Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  Wearing the delicate necklace and earrings that she still had in the dresser in her bedroom, the Oley in the picture stretched out naked on the bed and looked directly into the camera. Rob had lightened her body and darkened the background, so she seemed almost to float toward the camera, her gaze blankened and bold.

  Oley looked at the picture a long time, trying to recognize herself in it. Then she picked up her iced tea and carried it into the bedroom. The cubes clinked gently together as she walked. She set the glass down on top of the bureau, opened the top drawer, and took out the necklace and earrings. Standing in front of her full-length mirror, she took off all her clothes and put on the jewelry. She looked at her familiar reflection—the solid wide hips, the large breasts, the pubic hair dark in spite of her blondness. She stood in her bedroom and looked at herself. On the breeze that stirred through the apartment and lightly touched her body floated the sound of someone’s transistor radio, the rhythm of teenaged voices in conversation. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself making love with Rob, the familiar sequence of sensations she had thought of as shapes they made together. She couldn’t. That possibility seemed remote, as far away as the small town she’d grown up in, as far away as the Olympia Rob had created in the photograph.

  Leaving Home

  “Go find Daddy,” Anita said in the kitchen. “Where did Daddy go?”

  Leah was in the closet in the living room, and Anita’s voice sounded muted and thickened to her. The closet smelled of mildew and camphor, and was full of old boots and boxes of clothing. Leah knelt among them and listened to Anita cross from the kitchen to the foot of the stairs.

  “The baby stinks, Greg.” Anita’s voice was closer, sharper. There was silence from upstairs.

  “Did you hear me, Greg? The baby stinks and it’s my birthday. I’m not going to change her.” Anita walked back to the kitchen, past Sophie, who had followed her across the living room. Leah rose and stepped out of the closet to watch her grandchild. The little girl had just learned to walk and she held her amazed hands up in the air and waved them for balance with each exaggerated step, a miniature tightrope walker. There was a large wet stain down one leg of her overalls.

  Greg lumbered down the stairs, and Sophie smiled up at him. Her bare feet curved inward at the toe. Greg squatted in front of her. “Soph, you did it again,” he said. Then he noticed his mother, standing in the closet doorway. “Isn’t that something?” he asked her, as though Sophie had just performed some prodigious musical or artistic feat. His face was deadpan.

  Leah laughed, pushing her curly hair off her face.

  “Do you stink, Soph?” he asked the child. “Are you, in fact, a … stinker?”

  Sophie smiled, watching him with delight.

  “Are you”—he paused again, and in anticipation she made a small squealing noise—“a stinker?” She laughed and set her tiny hands on his face.

  “Are you”—she had the game now, and was already laughing, but watched him rapturously until he had said it—“a stinker?” Her body gave itself up to laughter, and she suddenly lost her balance and sat down hard on the floor, still laughing.

  “Look how smart she is, honey,” Leah said. “She just picks up anything so fast.”

  “If she’s so smart, how come she isn’t toilet trained?” He scooped her up and held her balanced horizontally across his hip. A strand of drool dangled from her mouth and was suddenly gone, a drop on the floor. Sophie watched it, fascinated.

  “What were you doing in the closet, Mom?” Greg asked.

  “Trying to find the damn picnic basket.”

  “Didn’t you used to keep it in the basement?”

  “Yes, but we had a picnic just a week or so ago, and I thought I put it away up here.”

  He stood looking at his mother for a moment. She was still pretty, in a slightly plump, worn way. She was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt that had his high school emblem on it.

  “Who is this ‘we’ that keeps cropping up?”

  Leah blushed. “Just a man I’ve been seeing a little of.”

  “Just a man?”

  She nodded.

  “Wasn’t there a movie called Just a Man?” He shifted Sophie on his hip.

  “No,” Leah said. “You’re thinking of Nothing But a Man.”

  “No I’m not, Mom. I’m thinking of this movie Just a Man. It’s different from Nothing But a Man.”

  “God, that was a good movie, that Nothing But a Man.” Leah’s hand strayed to her hair again. “And the sound track. I mean, it wasn’t a musical, but do you remember that song ‘Heat Wave’?”

  “No, but you do.” Sophie began to make complaining noises, and wriggled. “Okay, Soph, here we go,” he said.

  “I can’t believe it,” Leah said, as he turned to go up the stairs. “You don’t remember ‘Heat Wave.’”

  He laughed. “That was your life, Mom.”

  Leah stood a moment at the bottom of the stairs and watched him carry Sophie up, jouncing her on each step. “Hup, hup,” he said. Then she turned and crossed to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was flooded with early-afternoon sunlight. Anita sat at the round wooden table by the windows, drinking coffee and reading the paper. The lunch dishes still littered the table. Anita had said she would do them. Leah had to will herself not to start cleaning up.

  She sat down at what had been her place and sipped at the cold milky coffee left in her cup.

  Anita lowered the paper. She was wearing her glasses, two clear, thick circles with steel-rimmed frames that perched weightlessly on her perfect nose. She was a law student. Most of the time Leah had trouble imagining her, delicate and frail as she seemed, in that competitive world. But now, wearing her glasses, she looked icy and determined. Leah didn’t know if Greg had married Anita for her eggshell-frail beauty or for the steely competence that lay underneath it. Or both, of course. When he told her they were getting married, she asked him why. He seemed too young to Leah, hopelessly young. “Because, Mom,” he answered earnestly then, “she’s someone I know I can live with the rest of my life.” She was touched by his conviction and ashamed of the impulse she had to mock him for it. Now she looked at Anita. Why can’t I ever tell what she’s thinking? Leah wondered. Why does she make me feel like the younger of us two. She sighed.

  “What’s up?” Anita asked.

  “Oh, just nothing’s working today, and now I can’t find the damned picnic basket.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  Leah instantly felt annoyed. She didn’t want Anita’s help. She didn’t want Anita to find it for her.

  “The way they look. A big square hampery kind of thing.”

  “Oh. I might have seen it, I think.”

  “Where?”

  “The broom closet by the back door, maybe?”

  Leah went to the broom closet and opened the door. The hamper sat on the top shelf, beyond her easy reach. Joe, so much taller, so much more domestic than she, must have put it away after their picnic. She stood on her toes and, with the tips of her fingers, slid the basket forward on the shelf until it leaned suddenly toward her and she caught it. She had thought about asking him over tonight. It was Anita’s birthday, her twenty-fifth, and they were going to have a party outside in the backyard. Greg had invited Pete Slattery, his closest friend from high school, and his wife. She and Joe had talked about whether he should come, but they had decided no. Two of his children still lived at home and when Leah and Joe were together at his house they felt obliged to adopt a pose of almost marital stability. They both liked the sense of freedom, of abandon, they had at her house. Last Sunday after breakfast, they had made love in the kitchen. Leah had sat in the bright summer light on the counter amid the egg-stained dishes and chipped coffee mugs, the sun warning her back and Joe warming her front; and she had cried out, “Oh. Oh. Oh,” as loudly as she wanted when she came. After all her years of negotiated privacy when Greg was young, of sneaking the occasional lover in and out of the
house, as though she were the teenager, and Greg—heavily asleep in his room, which smelled of dirty socks and the sulfurous acne medication he wore to bed—were the parent, she was jealous of her long-awaited freedom, her claim to sexuality. They decided there was no rush for Joe to meet her family.

  But a few hours before Anita and Greg were to arrive, he’d turned up at her back door with a present, a loaf of zucchini bread he’d made for the party. It was wrapped in aluminum foil, and it was still warm in Leah’s hands as she stood with him on the back stoop.

  “It smells good. Is it supposed to be your version of a silver bullet, Joe? Who was that masked man, and all that?”

  She blocked the kitchen doorway. She was embarrassed for Joe to see how much neater the house was than usual. Even though he stood several steps below her, Joe’s head was level with hers.

  “It’s supposed to make you remember me. You’re going to eat a piece of that bread and want me in the middle of the family doings.”

  She held the present against her. The heat touched her breasts through her shirt. “If I had to pick something to remind you of me in my absence, it wouldn’t be zucchini bread,” she said, after a moment.

  He shrugged and grinned at her. He was a skinny man, balding, with one eye that swiveled out as though to check on what was going on in the rest of the world. She had told him that she’d never have been attracted to him if it weren’t for the wild freedom of that eye. She had felt a positive erotic charge trying to meet his difficult gaze when they’d been introduced, at a parent-teacher night in the high school, where his youngest child, a girl named Fiona, was Leah’s student. “Well,” he said, “actually we just had too goddamn many zucchini in the garden. That’s the bald-faced truth of the situation.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me the bald-faced truth,” she said. “I never want to hear that.” He kept grinning as he leaned forward to kiss her. His tongue came a little way into her mouth. Then he was gone, gone until this weekend of her being a mother again was over.

  Now, as Leah brought the hamper over to the kitchen table, Anita got up lazily and started to carry the lunch dishes to the sink. What had bothered her most about the scene at the foot of the stairs, Leah suddenly thought, watching her tall daughter-in-law move across the kitchen, graceful as a giraffe, was that Anita had called Sophie “the baby.” She ought to say her name.

  Around three o’clock, with the house in a dazed silence because of the heat and Sophie’s nap, Leah went out to the back steps to shell peas. The sun had swung around, off the stairs, but the heat rose, still and stifling and smelling of dirt from the earth in the backyard. Leah knew that the meal she had planned for this party was too elaborate, was taking too much of her time; but she knew, too, that she had organized it this way in part so that she could stay away from Anita and Greg and a vague feeling of anxiety they roused in her. She was glad to have this job to do, to be able to leave the house and come out here alone to sit.

  Greg and Anita had had a small, quickly suppressed argument just before Sophie’s nap, and Leah frowned, thinking of it, as her thumbnail slid along the seam of a bright-green peapod. She and Anita had been working in the kitchen, and Sophie was standing on a stool by the sink, playing quietly with the soapy water Anita had run for her. She was wearing only her Pampers, and she carefully poured water from one plastic container to another in the sink. Her fat protruding belly glistened with what she had spilled on it.

  Greg came into the room and began to play with her. Leah stopped what she was doing for a moment to watch them. He was wearing only cut-off shorts, and his brown body, with the big bones moving under the skin, gave her as much pleasure as Sophie’s translucent roundness did. She remembered how homely Greg had been just before he entered his teens, a fat child who wasn’t popular and who stammered in any new situation. Once he had used her razor to shave his eyebrows off. He hated the way he looked, he had said when she asked him why. “And this is better?” she countered in a tense, shrill voice. He had looked at her as though he’d like to kill her in some slow and painful way.

  “Y-y-y-y-yes,” he said, his eyes not blinking under his smooth, naked forehead.

  Greg made a waterfall, he blew bubbles with a straw he found in a kitchen drawer. Leah watched his muscular back, looked at Sophie’s compact and delicate body on the stool next to him.

  “Why can’t you leave her alone for just a few minutes, Greg?” Anita said.

  Leah looked away quickly; went back to peeling boiled potatoes for a salad.

  “Why should I leave her alone?” Greg asked, standing straight. He shook the bubbly water from his fingers.

  Anita’s voice strained to be casual, reasonable. “Because you never do. She’s perfectly content, playing by herself. And you always have to charm her with your game, your …” There was silence for a moment. “I just don’t think it’s good for her,” Anita said finally.

  Greg stood next to Sophie, looking at Anita. Leah looked at her too. She was staring over Sophie’s head at Leah’s son, with eyes that were free of love, free of any response to his beauty.

  “Bupps, Daddy?” Sophie said. She had fished the soggy straw out of the water and held it up to Greg.

  “Not now, honey,” Greg said. He walked toward the door, his sense of injury apparent in the way he held his shoulders.

  “Bupps!” Sophie shrieked after him. “Bupps,” she wailed, and then bent over and cried, loudly and dramatically, with her head touching the counter, her face hidden against her small fat hands.

  “Whoo,” Anita said, moving toward her daughter and raising her eyebrows for Leah’s benefit. “Naptime for this kidlet.”

  When Leah finished shelling the peas, she picked up the pot and the colander and went back into the kitchen. She glanced through the doorway into the living room. Greg lay on the floor, alone, reading an old issue of Sports Illustrated. Leah realized she hadn’t seen Greg and Anita touch each other since they arrived.

  Leah’s house was like all the others around it, only with a slightly different “porch treatment” in front. It was part of a cheap suburban tract. She had bought it three years after she and Greg’s father had been divorced, a year after she’d started teaching at the high school. The development was to have extended into the field and woods behind it, but by the time she and Greg had moved in, the first group of eight houses was already having trouble with its septic tanks. Until the town extended its sewer lines out as far as the development, which it didn’t have any apparent intention of doing, no more houses could be built. Thus Leah had an unexpected park behind her. Deer sometimes wandered into her yard in the dusky mornings while she had her solitary breakfast; and on winter nights she occasionally went outside and listened to the snow fall with a hissing sound into the woods.

  Anita’s picnic was going to be at the bottom of the meadow, twenty or so feet before the woods started. They would be close enough to the house to hear Sophie if she cried, but far enough away so their noise wouldn’t bother her.

  While Greg got Sophie ready for bed and the steady pulse of the pump forcing water for Anita’s shower thrummed through the house, Leah carried quilts and pillows, candles, and load after load of food and wine and beer down to the bottom of the lawn. She had changed into a dress and she had her shoes off and the grass felt cool and damp on her bare feet. Although it was still light outside, twilight had begun in the house, and she turned on the lamp in the kitchen as she assembled the final load from the clothes remaining in the hamper. Then she stayed outside, on her back on the faded and stained quilt, a glass of white wine within reach.

  Greg called her and she answered halfheartedly, but she knew he couldn’t hear her and she didn’t get up. After a while the screen door smacked shut. She looked up and saw him walk across the grass to her. Over his cutoffs he wore a T-shirt that said “Computer programmers do it Digitally.” He had worked for Digital since he’d graduated from Rutgers, since he’d married Anita.

  “God, you did everything,
Mom.”

  Leah propped herself up on an elbow. “I wanted to be able to just lie here without thinking about having to get up in a while to help.”

  “But you should have called me.” He sat down on a pillow and reached into the cooler for a beer.

  “Honey, you don’t have to help with everything.” And you shouldn’t, she wanted to say. You shouldn’t. She thought suddenly of all the years she had made him help her with the housework, even when she could have done it more efficiently herself; of all the times she’d lectured him on his responsibility to their tiny household. She had a vague, apologetic sense now that it had all been wrong, wrongheaded.

  “What do you think,” she asked, looking up at the first faint stars in the white sky, “was the thing that attracted you and Anita to each other in college?” She was embarrassed by the question as soon as she’d asked it, and rushed to qualify it. “I mean, looking back,” she said.

  He was saved from having to answer by the sound of a car in the driveway. “Ah. Guess who?” he said, and smiled. He got up and disappeared around the corner of the house, carrying his beer. She could hear voices raised in greeting, and in a minute they all appeared, Greg and Pete, and Pete’s wife, Debby. Debby had been a student of Leah’s years before. She was a sweet, stupid girl, with enormous breasts. She had had to marry Pete before she finished her junior year of high school. At the party Greg had thrown for them a few weeks after the wedding, Leah had found Debby crying in the bathroom; had cleaned up the vomit which had missed the toilet; and had tucked the miserable sixteen-year-old bride into her own bed for the night, while the noise of the party continued below.

  They were cheerful now as they sat down and got beer and wine to drink. Pete told Leah how pretty she looked, and she made the mocking face she used at school when a student tried to flatter her. This teacherly manner had been her defense ever since Greg’s friends began to turn into men suddenly, when she was alone and in her mid-thirties. It was like a joke they had all shared, especially she and Pete, the wildest of the friends, who had been sexually alert at an age when Greg still seemed to be sleepwalking through life.