by Sue Miller
She looked at me for a moment with her mouth open, and then she turned away.
I didn’t see her again before I moved to Chicago. I wanted to be nearer my mother, who wasn’t well, and I’d gotten a good job with a repertory company there.
My mother got worse over the next three years—she had cancer—and I often went down and spent two or three weeks in the old house with her when there were breaks in my work. One summer night we were driving past the Abbotts’ and the tent was up again. Dance music swelled out on the summer air. The band was playing “Blowin’ in the Wind” to a bouncy foxtrot rhythm. My mother looked over at the soft yellow lights, the moving figures. “Imagine a child of Alice’s being old enough to dance,” she said. And I recalled, abruptly, that she had known all the Abbotts, all the children in town, really, as second graders. That in some sense we remained always young, always vulnerable in her vision. She didn’t think of the pain we’d all caused each other.
She died in the early winter of that year. I went down frequently in the fall. We sat around at home in the evenings, often drinking a fair amount. She’d lost so much weight by then that she was, as she called herself, a cheap drunk; and we seemed to float back easily into the comfortable, desultory intimacy we’d had when I was home alone with her in high school. Once she asked me what came next for me in life. I asked her what she meant. “Oh, I don’t know, darling,” she said. “You just seem so content, I wonder if this is really … it for you.”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. I felt, at the moment, so peaceful that it wouldn’t have bothered me if it was. “It seems to me I’ve chosen the right profession, certainly. I’m really much better at pretending than at being. You know, I used to have such contempt for Jacey, for what he wanted out of life, for the kinds of women he went after. But in fact he always really went after things. And he suffered with it, but he’s all right in the end. I like him. Whereas I haven’t done that. I’m happy, but… Well, that’s all that really counts, I guess. I am happy. I’m actually very happy.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve been happy too, and glad I didn’t have the messes that some of my friends made of their lives. But sometimes I’ve worried that I lived a little like a nun, you know. Sort of a pinched life, in the end.”
We sat. The only sound was the occasional faint noise of the old house shifting somewhere slightly in the cold fall air.
Then I said, “Why didn’t you ever remarry, Mother? Surely there were possibilities.”
“Fewer than you’d think,” she said. “Everyone always thinks things are more possible than they are. I mean, single men don’t stay in Haley if they’ve got any starch. Who was there my age who was eligible? Drew Carter was always around, but he’s a washout. And now there’s a few old widowers who smell like their dogs.” She laughed. “I’m getting mean,” she said. “And then I was a schoolteacher for all those years. You don’t meet men in a job like that. No, the only time I ever met anyone was in Chicago, a friend of Beatrice Goulding’s. I used to go up and visit him every summer, stay with him for five or six days. Surely you remember that. I always told you I was staying with Beatrice.” I nodded. I remembered those visits. “He was a wonderful man. Wonderful.” And then, with the deft way my mother had of casting the entire story she was telling in a new light, she said, “A little boring, but really, very wonderful.”
“Well, why didn’t you marry him? Move us all up there?”
“Oh, I couldn’t have done that to John,” she said instantly. “He’d had such a terrible early childhood, and he was so happy at that stage. Remember? He was playing ball and had a good job and was chasing around after that middle Abbott girl. No.” She shook her head. “All this life in Haley had gotten to be too important to him then. I can’t imagine having asked him to give it up. I never would have forgiven myself. No, it was better for me to go on as I had been. And besides, I was still really in love with Charlie. With my memory of him. And I’ve enjoyed my life. I have,” she said wistfully.
“Well, it’s not over yet,” I said.
But it nearly was. Jacey came out for the eight or ten days before she died. We took care of her at home, as she’d wanted, with a visiting nurse to help us. She was very uncomfortable the last few days, though not in actual pain, and I think we were both relieved when her struggle stopped, when we didn’t have to listen to her trying to breathe anymore in the night.
There wasn’t really a funeral, because she’d been cremated and because she didn’t want a service. She had requested that we have a hymn sing, and she had written down three or four of her own favorites she wanted us to be sure to do. Jacey and I discussed the plans the morning after she’d died. We were washing the last of her dishes, putting things away in the kitchen. “Isn’t it like her,” he said, tears sitting in his eyes, “to want to control even the way we let her go.” He shook his head in proud amazement, and I thought how differently we knew her, understood her.
So we gathered, around twenty or so of her friends, mostly women, and Jacey and I, and some young people who were former students; and sang “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” and “Fight the Good Fight” and “Amazing Grace” and “For All the Saints.” It seemed so insufficient, as any service does, I suppose, that we went on singing too long to compensate, and Jacey and I were both hoarse the next day.
But there were still things to pack up, and so we went to the old center of town to get some boxes. It was a cold, bright day, and the town looked small and shabby in the raw light, as though nothing important could ever have happened there. We were loading the trunk and the back seat of the car in front of the liquor store, when I saw a woman walking toward us down the street whom I recognized instantly as Mrs. Abbott. She didn’t look very different from the way she had at all those parties. Her hair, dyed now, I suppose, was still a pale arranged blond; her lipstick was a girlish pink. She saw Jacey, and I could tell that for a moment she was thinking of walking past us without acknowledging us; her step wavered marginally. But then she made some internal decision and approached. Jacey saw her and straightened up. We both assumed, I think, that she would speak to us of our mother’s death, which is what every conversation we’d had in the last few days had started with.
But whether she didn’t know what we were both in town for, or whether her own emotions of the moment drove it out of her mind, that’s not what she spoke of. A brilliant social smile flickered quickly across her face and was gone. Then, standing an uncomfortable distance from us on the sidewalk, she made for a minute or two the kind of small talk she’d made all those years ago under the tents in her backyard—a comment on the weather, on how we’d changed, on how busy young people’s lives were, they could hardly ever get home anymore. As she spoke she nodded repeatedly, an odd birdlike motion of her head. There was an awkward silence when she finished—I know I couldn’t imagine what an appropriate response would be—and then she said with brittle cheer to Jacey alone, “Well, I’ve no more daughters for you.” And as though she’d been talking about his loss rather than her own, she smiled again, and walked on.
For a moment we stood motionless on the sidewalk, watching her diminishing figure. Then I turned to Jacey, expecting, I suppose, some comment, and ready to be angry along with him, on his behalf. Instead he bent down and started again to load the empty boxes that would hold my mother’s belongings into the car, as though what Mrs. Abbott had just said and done had all happened years before, with the rest of it, when he was a child.
Tyler and Brina
Tyler loved women. He was in love with women. He saw them in shops, on the subway, at work, and imagined them falling back over and over, laughing, crying, soft, wet. He had a hard-on half the day. He didn’t much care what they looked like. The firm girls with Tshirts ending above their navels who weighed his fruit at the grocery store. His secretary, with the little rim of fat riding over her girdle and her sad eyes. He stood, offering a plum, holding out a bill, and he loved them. He wa
nted to lift the hair out of their eyes, to slide his hand down over the tops of their blue jeans onto their tanned bellies, to push them down—so gently!—to make them smile, open their mouths, to make them cry out softly, to take their pain away.
He had thought this might change when he married Brina. He had hoped it would. But even though he slept around less, he still yearned after women all the time, yearned for their gentleness, their loving response, their sweet dampness.
Now Brina wanted a divorce. She’d moved out and was living in an apartment belonging to a woman from her office who was on vacation. Tyler dropped by nearly every evening after Petey was asleep. He wanted Brina back. He made love to her again and again on the living room couch where she slept at night, often with all his clothes on, Brina’s skirt wrinkled into a thick belt at her waist. Something about seeing her like that in the purplish light of the streetlamp which flooded into the room drove him on. Even when he couldn’t come anymore, he was hard, he wanted her. “Oh, you asshole,” she’d moan. “You motherfucker. God, I hate you. I hate you.”
Petey was seven years old. He was Brina’s son by her first marriage. She wouldn’t let Tyler see him anymore. She thought it would be difficult for Petey. It had been difficult for him to get used to Tyler in the first place. It had taken nearly the whole year he and Brina had been married. As recently as a few months before Brina moved out, Petey would take the opportunity, if he and Tyler were wrestling or tickling, to punch or kick Tyler as hard as he could in the groin. Once Tyler had heard Petey actually whisper to himself, “Get him!” before he struck.
The morning of the day that Brina left him, Tyler had taken a shower with Petey. He had squatted down under the spray and let Petey scrub his back. Petey’s wiry small body felt strange gliding across Tyler’s back and buttocks while Petey scrubbed. Then Tyler felt a short stream of lukewarm water on his back, and Petey said, “I spit on you, Tyler, did you feel it? I spitted right on you.” Tyler turned, still squatting, to look at Petey. He was grinning expectantly with his mouth open, the water flattening his blond hair dark against his small, neat head. Tyler felt the sense of uneasiness he often felt with Petey and never felt with women, a sense of not knowing what the next move ought to be.
“Now can I get you?” Tyler asked.
“Yeah!” Petey said. His body jigged in anticipation.
Tyler tipped his head up into the spray and filled his mouth.
He squirted the water onto Petey’s chest. Petey laughed, and Tyler laughed with him, partly in relief that he’d chosen the right thing to do.
“I can’t even feel it,” Petey said. “I can’t even feel it because I’m already wet.”
Tyler had seen Brina smile at them through the clear plastic shower curtain while she put her makeup on. He had felt a sense, suddenly, of the three of them as a family, locked together irrevocably. Something about this rekindled his feelings of uneasiness, and he stood up and turned away from Petey to rinse himself off. But when they had dropped Tyler off at the subway on the way to Petey’s school, her work, he had kissed Brina’s mouth, had rested his hand briefly on Petey’s damp hair.
Tyler was a contractor and a part-time developer. He owned and managed eight small apartment buildings around the city. He’d bought them one by one, including the one he and Brina lived in, and done the renovations on them himself. That night just before he left the office, one of his tenants called. Someone had broken into her apartment, had stolen her television set and stereo. The lock on her door had been broken, and the super was out for the evening—he’d left a note by his buzzer. She was afraid to stay overnight by herself unless someone fixed it. Tyler called Brina and told her he’d be late for supper, not to wait. He took the truck and stopped at the hardware store for a new lock, and a chain because he guessed that the extra protection would reassure his tenant.
When he arrived at her apartment, she was sitting in the entryway with the door swung open, smoking a cigarette and drinking what looked like whiskey. “Oh, thank God you’re here,” she said. She stood and stubbed out the cigarette. “Look, just look at what these jerks did to my house!” She gestured behind her toward the living room. Tyler could see records in and out of their jackets spilled all over the floor. Papers were strewn everywhere.
“And look in here,” she said. She walked down the hall ahead of him. She was wearing heels and a skirt. Tyler watched her legs, the quick shifting gleam of the light on her stockings as she moved in front of him. She stood in her bedroom doorway. It was worse in here. Her clothes had been dumped from the drawers. The closet yawned open, the empty hangers angled awkwardly this way and that. “It just makes me feel so violated,” she said.
Tyler had heard it before. Several of his buildings weren’t in such great neighborhoods. He was carefully sympathetic, though. He talked to her for a while before he started working on the door. When he’d finished, she offered him a beer and asked him to sit down for a few minutes before he left, just until she calmed down. She had been working in her bedroom, and she’d changed into jeans and a fuzzy pink sweater. Tyler sat on the couch, and she curled up in a large chair opposite him. They talked about insurance, what kinds of coverage they had. Then he asked her about her work. She was a social worker, she said. She worked with juvenile offenders. “In fact,” she said, and giggled, “the chances are excellent that some client of mine pulled this little number tonight.”
Tyler smiled and gently shook his beer can. Almost empty.
“Oh, I’m going to miss my record player,” she said abruptly. “I was just thinking how usually when people are over I play music while we talk. Course, I’ve got a radio. Do you want some music?” She was a little drunk, too serious. Tyler grinned and shrugged. “I’m going to get my radio,” she said. “You stay right there.” She got up and ran down the hall. When she returned, Tyler noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra under the sweater. She looked up from plugging the radio in and caught him staring at her. As she sat down next to him on the couch, they were both smiling as if they already shared some kind of secret.
When he called Brina at her job, about ten the next morning, she said, “Oh, God, you’re all right.” There was a long silence, and then she said more softly, “I called the hospitals, but you weren’t there.” He could hear that she was starting to cry.
“No,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”
After a minute, she said in a pinched voice, “How can this be? I don’t want this to happen, Tyler.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“But what? What do you plan?” she said. “How can this be?” She was crying openly now. He could imagine her in her office, trying to cover her face in case anyone walked in.
“Can we talk about it tonight? Can I come home?” he asked.
“Home?” Her voice soared to an unfamiliar, awkward register on the word. “Home?” she asked, and then she hung up.
One side of Brina’s face was dead, injured in a childhood accident. When they made love, Tyler, for some reason, lay more often with his head on that side of hers. Looking at her, he was sometimes startled by the stillness on her face, as though she were in a deep dreamless sleep. “Oh oh, oh God,” she would cry in an agonized voice from her blank face as Tyler lowered his head to her shoulder, his body hard at work. When she smiled, half of Brina’s face lit up, and the rest lifted only slightly in sympathy, as though, Tyler thought, she knew of some deep sorrow that lay under every fleeting joy.
When Tyler first saw her after he’d slept with Meredith, the live side of her face was distorted with rage, and both eyes were puffy from sleeplessness and tears. He’d gone home first, but she wasn’t there. Their apartment looked a little like Meredith’s the night before. Brina had pulled things out of drawers and left them all over their bedroom, Petey’s bedroom. The suitcases that usually sat on the top shelves of their closet were gone. Tyler felt such a sense of desolation that for a moment he thought of leaving the apartment too, of going somewhere to have a dri
nk. But he didn’t. He got out their Rolodex and began to call their friends, Brina’s friends, until he found someone who knew where she had gone. In a cold voice, Marietta said, “Well, I suppose you’ll find out anyway,” and gave him the address.
It was about ten o’clock when Tyler got there. The building was an old triple decker in a run-down part of town where mostly students and blacks lived. Under the stairs in the entrance hall were baby carriages, someone’s cross-country skis, heaped-up boots. From the first-floor apartment came laughter and Otis Redding. Tyler mounted the stairs. On the second floor, the name he was looking for, Eliopoulos, was printed on masking tape above the doorbell. He rang and waited. Then he rang again. He could hear Brina blowing her nose. The door opened. She looked at him for a moment, half of her face pulling into hard, angry lines. Tyler tried to look at the other side, her sad eye, her drooping lips. Abruptly she stepped forward and began to hit him. She hit him sharply with her fists, four times, then stepped back and slammed the door. Neither of them had said anything, though Brina had made a little noise of effort with each blow. She had been swinging awkwardly, from the side, and Tyler covered his head as well as he could after the first blow smashed into the side of his nose, but one of his ears was ringing dully as he left, and when he reached up to touch it, his hand came away wet with blood.
He had stopped in a drugstore on the way home to get disinfectant and a styptic pencil. He stood in front of a display of panty hose thinking about Brina, about what he could do to get her to talk to him. He knew if he could just talk to her, just get his hands on her—he could see his hands slide across the top of her bathrobe onto her breasts—things would be all right. She was all he wanted.
“Can I help you find something?” the girl asked. Tyler looked at her. Freckles, long straight hair. She was wearing a pale blue drugstore smock and very tight jeans. She smelled of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. She smiled at him. A big gap between her two front teeth touched Tyler’s heart, and he smiled back. “Yes,” he said.