The World Below

by Sue Miller

  Fourteen

  Ididn’t move into my own house until just before Christmas, when the renters left. By then I’d been to Vermont and back again. I stayed for just four days—to pack everything up, to say goodbye, to let Samuel know he could take over the house again, to return the rental car—because it was settled. I was going back. Back to my old life, and also my new life, in San Francisco–that strange city where it seems everyone has come in flight from somewhere else. Not just from Italy or China or South America but from the narrowness of the East, the flatness of the Midwest, the constrictions of the past.

  For me, though, it felt less like a flight this time than a beckoning. I thought of myself as moving forward, I suppose into the future. It seemed to me that Jessie’s presence, her simply being alive, had changed the terms of my life, was calling me away from what might have been in Vermont and returning me to a realer and messier and more ambiguous world.

  I barely saw West Barstow this time, so focused was I on getting home. The real event of each day for me was the late-afternoon call to hear how Jessie was doing. Her progress was slow, but it was progress. They had moved her to a room for less critical babies, so though she still had apnea she was now officially a “grower and feeder.” She had begun to nurse a little. When Karen told me this, she cried for a moment on the phone. We spoke of when Jessie would come home, though she had a long way to go to the fivepound cutoff. We spoke of Christmas, of my next semester back at the Frye School.

  I had dreaded seeing Samuel, worried, I suppose, that something of the tension and sorrow of our last encounter would remain between us—maybe even be all that was between us. But he arrived with flowers and determined good cheer. We were not having a drink at my house, he said. Too banal. We were going to the Babcock Inn.

  I went upstairs and changed out of my jeans. We drove the two towns over and sat in a dim corner of the wood-paneled bar and ordered burgers and fries and a raw-tasting Chianti.

  Samuel announced that he had turned seventy-three in my absence. We were celebrating, he said, and we clinked glasses.

  “What’dja get?” I asked him.

  “Ha!” he said. “One tasteless card, signed by both my children. So it goes for us oldies.”

  “Well, who wants the stuff anyway? I get knickknacks now. That’s how I know I’m over the hill. And I never know what to do with them. Display them? I’d sooner shoot myself.”

  “Yes. The knickknack. It metamorphoses into the card, eventually.”

  “I’ll be grateful, honestly,” I said. I drank some Chianti. “I’ll confess I got peanut brittle last year,” I offered.

  “That’s really a kind of knickknack, isn’t it?”

  I laughed. We talked about age-the upside: Jessie, his grandchildren. The downside: knickknacks. Pain. Being humored. We talked about the house, which I was still unsure about selling. He could wait a little longer, he said. He’d be grateful just to be living there again. “In part, of course, because it comes with memories for me too. Of Margaret.”

  We talked about gas mileage with snow tires, about his essays, about the political campaigns. We finished the bottle of wine and he drove me home, walked me to my door.

  “I won’t ask you in,” I said, and was starting to explain—the packing I hadn’t done, the hour I had to leaver—but he said, “No, please don’t,” and smiled in a way that made me laugh. And then he stepped forward and kissed me. It was a two-armed, thorough, and accomplished kiss that pressed the length of my body against him and tasted of wine and left me breathless.

  After a moment, he let me go and stepped away. “There!” he whispered, as in Touché.

  “Oh,” I answered.

  He walked away across the snowy lawn in his boots, and I opened the door and stepped into the house, just so he wouldn’t see me standing there looking sad and goofy, which is how I felt.

  I sat down with my coat still on in the darkened front parlor and listened to him start his car and drive away. If he’d wanted to make me feel what I might have had, what I’d turned away from, it worked. I felt emptied out and very alone.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there, but finally I got up. Without much thinking about it, I went outside. I walked, up to Main Street and then to the town green, as I’d done the first day I was here in the early fall. There were lights on in the houses—in Samuel’s too—and in the church. I could hear singing as I passed; they were having choir practice. I made myself take it all in, and then I walked slowly home to pack. Everything, everything seemed lovely and lost and precious to me, now that I knew I was going.

  Fiona met me at the San Francisco airport; she’d gotten in the day before. She said the house looked fine to her and that some of my boxes had arrived. She’d been to see Jessie twice, she said, and sat with her in her arms for a while, “trailing her finery—all those tubes.”

  When we stepped outside to walk to the parking lot, the warmth, the moisture in the air, the greenness of the hills around us, all startled me anew. There had been patchy, crusted snow on the ground in Vermont. I took a deep breath. “Ah, winter in California,” I said.

  “I know,” Fiona answered. “I arrived in a parka.”

  “Well, it’ll be handy when you rearrive, back in New York.”

  In the car, we talked about Jessie. Fiona hadn’t wanted to ask what her prognosis was.

  “I’m glad you didn’t, actually,” I said. “I think it’s hard for them to talk about. Not that she seems much at risk. But she had a little head bleed. And then … I don’t know. It took her a little while to breathe when she was first born. Things like that. I think, honestly, no one knows.”

  I watched the traffic for a moment. Then I turned to her.

  “Well, some things they know. I mean, she’s doing well. Really well. But some things they just can’t know about. And they won’t, until they see how she does what she does.”

  “That would drive me totally crazy,” she said, banging the steering wheel for emphasis.

  “Would it?” I realized that it didn’t drive me crazy; it didn’t even bother me anymore. Not at all. As Robert had said to me about himself, I’d crossed over.

  “Yes. Are you kidding?” She looked over at me. “Not to know?”

  “But she’s going to live, Fee. She breathes on her own. She nurses. She looks at you and responds. And a while ago they were afraid about all that stuff. So they’re glad. They see her as vastly accomplished. And she is. For her age? She shouldn’t be breathing now. She’s a miracle!”

  “Still, Mom.”

  “Oh, Fee. I know what you mean, of course I do. But you never know anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh. Just … well, you, for instance. Actually any of you. You could have been schizophrenic. Don’t you think I worried about that, with my mother as crazy as a loon? Or you could turn into a … junkie, let’s say. Any second now.” She waved her hand dismissively, making a face. “Okay, let’s get more ordinary,” I said. “You could come to hate me for some reason or other and we’d be forever estranged. Or Jeff. He could stay on in South America and we’d never see him again.”

  “Not likely,” she said.

  “No, but you know what I mean. It’s just, I guess, that it’s all so unknown anyway, what becomes of one’s children. What we become, for that matter. It’s really … I mean, now that she’s here, it doesn’t seem any harder to me not to know about Jessie than not to know what will become of each of you.”

  “Any harder?” She looked at me again, eyebrows raised. “Any harder, Mom?”

  “Well, maybe a little harder. But only a little. Really.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She shifted her weight and hunched forward over the wheel. After a moment, she said, “You’re such a …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Such a mother, I guess.”

  I smiled, remembering that this is what the nurse had called Jessie. “Why, thanks, my dear,” I said.

  Whe
n we pulled up outside the house, I saw that Fiona had put a tree up. Its tiny white lights glowed in the living room window.

  “Oh, Fee,” I said. “It’s like coming home.”

  “What do you mean, you big jerk? It is home.”

  We got out and she lugged my bag in. She’d bought the tree the day before, she said, and gotten just the lights on by herself. She’d waited to do more until I was back. So after I’d unpacked and changed my clothes, I made myself some coffee and we went to work on it together, pulling the old ornaments out of their damp-smelling boxes. Fiona cried out with delight, as she did every year, to see certain familiar shapes: the teapot, the Santa, the tin angel.

  We talked off and on as we worked. At one point Fiona said, “You’re gonna stay, right?”

  “Here, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Good,” she said. She hung a gilded pear up with elaborate care. Then she said, “Though I thought Samuel was mighty nice.”

  “Well, of course he was. He is.”

  When I looked up at her, she was grinning.

  I shrugged.

  We were stepping back from the tree now before we hung each ornament, to see where the few remaining empty spots were.

  “Are you sad to be back?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “I just wondered. I mean, seriously, what … whether you felt you could have lived there. You know, made a life there.” “Did you think I should?”

  “I dunno. I mean, in a way it seemed … I mean, like even Samuel, like some kind of replication of your grandmother’s life. Like getting really, really old, really really fast. Getting ready to die or something. You know what I mean?”

  I said I did.

  “But then I’d think no, no, it was just the opposite. That it was brave of you to think about starting out all new again in a different place.” She had flopped down on the couch. “I don’t know,” she said, chewing her nail. “I guess I just kind of stopped trying to figure it out, I was, like, so totally confused.”

  I sat down opposite her. The window had darkened, and the tree lights filled the room with their aimless light. Fiona’s eyes looked almost teary reflecting them.

  “On the other hand,” I said, “it occurs to me that maybe it’s more like getting ready to die to come back here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I looked at her.

  “Well, here is where I really am a grandmother. You know, first in line for the Reaper, when he comes. The buffer between him and all of you. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ ” I pointed to my own chest. “ ‘Over here first, please.’ ”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, really. I feel that. I do. Especially because of Jessie. It’s just important, her life, in a way mine isn’t anymore.”

  She snorted. “Please!”

  “No, really, Fee.”

  “Really, nothing. Here is where you stay young forever. This is California, remember? You have permission for everything. Wanna be a dancer now? At-what, fifty-two? No problem. Wanna … I don’t know. I mean, look at Joe. Wanna begin again, and again and again?”

  “But maybe I don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t want to begin again.”

  She waved her hand. “That’s just un-American. Forget that. Grow up. Live in the real world, Ma.”

  I shrugged. “It is how I feel, whatever world it is.”

  We sat for a while, not talking, looking at the glittering ornaments and the white lights.

  Fiona went out to see friends after supper. After she’d gone, I turned out all the lights except for the ones on the tree, and put on a CD of Annie Fischer playing Schubert and Liszt. I lay down on the couch. The lights cast fractured, crazed patterns over the ceiling. I was tracing them with my eyes, listening to the music, and then I noticed something else up there. Smudges. A pattern to them, too. I got up and turned the light back on.

  They were footprints, barefoot footprints, faint and gray.

  My inventive acrobatic adolescent tenants, clearly. The prints seemed to run across the ceiling to the front window, and then they disappeared. The piano surged dramatically and I laughed out loud.

  For a moment I wondered why they’d done it. Probably no answer. Because it was fun. Because it was so unlikely. Because it would make me, the stodgy owner, wonder how they’d accomplished it, this mad reference to a world turned upside down. Or maybe to the idea of escape. Or maybe to precisely nothing. I turned the lights off again and lay down. You could always paint them over, I thought.

  Though you’d have to be crazy to do that.

  None of us had done much of anything for each other for Christmas, Fiona because of exams, I because I’d been moving around so much, Karen and Robert because of Jessie’s birth. All of us, though, had somehow found time to get presents for the baby, and Jeff had sent a box of things from South America, which had arrived while the tenants were still in the house. So we opened Jessie’s gifts—stuffed animals, clothes, books—and Jeff’s box, full of odd-smelling weavings and cheap, beautiful jewelry. And then we made a trip to the hospital, taking a couple of the toys with us. Everyone else with babies in the neonatal unit had had the same idea, of course, so we had to take turns going in. We left Robert there after an hour or so and came home to fix dinner.

  He had just come back in the early afternoon, we were all standing around in the kitchen doing last-minute things to the food, when I looked out the window and noticed the sun slanting across the backyard, making everything seem lush and green. “Look!” I called out. “How pretty it is!”

  “Let’s get a picture,” Karen said. “I’d like to have a record for Jessie of her first Christmas. We can take turns taking them.”

  “Her first Christmas, and already she’s spending it away from home,” Fiona said. “What a model modern girl!”

  “It’d be nice to have some to send to Jeff too,” I said. “Make him sorry he wasn’t here.”

  We all put on coats and trooped into the backyard. Robert was the photographer first. He arranged us in a line coming down the back stairs, one hand on the railing.

  “This is so hokey,” Fiona objected.

  “Hokey’s the very thing in the family photo,” he said.

  We moved over by the olive trees. Fiona and then Karen took shots of us sitting in a row. Then Karen set the timer and we all stood in the horizontal late-day light and squinted at the camera. She took about three this way, dashing back each time to get in the frame, and then suddenly the sun was gone, and the air felt chilly and damp. As we headed back in, I heard Karen ask Robert, “Did she seem okay when you left?” and I recognized that for her the divided life had begun, that life always half lived elsewhere, always ready to be claimed and summoned. I felt a curious pang for her—some combination, I suppose, of compassion and envy.

  I still have those pictures. They’re not kind to any of us, because of the low sunlight and the way our faces look squinting into it, but I love them anyway. Karen presented my copies to me the week after Christmas. By then the boxes had arrived from Vermont, and I’d unpacked them. I’d set the badger and the great blue heron out, the bird on top of the piano, the badger in the kitchen, as if rooting around on the floor. I’d put the diaries in a row on the shelf above my desk, and when Karen gave me the pictures, I arranged five or six on the same shelf.

  Fiona was looking at the pictures one day late in her stay when her eye fell on the cloth of the old bindings. “Oh, here they are, all those diaries of Gran’s,” she said.

  “Yes. I’m not quite sure what to do with them.”

  She splayed her fingers and wiggled them spookily. “Any deep dark secrets?”

  “A few.”

  “Yeah, but it all came out happily in the end, right?”

  “Happily enough,” I said.

  It had actually taken me a while to piece together the last chapters of the story. I hadn’t, in
fact, until late on the last night of my stay in Vermont, when I sleeplessly went downstairs for hot milk. It was the evening I had dinner with Samuel, the evening he kissed me good night and made me want him. I was restless and upset, full of the sense of loss and self-doubt. In that mood, I wandered back into my grandfather’s study. I sat down and flipped through the first diary to the page that confused me each time I read it: a single reference, very late—long after his death and my grandparents’ reconciliation—to Seward Wallace again. This was it:

  March 18: Sleet. A muddy, cold day. Terrible drive to Bangor to say a last goodbye to SW. Even worse on the way home. I told John the whole story tonight. It seems settled at last. Happy.

  I simply couldn’t understand it. How could there be “a last goodbye” now? Seward had died the summer before, in Colorado. And how odd this switch to initials for him seemed. Though it occurred to me as I sat looking at it that night that she’d used them for Seward somewhere before. I just wasn’t sure where. I flipped backward through the diary to the section where she met him, to her life in the san, but in every other reference she used his name: Seward, Seward, Seward, Seward. Where had I seen it then? SW. Where was that the way she referred to him?

  Then I remembered. It had been in the ledger. In her accounts. I opened that outsize book and went to the same period of time, the middle of March. And then, because I saw nothing but the usual list of names, I backed up through the weeks and months of recorded purchases and expenses.

  And there he was, starting in January: SW. Among all the other initials and names that came up weekly or monthly: Mrs. B, the piano teacher; LG, the iceman; Mr. P, chimneys cleaned. There was SW. Moving slowly back farther, I saw that listed next to him each week was usually around $5 or $6. The last of these notations occurred in October. Before then, nothing. I turned the pages forward again, to January. A week or so after the last deduction by Seward’s initals, I found the entry Miss Wallace and noted by her name the astronomical sum of $65.