by Sue Miller
Here’s how it ended.
One sunny afternoon, I decided I’d take the children out to the park just down the hill from our house. Out of guilt, primarily—I’d had three naps already that day, I’d given them Cheerios for both of the meals they’d eaten, they’d been squabbling and fighting with each other all afternoon. All right, I said, around three. All right. Here’s the story. We’re going out. We’re going for a walk.
I found some shoes for all of us. That took awhile. Responsibly—noticing how responsible I was being—I put an undershirt and a tiny sun hat on Fiona. I bounced her carriage down the front steps and we all went out into the glaring midafternoon light.
The children were wild with the sense of release. Possibly also with excitement—I bought them each an ice-cream bar when the truck pulled up beside the playground. And then I bought them another, the thought being that maybe I could get away with just fruit and milk for supper. Sticky, sweaty, they ran and swung and dug in the sand. I’m not sure what time we headed home—I didn’t have a watch on—but most of the other kids and mothers had left, and we cast long pointed shadows on the sidewalk.
The children were whiny and fussy now, though the baby was sound asleep. In the front hall they started to fight, grabbing each other’s hair, hitting. I squatted with the baby tucked up against me and tried to separate them, yanking wherever I could get a hand on one of them. Jeff had a metal Matchbox truck in one fist. He hit me in the face, across the mouth. I cried out in startled pain, and suddenly they froze, staring at me. I tasted blood, then felt it filling my mouth, rolling down my chin. The baby’s undershirt had a big splotch on it, then three splotches, then a single, widening stain. Karen started to cry.
I grabbed a clean diaper from the stroller and pressed it to my mouth. My voice shrill, I ordered the two older children to their room. In their terror, they obeyed me.
I laid the baby on our bed and went into the bathroom. There was a deep clean slice across my upper lip, already swelling open from underneath. I washed it with soap. I pressed a towel against it. The baby started her scratchy cry. When I bent over her to check her diaper, drops of blood started to land on her again. I changed her, biting down on a towel. When I was done and she’d quieted, I went back to the bathroom and found one of Peter’s styptic pencils. The bleeding finally slowed to an ooze of thickened blood.
I carried the baby to the kitchen. I gathered up some bananas, some apples. I took them to the children’s room and propped myself up against Karen’s pillow to nurse Fiona while they ate the fruit. I sang softly to them for a long time: “The Wheels on the Bus”; “I Bought a Goat”; “Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit”; “Clementine.” The sun streaked sideways into the room and then turned pink and faded. The children lay tangled together. The baby had fallen openmouthed and stunned with sleep away from my breast. In a minute, I thought, I’d get up and run a tub for Jeff and Karen. In a minute I’d get out their clean seersucker pajamas. I’d read them a story and tuck them in and pick up a little before Peter came home.
And then suddenly his dark shape was in the doorway, the hall light bright behind him.
“Jesus Christ!” he said, and in three steps was upon me, grabbing the baby. “What the fuck …?”
Karen moaned and turned on her side, tucking her hands between her thighs. The baby had started to cry. “Shhh, shhhh …” I began.
“Get out here!” he said. “Get the fuck up.”
He had the baby, he was under the hall light. Blood was all over her. She looked horrible, I saw that. The cut must have opened again while I slept. There was even blood on her face now too. “It’s not her,” I said. I was shutting the door behind me on the dirty sleeping children.
“What the hell is going on here?” he said. He was handling the baby roughly, trying to find the source of blood, and she had begun screeching—a dry, ratchety noise.
“Here,” I said, trying to take her from him, to comfort her.
He thrust his elbow hard into me and I stumbled and fell. My head hit the door frame and I cried out. He looked down at me pitilessly, at my swollen bloody mouth, my open blouse, my heavy breasts, my dirty bare feet. In his face I saw that it seemed possible to him that what he thought had happened could have happened—that I could have hurt the baby, badly, and hardly noticed, or perhaps not even have cared.
How do these things change? That what you loved you come to hate? That it is gone, all the love? In any case, it all poured out from him—how he couldn’t stand it anymore: my dazed incompetence, my unconsciousness, my miredness in my body, in the children. I took my turn too, of course. He’d abandoned us since the move to California. There was no car, no way to shop for anything, no money with which to shop anyway. The baby, in case he hadn’t noticed, was two weeks old. How could I not be mired in her? What did he think I ought to be doing instead?
At one point he said, “I didn’t want any of this,” and that seemed so deeply offensive to me—these were our children!—that I told him to leave. We went round a few more times before he did. My lip was bleeding again now, I’d nursed the baby once more. But finally he picked up the car keys and started toward the door.
“Leave the car,” I said. That’s how I knew it was over. My practicality. My hardness.
He was startled.
“I’ve got three kids. I’ve got shopping and doctors’ appointments and errands. You leave the car right here.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. But he left the key and walked out. There were apparently other places he could go to spend the night, something that couldn’t have been said for me.
In fairness—ah, in fairness! which came much later—it was a hard time for him too. Everything else had fallen apart in his life. The war was over, Watergate was resolved, Nixon was gone, Saigon had fallen and been shamefully abandoned. The glory days of the academic political scientist were past. His youth had run out. Now he was an assistant professor hoping to get on the tenure track, hoping desperately for what he’d once scorned, a middle-class bourgeois life. The arrests, the magazine interviews, the cocktail parties, the all-night strategizing, the TV appearances, the access to the famous and the infamous, to women, to drugs, to free meals—they were done, all done.
When we’d met, he was just beginning all that, and I was along for the sexy, sexy ride, adoring and pliable. A smarty-pants. One of those clever girls who corrected Stokely Carmichael’s language when he said the only position for women in the movement was prone. Surely he meant supine, we said, allowing ourselves that momentary frisson of superiority without apparently noticing the meaning of what was being said or the way it was received among our boyfriends and lovers: as a damned good joke. Well, when the laughter died, I was alone with the kids.
Over the few weeks after Peter left, we agreed: I’d go east for the summer and he’d move back into the rented house on Alabama Street. By fall he would have found another place to live, and I’d return and we’d figure out how to get divorced. I was twenty-seven years old, and I felt my life was finished. Wrecked.
We made it to Vermont in six days. I drove when the children slept, usually until one or two at night. Then I’d pull into a rest area and nurse the baby and sleep myself. When dawn broke I’d start the car and drive for a few more hours until they woke. We’d stop for breakfast, we’d play ball, fly kites, sightsee. We poked around in Las Vegas, saw Mesa Verde National Park, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Indiana dunes. I did more with them than I’d done in months. They were happy. After lunch they’d nap and I’d drive again. We’d have a long picnic dinner somewhere by the side of the road, then get back in the car for the night.
What I didn’t let them see was how terrified I was: of what would become of me, of what would become of them. I kept that to myself. I let it flood me as I drove at night. I let the frightened, obsessive thoughts rise and rise again. I would have to work: what could I do? I couldn’t even type. Who would care for the children? How could we pay for things? Who woul
d care for me?
We arrived at my grandmother’s house in early June. She came out to greet us in the cool evening air, her hair pinned up in a bun at her neck, wearing an apron over her sweater and skirt, wearing her old-lady shoes with the moderate heel, and stockings. The lilac by the front door was just starting to bloom. My grandmother smelled of sachet and maybe vanilla, of everything clean and comforting. When she held me, I started to cry.
That was the last extended stay I had with her, that long summer. A summer in which my bottomless appetite for sleep seemed finally satisfied, in which the children adapted quickly and easily to all her routines, learned to say please and thank you and to carry their plates to the kitchen when meals were through. In which we all napped deeply for several hours after lunch and then went down to the pond behind the cornfield to wade and catch tadpoles and play with the other children. In which I walked with the baby for an hour after supper, in which I cut my hair and rode a bike and lost weight, in which the baby began to sleep through the night, in which the lights in the house were all out by nine and I woke to sunlight, to the smell of breakfast cooking, to the sounds of Karen and Jeff and my grandmother in the kitchen, and the chucking cries of the baby in the fold-up crib next to my bed. I got well, it seems to me. I recovered from all that had happened, to me and to the world. The cut on my mouth turned to a deep scab, and then a red scar, and then to the white line through my lip I carry to this day.
In the fall I went back to the little house in San Francisco. For the first several years Peter supported us in a sporadic way. Lawrence helped me too, and I had a series of part-time jobs with flexible hours. I did plant care for Barbara’s Botanicals, staggering into verdant office lobbies all over San Francisco with Fiona in a pack on my back, to prune, to mist, to water, to mulch, to do tasteful seasonal underplanting. I worked at home for a catering company and became well known among a certain clientele for my dacquoise, for my lemon pound cake. I worked for a tutoring company helping high-school kids write their college application essays and term papers.
It was through one of my parents at the tutoring company that I heard about the temporary job at the Frye School for Girls. I worked as a substitute for a semester, and then when a real opening came up a year later, I applied for it and got it. Karen and Jeff were in school all day by then, and Fiona was in kindergarten, so it wasn’t too hard to manage. Suddenly I had a real salary, and we felt rich. In that same year the owner of the little house decided to sell it. My father loaned me the down payment, Lawrence co-signed the mortgage—by now we rarely heard from Peter—and it was ours.
It would be fair to say that I loved my life in this period. I loved the children with a kind of consuming adoration—for everything they said, for their very physical beings: their voices, their bodies, their turns of phrase, the way they moved, the way their minds worked. I loved the house. I loved its being mine. I loved walking into it at the end of the day, I loved painting it and rearranging it. I liked my work, and the feeling of independence it gave me. Nothing else mattered much, especially not men. I went out perhaps two or three times a year. Once or twice I started affairs—my lover Carl, who later moved to Boston, was in this category—but they were all short-lived. They seemed like static, like complication and interference in my otherwise full and happy life.
I met Joe four years later. Karen was almost thirteen by then, musically gifted, we’d discovered. I decided, in a flush moment, to buy her a piano; up till now she’d been staying after school to practice on their piano each day.
Engle and Sons was a deep jumble of elephantine grand pianos. The showroom was cool and dark; it smelled of dust and wood. The uprights, the elderly man with the eastern European accent told us, were in the back room.
While Karen tried them, setting her music up in her precise and careful way on one after another, I could hear him arguing with someone in the office he’d retreated to—arguing about money, a loan. Arguing with his son. Papa, the other man’s voice kept saying. Papa, you always; Papa, you never.
Karen did scales. She thrummed around in the bass notes, did arpeggios up high. She was quick and dismissive, as though she’d been doing this all her life, as though it were her job to rate pianos. Ugh, this one feels so awful. I was reading price tags and eavesdropping. Fiona was noodling around on the grands in the front room, bits of “Chopsticks” or “Heart and Soul.” Ick, buzzy! Karen said. The son wanted money, some investment that was sure to pay off. The father had heard it all before and didn’t have it anyway. Business was slow. Look at it out there. Nobody was buying. Everyone wanted a bargain. And what about his own old age? What was he supposed to live on?
The son was good-natured and persistent. He’d heard it all before too. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll throw in my firstborn child.”
“To have a child,” the old man said, “you first need a wife.”
“This is a nice one,” Karen said. “It’s only one thousand two hundred dollars.” She struck a dramatic chord, the beginning of the Beethoven sonata she was memorizing for a recital, and moved on to the light runs that followed. I sat down on one of the benches to listen. In a moment the old man and the son came to the office door, drawn by the music. The son stood behind the old man, tall, with a neatly trimmed black beard. He made his father seem wizened and frail. When Karen was finished, he burst into wild applause and whistles.
That was Joe.
Karen was flustered. She hadn’t known anyone was paying attention. But then, in a moment of grace uncharacteristic of her, she stood and solemnly bowed, her face radiant. Her shy pleasure made her, for the moment, beautiful. Joe used to joke that he fell in love with her at first sight, that falling in love with me took a little longer.
What shall I say of Joe? That I felt rescued by him from something I hadn’t been conscious of needing rescue from? That I trusted him? Both were true. I never considered that I might be rescuing him. I never thought about how safe and comforting a package I offered him: a happy woman, a woman with a house, with pleasant, bright children, with a job, with an income, with friends and habits.
He moved in. We married. We built an addition on the house, what the architect called the master-bedroom suite. Joe’s investment—in a vineyard in the Sonoma valley—did very well. When the time came, the children were able to go to colleges I could never have afforded. Joe invested in a restaurant in the city. We began to know food people, wine people. We redid the kitchen and had dinner parties and weekend luncheons that lasted into the evening. Joe was busy. He had dozens of friends. I didn’t notice at first how much more he was staying away overnight north of the city, how distracted and distant he seemed.
I’d met her, of course—Edie, the woman he married after we divorced. I’d watched him charm her over dinner at a friend’s house with the stories that always worked, the same stories that had worked on me. Stories of his parents’ flight to South America from Poland just as the Second World War started, of their arrival in San Francisco speaking no English, with no money, his father trained as a piano tuner. How he’d taken Joe along to translate when he went to rent his first store.
“It’s so hard to grasp,” Edie had said to me that night. “That absolute dislocation from your past, from everything that was familiar. And what a burden on a kid. Poor Joe. To have to bridge it all for his parents. That sense of exile.”
“Oh, Joe,” I’d said dismissively. I’d heard this same story once too often, and I’d seen Joe once too often be unpleasant to his father or mother about the very things he’d described to Edie—their dependence on him, their sometimes faltering English, their harping on what was forever gone. “He always plays that refugee card,” I said. “And it almost always works, too.”
Later, when Joe told me he’d fallen in love with her, that he wanted us to separate so he could be with her, I thought of that dinner party, how I’d made our old friends laugh with my remark—they knew Joe so well too—and how I must have sounded to Edie: so unloving,
so unpleasant and hard a person. This would be part of the way she thought of Joe, of course. That he had a wife who made fun of what mattered to him, who mocked his history and the meaning of his parents’ lives—their having made their way in this new world, their having to live at such a painful distance from all that meant home and comfort to them.
That wasn’t who I was, I wanted to tell her. I loved him longer and better than he loved me. I loved his father and mother, I loved what they’d made of their exile. It was I who sat with his mother through her long dying, when she spoke again only in Yiddish and Polish, when she seemed to be swimming back in time to a place where she finally belonged. It didn’t seem alien or foreign to me, that swimming. It seemed how it must be, how we are. It made me think of the borders we all cross, the distances we’ve all come from what feels like home. Who lives at home, in America, now?
When I was living with my grandmother for the last time, that summer after I left Peter—or he left me—we sat up late one evening on the side porch.
Well, not really late. It was perhaps all of nine. But it was August, and dark at nine, though the moon was out, bathing everything in its clear, virtuous light.
I had just come from tucking the older two children into their beds in the hot attic space. I’d pulled a sheet over each of them and kissed them by their damp ears where the hair was still wet. In the bathroom, under the old yellow overhead light, I rinsed the grit out of the tub and put their brightly colored plastic playthings in a basket.