While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “Do you?” I asked.

  She nodded gravely, her eyes wide and black in the faint light. “I really do.”

  “Who, then? Who is she?”

  Shyly she said, “She’s you.”

  I was pleased and even a little embarrassed to be so admired, and whenever I told her these stories afterward, I felt a special tenderness toward Cass. But then, of course, she got older and stopped needing me in the night.

  Several years later, though, when Cass’s disaffection began, and then her rage at us—at me—it helped to remember that once she’d thought Miraculotta and I were one, to know in what regard she’d held me. It helped me to understand how repulsive she found me when all of that had fallen away. “You’re so limited,” she said to me once when she was about fourteen and I was telling her she could not do one thing or another. And I thought, Well, yes, of course I am.

  But at that earlier time, I realized that Cassie was right, that she’d parsed it well: Miraculotta was me, me and Dana combined. That when I was dreaming her up in the dark with Cassie, I was talking about all the feelings I had about that time, the sense of magical possibility embodied for me in Dana’s energy and passion, in the open-endedness of my own life, in the curious and momentary hallucination we all shared then—more important to me, I think, than to anyone else in the house—that we could make of our lives anything we wanted, that all the rules we’d learned growing up did not apply.

  We didn’t know what would happen next: that was our great gift. The gift of youth. The thing we miss, it seems to me, no matter what we’ve made of our lives, as we get older. When we do know what will happen next. And next and next, and then last.

  And that is what I felt again after my coffee with Eli—that sense of a surprise, that heady sense of not knowing, that gift of a possible turn in the path.

  The next day I drove into Boston to meet my mother. This had become an annual ritual, since by choice she stayed home for Christmas, and my brother’s family came over from New Hampshire to be with her. She and I had gradually evolved what she called our “early Christmas” together: a meeting, an exchange of gifts, lunch, a day of shopping, and then always, before I put her back on the bus, a double martini for her and a glass of wine or coffee for me at the Copley Plaza Hotel. In the old days I’d brought the girls along, and the day had exhausted all of us. For the last four years, though, it had been just the two of us, my mother and I, and our pace was more civilized, our pauses were longer. She had told me when we talked the week before that the only thing she had to get done was presents for her great-grandchildren, my brother Fred’s first grandchildren, now six and three. We planned to go to the Museum of Science for these. They had educational toys in their gift shop, toys my mother believed in, toys such as all toys had once been, it seemed to me—things you cut or carved or assembled and glued. Things you mixed and stirred. Kites. Gyroscopes, yo-yos. “Nothing”—and here Mother’s voice on the telephone had changed, and I could imagine her drawing herself up slightly in a ladylike repulsion—“electronic.”

  I had laughed. For beyond even her age, my mother was old-fashioned. She’d been a farm girl, from the center of Maine, and she’d come to the university to work at nineteen after taking secretarial courses, an ambitious reaching out for a girl of her background. By chance she’d been assigned to my father’s office. He was twenty years older than she was, a professor of botany, and he was married, though his wife was dying. My parents’ love, their courtship, was never spoken of in our house—there was always a deep reticence about anything that smacked of emotion—but I imagined it later as her listening to him, admiring him, learning from him, botanizing with him; as her slowly becoming a necessity to him, this quiet country girl with the wide, surprising smile.

  And this seemed to be the nature of their love, even long after his wife had died and they had married and my brother and then I had been born. Each of them solitary, busy, mostly silent, turning to the other from time to time to say things like, “Isn’t that remarkable!” Or, “Most interesting.”

  I think she didn’t feel comfortable as a faculty wife—perhaps she thought of it as a kind of posthumous usurpation of his first wife’s role—so my father’s life did not change much as a result of this new marriage, or even when he became a father two times over. My mother continued part time as his secretary, she still accompanied him to the office each morning and went out on long walks with him. She continued to behave, generally, as though, like him, she were a middle-aged botanist.

  When he died, her grief was invisible to me, except as a kind of stiffening, a further aging. She was only forty-four then. She might have thought of her life as having other beginnings. Other chapters anyway. She might have thought of remarriage. But within a few months she was back at work full time, and her life’s shape seemed unaltered. As it had for all the years since.

  I waited for her on the bus platform at South Station. A raw wind was blowing off the ocean, and the day was heavy and gray. A motley group got off the bus when it pulled up: some young people, a few guys in military uniforms, a fat mother with three little kids. When the driver stepped forward and held his hand out to help someone, I knew it would be Mother descending. He had made an odd motion first, as though—almost as though—he was going to take his hat off, in respect.

  She emerged slowly, said something to him after she’d gotten down: they bent together briefly and then leaned back, smiling in polite collusion with each other. Then she looked around quickly, ascertained which direction she should head in, and came toward me, utterly erect, white-haired, a kind of jaunty wide beret pinned on the back of her head. She had on her ancient all-purpose coat, heavy no-color duckcloth she zipped the plaid lining out of in spring. I was startled to see that on her feet she was wearing—for the first time to my knowledge—old-lady shoes, black oxfords you laced up over the instep, with a thick heel. Her gait was slightly more widespread than usual, as though she was conscious of the issue of balance.

  I called out and crossed to her, watching her face shift as she recognized me. “Why, Josie!” she said, and we held each other.

  We had lunch right away, in a place we usually went to near the terminal. Despite my exclamations of interest in various dishes, she conscientiously ordered the least expensive item on the menu, as she always did, and black coffee. She asked about Daniel, about the girls, and I gave my report, offering mostly achievements and accomplishments, not so much to boast as because that was what I assumed would give her greatest pleasure. She offered in exchange information about her students, the students who boarded with her. A thin smile played over her lips as she went on about these strangers, and I was startled, as I always was, to hear how important they were to her, to feel how much more interested she was in their activities, their achievements, than in Cassie’s or Sadie’s or Nora’s. But they, of course, were in her life every day, whereas the girls were, I suppose, a kind of lovely abstraction for her at this point, a nice idea.

  And I was glad, in a sense, for her involvement with Edward and Rolf and Naomi and Susie—the names changed almost yearly. Still, it was boring, too, the tedious accumulation of detail about people I didn’t know and didn’t care about. As she spoke, I drifted off. I watched the passersby moving in the brisk wind outside. I looked up at the warehouse windows above us and wondered about the kinds of lives being lived there. I let myself think of Eli. “I’d like to see you again,” he says, smiling at me. I smiled at my mother now, too warmly perhaps, for she gave me an odd, sharp look and then sniffed, loudly.

  I asked for the check.

  I had read in the paper of a program of Christmas music at two o’clock at Trinity Church, and Mother said that would be lovely, so we drove there next. I was parking at a meter only a block or so away—we had congratulated each other on finding it—when she cried out, “Oh! I wanted to be sure to tell you: Albert Moran died.”

  Dr. Moran. I turned the engine off. He came to me, bending over a wounded dog,
covering it with his big hands, turning to say to me in his soft voice, “Our friend here has gone somewhere he should not have gone, I’m afraid.” I saw him tidily tucking his napkin into his collar before opening his old-fashioned lunchbox, as black and humped as a steam engine.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Oh, a couple of weeks ago, I think.” Mother was casual. She was used to death. It was her familiar by now.

  “Had he been ill?”

  “Dearie, I don’t know. I just read it in the paper and thought you might like to have the information.”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Though come to think of it, they said he was in a nursing home, so he might have been. Ill. But he was ninety-six. A good old age.” She sounded approving. This was how it should happen, the distinguished thing.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She was opening her door. “He was certainly good to you. I won’t soon forget that.”

  “Nor will I,” I said.

  The wind was driving and powerful off the glass of the Hancock Building as we approached the church. Mother held her hat on with one hand and I hooked my arm in hers as we pushed against the blast. Her coat flapped back, showing the worn lining.

  Inside the church, we turned away from each other, gasping in the peacefulness, the dim, reddish quiet. I blew my nose, and Mother savagely repinned her hat.

  As we entered the nave, the lighted altar glowed, golden and radiant, in the vast space. The dark wooden pews were more than half full, and we slid into the first empty one we came to. We whispered an intermittent conversation, quieted by the hush around us, by the high, empty spaces arching above. Mother was admiring of the needlepoint on the kneelers, the names of the needlewomen or their families picked out across them. Hannah Maynard Shaw. Lilian Tappan. Edward and Rebecca Soames.

  I was glad, when the music started, to sink into it and my own thoughts—a strange mixture of Dr. Moran and my work with him, of Dana, of Eli again, and now and then of Daniel. Of Mother and her curious, proud, and lonely life. Did she regret it? Any of it? Did she sense the end of it closing in on her and wish she’d done things she hadn’t? Wish she’d gone places she should not have gone? Or was it enough for her to have done steadily and honorably and carefully and thoroughly all the things she’d undertaken to do? Perhaps it was. My heart ached for her, suddenly.

  The concert closed with several carols, and Mother and I stood next to each other, sharing a hymnal. Her voice was thin and parched but completely on key, and at one point she ventured into a few notes of harmony against me, and we met each other’s eyes and smiled.

  The museum was busy, though not frantic, as it sometimes was when we came; late enough in the day so the school groups had left, we speculated. We went straight to the gift: shop, and Mother started making her careful choices: a bag of cat’s-eye marbles, a boomerang, a kit for building a dinosaur’s skeleton. There was a painful kind of parsimony to all this, and I found it difficult to watch. I moved away from her. I spent some time looking at the literature they had on animal life.

  I was standing in the doorway, watching her pay—cash: she didn’t believe in credit cards—when I heard the announcement for a movie on African lions, a subject I was not without interest in, having helped to raise a litter of them once when I was working at the zoo. It would give Mother a chance to rest, I thought, for she had seemed tired on the longish walk in from the parking area. “That would be very interesting,” she said, and so I took her packages from her, and we bought our tickets and proceeded through the museum behind the crowd of people also headed to the movie.

  The theater was huge: an Omnimax, I saw. The pale-beige ceiling rounded vastly over the chairs like a tepid sky. I explained to Mother the way it worked, as we sat down, as we tilted back. “Why, it’s just like going to the dentist,” she said, and we both laughed. It felt strangely intimate to be stretched out next to her.

  The film started above us, around us. A man’s voice, deep and self-important, narrated. He sounded remarkably like the civic voice that had accompanied educational films of my school days. The photography was wonderful to watch, the animals with their gravity, their powerful tawny slowness and then murderous speed.

  The narrative offended me, though. It was utterly spurious and imposed, involving, as it did, the repeated stumblings into danger and then rescues of the photographic crew as they tried to get in close for better shots. The deep voice vibrated, trying to pump up the excitement, as though watching the animals themselves couldn’t possibly be enough.

  At some point I turned my head to see how all of this was affecting Mother. She lay perfectly still, her skirt carefully draped over her knees. Her old-lady shoes touched each other at the toes. She’d pulled her hands up and folded them together on her bosom, in modesty, perhaps, at lying down in public. Her mouth was slack, her eyes had swung up to look at something at the top of the ceiling, and I could see just the glimmer of white under the iris. I realized suddenly that this was the way she would look, dead. My pulse throbbed heavily, and I felt a moment of purest terror, of unreadiness. No, I thought. Not yet. I leaned over her, horrified.

  She felt me looking; her eyes swung to me and saw the terrible thing in my face. “What?” she cried out, struggling up, as frightened by me as I’d been by her. “What?”

  The hectic days passed. Sadie came home from school, slept late, often wanted the car in the afternoon. I took to driving home at lunch. She would drive me back to work and pick me up at the end of the day. I foisted errands off on her or we did them together late in the afternoon. We had family meals again, we had loud music in the living room at night. The house would suddenly be full of her friends, and I caught up with them: who was dropping out, who was transferring, who was in love. Daniel played carols at the piano, and we all sang along.

  My chores increased; I was never alone. My life seemed to claim me utterly, in a way I would have said I was hoping for. But throughout all this, I couldn’t stop thinking about Eli. I thought of the way he had bent down to touch his cheek to mine in the parking lot at the Pennock Inn, the heat he radiated physically. I thought of the way his features had thickened and even coarsened some as he’d aged, making him seem a man of appetites. Energetic.

  What Daniel had called my crush had changed, or I felt it differently. It was no longer my past, my own youth, that attracted me to Eli. It was the thought of Eli himself, the heavy, buoyant middle-aged man. Still, I tried to think of this as lightly as I’d thought of that earlier attraction. As a kind of joke, really, one I might share with Daniel, as I had the other one. But of course I didn’t. I kept it private. A joke I shared with only me, then. Deliberately, playfully, I fed my fantasies about Eli. I allowed them to become sexual, I gave them specific flesh. I imagined us in sundering, tearing passion in hotel rooms in Boston, in nondescript motels or inns in towns twenty or fifty miles away, laboring together, slick with sweat, sore, spent.

  I’d look up from addressing cards or wrapping presents or doing dishes and see Sadie slouched in a chair, her eyes unfocused, a Walkman buzzing into her ears; or Daniel reading the paper or a book; and be embarrassed at the Technicolor detail of my sexual thoughts. Be surprised they couldn’t feel my heated distraction.

  It was all right to imagine this, I said to myself, my own reassuring Ann Landers. As long as I understood it wasn’t going to happen.

  It isn’t going to happen, I’d tell myself.

  And then I’d imagine another scene, another inventive coupling, another spent falling away from each other in another bed.

  I went further. I’d imagine Jean’s death, my divorcing Daniel. Or Daniel’s death, Eli’s divorcing Jean. Only stories, I said to myself. Just that. Or they could both die. Painlessly, of course. A period of mourning, Eli and I turning more and more to each other.

  It was all adolescent. I recognized this and even felt some contempt for myself on account of it. It reminded me of the period in my life when I was eight or nine a
nd most in love with my father. During that time, I repeatedly imagined my mother’s dying in a variety of ways and my stepping into her role, caring for my father, becoming his sine qua non, his necessary. And now I told myself that this, all this daze of imaginary flesh I lived in, was as little connected to what was going to happen, to what I truly wanted, as that had been.

  But what I was wondering was what I truly wanted. And what if Eli wanted an affair, what if he pressed for that? Would I resist?

  I had certainly had temptations in the past—a number of mild pleasurable flirtations, and twice moments when I felt I was actively, and even perhaps reluctantly, choosing not to succumb to something that both compelled and frightened me. Once, only a few years earlier, at a conference of small-clinic vets in Hawaii, I’d been drawn to a vet from Seattle named Davis Holliston, a rumpled, cheerful, profane man, kind and sexy, a master teller of jokes. He had only to start, “A duck walks into a bar,” and I would be convulsed. Night after night we sat up late, drinking and talking and laughing with others. And then, finally, it was just us, and I had to decide.

  And once, much earlier, we’d hired a man older than our usual high-school student—a man in his twenties—as an assistant in the clinic. I was in my mid-thirties, just starting the practice then, swamped with work and small children and the demands of the house, which we’d recently moved into, each room of which was a project waiting to be undertaken: decaying, water-stained wallpaper, linoleum flooring, obsolete, exposed pipes running from floor to ceiling. To be reminded—as I was one night when we stayed on together and he hesitantly, then authoritatively, then wildly, kissed me—that I was sexual, that I was still young, that I was attractive, even in my scrubs, my grubby sneakers: this was a revelation, an awakening, a thrill. A temptation.

  I resisted it. I broke away. I wept. I clung to him. I wept some more. I went home and confessed my feelings to Daniel. For days we made time for each other, we talked passionately about our life together and what we needed to do to make it more intense, more loving again.