by Sue Miller
Mary Ellen was suddenly behind me, her hand on my shoulder. “You okay?” she said.
I turned to her. She had her coat on, and big purple boots. She would probably be late to pick up her son at day care. Her broad, pretty face was tense behind her glasses.
“I am. It’s never easy, is it?”
“No,” she said.
“Thanks for staying.”
“You’ve done it for me,” she said. She pulled her hat on, and some mittens. Nothing matched. “Is he a friend?” she asked. She was gesturing at the parking lot. Arthur and Eli were gone.
“Kind of,” I said. “Someone I knew way back when, who just moved here.”
“Beattie said something like that.” She pulled her shoulders square. “Well,” she announced. “I gotta go.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “Go. Go.” I waved her away.
“You’re okay.”
“I really am,” I said.
“Treat yourself when you get home,” she said.
“Thanks, Mary Ellen,” I said.
And then I was alone. I moved around the office slowly, putting a few things away, wiping down my table. I left a note for Ned, explaining that we’d left a little early. I got my coat on.
The air outside was raw, and I was sorry I hadn’t taken the time to get out winter clothes this morning. Gloves anyway, or maybe a hat. Had I not believed in the snow, after yesterday’s warm sunshine? It was still melting now as it landed, but the ground felt icy underfoot. I sat in the car and let it warm up, my breath a pale shadow in front of my face with each exhalation.
The houses along the back roads home were lighted for the most part. Here and there you could see someone—usually a woman—moving around, or the bluish flicker of a TV. Daniel wouldn’t be home yet. Our house would be dark. I pulled up to a red light at the intersection of Bishops Pond Road. If I turned left instead of right here when the light changed to green, I would have only a half mile or so to get to Eli’s house. I imagined the way it would look—massive, many-windowed, many-terraced. I imagined Eli, carrying the box that held Arthur.
Do you do many of these? Eli had asked.
Hundreds by now. Maybe a thousand. Always with a kind of breathlessness at the last moment. A fear of it, I suppose. A fear, of course, that it might not go well, that the animal might keen or howl, as some did, or that the owner might be overwhelmed by grief. But mostly, just a kind of terror of the speed with which it happened once I gave the injection, of how quickly the line between life and death was crossed. I thought of that moment with Arthur, his utter relaxation into death within seconds, my hands on him as he went over. Eli there.
And then I realized that the Eli who floated somewhere close by this image in my mind, the Eli who bent over his dog, was the young Eli, the Eli standing alone on the porch as I pulled away in a cab from the house on Lyman Street. Consciously I tried to focus on the older Eli’s face. And could not quite get it. I realized I was confusing him visually with an old friend of Daniel’s from divinity school, another big, slightly paunchy man who had visited us occasionally over the years when he was on the East Coast.
The light changed, and I turned right, for home. In the headlights, the snow thickened with a dizzying motion. I drove slowly, and after I’d pulled into our driveway and turned the lights off, I sat for a long time in the dark, watching the wet flakes swirl and thinking in a confused overlay of the house on Lyman Street and of putting Arthur down—so that it seemed to me nearly as though I’d done it then, in that world, in that other life.
CHAPTER
8
When I came into the kitchen two days before Thanksgiving, Daniel pointed to the dirty duffel bag, the banged-up guitar case by the back door, and said, “Cass.”
“Where is she?” I asked, still stupid from sleep.
He raised his eyes and pointed his thumb at the ceiling. Upstairs. “Sleeping, I reckon.”
“Did you hear her?” I asked.
“I heard something, but I thought it was just the dogs.”
I poured coffee. “Damn it, why does she do this? I have to go to work.”
“I’ll stay home. I just have calls and letters, and I can do them here.”
“Will you call me when she gets up? Or have her call. Maybe I can weasel home early somehow. Or for lunch or something.”
“She’ll understand.”
“But it’s so familiar!” I pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him at the table. “She doesn’t say when she’s coming, so I can’t be here to welcome her, so she’ll be hurt and I’ll feel bad.” I drank some coffee. “But also set up. Da dah, da dah. And off we go again.”
“Don’t get ahead of everything, Joey. Maybe she’s mellowed.” He was smiling at me.
I looked out the window at the dooryard. No cars but our own. “How’d she get here, I wonder.”
“Somebody must have dropped her off.”
“What time do you think you heard her?”
“I didn’t look. More night than morning, though.”
Allie came and rested her head on my thigh. Good morning. I stroked her fur, absently pulled at a burr stuck in it. “God, I wish I could stay. I’m so excited to see her. I wish I could stay. I wish I were you and you were me.”
“Mmm. Me too. Then you could call all the members of the fund-raising committee.”
“And you could check the stool samples.”
“And you could tell the roofer we’ll have to pay him in installments.”
“And you could catheterize Florence Dicey’s cat.”
He smiled at me. “Horrible lives, aren’t they? Interchangeably and profoundly horrible.”
I couldn’t get away all day. When I arrived home, late in the afternoon, Cass was in the tub—I could hear her singing upstairs over the faint rumble of running water. Daniel had left me a note on the kitchen table, saying he’d be back for dinner briefly at around six, reporting that he and Cass had made chili, suggesting that maybe I could throw a salad together. The table was set for three, the kitchen was neat, the dogs’ bowls were full. The dogs themselves were circling me frantically, and now I stopped to pet each one and then released them into the dark night air. When I flicked the outside light on, it caught their rumps disappearing, the long bushy tails swinging with pleasure as they plunged into the black thicket under the pine trees.
I pried off my boots, hung up my coat, and then climbed the steep painted stairs, pulling on the wooden handrail. Cass’s duffel was open on the floor of her room now, and her clothes were sorted into several messy piles. The bed was made. I leaned against the noisy bathroom door and knocked. “Cass?” I yelled. “Cassie, it’s Mom.”
The water stopped. “Mom?”
“Yes, I’m home.”
“Three secs. Two. I’ll be right down.”
In the kitchen, I poured myself some wine. I rinsed the lettuce and made a dressing. I could hear Cass moving around upstairs. I wanted to go to her, but I felt I’d been instructed not to, told to wait.
Finally I heard her on the stairs. I rushed into the living room and met her as she emerged from the narrow stairwell.
“Darling!” I cried. She was thin, her hair was nearly shaved, but her face was innocent and open in embarrassed pleasure, and she looked pretty. I held her. Bones, bones. How mushy I must feel to her! We rocked together a moment. Then I felt her slight withdrawal. Quickly I released her. “Let me see you. Let me see this incarnation,” I said.
She laughed and twirled around in a charming gesture—but a gesture, too, that let her move farther away from me. Her expression was still perfectly pleasant, but it had somehow closed up. She was much too thin, I saw now. Her jeans hung loosely off her hips and legs, bagged a little at her bottom. Her hair was bluish fuzz on her skull. She had an earring in one eyebrow and a semicircle of a dozen or so more arcing along the outer curve of one ear. She wore a tight orange top, leopard-dotted. Her breasts had gotten nearly flat, her rib cage was clearly outlined. On her
feet were thick, orthopedic-looking black boots. But she had smelled clean and soapy when I held her, her eyes now were bright, and her skin, Daniel’s pale skin, was clear and taut.
“The hair is an adjustment for me, I have to say, but you look great.”
“Well, I had to shave it.” She made a face. “It was so fucked up from the last dye job that I had no choice.” She was wearing dark eye makeup, like kohl, all around her eyes. They looked, as my mother used to say, like two burned holes in a blanket.
We went into the kitchen so I could heat up the chili and pour her some wine. She began to talk, pacing, sipping, finally sitting down at the table. The talk seemed pressured, as though she needed it—a miracle, for silent, sullen Cass. I busied myself putting clean dishes away, wiping counters. I was fearful of coming too close, even of sitting opposite her, fearful of seeming to want more than she was giving. Or of wanting anything at all, really. Cass made you careful.
“I’ve gotten so I really really hate it,” she was saying. “Just the kind of stupid interactions, the way things have to get negotiated. You know, who has power over who, who’s going to decide. But it’s all such crap. Like, decide where to spend the night? I mean, what are the options? Ever? We either have one place or none. And who cares? And it’s, like, once Stellie left”—the other girl in the band—“I was supposed to be, like, everyone’s mother. They were always confiding things. Ugh. Creepy things. Even Raimondo. Who wants to know? I’d tell them. Who wants to know stuff like the girl you once beat up, or the time you made it with a guy, or who followed you into the men’s room and did what to you tonight after the show.”
Sometimes I thought she wanted me to probe—I could feel her eyes slotting over to me after she said something that might have shocked me—but I stayed quiet. I made the most noncommittal of comments, or just mild noises. Olive Oyl on Prozac.
“So I think this is it for me. We have, like, six gigs after Christmas all up and down the coast, and then I’m done with it. I bail.”
It suddenly occurred to me with a kind of yank of the heart—fear? pleasure?—that she might be suggesting she’d like to live at home again. “And then what will you do, you think?”
“New Yawhk!” she cried. “I’m gonna go get famous.” She laughed. “And spit in all their eyes.”
Whose eyes? I wanted to ask. Why? But some part: of me relaxed—my life with Daniel wouldn’t have to change—and then I felt mean because of that.
I was hoping she hadn’t noticed my relief. But she was safely launched in another direction: “See, I met this guy in Washington, and he handles models, sort of drugged-looking models. Not, like, pretty-girl stuff—I mean, it wasn’t like he was coming on to me. But he said he was sure I could do it. I guess I have that certain sordid beauty they want.” She posed suddenly, pouting, pushing her shoulders forward, elongating her arms, deadening her face, and I saw that she was like an ad I’d seen. For what? Underwear, maybe. Perfume. I wasn’t sure.
“My hair should get kind of, like, a little longer, but no problem, it will be by then, and then, if I can just get some cash together, maybe Stellie and I can cut a demo or something. That’s the big dream. The modeling, if that works out, is fine, but it’s more, like, kind of a means to an end.”
“So you got thin for that.”
She laughed roughly. “I got thin, Mother dear, because I haven’t had enough food to eat. Because I’ve stayed up too late doing naughty things.” I could hear that she was pleased to be telling me this, pleased to introduce me to the harsh realities of her life. “But that is why he offered me the job, so I dassn’t fatten up much. We have to keep the home-cooking scene here pretty minimal. We want those bones to stick right out there.” She tapped her clavicles with her purple fingernails.
When Daniel came home I relaxed a bit. He was much easier with her, much more able to ask her things directly. I felt, though, that the version of her life she offered him was different from what she had wanted to show to me. With him she talked about the music she’d written, the limitations of the band, what she thought she might be able to do with Stellie in New York. Once or twice she alluded to something darker, but she didn’t seem to have the desire to shock Daniel, or to wound him, with what was painful to hear about in her life. If that’s what she’d wanted from me.
Was it? I had never known with Cass. And the truth was she probably didn’t know either. When I was most confused by her, it helped me to remember myself at her age—just that egocentric, just that lost, just that uncaring about the pain I might be causing others, because I felt I was in so much pain myself.
After supper, Daniel left and Cass helped me clean up. Then she asked to borrow my car. She wanted to go to the Sidecar, a bar two towns over that featured local bands. “I just want to see what’s happening, see if anyone I know is around. I won’t be late.”
But Daniel was long home from his church group and we were both in bed with the light out when she came in. I listened to her moving slowly through the living room, murmuring to the dogs as she made her way. Their paws clicked wildly on the floor in their dance of excitement. She stumbled on the first step up and said, “Shit!” clearly. The floorboards upstairs creaked and groaned and marked her progress until she’d gotten safely into bed.
I relaxed then, I changed position. I spoke Daniel’s name, barely audibly.
“I’m awake,” he whispered back. “Reminds me of the bad old days. Doesn’t it?”
Yes. Yes, it did. The times when one of the girls was out until dawn and we didn’t know whether to call the police or not. The time when friends had brought Nora home so drunk that she threw up before we could get her to the bathroom. The time when Sadie called from Hadley to say she’d wrecked the car and cut her forehead open. All the times when Daniel and I lay like this, side by side in the dark, unsure, unknowing, scared as children; while the children moved dangerously around in the world, learning to be adults.
The next day, a half day of work for me, Cass offered to go get Sadie at school and to do the shopping I needed done on the way. Both girls came stumbling in with grocery bags just as dusk was falling—and the first few flakes of what was predicted to be a blizzard. They were noisy and cheerful, and their speed and energy and sheer volume reminded me of the happiest days of their adolescence.
We had a light supper—chowder and corn bread, fruit for dessert. After dinner, I got the stuffing ready while Daniel and Sadie made two pies. Cass sat at the table with a glass of wine, disappearing outside occasionally to have a cigarette. We could see her through the kitchen windows under the falling snow, her breath itself as cloudy as smoke, her skull covered by a wool cap, her body huddled against the cold as she drew luxuriantly on the cigarette.
When the pies were in the oven, we all moved to the living room. Cass played us a few of her own songs—gloomy and elliptical, but with complex, even lovely rhyme schemes. It was hard to get a sense of what they might sound like in performance: she kept interrupting herself to tell us what Stellie would be doing now (“She’s going, like, ‘aa-oaah, ah, ah’ ”) or what the bass player would be up to. But when she finished we all applauded, and she flushed and suddenly looked girlish and sweet. Sadie pulled two red tulips out of the pitcher on the table next to her and tossed them to Cassie, who stood to pick them up, pressed them dramatically—elegantly—to what there was of her bosom, and then suddenly curtsied to the floor, showing us fully the smooth, shadowy surface of the top of her head.
Afterward she played some tapes for us, tapes of her band and of a few others she knew. Standing by the tape deck after the first few songs, she started to sway in rhythm, tentatively, then assuredly. Sadie jumped up and joined her. Together they moved around the room, as all three girls used to do occasionally in high school, each lost in a separate, wild response to the beat—Sadie’s more a matter of bouncing, almost leaping, up and down, her arms moving like wings, elbows in the lead; Cass doing a kind of step dance in her clunky boots. They both kept their
eyes nearly closed in pleasure, they wore eager, rapacious smiles. They were showing us something, marking some difference between themselves and us with their loose, beautiful bodies, with their response to the music. I loved to watch them, but it made me sad too.
Both of them were pinked and glistening with sweat when Daniel and I met each other’s eyes and he announced, in the break between two songs, that we were going to walk the dogs and then go to bed.
Cass ran to the tape deck and clicked it off. “No, no, no, let us do it. Sadie, lookit the snow!” She went to the window. We all got up and followed.
Outside, the world had been transformed, all the particular shapes and structures of our yard gentled, humped. Each dark branch of the horse chestnut was outlined in white. The light post wore a jaunty, perfectly balanced cap of it. The snow still fell, slow fat flakes in the windless air. We were silent a moment.
“This is perfect,” Sadie announced then. “God, isn’t it great? I have a holiday and we get snowed in. I ordered this!” she cried.
“I worry about Nor,” I said to Daniel.
“Don’t. It’ll all be plowed by the time she starts out,” he said. “Especially because it’s Thanksgiving.”
“What time is she getting here?” Cass asked. I was standing right behind her. She smelled of wine and tobacco and bath oil, and faintly, too, of perspiration, a salty odor.
“Noony, she thought,” I answered.
“ ‘Noony’?!” Sadie cried. She and Cass looked at each other and grinned. “ ‘Noony,’ ” Sadie repeated. “She said ‘Noony’!”
“What’s so funny about that?”
“It’s the kind of thing you’re always saying, Mom.”
Cass began to sing, moving her splayed hands in stylized punctuation: “Noony. / By the way, it rhymes with moony. / If you’d rather, Georgie Clooney. / But Mom said it: / Noony . . .”
I waved dismissively at them and headed for the bedroom. But I was feeling a kind of sweet delight at their amusement—an amusement Cass would never have indulged on her own. Maybe Sadie could show Cass a way to be occasionally affectionate about my foibles, my failures, instead of always angry. Just as I shut the bedroom door, I thought to yell at them, “And bundle up! You’re all overheated, and vulnerable.”