by Sue Miller
He and Pete laughed.
Lainey felt a surge of disproportionate rage, as though she were an adolescent again. “The hell with you,” she said. But they all laughed now. She walked away from them. She set her ball a mallet’s length from the starting post and began to play through. Fueled by her anger, she played well, stroking the ball with careless assurance and power.
She reached the center of the court with four shots still to spare. As she drove through the middle wicket, her ball rolled toward Pete’s, coming to rest against it with a gentle tock! She stepped up to the balls, nestled like strange bright eggs, and looked at them a moment. Then she lifted her sandaled foot, set it down on her own red ball, and swung as hard as she could against it. The yellow ball shot out, spun quickly across the flat lawn, then rolled twenty feet or so down the incline toward the driveway. There was an abrupt silence behind Lainey. Then Sam said, “Good Lord! Killer croquet!”
“Gee, Lainey, what’d I ever do to you?” Pete asked. He sounded genuinely plaintive.
Lainey didn’t answer. With careful, grim pleasure, she aimed for the next wicket. The ball rolled steadily but came to rest just in front of it. She heard Sam ask, “How many shots she got left?” and Paul answer, “I make it two.” He always knew. He was the only one who ever really cared how things were done. They used to joke that he read Hoyle for pleasure in his free time. Hunched over the wicket, Lainey shot through.
Now she could move on to the double wickets at the end of the court, but Paul’s ball lay over to the right of them. She turned and aimed at it. Behind her, her brothers were watching. The balls collided with such force that the blue one jumped and landed more than a foot from hers. Lainey walked over, picked her ball up and set it next to Paul’s, then repeated her powerful swing against the red ball under her foot. Paul’s ball spun away from her toward the house, disappearing into the rhododendron bushes under the dining room windows.
Lainey had no idea now how many shots she had left, whether she had any. She felt a pure anger at all of them, an anger somehow connected with her mother’s death and somehow exciting in its viciousness. In two shots she hit Sam’s ball. It too she drove downhill toward the driveway. It sailed out over a bump and rolled on past Pete’s, coming to rest nearly where the children were bicycling. They stopped for a moment and looked up at the grownups, suddenly brought back from their invented world by this tiny bright missive from another.
Lainey stood and looked up and down the court. She was panting slightly from effort and the excitement of her anger. Her red ball was the only spot of color on the smooth green expanse of lawn. The men were clustered, silent, behind her.
Suddenly she had a sense of deep defeat, a sense of her own foolishness. She let her mallet fall—let them pick it up, let them pick it all up—and, without looking back at any of them, walked toward the house. She heard one of them say, “For Christ’s sweet sake?” in perplexity, and then another, in an undertone, something she couldn’t understand.
Lainey walked on, into the dark shadow of the house. Inside, she was blinded by the contrast with the sunlight, but she fumblingly made her way to the stairs, past the worn elegant furniture, the marble bust of Homer, the tea service on the hall table, all the familiar hand-me-downs or gifts from her parents’ parishes, set on display over and over in the series of homes that weren’t really theirs. Up one carpeted flight in the still house, rising away from the easy boys. She felt her fatigue, her pregnancy, like the weight of age, though she was the youngest. It isn’t fair, she thought, for a moment almost believing in the relevance of the protest. Then the second flight, to the attic, the bare chipped stairs below her becoming slowly visible as her eyes adjusted.
The attic room was small and stuffy, though the single window was propped open with a short board. The sun was streaming in, and dust motes swam slowly in the hot light. Her brothers’ voices rose from the lawn, a dim murmur. She heard laughter explode, then die.
Her mother had used this as a sewing room. The sewing machine was still set up, the old-fashioned treadle kind her mother preferred. There was a dress form standing in the corner, small and bosomy. Its curves were shaped of a padded gray muslin stretched over a wire frame. The frame hung below the muslin like a kind of narrow, abbreviated hoop skirt. Against the wall, a long rectangular mirror rested in a wooden stand on the floor. It was swung up now at an odd angle so that it reflected only the blank surface of the ceiling. It looked like a blind eye. Lainey stepped over to it and swung the mirror down. She met herself, for a moment rocking wildly in the motion of the glass, tall and dark and somber in the dusty yellow light. She stood and waited as her reflection stilled. Then she stared back for a long minute at the surprisingly young-looking, strong-looking image, as though she were seeing a stranger. She was shocked by the vibrancy her coloring gave her. She felt so washed out, so pale, it was hard to remember that the world saw her this other way.
Suddenly she reached to her chest and began to unbutton her shirt, watching her big hands moving in the mirror. When she was finished, she dropped her arms, then wiggled out of the shirt. It fell with a whisper to the floor. Moving quickly, she unhooked her brassiere, let it slide forward off her arms. She fumbled with the side buttons on her shorts, pushed them down with her underpants, and awkwardly, hurriedly, stepped out of them both. Last she bent over and unbuckled her sandals. Wildly, as though they were hurting her, she kicked them off. They bounced across the floor and landed, yawning, several feet from each other against the wall. Now she stood looking at herself naked in the mirror. Her hips were wide, her abdomen streaked with silver, her pubic hair a dark thick flag below it. Her big breasts hung, already slightly swollen with her pregnancy, the nipples so elongated by nursing that they looked like two of Mary’s stubby fingers pointing downward. Lainey stepped even closer to the mirror, stared at her face, then at the used-up flesh of her body. She lifted one breast, let it flop. Then she saw again, in the mirror, in the corner behind her, the dress form, small and neat, its little cluster of straight pins glinting like a brooch at this distance on its bosom. She felt the impulse to weep clutch her throat, and she looked away. She turned and crossed to the unmade rollaway bed. She lay down on its rumpled, coarse sheets. In the rush of air caused by her motion, the dust motes stirred frantically, danced golden and thick in the sunlight falling across the bed.
The waxy light lay in a warming rectangle over her body. Lainey felt the stirring of some inchoate desire. She held her breasts, trying to conjure an image that would focus this yearning. David, she thought; and then, when her mind stayed blank, blank as the uptilted mirror: Mother.
The next morning, Lainey stood in front of the mirror again, carefully pinning on her hat, a scrap of dark straw with a veil. She was wearing the same heavy green silk suit she’d worn on the train. She noticed there was a grease stain the size of a half-dollar in the front near the hem—probably something spilled on the ride from Chicago. Well, there was nothing to be done about that. She adjusted her veil to cover the upper half of her face. At each corner, where four strands of the veil came together, there was a tiny mesh rectangle, and the blur this network established across her vision gave her a strange sense of distance from the reflection in the mirror. The suit was stretched slightly across her belly, and she pulled her stomach in, turned first one way and then another. When she had walked down the aisle in the train on her way to her private berth, she had slowly become aware of the unfamiliar, sexually appraising stare of two or three businessmen. She had at first felt a rising, a quickening in her; and then abruptly remembered the baby that was responsible for her newly rounded figure, her plumped flesh. It was a miracle David hadn’t noticed, she thought, or perhaps just a symptom of how little he noticed her at all anymore. But then she recalled how wonderful he had been as she got ready to go. He had canceled several afternoon patients to be with the children so she could pack, had gently kissed her as the taxi waited out on the street. “I’ll call,” he had said, and
he touched her elbow. She could only be grateful.
Below her now she could hear her brothers gathering outside in the driveway, the crunching sound of their shoes on gravel, the opening and slamming of car doors, their voices calling back and forth. One of Sam’s children was whining somewhere below in the house, and she heard Myra answer sharply, “I said no. I said no once earlier, and I meant it.” Lainey tilted back, checked her seams, picked up her purse, and went downstairs.
In the car on the way to church, she and Paul and Pete were silent. Their father had gone ahead in his own car to be sure everything was all right. Myra and Sam and the children were driving behind them.
Each of them sat against a car door, smoking, staring out into the woods that flickered quickly past. There were still a few rhododendrons and mountain laurels blossoming in the deep shade. Lainey thought of the thousand Sundays from their past, all the mornings when they had to be forced up from their thick adolescent sleep, prodded into the costumes of middle age it was customary to wear to church or formal events. Then, however, their mother would have been at the wheel, chattering steadily to them to get them ready for conversation, civility, their father’s interested congregation. Now Paul was driving. Lainey looked over at him. He was her favorite brother. His hands gripping the steering wheel were white, prettier than her own. She looked at his face. Under his eyes and running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth were the beginnings of the lines of age. The same marks of having lived, having suffered, that seemed so unremarkable to Lainey on her own face seemed unwarranted on Paul’s. Cruel. She deliberately blurred her vision to erase them. He felt her gaze, looked over at her and smiled. “I’ll be glad when this part’s over,” he said.
“Me too,” she answered.
As they came into town, Lainey could feel herself stiffen in readiness. The white wooden church stood with its doors flung open at the head of the town green. The green itself was completely encircled in cars, parked legally and illegally, some tilted with two wheels up on the lawn. As they passed the church, Lainey looked over. People were mingling on the stairs in the sunlight, or slowly shuffling in. Beyond them she could see the dim, chaste interior, briefly she could hear the organ’s gentle rhythm, like the cool breathing noise of the building itself. She felt a sinking, a resistance to the role she would have to play.
Paul drove a block or so past the green and parked. As they started to walk back to the church, Pete bent toward Lainey, touching her elbow. Softly he chanted: “Manufacture your sobriety, resurrect your piety. Time to get set for … the Lord, strong and miety.” Lainey smiled. He had recited this regularly as they got out of the car on Sundays; and their mother had always said, “Hush, you child in adult’s clothing,” and sometimes swatted him lightly across his bottom if she was close enough.
Most of the congregation that had gathered in little groups on the steps and in the narthex fell back from them slightly as they entered. Lainey was grateful. There would be enough polite commiseration with strangers at the tea afterward. But in the back of the chapel, waiting for them, were her mother’s sisters, Margaret and Eulalia. They were both short, pretty women, like her mother, though Margaret wore eyebrow pencil and a rigid blue permanent in her hair. It was Aunt Lalie, childless and scatter-brained, who had been closer to Lainey’s mother. She began to weep when she saw them, and Lainey crossed to embrace her. “Now, I wasn’t going to cry,” she said into Lainey’s ear. “But then I saw you, my dear.” Her voice was deep and warm, like Lainey’s mother’s. She stepped back and looked searchingly into Lainey’s face. “Isn’t it awful?” she said. Lainey nodded, and turned to Margaret.
As soon as she could, Lainey broke away and walked quickly, alone, down the aisle of the church, leaving her brothers and Myra to accompany the two older women. She went directly to the pew at the front on the right, slid in, and bowed her head, as if in intense prayer. Even when her brothers filed in and sat down next to her, she didn’t look up, and so they didn’t speak to her. It was only when the organ stopped its gentle murmur, paused, and then began the pealing processional, that she lifted her head.
The room was full, perhaps three hundred people, and the sound of their rising was like a great roar. Her father and the assistant pastor filed in, and each stood in front of a wooden bench behind the pulpit. The assistant pastor raised his arms toward them. He intoned: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Lainey’s throat clotted. The assistant pastor was a young man. His voice was hopeful and strong. “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.”
His voice changed; lowered. “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Their “Amen” was like a moan from the congregation, and they sat down.
While the assistant read from the Scriptures all the promises of a bright life after this one, Lainey stared ahead of her, through the clear glass windows, at the ferns and lupines moving in and out of the sunlight with the breeze. The church was austere and simple, not like the imitation-Gothic church she attended in Chicago. The windows were clear, the walls white, the floor a painted gray.
Between the Scriptures and the hymns, several of Lainey’s mother’s friends rose to speak of her, talking of her energy, her compassion, her activities on behalf of others. Lainey felt a kind of jealousy of their knowledge, a competitive resistance to their way of knowing her mother that made it hard for her to listen to what they said. One of the women broke down partway through her eulogy, and her husband came forward and finished reading it at her side.
Near the end of the service, Lainey’s father stood up and came forward behind the pulpit. He was going to do the Twenty-third Psalm. He had wanted to do this. Lainey closed her eyes, and like the afterimage of what we see in bright light, she saw him as he’d been through those countless Sundays of her childhood and adolescence: rising above her in his robes like some magnificent bird, transformed into a spiritual being untouchable and pure, even his voice changed, his elocution a tribute to years of training and to what Lainey then felt was his direct link to God.
Now he began the old beautiful words, and with their rhythm, Lainey felt her readiness to let herself be touched, comforted. But almost instantly she found that his elocution disturbed her. His words were too smooth, too professional. She felt a quick, hateful anger for her father. She remembered Mack crying out, “Doesn’t anybody care? Don’t you care, Mom?” and she felt that same indignant confusion. Next to her, Sam had begun to weep, and she turned to look at him. She met the dry-eyed stare of his two boys beyond him, looking also. She had a sense then, before she turned quickly away, of how strange she must seem to them, so held in she couldn’t even cry for her own mother. Maybe if her children were here too, she thought; and she let herself remember the release of tears they had worked for her when she told them the news.
The last hymn was “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” one of her mother’s favorites. Lainey had a terrible voice, unmusical and sharp, and she usually pitched herself an octave below the sopranos to submerge it. She could never hear her own voice separate from the congregation’s, and now she felt particularly lost in the ringing sound that surrounded her. She was still thinking in a distracted way of her children, of the way they had looked around the kitchen table when David spoke to them of life and death. On the third verse, though, as the sopranos rose sharply on the words “Feed me till I want no more,” she had a sudden clear image of her mother in that same kitchen on Harper Avenue, the first morning Lainey had ventured downstairs after Randall’s birth. It had been late, almost lunchtime, and Lainey was as hungry as a child. When she stepped into the room, her mother was
bent over the stove, a spatula in her hand, lifting a cookie from the sheet that sat cooling on the burners. The kitchen smelled of butter and lemon and cinnamon. Her mother turned and lifted her face when she heard Lainey. “My dear!” she had said, in her quick, thrilling voice, and her face shone with joy to see her daughter.
“Feed me till I want no more,” the sopranos were singing. Lainey heard her own voice break below theirs. She sat down and covered her face with her hands. She heard the assistant pastor say the benediction. She was aware of a low keening noise coming from her chest, and then Sam’s arm was around her, and she leaned blindly into his big embrace.
When the recessional began, his arm helped to lift her, to move her out of the pew. She didn’t want to go. On her own, she would have sat there not moving, holding on to the image of her mother, to the sound of that warm voice in her ear. Sam kept his arm around her as she stumbled slowly down the aisle to where the doors had been swung open again on the town green. As they crossed the threshold and the sun struck her face, she had to shut her eyes against its glimmering light, refracted and intensified through her tears. In the orange darkness behind her lids she saw her children’s faces, sliding like motes across her vision.
But now they all looked strangely like Randall, and their mouths opened to her like hungry birds, and she blinked her eyes quickly to blind herself to them for just a moment more, as they began to call her, call her back to them.
Chapter 4
December 1954
At least twice in the night David had waked to hear Lainey with the new baby, Sarah—the scratchy, chickenlike cries of hunger diminishing quickly to faint grunting and smacking as Lainey found the infant’s mouth with her breast in the dark. The last time there was a gassy pale light in the bedroom, and he tented himself in the dim must under the covers to find his way back to sleep.
