Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  A receiving line formed in the entrance hall, and I stood opposite the old couple at its head. Over and over I caught the warm embraces, the joyous smiles. The teenagers touched me the most. There must have been eight or ten of them. They seemed huge and awkward, even those that were only average size, because they all towered over their miniature great-grandparents. And they seemed not to have learned yet the restraint of the formal embrace: they threw their arms with embarrassed and dangerous power around the elderly couple when their turns came, leaving them breathless and flustered in their wake.

  When the line finally broke up, the grandparents were helped out to chairs on the back lawn, and people began finding beers or coffee or lemonade. They hailed each other, they slapped each other’s shoulders, they embraced and wept. I was wearing several cameras slung around my neck, a sort of armor against intimacy, and it worked. By and large they ignored me. Occasionally someone would approach, eyebrows raised, drink in hand: “You’re … ?”

  I’d shake my head. “Just the photographer,” I’d say, and gesture to my name tag.

  The granddaughter found me on the back lawn. She had changed her mind. The big portrait would come before the meal. “Everyone’s just going to spread out afterwards, and we’ll never get them together again,” she said. She was drinking beer now, and she seemed a little more relaxed. It took her twenty minutes or so to round everyone up. They gathered slowly on the wide front stairs of the house, and the old couple came and stood at the top.

  I waited alone, in front of them on the lawn, while they discussed the arrangement they wanted, while teenage runners were dispatched for those who were obliviously chatting in the house or out back. Somewhere in the group on the stairs, a child started crying, in rising hysteria.

  Finally the granddaughter in charge and one of the seventyish sons came and stood next to me. He had a bullhorn, and he translated her instructions in his amplified baritone. The family all fell obediently into the desired shape, a widening triangle, with the grandparents at its peak, the immediate children on the first step down, then the spouses and grandchildren beginning and tumbling down the stairs. The second and third cousins were asked to form a kind of border at the edges. In three long rows on the lawn at the bottom of the triangle, standing, kneeling, and then sitting, were the great-grandchildren. As I was photographing at last, one tiny member of the last generation crawled forward and sat back in the grass on his rubbery legs, sat back as though to look with amazement on all the other generations that had labored and suffered and loved to produce him.

  It wasn’t a good picture in any sense. There was hardly a way it could be. The best pictures, from my point of view, would be the ones the family didn’t even want: Shots of a wailing child, clinging in lonely misery to the leg of his happily talking mother. Of two sisters, side by side, claimed by their genes in spite of wildly varied hairstyles, clothes, makeup. Of the elderly couple, sitting for a moment unattended and speechless in their lawn chairs, each of their faces sunk in isolation and exhaustion.

  This, the family portrait, was simply a picture of almost reasonless increase, the instinctual pressure of greedy life wanting more, and then more. But when I looked at it later in my apartment, it seemed connected somehow with that strange assortment of images I’d chosen to remember my family by. And so, oddly, I stuck a copy of it up with them. A picture of perfect strangers. And though for a while it drew me anew to that corner of the room—it seemed to bring to life some question I still couldn’t answer—finally it, too, became familiar as wallpaper; I rarely saw it either, though my eyes moved over it every day.

  It wasn’t until just recently, pregnant again myself and moving to a larger apartment in the city, that I looked clearly at these things once more. We were packing. My husband was doing the books and the heavy stuff. He had the ball game on the radio, and from time to time the announcer’s excited voice or the rising cheers of the crowd would float in to me. I was in charge of the small things—dishes from the kitchen shelves, the pictures on the walls, the funny collections of stuff sitting around: a bowl of bright marbles and a shoe box full of Matchbox cars that my stepson played with when he came to stay with us on weekends. Some seashells and a striated, perfectly egg-shaped stone my husband had found for me on the beach before we were even sure I was pregnant.

  I moved finally to the corner of the room where I’d stuck up my peculiar arrangement and looked again at all the images. And as I scanned them this time, I realized I was seeing them differently: not as alternative explanations of my family’s meaning, competing with each other for dominance; but as one of those puzzles in which you are given different elements and asked to guess their connection, how they all fit together. And out of the blue I understood that the family photograph held the answer. That it was really a portrait of a kind of reckless courage, a testament to the great loving carelessness at the heart of every family’s life, even ours. That each child represented such risk, such blind daring on its parents’ parts—such possibility for anguish and pain—that each one’s existence was a kind of miracle.

  But almost simultaneously I realized that if I’d chosen three or four other items from my mother’s magic trunks—as Mack would have, or Mary or Sarah—the puzzle itself would have changed shape, would have been different, the mysteries and preoccupations. This was the puzzle I had chosen to try to solve. And the exact nature of this puzzle, the way I had tried to solve it, had as much to do with the puzzle of who I was, the puzzle of what I wished to make of my life, as it did with the mystery of my family. My very choices, how I saw them, were part of the puzzle itself. The Virgin Mary who at first tries to flee her fate, the Mary who waits; the boy who is healthy, the boy who is ill; the understanding that comes from faith, the one that comes from a brave new science—they were all just possibilities. And the story they told me now as they came together was as different from what Mack’s story might be—or Liddie’s, or Mary’s—as I am from them.

  And, of course, the ending then is different too.

  Here is mine.

  Lainey is pregnant, pregnant with her third child. She’s “as big as a country barn,” she says, as big as Mary in the pictures I took. As big as I am now. It’s July, a hot day. The sun is invisible, directly overhead. She’s walking slowly down Fifty-seventh Street, east, in the direction of the lake. Her feet are so swollen that she’s put on my father’s sandals to make herself comfortable. It’s Tony walking next to her, that slightly rolling, dancer’s walk. Lainey is trying to amuse her, this new friend, trying to be charming. “Mack was the hard one,” she’s saying. “My memory is he cried nonstop for the first three months. The most reluctant baby I ever saw.” She makes her voice small. “‘Wait a minute,’” she says. “‘I take it all back. I’ve changed my mind.’”

  Ahead of them, Mack and Allie, Tony’s little boy, have run into the dark echo chamber of the viaduct. Now they’re hooting to hear their own voices call back, and their sandals slap noisily in the cool air under there. The husbands are with them, a hundred feet or so ahead of the women. My father has Liddie on his shoulders. You can’t see his head from back here, just her slender body rising out of his. Harold is turned to him, gesturing, talking. They’re all going on a picnic.

  When she enters the viaduct, Lainey welcomes the cool air, thinks of it as a benediction—it puffs her hair, it makes her cotton maternity dress ruffle against her. Then she feels a pain, a little contraction, and she rests her hands on herself. She’s been having these pains for the last few days, but she’s tried to ignore them. The baby isn’t due for two weeks yet, and she had these same convulsions nearly every day for a full month before Mack was born. She hasn’t even mentioned them to my father.

  When they come out into the sun again, Lainey blinks, the world is so bright, the colors so intense after the damp twilight of the viaduct. They pass the artists’ studios, strange, ornate wooden storefronts left over from the 1893 world’s fair. She remembers, looking into their musty
interiors as she walks by now, how she yearned after the life she imagined in them when she first came to Chicago—the messy, unmade beds you could see in the back room behind the studios, the tables like still lifes: fruit, bottles of whiskey, books. They’d be gathered in there at any time of day, three or four of them, bearded men, slatternly looking women. Lainey had thought it wonderfully romantic. Now they all seem lost to her: their paintings and sculpture gathering dust in the streaked display windows, their childless, safe lives tawdry, without meaning. One of them, a woman with bored, empty eyes, stands in an open doorway and watches her wordlessly as she lumbers slowly past.

  They cross Stony Island Avenue and enter the park. Tony is pushing a carriage, with her baby, Susan, lying asleep in it. They can see, as they start down the bridle path toward the lagoon, that the parking lot at the museum is full. A shimmer of heat rises over it, making the trees beyond vibrate oddly. The brightly colored cars in the sunshine look like miniatures from here, like so many of Mack’s Matchbox toys.

  They move through an opening in the thicket at the bridle path’s edge, and they are suddenly out on the lawn. It slopes slowly down toward the lagoon behind the museum, toward the spot that Liddie has told them is her favorite in the whole world, where an old tree stretches its thick trunk horizontally over the stagnant water. She likes to sit on it and dangle her feet in the murky green soup, watching the ducks squabble over crumbs she throws them. The trees arch thickly over them as they cross the grass; the sun is dappled, it loses its scorching power. Everything smells new. Ahead of them the husbands are spreading the blankets, and Lainey watches the flutter of their old blue bedspread. It sinks with incredible slow, billowing grace to the ground.

  As soon as they are there, Lainey falls onto it and takes David’s sandals off. Huge as they ought to be on her, they’ve left indented pink stripes in her shapeless feet.

  My father has brought a camera, and over the long afternoon, he takes a roll of pictures, mostly of the children perched on the tree trunk. But there are also several of Lainey, even though she doesn’t like him to photograph her pregnant. (Later, when we try to linger over these shots in the album, she will cry out, “Those ghastly pictures! Turn the page, turn the page!”) One is of her lying down with Liddie astride her thighs, the little girl’s hands resting on the drum of her mother’s belly. And there’s one of her alone that always fascinated me. Her mouth and eyes are peculiarly rounded, like a Kewpie doll’s. She’s feeling a contraction, a sharp one that almost makes her groan, that makes her think perhaps this baby means business after all.

  The sun’s shadows grow longer over the thick grass. They’ve finished all the food. Tony and Lainey lie side by side, smoking indolently in the murky sunlight, while the sweaty children make a game, screaming and running, of gathering the creased, salty wax paper, the napkins, the soggy paper plates, and throwing them away.

  On their way home they walk into the setting sun, holding their hands up to shield their eyes when they speak to each other. Mack and Liddie sit turned in opposite directions in the carriage my father pushes. Liddie’s singing quietly to herself, he’s sucking his thumb, and his eyes are empty in his fatigue. The grownups are tired too, but they don’t want the day to stop. My father asks Tony and Harold in for a drink, and while he mixes them, Lainey runs a tepid bath for the children, and she and Tony put them down to bed—all together to keep them happy—in her and my father’s room.

  Then the two couples sit together in the darkening living room. David has opened a can of almonds. They’re sipping the strong martinis and talking. It doesn’t matter what about—perhaps the political conventions coming up, maybe hospital stories: Harold is an M.D. too, a surgeon. It could be just gossip about the other couples on the street, or their personal histories: they barely know each other, after all; there’s everything to discover, and it will all seem fascinating and complex at first. At any rate, they’re happy. From outside come the excited shouts of other people’s children at play in the square, and the twilight in here has grown so deep that Lainey can’t tell until she tilts her glass against her lips whether it’s empty or full.

  But Allie has been up now twice, worried about where he is in this new house. First they heard his bare feet lightly smacking the second-floor hallway, and then his shy voice calling from the top of the stairs. Tony went up to him, put him back in bed with the other children. But when Susan begins to wail in her carriage in the front hall, they laughingly decide it’s time to give up. Harold goes to the second floor and gets Allie, my father helps Tony lift the baby carriage down the porch stairs, and the Bakers leave, ambling along the shadowed path under the lemony sky, stopping to call back good night before they turn down the block to their own house.

  Lainey goes up and rouses the children out of their bed. Liddie has been asleep, and she’s cranky about having to get up again. She stumbles to the bathroom by herself and then into her room. My father goes in to her, to sing, to tuck her in.

  Lainey flips the toilet seat up for Mack, crouches next to him as he lifts his stubby penis over the edge of the porcelain bowl. She bends her face for a moment into his damp neck.

  “I pee standing up,” he says hoarsely.

  “What a smartie you are,” she agrees.

  “Not like Liddie,” he says. He pulls the toilet handle, and together they watch the water swirl and gurgle.

  “Well, she’s a girl, like me. We’re smart to sit,” Lainey says.

  He walks ahead of her to his bed and climbs in. Nearly instantly his breathing thickens. She peels back the blanket—it is still hot at ten o’clock—and pushes his hair off his forehead.

  “Want a song, sweetie?” she asks.

  He stared up at her fixedly as though trying to remember who she is. Then his eyelids lower.

  Lainey sits on the edge of his bed and sings softly, just slightly out of tune, all the verses of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”

  When she moves back to the bathroom she’s still humming. She bends over the tub, picks up the toys strewn across its bottom, and rinses away the thin layer of grit left by the children’s bathwater. On the way to her room, she checks Liddie. The little girl has fallen quickly asleep again, crumpled uncomfortably into a corner against the wall. Lainey straightens her out, pulls the sheet gently over her.

  David is in bed, reading by the bedside lamp when she comes in. He’s wearing his glasses. They’re hom-rimmed, severe, and she smiles at how peculiarly they go with the animal grace of his naked body. He takes them off as she undresses, and she feels his pale eyes steady on her. She lies down next to him. He turns the light off.

  The sheets smell of the children, a sweet soapy odor. For a while my parents lie still, side by side. The window is open, and when the air blows in, the curtains rise like little flags and the bedroom brightens; then dims again as they fall back. Lainey can hear the stir of the silver maple leaves outside each time they flutter. Somewhere out on the street, conversing voices slowly fade. A solitary walker goes by. She thinks of how happy she is. She thinks of what she will say to her children when they ask her how she and my father fell in love—she has it planned. Her voice will be careless. “Oh, love,” she’ll say dismissively. “Oh, yes, we fell in love. But we didn’t even know what love was until years after that.”

  “Are you awake?” he whispers.

  “Yes,” she says.

  He moves down on the bed then and kneels naked at her feet. He begins to massage them.

  She watches him, watches his body in the light her eyes have almost grown accustomed to. He is so white, so beautifully shaped. “I can’t wait to make love again,” she says.

  “Needless to say …” He slides his fingers between her toes. His touch feels intimate and sexual, even there.

  After a moment she says, “Tony’s gorgeous, isn’t she?” It’s true, but Lainey is asking, too, for David’s admiration for herself.

  “She laughs too much,” David says.

  “Well, you make her
nervous. She told me so.”

  Now he grips her ankles, pulls her feet up onto his thighs. She can feel his electric springy hair under her soles. His penis lies, heavy and warm, between her feet. She presses them lightly against it.

  “I’d like to make you nervous again,” he whispers.

  “Mmm,” she answers. Her legs have pulled slightly apart when he lifted them, and he’s looking down at her. She has the sense of being open to him, a sense that’s more than sexual, that has to do also with the baby that moves now, hard, inside her.

  His hands, cool and dry, move up and down her legs, pushing them apart. “Wouldn’t you like it, to be just a little nervous tonight?” he asks. They’ve gotten so good as pleasing each other, even when they can’t make love.

  She can feel him stiffening under her feet. “I am, already, a little nervous,” she whispers. But then his hand moving back over her foot hits a sensitive spot, and her whole leg jerks involuntarily. “Ah!” she says. “Tickle!”

  “I thought you didn’t indulge,” he says.

  She’s told him this, that she can choose not to be ticklish. She learned it as a child, when her brothers tormented her. You could will insensitivity. You could make your body go away. “I certainly don’t,” she says, and she starts to concentrate on reaching that state. But now he touches her again—she’s not ready yet—and she whoops with laughter, she turns her body sharply sideways, her legs swinging together.

  “You’re in my power now,” he says. He’s reaching over her, his hands are everywhere on her. She gives herself over to it, to him, to her body. She’s laughing now, out of control, delirious with a happiness that feels like being a child and being a woman, all at once—that is both sex and play—when she feels the explosive burst of warm liquid flood from her body. Instantly she’s motionless.

  “David!” she cries. The leaves sigh outside the window and the curtains billow again, the faint light washes into the room. They find each other’s eager faces in the few moments of light, they hold each other’s gaze; until the curtains fall back again, and the room is dark, and the great adventure of their life begins.