The World Below

by Sue Miller

My first morning in West Barstow was cold and damp. A mist hung low to the ground outside, as if being exhaled by the earth. Frost silvered the blades of the lushly overgrown grass. I made myself some more of the horrible coffee and sat in the chilly, bright living room with thick wool socks on, wondering what I’d do with the day. When I’d pictured myself living here, I’d always been outside in sunlight, walking, raking leaves; or driving down dappled country lanes, stopping to buy blackberries here, apple cider there. None of this seemed likely today, overcast as it was. I would have to improvise projects for myself.

  In my other life—what I was thinking of as my real life now—I would be at work already, in the teacher’s lounge with Emily LaFollette, with Ellen Gerstein, with Carole McNamara and Bob Willburn. I would be having my last sips of coffee and listening to their talk before we all headed down to chapel and the start of the day. We’d be discussing whether Liddy Dole would suffer in the primaries because of her husband’s erectile dysfunction ads. Did this make her, somehow, politically laughable? Whether fat substitutes were carcinogenic. Whether Potrero Hill was safe at night. Whether Bob really needed to raise his kids Catholic now that he had them, just because he’d promised to before he did. I missed it, I realized, even the most tedious aspects: Bob’s terrible dirty jokes, Emily’s ability to reproduce verbatim long and uninteresting conversations between her and her kids or her husband, Ellen’s ongoing bitter divorce.

  The school was private, a girls’ school, one that clung to such traditions as the uniform, the formal standing greeting to the teacher at the start of class (though the girls knew how to bray it just enough too enthusiastically to show their contempt for the very notion of what they were doing), and chapel—of course no longer specifically religious. No, more a time for a quick homily of moral life from our headmistress, and sometimes just for announcements. I’d taught there for twenty years, in part because it meant my own girls could attend tuition-free at a time when I had no money, in part because I could work there without the teaching degree I would have had to get for public school—which paid better—and in part because I got used to the rhythms and routines and it was easy work. Time-consuming during the school year, but easy. I liked the girls too, most of them. And literature was a way of talking with them about life, of making them think about who they were, about what choices they might have.

  If I moved to Vermont, there was no guarantee I’d find anything comparable. Probably not in a private school nearby, in any case. Was there, in fact, a private school nearby? I didn’t know. I had enough money not to have to worry for a while—Joe had been generous when we divorced—and if I sold my house in San Francisco I’d actually be quite comfortable. But I couldn’t imagine a life without work of some kind. To come here would be to start over, to invent myself anew. There had been moments, thinking about this in San Francisco, when I felt eager for it, even impatient. Now, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with not the least idea what to do with just this overcast day, I wasn’t so sure.

  I had been slowly taking in the room around me as I thought about all this—sipping gingerly at the coffee and noticing again the changed light in the house, even on a day as dark as this one, appreciating the well-chosen bursts of color, the spare quality—when suddenly I thought Enough of this. I took my cup back to the kitchen and poured the remaining coffee out into the old soapstone sink. I went back upstairs and got dressed, washed my face, and put makeup on. It was ten-thirty by now, still as dark as a much earlier hour outside, but it wasn’t really raining, not yet. I decided to go for a walk.

  I’d learned to be a respecter of motion, even of going through the motions, after Joe moved out. I’d been motionless for some time then, and just the memory of that could terrify me—my blankness, my ability to sit unmoving for long hours, looking out a window, listening to street noises or the tic … tic … tic … tic of a clock dropping seconds. I remember being grateful that school was in session then, that I was forced to get up each day and perform in that context anyway—and I performed adequately, if not well; but I had enough goodwill built up from having done it well before so that even the girls went along with my charade. They continued to work, to behave for me, whereas with a newcomer with as little energy as I had there would have been minor rebellions. Note-passing. That barely masked rudeness and disobedience that signals the imminent arrival of classroom chaos.

  I collapsed once I got through work each day. When I bothered to eat, I did it standing in the kitchen, never even turning on the expensive appliances, just making odd meals from whatever was left of my dwindling supply of groceries: peanut butter on stale crackers, or cereal, or canned soup. I stopped cleaning. When friends called and suggested doing things, I made up lies, reasons I couldn’t. The thought of it: getting in the car; driving to the theater or a restaurant or a museum; parking; then talking, looking, eating, smiling—all that seemed like insurmountably difficult labor.

  An accident in the car brought it to an end, this spell of blank misery I was in.

  I was on 101, heading north for home from a meeting at a fellow teacher’s house. I was in the passing lane, almost pulling alongsid a car going slower in the traveling lane, when I saw a jerk speeding toward me from behind and to the right—also in the traveling lane. I knew he was going to pass me on the right and cut in. I knew it. I could tell by his assaultive speed in the rearview mirror and then also by instinct. I slowed, to give him room for his maneuver.

  And he did, he cut in sharply in front of me from the right, with barely enough room to make it in the space I’d left. But he’d cut too hard, he was going too fast; his car began to fishtail lazily—in memory, almost gracefully—left, right, left. In response, I began to brake, to swerve too. Everything was happening very fast and very slowly at the same time: I was aware of his long slide sideways in front of the car I’d been trying to pass, of that car’s swerving and braking too, of my own braking with all my strength, steering sharply to the left, away from whatever was going to happen with them; of hitting the guard rail, then hitting it again as I slowed and turned and came to a stop in the ripping of metal, the screaming of my own tires and brakes and others’; and what I’d been thinking as I responded, as I acted, was passionately and violently angry, more than anything else: Not me! Not me! Not now!

  I sat in the momentary stillness—before several other cars began braking and skidding and hitting each other; seven of us were involved by the time it was over—and in those few seconds I heard my own laughter, silly and slightly hysterical. Girlish-sounding. What I felt, aside from the sense of my own body at work—pulse, breath, nerves—was an overwhelming relief and gratitude to be alive.

  And that was it, really. I made an appointment with my doctor that afternoon, and he referred me to a psychiatrist. I got pills, I had about a dozen sessions with her. All of that helped. It was useful to me, yes. But secondary, I felt. Secondary to my yanking the steering wheel, to my pulling sharply left as I braked, to my wanting so desperately and reflexively to be in life, to be still moving and doing, those wonderful verbs.

  • • •

  Downstairs now, I found a vinyl slicker, crackled with age, in the front hall closet under the stairs. I pulled it on and went out.

  The air was utterly still, heavy with moisture. A car hissed by up on Main Street, its lights on. I turned up that way. I walked past the post office and then the four or five small stores—a pharmacy, a hardware store, an antiques store (open only on weekends the sign said, and by appointment), and a general store, which, I knew, sold newspapers and staple grocery items and coffee and magazines. (“Run up to Grayson’s and get me some yeast,” my grandmother would say. “And here’s a penny for the great trouble I’m putting you to.” The penny would buy me something from one of the squat glass jars of candy that sat at child’s-eye level in front of the cash register.)

  The mist was beginning to feel more like rain. There were no other walkers around, though an empty car idled, its radio squaw
king faintly, in front of Grayson’s. I walked up to the green that opened off Main Street. It was the site of my social life in my adolescence, the place where kids gathered after school to smoke, to flirt, to watch the older boys drive by in cars and pickups. It was lined on its three closed sides with buildings, the tall white Congregational church where I’d been married the first time prominent among them. There had been elms in the old days, perhaps a dozen, arched thickly over the grass. Now there were three big maples flaring a light yellow-orange through the gentle rain.

  I started my walk around. As I passed the graceful, silent houses, I stared at them. I could still feel it—the same charm, the same pull the town had for me when I’d come here before, something that had to do with the pull of my grandparents’ lives too, the promise of some ordered and old-fashioned way of living that I knew full well I sentimentalized: a world I had created in my imagination, where words like “lilac” and “fidelity” had a similar weight and power.

  It had started to rain in earnest. I put my hood up and walked faster, back toward the shelter of my grandmother’s house. I was almost running as I cut across the lawn to the side porch—the rain was pelting now—so I didn’t notice the car pulled up behind mine in the driveway. But then I heard its door slam and turned to see a woman running up to and then past me. She stopped once she’d reached the shelter of the porch and turned back.

  She was smiling and gesturing upward as I approached. “Not a very nice welcome for you,” she called. She was fortyish, and pretty. Or not truly pretty, I saw, but well groomed and cared for in a way that was attractive and appealing. Hair of that elegant but clearly tinted ashy blond, makeup that was muted but carefully applied, expensive wool slacks and a silk blouse under her jacket. The only false note from my urban perspective were the ugly gray rubber shoes she wore. But I envied her them. My feet were wet and cold.

  “Hello,” I said, as I stepped onto the porch and flipped my hood back. “I’m Catherine Hubbard. Cath. You’re …?”

  “Leslie Knox. Just a sec, I’ve got a card.”

  I recognized her name: the real estate agent who managed the house. We’d written and e-mailed back and forth.

  And then I noticed the boxes, the three cardboard cartons of clothes and possessions I’d sent to myself from California. “Oh, these came!” I said.

  “Yes, I told the guy it was okay to leave them, I hope you don’t mind.” She had found the card and handed it to me. “They looked fine to me.” She laughed. “And I sure hope they are, now that I’m responsible for them.”

  “Yes. Thanks,” I said. “Well, it’s nice to meet you.” I pretended to look at the card and pocketed it. “Would you like to come in?”

  I led her inside, taking my parka off. I hung it on the doorknob to drip.

  She stood, just in the room, looking around. “I always forget this is such a pretty house,” she said. “I have to say, if you ever do decide to sell, it’ll show fantastically.”

  “Please!” I said. I was startled. We hadn’t really talked about this. “I’m a long, long way from that!”

  “Oh, I know. I know. Ignore me if you can. It’s just the broker in me talking. I never stop thinking in those terms.”

  “Will you sit down?” I gestured at the couch. “Can I offer you coffee? Or actually I have juice too.”

  “Oh, no, thanks so much,” she said. “I was just driving by and I saw the UPS guy about to leave, so I hailed him down. And then I thought I’d wait a few minutes, since your car was here, to see if you turned up. I just wanted to say hi and be sure you were settling in okay.”

  I told her now that my boxes had come I’d feel more settled, and we talked of the importance of having your own things around you. She produced for me from her vast purse an information packet about the surrounding area, “part info, part Welcome Wagon kind of stuff,” she said. She was chattering about it as I flipped through the material. The whole time I could see her eyes move restlessly and appraisingly around the room. But I talked back, grateful and interested-sounding, I think.

  Finally she came to the point: how much she’d love to show the house—could I bear it? when I’d just got here?—to a couple coming up from New York next week. Not that she’d say it was on the market, just to give them an idea, an idea of what some of these old houses could look like with a little TLC. And maybe to get an idea, too, of the response to this one. That never hurt.

  “But I thought we had a buyer if I wanted to sell. A potential buyer.”

  “Oh, Eliasson. Yes. Well, but you don’t want to just hand it over, on the other hand, do you? I mean, it’d be nice to have the sense of others, waiting in the wings, as it were. We’d like to get what we can, after all.”

  Yes. Yes, I saw that. Though I wanted to remind her …

  Oh, yes, she knew. It wasn’t for sale. No problem. She’d make that clear.

  She’d moved back to the door now, and she turned to look around one last time. “It’s just it’s such a great story too, you know. This house”—her hands circled—“in the family for generations. Both your grandparents living here into their old age, and so forth.”

  “But none of that’s true!” I protested.

  “No?”

  “No, it wasn’t in the family for generations. Not at all. My grandparents bought it sometime in the twenties. They moved here from Maine. I don’t have any idea who owned it before then.”

  She laughed. “That’s still enough generations to make a good story for your average New Yorker. Your grandparents, your parents, you, your children …”

  I didn’t bother to argue any further.

  As I stood watching her cross the yard, I wondered why I’d recoiled so instinctively from her version. Maybe, I thought, I was just reluctant to think of myself as standing in for a generation, such a small quickly-summed-up part of the story, so easily over and done with.

  And then I thought, no. No, that wasn’t it. The truth was I didn’t want to think of any of us that way: my grandparents, my mother, me. Or to have our life here used as a selling point—all that pain and sorrow and joy—to make the house itself more appealing. We weren’t the house’s story, none of us. That was what I objected to. That, and the fact that the story was so much more complicated than she could know.

  I went back out on the porch, and one by one I slid the heavy cartons over the threshold into the house. From the kitchen, I got a knife to slit them open. Though I’d packed them only a week or so earlier, I felt a kind of childish eagerness to get at what was inside—to arrange the things I’d chosen to mark the house as mine for however long I’d stay.

  I spent several hours at it, setting my few framed photos on top of the upright piano in the dining room, standing the books up on my grandfather’s shelves. I got out the little espresso machine, the beans and grinder, and made myself what I thought of as a real cup of coffee. I lugged the clothes upstairs, hung them up, or put them in drawers. I claimed the shelves in the medicine chest with my cosmetics and my drugs, throwing away the Mercurochrome I found there, the rusted bobby pins in a little cup, the ancient-looking bottle of aspirin.

  I got waylaid by an old box of photos I’d sent myself—I planned to spend some long solitary evenings by the fire putting them into albums. Here was my life for twenty years or so, now that that life was over—photos of the children at various stages, photos of Joe before and during our marriage.

  I picked up a picture of my father and his second wife, Rosalie, standing in the overgrown abandoned vineyards behind their adult community just outside Calistoga a year or two before his long dying began—a series of cruel little strokes, each one waiting to arrive until he’d just begun to recover from the one before, until he’d just begun to be hopeful, as if to say, Oh, no, you don’t! I came to think of them this way, actually: animated with willful malevolence. I was furious at his death, and inconsolable for weeks afterward. During this period, when I would sometimes stand cooking dinner or cleaning up with tears dripp
ing off my face, Fiona said to me one night, “Well, it was his own fault, really, Mom.” And then, in response to my incredulity: “I mean, he could have stopped smoking and then he’d probably still be alive.” I stepped forward and slapped her then—I, who took pride in never hitting my kids.

  In the picture, my father looks healthy and strong, and Rosalie, with her great mass of obviously dyed black hair, is in the midst of saying something to him animatedly.

  They moved west when he retired, to be near me and Lawrence. I was glad later that he’d died before Joe and I divorced. He once said to me, “It’s good for me to see you so happily settled. I always worried, after you got divorced, that your mother—you know, her illness—might have maybe damaged you in a way, for love.”

  An assortment of others: many of Jeff giving the camera the finger, his favorite pose for years. Many of my garden in the backyard, taken to help me plan changes in it. A few of me, when someone wrested the camera from my hands. Here’s one in which I’m turning from the sink, talking, apparently—my mouth is open in an unattractive way. It was at a period when I had my hair short, a big mistake, and the apron I have on makes me look shapeless and thick. What you see in this picture is a woman whose husband might leave her, who might find herself at midlife casting about in her past for answers to her future. I tore it in two pieces, then in four, and threw it away.

  The last time I went to my grandmother’s, the time I went to stay, I was fifteen. My mother had managed it finally, her own death, and she’d done it well, I came to think when I was older, in that none of us had had to find her.

  In the months before it happened, she’d had an increasingly intense preoccupation with Egyptian hieroglyphics. As part of this, she found an educational conference she wanted to attend at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago: two days of scholarly papers. My father thought about it—she’d asked his permission, essentially—and then said yes. She’d been all right for a while, though I think my father was worried about her near obsession with this glyphic language, the notion of signs and symbols that spoke to her. Still, she arranged it all competently and seemingly calmly, and this reassured him. She booked a hotel for two nights, with a view of the lake, near the university—so she wouldn’t have to make the long commute back and forth each day, she said. That made perfect sense, too. Fine, then.