Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  “Graphics,” she said.

  “Eh?”

  She bit her lip and looked angry. “Now I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Fetch me my … you know.” She pointed to her nose. The marks of her glasses were like permanent bluish stains on either side of the bridge. “They’re somewhere or other in that coffin there,” and she gestured at the stand by her bed.

  Henry opened the drawer and got her glasses out. He started to help her put them on, but she waved his hands away and hooked them over her ears herself.

  “My love,” Henry began, seating himself by her bed.

  But she cut him off. “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Why, my dear, I just arrived, but you were asleep so I stood by the door… .”

  “Not likely!” she snapped, and behind her glasses her eyes glinted malevolently at him.

  “Very well, my love,” he said in an injured tone, resolved to be patient. The doctors had told him it was a miracle she had survived at all, and besides, Henry couldn’t forget the shame of his behavior to her in the moments before her stroke. Worse yet, he found himself hoping she would never recover fully enough to recall it herself, to blame him or tell the children.

  “I heard you down there in that other room,” Frannie said, slowly and carefully.

  “Now, Frannie, you must stay calm.”

  She shut her eyes and seemed for a moment to relax or to be asleep. Then her eyes opened and she smiled. “Yes, I’m not well. Not a bit well.”

  “But you’re getting better.”

  Her lips labored, as though choosing the exact position they needed to be in to form the next word. “The children were here.”

  “That’s right, dear.”

  “Maggie. And Frieda. And Martha. And that other.”

  “Laura? She couldn’t come. She wasn’t here.”

  “Not Laura,” she said irritably. “Not one of mine. That other.”

  “Louisa? Charlotte?”

  “Yes! That one.” She smiled in satisfaction. A moment later she said, “Did I tell you the children were here?”

  “Yes, you just did, my love. You just said that.” And he laughed loudly at her.

  Her eyes narrowed behind the bifocals. Her mouth tensed into an angry line. A nurse walked in briskly.

  “Ah, here comes that …” She stopped.

  “It’s Nurse Gorman, Mrs. Winter. Just checking your blood pressure again.”

  “Again? You have nothing superior to do?” Something funny in her sentence made Frannie shake her head angrily.

  “I just wanted to get another reading ’cause it’s been a few hours, honey.” She pumped up the band around Frannie’s skinny arm, squeezing the loose flesh close to the bone. “Your wife is my favorite patient, Mr. Winter. She’s a doll.”

  “Eh?” said Henry.

  “Your wife is doing well,” yelled the nurse. She was tall and wore glasses and very red lipstick.

  “Oh, I know, yes, thanks,” said Henry.

  After the nurse left, Frannie closed her eyes for a while and seemed to sleep again. Henry looked at a copy of Newsweek he’d picked up in the lobby.

  “Oh, you’re still here.” She labored over the words.

  “Yes, my love,” he said, and patted her hand.

  “Why don’t you just go down there. If you want to. Go right on down. To your little nurse.”

  Henry frowned.

  “I heard you down there. Yes. The children, probably. Thought it was just me again. Making that noise. But I knew just what it was with that Mrs. Sheffield.” She said this very slowly and precisely. “Fucking Mrs. Sheffield.”

  Henry started and withdrew his hand.

  “Always that. Mrs. Sheffield. When I wanted some other nurse, but oh, no, you had to have her. Again. Sneaking off down the hall. Did you think I couldn’t hear? You? I knew just what it was. I heard you.”

  “You’re upset, Frances. You—you should sleep.”

  “Yes. Sleep. Don’t you wish. I saw you looking at her. As soon as I sleep you’ll go off. Down the hall again. Why couldn’t we have some other nurse? I didn’t want Mrs. Sheffield again.” Her voice had become plaintive.

  Henry stood up.

  Frances began to cry. Her face crumpled into bitter lines. “I don’t want her. There’s too many children here, and you. Always sneaking around with her, making those noises down the hall. Yes, go. Go on. I know where you’re … you’re going.”

  Henry drove home slowly. He didn’t notice the line of cars forming behind him and he didn’t hear the honking. The sun was low and pink in the Connecticut sky. He was remembering Mrs. Sheffield, whose eyes had bulged out slightly so that the whites showed all the way around the iris and made Henry think of nipples sitting round and staring in the middle of her breasts. She was quiet and solemn as she performed her duties after Maggie’s birth and she wouldn’t sit with him at meals. He had known what he wanted from her when he wrote to hire her again for the second child. After that she had come and stayed with them at each birth, and Frannie, he thought, had never known. Mrs. Sheffield was small and plump, with dark hair, and he had been right, her nipples did sit exactly in the middle of her small breasts, unlike his wife’s, which dropped down and leaked milk at his mouth’s pull for years on end.

  When he got home, Henry called the doctor and explained that he thought his presence was distressing to his wife, and with his permission Henry wouldn’t come in for a bit. The doctor was surprised that Henry thought he needed permission to stay away.

  And now each person who visited Frannie came to a point in telling how she was doing where he or she would fall silent and then say in a perplexed tone that Grandma Frannie was still not really herself. In little groups of two and three they discussed her and they agreed that they wouldn’t have believed Grandma Frannie even knew the meaning of half the words she was using. She told Charlotte’s husband that Henry didn’t know the first thing about fucking. She said “fucking.” “In and out,” she said. “That was his big idea. I hope you take a little more time and care. And if you don’t know what’s up,” she said, “there’s no shame in asking.” She told Maggie that she had thought she would die when they were all little. She said she’d spent fifteen years “up to my elbows in runny yellow shit. Not one of you children turned out a well-formed stool until you were doing it on your own.”

  Maggie had blushed and spoken to her as though she were a child. “Be nice, Mother,” she’d said, nervously smiling.

  “Oh, nice, nice!” said Grandma Frannie. “I know very well how to be nice.”

  Like Henry, the children and grandchildren began to think of reasons why they couldn’t visit. Maggie still went once a day, but most of the time the others stayed away. Late one night Maggie called her husband long-distance in Pennsylvania. She stood in her flannel nightgown in the hall and sobbed softly into the phone so Henry wouldn’t hear her. “I can’t imagine where she ever heard that kind of language. I almost wished she’d died rather than end up like this.”

  A few weeks after this, when Frannie began to get better, the doctors called it the return of “appropriate affect.” Maggie sent out a family letter saying: “Mother’s coming around. She’s practically back to normal except for forgetting a few words and we’re planning on a homecoming party soon.”

  And later: “Mother seems just about okay now. Sends her love to everyone and asks about you all. She can’t remember who visited and who didn’t, but she’s talking normally now, thank goodness. For those who can come, we’ll bring her home February 16 in the early afternoon and the doctor says a very short party would be all right.”

  Snow had fallen the night of the fifteenth, but the sixteenth was bright and cold. Frannie’s daughters and granddaughters took charge of lunch. One of the sons-in-law put the extra leaf in the table again and took three of the smaller children out to shovel the walk. They ran in and out all morning, bringing cold air and snow into the front hall. “Here, here,” Henry said crossly. “In o
r out. I’m not paying to heat all outdoors.”

  Someone brought a towel and left it by the front door to mop up the puddles of melting snow. Charlotte’s husband lugged two high chairs up from the basement, washed off the dust and cobwebs, and set them at corners of the table.

  The chime of the metal shovel ringing on concrete outside, the banging of the front door, the good smells from the kitchen, the table gleaming with silver, made it seem like a dozen Christmases they’d shared in the past. But there was a subdued anxiousness among the adults and several tense abbreviated conversations. Maggie said over and over to people, “Really, she’s quite all right now.” Henry was surly and spent the morning watching TV or scolding his great-grandchildren.

  At one o’clock, Bob Hancock’s car swung up the driveway. His oldest boy, Nick, jumped out from the far side and extracted a walker from the back seat. He brought it around to the door Bob was opening at the foot of the walk. Frannie rose slowly out of the car and Nick put the walker down in front of his great-grandmother. The children who were outside danced around her and their muffled shouts brought the family in the house to the windows. “She’s home! She’s home!” they cried. Henry rose and went to the window.

  Slowly, with Nick at one elbow and Bob at the other, Frannie made her way across the shoveled, sanded walk. Her entourage of great-grandchildren in bright nylon snowsuits leapt around her. She was watching her feet, so Henry couldn’t see her face. Charlotte had gone to the hospital two days before to give her a permanent, and her hair was immobilized in rigid waves on her head, though the wind made her coat flap.

  She turned at the bottom of the porch stairs and Bob came to face her. Holding each other’s hands like partners in some old court dance, they stepped sideways up the stairs. Then the children burst open the front door, yelling and stomping the snow off their feet and taking advantage of the excitement to dance around in the front hall without having to remove their boots. Frannie shuffled in and looked around at her family gathered in an irregular circle in the hallway. Charlotte fished a Kleenex out of her maternity smock and several others Wiped at their eyes.

  “Where’s Henry?” Frannie asked. Henry felt a slight constriction in his chest, but he pushed past his children and grandchildren and stood before her. “Here I am, my darling,” he said. She looked at him a moment. Then she smiled her sad smile and raised her face to be kissed. Gratefully, he put his lips to hers.

  The children yelled and danced, the adults broke into applause. Henry said softly, “It’s wonderful to see you yourself again, Frances.”

  Grandma Frannie looked at him and then at her clapping family. She raised her hands slightly as though to ward off the noise, and for a moment her face registered confusion. But the applause continued.

  Then she seemed to realize what they wanted from her. Unassisted and shaky, she stepped forward and smiled again. Slowly she bowed her head, as though to receive the homage due a long and difficult performance.

  Slides

  There were seven slides, and Georgia was naked in all of them. She had been slender and attractive, although in a monochromatic way. Her hair was dirty blond, her skin had a beige tone, and her eyes were light brown. But her small breasts were round and tilted up at the nipples, and her hips, which were later described by a woman selling an exercise program at the YWCA pool as her “problem area,” were then nicely curved, merely full.

  Georgia’s ex-husband, David, had taken all the slides early in their marriage. He hadn’t even asked permission before he took the first one. He had been sitting on the secondhand couch in their first apartment. He was wearing shorts, and fiddling with a camera they’d been given as a wedding present. Georgia had walked naked into the room, carrying Amy Vanderbilt’s Book of Etiquette, also a wedding present, to read David the section on thank-you notes. She was wearing new glasses. They were hornrimmed and businesslike, and she thought they made her look older for her first job, a teaching assistantship in political science. They’d come back from their honeymoon three days earlier, and the shape of Georgia’s bikini seemed imprinted on her brown body in silvery flesh. The white band circling her hips made her dark bush shocking. Just as she looked up to begin to read to him, David took her picture, fully frontal.

  “You bastard!” she said. “I hope that thing isn’t loaded.”

  “Would I have wasted a flash if it weren’t loaded?” David was grinning.

  “Give me the film.” Although Georgia felt flattered, she was angry too, and her voice was hard. David kept smiling. He held the camera away from her. “I mean it, David. Give me the film.”

  “I can’t, George. It’s on a roll with a lot of other good stuff.”

  “Well, you’re not developing it anyway, so you might as well give it to me.” She was stretching across him, trying not to touch his body with hers and still grab the camera.

  He reached up and held her breast, which was bobbling inches from his face, with his free hand. “George, this is silly.” He licked her.

  She pulled away, glaring at him. Her nipple, where his warm tongue had made it wet, tingled with cold. She covered it with her hand.

  David was surprised at the anger in her face. He asked her more seriously, “Why don’t you want it developed?”

  She sat down at a distance from him on the couch. “Because I don’t want some bunch of jerks at the developing place leering at my body, I guess.”

  “But that’s not the way it works, George. They don’t develop them by hand anymore. They don’t even look at them most of the time. It’s a purely mechanical process.” David wasn’t at all sure of this, but he knew Georgia would take his word for it. “Let’s just send it in with the rest and see how it comes out.”

  Georgia was convinced, as she frequently was then, by the sweet reasonableness in David’s tone. When the slides came back, David borrowed a projector from a friend who worked in the biology lab with him, and she sat down with him in the darkened room to watch the images slip by them. Pictures of the Caribbean island on which they’d honeymooned cast green and blue shadows over their faces. Georgia had made popcorn, but David wouldn’t touch it until the show was over because he didn’t want to get grease on the slides.

  He had taken most of the pictures. The new camera had excited him. He had brought along on their honeymoon all the literature that had come with it, and kept it spread out over the bureau and bed in the little stone cottage they’d stayed in. Georgia was irritated at his sloppiness, which she had never noticed before. But every time they went out, the black maid would come in and neatly stack the literature again on the bedside table; the sheets would be changed, the bed would be taut.

  Georgia had taken only a few pictures of David. In one, he was asleep on the beach. Georgia had been sitting by his feet when she snapped it, so they loomed large in the foreground. His small head lolled to one side in the distance, mouth open.

  “Very attractive, George,” David commented, and pushed the button.

  “This popcorn is terrific,” Georgia said by way of apology. “Don’t you want me to shove a few greasy little kernels into your mouth for you?” David declined.

  Finally, in the midst of the honeymoon shots, David pushed the button and Georgia came on, naked, duck-footed, holding the Amy Vanderbilt as though it were the text for a lesson she was giving. The flash gleamed doubly from the lenses of her glasses. Georgia stopped chewing for a moment. David cleared his throat, but said nothing. He pushed the focus button several times, as though in hopes of improving the picture. The mechanism whined. The projector’s fan whirred steadily in the silence between them.

  “Well,” said Georgia finally, reaching for another handful. “It sure makes that picture I took of you look like great PR.”

  “I’ll admit it isn’t particularly erotic,” David began.

  “Erotic! Anyone who could even maintain an erection in the presence of that picture deserves some sort of award. God! Switch it. And I’m not saving any of this popcorn for you
, either.” In spite of herself, Georgia was profoundly disappointed in the slide, in her lack of grace or beauty in it. She felt a sudden flash of hateful anger for David, as though he were responsible for the way she looked to herself.

  When they were through with the slides, David packed up the projector, putting each part with satisfaction into its Styrofoam casing. Then he made some more popcorn and came to sit by Georgia. They sat together in the half light, both remembering their honeymoon. The things they remembered were quite different, but the memories made each of them similarly happy. They kissed, sliding their buttered lips together, and after a while made love on the couch.

  They lay silent together. Georgia was almost asleep. David whispered, “George, let me take another picture of you.”

  “Oh, David, why?” Georgia moaned in sleepy irritation.

  “Because that picture is awful, Georgia, and I’d like a good one, a beautiful one.” He leaned up on one elbow and stroked her arm. His words came slowly and with effort, as they always did when he was most serious. She abandoned her annoyance and tried to listen. “I’d like to take a picture that somehow reflects how I’m feeling right now. That shows how much I love you. Let me.”

  Georgia was overwhelmingly sleepy. She trusted David’s tone of voice, so she agreed. He got up carefully, easing his leg out from under hers. He found the camera, and took the picture as she slept on the couch. Her eyelids tightened reflexively when the flash went off, but she didn’t awake.

  Over the next two years, before she got pregnant with Jeff, he took the other five pictures. Each time she consented, an each time she was disturbed and saddened by the slide, though she always pretended to laugh at the graceless young girl half-reclining on the bed or sitting stiffly in the bathtub. She knew she couldn’t talk about her real feelings to David. It would mean acknowledging some different, private idea she had of herself, an idea that his satisfaction with the slides told her he didn’t share.

  The last time David photographed her, she was furious. They had just finished making love, in bed this time, and he got up almost immediately afterward, announcing, “I’m getting the camera.”