by Sue Miller
“I asked first.”
There was a long pause. “Event,” he said. “Children,” he offered. “A job. Sex.” His voice was tinged with sadness, I thought. I was glad I couldn’t see his face more plainly.
“No fair,” I said, trying to keep my voice playful. “I was going to use all those to define life?”
He swallowed the last of his drink and sat holding the glass. “How would you define event then?” he asked.
“Oh, I suppose the accidents that happen to us. War or illness. Hurricanes. Floods. Pestilence.” I smiled at him. “Children,” I said. “Sex.”
He leaned forward. The light struck his face now, harshly. His skin looked white and papery. He was frowning. “But don’t you think—wouldn’t you agree—that there comes a time in life when even those—the accidents—happen less often?”
“How could that be?” I said. “How could that possibly be? Accidents always happen.”
He shrugged. “One is removed, I suppose.” He sat back again. “One has less at stake, and so it seems that these things really do happen more to others. Without some urgency, it’s hard to feel an event personally.” He set his glass down with a little thunk.
“Is that how it seems to you?” I asked, finally.
“It is,” he said.
I thought, at that moment, that he was asking me for something. That he was asking me to happen to him. I felt I had a choice. I could set my glass down too and cross to him, cross to him and touch him, kiss him, lead him upstairs. Be his event, like the prince who comes to wake the princess.
Or I could do nothing and this moment would pass, and we would be two people talking a little sadly at the end of a pleasant enough day.
I did nothing. And it wasn’t that I didn’t find Samuel attractive, because I did—though it may be that seeing that photograph of him in his prime had helped me with this. But it was over. I felt it then. The moment of promise, of suggestion was gone. Because of everything. But mostly, yes, because of his insistence that I had imagined the buildings I remembered seeing, because of his insistence that his enormous reservoir was the country lake I’d paddled my grandfather across. His insistence that I was wrong. A small mean thing like that.
I thought about both of my husbands then and wondered if it had been like this for them, if at some point, as a result of some small thing that suddenly seemed a large thing, an unbearable thing—lipstick on my teeth as a reminder of my slovenliness maybe, or some begging quality to my voice, or a stupid remark in public—they turned; they nearly involuntarily made a decision: this is over. I cannot live another day with this person.
Though they had, of course. Lived another day with me. And another. Each of them had, until a larger and a larger and a larger thing had happened. Until the bad thing that we could fight over, separate over, happened.
Maybe I should be grateful, I thought, that this little bad thing had happened now and would make unnecessary bigger and uglier ones between Samuel and me.
We sat there for a while more, talking. He wondered if I was interested in taking on the writing of the basketball columns; the editor had offered it to me. I asked him about his current essay. We discussed tax policy in Vermont. It was easy, partly because I was a little looped by now-two big scotches on an empty stomach.
When I stood up to go home, he stood too and said he would drive me.
“What? It’s a five-minute walk!”
“Ten,” he said.
“Seven and a half,” I said. “Never let it be said I’m incapable of compromise.” I moved toward the front hall. “No. No, I need the air,” I said.
He was following me. “It’s dark and cold,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”
I turned around to face him, and we nearly bumped into each other in the narrow hallway. “Samuel, I don’t want a ride,” I said. “You cannot force me to take a ride.”
He had stepped back. Now he opened the closet door and handed my coat to me.
“If you try to, I’ll scream,” I warned him.
“Oh, come on, Cath.”
I screamed. Once. “See? I mean it,” I said. My hand rose involuntarily. I had hurt my throat a little.
He stood frozen in the act of reaching for his own coat. Then his arms dropped. “Apparently you do.” His voice was hurt and chilly.
“Come on, Samuel,” I said. “Don’t be pissed. I’m a grown woman. A grown person. I know what I want. I want to walk home. Alone. And sober up and smell the night air.”
“I must accede to that, apparently.”
“You must. You absolutely must.” My coat was on by now. Samuel was still standing by the closet. “Good night,” I said, gently. “Thank you.”
He seemed to hear the apology in my voice, the sadness for both of us. He came over to me and held my hands for a moment. “Good night,” he said.
I stumbled down the uneven front walk and stepped onto the paving. I made myself turn and wave to Samuel, who was standing behind the glass storm door. His hand lifted in response, and then he stepped back and shut the inner wooden door.
It was cold. Starless. Moonless. I had a certain pleasant numbness brought on by the scotch. Even so, I buttoned up my coat and then fished in my pockets for the hand-knit mittens I’d bought a week or so before at a church bazaar. If I was going to stay, I’d need a hat soon, too, and a decent winter coat, not just the wool one I had on. But was I going to stay? I didn’t care at the moment. All I felt was a child’s shallow excitement at what seemed like an escape.
From what? I wasn’t sure. Something safe. Something too rooted and confining for me. I felt giddy, drunkenly pleased with myself. I was walking fast against the cold, my steps jolting on the uneven, buckled sidewalk, my own fogged breathing loud inside my head. Main Street was busy, fifteen or so cars parked in front of Grayson’s, and people coming in and out with bags of last-minute things they’d need for dinner that night, calling greetings or good night to each other. I saw a woman I knew from the newspaper getting out of her car, and we waved and called out hi.
There were no street lamps on my grandmother’s street, and the sudden darkness felt inky, like a texture. No lights on at the house either; it looked cold and empty. I slowed as I crossed the yard.
I stood on the porch for a minute before I went in, looking at the dull night sky. I could feel my exhilaration drain from me, though nothing else came to replace it, just an odd blankness, a hollowness. It lingered with me even as I moved around inside, turning on lights, making dinner. It was with me when I lay down alone in my grandmother’s bed, and it was still with me when I woke, quite early the next morning. I had coffee and then breakfast. I watched the gray squares of the window lighten to reveal the world outside. When I thought it was late enough, I called my Boston lover, Carl, at his office.
He wasn’t there. His voice mail said he was out of town all week.
I didn’t leave a message. It was so much a desperate whim, my sense of needing him, of wanting him, that it was gone as soon as he wasn’t there to answer it. Because it wasn’t Carl that I really wanted anyway. No, I think what I wanted was what Samuel had seemed to want the night before: I wanted to escape myself. I wanted to feel overwhelmed and disrupted. I wanted something-an event- to happen to me, to sweep me up and change my life.
Unexpectedly, from another quarter, it did.
Thirteen
The call came in the night, as these calls always seem to. You’re jolted from sleep, you fumble toward where the noise, the alarm, comes from, you shake off whatever world you’ve been in to get to the one you’re being summoned to.
It was Karen’s husband, Robert. Her labor had begun again, unstoppable and urgent this time. They’d had to deliver the baby early; there had simply been no choice.
I moistened my mouth. “Is she all right?” I asked.
“The baby?”
“Well, Karen, I meant. And the baby, of course. It’s a girl?”
“Yes.” He laughed sorrowfully. Behind
him I could hear voices and a binging noise, the busyness of a hospital. “Yes, a tiny little girl. Named Jessie.”
“Oh, I love that name,” I said. I turned the bedside lamp on and squinted into the harsh light.
“And Karen’s okay. She’s … she’s fine, really.” I waited. “Things are really a mess here, Cath,” he said finally, his voice suddenly private and close.
“But the baby’s okay,” I insisted.
“The baby—I don’t know. Yeah, they say she’ll likely be okay. But she’s so banged up. It was a really messy birth, I guess. They had to kind of vacuum her out. And she’s unbelievably tiny, and they’ve got her hooked up to all this stuff. It’s really … I don’t know. It’s awful. It’s just godawful. This tiny little girl, full of tubes. Christ, she’s got a blindfold on.”
“Oh, Robert.”
He told me she’d been born three hours earlier. Karen had come to the hospital the day before, because she started to have contractions again and they hoped they could get her under control. And they were still thinking they would be able to when he left at about ten o’clock to get some sleep. But the phone was ringing when he opened the door at home. He went back down to his car, drove to the hospital, and went straight up to the delivery room.
Karen was resting now. The baby was struggling to live, chemically forced to rest, pumped with air she couldn’t yet draw on her own. He was making phone calls. His parents. Me. His siblings. Karen’s. Their closest friends.
“Shall I come?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s up to you. Karen is … well, I’m not sure how long she’ll be in here. I guess she’s kind of cut up inside too. And nothing’s ready at home. I’d been planning to get to it one of these weekends.”
There was a long pause. Clearly he hadn’t imagined this, what came next for him and Karen and the baby. Then we both spoke at the same time.
“Yeah, come,” he said. “I’ll come,” I said.
Of course I’d thought of Karen often through the fall, especially after she was sentenced to bed with the pregnancy. I e-mailed her almost daily, and sent her regular care packages: books and baby things and, once, a pretty nightgown I saw in a store window in Rutland. But I hadn’t worried about her. Partly, I suppose, because I’d known other people who’d spent good portions of their pregnancies in bed and delivered more or less on time, and partly because Karen herself seemed so unworried, so blasé about it. I should have known better.
Of my three children, Karen was the one most hurt—most damaged, I would say—by my divorce from Peter. But of course I would also say that she was the one most likely by temperament to have been hurt. To receive his departure as pain.
She’d always been a grave, sober child. She was bright and quick, but she somehow also felt that life was serious business. All of the tasks of childhood—now she rolled over, now she sat up, now she walked, now she spoke her first words—were accomplished by her with a labored earnestness; unlike Fiona, whose achievements at these same kinds of tasks seemed to happen to her—she greeted each one mildly, with good humor, with grace, with a sense of pleasant discovery—and unlike Jeff, whose impatience and frustration with himself meant we all rushed to help him and thus made everything more difficult. For Karen, each was a milestone, methodically worked for, struggled at, done—and then she’d move directly on and begin her struggle with the next.
For a while after the divorce, what she worked at was getting Peter back. Dressed neatly in what she thought of as her prettiest outfit, she’d be ready for his visits long ahead of time. As I chased Jeff down to get him clean and ready, I’d see her sitting on the windowsill in the living room, watching for her father’s car, and my heart would ache for her. It didn’t help that I still wanted him back then too. That, just like her, I dressed carefully before he was to come over, that I always hoped, as she clearly did, that he’d see me and be flooded with yearning for everything he’d turned away from.
He told me that she tried more than once to persuade him to let her live with him. She made a distinction between herself and Jeff and Fiona. They were little; she was big. They didn’t know how to be good, how to be quiet. She did. She also knew how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she was learning how to wash the dishes. When he told me this, I felt such sorrow for her that I almost wept.
But what was there to be done? Peter and I had failed. It was finished. My fault. His fault. Not hers. I told her that over and over. I explained how the divorce simply meant she couldn’t have us both at the same time anymore. But as it turned out, she could hardly have him at all.
It actually seemed to get easier for her, though, as Peter withdrew from all their lives, so that when he got a better job in Arizona and took it, I was grateful. Coward that I was, I suppose I preferred those slow wounds I didn’t have to see to her sharp, visible pain at his every arrival or departure.
But that carefulness, that observant, noticing quality, that wish to please, remained with her as she grew up. She was nice. Too nice. As though if she stopped being perfectly pleasant for even a moment, you’d leave. And she attached herself to Joe with an intensity that frightened me.
Though when we separated, she didn’t get angry or upset with him. No, as I’ve said, it was Fiona who swore and stamped and behaved horribly. Karen, Karen was nice even here, sympathetic and understanding to Joe. To me too, of course.
What I told myself was that this was to be expected. She was older. She was married herself. It mattered so much less to her now.
And all that was true. She did seem sealed off and protected from many of the bumps of life by her marriage to Robert. But I suspect that she was also being careful with Joe and me about this. Careful, lovable, risking nothing.
We fucked up, I sometimes wanted to say to her. I fucked up. You haye a right to be mad. Get mad.
But I didn’t. Again, I was grateful, too grateful, for her kindness, her carefulness and calm. And of course, by now they were indelibly who she was, anyway. There was no longer the possibility of an alternate Karen. A Karen who would have said to me about this pregnancy, “I’m scared, Mom,” or “I need your help.”
• • •
She was sleeping when I came into her room, though her door was open and there was the standard hospital traffic and noise in the hallway. I stood at the foot of her bed and watched her for a minute. She looked done in. She hadn’t been outside in months, and it showed in her face, which was as white as her hospital johnny, white as the sheets draped over her. White, with dark smudges of fatigue under her eyes. Her mouth was slightly open, her breathing deep. No makeup. She looked like an exhausted child except for the full swell of her belly and breasts under the sheets.
One bare foot stuck out from under the sheet, long and gracefully arched, the bottom of it a little grimy, the bright nail polish almost grown out, a little stripe of color at the tip of each toe. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to hold her foot. Watching her breathe, I had that feeling I think most parents get when their children are suffering, no matter what their age—the sense that we should have protected them, that somehow it was our failure that caused them to have to feel the pain of the world—even while we know this is ridiculous.
After a few moments I set my flowers down on her tray table and left the room. I asked the first nurse I saw where the neonatal intensive care unit was.
I thought I was prepared for Jessie. I wasn’t.
She was incredibly tiny. Not just small—that I’d thought of—but scrawny, her angry red flesh draped loosely over her miniature bones. What I could see of her face and shoulders was mottled with ugly purple bruises. She looked like a newly hatched sparrow, fallen out of the nest. Fallen very hard out of the nest.
She lay on a small chest-high platform crib under bright lights, naked except for a diaper and a tiny pink knitted cap. Plastic tubes or lines of different sizes ran from her every where—her navel, her foot, her mouth—to a machine that reminded me of nothing so much as th
e stand in a dentist’s office, the stand that holds the fountain, the lamp, the armature for the drill. Plastic wrap lay suspended about six inches above her. She was blindfolded, as Robert had said, and somehow this seemed more terrible than anything else. Her arms and legs swam vaguely and spasmodically in the air.
A sign by her station said PLEASE BE QUIET, I’M TRYING TO REST. A monitor above her gave what I suppose were her vital signs, pulse being the only one I could understand. The nurse who’d been sitting next to her had stood up when I approached. Now she whispered, “You’re the grandma?”
I nodded.
She whispered, “She’s doing so well, really. Would you like to touch her?”
“Can I?” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “Gently, it goes without saying. Here, I’ll shift the cover.” She lifted the plastic and I reached in and lightly laid my hand on Jessie’s belly, just above the tube strung from her umbilicus. It looked immense, my hand, a giant’s ugly, veined mitt descending onto her. Under my fingers she felt hot and dry, but her flesh quivered with life, and her arm motion speeded up.
“Ooo, she’s excited,” the nurse whispered, looking at the monitor. She was young and pretty, her long hair pinned back. She wore a vividly printed medical smock.
“Is that okay?” I asked.
“Well, a little goes a long way,” she said.
I quickly pulled my hand back, and she redraped the plastic.
“What’s that for?” I whispered.
“The plastic?”
“Yes.”
“It’s so she won’t dry out under the lights.”
“And the lights are on to keep her warm?”
“No, actually, they’re for the bruises. The light helps her body absorb the blood waste from them.”
“So is that what’s wrong with her?”
“Well. That’s one thing. She can’t breathe on her own yet. And she had a bleed too, did they tell you?”
“No, I just got here. I don’t know anything.”
We’d moved over by the door, but the nurse was still whispering. Everywhere in the large twilit room—and there must have been ten or twelve stations or insulettes where babies lay and nurses or parents hovered—there was a hush. Even the babies were hushed. No one cried. The noises were mostly electronic—the beeps and dings of monitors and machines keeping the babies alive.