by Sue Miller
Lottie gestured behind her. ‘We’re getting the house ready to sell. My mother’s in a nursing home.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Elizabeth said. She whipped off her sunglasses as if to show the compassion in her eyes. Lottie noted the careful, unfashionably thick black eyeliner, drawn as though the sixties had never ended, with a little wing at the outer corner of each eye. ‘How long are you staying?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘I’ve no idea, myself.’
‘About a month, I think. It’s a tremendous mess in there.’
‘But you’re not doing it all by yourself? Surely someone … ?’
‘My son is helping me.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I knew you had a son. God, he must be gigantic by now, you started so young.’
How was she meant to take this? Lottie wondered. But she answered only, ‘He’s twenty. Almost twenty-one.’
‘Twenty-one! Weren’t you smart! Smarter than any of us. By the time my youngest is twenty-one, I’ll be geriatric.’ She snorted. ‘She can wheel me around.’
‘Oh, come on. You look fabulous, Elizabeth.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘I wasn’t fishing, I promise,’ she said. ‘But how nice you were to say so.’ She leaned forward. Her voice dropped, became warm and confidential. ‘Look, we should do something together. Let’s have lunch. Let’s be nice suburban ladies who lunch.’
‘That’d be great,’ Lottie said. ‘I’d love a break from all this.’
‘Me too,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Not that I’m doing a damn thing to take a break from. I can’t honestly tell you even what I have been doing since I got here. Bored does not begin to describe it. A nice, winey lunch would be just the thing. We can catch each other up on all these years. Some of which I’d rather forget.’
‘Yeah,’ Lottie said. ‘I’ve got about a decade like that.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘Well, the nice thing is, we can just edit out whatever we want. Or don’t want.’
‘Well, great,’ Lottie said. She tapped the car with her open hand in preparation to leave. She was aware, suddenly, of a desire not to be looked at as she was any longer. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
‘Me too,’ Elizabeth agreed. She slid her sunglasses back on. ‘So, you’ll call?’
Lottie smiled. ‘Why don’t you call me?’ she said in a voice gone suddenly cool and dry. She straightened up and stepped away from the car.
But Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice being corrected. ‘Of course, of course,’ she cried. She put the car in gear, waved as if she were going on a long journey, and then she drove the little distance up the street to her house.
Lottie stood, massaging her back under the arching trees. She watched as the big new station wagon turned silently up the long driveway. She waited until it disappeared under the elaborate porte cochere at the side of the house. Then she stepped over all the junk she’d carried out and walked slowly up to her mother’s house. She was still smiling. All the old feelings, she thought.
She shut the door behind herself and stood for a moment in the empty entrance hall. ‘How humiliating,’ she said aloud. ‘How can it possibly be?’
‘Ah, ah!’ Ryan’s voice floated down from upstairs. ‘You’re talking to yourself again, Mom.’
‘Oh, leave me alone. You’ll do it too one day,’ Lottie called back.
‘Hey, you talk like I’m going to get old, like you. When you know I never will.’ When she didn’t respond after a moment, he started to sing along with the radio again, his voice pathetically faking funk: ‘I got a black-eyed bone. I got a mojo too …’
In the kitchen, Lottie was pouring herself a glass of wine. But instead of heading for the shower upstairs, where Ryan might want to talk to her, she opened the back door and stepped outside. She sat on the stoop. Elizabeth, she thought. Shit. Lottie hated the past; she was sorry she’d ever consented to come home. A gnat buzzed by her forehead and she caught at it. The backyard smelled of dirt, of the summer’s rain, of weedy blossoms. She felt mugged by memory, suddenly: God. She gulped some wine and closed her eyes.
It was in high school, when she and Elizabeth were no longer friends, although they still stopped and talked in what would have seemed a friendly way if they saw each other on the street. But the kids who played together outside on the street now were younger than they were, and the kids their age had separated out, went to different schools, had different friends, different hairstyles, different ways of talking.
So Lottie should have been smarter when Elizabeth called. She should have known something was wrong: there was whispering in the background, laughter. Elizabeth’s voice was strange too, secretive, lilting with a pleasure Lottie couldn’t understand. But Lottie was foolishly eager, hopeful. She saw a whole new social world opening to her. She said no, no, she wasn’t doing anything Friday. Yes, she would come to the party.
When the game was decided on – Fifteen Minutes of Heaven – Elizabeth and her boyfriend had gone first. ‘To show the rest of you how it’s done,’ he said, and everyone laughed. There were about twenty kids, none of whom Lottie knew. They all talked to one another while Elizabeth and her boyfriend were in the closet; they made sly remarks, sniggered. Lottie stood smiling in what she hoped was a friendly way, but no one spoke to her. When it was time to open the door, Elizabeth and her boyfriend stumbled out, blinking and flushed and laughing in embarrassment and pride.
And then it had been Lottie’s turn, and she was shut into the muffled dark with a boy she didn’t know, a boy who hadn’t bothered to speak to her or look at her while Elizabeth was in the closet. He was supposed to be able to do whatever he wanted until the strangers outside called ‘time,’ that was the way the game was played, and Lottie had seen from his expression as he stepped into the little room behind her that he had been promised this, that she had been summoned by Elizabeth as a gift for this boy. Her notion of a new life shriveled, and she felt exposed: here it was, the camphor-smelling dark, the funny, ugly boy the other girls didn’t want but thought they could give her to. Probably he was ‘nice.’ Probably everyone thought he had a good sense of humor. As soon as the door was shut, he pressed against Lottie. She said no.
‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘What will it hurt?’ He smelled of onion dip.
Thinking of this now, Lottie set her wineglass down on the mossy wood of her mother’s back stoop. As she looked out over the overgrown backyard, her face was clenched in anguish for that younger Charlotte. Why hadn’t it been possible, she wondered, to open the door? to step out of the closet? To walk out of the house, to cross the street back to where her mother sat in the darkened living room, the TV turned too loud, the bottomless drink balanced on the arm of the chair.
It just wasn’t, it wasn’t. He pushed a knee between hers. His breath was in her face. Lottie was backed into a space Elizabeth and her boyfriend had cleared by shoving the coats and hangers to either end of the bar.
‘Get away from me,’ she said.
Her back was against the wall. She bent her knees and slid down until she was sitting on the floor.
‘Hey,’ he complained softly in the air above her. The empty hangers clicked as he fumbled around where she’d been.
Lottie set her hands on the wooden floor of the closet; and felt, under her fingers, something cottony and wet and warm. Sticky. A string at one end. She knew before her brain said the word: Tampax. And it had to be Elizabeth’s; she was the only girl in the closet before Lottie. The boy squatted by her; she could feel him.
‘C’mon, please,’ he said.
She folded her fingers around the Tampax. In her mind were clear, sharp images of how it had come to be here. What she could say! Casually: ‘Does this belong to you?’ What she could do to Elizabeth! She carefully pocketed it.
‘Please,’ he said again.
She felt sorry for him, suddenly. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’ This was a lie. ‘Elizabeth never asked me, or I would have told her.’
“Ahhh, hell,�
� he said. Then there was a long silence. He stood up finally. Next to Lottie, his feet shifted every few minutes.
She stood up, too, before they called ‘time.’ She stood up and in a generous impulse rumpled her own hair, rubbed her lipstick off. What did she care what anyone here thought of her? And when they opened the door, she staggered out with the boy, looking the slutty way she was supposed to look.
She left a short time later. Elizabeth was in the kitchen. She hadn’t spoken to Lottie since the game started, When Lottie came in, Elizabeth looked up. There were two girls standing with her, and they all smiled at Lottie. Lottie said she had to go, and Elizabeth answered with heavy sarcasm, as though the last thing she would ever really want to do was ask Lottie to stay: ‘Oh, are you sure?’ She and her friends exchanged smirking glances.
She closed her hand around the Tampax in her pocket before she answered. Just knowing it was there was enough. She smiled right back. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff I have to do, actually.’
It was the summer after this party, the summer when Lottie and Elizabeth were both between their junior and senior years of high school, that Cameron had started dating Elizabeth. When Lottie found out, she felt a sense of intense betrayal. Cam should have been in love with someone like her, she thought. Though if he’d asked her what that meant, she would have said only someone who’d gone to Cambridge Latin, not the Winsor School. She wouldn’t have been able to label, or even describe, the other differences: someone whose family rented rooms, someone who had to have a job, someone who wasn’t going to Martha’s Vineyard for three weeks in August. Someone whose life had tighter corners, a smaller fence, a shape Lottie could imagine. Someone who wouldn’t have thought Lottie was a cheap, stupid girl she could donate to some drip.
Lottie was working afternoons and evenings that summer at an ice cream parlour in Harvard Square – Brigham’s – so she didn’t see much of Cameron. He was gone by the time she got up; he had a job downtown at a bookstore. He never told her he was taking Elizabeth out, but one night when she came home from work, she heard laughter and, looking over, saw them on the glider on Elizabeth’s front porch. After that she began to see them together everywhere. They were down on the weedy riverbank of the Charles one Sunday afternoon when Lottie went there with a towel to sunbathe. She pedaled right past them on her bike and turned back up Boylston Street. She saw them walking in Harvard Square, she saw them sitting together on a bench on the Cambridge Common. They came into Brigham’s once; she looked up from the register and they were seated at one of her booths. She asked another waitress, Jan, if she’d take them.
‘Uuh uuh. Can’t. They asked for your station.’
Lottie walked over to them, conscious suddenly of the servile-looking uniform, the apron, the clunky white shoes, like a nurse’s, or an old lady’s. She pretended that she was very busy, that she didn’t have time to talk. Cameron teased her; he said if she wasn’t nicer she wouldn’t get a tip. After she’d brought them their order – he had iced coffee, Elizabeth had a frappe – she noticed when she passed their booth that he was reading aloud to Elizabeth, that she was rapt, intent, watching his mouth, his hands holding the book. Lottie had thought of the closet, the homely boy, the Tampax. It made her most angry, oddly, at Cameron.
After Elizabeth left for Martha’s Vineyard, Cameron was home a lot more, and he suddenly focused his attention on Lottie. Where was she thinking of going to college? How much money had she saved? Why was she wearing so much makeup? What were her board scores? Did she ever go out? Who did she go out with? He was five years older than Lottie, and he often began his sentences, ‘You know, Char, it’s time you thought about …’
Well, she’d thought about none of it. She’d gone through the motions with the college-track kids at school, but she’d assumed that when the time came, the counselor – someone – would tell her where to apply, what to do. When Cameron began asking his questions, she saw that she might have been thinking differently, that she should have been thinking differently. That Cameron must have thought differently to be where he was; that Elizabeth, of course, had thought differently all along. She felt suddenly thick, stupid. Absurdly, she missed her father. Maybe it was something he’d said to Cam, given to him before he went away, that made her brother so different from her. She hadn’t worked hard in school at all. Her grades were mediocre. She had almost no money saved up. She’d used it to buy clothes, records, makeup. To go to movies. To have her hair straightened.
Cameron had advice for her, lots, and Lottie didn’t want to hear any of it. They fought. ‘Oh, leave her alone, will you?’ their mother would say. ‘For God’s sake, let’s have some peace in the house.’
But he didn’t. One night he followed her into the kitchen when she got home from work. While she stood at the counter in her uniform, eating a bowl of cereal – her dinner – he brought up rumors he’d heard from Elizabeth that she’d been going out with an older guy, a guy who had dropped out of high school, who was known as a troublemaker.
‘So what?’ she said. She had, briefly.
‘That’s all you’d need,’ he said. ‘To get knocked up by some guy who’s going to end up driving a bus for the MTA.’
‘Elizabeth’s much more likely to get knocked up than I am,’ Lottie said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked.
But Lottie turned away. She dumped the cereal into the sink, rinsed the bowl. She couldn’t have told him what she knew. She couldn’t have confided it, the secret that had given her a sense of power over Elizabeth. Besides, she was angry at Cameron for trying to change her. Not telling him made a barrier between herself and him that she could use to ward off his advice, to keep herself deaf to his good sense. She was relieved when Elizabeth came home a week or so later and Cameron left her alone.
That winter, of course, everything changed between Elizabeth and Cameron. At Christmas, he fell from her porch roof as he climbed out of her room at night, and after that Elizabeth was forbidden to him. At the semester break, there was the drunken scene when Elizabeth’s father walked him home across the snowy street, and then it seemed to be pretty much over. And Lottie was glad. Glad for his pain: he thought he was so much better than she was! And glad for the possibility that Elizabeth had been hurt too.
All this without once really examining the differences between her life and Elizabeth’s. Because to have thought about them would have been to acknowledge the lack of choice in her own life, the way in which money and class and circumstance had shaped her sense of who she might be. And that was something she wasn’t ready to think about, that she wouldn’t be ready to think about for years. Instead she conceived of herself then as hating Elizabeth for purely personal reasons. The differences in their lives reflected only the differences in who they were. She thought of them as simply being Elizabeth, Charlotte, willfully and freely making all the choices that they made.
Lottie did go to college the next fall – to the University of New Hampshire. She remembered those two months before she dropped out as being among the most miserable of her life. She missed home, she missed the city, she missed her mother and the dark, stale-smelling living room. She missed the shy greetings of the roomers as they went in and out, the blare of the television still going as she dropped off to sleep at night, the solitude of the little first-floor bathroom in the mornings. It was easy to leave school, to say she couldn’t afford it anymore, because this was at least in part the truth.
But when she came back home, she felt somehow unfitted for that life too. She never argued with her mother, but she saw things differently. The house was shabby, dirty. The silent boarders seemed suddenly like shadowey grotesques. She noticed, for the first time, not just that her mother drank – she’d known that – but that she got shit-faced, as they’d called it at college, just about every evening. Sometimes Lottie would wake in the night to hear the television still shouting in the living room. She’d go in to turn it off, and her mother would be aslee
p in the chair, the bottle she’d fetched after Lottie went to her room within reach, her mouth shaping a slack rictus, her knees flung wide in what seemed to Lottie a hideous parody of sexuality.
When she’d saved a little money, Lottie moved out. She rented a room in a big boardinghouse on Mass Ave and began a new life. She had a job at the Midget, a deli and restaurant where students and faculty met for breakfast, for lunch. She made good tips. Somtimes she picked people up, slept with them. She bought herself a hot plate, an Indian bedspread, fat scented candles she burned when she was alone. She signed up for night courses at the Extension School.
She saw Elizabeth occasionally, heading across Harvard Yard on her way to class or the library in one of her eccentric outfits – sometimes peasant clothing from Turkey or South America, things her father might have brought back for her from his journeys. Sometimes all black. Always pale lipstick and dark eye makeup. Once Lottie glimpsed her in a rainstorm wearing what clearly was a flowered pink plastic hair-dryer hood over her dark-red mane. But even then there was a young man walking with her as there usually was, though he looked – they all always looked – as though he were following a few paces behind. And what Lottie felt then, what she felt whenever she saw Elizabeth, was no pang of envy for her or for the life she was leading, no impulse to compare what seemed to be their fates. Just the sense of hateful recognition: ‘Ah, Elizabeth.’
There was a coach house behind her boardinghouse, rented to a group of graduate students, all men. Lottie met them when she was sunbathing in the side yard the next spring. They invited her to a party where everyone got very drunk, where someone rode a bicycle in and out of the house, where someone else attacked the police with a squirt gun when they arrived to break things up. It was 1964, 1965, and a brave new world was just beginning, the great romance everyone decided to have with everything that was different. A few years earlier, Lottie couldn’t have made it happen even with enormous effort, but now she was interesting to several of these men; she represented a half-formed idea that would come to full flower later as the counterculture. They had posters on their walls of Malcolm X, of Mao, of Che Guevara. Lottie was another, different species of exotic.
