by Sue Miller
Cam, writes Lottie. Please check in with me. I have news. I have a letter for you from Elizabeth. Call. Lottie. She folds the note, writes Cameron on the flap, and pushes it back over the counter to Maeve.
‘Okeydoke,’ Maeve says. She turns and tucks it into the frame of the mirror on the wall behind her. ‘He won’t escape my eagle eye, you may be sure.’
‘Thanks, Maeve,’ Lottie says.
‘De nada,’ the younger woman answers. And as Lottie starts to push the door open on her way out, ‘Hey, send that cute boy of yours around here sometime, okay?’
‘Right,’ Lottie calls.
Maeve grins and lifts her hand.
Driving back, Lottie feels the adrenaline slowing in her body. He will call in. She chants this silently once or twice. My mantra, she thinks, and smiles. But she does feel safer about him. Reassured. She turns the radio on. A drag of dissonance bursts at her, and she quickly hits the Seek button. She lets the radio leap from station to station for a while, taking a kind of pleasure in the motion, in the throop of its track to a new program. She settles on a Brit, discussing the state of what he calls ‘the cinema’ in England. It is sorry, Lottie gathers.
She stops at an expensive little restaurant and grocery store in Cambridge for two take-out sandwiches on French bread. While she waits for them to be assembled, she paces, she mindlessly picks up the elegant little packets and jars of marzipan, of imported bitter chocolate, of hoisin sauce, of anchovy paste and eau-de-vie. It would have been possible, she thinks, for her mother to have wandered into this store and found nothing she was familiar with, nothing she could use in the way of food.
The moment she steps into her mother’s house, carrying the paper bag, she can hear that Ryan is still at it. She grabs a bottle of seltzer from the refrigerator and two glasses. She pushes the wooden screen door open and shades her eyes to look up at his dark shape above her on the ladder. ‘Come down,’ she commands. ‘I’ve got a picnic.’
‘Good. I’m starved,’ he says. He shoves the scraper into his back pocket and grips the side rails, starts to descend.
Lottie sets the bag, the seltzer and glasses, on the stoop and steps back up into the kitchen’s sudden dark to get salt and pepper and a sharp knife. When she opens the screen door again, Ryan is just sitting down, opening the bag. Lottie lowers herself next to him on the stoop. Her knees creak audibly. ‘Want to go halvesies?’ she asks. ‘One is roast beef and Boursin, and one is turkey and Swiss with mustard.’
‘Oh, upscale stuff. Trying to impress me, huh?’ She nods. ‘Gimme the roast beef first.’
‘The sun falls directly on to them, and they sit side by side and squint out into Lottie’s mother’s backyard. The arbor would be there, Lottie thinks. In its place now is a rampant patch of mint with a wild vine snaking through it. The vine has swallowed the tree back here too, so that it looks droopy and deformed. In the far corner of the yard, a few daylilies survive, but the rest of the growth and flowers are weedy and lanky. Lottie’s filled with a sudden absurd yearning for the father she never knew. ‘Maybe I should clear out the jungle back here,’ she says idly to Ryan.
‘No way. If you’ve got that kind of time, you ought to help me.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. It’s low on the priority list.’ She drinks some seltzer. ‘It’s just that it’s such a mess.’
‘Who cares?’ he asks. He looks around. ‘It’s green anyway. I like it like this.’
Lottie shrugs. They chew companionably, and the seltzer fizzes with a steady, pleasing sound in their glasses. Lottie thinks of Cameron, in a phone booth somewhere, calling. She notices that little flecks of dried paint are sprinkled on Ryan’s forearms, on his T-shirt and pants.
‘Be careful not to eat that stuff,’ Lottie says, pointing. ‘I’m sure it’s laced with lead.’
‘Now you tell me, after I’ve been licking the window frames all morning long.’
‘Well. Be careful, is all I mean.’
‘Careful’s my middle name, Mom. You know me.’
She snorts.
After a moment he says, ‘But I’m not doing this very carefully back here. I figure the front was what counted. Right? For selling the house and stuff.’
Lottie shades her eyes and looks up at the bare, light patches on the wood trim. They haven’t taken the siding off back here, or on the sides of the house. He’s just scraping and repairing the wood of the windows. ‘No, it’s fine. When they take the siding off, they’ll have to do a lot of repair anyway. Just make it look okay for now.’
After a little silence he says, ‘If it’ll just stay dry for a day or two, I think I can finish up.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you before, Mom.’
‘You were upset,’ she says. ‘How’s your hand?’
‘It hurts a little.’ He holds it up. It’s a clean slash across the pad at the base of his thumb. The skin has whitened and curled a little around the edges of the cut, and the blood in the middle is blackened and solid-looking.
‘But it’s huge! Maybe you need a stitch.’
‘I don’t want one, though.’
‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ she says.
‘Bad rhyme, Mother Goose.’ He shakes his head. ‘ “Nine” and “time.” ’
‘Nonetheless,’ she answers. They munch in silence. Lottie can feel the pressure of the new filling as she chews. She shifts the food to the other side of her mouth. She is busy looking out over the backyard, trying to see it as it was, trying to imagine that world, and her parents in it.
She thinks of her mother as she is now, in the nursing home. Lottie has seen her only once this summer, in the second week she was here, and Ryan and Cameron were both with her to buffer it. She has told herself several times she ought to go again, alone, but she had put it off. She wasn’t sure her mother even knew her on the first visit. But more than that, her mother’s confusion, her incoherence, had frightened Lottie, repulsed her. Each time she’s thought of driving out there again, she’s pictured the empty, watery eyes, the slack mouth, and found a reason not to go yet.
‘Is there going to be a funeral?’ Ryan asks abruptly.
She looks at him. He’s frowning. His eyes don’t meet hers. ‘I don’t know, honey. I assume so.’
‘Do you think I should go?’
‘I don’t know, Ryan.’ Then, because he still looks unhappy: ‘No one will object, certainly. If you want to, then you should.’
‘Well, I know I want to. I just mean, do you think it’s okay to go?’ He points at her with what’s left of his sandwich. ‘Not, somehow, false.’
Lottie looks at him. ‘Why false?’ He shrugs and takes a big bite. ‘Because you slept with her but didn’t care for her?’
‘God, Lottie!’ He can barely speak with his mouth so full. He finishes chewing and swallows, hard. ‘Be more direct, why don’t you.’ Lottie laughs. He frowns again then, and says, ‘Actually, maybe that’s it, I guess. I just wasn’t … I don’t know. I wasn’t particularly nice to her.’
‘Were you actively not nice? Do you think you were cruel?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ever call her back, all those times she called me. But I thought it would be more … cruel, yeah, I guess, to call or let her think she was, like, special to me. But also, honestly, it was selfish. I didn’t want her hanging around that much.’ He sets his sandwich down. ‘God, how can I be saying this about someone who’s dead?’
Lottie reaches over and rubs his shoulders and neck. He lets her. ‘Why would you want to go to her funeral, then?’ she asks softly after a minute.
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs again. ‘A kind of penance, maybe. That I was that close to someone I didn’t want to bother to really know as a person.’ He looks sharply at Lottie. ‘I mean, I’m not saying I would have loved her or anything. Or even that I would have liked her. In fact, I don’t honestly think I would. But just that I should have, like, noticed her more. Her personhood. I should know what I fucking felt for her, and I don’t.’
‘So the funeral would be the equivalent of tying a string around your finger to remind yourself not to do that again?’
He chews slowly. ‘Well, no, actually. That’s not what I want. It’s just that the people there will know her. Will have known her. And I, maybe, should watch – should have to watch – what she was to them.’
‘Honey, you shouldn’t have to anything. You don’t have any guilt in this thing.’
‘No, I know that. But I want to. I just feel I have to mark this. To, somehow, acknowledge her death.’
They eat in silence for a few minutes. ‘Are you ready for some turkey?’ Lottie asks. He nods and reaches for the half sandwich she passes him.
‘I remember my father’s funeral,’ Lottie tells him. ‘It was the first one I ever went to, and I think I felt a little the way you’re feeling – that somehow I could get to know him, or something about him anyway, by watching the grownups grieve.’
‘You didn’t remember him?’ Ryan knows that her father died in prison.
‘No, not really. I was only five when he went to jail.’
‘God, I remember a lot of stuff from before I was five.’
‘Well, I just don’t. About him anyway. Maybe when someone is gone like that, and you don’t have their presence to trigger earlier memories, they just fade gradually. It’s really true that I have a total of about three images of him.’
‘Which are?’
‘One: that he wore a green, see-through visor when he worked – I suppose cellophane or something. His office was in the little bedroom you’re in, the one I had later for my own. It was crammed with books and papers, it was really a mess, and he sat there and worked on wills or estates or medical claims—’
‘And doctored the numbers.’ Ryan’s grinning. He’s proud, in a perverse way, of this part of his own history. That his grandfather went to jail for embezzlement and fraud. What he hasn’t taken in, what Lottie has always known, is how small-time, how pathetic, even, the criminality was. A two-bit lawyer, chiseling two-bit, marginal clients. Nothing to be proud of.
‘Whatever. But that visor just terrified me. I don’t know: something about its greenness, something about the way his face looked under it.’ She stares out over the shadowy yard, remembering.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘The other memories?’
‘Oh. When we got the TV. When he brought the TV in, how pleased he was. I loved him then.’ A breeze stirs the trees, gently bends the lanky weeds. ‘I got the crate too, the crate it came in. I had it back here, for a house, a playhouse, for the longest time.’ Lottie’s voice has slowed. ‘There was something magical about it that I connected to him.
‘And I remember that he used to dance me.’ She smiles at Ryan. ‘I did it with you too. You know, when you’re little and you put your feet on the grownup’s shoes, and suddenly you’re taking giant steps and twirling as though you’re part of them. Moving in great … arcs!’ She gestures broadly with her sandwich. ‘It felt wonderful. It was … heavenly. I can’t explain it.’
Ryan has been watching her face closely. Now he says, ‘Was he a lush too?’
Lottie sets the hand holding her sandwich down on her thigh. ‘I don’t know, really. And people felt differently about booze then, anyway. It was just a boozier time. I don’t know. I just can’t remember it. Maybe she wasn’t even as bad when he was still around. And after all, he did work. So he must have been sober some of the time.’ Lottie thinks again of the picture of them together back here, looking at each other, the secret of what was between them. She lifts her shoulders. ‘If he was a lush, he was more part-time than Mother anyway. She was a pro.’
After a moment, Ryan says, ‘So anyhow, the funeral?’
‘Oh! I don’t know. It didn’t help, that’s all, as it turned out. So few people came. And I didn’t know a soul, and they didn’t seem inordinately sad either. And then they all came here and had drinks, and Cam and I went out and played in our good clothes and got in trouble. Not even so much because we left the collation as that we’d played wearing those special clothes that had been bought just for the funeral.’
Ryan shakes his head. ‘I have to say, Mom, that you had a really weird upbringing.’
‘No weirder than yours.’
‘Christ yes, it was. Are you kidding me?’
She looks at him. He believes what he’s saying. ‘Well, actually I’m glad you think so. I used to feel guilty about how bizarre yours was.’
‘Mine? Mine was normal compared to yours.’
Lottie decides just to laugh. Not to bring up or list for him all the things that make her feel uncomfortable about how he grew up – the sometimes strange baby-sitters she had to arrange for him while she worked, his unbuffered exposure to her short temper and weepiness when a love affair or money were a problem. Even some of the good things have come to seem liabilities. Their tremendous early closeness seems to have turned him into this edgy, sometimes slightly chilly young man. And compromised her life too: she feels that no adult intimacy will ever approach in either comfort or clarity the feelings she had for him when he was small. Everyone feels that, she has argued to herself. But she knows that she was more deeply solitary than most people then – no family, no husband, for some years no close friends. She clung to Ryan.
What’s more, she knows that she was healing herself with Ryan’s childhood. For it wasn’t that with their closeness she asked him to be grown up, to be the little man of the house. No, instead she took the opportunity to be young again herself. She appeared to be a loving parent, she knew. And she was. But she was also a child, reliving in the things she did for Ryan and gave to him what might have been done for her, given to her, but hadn’t been. And no matter how much she tells herself that she didn’t, after all, take anything from him with all this, his occasional coolness to her now is like a rebuke to that notion – as though he understands there is something suspect and finally self-serving in the very depth of her attachment to him.
Though who knows? Maybe he feels none of this.
‘I’ve got to get some more paint,’ Ryan says now. ‘Can I take the car?’
‘Sure. Maybe I’ll work a little up there while you’re gone. Priming, I mean. I don’t want to scrape.’
‘Great. Do as much as you want. I’ll work from the ground up when I get back if you’re still at it.’ They both stare over at the windows, appraising.
Lottie sighs. ‘Well, we’ll see how long I last. I need something to calm me down, though.’
‘Why? ’Cause of Jessica?’
‘Yeah. Not just the accident, though. Though that’s bad enough. But Cam too – I feel so bad for him. And I can’t find him to tell him so.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just … no one can find him.’ Ryan frowns at her, a sharp adult furrow between his brows. Lottie explains: ‘He left his car at Elizabeth’s last night, and it was still there today, and no one can find him. He did call the store, it’s true, so he’s around somewhere. But I’d like to talk to him, just to be sure he’s okay.’
‘But isn’t that, like, illegal? Like leaving the scene of the crime, or something?’
‘No, no, no. He didn’t leave then. He stayed and talked to the police and went and had his blood tested and everything. All those things. But as soon as they gave him permission to leave, he vanished.’ She lifts her hands, her shoulders. ‘I’ve called his home, I went over there, I went to the store—’
‘Doesn’t Elizabeth know? Where he is?’
‘No; she’s all muddled up in her own mess. Her husband turned up, I guess. And she’s going back to him. With him. That’s part of it, I’m sure, with Cam. He knows that. I’m sure he’s upset about that too.’ She starts to pick up the plastic wrap, the empty seltzer bottle.
‘But I thought he and Elizabeth were, like, in love. For real, or something.’
Lottie half grins. ‘I would have thought so too. I’m sure Cam did.’<
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‘Christ. Uncle Cam.’ He shakes his head. ‘First Jessica, then Elizabeth. Bummer.’
‘Good Lord, Ryan: bummer?’ Lottie says. Her voice sounds pinched and affronted, even to herself. ‘It’s a little more than a bummer, I’d say.’ Neither of them speaks for a few moments. He doesn’t look at her. Finally she tries to make a joke of it: ‘And to think I worried that you’d come back from England with a vocabulary too high falutin for me to keep up with.’
He turns to her, and here it is, the suddenly blank face, the eyes a little more hooded than usual: Do I know you? Have we been introduced? After a moment he says in a small, tight voice, ‘It’s just a wee figure of speech, Lottie.’ He stands up and brushes crumbs off his jeans. ‘A figure of speech, is all. Keys inside?’
‘Yes. On my worktable in the dining room.’
‘Okay. Later. Thanks for lunch,’ he says coldly.
Lottie moves out of his way so he can open the screen. ‘Okeydoke,’ she says.
After she hears the door shut behind him at the front of the house, she picks up the rest of the lunch debris and goes inside. She throws the paper away, sets the glasses and bottle down, and then she stands, looking around the kitchen. Suddenly it seems pointless, all this sifting through what is, after all, trash. The broken bits of dishes and glass still lying on the foor make it seem especially so. She gets out a big trash bag and begins wiping the counters and table clean, sliding everything in. She fills two bags. She sweeps the floor free of the glistening bits of glass and china and ties the bags up, sets them in the living room until trash day.
Then she goes upstairs to change into painting clothes. Richard Lester has left his door open, and she can’t help looking in as she passes his room on the way back down. He’s begun to pack for his move, she’s glad to see. There are liquor cartons filled with books and papers lined up against the wall.
Outside again, as she opens the bulkhead and begins getting the primer and brush out, she’s thinking of Ryan’s face when she chided him, his sudden coldness. How quickly he can change!
Didn’t she start it, though? If it were anyone else, would ‘bummer’ have offended her so? Didn’t she, after all, act like a mother first? Of course he resented her tone, her telling him what to do. I own you, that tone said. And what he was saying with his coldness was simply: No, you don’t. Why should she feel hurt when he acted like a grownup son, too big to be told what to do? He was, after all.
