For Love

by Sue Miller

  Lottie was dizzy with sleepiness, but she reached over in response and touched his shoulder.

  She turned the desk lamp off and got up and went to the window. It was almost five, and the sky was turning a papery white. The rectangular backyard was deep, black with shadow. Jack had told her Evelyn had had a flower garden, which he’d tried to keep up for a few years after her first stroke, so she could sit in her wheelchair and look out over it; but that it had slowly become overgrown and weed-choked, and finally he’d had a yardman tear everything out and plant yew bushes. He said Evelyn didn’t notice at that point.

  Lottie thought of Evelyn looking blindly out on the yard; she thought of herself driving down the alley, looking in with all her frantic passion. Bader yelped suddenly, painfully, from his exile on the threshold, and she looked over at him. He tilted his head, he moaned in love.

  ‘Yes, just like that,’ she said, and laughed out loud.

  In the weeks before Lottie left, she and Jack were, if anything, even more careful with each other than they’d been. Sometimes Lottie had the sense of herself being an invalid in Jack’s eyes, he was so solicitous with her. This is the way he must have treated Evelyn, she thought. And then she’d wonder again whether the problem might not be more Jack’s than her own. Whether he simply didn’t remember how to have a wife who took up room, who was whole and wanted something from him. At other times, though, when she had to stop herself from picking up the telephone to call his office in the middle of the day, or felt herself yearning for him in the night, even though he was lying next to her, she was aware of how easily she could slip again into her crazy, shameful desperation.

  The morning they packed the car, the air was clear and cool. It felt like a fall day in New England, and Lottie sang of distance as she carried things out to the driveway: ‘… across the wide Missooou-ri.’ She was familiar from her freelance days with the rising excitement in herself. She’d driven off to do research or an interview often enough with the same eager heart.

  Bader followed her on her trips in and out. The last time in, she went to the kitchen to say goodbye to Megan, who was still in her shorty nightgown, having breakfast. She looked up at Lottie, startled. She had cut her hair recently, in a kind of elongated flattop, which she kept in vertical spikes in the daytime with gel. Now it was matted from sleep. It looked artificial, like a cheap toupee made of some clumped synthetic fiber.

  ‘God, you’re leaving so soon?’ she asked, as though she’d been unconscious of the bustle of preparation around her for the last hour or more. Then she stood up and crossed to Lottie. Awkwardly and with her eyes swung to a far corner of the room, she pressed herself momentarily into Lottie’s arms. Lottie could feel the girl’s small high breasts, could smell her sweet breath – she’d been eating pancakes with maple syrup. This was the first time Megan had voluntarily embraced her stepmother, and Lottie found herself suddenly tearful. When Megan stepped back, which she did very quickly, Lottie turned away too, so the girl couldn’t see her face. At the doorway, though, she stopped. ‘Have a good month, Meggie,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah, like I can with summer school breathing down my neck.’

  ‘Well, maybe you can manage a good moment or two, though,’ Lottie said.

  ‘Yeah. Well, you too,’ Megan said, and sat down again at the table, where the funnies were spread out next to her plate.

  When Lottie came outside, Jack was hauling Bader out of the front seat of the car. The back seat was full of her bags and boxes of books. She’d put her computer in the trunk.

  ‘He’s been misinformed. He thinks he gets to go,’ Jack said.

  ‘No way, Mister Master.’ Lottie bent over the dog and let him lick her chin. Then she stood and turned to Jack. She reached up and set her hand on his face. ‘I hate goodbyes,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you when I get there, and we can say hello.’

  ‘I love you,’ he answered. He reached for her. His hand spread across the small of her back and held her in the way it always did, a way that reminded her of dancing, that made her feel fitted to him, part of him. Then Bader barked and nosed her butt jealously, and they pulled apart, laughing.

  As he bent down over her open window, Jack said, ‘Have a good rest from us, and then come home and let’s get on with it. Or get it on, or something.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ she said. She ran her hand up his forearm to where the veins corded in a greenish knot inside his elbow. Then she turned quickly to back down the driveway.

  Before she reached the corner she had the radio on, and she kept it on across Indiana and Ohio and into Pennsylvania, where she spent the night – all the oldies stations catering to people her age who yearned back to the time when they were twelve, or fifteen, or twenty. She sang along at the top of her voice, she pounded the steering wheel to Fats Domino, to Little Richard and the Beatles. It was quite possible that Jack would have enjoyed this too, but she chose to imagine him disapproving, changing the station.

  She stopped at a Holiday Inn. After dinner, she went to the lounge for a drink. Everywhere in the public areas the floor was carpeted in a dark-red plaid, as though they wanted you to believe you were in some private British club, she thought. There was a large-screen TV hanging over the bar, tuned to the NBA playoffs. She had a slow dark beer and talked easily to the bartender, a kid a few years older than Ryan, wearing a clip-on black bow tie.

  When she went back to her room, she opened the window and lay down on the one of the two king-size beds that was closer to it. She could hear some children using the pool; she could hear the whine of the highway. She placed her hands on her breasts and moved them slowly down her body. She felt at home, she realized. Relaxed in her body. Relaxed, in this ugly, junky motel room. The feeling frightened her, and she tried to think of Jack, of what he might be doing at that moment: cleaning up after dinner, or reading, or talking to Megan. Or maybe he was watching TV, the playoffs too. He liked basketball.

  But the world she shared with him seemed far away from who she felt she was at the moment. It was hard to picture him. Outside, a man laughed; she could hear the drone of someone’s TV. She looked up at the sky, which opened over the motel, an untroubled, improbable pink. She turned on her side, bent her knees, slipped her hands between them. Inside her, a door shut firmly against any thoughts, and she felt a dizzy, empty happiness at being here, nowhere, alone at last.

  CHAPTER V

  Lottie arrived in Cambridge in mid-June, thinking she might stay at the most for four or five weeks. Certainly she would have said then that she’d be back in Chicago by late July, which was when the accident occurred. Sometimes, later, she would wonder: if she’d left earlier, if she’d taken Ryan and gone when she originally planned to, would it have changed anything? And then she’d try to dismiss the thought.

  Her first five days in Cambridge were sunny and hot, and Lottie had her mother’s house almost to herself – only Richard Lester, the last tenant, crept in and out like a frightened fat ghost. Actually, Lottie felt a little like a ghost, or a shadow, herself as she moved alone through the cluttered rooms. She slept in her mother’s bed, she sat in her mother’s chair, she ate from her mother’s chipped, stained dishes – even drank from what was left of a cheap bottle of her mother’s gin.

  The first evening she was in town, she had dinner with Cameron in his apartment, which lifted her spirits temporarily. But when she opened the door to her mother’s house that night and the familiar musty, sour smell rose to greet her; when she flicked on the light in the dining room and felt the room, noisy with doodads, with heavy, outdated furniture, with violently patterned draperies, press in around her: then she felt as trapped and yet somehow as emptied as she had as a young woman planning her escape. She went immediately to the telephone and called Jack. He was in bed, reading. They spoke for ten or fifteen minutes in halting, hungry phrases, like new lovers.

  The second morning she woke in her mother’s airless bedroom, the heavy faded curtains closed, and stared at the
collection of dinky glass figurines on the bedside table a few feet from her face. There were a chihuahua, a poodle, a mother dachshund and three tiny pups. Next to them, irrelevantly, stood a shepherdess with a broken crook, so badly painted she was cross-eyed. Lottie felt a momentary pulse of confusion, not just about where she was, but who. Reflexively, her fingers floated up her body, rested on her dented breast.

  Her first act after dressing and brushing her teeth was to unhook the bedroom curtains. They fell in a heap on the floor, releasing a swirl of dust motes into the leaf-filtered light that entered the room. Next she swept clear every surface, dumping the figurines, the decorated Kleenex container, the dusty, faded, and dirty cloth flowers, into the wastebasket – itself painted with a bucolic scene. And all that day she moved through the house, scooping things off shelves, out of drawers, piling everything into any container she could find – a bucket, a trash can, a plastic bag. That evening, before she ran, she dragged all this, plus all the small pieces of furniture that she didn’t think anyone would want, out to the curb.

  She jogged slowly through the hilly streets, making her way by feel down to the river, emerging finally on to Memorial Drive from a narrow dark street of tall apartment buildings. The light was still a yellowy pink in the western sky over the water, and a last power boat was making its way slowly upriver. It threw a wake, which lapped at the weedy banks as Lottie ran along. She could hear it over her own deep breaths.

  As soon as she started back toward her mother’s house, the shadowy, tree-lined streets engulfed her in darkness. The streetlights above her were flickering on, and here and there, windows were lighted in the apartments, the houses she passed. She walked the last block home. On her mother’s street, she could see her neighbors moving inside houses that were so altered from her childhood days she wouldn’t have recognized them individually. In front of her mother’s house, the curb had emptied a little; some of the furniture had been hauled off. After she’d showered, she unpacked her books and notes and sat for a while, reading, in the transformed bedroom, telling herself she already felt better.

  Over the next few days, she drove around Cambridge and Boston, locating junk dealers, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, hardware stores, rental tools, paint stores. In this, too, she had a sense of dislocation: everything was approximately the same but also deeply changed. Mostly spruced up, made expensive-looking and spiffy. Houses were repainted in tricolor pastel schemes. Yards that had been dirt-packed playgrounds in her youth were full of perennials and roses. The A & P was gone and the old five and ten, replaced by gourmet shops, elegant little clothing and fabric stores. Even the old yellow-brick Sears, where she’d gone hoping to buy a fan the second day, was transformed, its ugly factory bulk turned into an unconvincing mall with a few stores sprinkled through it in lonely, upscale splendor. She found herself grateful for the rudeness of the man at the hardware store; for the seediness of the secondhand-furniture dealer, who left the lingering stale odor of a fat black cigar floating in the rooms of her mother’s house as he moved through them, pointing out to his assistants whatever he thought he could sell. Lottie sat on the front steps and watched the sweaty young men haul her mother’s possessions out to his flatbed truck in a light, warm rain.

  On Saturday, Ryan arrived from London. Lottie was twenty minutes or so early to pick him up, and she sat near the door to customs and drank two weak cappuccinos as she waited. She was nervous. She’d dressed casually, in a denim shirt, blue jeans, and little heeled sandals. Still, she’d put on her makeup carefully, she’d been aware of wanting to look pretty.

  Jack had always teased her about her relationship with Ryan. He called it their ‘romance.’ And when Lottie had met Jack, that had seemed especially apt. Ryan was just thirteen then, and Lottie had barely finished her treatment for cancer. They’d always been close, but Lottie was aware of feeling even more focused on him after her lump had been diagnosed. Actually, a small part of her initial eagerness to get involved with Jack had to do with her feeling that it would help her not hold on to Ryan, not get in the way of his trying not to be her little boy anymore.

  What she’d felt in recent years, though, particularly since Ryan had gone off to college, was how absolute the ending to that mother-child romance was. It astonished her, given how central it had been in her life, given how much of her emotion had been taken up by Ryan – by love for him and anger at him and sadness with him and pride in him – how suddenly gone he was. All of that world was. She’d had a sense, the last few times he’d been home for a stretch, that there was some new relationship unfolding, something that, with luck, might look finally more like a kind of friendship. But mostly what she felt was the absence in herself of the old mothering emotions. Not that she loved him less. Not that at all. But that the kind of love was different. Less consuming.

  She was, on the whole, glad for this. But she missed the other too. She missed him, the person he had been and wasn’t anymore. The younger Ryan, the little Ryan – all the little Ryans – who might as well have died, really. Sometimes she dreamed of him as he was at three, or six; and woke with a mixture of gratitude and bottomless sorrow, the same feeling she had when she dreamed of one of the few close friends she’d had who’d died.

  They were coming in twos and threes through the customs door now, most of them pushing carts stacked high with luggage. Lottie had moved over to the waiting area and was quickly shoved up against the barrier with the crowd. She saw Ryan before he saw her. He was messy-looking, unshaven, but tall and blond and very adult. An enormous backpack towered behind his head, and he walked toward the edge of the barrier, lugging a big duffel bag in each hand and scanning the crowd for her. When she broke free and stepped toward him, she saw his face open in pleasure.

  ‘Hey, my ma!’ he said. He set both bags down and held his arms out. She stepped forward, into his embrace, and he held her hard against his chest. He smelled funky, and Lottie laughed and hugged him back, her arms trying to circle his waist, fumbling against the frame of the backpack.

  All the way home in the car he chattered to her. He had stuff to show her, tapes she had to hear; he’d met the greatest people, it had been an amazing time.

  In the next days, he seemed to expand and fill the little house with his energy, his noise. Everywhere Lottie turned, there were the signs of his presence. He trimmed his hair and left the pale curved wisps in the sink. His abandoned shoes were waiting to trip her in almost every room. He left his dishes all over the house. He stood in front of the refrigerator with the door open and drank milk directly from the cardboard carton. He claimed the very air. He played the radio from the moment he got up, rap and blues, the music he’d missed most, he said. He was on the phone for hours each evening, calling people from school who lived in Boston or Cambridge, calling friends in Chicago, calling his father in Connecticut.

  Lottie felt restored to some earlier, familiar version of herself. It made her aware, abruptly, of how long it had been since she lived with a daily sense of ease with herself, of belonging in her skin. Since before she married Jack, since before she moved in with him. This seemed a dangerous line of thinking to pursue, and she put it aside. But it rushed over her as feeling several times a day – when she heard Ryan making his noises somewhere else in the house, or outside; when she was fixing a meal she knew he liked. And she didn’t fight it then, in that form.

  Ryan had begun the work project with characteristic energy too, peeling back curled corners of the ancient wallpaper the very first time he walked through the house. His first full day of work, he had rented an extension ladder and completely removed the siding from the front of the house.

  Today, four days after his arrival, he was stripping wallpaper upstairs; outside, it was still wet from last night’s rain. Lottie was hauling trash out to the street. She’d been in Cambridge almost ten days now, through two trash pickups at this point, and both times she’d filled the curbside and the little strip of lawn in front of it for the width of her mot
her’s property with bulging green plastic bags, sagging stained furniture, and cartons of rusted or moldy junk from the basement. The bag she was pulling behind her now was heavy – bottles – and her back was bothering her. She was thinking about taking a hot shower as she dragged the bag, clinking and shifting weight, down to where everything else was heaped.

  A car honked and swung over close to the lumpy bags already lurching this way and that on the curb. It braked with a sharp, animal squeal, and Lottie turned to it, annoyed; and then she saw the henna-red hair, the oversize sunglasses. ‘Elizabeth!’ she said, mostly to herself. She stepped over the bags and leaned into the car’s window on the passenger side. ‘My God, Elizabeth! How are you? What are you doing here?’

  In the kind, dimmed light of the car’s interior, Elizabeth looked young still, even beautiful. Lottie was abruptly aware of the frayed T-shirt she herself was wearing, the baggy work pants, the paint-dotted bandanna covering her hair. No makeup: naturally, she thought.

  ‘Charlotte! This is utterly amazing!’ Elizabeth cried. ‘How wonderful to see you!’

  ‘But what brings you here?’ Lottie asked. ‘This is such a coincidence!’

  Elizabeth waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, I’m visiting. Kiddies too. Marital trauma, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a boring tale if ever there was one.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lottie said. ‘Well, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be,’ Elizabeth said. ‘After all, it happens to everyone. Why should I be exempt?’

  ‘Still, it’s hard, I’m sure,’ Lottie fumbled.

  Elizabeth shrugged. Her blouse was silk, expensive, and it shimmered with the gesture, made it more elegant, more dramatic than it would have been otherwise. She wore a bold, Indian-looking pendant, and cufflike silver bracelets on both wrists. ‘And you?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Visiting too?’