Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  Suddenly Miss Foote says in an irritated voice, “Barbara, you will have to learn you can’t always be the center of attention.”

  Barbara is the smartest girl in class. There is one boy who is probably as smart as she is, Jimmy Nakagawa, but he won’t talk when he is called on. He laughs to himself and shakes his head, so Miss Foote never calls on him at all anymore. Barbara and Jimmy Nakagawa never speak to each other, and hardly anyone else ever speaks to either of them. Barbara’s parents’ friends are always surprised when they hear where she goes to school. “She does just beautifully there,” Barbara’s mother says. “The instruction is really almost as good as in a private school, and we like her to meet all different kinds of children. She even has a special friend among the black children, a little boy named Ernest.”

  She is the smartest girl in confirmation class too. They are studying the sacraments, communion. Dr. Wilson says communion is the central ritual of Christian life. He reads Christ’s words: “Take, eat, this is my Body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” He asks the girls what the sacrament of communion means. No one raises a hand or says anything. He looks at Barbara. Barbara has studied this. She knows the answer, but she cannot remember it. The room is silent. Dr. Wilson looks angry and tired. He begins to answer his own question. The next Sunday, Barbara is sick and doesn’t have to go to church or confirmation class. She stays in the house all weekend.

  “Hey, girl. I be waitin for you last Saturday. You told me you meet me under the viaduck and I wait for you maybe three hours.” Barbara shakes her head in confusion. “Why you tell me that when you not goin to meet me, why you do that?”

  She never looks at Ernest when he talks to her, but she knows how he looks, she can imagine his mouth as she feels his humid whisper. It is as pink as bubble gum inside, his tongue is pink too, his lips slowly turn pink as they curve into his warm mouth.

  Sometimes at recess Barbara stands near the viaduct and listens to the black kids. There are three girls who sing together—Norma Jean is one of them—and Barbara likes the way their voices move so close. Their voices almost touch each other but don’t. “Red hots, french fries,” they sing, and clap. “And chili macs.” Ernest is smoking a cigarette. He sees her looking at him and says something to James. They laugh.

  Barbara tells her father she doesn’t want to be confirmed. She doesn’t feel ready to take communion, to drink the blood, to eat the body of Christ. Her father is understanding. She will go to church with them on Sunday still but not be confirmed, and, for now, stop the confirmation classes. “What’s most important,” he says to Barbara, “is to listen to your own inner voice.”

  Sometimes he doesn’t speak to her for days. Behind her back, she hears him talking, laughing, with James, with Sterling, with Norma Jean. She waits for the pause, the break, then the softer, moist voice near her head. She listens to the silence behind her when Miss Foote is talking. She stares intently at Miss Foote’s moving mouth, the gold teeth in the back flashing occasionally. She listens to Ernest’s breath behind her. Miss Foote calls on her and she stares and doesn’t answer.

  Miss Foote is upset and sends for her mother. Her mother is concerned. Perhaps there is some physiological problem. Barbara goes to the eye doctor, the ear doctor. The ear doctor whispers at the back of her head, “Can you hear this?” His breath is cool, but it stirs the hairs on her neck. “Yes. Yes,” she whispers back with her eyes closed, like a lover in the dark. There is nothing wrong with her, they say. It’s nothing organic.

  Ernest’s desk is empty. Barbara leans back in her chair and watches the door as the latecomers straggle in. After the Pledge of Allegiance, Miss Foote calls the roll and then talks about Ernest. His sixteenth birthday was the day before and he won’t be back. Miss Foote says this is a tragedy, that Ernest should have tried to finish eighth grade anyway, that people should always try to finish what they have begun. She talks about how Ernest is hurting his chances forever to be a success, to make something of himself, by quitting now. She hopes everyone in this classroom will finish eighth grade, whatever their age, whatever their background or skin color, and think about high school, and even college.

  In her seat, Barbara tried to hide the slow tears starting down her face.

  Travel

  The room at the tourist hotel was small, with casement windows that opened out over the kitchen annex. Starting at about seven in the morning, the happy incomprehensible banter of the kitchen staff, the crash and clatter of garbage cans and dishes, would rise into Oley and Rob’s room. Oley lay in bed and listened. From the bathroom floated in the smell of fermenting strawberries. Oley and Rob had bought them at the market on their first day in Trujillo. An impassive Indian woman had sat next to an enormous basket of the fruit, a deep basket at least four feet in diameter. It seemed romantic, the luxuriance of so many strawberries gleaming uniformly fat and red, so unlike the parsimony of pint boxes in the supermarket at home, boxes in which only the top layer of fruit was red; the buyer knew that distributed underneath were the ones with hard white patches or soft sides. Oley and Rob bought a large bag of the fruit from the Indian woman, and a bottle of wine. On their first night in the hotel they’d played gin rummy in their room, eating and drinking. Then, drunk, full, they’d made love, smelling the strawberries in each other’s mouths, and then on each other’s skin, everywhere.

  Rob was gone from the bed already. Probably out taking pictures. He was doing a travel article. It had been gray and overcast since they’d arrived in Trujillo, so he didn’t want to do the ruins yet, or the plaza. He got up early to do interiors—churches, museums—before they were crowded with people, whose appeal or lack of it to potential tourists he couldn’t control. Once she would have gone with him, held the cameras and lenses he wasn’t using. But there was some silent agreement they’d reached about this now and he let her sleep on alone.

  She got up and went into the bathroom. The smell of fermenting strawberries was much stronger, almost sickening, in here. The plastic bag rested on the windowsill, and she could see that the strawberries had exuded a little pool of pinkish liquid, in which they sat. She picked up the bag and dropped it into the wastebasket. A little of it had oozed out onto the sill.

  As she hunched over on the toilet, the complicated, funky smell of their lovemaking the night before rose to her nostrils too. She reached over to the sink and filled the water glass. She lowered it between her legs and splashed herself with little handfuls of the warm water four or five times. She stood up and dabbed at herself with a towel. Bright laughter floated up from the kitchen. She pushed the heavy nickel handle and the toilet flushed violently.

  Rob came back full of energy, with presents for Oley. He dumped them on her naked thighs as she lay stretched out on the bed, and then sat in the room’s only chair, the desk chair, to watch her open them. There was a little white box that held silver earrings and a necklace nested in slightly soiled cotton; a tiny, brightly colored basket in a brown paper bag; and a greenish fruit he couldn’t remember the name of. She thanked him over and over. She put on the jewelry and looked at herself in the hand mirror he gave her. The dangling earrings brushed against the sides of her neck.

  “And pictures?” she asked. She was trying to be generous too. “Did you get any good pictures?”

  He raised the camera, as though to fiddle with it. Then it was in front of his face. It clicked. “One, anyway,” he said, and smiled at her.

  Olympia had flown to Lima with money that Rob had mailed to her. He’d called her long-distance three times from Peru before she’d agreed to join him. She had at first been determined not to. Rob had decided only two months earlier that he couldn’t marry her. They’d been living together for more than a year. She had asked him to move out.

  He wanted her to join him, he said on the phone, because he was lonely, because they’d always traveled so well together. Why couldn’t they still be loving friends, especially in a faraway place? She ought to see Peru at
least this once. He’d be more than happy to pay all her expenses.

  Oley had missed Rob, the excitement he brought into her life. She’d grown up in a safe, small town and was a little afraid of anything new or random. In New Haven she was a teacher; her work was regular and held no surprises for her. When Rob had lived with her, was her lover, she liked the feeling of involvement with passing events he introduced her to, the way life seemed to reach in and touch him. His voice on the telephone seemed like that exciting, random touch. She decided to go.

  After she’d made the decision, when she began to think about seeing Rob again, Oley felt, in spite of herself, a return of the hope that had fueled her during their year together: the hope that given enough time, she could will Rob into the kind of love that would make him want to stay. She had to consciously remind herself that she was going only to have a good time, only to travel.

  And at first it had seemed as though it might work on that basis. In the airport, watching him walk toward her, tanned, his hair longer than when she’d last seen him, she felt a rush of intense passion that made her throat hurt. They’d had the night with the strawberries and for a few days after that they’d been happy. Rob made little ceremonies of every meal, every gift he gave her. She spoke no Spanish and so he had to act as her interpreter to the world. She felt sheltered and protected, cared for in a way that hadn’t been possible for a long time at home. There her toughness, her competence, had been things she felt she needed to stress as it became clearer and clearer to her that he was choosing not to marry her.

  But as the slow days passed in Trujillo, Oley came to resent the very gifts, the courtliness that had at first charmed her. She was sometimes unpleasant to Rob, petulant. She didn’t like herself then, but she wasn’t able to stop. Everything he gave her, everything he did for her, reminded her only of what he wouldn’t give, wouldn’t do.

  As they crossed the plaza on their way to the bakery, three little boys with shoeshine kits followed them, their clothes ragged, their faces dirty. They were always on the plaza, noisy and cheerful. The first day, Rob and Oley had decided to have a shoeshine, and had hired the two thinnest, smallest boys. A group of ten or so, all with their wooden kits, assembled to watch the process, chatting and commenting while the chosen boys stylishly and elaborately polished and buffed. On the final buffing, their cloths took on a life of their own, cracking and whipping through the air.

  The second day, in their eagerness for business, the boys had followed Rob and Oley without noticing that they were both wearing sandals. Rob had stopped finally and pointed this out. He’d asked them what color they would polish his bare feet, and they’d laughed at this joke, at themselves. Now they always trailed behind Rob and Oley, laughing, calling out. They seemed to like Rob. He told Oley that they’d become very familiar, were sometimes quite insulting in their comments on the condition of his Frye boots, of Oley’s shoes.

  Today Rob delivered a long dramatic monologue to the boys as they crossed the plaza, his face and voice mournful. The boys laughed and danced around him, egging him on. Oley felt edged out, ignored.

  They crossed to a side street, leaving the ragged group behind, and Oley asked him what he’d been saying.

  “Long sad story,” said Rob. He lifted an imaginary violin and began to play. “I’m so poor I can’t afford even a shoeshine. And if I had the money I ought to take it home to my even poorer mother, who sits alone with fourteen babies, trying to make supper from a cup of meal and one starving guinea pig. In fact, if I had the money, I ought to take it home to the guinea pig of my mother, who hasn’t had anything to eat since …” He stopped abruptly, looking at Oley.

  “Not funny, O?” He bent to look at her face. “You no like?”

  She shook her head. They walked a block in silence. The dark men turned to stare at Oley, who was tall and fair, with straight blond hair hanging down her back and over her shoulders.

  “Well, I’d hate to ask you why,” Rob said finally, with hostility in his voice. “I’d be so fucking scared you’d tell me.”

  She pressed her lips together, and then spoke. She’d never felt more like a schoolteacher. “It seems unkind,” she said, “when by their standards we’re so rich, for you to make fun of their poverty.”

  He shrugged. “Therein, of course, lies the joke,” he said. They turned into the bakery, pushing aside the beaded curtain. Everyone looked up at them for a moment, at the tall, long-haired man dressed a little like a cowboy in his jeans and work shirt, and his blond companion. “Clearly they thought it was funny,” he said, behind her. “If they can laugh at it, then there must be some level on which it is funny.”

  There were empty tables in the back, and they walked toward them through the groups of Peruvians nearer the front. There were mostly men in the bakery, except for the women who worked behind the counter.

  “The trouble with you, Oley, is that you always imagine everyone else has exactly your sensibility.” As he said this, Rob was pulling the chair out for Oley. She sat down. “And they don’t. They don’t. By and large, the human race is tougher and has a better sense of humor than you do, O.”

  He sat down opposite her and Oley looked at him. She; would never, she felt, not find him attractive.

  “That’s just how you imagine them,” she said. “And that’s just because you think everyone is like you. So you see, we’re not really so different after all.”

  Oley had met Rob when he came to take photographs of the preschool kids she taught. Oley, who was often somber and shy when she met new people, whose high school yearbook photo had “Still Waters Run Deep” under it, was animated and energetic around the children. Rob took as many pictures of her as he did of the kids.

  She was aware of using her playfulness with the children to charm him, and felt, a few times during the day, guilty enough about this element of duplicity to draw back suddenly into a shy stiffness. But the children insisted on the Oley they knew. “Not that way, Oley,” they’d say. “Do it the other way, the silly way.”

  He took her out for dinner that night. The combination of his own almost childish energy and his having seen her earlier so full of life made it easier for her to continue what she couldn’t help thinking of as a charade during the meal. Even as they made love back in her apartment, she wanted to tell him he’d made a mistake, that she wasn’t who he thought she was.

  As the week in Trujillo went by, Oley and Rob spent more and more time after dinner in the hotel bar. They played gin rummy, keeping a running score, and drank foaming, lemony Pisco sours. The bar was as old as the rest of the hotel, paneled in mahogany and mirrored on one side. Louvered doors opened into the dining room and the lobby. A large fan with wooden blades twirled slowly overhead. The bartender, a short, plump Indian man with liquid black eyes, stared at Oley almost constantly; at her size, they speculated, at her blondness, her freckles.

  “And my boobs,” Oley said. She was drunk. “Boobs’ll do it every time, the world over. It’s amazing how predictable it all is.”

  “I’ll drink to that. I’ll drink to predictability,” he said, spreading his cards on the table, “and I’ll go down with three.”

  “Bastard,” she said.

  They still made love every night, always with the same skillful familiarity with each other’s bodies, but they postponed until later and later the time when they’d leave the warm light of the bar and climb the wide wooden staircase together. Each night, undressing, getting ready for sure pleasure, Oley felt increasingly that it was a capitulation that shamed her somehow. More than once they were the last people to leave the bar, but the solemn, handsome bartender never complained, never rushed them, never stopped staring and blushing.

  “He loves you, O,” Rob said. He lay naked on the bed, watching Oley undress.

  “I know,” Oley said sadly. She carefully folded her jeans and shirt, then came to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “You know how I know?” Rob asked.

  “No.”
>
  “’Cause he doesn’t charge us for about half of what we drink. Your half, I figure.” He had moved over to accommodate her. Now he began to stroke her back and arms.

  Oley looked at him. “Is that true?”

  “As sure as I’m about to screw you madly.”

  “No, wait. Tell me the truth.” She put her hands on his, to still them. “He’s been giving us free drinks?”

  “Yes. You, anyway. I asked that Chilean guy, you know, the one with the fat wife and all the kids?” Oley nodded. “I asked him if he was getting free drinks and he said not. Said it must be because the guy’s so smitten with you. Everybody knows it, Oley. My big, blond Oley.”

  She turned from him. “Oh, that’s so sad.”

  “Why? What’s so sad about it?”

  “I don’t know. Everything. That he’s a grown man; and his world is so small that he sees me as some kind of princess. And all he has to offer me is Pisco sours. And I’m up here fucking you, who couldn’t care less at some level. And he ends up, really, giving you the drinks. It just all seems so … misplaced and pathetic.”

  Rob was silent a moment. Then he began stroking her arm again. His hand touched lightly the side of Oley’s breast and she felt the dropping sensation inside that was, for her, the beginning of desire. “Well, he can’t give you the drinks without treating me too. That’s just how it is.”

  “I know. That’s what I mean.”