by Sue Miller
He examined her silently, gravely, his eyes always averted from hers. She breathed deeply for him. She coughed. She felt his cool dry fingertips as he tap-tapped against her hollow-sounding chest.
When he was done, he stood on the other side of the office to inform her that he thought she should take a tuberculin skin test, that it seemed possible she’d been infected somehow. She’d gotten dressed again, and her hand rose to her bosom when he said this. It rested where his fingers too had touched her. He leaned against his oak file cabinet and looked at that hand, work-roughened but still so young. He was thinking about her breasts, her lungs beneath them. She agreed to the test, trying to sound lighthearted and unafraid, but his words had been like a blow to her.
As she unbuttoned her sleeve to expose the flesh of her arm to him to be scratched, he was talking. She would have to come back again in three days to have the test read—Saturday. Was there someone who could bring her again then?
Her father, she said.
Though a part of her understood what it meant as soon as it began to rise—the reddened swelling on her forearm where Dr. Holbrooke had tested her—Georgia hoped she was wrong, she hoped perhaps it wasn’t quite red enough, quite swollen enough to indicate anything serious. By Dr. Holbrooke’s grave face when he looked at it on Saturday, she saw that she’d been wrong to indulge this hope.
And then it was all happening too fast for her. He was telling her father she couldn’t live at home any longer, that she needed to rest, to gather her strength to fight the illness. She needed further tests: fluoroscopic examinations, sputum slides. He wanted to send her directly to the sanatorium from his office.
“Oh, no, not today!” she cried. She looked to her father for help and saw that none would be coming. There was something already fixed and sorrowful, closed off to her, in his wide, boyish face.
She looked at the doctor. “I just can’t today,” she pleaded.
He smiled gently back. “Why not?”
Why not? There was too much to do. And she began to list her duties: the school clothes that needed mending, the rugs to beat, the Sunday dinner to fix tomorrow, the trip to buy groceries planned for this afternoon, after her appointment here. But as she spoke, as the image of each task rose in her mind, it was not so much they but the unspoken pictures she was barely conscious of that pulled her: her long delicious nights alone, the close air of the bedroom she shared with Ada, the way it looked by lamplight, the wild freedom of her solitude, the gleeful preparation for Friday night, the gargling sound of her father’s motorcar pulling into the shed. How could she give any of it up? How could she go away? She just couldn’t, not today.
When she was done with her public list—her list of chores—he smiled kindly at her again. “But you see,” he said, “this is precisely why you have to go.”
He had made all the arrangements, it turned out. He had done this because he wanted to be prepared in case the test was positive to fend off any protests by her father. He wanted to be ready to present her going away, if that’s what was required, as a fait accompli.
As it happened, her father was quietly grateful that it could all be taken care of so easily, so quickly. He turned to his daughter, and he too began gently to insist: she had to go, there was to be no questioning, no arguing about this. It was something she must do for all of them.
Holbrooke watched him speaking to his daughter. All the ease and joviality were erased from the man’s wide, fleshy face. He looked stricken, actually. Ashy. For a moment only, then, the doctor allowed himself to think of the other man’s losses, of the fear he must be experiencing. To feel sorry for him.
There are only a few pictures of Georgia at the sanatorium, taken by friends, I suppose, or by Ada or her father when they came to visit her; and then, later, at the end of her stay, by the man she married—her doctor. Dr. Holbrooke. My grandfather. The difference between her image in these pictures and those of her in her earlier life is a revelation. In the old days she wore long dresses, white in the summer, dark plaids or stripes or solid colors for winter. She kept her hair parted in the middle, pulled back into braids or, later, in a bun at her neck, fastened often with a long, drooping ribbon. She had a radiant, open smile: a girl’s smile.
The san remade her. Of course, the way other women looked and acted changed too, with the end of a kind of national innocence; everyone, after the war, was moving into a newly made world. But clearly my grandmother embraced the change eagerly, chose it. Her hair in the san pictures has been cropped and blows in loose curls around her face. Sitting in the sun in a cure chair on the open terrace has lightened it, so that in these faded photographs she looks suddenly blond. She wears the new narrow skirts of midcalf length and a long baggy sweater jacket. A scarf is flung carelessly around her neck. She is laughing in several of these pictures, she is self-consciously flirting with the camera. She looks the way I remember her looking later in life too: confident, poised, self-contained.
She said not, though. She said she was nervous as a cat, wild with constant strained emotion. “I was kind of crazy, I think,” she told me once. “We all were. And of course, everyone was in love, even the ones who were dying. Even some of the patients we thought of as the old folks, strange to say, had their romances. Romance.” She weighted the word oddly. Then she smiled, what seemed a sad smile. “It was how we managed to get by from day to day.”
The way I used to think of it, her stay in the san, the way she described it to us, was as if it were a long voyage on a boat—that same forced intimacy of the small private world within the larger one. The enormous emerging importance of people you might not pay a moment’s attention to if your life were your own.
She felt that—that her life was not her own. And she hadn’t brought anything with her to help her remember her old life, her arrival was so rushed. It wasn’t until the third day there that her father and Ada arrived with several boxes of things they had packed for her. In them, the quilt from her bed at home, pieced by her grandmother. Her clean monthly cloths, folded and wrapped discreetly by Ada in a wool shawl. A few dresses, a few sweaters, quantities of the necessary undergarments. Her three-month baby picture in her mother’s arms, her mother “fat as a pig,” in her own words. Cookies made by Ada and her four-year diary, which she was in the last year of.
She had been a faithful diarist, and she would feel an ache whenever she opened these pages to the empty days she’d missed when she was first sent away and then when she wasn’t allowed to write in the san. Her first entry after the almost monthlong blank:
April 14. A lovely day, but chilly. News: I’m ill, the doctor says, and must stay here, in Bryce Sanatorium, until I get well. I worry about Ada and Fred, but Father says not to, maybe he’ll marry some nice widow to take my place, ha-ha! I cried for several days at first, but then he and Ada brought all my things and lightened my spirits. Still, I’ve been gloomy since then.
On the same day three years before:
Lovely day. After school I weeded and turned over the vegetable patch. Father will bring the seeds home on Friday, so it’s good to be ready. Mother had a bad night. Mrs. Beston left Spanish rice for supper. Fred wouldn’t eat it.
Two years before:
Strangely warm today. We ate lunch outside at school, though we kept our coats on, and John Mitchell sat with me and asked me to go bicycling with him. I am cutting down an old dress of Mother’s for Ada to have—the soft brown wool she wore for best in winter. At first Ada said she didn’t want it, but now she sees how pretty it will be, she does.
And the year before:
A gray day, wintry and sullen. Winnie told me she is engaged! To Harold of course. It’s still a secret. She will marry in the fall if he doesn’t have to go to war—and surely it will be over by then, with all our boys headed over! She would like me to be maid of honor. I’ve said that I will be pleased to. She’s already planning it out. We’re all to be in apple green taffeta, she thinks. Not my best color, but I don’t comp
lain, I am so happy for her.
Georgia’s father married again just after she was released from the sanatorium—as it happened, the widow he’d joked about had been real. A little over three months after that, Georgia became engaged to my grandfather, and they were married too, after a scandalously short engagement. Looking casually at this history, you might have thought that she’d arranged a life that repeated itself, that she was again offering herself as a caregiver to a much older man. But that wasn’t the nature of the relationship as I remember it.
My grandfather did seem very old to me when I was a girl; he was in his seventies then. But in spite of this, it was he who seemed the caretaker in the family: he was always completely protective and solicitous of my grandmother. It was as though she were a fragile blossom, as though she could be easily damaged. Which seemed strange to me. For she was—everyone who knew her said so—the most flirtatious, the most playful, the most energetic of women. He was the one who seemed vulnerable: frail and shaky.
My grandfather was white-haired and tall. He bent slightly forward from the hips when he walked, and he walked stiffly. His hands trembled, rising to any task, though in its execution he was always steady and precise. In the evenings he read, Hardy or George Eliot, occasionally Raymond Chandler, but mostly his favorite, Dickens. At some point his breathing would begin to thicken, the book would slip from his hands, and his head would drop forward. “Give him a poke, lovey,” my grandmother would say, passing through the room on her way to some duty. “It’s too early for bed, and he’s not in it.”
And my brother or I would cross the room and gently, almost fearfully, shake his shoulder till he woke.
“Ah! Thank you, my dear,” he’d say, and pick up the trembling book again.
But still, it was he who hovered gently around her, who reminded her to rest each day. Who took us out, away, so she could do so, always with the same line: “Your gran needs her beauty sleep.”
But what could I know of them then, or of their marriage, really? My old grandmother, my very old grandfather. I saw only what they wanted to show me, what they chose to show the world. And they were as careful about this as they were about what they wore—about dressing each day, for instance. It mattered, I think, that my grandfather arose each morning and put on a jacket and tie, even long after he retired. That my grandmother wore a dress—or a skirt and blouse—and stockings and shoes with a moderate heel. Every single day. (These stockings were held up by a girdle or a garter belt, never panty hose. You could glimpse this elaborate arrangement every now and then if she sat awkwardly, and you saw these things pinned on the line in the summertime—businesslike, glaringly white: no-nonsense. Though there was something humorous, I always thought, in the way the tabs danced so gaily, so promiscuously, in the wind.)
It mattered, I think, because appearances, surfaces, counted for so much with them. Because this was where they lived, for the most part. Because, it seemed to me then—and it does now too—they didn’t have the habit of examining their lives, of looking under the surfaces for what was dark or difficult. Their days together were predictable and ordered from the moment they got up. My grandmother made a full, hearty breakfast every morning: freshly squeezed orange juice—though she allowed herself the frozen kind when it became available—bacon and eggs, or pancakes, or muffins, or waffles, with maple syrup. She moved around her kitchen as she moved through life—as a hummingbird moves: a rush in one direction and a focused stillness about her work at that station. Then another rush, and the concentration on whatever needed to be done next.
And all the while she kept up a light, easy chatter, a kind of perpetual warm invitation to her view of the world. Ah! she’d just remembered: she’d had a funny dream in the night, had anyone else? How many pancakes, by the way? Lawrence? John? Cath? Looky here, Lawrence shouldn’t let his grandfather show him up that way, surely he could do as well, squeeze a few more in. Now, her dream, if she remembered it rightly, was one of those pickles—you know them—where you end up in your nightie right in the middle of the town crossroads. She’d waked up with a start, she was so embarrassed.
“Which nightie was it?” my grandfather asked.
“Why? Whatever difference would that make?”
“It would make a difference to me,” he said.
My grandmother laughed, and we did too, though we didn’t know why. “Aren’t you ashamed,” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder as she leaned forward to slide a stack of pancakes onto his plate.
Darker events than these took place in our house, and it was my pleasure, mine and Lawrence’s, to soak up what seemed the light, the air, the sense of play that was the atmosphere in my grandparents’ house, that surrounded my grandmother even when she was busiest at what was clearly her work. And if we didn’t notice the charged quality in a silence that fell between them occasionally, if we chose to disregard a sudden burst of impatience on her part toward him, or a long hard look from time to time, who could blame us? We had every reason to find it perfect—their life—to think of it as a safe haven, a refuge. For us it was.
“Oh, your grandfather!” she would say. “His big idea was, he wanted to lock me up in a castle with a big moat around it—the moat to be called tuberculosis, you understand—and he the only person supposed to cross the drawbridge. Well! Little did he know!”
And we’d all laugh, my grandfather too.
It was only later that I thought, What? Little did he know what?
Five
Of course I idealized them. I took the pieces I knew of their story and made from them a great and uncomplicated romance, a thing of deep and enduring fidelity and devotion, which I heard in my head in my grandmother’s rhythmic, storytelling voice. Why wouldn’t I have been eager to believe in it this way, growing up as I did? And as my life went on, and filled up with what seemed to me its own sordid adult complications, I didn’t revise that view. Instead, I idealized them even more. I wanted to. I wanted there to be a world where things were simpler and cleaner and finer than the world I seemed to have landed in as I started making my own way in life.
Occasionally I still hear about my first husband, Peter, or read about him. He was famous for a while as a political activist; even now he’s still unearthed from time to time—dug up, as it were, from where he’s buried himself in his present life—to comment on those times, the times in which he had his fleeting fame. Once I was watching a television documentary on those days and there he was, both young and old. Young, much as I remembered him, but with that pall of the ridiculous—hair, clothes, manner of speech—that falls over those we knew then, even over ourselves, when we look at old photos or films. It’s not there in memory, of course. There we are only who we were, young and beautiful and passionate. But in the record that’s been made, we wear the absurd uniform of the time: hairy, wildly patterned, deliberately frayed and worn, hippie. We speak in ways we’ve come to mock in this more ironic age.
But I wouldn’t have mocked Peter in this documentary. Everything he was saying—about life, about the government, about Vietnam—was what I believed then.
The older version was a shock. He’s heavy now. Those mournful, delicate features have become doughy and thick. His hair is scooped back smoothly on his head. It looks wet. He wears rimless spectacles. In this documentary he spoke of the fate of Jerry, of Abbie and Rap. He spoke of his disillusionment with political answers, of the importance of self-actualization and living mindfully.
I don’t mean to suggest he sounded stupid. To me, he didn’t sound stupid. He just sounded lost. He sounded, really, wrecked. Destroyed by what had happened in the passing of all that time.
At the time we separated, he said I was what was destroying him.
I had just had Fiona. I was in a daze of nursing and sleep and child care. My episiotomy was swollen and sore. My body was immense and slack. I still looked pregnant, actually, in a baggy, softened way. But that wasn’t all he had to complain of. There was the way I kept, o
r didn’t keep, the house. Every time he went to use the toilet, there were dirty diapers soaking in it. I had spilled a sack of flour in the kitchen and it took me three days to clean it up—three days in which the two older children played in the powder as though it had been arranged for their pleasure, like sand in a sandbox. The house was tracked with it, the furniture bore little white handprints. I didn’t care, and this, to him, was unforgivable.
I didn’t care about much, actually, except making it through each day. For days there was no coffee in the house, nothing for dinner except what I fixed for the kids: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, macaroni and cheese. Someone had scribbled on the living room walls with Magic Marker. I didn’t care. He said living with me was like living with a zombie.
I felt a sorrowful sense of betrayal. He had forgotten the first two births; for each of those he had been a zombie with me. He’d get up in the night, then, and change the baby—Karen or Jeff—and bring it to me in bed to be nursed. Sometimes we talked companionably for a little while before we slept again. Sometimes we slept leaned together while the baby nursed. In the mornings we all had breakfast in bed. I remember those as the happiest days of our marriage.
This time around he had no patience for that. We had just moved back to California, after his stint as a postdoc in the Midwest. He was anxious to prove himself to his mentor at San Francisco State. What’s more, the timing of Fiona’s birth couldn’t have been worse. Peter had a full month to go until the end of the semester, the busiest month of the year in terms of his workload: papers to grade, exams to prepare, final conferences, planning for the fall. All of this gave him a clear distance and perspective on me and the children and what we had done to his fine and interesting life.