by Sue Miller
The walls were hung with the children’s drawings and paintings, bright blobs of running colors, which Lainey loved; and with newspaper and magazine clippings and photographs of Lainey’s heroes: Joseph Welch in a prim bow tie, Adlai Stevenson resting his worn-out shoes on a table in front of him during his losing campaign.
David had hung a photograph of Freud up with them—the famous portrait—but its piercing stare had frightened Nina. When she noticed it, she would cover her own eyes and say. “No, man!”—would sometimes even whimper. When Lainey had found another picture of Freud, in an old copy of Life—a slightly overexposed photograph of him with his wife in a garden—she had substituted it. David didn’t notice for a few days. But then one evening she caught him staring at it. Freud looked puzzled in the photo. He was frowning into the sun in front of some rosebushes. His wife’s hand rested on his shoulder like a claim, though she held her body a little distance from him. And you could see a confusion of shadows in the space between them: flowers, or perhaps another shrub.
David had turned to her. “Well, Lainey, quite a reach you’ve got. You’ve managed to domesticate even Freud.”
“We needed a more domestic Freud,” she said, with willed obliviousness to his tone. “The other one scared Nina.”
“Ah!” he had said. “No, this one wouldn’t.” And he left the room.
Now Lainey turned on one of the stove’s burners to start some coffee. The kettle clashed across the metal grid. She was careless of the noise she made down here. This was where she brought Randall when he woke at night, which happened once or twice a week. The children were used to hearing in their sleep the distant, muted noises of their mother and their crazy brother as they lead their separate peculiar kitchen life.
While the water heated, she went to the hall, opened the door to the dirty-laundry closet, and filled the basket. The clothes smelled of her sweaty children, and she felt a kind of animal pleasure as she bent into them and scooped them up. Before she lugged the basket to the basement door, she fished out a pair of David’s socks for her cold feet.
The dirt floor smelled earthy and wet. Even in winter, each time she descended these hopelessly tilting stairs, the odor made Lainey think of the beginnings of life, of things growing. Now, inexplicably she thought, Mother, and then remembered. She had found her mother down here folding laundry one day during her long visit after Randall’s birth; she had shooed Lainey upstairs to rest. Lainey recalled her laughing face, her mock irritation, the indolent pleasure of her own slow shuffle back to bed. Her mother had stayed for a month that time, and Lainey had often lingered in bed until noon with Randall—her easiest, prettiest baby—reading, sleeping, nursing him. As the baby’s mouth pulled steadily on her breast, she could hear from below her through the walls, through the serpentine old heating ducts, Liddie and Mack’s voices, and sometimes her mother’s laughter. Hunched over the laundry basket, she felt the pressure of tears starting, but she wouldn’t allow them now. There was too much to do. “We won’t have that, thanks,” she whispered to herself as she tossed the white things into a heap.
Upstairs, the coffee was ready. She lighted another cigarette and sat down at the table to have a cup. She couldn’t remember when she’d last sat like this, alone, in silence in the night. Only the steady hum of the refrigerator and the distant slosh of the washing machine in the basement—mechanical songs—kept her company. She felt for a moment, in spite of all that was pressing in on her, a deep sense of luxury, a kind of pleasure. Sometimes she sat like this with Randall in the night, smoking and drinking coffee, not talking; but always he was there, her idiot child, her dearest child in some ways, drawing or playing with one of his “toys”—the silver-balled chain of the bathtub plug, a piece of string, sometimes just his hands. Every now and then Lainey would look at his blank perfect beauty and feel a pang; what had she kept him home for if she wasn’t going to help him? Then she would rouse herself, she would try to engage him in a game or go through a picture book with him, saying the names of things over and over out loud.
But more often they just sat together, taking, Lainey hoped, a kind of comfort from each other.
Occasionally David would come down, waked by their kitchen noises—Randall’s tuneless humming, Lainey’s clattering dishes—and they would start again the argument that had run under their lives together since they had found out what was wrong with Randall.
There’d been a repeat of this only a few nights before. It had been raining gently when they went to bed, a steady, comforting noise. But sometime in the early-morning hours, Lainey woke to a wild clap of thunder that seemed to reach into her rib cage and set her heart racing. She thought of Randall before she was fully conscious. She got up quickly and unlocked the door to his room. He was kneeling on his bed, his eyes huge, his hands covering his ears, his breathing irregular. She had led him slowly to the kitchen, crooning reassurance, praying he wouldn’t start yelling until the door was shut behind them. She set his blocks out on the table and put his favorite record—Danny Kaye singing the sound track from Hans Christian Andersen—on the portable player. When the thunder roared outside, she sang along loudly with the foolish lyrics to cover its noise. “Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing …”
Suddenly the door had opened and David stood there, looking somehow self-contained and handsome, even in his bathrobe.
“Oh.” Lainey’s hands involuntarily flew up to touch her messy hair, then fell again. “I’m sorry we woke you,” she said.
“Don’t be silly.” He shut the door behind him and crossed to the table. He sat down next to Randall, opposite her. “I’m sorry he woke you.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Well. The thunder.”
“Yes. The thunder,” he said, looking at Randall. His son lay on his extended arm on the table, setting a red block carefully next to a blue one. A little strand of drool ran from his mouth to the tabletop. He hadn’t noticed his father. “And if not the thunder, what? An ambulance. A train. A dog barking, five blocks away. We all know the list.”
Lainey sat, feeling ugly and sullen. “I don’t want to start it tonight,” she said finally. “I haven’t the energy.”
“No. You’re right,” he said. “You’re right, of course.” He watched Randall for a minute. “May I have a cigarette?” he asked.
She pushed the pack over to him. He took one, tapped it on the table, put it in his mouth. The noisy flare of the match caught Randall’s attention, and he sat up and watched as David lighted his cigarette. David held the match out so he could see it, let it burn down for a few seconds. “Fire,” Lainey whispered, almost unconsciously; and then David blew it out.
They sat together in silence, all three of them, for a few minutes. “When’s the last time he spoke?” David asked.
Lainey shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. She tried to smile at him.
“Look, it’s just that this would be a good time. He’ll be six, Lainey. There are places that will take him at six. Fine places. The Orthogenic School, for one. He’d be right around the corner.”
She shook her head again. “I’m not willing to talk about it. I’m not going to send him away. He’s mine. He’s ours. He belongs with us.”
David reached out toward the ashtray, and she pushed it to him. She was aware of the scratchy, corny music in the background.
He waited a minute. Then he said, “Lainey, I’m not blaming you.” His voice had become gentle. She thought abruptly of his professional life and shifted in her chair. “There’s no one to blame. But even if there’s nothing … problematic here—at home—he needs …” He looked down. “He needs more help than this.”
“He has help. I help him. His school helps him.”
His face tightened momentarily, in disgust or contempt, and Lainey felt a quick anger.
“What’s wrong with Randall’s school? Precisely what’s wrong with it? Those people are trained too.”
David looked at her and shook his head. “We’ve be
en over and over this. They only work part-time, and they only work at the cognitive level. A residence would treat him night and day, essentially. And it could really get at … the roots of the problem.”
“I work with him night and day,” she said shrilly.
Now David smiled and spread his hands to take it all in—the messy kitchen, Randall in his chewed pajamas, lining up his blocks in the same predictable rows he’d been using for what seemed like years, over and over, lost; and Lainey, her hair still matted from sleep, her robe stained, Lainey with her coffee, her cigarettes, her hopeless fatigue, and her love for Randall.
“Lainey.” He leaned forward. His voice was urgent. “What I do hold you responsible for, the only way I do blame you, is for compounding the effect, when other people, people trained to work with kids like this, could help Randall. And you deny him that. I blame you only for that.”
“That’s all?” she asked brightly, bitterly, and inhaled on her cigarette.
“Lainey …”
There had been another loud clap of thunder then, and Randall jumped, made a frightened noise a little like the miaow of a cat. David leaned back and turned away. He looked out toward the window, where the night was black and drizzles of rain falling from the roof fell in silver-dotted lines caught in the kitchen’s light. In the droop of his shoulders and the pull forward of his neck, Lainey could read his exhaustion, his aging, and she felt a pang of guilt for her contribution to it.
He turned back to her. “Who is this helping, Lainey?” he pleaded. “What good is it, except to make you feel more … Christly or something? And to make the rest of us miserable?”
Now Lainey waved her hand at the memory, as though it would clear out like the cigarette smoke around her. She stood and took her cup to the sink, crossed to the pantry, where the clean laundry was rough-folded, and began to pull out the clothes she would leave sprinkled and rolled for Retta to iron when she came.
When David came downstairs at six-thirty, steeling himself against the irritation he always felt at finding Lainey and Randall shut into their sloppy, silent, nicotine-smelling world, he found the table set. The kitchen smelled of bleach, bacon, coffee. Though Lainey hadn’t dressed yet, she’d brushed her hair, she’d washed her face to wake herself up. When he opened the door and she turned to him and smiled—almost in embarrassment that such order should be so unexpected in their lives—she looked like a teenager, neat and pretty in her flowered pajamas. He felt a sudden stab of longing for her, for the girl she’d once been.
“My father called in the night,” she said, as though in response to whatever she read on his face. “Mother died. Of a heart attack.” She was still smiling.
“Oh, Lainey,” he said. His hands lifted toward her.
But she turned slightly from him. Her eyes slid away from his. To David, for a moment, her blank face looked strangely like Randalls. “I’m fine,” she said. “I haven’t even cried yet. And it’s funny. I just … Well.” She shrugged. “Can you help with the children this morning? And then I’ve got to make some arrangements. I’ll need your help. I’m going to go home. To Father.” While she was speaking he had crossed to her and put his arm around her in spite of her odd posture. But her body didn’t yield or respond—she kept talking—and after a moment he let his arm fall. He stepped back from her, he went to the stove and poured himself a cup of coffee. Above them they could hear the children’s voices rising in volume. Mary began to call for Lainey.
Leaning against the front of the stove, David asked her, and she told him, how it had happened, what time her father had called, how he had seemed. The slight, embarrassed smile flitted on and off her face, as though she were one of the children having to talk of a bodily function. As she spoke of her father, her eyes reddened and she turned away.
When she finished, they stood opposite each other, looking at each other for a long moment. Then each became aware that Mary was now shrieking steadily, that Randall had begun thumping in his bed. David set his cup down. “I’ll head up and get Randall and check on the older two, if you want to do them.” He nodded at the ceiling, a gesture meant to indicate the babies, Nina and Mary.
She started to cross to the pantry. “Just send them down here, if they don’t have messy dipes,” she said. “I’ll change both of them after breakfast.”
At the stairs, he turned back. “Lainey, this … this isn’t good. It isn’t good for you, holding all this in.” Then, as if it had just occurred to him: “Why didn’t you wake me?”
She shrugged. “I had so much to do,” she said. He watched her for a moment as she brought the pitcher of orange juice to the table and set it down. Suddenly he noticed the old pair of his own socks on her feet. For some reason, this, more than anything, made his heart ache for her, for their distance from each other.
David was still upstairs with Randall when Lainey told the other children. Of course, Nina and Mary, perched at the wooden table in their high chairs, didn’t really have a response; and Mack bent over his plate so Lainey couldn’t see his face. But Liddie’s expression turned instantly grave. At nine, she had a keen sense for drama, and she knew this was a moment she could rise to.
“What did she die of?” Liddie asked. She was slender and fair, unexpectedly, with a smattering of small freckles like spilled cinnamon across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks. All the other children were dark, like Lainey and David.
“She had a heart attack, honey. She was old, and her heart wasn’t good. It just gave out.” Lainey leaned against the stove, as David had earlier, and drew on her cigarette. The children sat around the white wooden table across from her. There were two unoccupied places set, one for David and one for Randall. None for Lainey. She never sat down at breakfast, never ate until she’d gotten everyone else fed, until David and the older children had gone off to work and school. Then, as she cleared the table, she scooped the crusts, the rinds of bacon, the dribbles of jelly off their plates and ate them, washing them down with milky cold coffee. “Mother’s rations.” she had called it in embarrassment once when David caught her at it; but the truth was, she liked it better than the heavy meals she made for them. Mary began banging on the table with her spoon, and Lainey automatically picked up the skillet, crossed to her, and lifted more scrambled eggs onto her plate.
“I’m so sad for Grampa,” Liddie said piously. “Now he’s all alone.” Her voice mournfully caressed the last syllable.
“We’ll all have to write him extra letters and be especially loving to him,” Lainey said, There was a silence, except for the clicking of their spoons on the plastic breakfast plates and their eating noises. Lainey poured herself more coffee, thinking only how easy this had been, how matter-of-fact, how unknowing, the children were. She turned to the counter and began to fold the underwear and socks she’d lugged up from the basement.
Then Nina, who’d been sitting silently, pushing her eggs slowly and carefully into her mouth, stopped. She lowered her head nearly to the table to try to see Mack’s face, which was still bent away from all of them. “Mackie’s sad?” she asked. Lainey turned quickly to look.
Mack reached out his hand, as if to push their attention away. He turned his head to the wall.
“Mackie’s sad?” Nina repeated.
Now Mack lifted his face. It was reddened, agonized, glistening with tears. “Don’t you care, Mom?” he cried. “Doesn’t anybody care?”
In three quick steps, Lainey crossed to the table. She knelt by his chair and turned it to her. It scuddered loudly on the linoleum. “Oh, honey, of course I do,” she said. Her arms reached up, encircled him, and he leaned forward, sobbing, onto her shoulder. Lainey’s heart seemed to tighten unbearably in her chest, to squeeze even her throat. She felt the sudden sweet release of her own tears. From somewhere far behind her she could hear Nina persevering: “Mackie’s sad? Mommy’s sad?” and Mary crowing with strange nervous laughter to hear the big people crying. Lainey held Mack tight in gratitude and sorrow and thought how o
ften her children did this for her—released her to herself.
For perhaps a minute she and Mackie wept, holding each other. Then he pulled away, sniffling. She fished into her pajama pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose. Liddie had begun to explain to Nina in a falsely grownup voice that Mackie and Mommy were sad but they’d be better soon.
Nina changed her chant: “Mommy’s better soon? Mackie’s better soon?”
Now Mack wiped his face on his sleeve and turned away from Lainey. “Use your napkin,” she murmured to him, and he reached obediently for it.
“Mommy’s better soon?” Nina asked again.
Lainey stood up, feeling stiff, as though she’d been kneeling for a long time. “Yes, Neen.” She cupped the little girl’s silken skull with her hand. “Mackie and I are sad because we miss Gram.”
“I miss her too, Mom,” Liddie said defensively.
“I know, Lid,” Lainey said.
Mack’s body spun toward his sister. “Then why are you eating?” he accused. “You ate your whole breakfast, just like it didn’t even matter to you. Everyone’s eating around here,” he protested to Lainey. “That’s what bothers me.”
“I only ate one helping,” Liddie said. Her face had gone white in shame.
“I eat a all up,” Nina volunteered, hoping for praise.
“Ee ee ee,” Mary echoed, bouncing herself rhythmically with each squeal.
“It’s all right to eat, Mack,” Lainey said. She could hear David and Randall starting to come downstairs, and she wiped her face again and turned to fix their plates.
“It makes me sick,” Mack persisted. He pushed his plate away.
“Well, you don’t have to eat if you don’t want to,” Lainey said gently.
“And she makes me sick. She pretends to be so upset, and then she eats and eats.” His voice rose; he was near tears again. “She’s a big pig.”
