by Sue Miller
Her mother didn’t respond one way or another. The next time Lottie saw her, months later, on a trip east, she asked her what she’d thought of it.
She didn’t look at Lottie when she said, ‘Well, if anyone had accused you of being capable of writing such a thing, I’d have defended you to the death. “It couldn’t have been Charlotte,” I’d have said. “This story’s too full of hate.” ’
Lottie had tried to talk to her then about its being fiction, invented. She said she had thought her mother might be pleased. They were working side by side in the kitchen, doing dishes. Lottie had set the towel down, she’d turned to face her mother.
But her mother kept at her task, scrubbing, rinsing. ‘Pleased!’ she cried. Harsh lines pulled in her neck. ‘How could you imagine such an idiotic thing! A girl of your intelligence! That I’d read an article that shows me up to be a careless drunk? And want to say it was well written? What can you be dreaming of?’ When Lottie persisted, unwilling to acknowledge the point, her mother simply turned away and left the room, her wet hands leaving a trail of drops behind her.
Lottie and her mother were angry at each other for a long time after that, but they never spoke of it again. And even after Lottie understood what a mean story it was – understood that she had in fact intended it to be mean, intended the pain her mother had felt – she couldn’t find a way to talk about this to her mother. And she wasn’t sure it would make any difference anyway.
How strange it has been this summer, then, to step so directly back into this old universe, to poke slowly through her mother’s stuff, to put a value on the junk that cluttered her house, her life. Cam had wanted Lottie to sell everything at a yard sale, but she refused. She told him it was simply too much work and that they’d probably get as much benefit from donating anything of value to the Salvation Army. But the truth was she didn’t want the pathetic leavings of her mother’s life, the icons of her own early life, set out for strangers to paw through and comment on. And she’s been astonished and pained by the cheapness of everything, by its hopeless trashiness. The imitation Hummel figurines, smirking and badly painted. The grimed plastic fruit. The ancient, splitting squirrel coat. Every pair of shoes her mother had ever owned, it seems, some cracked, some dotted with blue mold. Graying underpants with sprung waists, bras with shot elastic. Stockings with mended runs. Drawers full of caked and dried-out ends of makeup. Little packets of carefully clipped, long-outdated coupons. Aspirin so ancient it crumbles to powder when Lottie shakes it out. Stacks of magazines: Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, Woman’s Day. And empty bottles hidden everywhere, of course, like some bad joke about a drunk.
This was what it was, her childhood on this block. With the other, very different childhoods going on just steps away. She gets out of Cameron’s car and crosses the street slowly back to her house. Inside, after the freshness of the early morning air, she’s aware of the smell of the chemicals they’ve been using all summer – paint, polyurethane, turpentine. As she passes through the dining room to the kitchen, she stops to open each of the windows, shut yesterday against the rain.
In order to make coffee, she has to push aside some of the stuff she left out on the kitchen counter last night. While she waits for the water to boil, she tries to call Cameron. Maybe he can tell her what’s going on, what happened at Elizabeth’s. His answering machine cuts in after the fourth ring, and his voice says simply, ‘It’s Cameron Reed. I’m not home. Wait for the beep.’
Lottie leaves a short message, asking him to call her back. Then she goes into the kitchen and clears a corner of the table for Ryan, so there will be a place for him to have breakfast when he gets up. When the coffee is done, she takes a cup upstairs and sets it on the rim of the sink while she showers.
At home, Lottie always takes baths, long baths. She likes to read in the tub. But the tub here is a claw-foot model with the drain hole installed too low to allow it to fill deeply enough for comfort. And it is stained brown with mineral deposits, in themselves harmless enough but somehow, in light of all the roomers who have shared the tub over the years, who’ve cleaned or haven’t cleaned it after they used it, unwelcoming to Lottie. This is unreasonable, she knows. She’s had roomers in her apartment in her poverty-stricken years and never felt such suspicions about them. In her youth, she was a roomer herself, in a boardinghouse in Cambridge. She’s always been a good citizen, a scrupulous and lavish user of Comet or Ajax or whatever was provided. No doubt her mother’s roomers have been too. Richard Lester, for instance, with all the prescription bottles lining the medicine chest: would he have so many pills if he weren’t careful about his health? Doesn’t it argue that the tub is antiseptic?
It does, but that doesn’t matter. Here, Lottie showers, touching the embrowned porcelain with only the soles of her feet. This morning she soaps herself vigorously. Her elbows whack the circle of cracking plastic shower curtain suspended from the chrome ring above her. As she’s rinsing off, she remembers again the ambulance, the little helpless crowd of people left behind.
The betrayal in our bodies, she thinks, and her fingers rest for a moment on the white scar on her breast.
She imagines Elizabeth’s mother, her frightened, plump face. Touching her own body, she imagines for a moment – she can’t help it – Emily’s naked, fat body. She has seen women’s bodies in all shapes, all sizes, in the locker room at her health club. Almost all of them are pretty to Lottie. But Emily is too fat; something bad could have happened.
Surely not. Surely not, or Elizabeth would have said so on the telephone.
She steps out of the tub, she wipes the steamy mirror off and applies her makeup, sipping at the cooled coffee between foundation and eye shadow, mascara and lipstick. Then she pulls her clothes back on and takes the empty cup downstairs to the kitchen for a refill. It’s almost seven-thirty by the clock on the stovetop, the time by which the newspaper delivery is guaranteed. She goes outside to sit on the front porch steps and wait for it.
At the top of the sloping street, one of the neighbors is out bending and moving in her garden. Lottie can hear music somewhere, what she hopes is a child practicing the piano, the same uninflected phrases over and over. And here he comes, the paperboy, cresting the hill on his bike, then drifting down toward her. At each house where he has a delivery, he makes a slow elegant loop, standing on his pedals, and tosses the folded paper vaguely toward the intended porch. When he gets to Lottie’s house, he calls out, ‘Hey!’ and rides up the walk to hand the paper to her. He’s perhaps thirteen. His face is puffy and sullen with sleep. His head has been shaved at some point recently, and his hair has just begun to grow in. It makes a nearly invisible sheen on his skull, like a thin layer of something metallic poured on.
‘You must be glad the rain stopped in the night,’ Lottie says, smiling at him.
‘Yeah,’ he answers soberly, lifting his bike between his legs and turning it and himself awkwardly in the walk. ‘Rain sucks.’
Lottie watches him wobble back down the walk and across the curb, then pick up speed again. When he finally turns the corner at the bottom of the block, she spreads the paper out on the porch next to her. Sipping her coffee, she scans the headlines and flips through the front section. Politics, mostly. Then she turns to sports to see how the Red Sox have done. She reads a long article about Wade Boggs. As she’s closing the section, her glance falls to the page often reserved for deaths, and she sees it: a photograph of Elizabeth’s au pair girl, Jessica – she recognizes her instantly – and the headline, STUDENT KILLED IN ACCIDENT.
The morning stops. She sets her coffee down. She reads it through.
Jessica Laver, a nineteen-year-old college student, was struck and killed last night in what police describe as a freak accident. Miss Laver, a student at Wellesley College, was in the driveway of the Cambridge home where she was working as a baby-sitter, when she was hit by a car driven by a friend of the family. ‘The car didn’t even hit her that hard,’ said Sgt Robert Benson
of the Cambridge Police Department. ‘But there was a raised concrete edging to the driveway, and she was thrown back against that.’ The driver of the car, Cameron Reed, 49, was taken in for questioning and released. Police said they did not think alcohol was a factor in the accident.
Miss Laver was a freshman at Wellesley College, her family said. She lived in Lexington and attended Lexington High School. Funeral arrangements are incomplete at this time.
Lottie sits for a moment and feels the gentle stir of the morning air.
This is it, then. Jessica.
Lottie had met her several times this summer, had sat through a cookout in Elizabeth’s backyard with her. And of course, Ryan had at one point slept with her, though Lottie understood nothing about how to think of that. She’d surprised them in her bed one night, and it is that image of Jessica that rose in her mind as she was reading through the article, that lingers with her now: the girl’s face, turning toward Lottie in the sudden light from the hall, frowning and confused, her long hair covering one shoulder. For a moment Lottie had seen her legs, elegant and tanned against the sheets, and her startlingly white buttocks; and then Ryan, in a show of what Lottie assumes was chivalry, threw the top sheet over her, and Lottie shut the door and stumbled back downstairs, out of the house. She was supposed to be visiting a friend on Cape Cod, but she had started out too late on a Friday afternoon; the traffic was already bumper to bumper. Then, when she heard on the radio that there was an accident on the Bourne Bridge, she decided to turn back, to wait until morning and start all over. She stopped in the Square to eat and browse in a bookstore. She’d called her friend from the restaurant, but it hadn’t occurred to her to call Ryan.
So far as Lottie knows, Ryan didn’t take Jessica out again after that night, though Jessica telephoned him off and on for a few weeks. Lottie took the messages. ‘Could you have him call me?’ ‘Did he get my other message? Could you tell him I’d like to talk to him?’ Ryan’s face never changed when Lottie repeated her words to him.
And now she’s dead. Jessica. Not Ryan, Lottie thinks irrelevantly, and somehow feels a prideful comfort in the thought of him inside, asleep – as though she’s kept him safe. As though it is through some virtue of hers, or his, that he wasn’t the one in Elizabeth’s driveway. Lottie looks over again at Elizabeth’s house. She thinks of how it looked, the nightmare spotlights of the ambulance, the whirl of the blue police light, the child’s wail, the siren. Cam’s empty car in the driveway. The car, which had to be moved. Before the children woke up? Before Jessica’s parents came to get her things? The house looks serene, immaculate, like those you see in advertisements for life insurance, or cigarettes.
And Cam! Poor Cam, who was driving. Lottie gets up and goes inside. She tries to call him at his apartment again, but again gets the machine. This time she speaks haltingly. ‘Cam, it’s Lottie. I … saw in the paper about Jessica. About Elizabeth’s sitter. And I’m so sorry. So … concerned. Please call me when you get in. As soon as you get in. Thanks.’
Then she reads the article through once more, as though she doesn’t remember almost every word. She climbs the stairs slowly in a queer state of exhaustion, and uses the toilet. From her bedroom she dials Cam’s number again. Then she calls his bookstore and gets the message announcing its business hours.
She goes downstairs and pours herself another cup of coffee. She wanders uselessly through the blank rooms, sits for a while in one of the drooping chairs pushed up against the wall in the living room. She gets up and stands in the front doorway, looking over at Elizabeth’s house again. When the phone rings, she starts so violently that she spills coffee down the leg of her jeans.
It’s the police. They got her number from Mrs Butterfield – Elizabeth. They’re looking for Cameron Reed, understand he’s her brother. Does she know where he might be? No? Well, then, can they come by and ask her a few questions? Maybe half an hour or so.
Fine, she says. Fine; and gives them the address.
Almost as soon as she hangs up, the phone jangles again. It’s Elizabeth.
‘Char,’ she says. ‘You’re there.’
‘I saw the news,’ Lottie answers. ‘In the paper. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s in the paper?!’ Elizabeth cries. ‘Good God! They’re like vultures.’ Then her tone changes. ‘What did it say?’
‘Just … that Jessica died. That it was an accident. It said where she was from and that kind of thing. It gave Cameron’s name. Not yours.’
There’s a brief silence. Then Elizabeth says, ‘This is an unimaginable nightmare, Char.’
‘I’m sure,’ Lottie answers.
‘No; you don’t know the half of it. And now Cam disappearing like this … Do you have any idea? Where?’
‘No, I’ve been trying to reach him, but I—’
‘Charlotte, I just gave your number to the cops. They want to talk to him.’
‘I know. They called.’
‘I thought he might be with you.’
‘No.’
‘Well. Char.’ Elizabeth pauses. ‘I don’t know how to ask you this …’
‘Whatever.’ Lottie imagines supervising the children for the day, driving someone somewhere, making a casserole.
‘Could you … not mention? About Cam and me? To the police, I mean. I’ll explain it all later. But it just doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to Jessica, and I’d just rather it wasn’t mixed up with the whole thing. If you understand me.’
Lottie stiffens, wants not to say yes, not to do what Elizabeth is asking. It seems to her that there must be something important in Elizabeth’s denial of Cameron’s claim on her at this moment. But since she understands so little of what has happened, there seems no way, really, to refuse her; how can she refuse? ‘All right,’ she says. She can hear the reluctance in her own voice. ‘If that seems best to you.’
‘I know it’s best,’ Elizabeth answers, grownup to child. And then, as though to reassure Lottie: ‘It was just a terrible, terrible … just one of those inexplicable, horrible things. We’re devastated.’
Lottie murmurs something.
‘And no one, not even Jessica’s parents, blames Cam.’ Lottie doesn’t answer. ‘This is between you and me, Char’, – Elizabeth’s voice has warmed intimately – ‘but she’d been drinking. She stepped right out in front of him. There was nothing he could have done differently. Nothing. In a certain cruel sense – but you know what I mean – it was her own fault.’
‘I see.’ Behind her, Lottie hears Ryan’s door opening, his heavy footfall in work shoes shaking the tiny house with every step. He turns on the radio in the kitchen – loud suddenly, manic violins sawing the air – and then adjusts the volume.
‘I’d better go, Elizabeth,’ Lottie says.
‘Yes; me too. Look, I’ll talk to you later, then. I appreciate everything, Char. The car too, by the way. I’m just forever in your debt. You’re an angel.’
‘Okay. I’ll talk to you later.’
When Lottie comes to the kitchen doorway, Ryan is standing in front of the stove, drinking his coffee in regular small sips, as though it were a necessary but distasteful drug. He’s dressed in splattered paint clothes – torn jeans and a T-shirt he seems to be bursting out of. Printed on the shirt over the spots where his nipples might be, there are two large eyeballs with spiky lashes. ‘Hi, honey,’ Lottie says.
‘God, Mom.’ He lowers his cup. ‘What is going on around here? The goddam telephone must have rung six times already, and it’s not even eight-thirty yet.’
‘Come on out here, Ry.’ Lottie gestures behind her to the table in the dining room. ‘Let’s sit. I want to talk a minute.’
‘What? Just tell me.’
‘No; come on out and sit down.’ She steps back into the dining room and sits at the table. Papers and books, materials for an article she’s writing, cover it almost completely.
Ryan slouches into the kitchen doorway. He nearly fills it. He’s tall, like his father. H
e gets the blondness from him too. Except for the shape of his face, you would never guess that he and Lottie are related.
‘What?’ he asks. He’s irritated at her, she can tell. Too much melodrama.
‘There was an accident last night, Ryan. An automobile accident. And Jessica? Jessica … Laver was killed.’
He walks to the table and sets his cup down. ‘Jesus Christ, Mom,’ he says. He sits slowly, sideways, in the chair opposite her. ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this.’
‘I know, honey,’ she says, though in fact she can’t imagine what he might be feeling.
‘Are you sure?’ he asks, absurdly. Lottie nods. They sit without speaking for a few moments. Lottie is intensely aware of the violins, thin and nasal-sounding on her mother’s old radio in the kitchen.
‘This is so horrible,’ he says at last. His voice is oddly high-pitched. He lifts his hands and covers his face. Lottie stands, but then she doesn’t know whether to go to him and touch him. He jerks his head up abruptly, and shakes it. ‘Oh!’ he cries. ‘God! She was just a stupid kid.’
He gets up and quickly leaves the room. Lottie can hear him in the little back bathroom. For a while there’s the sound of running water, of splashing. He blows his nose, loudly.
The announcer comes on the radio, and in his maddeningly slow, self-important voice, begins to recite the news. Lottie gets up, nearly tipping her chair over in her sudden irritation. She goes directly to the radio and yanks the button to Off. She stands breathing heavily for a moment. Then she fills her coffee cup once more and goes back into the dining room, sits down at her place.
After a minute she hears Ryan blowing his nose again. When he finally comes back in and sits down too, his face is pink, his eyes red-rimmed. He clears his throat and then says nothing.
Lottie says, ‘There’s something else, honey.’
‘How could there be anything else?’ He slams the table and his cup jumps, slops coffee on to the scarred veneer. ‘Jesus, Mom,’ he says.
