Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  She stared at him. “Out where?” Petey sat up and looked back and forth from one of them to the other, worried by their voices.

  Tyler felt a little band of irritation squeeze his stomach. “I’m going to go sit on the front stoop. Okay with you?”

  She looked at him a moment more, frowning. Then she lifted her shoulders. “Okay,” she said.

  Tyler went downstairs and stood on the front steps. It was a warm night and it was still light outside. From the park on the corner he could hear the sounds of a ball game. An old couple three doors down had brought folding chairs outside and were sitting on the sidewalk, talking and surveying the empty street. Tyler put his hands in his pockets and looked first one way down the street and then the other. He sat down. Minutes passed. He felt almost sick. He debated walking to the corner to head Meredith off, but worried that for some reason she might come from the other direction and ring the bell before he could get back. He suddenly recalled her frosted hair, the dark nail polish she wore, things he knew that Brina would think cheap. A window opened and closed above him. Somewhere, someone called a wandering child to a slow rhythm: “Daaavid. Daaavid.”

  Meredith drove up. She got quickly out of the car, walked around behind it and came to stand in front of him. She smiled. “Hi,” she said.

  Tyler stood up. “Look, I’ve gotta get going,” he said. “This really isn’t a good time for me.”

  She looked at the old couple, who were watching them. “Let’s just go inside for a few minutes, Tyler,” she said. “I think I really need to talk to you about this.”

  Her voice was firm and authoritative, and Tyler felt again the irritation he’d felt before with Brina, more sharply this time. Who were these women, who thought they could run his life?

  “Can’t swing it,” he said. He was startled by the absoluteness in his own voice.

  She looked at him. “This isn’t like you, Tyler.” He shrugged. She shook her head. “I just have to tell you, Tyler, that I think she’s done a real number here.”

  “We’re married, Meredith. She doesn’t have to do any number for us to live together.”

  She looked at him, her eyes widening. They were a lighter color than he’d thought. “I really can’t believe this,” she said. “I just cannot believe it.”

  Tyler felt as though he were being accused of breaking some promise. “I never told you I was leaving Brina,” he said.

  “You never said so, no,” she said. “But what were all those conversations we had? I mean, someone just doesn’t talk that way.”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Tyler,” she said. There was pleading in her voice and her lower eyelids suddenly shimmered with tears. Tyler hated this. She saw him weakening and reached up to put her hand on his arm.

  Tyler had just begun to pull away gently, when he heard the crash behind him. He turned around. Brina stood in the lobby between the building’s two glass doors. She stared through the outer glass door at Meredith and Tyler on the stoop. She held an empty tray crookedly, and around her feet on the tiled floor were green shards of broken bottle glass, an overturned bowl, a bubbly pool of what must have been beer. Tyler stared in at her. Slowly, he raised his hands and put them on the glass door. She looked back out at him for a long moment, her whole face expressionless. Then her lips parted, moved a little as though she were whispering something; and the muscles began to pull and shift in the live side of her face. Tyler stepped closer to the door. But as he stared through the glass wall at her, she turned away from him. Now all he could see in Brina’s face was her vacant serenity as she looked down at the mess that lay around her feet.

  Appropriate Affect

  Grandma Frannie was a tall, slim woman, stooped now, who had been pretty before all her children were born. She still had a beautiful smile, with all her own teeth. It was sweet and sad, perhaps even reproachful, and she had used it for years to shame the family into orderly compliance. She had met Henry Winter before she finished library school, and brought to her marriage all the passion she had once lavished on the Dewey decimal system. In passion, she was disappointed. Henry was a rigid and unimaginative man, though a dutiful lover. She was pregnant within two months of the wedding, and within five years she had four daughters, Maggie, Laura, Frieda and Martha.

  No one escaped the bright beam of Grandma Frannie’s love. At eighty-six, she still sent birthday presents to every grandchild and great-grandchild. She remembered who was married to whom, and even who was living with whom, what his name was, and what he did. Although it didn’t really matter what anyone did. Her love leapt all hurdles. Her oldest grandson, Martin, who had a coming out party within a month of moving to San Francisco, had dedicated his first volume of poetry to Frannie. His mother cried when he told her he’d sent Frannie a copy, but Frannie kept it in plain view, on the coffee table in the living room. When Martin’s mother saw it there, she didn’t comment. She figured Frannie probably didn’t even know what it was about. And the Christmas after Fred showed up at a family Thanksgiving party with a black stripper, Frannie sent a card that brought love “to that pretty Tanya” and a gift (small, because she wasn’t family) from the church bazaar.

  “Christ,” said Louisa, Frieda’s youngest and a graduate student in psychology, “you can’t be a black sheep in this family even if you want.” It was true. The steady pressure of Grandma’s love reduced them all, eventually, to gray normality. Even Julian, who was in prison in Joliet, Illinois, for forgery, wrote her regularly.

  Frannie and Henry lived in Connecticut in a large frame house built on a hill. It had once overlooked an abandoned orchard where wizened little apples grew. Ten years before, a developer had leveled the field and built row on row of identical two-story gray town houses with fake mansard roofs.

  Henry and Frannie’s house was a faded salmon pink that was gently peeling, and here and there a shutter had fallen off and never been replaced. It was darkened by overgrown cedars in the front yard which reached above the roof for sunlight. The front porch listed slightly, but Bob Hancock, Laura’s son-in-law, had jumped up and down on it and it held. It was pronounced safe for Frannie and Henry for the time being.

  All the children wanted them to move to the retirement community nearby, but Henry couldn’t bear to think of it. He loved the ornate woodwork and soot-streaked wallpaper, the dark furniture inherited from his mother, and the threadbare Oriental rugs.

  One Sunday afternoon, an hour or so after their return from the Congregational church, Henry was watching football on television. Frannie came into the living room to tell him that dinner was ready. It was in the middle of the third quarter and that irritated Henry. Because he was slightly deaf and had the television on loud, he didn’t hear her coming and that irritated him even more. She stepped suddenly into his line of vision and turned the set off. She shouted, “Dinner, Henry,” at him, and smiled her warm, browbeaten smile.

  Henry stood up. “There’s no need to shout,” he said. “What’s more, I’m not ready for dinner and I won’t be for a good long while. The Sabbath was made for man, madam, not man for the Sabbath.” And he walked right over to the TV set and turned it back on.

  She said something to him, but he ignored her, so she started her long, slow shuffle back to the kitchen.

  Henry turned the set off about forty-five minutes later and started toward the kitchen himself. His walk was brisker and more steady than Frannie’s. He stopped abruptly when he rounded the doorway to the dining room: Frannie’s legs were sticking straight out from behind the highboy on the floor. He felt a numbed panic as he approached her. She was sitting up, wedged in the corner between the highboy and the wall. Her face was white and agonized. Her mouth had dropped open and her eyes were closed.

  “My dear!” Henry said, bending over her stiffly from the waist. He saw her lips move slightly as though she were trying to talk. Her left arm rested uselessly on the floor and her right was somehow bent behind her. Henry reached down and tried to lift
her up, but he only managed to slide her forward slightly. Her head lolled back and smacked the wall. Henry cried out. He straightened and started into the kitchen. Halfway to the telephone, with his arms already lifting to take off the receiver and dial, he turned and went back to her. He bent down again.

  “I’ll be right back, my darling,” he said very loudly and clearly, as though she were the deaf one. She made no sign that she’d heard. He went back and placed the call.

  No one answered when the ambulance driver rang the bell, so the men walked in with the stretcher. They looked around the dark, empty front hall and then heard a murmuring voice from the room on their right, the dining room. Henry had pulled a chair over next to Frances, and he was sitting in it, holding her hand across his knees and patting it, talking softly to her.

  When the ambulance driver was only a few steps away, Henry saw him and stopped talking. He stood up. “Sir, my name is Henry Winter and this is my wife,” he said. He began to explain the circumstances under which he’d found her, but the men were already lifting her onto the stretcher and strapping her in, giving loud instructions to each other.

  “You coming in the ambulance, Pop?” the driver asked as he picked up his end of the stretcher.

  “What say?” asked Henry, turning his head so his good ear was nearer the driver.

  “Are you coming with us?” the driver yelled.

  “Ah! Much obliged, but I’ll follow in my car,” said Henry, and he went to get his hat and coat.

  “Christ!” the driver said a minute later as they hoisted Frannie into the truck. “Can you imagine them letting an old guy like that have a license?”

  In the days following Frannie’s stroke, different children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren came and went in the house. As though it were an old country hotel getting ready for the season, rooms that had been shut up for years were opened, mouse droppings and dead insects were swept up and mattresses turned over. Frannie’s daughters ransacked the bedding box and clucked to each other about the down puffs and heavy linen sheets with hand stitching that you would think Mother might have handed down by now.

  For the first three days they took turns going in one at a time to sit by Frannie in intensive care. They got permission to have a member of the family stay by her straight through the night. The third night it was her granddaughter Charlotte’s turn.

  The overhead lights were off in the hospital room, but a white plastic nipple plugged into the wall socket next to Frannie’s bed glowed like a child’s night light and Charlotte could see the shape of her grandmother’s skinny body under the bedclothes. She didn’t like to look at Gram’s face, so embryonic and naked without her glasses, her hair uncombed for three days and her mouth slack. Instead she looked at the sac of IV fluid with its plastic umbilicus running into Gram’s bruised arm. Or she held Gram’s freckled hand, which lay alongside the mound of bones under the sheets; or she slept; or wept. She rubbed her hands up and down her slightly thickening waist and cried as she thought of life and death; of Gram about to die, and of the baby, her third, taking life inside her own body.

  She had tried to talk about this to her younger sister, Louisa, the afternoon before at Frannie and Henry’s house, but Louisa had been irritable. Louisa was always irritable when Charlotte cried. “Oh, spare us, why don’t you,” she’d said, chopping onions for stew. Her knife whacked the board rapidly, like a burst of gunfire. “Next you’ll be going on about reincarnation.”

  Charlotte blew her nose loudly into a Kleenex, and wiped her lower lids carefully so the mascara wouldn’t smear. Grandma Frannie stirred slightly and swung her head toward Charlotte. Her mouth closed with a smacking sound and opened again. Charlotte leaned toward the bed, grabbing the steel railings that boxed her grandmother in.

  “Gram?” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “Gram?” Her grandmother’s eyes snapped open and stared wildly for a second. Then the lids seemed to grow heavy and they drooped again.

  Charlotte stood up and put one hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. The other hand rested on her own belly. At her touch, her grandmother’s eyes opened again and she frowned and seemed to try to fix Charlotte in focus with the anxious intensity of a newborn.

  “Gram? Do you hear me?” Charlotte said. “Do you hear me?”

  After a few seconds’ pause, Grandma Frannie nodded, a slow swaying of her frizzy head.

  “Do you know me?” asked Charlotte. Gram shut her lips and tightened them and frowned hard at Charlotte.

  “It’s Charlotte, Grandma,” she said, and started to weep again. Her right hand was furiously rubbing her belly. She was already thinking of how she would tell the others of this moment. She leaned over and put her face close to her grandmother’s.

  “It’s Charlotte, Grandma. Do you know me?”

  Again her grandmother moved her head slightly, up and down. Her lips quivered with some private effort.

  “Oh, Grandma, I wanted you to know. I’m going to have a baby.” Tears ran down Charlotte’s face and plopped onto the neatly folded sheet covering her grandmother’s chest. “I’m going to have another baby, Gram.”

  There was no change in the intense frown on Grandma Frannie’s face, but her mouth opened. Charlotte leaned closer still and Grandma Frannie’s breath was horrible in her face. Frannie’s lips worked and her breathing was shallow and fast.

  “The. Nasty. Man,” she whispered.

  Charlotte reported to the doctors and the family that Grandma Frannie had waked in the night and had spoken. When they asked, as they did eagerly and repeatedly, what she had said, Charlotte would only say that she hadn’t been herself. Her cousin Elinore thought Charlotte was being “a bit of a snot” not to tell, trying to rivet all that attention on herself. Charlotte felt everyone’s irritation with her all the next day. Frannie was fluttering delicately in and out of consciousness and muttered only incoherent phrases as the nurses changed her bedding or inserted another IV. But Charlotte still tearfully refused to tell what it was Grandma had said to her, although she insisted that Grandma had spoken clearly. “God, you’d think it was her mantra,” Louisa said.

  After Charlotte heard Grandma Frannie speak, the family came by twos and threes for several days. Slowly Frannie began to recognize them, calling out their names as they walked in. Sometimes she couldn’t seem to say the name and then she’d spell it aloud, carefully and often correctly. It was a small hospital, and the doctors and nurses came to know the family as they sat in little clusters in the lounge or cafeteria, waiting for a turn to see Frannie.

  In the evening at the house, there were always nine or ten around the dinner table. Henry felt an almost unbearable joy sometimes when he was called in to the extended table covered with a white linen cloth. The china and glassware glittered. The tureens and platters that had come down from his parents were heaped with food like creamed onions and scalloped potatoes, food Henry hadn’t eaten at home in years, except at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  They talked animatedly at the table of what Gram had said or done that day. Everyone had a favorite story he liked to tell. Frannie had asked Elinore to get the bedpan, but called it a perambulator. She had clearly asked Maggie if she was going to die and cried when Maggie told her she would not, that she was getting better. She rambled on and on to Emily, her youngest grandchild, who was down from Smith for the weekend. She talked about apple trees and she had said, “I think of all those trees gone, don’t you know, the apples, all cut down. Well, that’s the way. All those trees.” Emily had sat in the darkened room and stroked her hand. “Why would they do a thing like that?” Grandma Frannie had asked, and Emily had said, honestly, that she didn’t know. Then Grandma Frannie had said, “Those assholes!” but Emily was sure she had meant to say “apples,” so she didn’t repeat that part.

  Henry told over and over how he had found her and called for the ambulance. He didn’t tell the whole truth. He said, “My dearest was in the kitchen making dinner. I sat in the corner of the li
ving room, you see, watching football—it was, I believe, the Los Angeles Rams that day, but I could be wrong—and when the game was over, I walked back towards the kitchen to inquire about dinner, and as I came around the corner, what do you think I saw?” He would wait here however long it took some listener to ask, “What?”

  “There was my darling sitting on the floor with her legs protruding out from behind the highboy that Auntie gave us for a wedding present.” He would go on, detailing every step of the process of getting Frannie to the hospital, and making himself sound very heroic.

  The group staying at the house shrank and stabilized somewhat after it became clear that Frannie was going to survive. Maggie stayed on with Henry to take care of him, and Charlotte, who lived nearby, often came for part of the day while her children were in school. Sometimes she returned later with them and her husband, to have dinner with Maggie and Henry.

  Frequently, one of the other children or grandchildren would arrive for a day or two. Michael stopped in one night with his entire band, Moonshot, and a few of their girlfriends on the way to a gig in the Berkshires. Maggie told everyone later, “Who knows who was with whom. I just told them where the bedrooms were and shut my eyes.”

  Grandma Frannie made extraordinary progress. She was having therapy with a walker and physically she had recovered almost completely, except for a dragging in her left leg. Most of her powers of speech had returned. But she still had trouble with an occasional word and when she was tired she would lose track of where she was and to whom she was speaking and drift off to other places and times. Like a baby, she napped three or four times a day.

  One afternoon, Henry went in alone to visit her. She was asleep. Her mouth puffed out with each exhalation and she snored faintly. Henry stood in the open doorway and tried to engage some of the passing hospital staff in conversation. His loud voice woke Frannie up.

  “Henry!” she called to him.

  He turned. “Oh, my dear, now you’re awake, and looking so well today, so very well.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek.