Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  “But I didn’t. I wouldn’t do something like that.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “That’s a nice idea to have about yourself. I feel that way about myself, too. But I want you to talk about what happened. I want you to say, ‘I made the calls.’”

  He thought for a moment. “What’ll happen if I say I did?”

  “You will have told the truth,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t say that.”

  She hung up.

  For a long time he sat with the phone in his hand, not thinking about anything. Then he realized that he was listening hard to the piercing beep coming over the line, that it was making him feel dizzy, sick to his stomach.

  On and off through the day he thought of calling her again, of telling her what he thought of her. He could imagine calling and just saying “bitch” or “cunt,” and hanging up. But thinking about it brought back that same sick feeling.

  Two nights later, he had a few drinks and he called again. It was around ten-thirty. The phone rang twice, then a computerized voice came on the line and said that the number he was calling had been disconnected. He was startled by the unexpected sharp voice. It repeated its message. He hung up. He dialed the operator. She said yes, that number had been disconnected.

  Was there a new number? he asked.

  Yes, she said, but at the request of the customer, she wasn’t allowed to release it.

  He called her number three or four more times that night, and always the computerized voice came on, and always it told him twice over, firmly and clearly, what he already knew.

  After that, he called once or sometimes twice nearly every night, even though he knew what to expect. It wasn’t until three or four weeks later, until he’d met someone else, that he stopped.

  Expensive Gifts

  Charlie Kelly was her eighth lover since the divorce. He was standing naked in silhouette, as slim as a stiletto in the light from the hall, rifling through the pockets in his jacket for his cigarettes. The sight of him gave Kate no pleasure. She hated the smell of cigarette smoke in her bedroom. She hated the horrible silence that fell between men and women who didn’t know each other well after making love, but she hated even more for it to be filled with the rustling little rituals of the smoker.

  “I’m afraid there are no ashtrays in here,” she said. Her voice was pinched and proper. Five minutes before, she had been expelling short, pleased grunts, like a bear rooting around in garbage.

  “That’s okay,” he said, sitting on the bed again, and lighting up. “My wineglass is empty.”

  “Actually,” she said, although she wasn’t at all sure of it, “that was my wineglass. And I was going to get some more wine.” She stood up on her side of the bed and smashed her head on the Swedish ivy. She usually occupied Charlie’s side of the bed. She wasn’t used to the pitfalls on the other side. He appeared not to have noticed her accident.

  “Here,” she said, reaching over for the glass. “I’ll bring you a real ashtray.” He handed over the expensive wineglass, one of her wedding presents. The cardboard match leaned at an angle within it, its charred head resting in a tiny pool of red liquid. Kate felt Charlie’s eyes upon her as she walked away from him, her slender silhouette now harshly revealed in the glare of the hall light. Her gait felt unfamiliar to her, awkward.

  In the kitchen she threw the match away and set her glass down. She wanted to check Neddie. He always kicked the covers off in the intense private struggles that dominated his dreaming life, and he had a bad cold now. Kate dressed him for bed in a big sleeper that probably made a blanket unnecessary, but she still had a mystical belief in tucking him in, in pulling the covers right up to his chin.

  The night light was on in his room, a tiny leering Mickey Mouse head that leaked excess light from a hole where its nose had been until Ned knocked it off with a toy one day. The covers had slid sideways off the bed into a tangled heap on the floor, and Neddie lay on his stomach. His hands were curled into fists, and one thumb rested near his open mouth, connected to it by a slender, almost invisible cord of saliva. His breathing was labored, thick with mucus.

  Kate bent over him to tuck the covers in on the far side. Her breasts swung down and brushed his back. He muttered in his sleep, and reinserted his thumb in his mouth. He sucked briefly, his throat working too, in the same thorough way he’d pulled at her breast when he was still nursing; but he couldn’t breathe. His mouth fell open after a moment, and his thumb slipped out. His face puckered slightly, but he slept on. Kate watched his face smooth out, and stroked his hair back.

  She stopped in the kitchen and poured herself a new glass of wine. She looked briefly and halfheartedly for an ashtray for Charlie, but settled, finally, on a saucer. She didn’t want to return to her bedroom and make polite conversation with him. She wanted to call Al, her ex-husband, and talk comfortably; to make a joke of Charlie’s stylized flattery of her and her own dogged unresponsiveness. But she couldn’t have called him anyway. Al was getting married again soon. He’d fallen in love with his lab assistant, a dark, serious woman, and she would be sleeping there beside him.

  She had called Al frequently in the two years since he’d moved out. Usually it was late at night, often she was drunk. Almost always it was after she’d been with someone else for an evening. Though they had fought bitterly in the year before they separated, the year after Neddie’s birth, they were kind and loving in these drunken phone calls; they commiserated on the difficulties of a single life.

  “Jesus,” he’d said to her. “I can’t seem to get the hang of anything. All the goddamn rules have changed. Either I’m a male chauvinist pig or I’m being attacked by an omnivorous Amazon, and I’m always totally surprised. No wonder those statistical people remarry so fast.”

  There was a silence while she thought of Al attacking, being attacked. He was small and slender, with curly brown hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses which he removed carefully before starting to make love. They left two purplish dents like bruises on the sides of his nose.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It seems to me the main thing to remember is that there just aren’t any rules anymore. You just have to do what makes you feel comfortable and good about yourself.”

  “Oh, Katie. You’ve been taking those wise pills again.” She didn’t respond. He cleared his throat. “Well, how about you? You feeling good about what you’re doing?”

  Kate had thought about the evening she had just spent. Her voice rose to a dangerously high pitch as she said “No” and started to cry.

  Now she carried her wine and the saucer back to Charlie. Her bedroom had been a sun porch in some previous life. Two of its walls were a parade of large, drafty windows. As if to compensate, the landlord had installed huge radiators the entire length of one of these walls; they clanked and hissed all winter long, and made her room the warmest in the apartment. Kate had hung the lower halves of the windows with curtains that moved constantly in the free-flowing air currents. She liked to lie in bed and look out the naked top panes at the sky. It had been a luminous soft gray earlier, and now thick flakes, a darker gray against its gentle glow, brushed silently against the panes.

  “Look,” she said to Charlie, handing him the saucer. He was lying on his back with the open Marlboro box on his chest, using the lid for an ashtray.

  “Yeah, I saw. It’s sticking too, and I don’t have snow tires. I’m going to have to leave pretty soon.”

  She looked away so he wouldn’t see relief leap into her eyes. “It’s so pretty, though. I almost feel like waking Neddie up to show him. He doesn’t really remember it from last year. It’s all new to him again. Can you imagine that?”

  Charlie put out his cigarette in the saucer.

  “You must be freezing your ass off.” Kate was standing by the windows, watching the snow’s straight descent. “Slide in here, lady, I’ll warm you up.”

  She turned obediently and got in, but she said, “My fath
er had a dog named Lady once. A collie. Horrible barker. He finally had someone shoot her. She just wouldn’t shut up.” None of that was true, but Kate didn’t like to be called “lady.”

  Kate was, in fact, a reflexive liar. She hated to be unpleasant or contradictory, and when she felt that way, a lie, fully formed almost before she began to think about it, fell from her lips. Her husband had had a knack for recognizing them—he’d said it was as though her voice resonated slightly differently—and he would simply repeat them slowly so she could hear them herself, and tell him what was making her angry. Once in a fight about whether Al should work less and help her more with Ned, she had cried out, “Ned is wonderful because I’ve given up my fucking life to him!” His patient echo had made her weep, because her claim seemed at once the truth and a terrible lie.

  Now Charlie tried to pull her over to him, but she said, “Ah, ah,” and held up her full wineglass as an explanation. She took a sip. He turned away to get another cigarette.

  “The kid all right?”

  “What, Neddie?”

  “Yeah, is that his name? Is he okay?” He leaned back with the cigarette in his mouth, and exhaled two long plumes of smoke from his nostrils. Kate thought about how the pillows would smell after he’d gone.

  “He’s sound asleep, but really stuffed up.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’s just three.”

  “Cute age,” said Charlie, tapping his cigarette on the saucer. “I’ve got two, you know.”

  “Two kids?” She was surprised. He nodded. “I would never have guessed that about you, Charlie. You’re too much the gay blade, the town rake.”

  He grinned appreciatively. He worked at it, and liked to know his efforts were successful. “They’re in Connecticut with my ex-wife.”

  “Do you see them often?”

  “About once a month, I guess. She’s remarried, so they’ve got a whole family scene there, really. It doesn’t seem so important anymore. They’re pretty much into their life, I’m pretty much into mine, you know.”

  “Yes,” she said. They sat in what she imagined he thought was companionable silence. Two used parents. She had an old iron bedstead with a large ornate grille for a headboard and a smaller one at the foot. Charlie’s head had slipped into the space between two of the white-painted rods. They pushed his ears forward slightly. He looked a little like the Mickey Mouse night light in Neddie’s room. She smiled. She wondered why she had been so excited about going out with him tonight. When he’d finished his cigarette, he reached for her again. She set her wineglass down on the floor by her side of the bed and they made love. Charlie seemed interested in some variations on their earlier theme, but she shook her head no, no, and their lovemaking was short and somewhat neutral in character. Just as he pulled limply and stickily away from her to find another cigarette, Neddie’s agonized shout floated back through the apartment to her. She leapt out of bed, upsetting her half-empty wineglass but avoiding the plant this time, and sprinted into the light and down the long hallway, pushing her breasts flat onto her chest to keep them from bouncing painfully.

  Neddie’s eyes were still shut. He had turned over onto his back and tears ran down his cheeks, into his ears. The covers were piled on the floor. “Nooo, monkey!” he moaned, and thrashed. Kate picked him up and cradled him close, his wet face pressing on her neck.

  “Neddie, it’s Mommy. Mommy’s here now. No monkeys. The monkeys are all gone. You’re in your room, Neddie, with Mommy, see?” She pulled her head back to look at him. His eyes were open now, but he looked blank. She walked around the room with him, talking slowly.

  “We’re at home, Neddie. You had a dream. That wasn’t real. That silly monkey was a dream. See, here’s Sleazy. He’s real.” She pointed to Ned’s bear, sitting on a shelf. Ned reached for him. “Sleazy,” he said, and tucked him in close under his chin, just as Kate held him. She shifted him to her hip now, and went around the room, showing him all his favorite things. Kate was tall and thin. She had down-drooping breasts and flat, narrow hips. She looked like a carved white column in the dim light.

  “And look, Ned. Look what’s happening out here.” She carried him to the window. The flakes danced thickly in a sudden gust of wind under the street light outside Ned’s room, a thousand suicidal moths. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Dat’s da snow!” he said. His mouth hung open and his breath was hot and damp on her breast.

  “And it’s all piling up on the ground, Neddie, see? And tomorrow we can find the sled that Daddy gave you in the basement, and put on boots and mittens …”

  “And my hat?” Ned wore a baseball hat every day. He watched her face now to be sure they were in agreement on this.

  “Yeah, your hat, but you have to pull your hood up over it to keep your ears warm. And we can play all day because tomorrow’s Sunday. Mommy doesn’t have to work.”

  “Not day care?”

  “No, tomorrow we can stay home all day. Okay?” They watched the snow together for a moment. Then she turned from the window. “I’m going to tuck you in now.” She carried the child to his bed and started to lower him. His legs and arms gripped her tightly, a monkey’s grip.

  “Stay here, Mumma.”

  “Okay.” He relaxed, and let her put him down on the bed. “But Mommy’s cold. You move over and make room for me under these covers.” He wiggled back against the wall and she slid in next to him and pulled the covers over them both. His face was inches from hers. He smiled at her and reached up to pat her face. His hands were sticky and warm. “Mumma,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, tenderly, and shut her eyes to set a good example for him. Sometime later she woke to hear the front door shut gently, and footsteps going down the stairs. Then dimly, as at a great distance, or as if it were all happening in some muffled, underwater world, a car started up in the street, there was a brief series of whirring sounds as it struggled back and forth out of its parking place, and then, like a thin cry, its noise evaporated into the night.

  When Neddie woke her, the sky was still gray. The light in the room was gray too, gentle and chaste. The snow had stuck in the mesh of the summer screens left on the windows, and the house seemed wrapped in gauze. It still fell outside, heavy and soft, but from somewhere on the street came the chink, chink of a lone optimist already shoveling.

  “Ned. Let me sleep a minute more.”

  “You already sleeped a long time, Mumma. And I need you.”

  He was standing by the bed, his face just above her head. He wore a red baseball cap, and his brown eyes regarded her gravely.

  “Why do you need me?”

  “You hafta make my train go.”

  “What, Granpoppy’s train?” He nodded his head solemnly. “Oh, Christ!” she swore, and violently threw the covers back, swinging her legs out in the same motion. He looked frightened, and she felt instantly remorseful. “No, Neddie, it’s all right. I’m just mad at the train. I’ll fix it.”

  Her parents had given Ned the train, an expensive Swedish model of painted wood. The cars fastened together with magnets. Occasionally, by chance, Ned would line them up correctly, but most often, one or two cars would be turned backward, north pole to north pole, or south to south, and the more he would try to push them together, the more they repelled each other. Her parents’ extravagance since her divorce, their attempts to ease her way and Ned’s with things she didn’t want, couldn’t use, annoyed her. She must have bent down to correct the magnetic attraction on this thing thirty times since they’d given it to Ned.

  He came and squatted by her. He had laid the track out and there were miniature pigs and sheep and ducks heaped up in the tiny open train cars. The thought of his working silently for so long, trying not to wake her, touched her. As they squatted together she began to try to explain to him the idea of polar attraction, turning the brightly painted cars first one way and then the other, so he could see the greedy pull at work.

  Suddenly his head
dipped slightly to look underneath her and his expression changed. She stopped. “Mumma’s leaking?” he asked pointing to the floor. She shifted her weight to one leg and looked on the floor under where she’d been squatting. Thick drops of whitish liquid, reminders of lovemaking the night before, glistened like pearls on the nicked wood. She laughed and stood up to get some Kleenex.

  “It’s all right, Neddie. Mommy can clean it up in a second. See?” she said. “All gone.”

  She smiled down at him as he squatted, fuzzy and compact in his sleeper, like a baby bear. He turned away and began to pull the toy train, now perfectly attached, around the expensive track.

  The Birds and the Bees

  My mother had been a debutante. She had renounced her frivolous nature when she met my father, who was a scholar, and had once demonstrated to her the purity of his soul by pronouncing “boogie-woogie” with soft g’s. They rushed to get married before the war because they assumed he would be sent abroad. But he had a bad kidney, it turned out. They settled down in New Haven while he finished his dissertation, and then moved to Chicago, where he got a teaching job, and she had me.

  Sometimes after my father had gone to his office, she would play records of the songs she had danced to in her late teens. Even now when I hear Cole Porter tunes I can remember the rich sour scent of the cotton blanket I held against my cheek while I rested on the couch and watched my tall blond mother foxtrot slowly by herself around our living room.

  My mother never got used to Chicago. Everything about it bothered her: the dirt, the congestion, the flat accents, and the danger. The danger both frightened and excited her. In the mornings my parents would sit in the yellow breakfast nook she’d created in a corner of the kitchen, and read the paper. My mother would say, “Did you see this? This man with the razor? It could have been anyone, just anyone passing by him!” Or: “Did you read about those three teenage girls? He might have walked right under our window on his way home!” She would shake her head, her eyes fierce, while my father grunted and read on in his section of the paper.