by Sue Miller
“Sue Miller … plunges the reader into a fascinating and thoughtful world… . Poignancy is the hallmark of this collection… . Miller’s strength is in creating honest, credible characters making their way through life’s pitfalls and hazards with only themselves to rely upon. Her stories are magnified glimpses of modern life.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Miller exhibits the same insight into character and gift for describing contemporary relationships evidenced in The Good Mother… . Though Miller has sympathy for all her characters, her moral vision is clear.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Miller is adept at sketching in character with a few broad strokes and capturing strong emotion in lean prose. The effect is powerful.”
—Atlanta Constitution
“Zooming in on small details that perfectly illuminate a mood or moment, [Miller] hooks the reader into her repressed, decorous, middle-class world… . [Miller’s] stories are the work of a major talent.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Sue Miller’s first collection of short stories possesses the same outstanding qualities that made … The Good Mother such a deserved bestseller… . Miller’s empathetic grasp of human pettiness and pride, neediness and vulnerability brings a deeply touching understanding to her characters’ lives… . Brilliant.”
—Kansas City Star
“Sue Miller is one of the finest writing talents to emerge in the past few years.”
—Providence Sunday Journal
Dedication
For Maxine Groffsky
Contents
Dedication
Inventing the Abbotts
Tyler and Brina
Appropriate Affect
Slides
What Ernest Says
Travel
Leaving Home
Calling
Expensive Gifts
The Birds and the Bees
The Quality of Life
About the Author
Also by Sue Miller
Copyright
About the Publisher
Inventing the Abbotts
Lloyd Abbott wasn’t the richest man in our town, but he had, in his daughters, a vehicle for displaying his wealth that some of the richer men didn’t have. And, more unusual in our midwestern community, he had the inclination to do so. And so, at least twice a year, passing by the Abbotts’ house on the way to school, we boys would see the striped fabric of a tent stretched out over their grand backyard, and we’d know there was going to be another occasion for social anxiety. One of the Abbott girls was having a birthday, or graduating, or coming out, or going away to college. “Or getting her period,” I said once to my brother, but he didn’t like that. He didn’t much like me at that time, either.
By the time we’d return home at the end of the day, the tent would be up and workmen would be moving under the cheerful colors, setting up tables and chairs, arranging big pots of seasonal flowers. The Abbotts’ house was on the main street in town, down four or five blocks from where the commercial section began, in an area of wide lawns and overarching elms. Now all those trees have been cut down because of Dutch elm disease and the area has an exposed, befuddled air. But then it was a grand promenade, nothing like our part of town, where the houses huddled close as if for company; and there probably weren’t many people in town who didn’t pass by the Abbotts’ house once a day or so, on their way to the library for a book, or to Woolworth’s for a ball of twine, or to the grocery store or the hardware store. And so everyone knew about and would openly discuss the parties, having to confess whether they’d been invited or not.
My brother Jacey usually had been, and for that reason was made particularly miserable on those rare occasions when he wasn’t. I was the age of the youngest daughter, Pamela, and so I was later to be added to the usual list. By the time I began to be invited to the events under the big top, I had witnessed enough of the agony which the whimsicality of the list cost my brother to resolve never to let it be that important to me. Often I just didn’t go to something I’d been invited to, more than once without bothering to RSVP. And when I did go, I refused to take it seriously. For instance, sometimes I didn’t dress as the occasion required. At one of the earliest parties I attended, when I was about thirteen, I inked sideburns on my cheeks, imagining I looked like my hero of the moment—of several years actually—Elvis Presley. When Jacey saw me, he tried to get my mother not to let me go unless I washed my face.
“It’ll look worse if I wash it,” I said maliciously. “It’s India ink. It’ll turn gray. It’ll look like dirt.”
My mother had been reading when we came in to ask her to adjudicate. She kept her finger in the book to mark her place the whole time we talked, and so I knew Jacey didn’t have much of a chance. She was just waiting for us to leave.
“What I don’t understand, John,” my mother said to Jacey—she was the only one who called him by his real name—“is why it should bother you if Doug wants to wear sideburns.”
“Mother” Jacey said. He was forever explaining life to her, and she never got it. “This isn’t a costume party. No one else is going to be pretending to be someone else. He’s supposed to just come in a jacket and tie and dance. And he isn’t even wearing a tie.”
“And that bothers you?” she asked in her gentle, high-pitched voice.
“Of course,” he said.
She thought for a moment. “Is it that you’re ashamed of him?”
This was hard for Jacey to answer. He knew by my mother’s tone that he ought to be above such pettiness. Finally, he said, “It’s not that I’m ashamed. I’m just trying to protect him. He’s going to be sorry. He looks like such a jerk and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t understand the implications.”
There was a moment of silence while we all took this in. Then my mother turned to me. She said, “Do you understand, Doug, that you may be the only person at this party in artificial sideburns?”
“Yeah,” I answered. Jacey stirred restlessly, desperately. He could see where this was heading.
“Do you understand, honey, that your sideburns don’t look real?” Her voice was unwaveringly gentle, kind.
Well, I had thought they might almost look real, and this news from someone as impartial as my mother was hard to take. But the stakes were high. I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.
She pressed it. “That they look, really, as though you’d drawn them on?”
I swallowed and shrugged. “Yeah,” I said again.
She looked hard at me a moment. Then she turned to Jacey. “Well, darling,” she said. “It appears he does understand. So you’ve really done all you can, and you’d better just go along and try to ignore him.” She smiled, as though to try to get him to share a joke. “Just pretend you never saw him before in your life.”
Jacey was enraged. I could see he was trembling, but he had boxed himself in with his putative concern for my social welfare. I felt the thrill of knowing I was causing him deep pain.
“Mother,” he said, as though the word were a threat. “You don’t understand anything.” He left the room, slamming the door behind him.
My mother, who never discussed the behavior of one of us with the other, didn’t even look at me. She bowed her head in the circle of lamplight and continued to read her book. I left too, after a moment, and was in my room when I heard Jacey hurtling past my door and down the stairs again. His rage had been feeding on itself and he was yelling almost before he got into her presence. “Let me tell you something, Mom. If you let him go to the party like that, I’m not going. Do you hear me? I’m not going.” His breathing was audible to me from the top of the stairs—he was near tears—but my mother’s answer, which was long, was
just a murmur, a gentle flow of her voice for a while. And though he ran out of the house afterward, slamming the front door this time, he was at the party when I got there later. He was dancing and following my mother’s advice to pretend he didn’t know me.
The reason my entry into his social world, particularly the Abbott part of it, was so painful, so important, to my brother was that he had already fallen in love with their family, with everything they stood for. In an immediate sense, he was in love with the middle Abbott girl, Eleanor. She wasn’t the prettiest of the three, but she seemed it. She was outgoing and sarcastic and very popular; and Jacey wasn’t the only boy at Bret Harte High trying to close in on her. He spent a long time on the phone each evening talking either to her or about her to girlfriends of hers who seemed to manage her social life through messages they would or wouldn’t take for her. He was with her whenever he could be after school and on weekends. But here he was at a disadvantage because he, like me, had a part-time job all through high school, which the other boys in our circle of friends didn’t. In this difference between us and the others we knew socially lay, I think, a tremendous portion of the appeal Eleanor Abbott had for my brother.
My father was one of the few in Haley who had died in the Second World War, killed by American bombs actually, while being held prisoner by the Germans. Most of the fathers of our friends had had large enough families by the time America got involved that they didn’t go. But my father enlisted when Jacey was two and I was on the way. He died only a few months before my birth, and my mother brought us back to live with her parents in Haley, the small town in Illinois where she’d grown up.
I can’t remember my Grandfather Vetter well—he had a heart attack when I was still quite small—but Grandma Vetter was as important as a second parent throughout my childhood. She died when I was ten. We had just sat down to dinner one night when she said, “I think I’ll just lie down for a little while,” as though that were what everyone did at the beginning of a meal. My mother watched her walk down the hallway to her room on the first floor, and then went directly to the telephone and called the doctor. Grandma Vetter was dead by the time he arrived, stretched out on the bed with her dress neatly covering her bony knees. I remember thinking that there was some link between the way she looked, as though she were just resting and would get up any minute, and the way the table looked, every place neatly set, every plate heaped with food, as though we would sit down any minute. I was very hungry, and looking at the table made me want to have my dinner, but I knew I shouldn’t care about the food at a time like this—my mother and brother were crying—and I was ashamed of myself.
Throughout my childhood my grandmother preferred Jacey to me—he was a more polite, conscientious boy—and this left my mother and me with a special bond. She was, as I’ve indicated, incapable of overt favoritism, but she told me later that my infancy provided her with a special physical comfort after my father’s death, and I often felt a charge of warmth and protectiveness from her when my grandmother was critical of me, as she often was, in one way or another.
My mother was the only women in our circle who worked. She taught second grade at the Haley Elementary School, moving to third grade the years Jacey and I would have been her pupils. And, as I’ve said, we boys worked too, starting in seventh and eighth grade, mowing lawns and delivering papers. By our senior year of high school, each of us had a salaried part-time job, Jacey at the county hospital, I at a drive-in in town. It wasn’t that others in our world led lives of great luxury—few besides the Abbott girls did. Our home, the things we did, the kinds of summer trips we took, were much like those of our friends. But my brother and I provided ourselves with many of the things our friends’ parents provided them with, eventually even paying most of our own way through college. We were “nice” boys, ambitious boys, but there was a price for our ambition.
Somehow we must have understood too, and yet didn’t question, that although our lives were relatively open—we could number among our friends the richest kids, the most popular kids—our mother’s mobility in Haley was over. She was single, she needed to work. These facts constituted an insurmountable social barrier for her. Yet it seems to me I barely noticed her solitude, her isolation from the sociable couples who were the parents of my friends. And even if I had noticed it, I wouldn’t have believed it could have a connection to the glorious possibilities I assumed for my own life.
Because of our relative poverty, our lives were full of events which were beyond the experience of our friends, but which then seemed only adventurous and exciting to me. For instance, coming back from a car trip to California one summer, we ran out of money. My mother stopped in Las Vegas with a nearly empty gas tank and about three dollars’ worth of change in her purse, and won over two hundred dollars—more than enough to get home on—with her second quarter in the slot machine. That kind of thing didn’t happen to friends of ours, and somehow, as a result, their mothers seemed more childish to me, less capable, less strong. I thought there was no one else like my mother.
But Jacey yearned for everything she, he, we, were not, and in his senior year of high school, he particularly yearned for Eleanor Abbott.
I’m finally able to see now that at least a part of my passionate embrace of the role of rebel in high school had to do with a need to leap over the embarrassment I could not, out of loyalty to my mother, let myself feel about all those aspects of our lives which I was slowly beginning to perceive as difficult or marginal. I did think the Abbott girls and their endless parties ostentatious, ridiculous; but in addition, some private part of me yearned, angrily, for the ease and gracefulness of their kind of life, their sure sense of who they were and how they fit in, as much as Jacey yearned overtly for it.
At the time, though, I thought his yearning, particularly his yearning for Eleanor, was shallow and contemptible. She was a year ahead of me in high school, but even I knew she wasn’t smart. In fact, she was in biology with me because she’d flunked it the first time around. I couldn’t understand what attracted him to her, especially since I knew she hung around at least as much, and perhaps more—because he was so often busy with his job—with three or four other senior boys.
One summer afternoon, though, the last summer before Jacey went off to college, the drive-in where I worked closed early because the air conditioning was out of order. I came straight home, elated to have an unexpected day off. My mother had gone up to Chicago for a few days to visit a college friend, and I expected Jacey might still be sleeping, since he was working the night shift as an orderly at the county hospital. I was hot, and I felt like celebrating my release from routine, so I charged down the basement stairs two at a time to raid the big freezer. My mother kept it stocked with four or five half gallons of various flavors of ice cream. As I opened the case and leaned into the cool, sweet darkness the freezer seemed to exhale up at me, I heard a rustling noise from the front part of the basement, a whisper. I shut the freezer slowly, my heart thudding, and moved silently toward the doorway. I don’t know what I expected—thieves, perhaps—but it wasn’t what I saw in the few seconds I stood in the doorway before my brother shouted “No!” and I turned away. He and Eleanor Abbott were naked on the daybed set up near the wall of the coalbin, and Eleanor Abbott was sitting on him. He was in the process of reaching up with his body to cover hers from view when I looked at them. The light in the basement was dim and they were in the far corner—it was like looking at silvery fish in an unlighted aquarium—but the vision lingered with me a long time, clear and indelible.
I left the house immediately—got my bike out of the garage and rode around aimlessly in the heat all afternoon. By the time I came home, it was twilight and my brother was gone. I went down to the basement again. I went into the front room and I lay down on the daybed. I turned my face into its mildew-smelling cover, and imagined that I was breathing in also the rich, mysterious odor of sex.
I remember being less surprised at my brother than I was
at Eleanor Abbott. I thought about the three or four other boys she went out with—some of them more seriously than with my brother, I knew from gossip at school. The possibility arose that Eleanor Abbott was having sex, not just normal sex as I’d been able to imagine it with girls I knew, but that she was actually sitting on all of the boys she went out with. The possibility arose that Eleanor Abbott, whom I’d seen as utterly vacuous, utterly the conventional rich girl, was a bigger rebel than even I was, in my blue jeans and secret cigarettes, in the haircut I now modeled on James Dean’s.
My brother never mentioned what I’d seen, and the silence seemed to increase the distance between us, although I felt a respect for him I’d never entertained before. I saw that even his life could contain mysteries unguessed at by me.
He went away to college that fall on a partial scholarship. I saw Eleanor Abbott around school. Sometimes she’d smile at me in the halls or say hello, especially when she was with friends. I felt that I was somehow comical or amusing to her, and I felt at those moments genuinely exposed, as though what she seemed to think of me was all I really was—a joker, a poser. I discovered, too, that she dominated my fantasy life completely, as she perhaps knew when she’d laugh and throw her head back and say, “Hello, Doug,” when we met. Once I actually walked into a door as she passed.
She went to college the next year, to a women’s college in the East. My brother mentioned her several times in letters to my mother, letters she read aloud to me. He said that he’d gone to visit her, or had her to Amherst for the weekend. I don’t know what visions this conjured for my mother—she never offered her opinion on any of the Abbotts except to say once that Lloyd Abbott had been “kind of a dud” as a young man—but for me images of absolute debauchery opened up. I could hardly wait to be alone in my room. I found these images nearly impossible, though, to connect with my breathing brother when he came home at Christmas or Easter, ever more trig, ever more polished.
