by Sue Miller
Was that it, was that what had happened?
That was it, Mark felt. She’d settled for John. And it seemed to have worked, it seemed to have made her happy. She and John moved into the derelict old house in town and fixed it up. John bought the bookstore for her. She had Theo. She seemed at peace. When Mark dropped by to get the girls, when he came over for birthday parties or holiday celebrations, he could feel the calm and the sense of order that surrounded her. It had to do with money, of course. But it had to do also with John, with his steadiness, his niceness.
Sometimes though, watching Eva move so efficiently across her big, expensive kitchen, watching her turn her slow, lovely, slightly gap-toothed smile on one guest or another, Mark would catch himself wondering if she didn’t miss their old life too, their questions, their passionate talk, the fights, the times they woke in the night afterward and wordlessly, wildly, began to make love. As much as anything, he felt, it was his betrayal that had made her available for a man like John. His fault.
IT WASN’T UNTIL about eight months or so after John died, on a hot day in May, that Mark understood what he was doing, what he’d been feeling all along. That he realized he was wooing Eva. That he saw that he was trying to reclaim her, to reclaim her through the children.
It hadn’t started that way. Early on, when Eva was so miserable, taking the girls more often had just felt the necessary, the right thing to do. Anything, to help. But it probably shifted, something shifted in Mark, when he’d started sometimes to take Theo too, along with the girls.
This had happened for the first time in early December, two months after John’s death, when Theo appeared at the top of the stairs with his backpack just as Mark was leaving. Daisy and Emily were already outside, and he was standing in the hall talking to Eva.
They heard Theo on the stairs at the same time, and they both turned and looked up, watching his slow descent in silence.
Mark broke it as Theo reached the bottom. “What’s up, big guy? Whatcha doing?”
“I got my stuff.”
“I see you got your stuff. Where are you taking it?”
“To Mark’s house. To you,” Theo said.
“Oh, sweetie,” Eva said, squatting to be at Theo’s height. Her dress fell in a circle around her on the floor. It was made of a fabric printed with tiny sprigs of flowers everywhere. Sprigs. Mark would have liked to offer her the word.
“See, honey, just the girls are going to Mark’s this time,” she said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why,” she said. She turned her face up to Mark. She looked stricken.
“Because I’m their father,” Mark said. “Because Emily and Daisy are my girls, so I like to have them come stay with me.”
Theo had looked from one of them to the other. “That’s no fair,” he said.
No one answered him.
He sat on the bottom step. “It’s not fair,” he said again. And then he started to cry.
Mark had looked at Eva. It seemed to him that she was about to cry too, for life’s unfairness, for Theo’s pain. For her aloneness. For everything.
“I sure don’t mind taking him, if you think it’s okay,” he’d said.
He watched as her face lifted to him again and changed—opened in relief.
“Would you, Mark?” she said.
After that, it had become an easy, comfortable thing. If Theo wanted to come, if Eva hadn’t planned something special to do with him in the girls’ absence, Mark brought him home too. He told himself he was doing it for Eva, but he also truly liked the little boy—for his enthusiasm, for his sweet, vulnerable presence lying in bed at night next to Mark, for his wiry physical energy, so like what Mark remembered of himself as a kid. Sometimes, when he rocked Theo at night, or kissed him as he put him down to sleep, he had a sense of loving himself, of healing some part of himself—a sense that he couldn’t have explained clearly to anyone else.
He had rationalized all this, he had told himself that the girls didn’t need him anymore. When they were at his house, they spent hours in their room with the door shut. He could hear them talking, or Emily on the phone. Sometimes they did each other’s hair. Emily often went out, with friends, on dates. Daisy stayed in their room. As he moved around the house, he could see her there reading, or working on something at the desk, or lying on the bed listening to music on her Walkman. If he were honest, he would have to say he didn’t know them anymore. And they didn’t seem to care to know him.
No, it was Theo who was interested in Mark, who wanted to do the activities he planned for the weekends—so that when Mark bought a picture puzzle the girl in the shop said was age appropriate for a three-and-a-half-year-old, when he helped Theo set up an elaborate marble chute with blocks that stretched from the living room into the dining room, when he knelt next to the tub and reached over to soap the little boy’s smooth, soft skin, singing him the bathtub songs he’d sung to the girls, it seemed to him that he was just responding to the situation—that it took nothing away from Emily and Daisy, who had moved on anyway.
But then on that day in May, because both girls turned him down, he took Theo alone out for an afternoon of fishing. After they’d returned, Daisy sulked around the kitchen while he fixed dinner, not so much helping as getting in the way. At one point, when Mark asked her to pass him a colander, he addressed her as Miss Grumps. This was a mistake. She burst into tears. She accused him of loving Theo more than he loved her, she said she didn’t know why he even bothered to have her over.
Mark was so pained for her he couldn’t answer, he just reached out his arms and pulled her in.
It was at this moment, actually, holding his grieving daughter, feeling a pang of deep sorrow at misunderstanding her—ungainly Daisy, so tall she had to bend her head slightly to rest it on his shoulder—that he realized why he was doing it, all of it. That he understood he was trying to earn his way back to Eva’s love through the children. Most of all, through Theo. The sense of recognition he felt, the quick jolt of shame, lasted only a moment. He was holding Daisy. He would do better by her. He did love her.
He loved her and Emily, and he had come to love Theo too. There was nothing false about any of it. It had happened because he loved Eva. He still loved her, and loving the children, all of them, was a way of coming back to that.
He stood in his kitchen and stroked his daughter’s hair and whispered, “Sweetheart, of course I love you”; and what he had moved on to thinking was that he could do it, he could make it happen. He knew he could. He just needed to be slow and patient. He would approach this the way he had approached college, he thought, with the conviction that though it might take him longer than it would take someone else, there was no reason he couldn’t do it. None.
Chapter Four
SOMETIMES WHEN they were younger, Daisy and Emily would talk about which of their fathers seemed more like a real father. This was in the early days in the house in town, on Kearney Street, when it was still being renovated, before they moved into separate rooms. When, as Daisy remembered it, they were still friends. (As Emily remembered it, they were always friends, but in this, of course, she was wrong.) It was before Emily went into seventh grade; it was when they still walked to school together every day, when they still lay down at night in the two beds only a few feet apart and talked on and on, long after their bedtime—talked until Eva came to the foot of the stairs and yelled, “If I have to come up there, someone’s going to be very sorry.” In those days, they often spoke together openly and clearly about the central complexity in their lives: having two fathers. Lying next to each other, their disembodied voices rising in the dark, they would list all the ways in which each one—Mark or John—was unconvincing. Fake, they called it.
Mark was too young, they said, though they knew he was only about five years younger than John. But John was much more grown up. Realer.
Daisy couldn’t have said what she meant by this. It had to do with a quality she later understood as a kind of attentiveness Joh
n had, a focus—on you, on what you said, on what you thought. Daisy knew, even then, that she loved John, that she loved him more than she loved Eva, maybe more than she loved Emily. She wasn’t sure about Mark.
What Emily meant—what she said she meant—was that Mark didn’t have the right clothes for a father, or the right car, that he let them get away with stuff, that he took them out to dinner too much when they were at his house. He was disorganized where they were concerned, Emily said. All these things were fake.
Her voice in the dark sounded strict, sounded correct to Daisy, as it always did. At this stage in their lives together, Emily made the rules for Daisy, and Daisy believed she was incapable of error.
They both agreed, on the other hand, that John was too polite to them. He spoiled them; he bought them too much stuff—whatever they wanted, almost. That was fake too, wasn’t it?
Daisy wasn’t convinced of this, because she loved John and she loved these things about him. Emily was harder-hearted. It was fake.
But what was real? They weren’t sure. Eva was, they knew that. Maybe one real parent was enough. That’s what Emily decided she thought, in the end.
Not Daisy. Daisy wanted two—a mother and a father. And the father she chose was John, partly because at around this time Mark more or less disappeared from their lives anyway. He had started dating someone, “dating hard,” Eva had said to them, smiling in a mean way. He canceled weekends, he didn’t show up sometimes to pick up one or the other of the girls after school. When they did go to his house, Erika was often there, and he seemed sometimes hardly to notice that they were too. Or maybe he just didn’t care anymore. But it didn’t matter to Daisy, because John had stepped forward and become the center of her life.
Emily had moved into her own room by now, and that and her entering high school had changed things between them. And they seemed to be headed in different directions anyway. Daisy had grown taller and taller and more and more awkward as she turned eleven, and then twelve. By now she towered over everyone in her class, boy or girl. Emily was small, like Eva, and pretty and popular. Within two months of entering high school, she had a boyfriend, a junior, Noah Weiss, a diver on the swim team. (When Daisy thought of Noah, she remembered being at some meet with Emily and seeing him for the first time. Even years later she could recall the amplified, echoing noise the cheering voices made in the tiled pool room, the heavy humidity of the air, the clean, bleachy smell of the water, and the way Noah looked, standing with his toes gripping the end of the board, his chest wide and hairless, the pouch in his Speedo prominent and, to Daisy, embarrassing. She had tried to ask Emily something about this afterward, about whether she didn’t think of it when she looked at him, think it was funny, really, as Daisy did, but Emily said she was juvenile—“God, you are so juvenile, Daze.”)
Theo had been born that year too—the year Emily entered high school—so Eva was lost to them all, lost in a world of breastfeeding and naps and changing diapers. She was always tired, she always said she’d do stuff later.
But Daisy had chosen John, and John seemed comfortable, maybe even glad to be chosen. When she talked about it years later in therapy, trying to reconstruct it from John’s point of view, Daisy wondered if it hadn’t been deliberated, his kindness to her. Maybe, she said to her doctor, he and Eva saw that she was too solitary, too shy. Maybe they discussed it together, how now that Eva was so busy with Theo, and Emily had moved off into the life of high school, Daisy needed extra attention. But what she concluded was that even if it was calculated in that sense—an act of parenting, that weird gerund—it didn’t matter. It had been done lovingly. It had changed things for her. She had a friend, an ally. Whatever Daisy asked him to do, John did. In return, she went with him—on errands, on hikes, on bicycle rides. And whatever they were doing, John would talk to Daisy. Or rather, he’d ask Daisy to talk to him.
At one time or another over the years that he was her stepfather, John asked Daisy how she would describe herself to someone else; he asked her how she imagined music when she dreamed: as notes? or maybe just as waves of sound or feeling?; he asked her whether she thought the way a language was structured—she had just finished reciting a poem she’d memorized for French—made a difference in the way people thought; he asked her whether she thought she would be a different person if she’d grown up somewhere else geographically—New York, say, or Beirut; he asked her whether she would have preferred to be the older or the younger child in the family, instead of the one in the middle, and what difference she thought that would make.
He never seemed to anticipate or to want a particular answer. He was just interested in what she thought.
Once he asked her how her life was different from the way she would have liked it to be. Daisy didn’t even need to think to answer this. She told him she wished her parents hadn’t gotten divorced and that they still lived in the house up in the hills.
John was taking her to a doctor’s appointment that time, driving. It was raining and the windshield wipers were slapping out their steady beat. John seemed concentrated on that, or on the road—in any case, you couldn’t have told from his expression that she’d said anything important. She watched his face and thought about her answer, about how hurtful it might be to him. Stupid! she thought. She said, “But then I wouldn’t have you and Theo, so I don’t know. It’s hard to know.”
“It is, isn’t it?” He had looked over at her quickly and smiled. “Hard to know.”
Only a few months before he died, he’d asked her a question about Emily. “What do you think of this business of having a beautiful older sister, Daisy?” he’d said. “Would it be a good idea if we bumped her off?”
Daisy had burst into laughter at this, but then, because John had been the one to say it, she allowed herself to realize, maybe for the first time, that there was a part of her that would have liked Emily to disappear forever—though simultaneously she understood that she would have felt bereft if that happened, that she would have felt that there was no one to instruct her in the way she should enter the world each day.
She was riding bikes with John on Bennett Lane when he asked her this. She had to raise her voice a little to answer him—he was behind her. She told him that sometimes she did feel that way next to Emily—ugly and angry. He caught up to her and was pedaling along beside her, frowning in concentration on what she was saying. She said, “But I really love Emily too. Sometimes I even feel sorry for her.”
“Sorry? For our Emily?” he asked. “How come?”
Daisy looked over at her stepfather. He was wearing his yellow bike helmet and an old T-shirt that said ARS(e). He had on shorts, and his legs were white and hairy. He was a nerd. Daisy knew this. He was big and freckled and nowhere near as handsome as her real father. She thought about what she had said. She hadn’t known this before—that she could feel sorry for Emily.
“Because,” she said. “Because Emily always has to do everything the right way, you know?” Was that what she felt? Or was she just making this up, to hold John’s attention? She wasn’t sure, actually. “Or maybe because she never gets to be, just, ignored.”
John had bicycled silently next to her for a while.
Daisy felt the wind—it lifted her hair and pushed against her skin. It was dry and smelled of dirt from the vineyards.
“Ignored is good, then?” he finally said.
“Well, then you can do whatever you want. Nobody cares. You can think about things for yourself.”
He dropped back and rode behind her again.
In the fields Daisy could see clusters of workers between the rows of vines. The harvest was just starting, and the Mexicans were suddenly everywhere—working in the fields, walking in groups down the sidewalks in town, sleeping at night in cars pulled off at the sides of quiet lanes. As you passed them on the street, as you walked by the park where they gathered in the hot afternoons, you could hear their melding voices, the different rhythm of their speech, their laughter. It was a
s though they brought their own world with them, she thought, and when she saw them or heard them, she felt her ordinary world was changed for the moment, made somehow exotic and magical.
John’s voice came from behind her now. “But you know that we care, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she called back. “But I mean, nobody in the world.”
“Ah! Well.” John had laughed then. “Yes.”
THE FALL that John died was beautiful. Daisy couldn’t recall ever having thought such a thing before, ever having noticed a season. Years later, calling it up as an adult, talking about it with Dr. Gerard, trying to figure out what she had been thinking and doing then, she would still be able to remember it sharply—the sound of Spanish, the sense of the work of the harvest, the gondolas and trucks driving past full of grapes, the smell of fermentation you’d suddenly get walking past someone’s shed, the color of the leaves, the cooler nights. The world around her. She remembered that she had the sense of awakening to it, to the world. She was full of hope.
She had started at the high school, and because John encouraged her to, she had applied to the literary magazine; she had signed up for chorus; she had gone to the preliminary tryouts for JV basketball, and was assured a place on the team. These were choices she knew were geeky—Emily, who was a senior now, confirmed this for her (“Can’t you choose just one kind of normal activity?”), but they were what she was good at, what she was interested in. And if the other kids who were interested in those things were also nerdy and geeky, they were kids Daisy felt she understood, kids she had a chance with. She realized that her life in high school was going to be different from Emily’s, but John made her feel all right about this. Made her feel she might be happy.
When John died, Daisy felt it was wrong that they were sent to Mark’s house. She had wanted to stay at home, where John was being mourned by Eva; where, she felt, he might still in some sense be present. They were at Mark’s only two nights and the day between before Eva called and wanted them back, but Daisy felt it as a kind of exile, an exile where they were not supposed to talk about what had just happened—she supposed because of Theo. An exile where life seemed to have rolled on, right over John’s death, where it seemed they were supposed to pretend everything was unchanged.