness I could see what might have become of me finally, how my instruction in giving myself over to someone else might have begun.

  It was as she heaved herself to a standing position in the tub and reached for a towel that I asked her if I could photograph her undressed. I was a little surprised when she consented.

  I hadn’t ever enjoyed the life photography courses I’d taken—those posed naked bodies seemed sterile to me, robbed of context, of the vitality I looked for in even the most ordinary human situations; but I liked taking Mary’s pictures. She vamped for me at first, making seductive calendar poses as though she were mocking herself for what wasn’t sexually beautiful about her body anymore. It was clear that she felt awkward and uncomfortable. She kept saying, “This is completely crazy”; or, “I’ve never done anything like this before.” But then, finally, as it sometimes happens with people in front of the camera, she just relaxed. She was able simply to turn in the light as I asked her to, to lie back, to squat, to dance to the music on the radio. She had one gesture that I caught in several of the pictures—that of holding her belly as though the baby in there had made her own body precious to her in a way we aren’t usually allowed to feel about ourselves.

  When we were through and she was getting dressed, I said, “Do you remember when we were little, Mary, and we’d play those dirty games up in our room? Or the basem
ent sometimes? Or Bumping Bottoms—remember that?”

  She had been carefully pinning the sprung waist of her maternity pants. Now she looked up at me and shook her head, smiling. She said, “You know, Nina, I think maybe we need to sit down together while I explain to you the function of repression in human life.”

  I clicked the lens at her several times, even though there was no film left. “The hell with repression,” I said. “I want to remember it all. That’s why I love taking pictures. My little victory over all those Freudian processes.”

  Suddenly she frowned. “Actually, Freud says something like that somewhere.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yes. You should ask Dad. It’s not as literal as what you’re saying. But it is something about art. About art being a way to … maybe not escape neurosis but to make use of it, or transform it somehow. I’ve forgotten.”

  “Interesting.” I watched her. Her hands were still on the big safety pin, and she was staring at me, trying to remember Freud. Her face was softened and made younger by the pregnancy, and she looked for all the world like the earnest little girl she’d been, the Mary who’d trailed after me for years and years, sweet and grave and utterly convinced I knew all the answers. I was sorry there was no film left in the camera.

  That film sat on a shelf in my darkroom for a month after I came back to New York. But one night late, unable to sleep, I got up and went in there, looking for something, anything, to do, and I remembered it. Frantic with loneliness, I began to develop the pictures, to fool around with light in the ones I liked.

  Will had moved out a week or so earlier. Splitting up with him had been both easier and harder than I had thought it would be. Easier because as it turned out, he felt we were at an impasse too, because he wanted to end it as much as I did. Typically, though, he thought the problem, the drama, was mine, was internal. In his version I was frightened. I was withdrawing from him because there had been something wrong with the baby, because I was fleeing the possibility of producing a damaged child, a child like Randall.

  “I know how much you wanted that timeless scene,” he said. “The happy family, the beautiful baby.”

  We were sitting across from each other in the living room, as we had for the last four or five evenings. It seemed to me that we clung to these conversations, these companionable postmortems, because we weren’t quite ready yet to say goodbye. We even had several quickly developed rituals: now we were both sipping expensive Calvados from tiny crystal glasses we’d received as a wedding present and barely used since. He spun his glass slowly on the arm of his elegant couch.

  I didn’t want to end this comfortable sense of aftermath by fighting with him, by saying that I thought it was he who had wanted a changeless, pretty life. Instead I skittered around the topic. I reached for abstraction. Safe. “But time is everything in that scene,” I told him.

  “Fine,” he said. He set his mouth. “Let’s not argue.”

  And we didn’t. We went over all the old stuff, even my infidelities, with what seemed almost like Lainey’s distance as she talked about my father on the porch. There was never the sense of something deep and abiding between us, though; never the sense of something to forgive, on either side, that had run under even my parents’ most peaceful moments. And that made it seem easy when the time finally came, when the Gentle Giant movers pulled up in front with their battered truck.

  The hard part, of course, was how much I missed him, all that was steady and reliable and comforting about him. For a while after he moved out, I called him with some regularity, and I only felt at home when I was listening to his voice. But then, once, a woman answered. When he came to the phone, I said just that I was sorry and hung up. And after that I tried to do something else with the energy that wanted to reach out to him.

  My repertory, though, was pretty banal. I drank too much, I listened to maudlin music—sometimes even descending for sorrow to country and western stuff. I often stayed up until two or three in the morning, watching anything I could find on TV.

  This night I had music on, loud. The Orchestral Songs, by Strauss. I was trying not to think about having a drink. I spread four or five of the finished prints of Mary out on a big worktable. And then I noticed, still stacked on the table’s corner, the pile of pictures I’d brought back from Chicago. I spread them out too.

  For a while I pushed everything idly around on the table—the photographs, the postcards. I began thinking of them as elements in a kind of Rock-Scissors-Paper game, which contained the mystery of my childhood. Which had the most power? Freud? That analytic version of my parents’ life, which insisted that Randall—and their misery—had its source in my mother’s wackiness and should be struggled against, fought, cured? Or the annunciations, which said, in effect, that Randall was holy, that the failure was my father’s in not accepting what was a given, what was fate—as both of the annunciation Marys did in their separate ways, as Mack did in his twinship with Randall. And what was my sister Mary, with her striped, heavy belly, in this game? Perhaps the reality of gestation and birth, which should have taken over the argument anyway with its simple, pressing insistence on life.

  In the end I did get a drink. In between sips, I tacked all the pictures up on the wall. And finally I went to bed with the music blasting and the bedroom light still on, curled up on myself in a half circle of misery, hugging my own bare knees.

  For weeks, for months, the pictures stayed there. Eventually I simply stopped seeing them, except occasionally when I would suddenly think of something that had happened while I was in Chicago; or something from childhood. Then I’d go and stand in front of them again, staring stupidly at one and then another image, as though if I looked hard enough, long enough, their meaning would become clear.

  I hadn’t gotten the grant, it turned out; and separating from Will meant that I was broke again. I’d started to do weddings and bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, in the late spring, I accepted a job in Darien for a sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. Will and I had filed for divorce only a few weeks earlier, and I had a sense of facing an appropriate kind of punishment as I assembled what I would need for the day, as I walked down the street through the pale sunlight to the rental car place. But then a rumpled old lady with her bags set down around her looked up from feeding the pigeons and said, “You’re up early this beautiful morning, my darling.” And I saw that there were blossoms on many of the trees; New York suddenly looked pretty and new. I realized I was glad to be walking through it, that I was taking pleasure in life again, in spite of myself.

  The woman who had called me had said the party would be huge—all the generations, “thousands of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” Thinking about it had made me conscious not just of my own failure with Will but of the strange inability of anyone in my family but Mary to take up what most people would call a normal kind of life. Liddie wasn’t interested at all, that was clear. Mack didn’t seem to be able to stay married long enough. And Sarah—it was hard to tell with Sarah, she was so cheerfully promiscuous. I knew she had slept with at least four members out of the other five in her band. Somehow she and her friends reminded me of those line drawings of bunnies, hundreds of them, that turned up everywhere in domestic life in the mid-seventies—on coffee mugs, on aprons and dish towels. Their innocent randiness was so blank-eyed that it had taken me a long time to realize that I was looking at—could there be such a thing?—bunny orgies.

  I found the place easily. It was a mansion on the coast that the town owned and rented to residents for special occasions. The family wasn’t there yet, but the woman who’d phoned me, a granddaughter—plump, red-haired, about forty—was waiting, bustling around in the elegant, wide entrance hall, ordering a couple of young women in maids’ uniforms to carry food and big bags of ice here and there. She gave me a name tag—Nina Eberhardt, Photographer, it said—and told me just to snap whatever was “fun.” “Try to get as many different people as you can,” she instructed. “Everyone’s g
oing to want a memento of this. We’ll do the big family portrait after the meal.” I could tell she was nervous. Her eyes in her plump face darted everywhere, never coming to rest on anything for more than a fraction of a second. She was carrying around an extra-large paper cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and there was another one, empty, resting on the table where all the other name tags sat.

  I pinned the label on myself and meandered through the grounds. Everything was in bloom here—rhododendron, mountain laurel, dogwood. It made the street scene in New York seem retroactively inadequate and skimpy. The dew wet my sneakers.

  I watched the family slowly gather, trying to get a sense of its shape, of the logical groupings within it. A brass quintet wearing tuxedos arrived too. They were young, probably college students. They blew and spat into their mouthpieces for a while, and then they began tootling Gabrieli on the wide back lawn.

  When the car with the celebrating couple started up the drive, the granddaughter who was running things came onto the veranda out back and shouted the news. The quintet played an impromptu cavalry charge and then ran for the front of the house. We all followed. The musicians stationed themselves quickly on either side of the stairs. As the car doors swung open, they blew a complicated, glorious fanfare, and the hundred or more children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren cheered and yelled.

  The couple was white-haired but not as ancient-looking as I had expected. They were both little and round, and each sported a huge corsage. I noted, too, that she was wearing makeup, though the eyebrows—high, irregular arches—were drawn on with a wavering pencil. Clearly they were ready to enjoy the day. They turned this way and that, like royalty on display, waving and smiling to the group around them. Then a younger, larger relative appeared at the elbow of each, and they began the laborious process of ascending the wide stairs.