by Sue Miller
She remembers another time, when Cam fell and broke his ankle climbing out Elizabeth’s window at night. In that case, too, it was Lottie who had to take charge, who had to comfort him and arrange for help, even though she couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen at the time. Their mother was home, of course, but she was up in bed, blanketed under a thick fog of booze.
Now a damp wind kisses Lottie’s face, flaps her nightgown around her legs. It seems to her that she’s had this same sense of watching for the entire summer. A sense of her own life stalled, halted, while everyone else’s – Elizabeth’s and Cameron’s, even Ryan’s – rushes forward with a violence and energy she can’t help being frightened of. Over and over she’s had the impulse to say to someone, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t …’ ‘Do you think you ought to …?’ It’s made her feel elderly, elderly and pinched.
Standing on the porch now, she’s vaguely aware of a vindictive pleasure rising in her at the idea of tragedy striking so close to Elizabeth and her brother: That’s what you get. The thought is gone almost before she lets herself feel it, dismissed by a startled pulse of shame that makes her suck her breath in, that widens her eyes in the dark. She shudders and pulls the sweater tighter around her. With her heart racing, she goes back inside. ‘To work, to work,’ she says out loud. In the kitchen, she lowers herself to the floor again and looks absently at the ordered piles of junk. She picks up a rolling pin with a long swollen crack in it and sits motionless for some minutes, holding it, before she’s able to make a decision about it.
At around eleven, she hears the front door opening. She looks up in time to see fat Richard Lester, the one remaining roomer, pass by the open doorway of the dining room. He sees Lottie in the kitchen, too, but instantly averts his eyes, moving nearly sideways in a crablike haste not to have to take notice of her. Sometimes she calls out to him when he does this, cruelly trying to force him to acknowledge that they have seen each other, that they do live in the same house; tonight she lets him go. She hears his muffled, modest noises in the bathroom upstairs and then the silence that means he’s working at his desk or reading in bed. The bright line under his door often glows all night. He’s a graduate student in linguistics. He’s lived in Lottie’s mother’s house for eight years. In September he’ll move to some other rented room. In Somerville, he’s told Lottie sorrowfully one of the few times they’ve spoken, as though she were somehow to blame for this fall from grace.
Lottie works for about another hour. There’s some crazy, drunken equation governing her behavior: since she can’t help over there, she can at least be useful here. Every now and then, though, she’s stopped completely by the image of Cam’s car in the driveway with its door hung open; or of the cold blue lights whirling and whirling in the rain.
At around midnight she closes the windows and goes upstairs to bed. She falls almost instantly into a heavy, boozy sleep, cradled by the sound of the rain. It’s close to two when she hears Ryan come in and go into the little bedroom on the first floor where she slept as a girl. The pipes hum and bang in the downstairs bathroom as the water goes on and off.
For a while Lottie lies in the musty dark listening to the silence on the street outside. Suddenly she realizes: the rain has stopped. She gets out of bed and raises the shade. Through the heavy cover of the leaves, she can see that the lights are all off at Elizabeth’s house now, and the door to Cameron’s car has been closed. Everything looks normal, except for the odd placement of the car – almost all the way up the drive, but not quite. This seems somehow more ominous to her than the ambulance earlier, or the blue lights.
She braces her feet and pulls slowly at the window; Ryan painted these windows only a few weeks ago, and they’re still a bit sticky when it’s damp outside. As it jerks open, she feels the cool rush of air moving her nightgown against her body, and she thinks of Jack, his touch. She lowers the shade partway and goes back to bed.
She lies awake for a long time. And then she sleeps, or thinks she sleeps. Very late, she hears Richard Lester get up and use the bathroom again, then his door shutting, the sharp click of his latch. She dreams Jack is there, moving with her through the bare, unencumbered rooms of her mother’s house. She can hear children somewhere crying, but they have nothing to do with her and Jack. Several times the breeze shakes the trees outside and leftover rain splatters against the house. The shade lifts and lightly whacks the window frame, the air moves across the room, and Lottie wakes partially at least once at its touch with a sense of deep pleasure in just being alive to feel it. And then she seems to remember that there’s trouble, that something has happened, something is wrong; but each time, this thought is folded into her pleasure – thickens and weights it – and she falls back heavily into animal sleep.
CHAPTER II
It’s early the next morning when the telephone on the floor starts to ring, loudly. Lottie dangles one arm over the edge of the bed and pulls the receiver up. Elizabeth’s voice is tight, low, and almost whispering.
‘Char,’ she says. ‘It’s Elizabeth. Listen, you’ve got to move Cameron’s car.’
‘I don’t have the keys.’ Lottie licks her lips and leans up on one elbow. ‘Isn’t Cameron with you? Elizabeth, what happened? What’s wrong?’
‘No, no, he’s not here. Never mind. Can’t you get Ryan to help you push it? You’ve got to get it out of here.’
‘Ryan’s asleep. But what’s wrong? Is it—’
‘Can’t you get him up, for God’s sake? This is important.’
‘Elizabeth—’
‘Oh Christ. I’ve got to get off. Do what you can. I’m begging, Char.’ The phone goes dead.
For a few moments, Lottie stupidly continues to hold the receiver against her ear. Then she hangs it up and looks at the clock. Six-thirty. Her head is throbbing lightly. She remembers the ambulance last night, the strange scene in its headlights. What could it be, she wonders, for Elizabeth to be up so early? To be sounding so urgent.
She has swung her legs down now, and her feet rest on the bare, nicked floor; she threw away the worn carpet weeks ago. In the open rectangle under the window shade she can see sun on the leaves across the street. Her mother’s room is greenish and underwatery in the reflected light. They repainted the walls white when they redid the bedroom – as they did every other room in the house – and the only furniture they put back after the paint was dry was the box spring and mattress that Lottie is sitting on. There’s something beautiful in the bareness of the room, Lottie thinks now, in the play of shifting light over the blank surfaces. She remembers her dream suddenly: moving with Jack through the open, empty spaces. It was happy, she realizes. Odd, when the waking thought of him is so hurtful. She stands up. And now this thing with Elizabeth, whatever it is. ‘The old vale of tears,’ she says out loud. That sounds to her like something W. C. Fields could have said, and she repeats it as she crosses the room, with his snide intonation.
She pulls on some jeans and finds a T-shirt in one of the piles against the wall, an old T-shirt of Ryan’s with the name of what she thinks must be a rock group on it, Worms in the Earth. She slides her feet into her flip-flops. In the bathroom she uses the toilet and brushes her teeth. Her jaw is tender under the temporary filling, and she thinks again of the dentist, of the long crazy day yesterday. She runs a hairbrush through her hair, then her fingers, fluffing it up. Down the creaking stairs with the intense smell of fresh paint, and across the empty front hall. She’s conscious of trying to move quietly. Richard Lester and Ryan, night owls both, routinely sleep late.
Outside, the air still carries the scent of last night’s rain. The light lies slantwise in a buttery yellow against the houses opposite, and on the huge, old trees. Lottie crosses the street, out of the shadows and into the sun’s warmth, and walks up the sloping, deserted sidewalk toward Elizabeth’s house. Then up the driveway. There’s no sign of life, no indication of whatever it was that might have happened the night before. Probably it was an ordinary accident,
she thinks. Just a little pain. One of the children needed stitches, swallowed the wrong way, broke his arm. Not anything serious, surely, or Elizabeth would have said so. Not Elizabeth’s mother, not Emily.
She opens the door to Cameron’s car and lowers herself into it. The car smells of Cam – a bookish, leathery smell – and of its own old age. It’s a ’71 Volvo. The upholstery is worn to a kind of fleshy gray colorlessness on the driver’s seat, though the passenger side is still a faded pinkish red. She releases the emergency brake. Nothing happens, in spite of the long slope the car is sitting on. She opens the door and pushes her foot against the driveway’s rounded concrete edging. The car moves, slightly. She pushes again, then once more as it begins to roll very gradually backward down the drive. She shuts the door and turns quickly to steer. The car slows when it gets to the street, but Lottie cuts it sharply toward the gutter so that it’s heading downhill again. After a few long seconds when it seems it will come to a stop, the car’s momentum picks up ever so slightly.
Everyone on Elizabeth’s side of the street has the same kind of long driveway to pull into, so the curb is free and Lottie can roll the car backward down the street’s slight incline, choosing where she wants to park. She swings in nearly opposite her mother’s house and brakes sharply. The grayish scaling trunk of one of the huge sycamores that overarch the street rises outside the window on the passenger side. She imagines that its bulk will partially block the car from sight at Elizabeth’s house, if that’s the point. Is it the point?
For a moment she sits, looking over at her mother’s house. Ryan had pulled off the old fake-brick asphalt siding from the front of the house in his first week here. Then he sanded and patched the clapboards that had slowly weathered and darkened under it. They chose a light-beige paint, and as soon as he finished the front, the house looked more like the others on the street than it had in years.
In scale, it – like the two houses next to it in a tight row – is still completely different. Small, only two stories, without much ornamentation, all three seem like miniatures of the huge Victorians that dominate the rest of the block on both sides of the street. But Lottie remembers that when she was a child the house didn’t seem so out of place as it had more recently. Tackiness was rampant then; no one yet knew about good taste. In those years even some of the largest houses had been covered in the same asphalt siding hers and Cameron’s had, and perhaps a third were divided up into rooming houses or apartments for graduate students and young faculty. One of the stateliest houses on the street was then a nursing home, wrapped in coiling fire escapes, which the children dared each other to climb. And all the kids of the block, no matter which house they came from, played wildly together, up to a certain age unconscious of the differences between them, unknowing about how much it would matter that one’s father was imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement, and another’s was a distinguished professor of anthropology – like Elizabeth’s.
It occurs to Lottie now that maybe some of her failure to understand the differences among the families then was because when she first began to notice them, they seemed to work so strongly in her family’s favor. There was a kind of Brahmin, academic parsimony that dominated Elizabeth’s house, for instance – the Harbours. They used margarine instead of butter – disgusting, Lottie thought. Cheap, her mother had said. They never had food like hot dogs or packaged cakes and cookies. Their bread seemed dry and grainy, and sometimes something in it crunched in your teeth. Nothing that was supposed to be sweet – cookies or cocoa – was anywhere near sweet enough. And Elizabeth had to have piano and dance lessons, while Cameron and Lottie were left on their own to play, to do what they liked. The Harbour kids had chores they had to do, too, and a chart on the kitchen wall on which to check them off each day. At the time, this seemed a kind of lunatic slavery to Lottie; she couldn’t understand how they could have consented to it.
They didn’t have a television either, none of the academic families did, whereas Lottie and Cameron had one of the earliest ones, a fuzzy, small, glowing rectangle in a huge wood-veneer cabinet. One of Lottie’s few memories of her father – who was sent to prison when she was five – is of his hauling that TV in. Cameron had helped him, and they carefully uncrated it and arranged it directly in front of the fireplace. It was with a sense of great ceremony and pride that her father made them all sit down in front of it before he turned it on. And it seems to Lottie that after that moment, it was always on, always part of what was happening. Part, even, of the way she thought, of her dream life.
Later, before she began to take on boarders, Lottie’s mother sold off many things around the house. Her washing machine went, her mangler, the radio, the record player. She even gathered up all the books in the house – their father’s lawbooks too – loaded them into her wire shopping cart, and lugged them down in repeated trips to the Harvard Coop to see what she could get for them.
But there was never a question about the TV. It was as permanent a part of the living room as the fireplace itself. When the afternoon shows were on, sometimes nine or ten kids from up and down the street would crowd into the darkened room to watch Howdy Doody, or Hopalong Cassidy, or Tom Corbett – or, later, the Mickey Mouse Club. Lottie’s mother was always there too, smoking, drinking; beer usually; she didn’t start on the hard stuff until after dinner. And she seemed fully as absorbed in what was passing on the screen as the children did. Sometimes she’d get up during a commercial to do some more ironing or fiddle in the kitchen, but she always came back in and sat once more in the sagging armchair that faced the television. No one else ever sat in that chair.
Often she would wordlessly place a bowl of small candies – Mary Janes, still in their yellow wrappers, or malted milk balls – on the coffee table. She never cared about the number of kids in her house, as long as they were quiet; she never said they ought to be outside on a beautiful day like this, as Elizabeth’s mother did. Absentmindedly, she called everyone ‘dear.’ ‘You’re so lucky,’ the other kids would say. Lottie felt, then, only that she was. ‘Your mother’s so nice,’ they said. And she was, nearly all the time.
Her anger, when it came, was quick and violent, and almost always directed at Cameron, so Lottie felt free to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t part of her life or who her mother was. It wasn’t until much later, after she’d escaped, that she could afford to think about it; and then the shameful memories came flooding back: the time when her mother locked Cameron in his room overnight and she and Lottie had supper downstairs and talked about the kind of hairstyle that might work best on Lottie, just as if he weren’t upstairs hungry and scared, as if he were out at a friend’s house. The time when her mother was slapping Cameron, banging his head against the wall in the dining room and shouting, ‘What’s wrong with you! What’s wrong! with! you!’; while Lottie and Elizabeth sat in front of the television in the shadowy living room and watched those cute boys, Spin and Marty. When their eyes occasionally slid toward each other, Lottie smiled at Elizabeth, a smile meant to say, It’s nothing; it’ll be over soon. You don’t need to pay any attention to it.
Years later, Lottie wrote a story about her mother. She was taking a creative writing course, trying to accumulate credits for a college degree at night school while she worked in the day. She and her first husband had recently bought a television set because it seemed so important to follow the news of the Vietnam War; and somehow its steady drone in the daytime, the way they existed in front of it, not speaking to each other, brought her childhood memories intensely back to her. Late one night, in a concentrated burst of energy, she wrote the entire story out. It was very minimal, very depressing, and the point of it was, as Lottie remembers it now, that after she’s gone up to bed, the mother in the story can’t recall whether her children are still awake watching television or whether they, too, have gone to bed at some point – she confuses them with the characters in a program she’s been watching. But somehow she finally decides it doesn’t really matter; and then sh
e sleeps.
Lottie showed it to her husband. He was impressed and pleased with her. Their marriage had been a rocky one from the start, and the story offered them a way to feel a momentary affection for each other. Lottie understood as they discussed it that he was excited also by this evidence that she had finally realized the inadequacy of her upbringing: when she’d met him, she still couldn’t see it clearly, she thought of it only as odd, a funny tale she could tell.
Of course, it seemed to Lottie that at first Derek liked the tale too. The crook, the drunk – it had all been exotic and therefore a little exciting to him. He’d grown up safe and solidly middle class in White Plains. But now it seemed the tale’s charms had faded. It seemed that what he wanted from her was credit for rescuing her from her life, and the story she wrote seemed the perfect expression of all this – both the content and the fact of her writing it. Her husband taught comparative literature, and most of what Lottie knew about fiction she’d learned from him.
He sent the story to a friend who edited a literary magazine, and they were both tremendously excited when it was taken. The story didn’t appear in print for almost a year after that, but when Lottie got her copies, she immediately sent one of them to her mother. Later she thought of this act as having been committed in a state of nearly willed unconsciousness of the pain it would cause her mother. All she allowed herself to feel at the time, though, was the sense of conviction that her mother would be proud of her accomplishment.
