Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  The men came out onto a stage and stood with their toes on a marker. Bright lights shone on them, and they all looked startled and unclean. A policeman giving them instructions said something that made them all laugh, and the line they were forming disintegrated for a moment and then took shape again. When I saw that none of the men was the one who had molested us, my heart, which had felt as though a hand were gripping it tight, relaxed and expanded in my chest, and I was able to cry.

  In the fall, Anna and I resumed our friendship. She didn’t want to talk about the events of the summer, though. She had had many nightmares, and she was trying to forget them all. I thought of them often. What I remembered most clearly was the man’s light voice, suffused with desperate tenderness, asking me to play, wouldn’t I play? Whatever game I liked. Tiny beads of sweat had sat on his upper lip even though it wasn’t a hot day; beads of sweat I could have reached down and touched as he squatted in front of me. I had thought I might reach out and run my finger gently across his upper lip, until Anna pulled my hand away and rescued me.

  The Quality of Life

  Alan watched Jody bending to get something out of the refrigerator. As she straightened up, their eyes met and she smiled at him. “So it’ll be one big happy family, huh?”

  Alan nodded. He’d been married to Jody until two years earlier, and he still felt an odd sense of comfort as he sat in the kitchen of the house they’d shared, the house she still lived in. She had poured them both some wine while the children—the young people—finished getting their stuff together. He was taking them for the Christmas holidays.

  “All her kids too?”

  “What do you mean, all, Jode? She’s only got three. Same as us.”

  She grinned. “It never seemed like only to me. Course in those days men weren’t into all this sharing, all this communicating with their offspring. Weeks could go by …”

  “Let’s not,” he said.

  She looked at him quizzically. “What is it with you? You used to be good for a few laughs anyway.”

  He shrugged.

  She sipped at her wine, then bent over the sink. Her hair, that even chestnut brown, fell forward and hid the side of her face. He wondered if she was touching it up now.

  “What’re you going to do?” he asked.

  She swept her hair back with one hand and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “For Christmas. For the holidays. Anything special?”

  She smiled. “I’ll think of something.” She turned and started fussing with whatever there was in the sink. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and he watched her bare arms move quickly, gracefully, the skin at her elbows creasing and puckering with her motion. Claudia’s arms weren’t like that. Not yet. He felt a sudden pang for Jody.

  “Mom!” It was Andrea, their youngest, calling from the second floor.

  Jody put her hands on her hips and arched her back slightly, a familiar, exaggerated posture of irritation. He watched the cords in her neck tighten as she yelled back, with slow and precise diction, “If you want to talk to me, please come to where I am so I do not have to shout to be heard.”

  “Oh, shit!” came the reply; but after a moment Andrea thundered down the stairs. Her hair flew in all directions. She ignored her father. She’d greeted him when he arrived, and besides, she wasn’t able to sustain a conversation with both parents at once. Her voice boomed. “For Christ’s sake, Mom. All I have is one little question and I’ve gotta come all the way down here?”

  Alan stared at them. Even though the girl was bigger than her mother, she was narrow and snaky through the hips. Slender Jody, her eyes steady on her daughter, still conveyed the mysterious massiveness of a grown woman.

  “I mean, doesn’t that strike you as unreasonable?”

  Jody didn’t answer.

  “Doesn’t it?” Andrea persisted. She looked nervously at her father.

  “What’s your question?” Jody asked.

  “Aaah!” Andrea shook her wild hair and stamped her foot in protest. Then asked her question. “Where are my painter’s pants?”

  “Check the dryer,” Jody answered, and Andrea flung herself at the basement door and down the stairs.

  “How’d her hair get like that?” he asked.

  “Like what?”

  “God, it’s so … bushy. So fanned out.”

  “Oh. She braids it wet. Tiny little braids all over.” They could hear Andrea in the basement, banging the dryer shut. She started up the stairs. “Our own sweet pickaninny,” Jody said loudly. Andrea emerged with the painter’s pants. “And when she wakes up and brushes it out … magic!”

  Andrea scowled at her mother as she crossed the kitchen. She stopped at the doorway to the back hall. “And you know what else I wish, Mom?”

  Jody looked at her. “No. What?” she asked calmly.

  “I wish you would not talk about me in the third person as though I wasn’t even there. It’s just fucking rude, that’s what it is.” She left the hall, and they could hear her, heavy-footed on the stairs.

  Jody sighed. “Sometimes I wish we had some sort of neutral drop-off point. An Ellis Island. A no-man’s-land or something. Where we could work these exchanges better.”

  “Is that what’s eating her?”

  “I think. At any rate, she’s usually actually kind of lovely. Foul-mouthed always. But really, the light of my life.”

  He looked up at her. She seemed to mean it. Behind the fall of her hair, she was chewing her lower lip. “She’s the only one who touches me anymore,” Jody said abruptly.

  His younger son, Steven, a senior in high school, walked in. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said. “It drives me nuts how long it takes to get anything to happen in this house.”

  “What’s your rush?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I thought we were trying to go or something. Wasn’t that the idea?” He looked at his father, who sat sprawled at the kitchen table, his legs stretched out in front of him. Alan had taken off his boots by the front door, and he wore wool socks of two different colors.

  Jody went back to her work at the sink. Washing lettuce, that’s what she was doing. She shook a handful of the wet green leaves and started to spread them on a cloth on the countertop.

  Alan picked up his glass. “David’s not ready anyway, is he? I haven’t seen him.”

  “He’s in the car,” Jody said.

  “What?”

  “He’s in the car. He was all packed when you came, and he took his bag out right away and he’s sitting in the car. Come look.”

  He went over to the sink and stood next to her. His older son had the interior light on in the car, probably to read by. At any rate, his head was bent down and he sat motionless in the little yellow world. Jody was watching Alan’s face, he could tell, and when he looked at her, she shrugged and grinned, as though embarrassed.

  “Yeah. So all we need is Andrea,” Steve said. He went out into the hall and up the stairs, calling for her.

  “Why is he like that?” Alan said, gesturing out the window with his wineglass.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being like that,” she said. “I used to be like that when I was a kid too.” She was bent over the sink again, rinsing the lettuce. It was escarole, and the frilled green edges made it look as though she were working with some delicate fabric. “I just couldn’t stand the amount of fussing it took to get us all aimed in one direction, so I’d just go sit by the front door till everyone was ready.” Jody was one of four sisters, daughters of an Episcopal priest. Alan had actually dated another one of them, Christine, before he’d met Jody. She was stately, beautiful. But it had been tomboyish Jody, who then still chain-smoked Camels and had a reputation for being wild, whom Alan felt relaxed with and finally chose. Christine had married a clergyman and moved to Minnesota.

  Jody set more lettuce on the cloth, and tore off several paper towels to pat it dry with. “It’s like on an airplane,” she said. “You can rush and get all y
our stuff together and fuss around, and then stand in the aisles for ten minutes. Or you can just sit and read in comfort until the door is open and the aisle is clear.”

  “You’re so smart,” he said.

  She grinned again. “Me and David,” she said. “It’s amazing, the persistence of family characteristics.”

  “Since you’re so smart,” he said, “why don’t you get one of those twirling baskets that dries the lettuce off in a second, instead of using up all these paper towels?”

  She looked at him a long moment. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to hear,” she said. “Is this the story of your concern about my finances? Or is this the story of how in later life you’ve become domestic, of how someone else has managed to do what I couldn’t?”

  “Oh, Jody,” he said wearily. “You’re not supposed to hear anything.”

  After a minute she said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that there was a time when you wouldn’t have noticed what I was doing with the goddamned lettuce. It’s just so odd to me that now you do.”

  They could hear Steve and Andrea on the stairs.

  “It’s easier to notice everything now,” he said. “Now that I don’t live here anymore.”

  Steve was in the doorway. “We’re ready. I think we’re ready. I think we’re really really ready.”

  “Let me come out and say goodbye,” Jody said.

  He felt an odd sinking, a sense of apprehension at leaving. He’d felt it before. Somehow, when he had the children, he didn’t see them as clearly as he did when he was with Jody. It seemed that she knew them in a way he couldn’t by himself, hadn’t been able to since the divorce. Or maybe it was the house, their own house, and something about the way they felt free to move around in it, to yell up and down the stairs, to walk around carrying plates of food; which they didn’t in the house he lived in with Claudia and her children, the expensive, carpeted house that was hers from her first marriage. When he was married to Jody, he was made miserable by the confusion, the lack of grace in his family life. But that disarray seemed elemental to his kids, and Alan had found nothing to offer them as a substitute.

  He followed Jody into the hall, pulling his coat on. Andrea was cool to her, let Jody kiss her cheek. But Steve made noise the whole time—thank God for Steve!—and so it felt like a cheerful goodbye.

  After Alan tied his boots, he turned to Jody. Steve and Andrea were outside. They could hear Steve singing a Christmas carol. “And David?” he asked. “Did you say goodbye to him?”

  She nodded. “He did everything absolutely correctly. A kiss, a Christmas present, the works.”

  “Well, then, Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “To you too,” she said. “I hope it’s great fun.”

  “Thanks,” he called back, already walking to the car.

  He got in and started the engine. Andrea and Steve had gotten in the back seat, their bags between them. As he turned out of the driveway, Andrea rolled down her window and called, “Bye, Mom! Bye, Mommy!”

  He looked back. Jody was silhouetted in the doorway, and her hand came up to wave.

  There was silence in the dark car. He said, “I feel a little bad for Mom, taking all you kids away from her for the holiday.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Steve said. “She’ll have a great time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Andrea piped up, “She gets to go to the Caribbean with that guy, and we all have to stay around here!”

  “It’s Caribbean,” David said in his flat voice, without turning.

  “Who cares?” Andrea said. “I don’t care.”

  “I think you can pronounce it either way, Dave,” Steve said.

  David shrugged. “Eyether way,” he said.

  “Wait a minute. She’s going away?” He felt a sense of indignation rising.

  “She’s going to the Caribbean with this guy she’s been dating,” Andrea said. She pulled herself forward behind him and he could feel her damp breath on his neck. “She’s going to be all warm and come back tanned and—”

  “But she didn’t tell me,” he said. “I mean, what if something happened? If we needed to get in touch with her?”

  “We’ve got her address, Dad,” David said. “In fact, she gave each of us the name of the hotel and the telephone number, in case one of us lost it.”

  Alan looked over at David, who stared levelly back.

  “She’s going with a guy named Floyce Hutchinson,” David said. “He’s a developer. Big bucks.” David was watching him, he could tell.

  His voice was casual. “Nice guy?” he asked.

  “Who cares?” Andrea said. “She’s going to be warm, and we have to stay here in this shitty winter and freeze for ten days.”

  In his mind’s eye, Jody washed the pale-green escarole, sometimes pausing to hook her falling hair back over one ear. He should have thought. You didn’t make fancy salads just for yourself. Jody didn’t anyway. Sometimes during their marriage he had accused her of having forgotten how to cook altogether. Often, if she was engrossed in a book, she’d just open a few cans of soup for dinner and tell the children they could read at the table too. Alan had hated that, those silent meals with bread and sandwich fixings not so much arranged as tossed on the table; and the intermittent sibilant flip of someone’s page the only human noise besides chewing, swallowing.

  He had wanted the divorce. Jody had argued against it, but most of her arguments had to do with the children. He had pointed this out to her, told her it was part of the problem as far as he was concerned. She had conceded, finally, that she didn’t have much energy for him. “But it’s not all meant to be fun,” she had said. “There’s got to be some pain too, if it’s real. I saw this as part of the long haul.” Tears were running down her face. Several times he’d had to get her to lower her voice so she wouldn’t wake the children, who were sleeping upstairs. “For this bunch of years it’s the kids, the jobs. Later I thought maybe we’d be sexy again.”

  Later was too late, he told her. And then he told her about Claudia.

  She was angry. She threw a salt shaker at him. She called him an idiot, an asshole. She predicted that the same thing would happen to him and Claudia as soon as they were living together with her children. “You wait,” she’d said. “Pretty soon all you’ll be talking about is money and the kids’ grades. And they won’t even be your kids.”

  She started to cry again, her voice loud, edging toward hysteria. He tried to touch her, but she pulled away and stood panting by herself next to the refrigerator. Suddenly David was in the doorway. He looked at his mother, tears coursing down her face, her hair disheveled. He was sixteen.

  “I just thought you ought to know,” he said. “You’ve got the whole second floor wide awake too.”

  She looked back at him a moment. He was the most beautiful of their children, the most self-contained. He seemed utterly calm in his striped pajamas. Suddenly she wailed and charged at him, her arms flailing. “You! You … twerp! You little know-nothing!” She belted him twice, and the sound of flesh smacking flesh was horrible. David turned and covered his head. Alan heard him say, “Don’t; don’t, Mom,” but his own response was slow, too slow, and by the time he rose to protect his son, David had turned again, had opened his arms to embrace his mother, and she covered her face with her hands and let him hold her.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. Jody was saying, “Oh, David, oh, David,” over and over. David seemed to be crying a little too.

  Then Andrea came to the door to see what was happening, and in a fog Alan began to try to explain. Steve’s voice shouted down the stairs, “Will someone please tell me what’s going on down there?”

  Jody and David were still apologizing to each other, laughing breathlessly in relief now. Jody pulled away and got a beer for each of them; and Steve shouted again, “Will somebody just tell me who the survivors are anyhow?”

  Andrea went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up, “Mommy and Daddy were having a terrible
fight over if he was moving out, and Dave told Mommy she was too noisy, and she hit him. But now it’s okay.”

  “Oh,” Steve said. Then he said, “And is Dad moving out?”

  “I don’t know,” Andrea called up. She came back to the kitchen doorway. “Are you moving out, Daddy?”

  Alan looked at her. He looked at Jody and David. Jody nodded her head.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You are?” Andrea said. “Is he really, Mom?”

  “Yes, baby,” Jody said.

  “Oh, shit,” Andrea said, and then she burst into tears. “Why does everything have to happen to me?”

  None of Jody’s predictions about him and Claudia had come true. If anything, in fact, things had stayed too intense between them. Sometimes an image of Claudia during sex would come to him in the middle of some ordinary task at work and he would feel, embarrassed even if he was by himself, the stirrings of desire. He hadn’t been able to relax with his new family. He seemed to be waiting every night for the kids to go to bed so he could be alone with her. He found himself staying later at the clinic than he had to, sometimes missing dinner so he wouldn’t have to pass the long evenings pretending to be a father, watching her be a mother. It was, oddly, a repetition of the pattern of turning away that had marked his first marriage, but for entirely different reasons, Alan reminded himself.

  During the school year it was better. Her oldest child was in college, and her ex-husband paid for Carol, the middle child, to go to boarding school. Just the youngest, a girl two years younger than Andrea, was at home. But this child, Stephanie, was the one he felt the least comfortable with. He couldn’t remember how Andrea had been two years earlier, but it seemed to him that Stephanie was utterly artificial. Much of her conversation consisted of imitations she did of other people’s tones of voice, ways of thinking. They’d drive past someone roller skating and she’d make her voice dopey and say, “Duh, yeah. What I like to do is, unhh, roller skate, yuh. Don’t like to read much. Nope. Or talk to much of anyone. Just wheel along here.” Or in line at a movie, she’d point to a studious-looking kid with glasses and say, “Well, yes, from time to time I like to take in a movie. Of course, it’s not as intellectually stimulating as reading philosophy, but even I have to relax sometime.”