by Sue Miller
She wants her children, Eva thinks.
No, that’s not right; the one she wants is Theo. Not Daisy, she realizes. Thinking of her daughter, Eva feels the no in herself, the defeat. Enormous Daisy. Sullen. Needy. Sullen because needy. She reaches for the phone and punches in Gracie’s number.
She put Theo down a little while ago, Gracie says. “But I bet he’s still awake. If he is, I’ll be right over with him. So here’s the deal: if you don’t hear from me within a few minutes, I’m on my way. And I’ll call back if he’s konked out.”
While she waits, Eva goes into her own room, her and John’s room, and changes her clothes, unpacks her bag. She takes her toiletries into their bathroom and spreads them out. How much space she has, without John’s things! She is tired of space.
She is down in the kitchen, seeing what there is in the refrigerator, when the front door opens and Gracie halloos.
By the time Eva steps across the tiled floor to the hallway door, Theo is there, running toward her in bare feet. She bends down and scoops him up, feels his legs circle her waist, his short arms twine her neck. He smells of an unfamiliar soap. She rains kisses on his face, and swings their bodies together from side to side. Gracie is beaming at them from down the hall.
When she finally sets Theo down, he jumps up and down a few times, in excitement. He’s wearing short seersucker pajamas printed with football helmets. He says, “What did you bring me, Mumma?”
Ah! Nothing!
She’s brought him nothing!
And she has a sense of herself suddenly, as the child, the one who has grabbed at him, wanted something from him, while offering him only her hungry self in return. She feels ashamed. Everyone knows about the gift after the trip away. She knows about it. She knows better.
But when she says they’re going to get something special tomorrow, he doesn’t protest, and she turns to thank Gracie, who’s still standing in the hallway by the opened front door.
Once Gracie has left, she carries Theo upstairs to bed. She sits next to him and sings softly until he falls asleep, suddenly and deeply, poleaxed by fatigue. She sits a long time after that, watching his still face, which seems almost returned to infancy, softened as it is in sleep, his eyelids and mouth slightly opened.
She remembers one night when John was still alive, after Theo had climbed into bed with them, his waking her by saying aloud in his sleep, “Where I put it? Where that goddam piggie is?” The phrase was so incongruous, so sweetly childish in its focus, and casually, profanely adult in its language, that she had felt a complicated series of emotions in response—surprise, amusement, joy; and then sorrow, sorrow at the thought of his adulthood, its inevitability and the loss it would bring.
She had intended to sleep next to Theo tonight—that was in her mind, she realizes now, when she called Gracie: curling up with his thin wiry body, hearing him mutter and breathe in the night.
Why, then, has she carried him to his own bed? Why does she go back down the hall to her room now, and start to undress there, to get ready to lie down alone?
It’s something about not having brought him a present, she thinks, about seeing herself as so in need of him, as so like a greedy child herself in that. She had felt exposed in front of Gracie at that moment, and ashamed of herself.
She can’t go on using Theo for comfort, she tells herself. She needs to let go of him, to have a life—more of a life anyway—in the world.
TWO DAYS LATER, with the sense of doing something self-prescribed as being good for herself, something almost medicinally necessary, Eva goes upstairs after the dishes are loaded in the dishwasher and calls a man she barely knows, Elliott McCauley, a man whom Gracie has suggested will be good company. Eva asks him if he’d like to meet for dinner sometime in the next few weeks, and he says yes, yes he would.
Chapter Six
THE VALLEY BOOKSTORE is on Main Street in St. Helena, three doors down from the grocery. It’s in essence one large open room, with a comfortable office and a lavatory down a little hallway at the back. There are posters on the walls, enlargements of famous photographs of famous writers, a few more women than men: Colette looking up from her desk with her steel-wool hair, her black mouth prissed. Toni Morrison, mammoth and fierce in an elegant dress and graying dreadlocks. A blurry portrait of an unexpectedly tentative-looking Willa Cather. And perhaps a dozen or so more, including the dramatically lighted Hemingway by Karsh, and a smiling photo of Saul Bellow as a younger man, wearing a rakish hat.
The register where Daisy presides is a U-shaped counter that bumps out from the wall into the room halfway back in this space. It’s slightly elevated, and Daisy thinks of it as being like a throne, or a pulpit. From here she can’t see everywhere in the store—the arrangement of the shelves makes what Eva calls “reading nooks,” in which she’s placed comfortable chairs—but even so Daisy can always tell when someone is there because the weathered, unfinished floorboards creak loudly at the lightest step.
Daisy is alone for the next two hours, the end-of-afternoon hours. Eva has gone to pick Theo up and to get dinner organized, and Callie, one of the women who works in the store, left at three. This is part of the deal, part of the reason Daisy was hired for the summer—to give Callie more time to be with her kids. But it’s okay, because Daisy likes Callie. Callie was the one who trained her while Eva was away taking Emily to her exchange program, and Daisy liked the sense of being an equal that Callie seemed to allow her. She liked Callie’s patience in explaining the procedures and routine. And she liked it when Callie occasionally seemed to include her in her little asides at Eva’s expense: “Now this isn’t quite the way your mom likes it done when she’s around, but she runs what you might call a really tight ship. The rest of us mere mortals find this works just as well.”
These late-afternoon hours—the hours Daisy works alone until Eva comes with Theo to close up and take her home—are usually slow ones. Most of the tourists have cleared out, driving back to the city or returning to hotels in the valley to rest and get ready for dinner. The locals usually come in in the morning to buy books, when there’s a chance to gossip; but in any case, by this time of day, they are doing what Eva is doing—picking up kids, shopping, cooking.
Eva has posted a list of chores by the cash register, chores Daisy can do if there’s time on her hands, and Daisy has actually done one of them this afternoon—rearranging all the special-order cards by distributor so they can find the books easily when deliveries come in and quickly call the customers who want them. But she finished that a half an hour ago, and now she’s just sitting on the stool behind the counter, her feet resting on the top shelf under it where there are boxes of desk supplies. She’s alternately watching the pedestrians stroll past the plate-glass window—moving slowly in the searing heat—and tearing at her cuticles, pulling the hard little edges off across the bottom of her nails, sometimes causing a bright drop of blood to rise.
Suddenly she hears voices from the street, loud, braying voices: kids! She looks up. It’s a group of boys, older boys, moving in a staggering group, punching at one another as they pass. Then they’re gone. One thing Daisy is grateful for is that kids her age don’t come into the bookstore. That at least there isn’t that possibility for embarrassment: that she almost certainly will never have to wait on someone she recognizes from high school.
From the back, in the children’s section, she can hear the only customers in the shop, a mother reading a book to the two little girls she brought in with her. Daisy knows this woman—she’s come in three or four times already during Daisy’s shift. She won’t buy anything. She just likes to bring her kids in and read to them. She’s young and pretty and nice to her kids, though sometimes she talks too loudly, too enthusiastically, in that stupid, fake way grown-ups have of interacting with their children: “Wow! The steam shovel book! That’s just about your favorite book in the whole world, isn’t it?!”
But reading, her voice is steady and low. Daisy listens to its m
urmur. It makes her remember the way Eva read to them, to Emily and her, when they were little. She remembers too the way the room felt around them in the house in the vineyards up on the hill, remembers the shiny floor, the couch with the old blue bedspread flung over it, the piney, dry smell of the air coming in the open windows. She can call up the way it was to lean against Eva, to smell her Eva-smell, to feel her arm tense as she got ready to turn the page, and then move under you, so you’d have to shift your weight a little each time. Sometimes if Mark were there, he’d stop and listen too, with a dreamy look on his face, as though he were seeing the things Eva was reading about. As though he were just a kid, like them.
It seems astonishing to her that all that could be gone. That whole life. That Mark is gone, and John too. That she’s here, alone, that these are her hands, her legs—she leans forward and rubs her legs—with this little bit of blackish stubble.
She has shaved her legs for the first time this summer, using Eva’s razor. It was one of the June days when Eva was gone off with Emily back east. Daisy had walked the few blocks over to the house to water the lawn and the plants in the front yard. She didn’t mind this chore. There was something pleasurable in the arc of water in the sun, the way the earth darkened and glistened momentarily under its flow, and then drank and emerged dry again. Daisy even liked the leak from the nozzle, the way the cold water dripped back over her arm, her clothes.
When she was done, she took the mail in and left it on the kitchen island. She went upstairs and wandered through the rooms there, dark because all the shutters were closed. Everything was still and airless and hot, and Daisy was aware of the perspiration wetting her underarms, rolling down her back. She went into Eva’s room and lay on her bed awhile, smelling the light perfume Eva always wore.
She sat up and went to Eva’s dressing table. There were three mirrors facing her, and set on the surface in front of them, a fourth, on a brass base, which magnified her face several times. Daisy looked at her skin closely in the mirror, poked it, squeezed a few whiteheads. Her nostrils seemed immense and hairy. Ugh. She opened Eva’s makeup drawer and tried the black eyeliner. Some gray shadow. Blush.
In the mirror, three dramatic Daisies looked back, darkly glamorous. Pretty!
She could look this way. She could put this makeup on for school this fall and look like this and everyone would notice.
And suddenly, with this notion—the kids at school (when she thought of them she pictured certain pretty girls in her class, girls who ran her class)—the face looking back at her in the mirror looked different. She seemed grotesque to herself, painted, though she was wearing, she knew, no more makeup than all those girls did. Probably less.
She got up and went into the bathroom. She washed her face. The rinse water in the basin was faintly gray, then pink. While she was drying herself with one of the big white towels, she noticed Eva’s razor in a cup on the sink’s wide lip. She opened the medicine chest. There was a tube of something called Rosemary Mint Shaving Cream. Daisy slung a leg up into the sink and ran the water, splashed it on herself. She soaped up with the shaving cream and slowly, carefully, shaved off the fine hairs on her legs. Then she took off her blouse and brassiere and shaved her underarms too. And then, because she hated the way it looked, she decided to shave the dark hair between her legs. She had to chop at it with a scissors first, it was so long. She put the little handfuls of disgusting crinkly hair into the toilet and flushed it away. When she had cut off as much as she could, she shaved down to smooth flesh, the way it had been before, when she was a little girl.
Now she looks out at the store window again and then slides her hand under the waistband of her shorts and feels down there. It’s stubbly too, like her legs—harshly scratchy against her fingertips, and then soft and warm in the middle.
The floorboards creak. The children are getting up, talking. Daisy sits up, begins to stand and reach to put away the special-order cards.
But the mother is carrying a book this time—she’s going to buy it. They all come toward Daisy, their faces shy and lifted, as though she might be proud of them for making this purchase. She says what she’s supposed to, “May I help you with that?,” and the mother hands it over. It’s a book Daisy doesn’t know, a book of lavishly illustrated nursery rhymes. Nothing Eva ever read to them, nothing John had read to Theo—for it was John who read aloud in their new family, sitting in the living room with Theo after supper, while Daisy and Emily did their homework on the dining room table. At first he read just picture books, naming books (“What do we see on this page?”); and then he did the simple stories—good-night stories or the adventures of machines: trains, steam shovels, little cars. Then he read some baby fairy tales; and he and Theo were just beginning Winnie-the-Pooh—though Eva said Theo was too young for Winnie-the-Pooh—when John was killed.
Daisy rings up the book and takes the woman’s credit card. She lays it in the machine and slides the bar across it. The woman signs the bill and Daisy separates the sheets, staples the receipt to the woman’s copy. She asks if they want a bag. No, the older girl says shyly. “You want to carry it, Adrienne?” the mother asks. The girl nods. Daisy hands the book to the little girl, and then the receipt to the mother. The mother puts it into the big straw bag slung from her shoulder.
Daisy watches them leave, the way they move together, the way the girls bump against their mother, the way she leans out over them as she opens the door. They pass almost ceremonially under the arch of her body. The door shuts. Daisy is alone.
She rings the cash register open again to put away the credit card receipt. The drawer slides out. The bills lie in their trays, pinned down under their hinged bars. Daisy lifts the tray, sets the receipt in under it, sets it down again. She stands looking at the denominations for a moment, and then she reaches in and takes a ten and, after a moment’s hesitation, a five. She folds them together and slides them into the pocket of her shorts. Then she shuts the cash drawer and sits down again on her stool to listen to her heart thudding, and to wait for her mother and Theo to come and get her.
DAISY IS A THIEF—why doesn’t it make her feel bad? Why doesn’t it make her feel guilty? It just doesn’t. The money that she took, that she’s continued to take over the hot, dragging weeks of summer, feels somehow hers by right, as though it’s making up for something done to her, some injury.
“Caused by Eva?” her shrink asked. (This was many years later, long after all these events took place, when Daisy was looking back on the things that happened in the year and a half or so after John died and trying to figure out what in all of it was wrong, what was right, trying to figure out why she’d gotten as lost as she had. And what part of being lost was perhaps necessary to finding herself. Or had she found herself? Maybe she’d been rescued from a dangerous fate. She knew most people would think so. She knew in some ways that she ought to think so. That she didn’t was part of what confused her, part of what she was talking about with Dr. Gerard, part of what she was seeking to understand.
“Maybe not exactly caused by Eva,” she said, trying to remember how that earlier Daisy had felt. “But certainly connected to her. She got to weep, she got to be the widow, she got the sympathy.” There was a long silence during which Daisy was looking at the floor, at an elaborate rug that nearly filled the office and was made of every color you could imagine. “And then she seemed to be trying to move on.”
“To live her life,” the shrink said.
After a moment’s pause, Daisy laughed. “Well, yes,” she said. “Unforgivable, wasn’t it?”)
In her bank account, Daisy has her real money, money she’s earned, the money Eva has paid her. But in a box on the floor of her closet, behind a jumble of shoes and possessions she hardly bothers with anymore, she has a shoebox of cash, the cash she’s stolen—small bills, but they add up to just over a hundred dollars. Every week or so she puts more in, and nearly every time she does this, she sits on the floor of her closet and counts it with an exact
ing and murderous pleasure, feeling her sense of isolation and anger increase with each oily bill she adds to the pile. All those years later she could still remember how justified it all felt to her at the time, how somehow earned the money seemed.
So much so that when Theo, who has suddenly become obsessed with money, gets caught pilfering change, Daisy feels no connection to the drama, no pang of recognition or guilt. He took the coins from the purses they always leave lying around, because, as he says, they have so many coins and he doesn’t have enough. Like Daisy, he has hidden his stash, but he hasn’t been as inventive. He has simply put it in the drawer by his bed, where Eva easily found it.
On this July evening, Eva is making him return everything, and Daisy sits, unmoved by his grief, as he tearfully counts out the six quarters and three dimes he stole from her. He has the hiccups, because he’s been crying so hard.
“Now say you’re sorry to your sister,” Eva says. She’s standing in the doorway to Daisy’s room, supervising this punishment. Daisy can tell by her face that she is amused, maybe even charmed, by Theo’s innocent guilt—that this forced confession and compensation are pure theatrics, a ritual Eva must feel is important for Theo’s proper development or something. Daisy’s angry that she’s been forced to be part of it.
You would think that her own thievery, and maybe even her resentment of Eva, would make her capable of saying something kind, something that lets Theo know she doesn’t really care, that he hasn’t done anything so terrible. But something else is at work in Daisy too. Something that makes her mean to Theo. So she waits with an exacting, hard-hearted distance as he says, “I’m very sorry, Daisy.”
After a moment she answers, “Yeah, well. Don’t do it again, is all.”