Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  When the screen door banged again, and Anita in a gauzy white dress stood poised a moment and then floated down through the fading summer light to them, Leah looked over at Pete and caught a look of sexual appraisal on his face.

  “The birthday girl,” Leah said quickly. Anita smiled at them all and sank down in the swirl of her skirts next to Greg.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” she said to each of them and leaned prettily, a frail reed, against Greg’s shoulder. “What is there for me to drink, sweetheart?”

  Greg poured some wine for her, let her lean. But he didn’t look at her or respond to her. Even though Leah knew Anita was posturing slightly for the guests, she was moved by the younger woman’s beauty, and irritated by Greg’s stubborn unresponsiveness to it. She had the sudden conviction, as she reached over to light the picnic lanterns she had brought out earlier, that he would lose Anita and his marriage, and so, of course, Sophie. Her eyes momentarily filled with tears. She lighted the lamps and began to pass around the wicker picnic plates.

  Leah drank too much during the meal. She poured herself glass after glass of white wine. The food she had spent all day preparing seemed tasteless to her. She ate a few small bites of the first course and didn’t even cut herself a piece of Anita’s birthday cake.

  After they’d finished eating and were stretched out, drinking wine and beer, Pete lit a joint and passed it around. Leah remembered that she’d heard from someone else, some other high school friend of Greg’s and Pete’s, that he was dealing in a small way. She wrinkled her nose at the smell and leaned out of the circle. She had tried grass once or twice at Greg’s insistence when he was in college, but it only made her sleepy and slightly nauseated. She thought it made Greg and his friends boring and she had told him so. He had shrugged and said, “It’s just the same thing I feel about you and your friends when you’ve all been drinking.”

  Now their voices grew slowly more subdued and intimate. Debby was hunched over her glass of wine, talking at length to Greg, who nodded and nodded, Anita and Pete, more relaxed, giggled. Leah was sorry she hadn’t invited Joe. She felt old and solitary, an observer. She wanted to clean up and go to bed.

  She stood and walked slowly to the house, carrying her wine. At the kitchen door she looked back. The scene was beautiful in the yellow lamplight; and at this distance their soft voices seemed like a part of nature, like the sound of leaves in the wind, or the liquid murmur of a stream.

  Leah went upstairs and looked a long time at herself in the bright light of the bathroom. Her eye makeup had smeared slightly. Her lipstick was gone. She pushed her hair back. Her face looked tired, weakened by age. She set down her wineglass and slowly washed her face, rinsing it over and over in the cool running water.

  She went down the darkened hallway to Sophie’s room. She stood just outside the doorway because Greg had told her that Sophie was a light sleeper. She listened to the child’s regular breathing as she had listened to her son a thousand times when he was small. The air was full of the perfumed smell of Sophie’s Pampers.

  The screen door smacked shut downstairs. Sophie stirred; the plastic Pampers rustled gently. Voices whispered, there was soft laughter in the kitchen. Dishes clinked. Were they picking up? Leah should go down and help. Someone turned on the faucet and the pipes sang gently behind the cheap walls. She reached into the bedroom and slowly closed Sophie’s door.

  Leah went downstairs, and as she crossed the living room, she heard Anita’s voice, thick with wine, grass, from the kitchen. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s just this endless mommy-daddy-baby shit. The endless threesomeness of it all. We always have to be so fucking responsible. It’s as though I don’t exist as a woman anymore.”

  And Pete’s voice, slurred and soft. “I can’t imagine that with you. If I were with you. I mean, I’ve always thought of you as one of the sexiest ladies I know.”

  Leah cleared her throat and then coughed, loudly enough, she hoped, to warn them she was about to intrude upon them. But when she stepped into the dimly lit kitchen in her bare feet, Pete was gently lifting Anita’s hair from her face in what was unmistakably the beginning of an embrace.

  “I’m here,” Leah said stupidly. Pete’s hands lept back as if burned. Anita turned slowly, foggily, toward Leah and smiled. The orange light glowed behind her and Leah could see she wasn’t wearing a bra under the gauzy dress. Let her be drunk enough not to remember, Leah thought.

  “Are you starting to clean up?” she asked brightly. “I’ll go outside and get some more.” She turned quickly away from them.

  Outside it was cooler. She stood a moment by the back door. The air itself lifted her spirits slightly; but as she approached Greg, she felt the return of her sense of helpless sorrow for him.

  He and Debby sat on the quilt, talking like two earnest children. They didn’t notice Leah for a moment at the edge of the lantern light, and Debby went on talking, telling Greg how much trouble she’d had getting her youngest child to give up a pacifier.

  Then Debby looked up and saw her. “Leah,” she said. “It’s Leah.”

  There was a pause as they both looked at her. In the still evening air Leah could hear crickets, the clatter of dishes in the kitchen.

  “Mom. Oh. You looked so weird to me.” Greg stared at her with amazed, stoned intensity, and Leah bent down to start loading the hamper. “For a minute I thought,” he said slowly, “I mean, I really thought, when I looked at you, that I was about ten years old again.”

  Later, after Pete and Debby had left, Leah sat on the edge of her bed upstairs and listened to Greg and Anita below in the living room. She heard the low metallic shriek that meant they were pulling out the foldaway bed, the lazy alternation of their voices. Then Anita’s took over, a pressured monologue, with an occasional sharply articulated word—“never,” or “fucking”—that floated up through the night air and the thin walls of the house. He didn’t answer. Leah wanted him to. She sat in her room and listened to the sound of her son’s marriage and wanted him to shout, to push, to hit. She thought of how he had sat, mute and resentful, when she had spoken just this way to him a hundred times, over the garbage not taken out, the bike not locked, the car dented, the curfew defied; thinking always that she was teaching him, teaching him the right way, the responsible way to get through life.

  When she tiptoed past the living room on her way out, she heard them making love. The couch squeaked to their rhythm, he cried out in bewildered wild whispers, and there was a low mournful keening from Anita. They still had that, then. Did it make the rest easier? Harder? Leah remembered that she and Greg’s father had made love, weeping, the night before he moved out of her life and Greg’s forever.

  For a moment, as she walked silently across the kitchen, she worried about leaving the house, about what seemed like an abandonment of Greg, of them all. But she had no power anymore—had never had the power, although at one time she thought she did—to stave off ruin, to guard her son against his share of pain. And for herself, right now, she wanted Joe. She wanted, just as Greg did, the illusion of wholeness, of repair, the broken parts fitting.

  As she stepped outside and turned to shut the door, the porch light falling into the kitchen gleamed on the silver wrapping of the bread Joe had given her, the gift she’d forgotten to take to the party.

  Calling

  At the very beginning he used to call her sometimes just to hear her voice. She’d say hello in that soft midwestern tone, and he’d listen—listen to hear whether she had a record on, or there were voices in the background, or there was just silence; and then he’d hang up. At first he told himself that he did it so he could imagine more clearly what she was doing when she wasn’t with him. But he knew it didn’t really help. If a record was playing, for instance, he’d find himself later wondering whether she’d been dancing with someone in her tiny apartment, as they had done on one of their first nights together. Or if there were voices, he’d wonder who it was, why she hadn’t asked him o
ver too. Was it a party, or had people just stopped by? Had she made dinner for them? He thought of the dinners she’d made for him, the various dishes she’d served him, and wondered if she’d cooked any of the same things.

  After her apartment was robbed, he knew he ought to stop calling. Whoever had broken in—well, they’d hardly broken in; she admitted she’d left the door unlocked by mistake when she went out—had taken only a few pieces of cheap jewelry. But he, or she, had ripped the apartment up a little, had poked through things he might have looked at if he’d been in her apartment alone—letters, diaries, photographs.

  She was upset. She worried that the thief might come back, especially since he hadn’t taken several valuable things which were sitting out in plain view—a portable TV, a silver vase. When he called right after the robbery, he could hear the tension in her voice on the phone. And once she said, “Look, whoever this is, will you please, please, please stop this. Stop calling, please.” He could tell that she was near tears and he felt very bad for her as he hung up.

  Sometimes, when he was with her, he’d ask, “Still getting those calls?” Once she asked him if he would answer the phone if it rang in the night. “Maybe if he hears a man’s voice, he’ll stop calling. Maybe it’s one of those nuts who just picks a female name at random from the phone book because he thinks that means she’s, you know, unprotected.”

  He had put his arm around her then, told her he’d always protect her. She was silent, as she often was when he seemed to be making some kind of claim on her.

  Once she got a call when he was there. She picked up the phone and said hello. Then after a moment she set it gently back down in its cradle.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  “Oh, it was another one of those freaky calls,” she said. “You know, the usual breathing then hang up routine.”

  He asked her again why she didn’t just come and stay at his place for a week or two, and she said, as she always did, that she wasn’t going to let some pervert, some crazy, drive her out of her apartment.

  When he thought about that call afterward, he was at first glad of it, because its happening to come when he was with her made it less likely that she’d ever suspect that the other calls came from him; but then he began to wonder who it was, who else she was seeing who might feel about her as he did. He suggested she talk to someone from the phone company about tracing the calls.

  The phone company wasn’t very helpful. They said there wasn’t much she could do besides changing her number. But they asked her to keep a log of the calls for a few weeks—what time each one occurred, what she was doing at the time, and what the call consisted of. He looked at the log after the first two weeks. They were all his calls, he was pretty sure, all made at ten-thirty or eleven at night so he wouldn’t wake her, disturb her sleep.

  She had initials by some of the calls. He asked her what they meant. She said they were initials of friends who were over when she received the calls. He looked carefully at the initials. He couldn’t figure out who all of them were, and that bothered him.

  He asked her why she hadn’t recorded the call she had gotten when he was there.

  “Because that happened before I started the log, before I called the phone company.”

  He told her he thought it was important that she record all the calls she could remember, and so, reluctantly, she wrote down the day and approximate time of that call, and put his initials by it. That made him feel better.

  By now she was seeing him only one or two nights a week. When he pushed for more time, she said that even if she was free she wouldn’t see him more than that, that she didn’t want to be seeing anyone that often. He accused her of having found someone else; she said that wasn’t it, although it wasn’t his business whether or not she was seeing someone else. She said she just needed privacy, time of her own. She said he was crowding her.

  One night when she wouldn’t see him, he went out to a bar alone, something he almost never did, and got drunk. He wasn’t quite sure how he got home, but when he did, he called her. He knew it was much later than he usually called, but he wasn’t sure how much later.

  She didn’t answer. He went into his bedroom and looked at the clock. It was one. Where was she? Who was she with? He called her again, and let it ring twenty or thirty times. He hung up.

  He thought of how once when they were making love in the afternoon the phone had started to ring and she had moaned, “please, please,” as though at the same time telling him to go on and the phone to stop. He called her again, but hung up after only one or two rings. She just wasn’t home. It was obvious.

  But then he was sure she was home, she was home with someone else on the mattress on the floor. When he made love with her, the mattress hitched slowly across the bedroom so that he’d wake up sometimes with the windows in an unfamiliar place and wonder, momentarily, where he was. He called her again and let it ring on and on.

  He lost track of how many times he called her, but then, finally, he got a busy signal. The sharp sound startled him, made his heart beat strangely. He dialed again, and got the busy signal again.

  He called the operator and said he thought the phone was broken, and it was an emergency, he needed to get through. She tried the number for him and said it wasn’t broken, it was just either busy or off the hook. He called it again four or five more times before he fell asleep, but he always got the busy signal.

  Late the next morning he stopped by her apartment. He had just gotten up and he knew he looked bad. His eyes were bloodshot and the lids were puffy. He felt tired and weak. She let him in and gave him coffee. She was wearing the old terry-cloth blue bathrobe that he liked. The coffee was so strong he could barely drink it.

  “I got drunk last night,” he told her. “Just flat-out too much booze. What’d you do?”

  “I went to a concert with Frannie,” she said.

  “Good concert?” he asked.

  “It was wonderful,” she said. “They did the sixth Brandenburg Concerto, clearly the best one.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  “Not much. I went over to her house for a minute. Had some wine.” She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down at the table opposite him. She looked out of the apartment window at the dead geranium on her fire escape. A sparrow stood on the rim of the pot and puffed itself up.

  “Then what?” he asked.

  She looked at him a moment. “Came home. Went to bed.” She shrugged. “And I got a bunch of those weird calls last night. Starting really late. I didn’t answer ’cause the phone wasn’t plugged in in my room—I had it out in the kitchen—and I didn’t want to wake all the way up and go out in the kitchen just to have some asshole breathe on me.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You have that kitchen thing.” He looked over and saw that the phone was still plugged in in the kitchen.

  “But this guy just kept calling. I’d sort of drift back to sleep, and then five minutes later it’d ring again. Sometimes just a few times, sometimes for a couple of minutes. So finally I came in here and just took the thing off the hook. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I might have to change the number.”

  He offered to spend the night that night, but she said she had other things to do. She sounded irritated by the offer. They talked for a while more, and then she told him he had to go, she was going out.

  The next day, she called him. She said she knew it would sound crazy, but she had what she called an “emotional conviction” that it had been him calling her the night before.

  He laughed. His heart was pounding. “What makes you think so?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just the way you were talking yesterday, I guess,” she said. “I don’t really think so, though,” she said. “I know so. It’s true.”

  He was silent a moment.

  “It is true, isn’t it?” she said. “I just want you to tell me it’s true.”

  “And do you think it was me the other times?�
�� he asked.

  “The other nights?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence on the phone and he was sorry he’d asked.

  “Well, you were with me for a couple of those calls,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

  “Yeah, a couple,” he said.

  “Are you going to answer my question?” she asked.

  “What question?”

  “Were you the one calling the other night?”

  “Well, I was pretty drunk,” he said. “But I don’t remember calling you.”

  “So it might have been you.” Her voice was sarcastic.

  “Might have. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it was, and I want you to tell me, one way or the other, if it was you. That’s what want,” she said.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of need you have to think that it was me making those calls, but if you want to believe it, go ahead.”

  There was silence on the line. Then she said, “So it was you?”

  “You know what I’m going to do in about a minute? I’m going to hang up on you. I don’t have to listen to this stuff.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Let me hear you hang up on me.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I don’t want to hang up,” he said. “This is ridiculous. Can’t we stop it?”

  “I’ll stop when you tell me you made the calls.”

  “I’m not going to tell you that. Why would I have called you like that, again and again?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re jealous? Because you’re crazy? Because you thought you’d catch me in bed with someone else? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you called.”

  “No! No, I didn’t call.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I know it was you.”

  “But how do you know? What’s your evidence?”

  “I’m not talking about evidence,” she said. “I’m talking about what’s true. I don’t have to offer evidence to you. I know this. I know it’s true. You. Made. The calls. That’s all. Just say it. Just say, ‘I made the calls.’ That’s all I want you to do.”