by Sue Miller
“Well, you won’t later,” I said. And instantly regretted it. I could feel Cass bristle, her eyebrows arched aristocratically.
“Oh, I think I will,” she said coolly. “I have earlier, and I think I will later.”
“Oh, how do you know, Cass?” asked Nora. She was smiling at me and Sadie.
“I know,” Cass said. She turned to me. “See, I’m just not interested in what you and Dad have. In a safe life,” she said. “In sweetness and light.” She made a fist and brought it down on the table. The glasses and dishes jumped, and she smiled. Her lips were still a deep brown-red. “I want things to be hard,” she announced.
“Things will be hard. You don’t have to want them to,” I said.
“Yeah,” Nora said. “Hard is easy to get. It’s when you want things to be good, when you want all sweetness and light, that you understand what’s really hard.” She was the grown-up, talking to the child.
“Well, if you mean boredom is hard, I’d agree with you there.” Cass drew fiercely on the last of her cigarette, her cheeks pulling in, and began to crush it in a coffee saucer. She turned her face away slightly to blow her smoke out.
“What are you suggesting, Cass?” Nora said. Her face was flushed. “That what I wanted with Brian is boring? That Mother’s life with Daddy is boring?”
Cassie’s green eyes flickered from face to face. She nervously pulled another cigarette out of the pack lying on the table and began to tap it. She shrugged suddenly. She was backing away from the argument. “It’s just not for me, that’s all.” She sounded infinitely superior.
“No,” Nora said. “No, you’d rather fuck in the van in some dark alley, with three guys sitting there watching it all.”
There was a long, terrible silence. I could feel Sadie looking quickly from one of us to another.
Finally Cass stood up. She stretched lazily, an unfolding of long bones. “You should try it sometime, Nora. It adds a certain zing. It ain’t boring anyway.” She turned at the door and pointed her unlighted cigarette at her twin. “And by the way, remind me, sweetie, never to confide in you again.”
We heard her shoes clunk across the living room, up the stairs. I looked over at Nora. She looked slapped, white around the eyes. She caught me watching her and turned away quickly. Her chair made a scraping noise as she stood, and two of the sleeping dogs jumped up and swam around her. “She never changes.” Her voice was trembling. “I should never have come home.” And she, too, walked out of the room.
For a long moment Sadie and I sat staring at each other. Her hair was wet and lank with sweat, her makeup had worn off. She looked about ten years old. She raised her eyebrows. “Zowie!” she said.
“Yikes,” I answered. I put my face in my hands and rubbed my eyes. “Maybe both those things are true,” I said. “That Cass will never change and that Nora shouldn’t have come home. Wouldn’t that be awful?”
“Don’t feel bad, Mom. They’ll get over it.” She had a little wine left in her glass, and now she finished it, leaning her head all the way back. I saw the flick of her tongue.
“What were you guys talking about before I so rudely interrupted?”
“Nothing, really. Just the party.” She set the glass down. “Who was cute, who likes who. Et cetera.”
“The chemistry sure hit the fan when I arrived.”
“Well, it always does,” she said cheerfully, as though reassuring me of something.
“It always does?” I cried.
“Yes, you know that.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, it’s ’cause they’re both so jealous about you. That’s my theory anyway.”
“Of me?”
“Duh, Mom. Yes, of you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re so . . .” She tilted her head, made a face. “Elusive. You know, Dad is just always there, the same, steady as a rock and all like that. And you . . . you’re different.”
“You find me elusive.”
“Well, I don’t, but that’s me. They do. But it’s, like, neither of them can admit it? So they kind of vie for you. Or with each other. Or something.”
I picked up the saucer with Cassie’s cigarette butts—two of them—and took it over to the trash can. When I came back, I announced, “If I thought I caused their antagonism to each other, I’d kill myself. If I thought I seemed elusive to my children, I’d kill myself.” I sat down.
Sadie was immune to my histrionics. “Well, you have to admit you’re secretive.”
“Sadie, I am not! I always tell the truth. You guys can ask me anything.”
“Okay. Fine. How’s this.” She leaned forward. “You lived with Jean’s husband?”
“Oh! That.”
Sadie laughed, and I did, too, for a few seconds, sheepishly. “You make me laugh,” she said.
“So I see.”
“Well?”
“Well, that was years ago. Obviously. I was in a group house with him. That’s all. A kind of quasi commune of the sixties.”
“Before you were married?”
“No, I was married then, to Ted. But I’d left him for a while.”
There was a quick puff of exasperated breath: See what I mean?
“I left him twice, actually, poor man.”
“God, Mom!” she protested.
“Well, that first time it was a kind of experiment, when I was in the group house. And then I went back. and then I left him again, for good, because I’d learned something from the experiment. That I couldn’t live with him anymore. But that was when I knew Eli. I was about . . . I was twenty-two. A little older than your age.”
“But he wasn’t, like, your boyfriend or anything.” Her voice said please don’t tell me that.
“I was married, Sadie. I didn’t let myself have a boyfriend.”
After a moment, she frowned and said, “So when, exactly, did you meet Dad?”
They all knew the part of the story that had me and Daniel meeting at an airport when I was still married to someone else, that had me calling Daniel three years later, when I was divorced. I’d used it too many times when they mooned over boys as adolescents, hoping to be chosen, hoping to be called. The last time, I’d barely begun the tale when Nora said, “Don’t, Mom. We all know,” and she chanted it: “You were the one who picked up the phone and called Dad.”
I told Sadie a longer version now, about my confusion in running away from Ted, about my staying out of touch with him and my mother for all those months, about my return, my leaving again for Maine, my depression, and then my finding my way—to my work, to her father, to the life that brought us here in the middle of a cold New England night, to this room, this table, this story.
I didn’t talk about Dana, though. I’m not sure why. I saw her face as I was speaking. She was especially in my mind, of course, because of seeing Eli and talking to him at the party, because he’d brought up her name at last. I’d thought of her earlier, too, at the moment when Cass seemed to be suggesting I’d led a boring life. Thought of her and knew I would say nothing. I would not use the drama of Dana’s random, senseless murder to make myself seem more interesting to my difficult daughter.
I think that I was also aware that Sadie might have heard a great deal in the last few days from Cass and Nora about what was hard, as Cass put it, in their lives, and I didn’t feel I needed to add the terrible lesson from my life to all that. So I didn’t speak of Dana, of Dana or her death.
The house was still, the dogs and people were all sound asleep, when Sadie and I stood at the foot of the stairs and said good night, whispering. “I love talking to you, Mom.” She reached out and hooked my hair behind my ear.
“Do you, Sadie?” I was surprised and moved, by her sweetness, by her willingness to touch me.
“Mmm,” she said. “And thanks for inviting Jean to the party. That was great.” Then she hoisted her nightie slightly, like a nineteenth-century belle lifting her long skirts, and turned, and I watched the bottoms of
her grimy white bare feet winking up the ladderlike stairs.
It was about a week and a half later that Daniel and I went to hear Cass and her band play. She’d hit the road again the Saturday after Thanksgiving, with the last flurry of gigs. Providence was the closest venue, and we’d promised to show up there.
After we’d found the place and parked, Daniel cut the engine, and we sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “I wonder who it is that books a place like this. How do they even know about them?” The street was empty, littered, completely cheerless. The neighborhood surrounding it was full of triple-deckers with aluminum or asphalt siding. Sodium-vapor light fell on everything with an unhealthy orange glow. Here and there a collapsing porch roof was propped up with long pieces of raw lumber. The plate-glass windows on the storefront next to Al Priest’s, the bar Cassie was playing in, were papered on the inside with long-faded banners reading EVERYTHING MUST GO. BARGAINS GALORE! On the other side was a locksmith shop, and on the corner, a small bodega, closed for the night, with a faint fluorescent light glowing somewhere deep within.
“They were probably grateful to get the gig. Providence must be the big time for them, wouldn’t you think?” I’d been feeling irritated with Daniel for the last few days, ever since our dinner at Eli and Jean’s. The evening there had been uncomfortable, so much so that Daniel had announced afterward that if I wanted to see Eli Mayhew again, I should do it on my own. I blamed Daniel for the way it had gone, I was annoyed at him.
There was a raw rain falling outside—there had been for the whole drive east. Now that our wipers were off, it blurred our view of the street.
“Here we go,” I said. A group of people was approaching, you could hear their voices drawing nearer under the rain’s thrumming on the car. A girl shrieked with laughter. There were six or seven of them. A few had umbrellas, but most were in parkas with the hoods pulled forward, hiding their faces. “Come on,” I crooned to them all. “Come to Cassie.”
They did. They stopped at the bar, and when they opened the door, there was a confusion of music and voices that floated out to us.
“Gee, it’s alive in there anyway,” Daniel said.
“Let’s go. At least now we know we won’t be the first.”
I had started to move away from the car when Daniel called over to me, “Lock it.”
He was right, of course, it was a rough neighborhood, but somehow I felt annoyed with him for thinking of it and for his peremptory tone—one in a series of what I knew very well were petty grievances I could have been said to be collecting against him over the last few days: He stood up one evening in the middle of something I was saying to him and began to pick up the bits of wet leaf one of the dogs had tracked into the living room. I overheard him on the phone passing judgment on a movie we’d seen in exactly my words, without crediting me. Even the blood-specked tissue stuck on a shaving cut one morning got on the list, and the familiar, theatrical groan as he rose from a living room chair. I knew these were absurdly small-minded; I knew they weren’t, in some sense, real. I knew anyone could have made a similar list about anyone else. About me, for instance. I knew, but somehow once I started, I couldn’t stop myself.
The club was warm and cheerfully noisy as we entered, the sound like a thick substance you moved through—a combination of canned music and shouted conversation. The room was long and narrow. There was a bar running along one side, up to where, on a lighted, raised platform, the mikes and stools and drums were set up. A solitary fat bass rested against the wall. The place was two-thirds full, mostly with young people sitting jammed in at the little round wooden tables. A few people were at the bar. Singletons, I remembered from my waitress days.
The jukebox was playing a loud song, hard and driving and antimelodic, a male voice shouting the lyrics, in accusation after accusation. A lone young woman was moving dreamily on what must have been the dance floor, a small open area in front of the bandstand, looking seraphic, so at peace, she seemed to be dancing to a tune other than the one playing.
Daniel and I went to the front of the room, searching for a table from which we might be able to see the bandstand easily, but they were all full up there. We decided, leaning toward each other and shouting, to sit at the near end of the bar. Better than a table anyway, we concluded, if people were going to be dancing right in front of the musicians.
“What, beer?” Daniel yelled at me when the bartender came over and pushed napkins at us. He, anyway, seemed not to care that we were the oldest people in the room—a big-jawed man who hung his face out at us and nodded once when Daniel gave him the order. The young people around us deliberately hadn’t registered us, as though we were profoundly handicapped, somehow difficult or embarrassing to look at.
The beer tasted wonderful, sharp and deeply bitter. I was ravenous, suddenly. I asked Daniel to order nuts or chips or something. “Which?” he yelled.
“Anything!” I shouted back.
I’d been nervous about the evening at Eli’s, but it had started well enough: Jean had cut her hair, and this gave us all something immediate to talk about. She looked elegant, and I said so. It was as though she were wearing a trim, wavy cap on her head.
“I hate it,” Eli said. He was helping me off with my coat in the entry hall. The floor was slate, I noted, as water from our boots pooled on it.
“Why do they do it?” he’d asked Daniel, who looked up from heeling his boots off, blank and polite. “Women,” Eli explained, gesturing at Jean and me. “Why do they take what’s so lovely and—chop!—get rid of it?”
I had thought of Dana then, looking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace. “Why did I do it?” she asks me.
“We do it because it’s easier,” Jean had said. “Same reason men have short hair.” Looking at her as she spoke, I realized she was as transformed as Dana had been: everything about her could be understood differently. She suddenly had a flapper’s careless glamour.
“The hell with ease,” he said. “Tell you what. Grow it back and I’ll brush it for you, or shampoo it, or whatever it is that makes it harder.”
“Oh, Eli, as if you were ever even here.”
He laughed. “I’ve been on the road all fall, lecturing and conferencing,” he said to Daniel as we moved into the living room. I trailed Jean with the wine we’d brought.
Daniel was asking Eli about his travels as we settled ourselves. There was a fire going in the large stone fireplace. I looked around. The room was huge, wainscoted to eye level with some reddish wood. Cherry, most likely. I sat on a black leather couch, Daniel in a deep plush chair. Jean had taken the wine from me, with thanks, and was pouring for us now from a bottle already open on the coffee table. Two huge abstract paintings, full of bold bands of color, stood propped against the wall. They weren’t going to fit above the wainscoting.
“I was supposed to be gathering my strength with the sabbatical,” Eli was saying. “Getting ready to launch myself anew. Instead I’ve completely dissipated it. I’ve shot my wad. But it’s been fun.” He laughed. “Hard on Jean, though.” He’d sat down in a chair next to the fireplace. “Made her so mad she cut her damned hair off.”
“God, the egocentrism of the guy! Here you go,” she said, handing me my glass, Daniel his. “Sometimes,” she said to Eli, lifting her own glass in his direction, “a haircut is just a haircut.”
Daniel laughed, his face moved into a rictus of false pleasure. He was being too polite. I sensed right away that there was something in Eli’s manner—in Eli—he didn’t like, maybe that mocking, ironic tone, maybe his ease around Jean and me, a kind of possession he seemed to take of us, of the situation. The alpha male. In any case, Daniel was being overcareful, solicitous. Now he was asking what Eli was doing on the road, what he’d been lecturing on—and so I, too, found out that he was working with something called nerve growth factor. Something that could regenerate damaged nerves in the brain. That the focus of his work might eventually be Alzheimer’s disease, or spinal injurie
s.
“Transport’s our area.”
“Transport?” Daniel asked.
“Getting the stuff where it needs to go. Right now you have to apply it directly, because the brain has such an efficient defense mechanism against toxins—and in this case, useful drugs. And that means surgery. Brain surgery.” He shook his head. “Which is hardly practical for a disease population of any size. So we’re looking for alternate ways.” He smiled at Daniel. “Alternate routes. I’m the transportation planner for the brain.” He leaned forward and stirred the fire with the poker. “If I ever get to work again.”
Jean began to speak. She had questions about the town, she said. A list, actually. Would we mind? No, fire away, I said. And she did. Where did we shop for groceries? What were the best dry cleaners? Were there good local restaurants? She’d noticed we had a piano—did we know a tuner? A dentist?
We gave her information, told tales on our neighbors. The dentist who’d survived a midlife crisis by training as a lay therapist, who stuffed your mouth with cotton and then earnestly asked you how you felt about your sexuality, about your parents. The eccentric chef at the tiny French restaurant, who could be heard weeping in the kitchen if things were not achieving the requisite level of perfection.
We moved around seemingly with ease from topic to topic through the evening—the party at our house, who the various guests were. My work, Arthur. Dogs in general. Dogs versus cats. Adams Mills, Jean’s and Sadie’s school. Throughout it all, Daniel maintained his civility, the reserve I’d noted earlier. “Do tell,” he said once, and I raised my eyebrows and made a face at him. If I could make him laugh at himself, maybe he’d notice how ridiculous he was being, maybe he’d relax. “Do tell?” I wanted to say. But I didn’t dare.
Halfway through dinner, Eli turned to him. “Jo tells me you’re a preacher.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s an interesting line of work.” I watched Daniel’s thin smile. “I’m wondering how you got into it.”
“Oh, I suppose in many ways it was similar to how you got into your line of work.” I tensed.