by Sue Miller
The last treats I gave out were an orange and two bananas, to three boys who’d left their unmuffled car idling deafeningly at the curb while they came up the walk. “Treat,” they grunted in almost bored unison when I opened the door. There was a little silence when I handed the fruit over into their bare hands—they had no bags, of course. I was glad for my mask, for the distance it created between us.
“A banana,” one of them said. “Is this some kind of fucking joke or something?”
“Trick!” I squealed in Olive Oyl’s high-pitched voice, and shut the door quickly.
I blew the candles out after that, and there were no more visitors.
When Daniel came home at ten, I tried to amuse him with this story, standing in the bathroom doorway as he brushed his teeth. “Whooo,” he said carefully, his mouth full of white foam.
I had thought we might talk that night, but he was tired, and we went to bed almost right away, without talking, without making love. I lay awake for a while, listening to his damp breathing, to the cars and voices in the distance, to the occasional raucous shouting, which might have signaled a trick for the adults to clean up in the morning—eggs or soap, or toilet paper wrapped around a tree.
The next day, Saturday, when Beattie called me from the exam room to the phone, she whispered dramatically, “It’s that Jean Bennett again.” As I followed her down the back hall, I realized by the rush of disappointment I was feeling that I’d been hoping for Eli—to see him, to talk with him. That had been part of the arc of expectation I’d ridden through the long week: on Saturday, my other life would come back to me.
Jean Bennett wanted to report on Arthur. Her voice sounded resigned. I heard in it, too, as I hadn’t when she was in my office, that she was from the Midwest. “No better at all,” she was saying. “Though he seems relaxed. In fact, he seems happy, poor old guy.”
“Well, I’m not surprised, honestly. I’m very sorry, though.”
“Yes. Anyway. My husband—Eli—said to tell you he’ll try to see you, early next week, he thinks. He had to stay on in San Francisco for the weekend. But he’ll come in Tuesday, most likely. To figure things out. I told him I didn’t want to be in charge, nor did I want to be translating from you to him. He said he’d call, to let you know exactly, and to see what will work with you, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“And in the meantime, should I just keep on with the steroids and stuff?”
“Yes, let’s do the whole round, just in case. And if the Valium is keeping him mellow, I’d stick with that too.”
“Yes,” she said.
I asked her if she needed a refill. She checked. She didn’t, if Eli really could see me Tuesday, so we agreed to wait and said goodbye.
After I hung up, I felt the weight of my disappointment—an empty feeling. I thought about it as I worked through the afternoon. What had I been imagining? Surely, when he came in, Eli and I would have talked mostly about Arthur, after all. But eventually, I thought, eventually we would have come to Dana. Dana, and who we were then, and all that had happened. Surely that was so, difficult as it was to imagine how we would begin. Remember the day after Dana was killed, when you got sick to your stomach because of all the blood? Remember the way the police went after Duncan? Remember how it felt to be the ones left alive?
And now that it would all have to wait, I discovered how impatient I was.
“Is it too late to talk?”
Daniel had left the kitchen right after we’d cleaned up, gone back to his study for a while. When he returned, he’d gotten immediately into bed. Now he was staring blankly, an opened book lying on the quilt that covered him. The light fell across his chest and over his hands on the sheet. He looked peculiarly like an invalid, which somehow irritated me. “I’m pretty tired,” he said.
“But I thought we would, tonight.”
“I’m sorry.” He’d come late to dinner, too, after I’d called over to the barn several times. He was preoccupied, he said, about his sermon.
“It’s just I’ve been alone with this all week.” I was standing at the foot of the bed, trying not to sound impatient.
“Alone with what?” He was frowning.
“With Dana’s death. With Eli’s coming back.”
“Oh, that.” He nodded. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That.
“Oh, that.” I tried to sound amused.
“I’m sorry. It’s just . . . it seems, in the context of all this”—his hand lifted—“so . . . remote.”
Now I nodded. I nodded and nodded, and then I left the room. I moved through the house, turning off lights. I came back to the bedroom doorway. He was reading. At any rate, he was holding the book upright. I said, “This is exactly what pisses me off about you, Daniel.”
He lowered his book. He took his glasses off and looked at me. I was leaned against the doorframe, arms folded. “I don’t think I knew this, Jo—that there’s something that pisses you off about me. As in all the time, I assume.”
“Well, there is.”
He sighed. He looked away. He looked back at me. He was letting me know how tired he was. His voice, when it came, was patient and ministerial. “And is this the context in which you want to discuss it?”
“No. I’m sorry. Of course you’re right.” I hated that voice. I hated being talked to like that. “It isn’t the context. You win.”
“Oh, now come on, Joey.”
“No. No, you’re right.” I went to our bathroom, an odd jury-rigged space off the hall where the front stairs had once been. I used the toilet, I brushed my teeth and washed my face. I came back into the bedroom and undressed, hanging my clothes on the hooks. Daniel was watching me now, the book set down.
Finally he said, “Why do you think you’re so upset about Eli? About Dana?”
I pulled on my T-shirt. I turned to him. I tried to keep my voice steady and reasonable. “Daniel, why not? It’s this horrible, violent thing in my past that is part of who I am, and of how I got to be who I am, and I live with it all the time in some faraway sense, and now it’s here, it’s in my life again.” My voice had risen.
There was a short silence, and then he said, “I didn’t know, either, that you lived with it all the time.” His tone weighted the words, and I understood that he thought I was being melodramatic.
“Oh, Daniel, you know what I mean.”
“I don’t, I’m afraid.”
“ ‘I’m afraid,’ ” I mocked.
His skin seemed to tighten. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” he said. “When we’re not so tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Right,” he said, and he turned out his light. “Good night.”
Being plunged into darkness—at his whim, I thought—felt like being slapped. I had to force myself to breathe evenly. I shut the bedroom door behind me. I paced the house frantically, Bailey and Allie behind me. Tears seemed to jolt from my eyes.
In the kitchen, everything was tidy and still in the green glow of the appliances’ digital clocks. Someone coming in here would think this was a lovingly ordered household, a place of peace and concord. I hate this, I thought. I hate my life. I stood with my hands on an old bowl left to dry on the kitchen sink. Its shape and the raised ceramic grapes on its side were utterly familiar under my fingers. I could smash this. I would wreck things. Bailey moaned in worry behind me. Why hadn’t I gone to bed? Why was I roaming the dark house? Why wasn’t I moving now? Why was I weeping?
I went to the kitchen door and opened it. The rain that had threatened and spit off and on through the day had started in earnest now. It made a steady rustling noise on the dry leaves that had fallen all week in the yard. The cool air blew wet through the screen onto my face, onto my bare arms and legs. I stood there until I was shivering, until finally I wanted to dry my tears and find the warmth of bed.
Daniel was gone when I woke. The steady sound of the rain had kept me falling in and out of sleep until nearly ten. In the bathroom mirror, my
eyes were swollen from crying. I ran the cold water until it numbed my fingers, and then I filled the bowl. I held my hair back and bent over, pushing my face in. I opened my eyes wide and saw the clear blue-white of the basin through water. I stayed there until my cheekbones felt like cracking from the cold. My dripping face, when I stood up, was a brilliant deep pink. I thought, I’ll go to church.
Religion had not been a part of my upbringing, although, since it was a kind of social requirement, as a little girl I went semi-regularly to church with my mother. But my father, man of science as he saw himself, thought faith was a childish comfort for the weak, and this is what I came to feel, too, probably mostly in order to be more grown up, more like him. When I fell in love with Daniel, then, I wasn’t sure what my feelings would be about his work or about my own religious impulses. I was very moved on the rare occasions when I heard him preach—he was only a part-time, and very assistant, pastor in those days. I think that early on I mistook this feeling in myself for incipient faith and hoped it would grow, that Daniel and I would have this in common.
But as I learned to separate my pride in and love for him from what I did or didn’t feel about the church, I saw that this wasn’t going to happen. And what’s more, my work, and then the girls, kept me from any kind of regular attendance. By the time he got his first church, Daniel and I understood enough about each other to make it clear to the search committee that they could not expect to be getting a traditional minister’s wife in me.
That had remained our pattern in the two other churches he’d taken. I did what I could to support him, I made our home a part of his ministry, but I attended church only sporadically and I did not perform any role in its life. Fortunately it turned out that this was not as problematic as it had seemed at one time it might be; more and more as wives of ministers worked, and as ministers themselves were women with working husbands, the church used assistant pastors and lay people to perform those functions anyway. I know my not attending church was noted—at any rate, my occasional appearances were the trigger for hearty chuckles and jokes. (“Well, well, I guess this is gonna be one hell of a sermon.”) But I don’t think many people took offense at my removal from the church’s life. They were used to it by now.
Today I felt my attendance would be a gesture of conciliation after our minor ugliness to each other the night before. A way of apologizing, of merging our lives again. I suppose also I was seeking to see Daniel at his best—as a means of kindling my admiration for him, of letting what was finest in him touch me, stir me, call up all my love.
The rain was steady as I drove over. A mist still sat in the low parts of the fields, where the grass was turning yellow-brown. Ahead of me most of the way was a car that carried four older women wearing hats, but they drove on when I turned off at the green where Daniel’s church was. Another town, another church, for them.
I hadn’t brought an umbrella, so after I’d parked I half walked, half ran through the rain, trying to favor my good hip. The church doors stood open, and I stopped in the narthex to take my coat off and shake it out. I entered the nave and moved to a pew about two-thirds of the way down, just at the edge of the fuller rows. I slid in and sat down. I bent my head and pretended to pray so I wouldn’t have to meet anyone’s eye and nod or smile. I could hear the little wave of interest and curiosity move across the few pews nearest me—hear it as the lightest hiss of whispered information, as a rustle of fabric on skin when the bodies turned slightly to take me in. I looked down at my hands, clasped in my lap—how bony they’d become!—and listened to the depressive meandering of the organ. The rain was a drumming on the high sloped roof, a moving beaded silver on the clear glass windows.
The organ focused in briefly on a melody and then stopped. Daniel rose from his invisible seat behind the pulpit, a slender man made somehow massive by the full black robe. He said, “Let us pray.” And with the words “Almighty God,” I gave myself over to it again, to the world whose beautiful ancient rituals he believed in and I sometimes yearned for. I rose, I sat, I opened my hymnal with the others. I recited the prayers and confessions, just another member of the congregation.
There was a moment, though, when I knew Daniel recognized me, when he realized I was there. He made no motion, gave no sign, but there was a kind of sharpening of his attention, which I felt connecting us. After that he could look away, or he could look directly at me, but it didn’t matter. I felt that every gesture and word was meant for me, without excluding any of the others. I was glad I’d worn the dress I had, a draped gray silk with a white collar, which he loved.
When Daniel stood for the sermon, he surveyed the room and then he smiled. “A belated happy Halloween,” he said. There was that polite titter which greets anything even approaching humor from the minister.
He often started this way, talking casually: today telling an anecdote, an anecdote about me. “At our house,” he said, “we ran out of treats.” His eyes had swung to me, and they rested there as he continued. The tough guys were there, and the bananas. Not the obscenity, though, and his gentle smile apologized to me for the censorship.
After this, information: he talked about the history of Halloween, the conflation of pagan rites with the celebration of All Saints’ Day. Which this Sunday was, he pointed out. He defined it, talked about its traditions. The drumming of the rain on the roof intensified and slowed as he spoke. He read again parts of the scripture lessons, a passage from the Old Testament about Israel living in safety in a land of grain and wine, “where the heavens drop down dew.” He read from the passage he’d selected from Revelation, pointing out the startling specificity of the promises, the beauty and safety of the twelve-gated city, coming at last to the magical lines I looked up much later: “And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass . . . its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.”
He quoted next from hymns, from popular culture, pointing out the various images of heaven, of eternal life, that surround us daily. He talked about the way we construct our ideas of an afterlife from all these promises, the way we borrow this language to console ourselves and others when someone dies, when we lose our private saints, our household saints.
“And yet,” he said, and paused. “And yet it seems these images, this language, have lost their power to console.” And he called up for the congregation his grandmother, a time she took him in her confidence to tell him that though she’d once believed she would meet her husband and all her dear departed friends after death—that they would all be in heaven together—she no longer did so. She no longer even knew, she said to him, where they’d gone.
I’d met his grandmother a few times in her great old age, a tall, skinny woman with a low-slung bosom, dressed for company whenever we visited in the same ancient, shiny navy blue dress. She had let Cassie rest on her lap while she rocked and talked to us one of those times, and after Cass climbed down and toddled off, she leaned forward conspiratorially and said, “That one is full of the devil.” And I’d felt an unfamiliar clutch of fear, as if a fairy-tale witch had cast a spell on my child.
“If my grandmother,” Daniel was saying now, “so well schooled in the Bible, so instinctive a believer, so surrounded by old-fashioned faith, came to question these promises, who among us in this more secular world can believe anymore in such consolations?” He shook his head. “No, most of us, if we believe the Bible at all about eternal life, believe it purely as metaphor. It must be something like a land of milk and honey. It is like a twelve-gated city. It will be as though we experienced shade and light all at once, and the absence of night and hunger and thirst and pain.”
But even this has no power for most people. The little child, he said, whose parent dies cannot conceive an afterlife, even through metaphors. “And why should such a vision console someone whose feeling is, ‘I want my mommy. Bring me back my mommy’? Whose question is, ‘Where is
she now?’ ” Most of us are like that child in the face of the death of someone we love, he said. Inconsolable, yearning, in a pain that feels permanent, that feels it will always be a part of who we are.
“But pain may be a gift to us. To us, and to that child. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory’s first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.”
His speech had become more rhythmic along the way, something the girls used to tease him about. With their noses for hypocrisy, for falsehood, they didn’t like him to be other than their Daniel. Bogus, they called any way of talking not his own. And from this they developed a dismissive name for any preacher who seemed to specialize in a false tone in the pulpit—a bogue. Said with flippant contempt: “What a bogue he was!”
But I felt a breathlessness, hearing it now, knowing he was drawing toward his point. He raised his arm, and the sleeve fell darkly away. “We pity the child who cries out,” he intoned. “Perhaps we should pity more the younger child who doesn’t. Who cannot know his loss, who won’t remember.”
He turned. The light glinted on his glasses. “For there will come a time when the lucky child who felt enough to weep then will at last be able to smile and say, ‘Remember when Mommy read me those stories, remember when she danced, remember when she made my costume.’ When the friend who thought she would never recover from grief, when the husband or wife who thought his own life was over, will cease to cry, will be able to take pleasure in saying: ‘Remember how she used to lean her head back when she laughed?’ ‘Remember how he loved to garden, out there way past the last frost?’ ‘Remember when she cut all her hair off and was so sorry?’ ”