by Sue Miller
In August, three people from the house went to Chicago for the Democratic convention. Jay was one of them. Margaret couldn’t go because the Head Start program she worked for couldn’t spare her. On the third night Jay was gone, Mack stood in the hallway outside Margaret’s door and invited her to come on a drive with him. She’d been napping. She was wearing shortie pajamas, and her red hair was wild and snarly, the way Liddie’s used to be in the mornings. She looked at him guardedly.
“Truce,” he said. “Just friends.”
“I don’t want any scenes,” she said.
“The scene will be a drive. Wherever you like. The Charles. Or Walden Pond.”
She chewed her lower lip. “It’s not going to change anything.”
“I’m seeing someone else anyway,” he said. He had, actually, slept once with the older woman who ran the parks program office. “This is just to prove we can talk to each other like human beings.”
She turned and stood looking back into her own room. Behind her he could see the mess, the clutter. Scattered around her feet on the floor were clothes she’d shed over the last days, or weeks.
“I always liked to talk to you,” he said gently.
“All right,” she said. “Why don’t you wait on the porch? I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
They drove to Walden Pond and walked past the beach, still crowded now at eight o’clock, to a cleared spot by the path that circled the shore. Neither had brought a swimsuit, but Margaret was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She took her shoes off on the soft dirt bank and walked slowly in.
Mack stripped down to his jeans. The water was just slightly cooler than a child’s bath, and they laughed and splashed each other in their pleasure in it. It was as though Jay had never happened, Mack thought.
Margaret’s hair darkened to a deep brown and straightened with the pull of the water’s weight. When she stepped slowly toward the shore, Mack could see through her wet shirt that she was wearing no bra.
They sat side by side at the shoreline for a while, talking about their jobs, about the house members, warming and drying out in the summer air. Then slowly they ambled back to the car. On the way, Margaret began to speak of Jay, to talk about his work, his sense of political commitment. Mack tried to change the subject several times, but she kept coming back to it, to Jay. He could feel how she loved to say his name, to conjure him by talking. He was expected to agree, to praise Jay, to think him a wholly admirable person.
When they got back to the car and were about to get in, Mack smiled across its roof at her. “You used to think those things about me,” he said. Then he bent his body into the hot, airless space inside. When she appeared opposite him in the passenger seat, Margaret’s face had changed. Soberly she looked over at him. Already her nose and upper cheeks were glistening with perspiration. She leaned forward and touched his damp jeans on the thigh. “I still think them about you too,” she said. “I still love you, Mack. I’m just not in love with you.”
He turned on the engine. “Ah, one of those delicate distinctions.”
She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I don’t like it when you start getting sarcastic.”
“Well, I have problems when you start getting so subtle.”
“I’m sure you understand the difference,” she said coolly.
He drove out of the lot, away from the pond. “Why don’t you explain it, though,” he said at last. The houses around them were pretty Victorian cottages, set far apart. Planted, groomed.
Margaret began to talk. “Well, when you just love someone, you feel … calm and good about them. And that’s the way I feel about you. I admire you. I want you to be in my life in a friendly way. I care for you.”
“Thanks,” Mack said.
“No, really, Mack,” she said.
They drove on in silence. The wind from the car’s motion whipped her hair around her head. It was curly again.
“Give me the in love part,” Mack said.
She shrugged sullenly and looked out the window.
“No. I want to hear it.” He smiled at her. “Please.”
“There’s just tension,” she said.
“Tension,” he repeated.
“Yes.” Her voice was irritable. “If you must know, when I’m with Jay, or just even when I think of him, I feel a tremendous tension—eagerness, anxiety, whatever. I’m very … distracted.”
“So even now, even when you’re with me, and you think of our mutual friend, you get this … tension?” They were coming up the main street of a town. Concord. It was lined with pretty, old-fashioned shops.
“Oh, Mack, why do you do this? You said you wouldn’t make a scene.”
“I guess I didn’t figure you’d try to tell me how wonderful Jay is.”
After a silence she said, “Mack, I like you so much. You just mean a lot to me.” Her voice was kind and concerned. Mack wanted her to shut up. But she went on. “I think of you so often, and I’m just sorry there has to be this … mess between us. I just keep hoping, I guess, that we can rise above it. That we can have what was nice between us be that way again.”
Mack pulled over abruptly to the curb. The guy behind him braked sharply, honked, then yelled something over at Mack as he drove past.
When Mack spoke, his voice was too loud for the tiny space they sat in. “What was nice between us, Margaret, was sex. Was when we fucked.”
“Mack,” she said. Under her freckles, the flesh around her mouth was suddenly white.
Together they watched a very elderly couple teeter past, staring in at them from under matching sun-shades. Then Mack said in a reasonable voice that she’d better get out. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he wasn’t going back to the house that night.
“But I can’t get out here. This is miles from home.”
“Well, I’m only going farther.”
“But how am I supposed to get back?”
“I don’t know. It’s a town. There’ll be a train, or a bus.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Yeah, I am.” He looked over at her.
“I can’t believe this. That you’d do this.”
“Just get out, Margaret.”
She waited a few moments for him to relent. When he didn’t say anything, she burst out, “This is just so fucking … immature. This is just absurd.”
“This is immature? This is absurd? You broke my heart, Margaret. You fucking wrecked my life. And you … you’re cavalierly screwing your way through the house. I can’t feel too bad for you that you have to take a train home.”
“They’re not the same.”
“You bet they’re not the same. That’s my point. Now get out.”
When she didn’t move, he reached across her and yanked the station wagon’s handle. The door groaned and swung out. Her face was inches from his. Mack could smell her breath, that familiar sweetish Margaret odor. She hesitated.
He leaned back and gripped the wheel. “I’m not driving you back there.” His voice was rising, getting harder. “Just fucking get out. Get out of the fucking car.” He could hear the threat, he felt it; his heart was pounding.
She looked at him silently for a long moment, then stepped out onto the street. She slammed the door so hard that the handle rattled. He pulled away, tires squealing.
He drove on the winding country roads for several hours as night fell. Finally, when it was truly dark, he turned back and wove his way home. It was around eleven when he got in. The air in the house seemed hot and smelled of sweat, food. No one was around. He went into the living room and turned on the television. He watched the end of a detective show.
Then the news came on, and there on the screen were the crowds of students and radicals in Chicago, swarming back and forth in front of the Hilton Hotel—bloodied, excited. When the lights and cameras played over the faces, they cheered and chanted, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
Perfect, thought Mack. Sitting alone in
the flickering blue light, he laughed once. “Fucking, fucking perfect,” he said out loud.
The following week, by a vote of five to two, with Margaret abstaining, he was thrown out of the group house. His behavior was called provocative and antisocial. Mack had known how the vote would go, had known who would vote for and against him. He’d prepared a short speech, actually, to make to the house members after the verdict was reached, a speech in which he defended his immaturity, his pettiness, as being more authentic, more felt, than their rules, which ignored human feeling. But in the end, surveying the closed sorrowful faces in the shabby room, he decided not to waste his time.
It didn’t matter that much, in any case. He spent a couple of very drunk nights with the project secretary. And then several of the Harvard houses began to open for early arrivals—the football team, the upperclassmen in charge of freshmen orientation—and it was easy enough to sneak in and out of unoccupied suites until they opened his hallway and he could move back in.
Sometimes, though, waking early in some bare room in order to get out before the maintenance crew arrived and found him, Mack would look frantically around the strange shabby elegance of the paneled walls, the empty fireplace and bookshelves, and he’d wonder, not so much where am I, but who am I.
Mack was watching the five o’clock news with his mother—he had gotten up only a few hours before—when he heard the front door open. Though it could have been any one of his younger sisters, he knew immediately that it wasn’t. He knew it was his father. And when David appeared in the open archway to the living room, Mack had pivoted to face him; their eyes met and locked for a long moment. Then there was the explosion of rifle fire on the television, and they both turned their heads that way. The young man on the screen flung his arms wide and tilted back into the tall grass. “My God,” whispered his mother. No one had greeted his father.
“Is this what we mean by bringing the war. home?” his father asked.
Lainey set her drink down. “David, you’re early!” She got up and crossed to the set, turned it off just as the narrative started up again, the deep, melodramatic voice of the combat reporter.
“I know. I wanted to see Mack before he made his nightly escape.”
Lainey seemed embarrassed, flustered. Her big hands wandered aimlessly in the air. “Would you like a drink?” she asked.
“No.” He sat down and stretched his feet out on the pale rug. “Yes. Yes, all right.”
This room had changed more slowly than the others after Randall left—but now the couch was recovered in yellow, and there was a rug, there were curtains at the windows and some paintings his mother had done in art class on the walls. The whole house looked more or less normal now. And they—they could be a normal family too, about to have a normal discussion. Mack’s mother went back into the kitchen. He could hear her in there after a moment, getting ice cubes out.
The long silence enveloped him and his father. His father broke it. “Well, Macklin,” he said at last. “Is this a convenient time for you to talk?”
And instantly Mack felt the ancient rage this sarcasm always triggered—and the wish to defend retroactively the small boy in himself who’d always been confused and rendered speechless by this tone of his father’s. Even when it was addressed—as it usually had been when he was small—to his mother. “I’m at your disposal,” he said.
“Wonderful,” his father said. He shifted on the couch. His posture seemed relaxed and comfortable. “Let me say, then, for starters, that I’m concerned about you.”
Mack was sitting up very straight, as he’d been since he heard the door open some minutes before. “You don’t need to be,” he said.
“Well, nonetheless, I am,” his father said. He smiled fleetingly, the slightest lift of his lips. “And my concern is, quite simply, that I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re doing at the moment. With your life, that is.”
“I guess that’s fair.”
David waited.
Finally Mack said, “But of course, it is my life.”
“Well, but not in every sense.”
“What do you mean?”
Lainey had come in. She set a glass down for David. She stood awkwardly, resting her thigh against the arm of the couch, looking from one of them to the other. Mack wondered if she had known this was coming, if she and his father had talked about it ahead of time. Her face was anxious. If she had ears, Mack thought, they’d be lying back. Then he smiled, because of course she did have ears. And they weren’t.
His father seemed offended by the smile. He sat forward, suddenly, as though to insist they were all business here. “What do I mean? I mean that you’re living at home, seemingly. It’s been a week and a half. That we’re paying your room and board.”
There was a shocked silence in the room. Then Mack said, “I didn’t realize that money was a problem.”
“Oh, it isn’t!” his mother cried. But his father had started to talk too, and he continued on after her cry: “… this pretense of independence. An independent person does not …” Now he sat back and took a sip from his glass. His voice was quiet when he began again: “does not bring the war home.” He set his glass down with a little clink on the coaster Lainey had brought. “And we’re paying for it doubly. We’re paying for a meal contract there, an empty room there, while you sit here and get stoned and sleep till noon every day, like some inert … lump in our midst.”
“David,” Lainey said. Her hand was resting on her bosom as if she felt pain there.
He looked up at her.
“Surely this isn’t the point,” she said.
“No,” he said then. “No, you’re right.” He sounded tired, suddenly. He looked at Mack. “You explain the point, then, Lainey.”
She stepped away from the couch and sat down between them, on the decorated wooden chair—Aunt Lalie’s chair—pushed against the wall. It was uncomfortable, rarely used except as extra seating at parties. Lainey had to perch forward on it. She was frowning. She looked like an earnest schoolgirl. “The point is just … that we are concerned, Mack. You seem so … lost, at the moment. And there are just so many—so many real consequences to being lost at your age. Especially as things are now. Not just school—whatever’s happening there—but …” She gestured at the TV. “The war. Getting drafted.”
David moved restlessly on the couch, and she looked quickly over at him, then back at Mack. “We’d just like to feel that … it is your life. In this sense: in the sense that you do what you decide to do, but because you know the consequences.”
“But you can’t always know the consequences.”
“Of course you can’t, but certain things are predictable.”
“Such as?”
His father’s voice was hard. “Such as, if you don’t go back to school, you’ll flunk out.”
Mack looked at him and slowly smiled. “Yeah, but chances are, if I do go back I’ll flunk out too.”
“What do you mean, chances are? What sort of a hell of a way to talk is that?”
“Just that my chances of passing anything this semester are not good.”
“Because you haven’t worked.”
“That’s right.”
“And why haven’t you, may I ask?”
“Because I don’t belong there. Nothing I might have worked on seemed … interesting or important to me.”
“But what does, darling?” Lainey asked. “What is important?”
Macklin shrugged. “To see how this all comes out.”
David sat forward suddenly. “You are in charge of how it comes out. Don’t speak as though you had nothing to do with the course of your life.”
“Well, I feel differently about that than you do, Dad.”
“You feel you don’t have control over your life.”
“That’s right.”
Lainey leaned toward her husband, as if she wanted to interpose herself between them. “Well, of course he feels that way, David. I mean, look at this wo
rld we live in. Just ceaseless violence. Assassination. This unholy war.”
David lifted his hand. “Mack has a choice about how to deal with that.”
“You believe I have a choice, Dad.”
“I know you have a choice, son. That is something I know. And even more immediately, you have many small choices. And it’s time for you to make a few. It’s time, for example, for you to get back to school. To get back to work.”
No one said anything for a moment. Then Mack spoke. “Well, I choose not to do that.”
“I see.” His father sat very still for a moment. When he spoke, there was sarcasm in his tone again. “I assume that’s final.”
Mack felt a furious leap of anger. “Yes, it is,” he said.
“Well, then, I’d like you to withdraw. To take some responsibility for that decision. To withdraw officially. Maybe I can get back some of the hundreds of dollars I shelled out in tuition.”
“David,” Lainey said.
“All right,” Mack said. “I’ll do that.”
“And I think you’d better get a job. Life is an expensive proposition when you’re in charge of your own.”
Mack stretched. “All right,” he said. “I can do that too, I think.”
Lainey said, “I don’t think we should be so hasty here.”
Mack turned to her. “It’s all right, Mom. This is what I want. This is just putting me in motion.”
“But, darling, it’s not so simple. They’ll have to let the draft board know, and then where will we be?”
“We’ll see, won’t we? It’s coming up anyhow, one way or another.”
“But it doesn’t have to.” She was frowning with intensity, pondering what she imagined was the future shape of his life. “You don’t have to lose the 2-S. You might want to go on to graduate school, for instance.” Mack smiled, but she didn’t notice. “And in June, if you waited until June, there’ll be so many others. I mean, this is just sticking your neck out, all alone. Surely they’ll take you. David, don’t you think … ?”
