by Sue Miller
Some of this was perhaps due to the feeling she had whenever she entered Delia's house—that oddly transformed version of her own—the feeling of being away, in another place. Some of it might even have been the white noise provided by the air conditioner, the way it blocked out the world and closed around them. But mostly it was her sense of being alive under Tom's gaze, of his returning her to who she was. Who she'd been. Herself.
If someone had asked her about the nature of what happened between them, of course she would have had to acknowledge its eroticism, its sexuality. But it was more than that. It was a charge between them. Or a recharge, she thought.
Yes, they were like batteries that had run down, and down, and then had stopped working. And now they were sparking, humming. After each of her afternoons with Tom, she had been aware of feeling easier, lighter in her life with Asa—and with Nathan too.
In fact on Friday, full of the sense of herself as strong, as attractive, she went out to the front porch with Asa and sat on the steps to wait for Nathan's return home. She had washed her face and put makeup on. She was wearing a dress that had just begun to fit her again, a sundress she'd worn often the summer she met Nathan. She laid the baby on his back along her thighs so he could look up at the trees, the sunlight flickering through them.
Nathan appeared on his bicycle on the street. She watched him see her, watched his expression change as she smiled at him and held Asa up quickly by way of greeting.
He rode up the driveway and swung his leg off the bike, graceful as a dancer. He walked across the lawn and up the steps to her, grinning. He bent and kissed her, one of his chlorinated kisses. He squatted and kissed the top of Asa's head.
He sat down next to her. “To what do I owe this great, great pleasure?” he asked.
Her mouth opened, her breath drew in, and then she just smiled.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Delia, July 19, 1994
THE MAN FROM Bodyworks drove Delia back into town on Tuesday and dropped her off at the Apthorp house. She was early, because they had wanted the car by eight. She went around to the back of the house and sat at one of the picnic tables. It was supposed to be hot again today—the heat wave might break records for length, she'd heard on the radio. For now, though, it was only in the low seventies—it had cooled off in the night. Birds were calling from high in the trees—a warbler's sweet-sweet-sweet song, and the bossy squawk of the jays in reply. The breeze stirred through the leaves from time to time. The orange daylilies were out, and the sky-blue balls of hydrangea.
Delia sat. She hadn't brought a book or notepaper or anything to pass the time, but she didn't need it. Her thoughts rushed by, turning her from one thing to another. She thought how her life seemed to have been enlarged suddenly—peopled, complicated, full of duties and chores and obligations. And pleasures. Exactly the things, she thought, that keep you alive. She thought of her own mother at her age, how old and resigned she had seemed, and of how different from that she felt. She went over the day's routines, the ones she'd set up so carefully. Tom off at nine to Putnam with the driver. Her long day here, which would likely be moderately busy. She'd have to walk home, of course, today and tomorrow too, but she didn't mind doing that. She'd been driving lately only on account of the increased number of errands she always had to run, and because she was always rushing to get back to relieve Meri or Matt.
She thought of Meri, with that slightly evasive, sly quality she had, a quality she'd lost for a while after the baby was born. Perhaps even earlier—during the pregnancy. It was coming back, Delia was happy to see. She seemed less desperate, less lost somehow. Less in need, Delia thought. It was easier to be around her. And she was beginning to look better again, tomboyish and sexual. It would all be fine, Delia thought, once that baby came a little more into his own.
She tried to remember if she'd been as overwhelmed the first time around, with Nancy. She doubted it. For one thing, she'd been surrounded by other women and their children. They were all stuck at home and would be at home for years, stuck, making the most of it together.
Meri's life was utterly different. Of course it was good that she would go back to work. But it meant that she'd never settle in, as Delia had, to the rhythm of day after day at home, to the idle pleasure of it, the easy boredom. The awareness of the tiny shifts in your children's behavior that marked their growing up, their developing personalities.
What had she done all that time? She really couldn't account for it. The days and days, years and years, of meals, of laundry, of shopping, of sewing, of setting up projects for the kids, helping them with homework. Later their games and plays and recitals and shows. Later than that, the nights of waiting up for kids who'd missed their curfews, who were driving for the first time, who'd gone off somewhere with a dangerous older crowd.
She had subsided into all that, happily enough, she would have said. Into that, and later the coordination of their double life in Washington and in Williston—into the campaigns, the good works required of her, all the socializing, all the arrangements to be made. It wasn't really so surprising, she supposed, that Tom had looked for a kind of excitement in sex elsewhere—for year after year she could hardly have provided it; though his arrival home at the end of the day, at the end of a week, had always made her heart feel lighter. As it did now, she thought.
When Adele arrived, Delia went inside with her. It was cooler in the dark rooms of the old house, but musty. She and Adele decided they would open the windows for an hour or so anyway to let the fresh air in. They moved separately through the rooms, turning the old latches, sliding the sashes up, propping them open. Delia had the sense, which she only fleetingly got, of what life might have been like—what a moment, anyway, of life might have been like—for Anne Apthorp, moving through these rooms on a warm summer day in the nineteenth century.
Life doesn't change in its fundamentals, she thought. The same small things bring pleasure, and always will.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Meri, July 19, 1994
AT SIX IT WAS already bright and hot in their bedroom. They all woke early—Asa first, then Meri, then Nathan. Nathan got up and went to the bathroom. Meri could hear him in the shower.
She changed Asa and nursed him in bed. Then she carried him downstairs. Nathan was already down there, padding around in his bare feet, fixing coffee, getting breakfast things out of the pantry.
The kitchen was cooler and darker than the rest of the house. Meri set Asa in his tilting chair up on the counter, and as their faces moved past him coming and going, he waved his arms and legs in excitement. The radio was on, turned low, but when the weather forecast came on, Meri turned it up. Another day in the midnineties.
“Christ!” Nathan said. “This has got to end soon.”
“Well, at least Asa and I will be comfortable at Delia's,” Meri said. She thought of Tom suddenly, and her face warmed.
“We should probably get an AC too,” Nathan said after a minute.
“Oh, yes, Nathan. Let's. For the bedroom anyway.”
“Then maybe we can try making love again sometime in the near future.”
She turned to look at him. He was pouring milk on his cereal. As he set the carton down, he looked directly at her from under his thatch of hair, an unsettling gaze that seemed to her so freighted with desire, but also with the memory of their difficulties, that her throat tightened and she had to look away.
MAYBE PARTLY BECAUSE of the heat, Asa was fussy earlier than usual, scrambling desperately at her an hour or so before she was to go over to Delia's and wait for Tom. She nursed him at home, feeling a little sorry that she and Tom wouldn't have their game.
But he was also unusually alert through most of the feeding, his eyes focused on her face. “Do you see me?” Meri asked. “Do you see me?” With her free hand, she stroked the pale golden down that covered his head now.
“Our own game,” Meri whispered to him. He stopped sucking for a moment, looking up at her, and his lips cur
ved in what seemed a rehearsal for a smile.
Meri smiled back. “You're funny,” she said. “You're quite the funny little person.”
He fell asleep as he was finishing, so when Meri crossed the porch to Delia's, she was carrying him once again in the bassinet.
The coolness of the house was a welcome relief, and Meri went straight to the living room. She set Asa down, covered him, and went back into the hall to pick up the mail lying on the floor. After she'd put it on the telephone stand, she stood with her back resting against the wall, looking out at the porch and the sun-bleached yard. It all seemed far away, closed up as she was in the humming silence.
While she was standing there, the black town car swung up into the driveway. When it stopped, Len got out and came around to Tom's door. He opened it and reached down to help Tom stand, he moved slowly next to Tom across the bumpy walk. Meri could see that he was talking away as usual, she could hear the faint rise and fall of his voice. He helped Tom up the steps. She opened the door for them, her finger to her lips.
“Baby's sleeping?” Len said softly.
“Yes. Sound asleep,” she said.
On his own, Tom went to the lavatory. When he came out, Len, who'd been talking to Meri about someone who'd almost cut him off on the ride home, turned to him. “How ’bout you? You gonna nap?”
Tom shook his head. “No nap. Leehven rhumm.” And he started on his way, shaking off Len's hand at his elbow.
“Be quiet in there,” Meri said. “Mum's the word.”
Tom turned. “You, mum.”
“Very funny guy,” Len said, grinning. “A regular Groucho.”
“See you next week, Len,” she said softly, hoping to get him to lower his voice, to leave. But Len wanted to talk. He wanted to describe to her the summers in Queens when he was growing up, the melting tar in the streets, the shimmer of heat above it. It was much, much worse than this, he told her. It was for this reason that he believed none of this global-warming bullshit.
When he'd finally gone, Meri came in and sat down in the chair opposite Tom. “Shall I read?” she asked.
Tom nodded, and she went through several articles from the paper, keeping her voice low. She could sense the impatience in him. She was flipping back to the front page again, looking for another story he might be interested in, when he spoke.
“Fee Ace?” he said. Feed Asa. His fingers moved in pantomime at the buttons of his own shirt.
“Ahh.” She made a face and raised her hands, helpless. “He nursed earlier. He'll just sleep now—it's his sleepiest time of the day.” She looked down at her son, splayed, utterly relaxed in his bassinet. “He'll be out till early evening.”
Tom nodded, his lips pressed together. Then he lifted his hands too, imitating her gesture of regret.
They sat for a moment. She asked him if he'd like her to read again, and he shook his head, no.
It was almost embarrassing, the silence. She didn't know what to do. To escape it, she leaned forward and started to read to herself—an article about the FBI's having spied on Leonard Bernstein for years on end.
A minute later, he said, clearly, “For me?”
She looked over at him. He'd lifted one of his hands so it rested, open, turned up—a beggar's gesture—against his chest.
She was still unsure what he meant, and then he made again the motion of unbuttoning his shirt.
“Oh!” Meri said, and sat up. This would change the rules.
Her first instinct was to say no. She was looking across at him, and his eyes held hers.
He was behind his eyes, as Delia had once said to her. She could see how much he wanted this—their game, their way of being together.
And in response she felt a pull of interest. She wanted it too. Why? Perhaps, she thought, to feel again the way Tom's gaze made her feel—beautiful, erotic. She was aware suddenly of the weight in her lower abdomen, in her crotch, that signaled sexual readiness to her. So it was that. Of course it was.
But it was also a desire for something they had made together, something that had happened because he was exactly who he was, and because she was in some way like him, she thought. Hungry. Greedy.
She sat very straight and smiled at him. She raised her hands to unbutton her blouse.
And with that light touch, her breasts were suddenly as full, as heavy and swollen, as when she was about to nurse. As she finished with the buttons, her blouse fell open and she moved her hands under her breasts. She cupped them, she held them gently.
She was watching Tom's face. His eyes moved over her. The air was cool on her flesh and her nipples shriveled tight. She looked down and saw that drops of milk were beading on their tips. When she slid her hands slowly over them, it spurted out, it wet her hands, it slipped through her moving fingers and down her arms. Tom never stopped watching.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Delia, Late Afternoon, July 19, 1994
DELIA STOPPED IN town to pick up a bottle of wine and a roast chicken. They'd have a salad too, a cucumber salad with yogurt and garlic and mint, but she had those ingredients at home. She hooked her bag over her shoulder and walked slowly up Main Street in the blistering heat. The secret of this weather was to go slowly, never to rush.
She stopped just before the turn onto Dumbarton to talk to Peggy Williams, her old neighbor, widowed now, who had just put her house on the market. They spoke of the revival of the real estate boom, how helpful it would be to them and how hard on the younger generation. Peggy would move away once the house sold. She was going to live in what was called an active-adult community near her son in northern California.
She asked about Tom, and Delia offered the quick version.
“Well, no matter what,” Peggy said, “he's alive. That's the important thing.”
“For all of us, I would think,” Delia said, and they smiled and walked off in their separate directions, Peggy toward town, Delia home.
She was grateful for the deep shade on Dumbarton. She walked slowly, lifting her head to greet the slightly cooler air under the trees. She passed the house that had belonged to the Bowers, the one the Donahues used to own. Little children were playing in a plastic pool in the driveway, shrieking and splashing.
She turned into her own driveway and went up it. She would pick some mint for the cucumber salad now, she thought. Then once she was in, she could stay in, with Tom, where it was cool.
She set her striped bag down on the back steps and broke off four or five stems of the mint. It had taken over the whole bed on this side of the back door. She should get Matt to pull some of it out. She bent her face to smell it, its fresh scent, before she put her sprigs in her bag and mounted the steps.
The house was cool and utterly still but for the noise of the air conditioner. Perhaps Tom was napping. Perhaps even Meri and the baby had dropped off in the living room. She wouldn't be surprised, in this heat.
She shut the door slowly behind her, hearing the latch click metallically in place with a wince. She set her bag and her keys down carefully on the kitchen table. Her hands still smelled of the mint. She raised them to her face for a moment and inhaled. Mint, she thought, is the smell of happiness.
She would tell Tom this. She would put her hands to his face and tell him. She walked across the kitchen and into the hallway. How lovely and cool it was in here! She'd have to remember to thank Matt again for the air conditioner when she saw him next.
She moved as quietly as she could in its steady, reassuring hum down the hallway to the living room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Meri, February 2007
MERI IS SITTING in the bleacher seats that rise above the indoor pool at Williston High School, waiting for Asa's event to start. She and Henry have barely made it here in time—she was late leaving work, and he dawdled, as usual, leaving preschool. He had to say good-bye to two friends. One, David—his beloved David (“What does he see in the guy?” Meri had asked Nathan not long ago, and they had discussed the improbab
ility of most childhood romances); and Jeff. Jeff, because he was too shy, Henry explained in the car.
“Wait, I didn't know this,” Meri said. “So you're in charge of the kids who are too shy?”
“No!” he shouted, grinning in delight. He's the only one who still believes in her great wit. Then he sobered. “But I am not shy.”
Henry is her angel, the last child she will have. She looks over at him. He's large for a three-year-old, sturdy and blond, unlike the older two boys. An enthusiast, unlike them too.
“Yes,” she said. “I know that.”
It was twenty-one degrees outside, and the heater in the car had only just started to blow tepid air over them when she parked and she and Henry made their dash from the sidewalk into the gym.
In here the air is heavy and warm, the bleachy, clean odor engulfs you, the tiled walls make every noise reverberate. They're calling out the times of the previous race, while those boys, their hair wet, their noses pinked, stand around with towels draped over their shoulders. But these races don't really count: Asa is a freshman, on the freshman team. The important competitions of the day are over—at this point in the meet, the bleachers are only about a third full. Meri feels that this makes it especially important that some members of the family be there to watch Asa. She and Henry are the only ones today—Nathan has an afternoon class, and Martin, her eleven-year-old, is at his clarinet lesson.
She spots Asa down among the other freshmen, wearing a tiny red Speedo. This is the closest to naked she gets to see him now—he was swamped by modesty at about age twelve. With his own money, he's actually bought a hook and eye for the inside of his door so the younger boys can't barge in on him.
