by Sue Miller
When I came down, Dana looked over at me in the mirror above the fireplace. She was standing alone in the room now—the others had disappeared. Her hair had been cut off to a length of about two or three inches all around her head. Freed from its own weight, it rose in thick waves around her face, waves that still showed the sharp line of the scissors’ path. She turned around. She looked stricken, like a child who has barbered herself and is waiting for her mother’s response.
I crossed the room, lifted my hands to her hair, and touched the ends. Then I ruffled it up, fluffed it this way and that. It was a terrible, cruel haircut, but Dana herself didn’t look bad.
“You need to let me fix the ends,” I said.
“What do you think?” she asked. She turned to herself in the mirror. “Why did I do it?” she whispered.
And I realized, looking at our reflections together, that though no one could miss how badly chopped at the hair was, the cut itself increased Dana’s beauty. Next to her, I—who’d resembled her so closely—looked conventional, merely girlish in my long straight hair. Dana’s bones seemed to have sprung free from some pull; their Slavic force announced itself.
“It’s going to be fine,” I told her. Her eyes were wide in fear. “It’s going to be better than fine,” I said. “Wait up for me. I know. Wash it and wait up for me. I’ll even it out.”
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
“Dana, did you hear me? You’re going to look great.”
“Am I?” she said. And then she turned suddenly. “Oh, look!” she cried. “Here it is, all my hair!” She’d gathered it and piled it on the wooden box between the couches. “Maybe I should try to glue it back on! Maybe I can weave a toupee!” She laughed fiercely. Then she looked at me. “No, seriously,” she said. “Would you like a lock of it?”
Before I thought, I answered, “God, what for? No!”
And then I saw she’d meant it, though she looked more puzzled than hurt by my answer. “Oh!” she said. “Well, I just thought maybe.”
Sara and I were going to be the only two there for Christmas dinner. Dana was in Chicopee, John in Chicago with his parents. (Within a week or so of his return he would move out, though Sara knew nothing of this yet. I had guessed at the possibility, since I was the witness to the furtive comings and goings of the new woman by day.) Duncan had flown to the West Coast on a red-eye special to spend the holidays with his girlfriend, Larry had gone to Marlborough Street with all the enthusiasm of someone about to have a lethal injection, and Eli was working but planned to join us later for dessert.
Sara and I each had only the day itself off, but in addition, neither of us had anyplace to go. Sara was estranged from her parents, wealthy San Franciscans; and Licia Stead’s parents were, of course, dead. We had planned the meal carefully, our way of staying cheerful about all this. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, peas—frozen, of course—and, at Sara’s insistence, creamed onions. “You cannot have Christmas dinner without creamed onions.” We had stayed up late the night before, baking and decorating cookies for dessert. We’d decorated the living room, too, with paper chains we’d made and strung around the walls. We’d wanted a tree but were appalled to discover how expensive one would be.
From time to time through the day’s preparations, I’d been overwhelmed by an unaccountable homesickness, and after we’d put the bird in to roast, I went to the upstairs hall and called my mother. It was about noon. Her dinner, if she was having one, wouldn’t start for several hours. After five or six rings, she answered, sounding far away and therefore old and weak.
“Mother?” I said. “It’s Jo.”
“Josie!” Her voice rang out with a pure surprise, even joy, that unexpectedly made my throat cotton, made me sorry I hadn’t written her a second time and reassured her that I was all right.
When she spoke again, she’d composed herself. Her voice was dry. “Well, I suppose I should say ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
“Well, that’s why I called, Mother. To say Merry Christmas to you.” I had composed myself too. “And I wondered how you are. What are you doing? For Christmas?” I asked, as though this were the kind of question that existed between us.
“Oh, Jo.” She didn’t want to make small talk with me and this made her sound irritated. “Well, your brother’s here,” she finally said, grudgingly.
“Nice,” I said. “And the kids?”
“Yes. Of course, Jo.”
“Nice. Sounds like fun.”
She didn’t answer.
“Tell me how you are, Mom.”
“I don’t want to, Josie. I’m too mad at you, if you want to know the truth.”
“Well, that tells me something about how you are.” The wires between us fogged and ticked.
Finally she said, “When are you going home? What you’re doing isn’t right.”
“But I need to do it anyway.”
She made a snorting sound. “There’s needing things and there’s wanting things, and you’re mixing up the two.”
I didn’t answer for a moment. Then I said, “I called to wish you Merry Christmas, Mom.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear your voice. I’m glad to know you’re alive. But I tell you what, Jo—I don’t want you to call me again until you’re back at home, where you belong. That’s just the way I feel.”
“Over and out,” I said. I was angry, too, now.
“Goodbye, then, Josie.”
“Bye, Mom.”
I sat in the upstairs hall for some minutes. Sara was singing carols in the kitchen. I’d noted a tendency with her to drift toward the ones in a minor key—“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”—or to the later, sadder, and more obscure verses of familiar ones: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dyyyyyying, / Sealed in a stone-cold tomb.”
What was I smelling? Sage, rosemary for remembrance, the nostalgic herbs of family meals, of feasts of celebration with others. I felt a wave of the purest self-pity. Tears rose in my throat. And then I made myself think it: I had chosen this, I had wanted it. It was I who was hurting others in my life, not the other way around. “I, I, I, I, I, I, I,” I whispered savagely. Downstairs, I heard Sara say, “Whoops!” and then, almost simultaneously, a loud, wet-sounding crash.
We finished eating about three-thirty, finished cleaning up sometime after four. We played a game of Scrabble and were almost done when Eli got home. He helped us set the table again, for dessert. While we were still sitting there with cookies and coffee, Larry arrived, loud and cheerful and smelling of “postprandial cigars,” as he called them. He was carrying a liquor carton, in which he had wine and ice cream and most of a pumpkin pie. The wine was real, in bottles, not jugs. We searched everywhere, but there was no corkscrew. Larry remembered: he had a Swiss army knife in his room, with, he thought, a tiny corkscrew on one end. He ran up and got it, and indeed, it did have a tiny, inadequate-looking curlicue you could unfold from its red body.
On its first pass it tore out, shredding the cork. The second time it had more purchase, and it slowly lifted up what was left of the cork. We cheered. We poured the wine into our odd collection of glasses and moved to the living room, making trips back for the ice cream, the cookies, the pie. Sara brought candles in, and she set them everywhere—on the fake mantel, on the wooden box, on the windowsills, on the floor. We turned off the lights. Larry put on one of his records, a Creole mass. The wine was thick and soft, unlike any I’d ever tasted. The room glowed. The music was joyous. We compared Christmas notes. The creamed onion fiasco here, the drunken uncle on Marlborough Street. Eli’s boss turning up late last night with expensive champagne tor everyone still working.
I asked, for once, and Eli explained what he was working on. As he spoke, he seemed astonishingly relaxed and easy with himself. Excited, actually, and very patient. He’d be a good teacher, I thought. He used a metaphor in his explanation about seeing things clearly for the first time—about making a scientific discovery, I suppose—that I still remember. He said it was like the momen
t when you know you are in love, and you suddenly understand what all the feelings and the questions are about, what universe they connect you to. We opened another bottle of the good wine, the music shifted to the blues. Sara smoked some dope. My mother seemed very far away.
At around eleven, the front door opened. We all looked over. Dana appeared in the hall doorway, bundled up and smiling at us. Her cheeks and nose were fiery red. “Did you know it was snowing out?” she cried. “It’s beautiful!” And indeed, there were white flakes resting in the thick hair that curled around her face.
“Oh, Dana!” Sara cried. “I didn’t think you were . . .” She frowned. “Interested. In snow.”
Dana laughed and pointed a mittened hand at Sara. “Think again,” she said. “If you dare.” She came and sat on the arm of one of the couches. “This looks so nice,” she said. And then she noticed the food. “Oh! Cookies. Oh, boy!”
“And we have this wonderful wine from Larry,” I said. “Get a glass.”
“I’ll get it.” Eli stood up. “Does anyone want more ice cream?” he asked from the kitchen doorway.
“Me!” Dana called. She’d gone back into the hall to take off her coat.
She entered again, to Sara’s evident puzzlement—her face fell openly, stupidly, into confusion: hadn’t Dana already just arrived?—and flopped deeply into one of the couches. “Guys, guys, guys!” she said. Eli set a glass down in front of her and began to pour some wine. She rubbed her hands together. “It’s so good, you can’t imagine, to be home.”
There’d been a January thaw the week before, three days of weather in the fifties and low sixties, followed by two days of rain. The snow melted to granular patches and then washed away, and all the bits of paper and trash, the nameless grayish stuff that had endured the winter, reappeared. But you could smell earth, dirt, for the first time in months. On the sidewalk in front of our house, a child’s blue mitten resurfaced, and I had laid it on the fire hydrant.
Now it was frozen there, gripping the bolt on the top. The ground had turned rock hard again, the salted streets were rimed cheerlessly white. It was nearly ten below zero.
Tuesday was normally a slow night anyway, but on this frigid Tuesday I had only two tables at ten o’clock, couples slowly drinking beer and playing the jukebox. Four guys at the bar. No street traffic, except every now and then some sexless, bundled form moving by fast, its breath pluming fiercely. Cappy sent me home.
I passed only two people on the way, both hurrying—scurrying, really, just as I was—to get to someplace warm. The last block or so, I actually did a little mincing run, trying to speed my pace but at the same time hold my body heat inside my coat.
Lights were on downstairs, I saw. Larry’s car was not in the driveway. I slammed the door behind me and stood in the front hall, moaning for a minute with each panting breath. When I was finally able to relax a little, I pulled my hat off, then my mittens, and stuffed them in the pockets of my coat. I called out, “Hello-o-o!” There was a funny house noise from the kitchen, but for the rest, everything was still. I remembered that Larry and Sara had talked about going to a movie. Duncan would still be working, Eli at the lab, no doubt. I unwound my scarf and draped it on one of the empty hooks.
I had just bent over to start to unlace my boots when I heard a sigh from the living room, a long, slightly guttural sigh of what sounded like the deepest weariness. “Hello?” I called again. No answer.
With the laces of one boot dangling, the plastic tips clicking lightly on the wooden floor, I stepped forward, around the corner into the living room doorway.
Dana lay wedged on her side against the couch. Blood was everywhere—pooled under her, smeared on the floor. Her bare feet, stretched toward me, were printed with blood on their dirty white soles. I made a noise. Dana was utterly still, her hands relaxed open. I crossed to her, I bent down. “Dana,” I whispered. “Dana!” I knelt and took her by the shoulders, moved her slightly. Her head rolled back, flat, and I saw that her cheek was deeply cut. I reached to her face, and my fingers came away wet, red. Dana’s skin was gray, a waxy gray, her eyes partly open. Blood sat in her mouth, outlining her teeth. I saw that her shirt was coarsely slicked red, that there were edges of torn fabric and skin like opened mouths, here on her chest, here on her rib cage. But she was warm, the blood was warm and sticky.
I was holding her face. No breath, no movement, the horrible color with all the bright blood. I was kneeling in it, Dana’s blood. And what I was somehow thinking was that she was alive, she was still alive—I’d heard her, hadn’t I? She was warm to my touch, she was warm, and she just needed air. She needed my breath, and she would be alive again. I bent forward, closed her nostrils with my fingers, put my mouth on Dana’s, blew. And heard—a sound I would never forget, as I would never forget that one long sigh, Dana’s final breath—the wet bubbling of my own breath pushing out from the slice in Dana’s cheek. I rocked back in horror. Then, after a few seconds, I leaned forward again and shook her gently, as I would later shake my daughters from deep sleep. She wobbled limply, loose as a doll.
At that moment the house made a sharp noise, and I was abruptly in a terror of recognition: someone had done this, some person! I half stood, to flee, then stopped. I couldn’t leave Dana here! Not if she was alive. I scrambled back and reached for her. I was making some kind of steady, crazy noise that I could hear as though it came from an animal separate from me.
But Dana’s weight was appalling, slippery and utterly, leadenly, resistant. I dragged her no more than a few feet, and then my panic was suddenly absolute and selfish. I let Dana go, I heard her head thunk on the wooden floor. I was half crawling, then I managed to stand and run, grabbing the doorframe to make a wide turn into the front hall, caroming off the post at the bottom of the stairs, clutching at the front doorknob.
Outside, my own raw noise in the cold still night increased my terror. I ran toward a porch light across the street. I fell once on the sidewalk, then again on the wooden stairs going up. I grabbed the door, rattling it, turning the knob. It was locked. I banged on the glass panel, on the wood. I found the bell, but even before I rang it, a face appeared in the glass. A woman’s. It opened in horror and then disappeared. Then a man was there, an old man, scared too. But he opened the door, and I stepped in and reached for him. My hands left blood on his shirt, and I felt him try to pull away, but I held him tight until my noises stopped and I could frame words. And then I said, “Help. Help us,” and started to cry.
CHAPTER
5
By the time they decided to take me back across the street, there were perhaps ten police cars out there, angled wildly this way and that. Their headlights were on, and the whirling beams on their roofs strobed the blank houses with hectic light. One was parked in our driveway, one had simply driven up onto the front lawn. Its two front doors were hanging open.
I’d been talking for what felt like hours at this point to different policemen at the Davises’ across the street. First to the one who’d responded to our emergency call. Then, after a while, to someone not in uniform, who was gentle but “needed,” as he said, to hear me explain everything once more. And then explain it again. Things I couldn’t remember: What time, exactly, did I leave Red Brown’s? What kind of noise did I think I heard in the kitchen? What had Dana said earlier about her plans for the evening? And then things I couldn’t begin to focus on: Did she have any enemies? Had she fought recently with anyone?
Now this same policeman—Connor was his name, Detective Connor—needed me to come back across the street. He wanted me to look around, to see if anything was missing. He wanted me to show him how she’d been lying, where she’d been lying, before I moved her.
“You okay, hon?” he asked. I was following him. His shoes made a scuffing sound on the gritty, frozen street. The Davises were standing behind the glass pane of their door, watching us. From one car or another you could hear the muffled squawk of a radio transmission.
“Yes,�
� I said.
“So . . . you come up here, right?” he said.
We had crossed the lawn and mounted the stairs. We were standing on the porch now. His breath smoked out of his mouth and nose under the porch light someone had turned on. He wasn’t wearing a coat, just a sports jacket, and looking at him made me feel even colder than I was. “You don’t see anybody in the living room.” He gestured at the lighted windows, where it was as crowded as a party now, with policemen both in and out of uniform moving around.
I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“So you unlock the door, right?” He made a gesture with his hands at the door, showing me what I had done.
“No.” I shook my head again. “No, it wasn’t locked.”
“It wasn’t locked? It was open? The door?” His face was round and slightly simian and, now, surprised-looking.
“No, it was shut, but it just wasn’t locked. We never locked it.”
He made a sharp noise to himself. “Okay, so you never locked it.” And then he looked at me. “Never locked the back door either?”
I shook my head. No, I whispered.
He grimaced. He had sandy, curly hair, cut short but for the sideburns. “Okay, so you open the door.” And he did. The noise floated out into the night. Voices. Laughter, which shocked me. “And you come in.” He let me pass in front of him, shut the door behind us.
He touched my shoulder gently. “Don’t move, hon,” he said, and walked away from me, to the back of the house. I could hear him talking in the kitchen, talking to several other people. As he came out again and crossed the living room toward me, he called, “The back door either,” and someone in the kitchen clearly said, “Mother of God.”