by Sue Miller
When they passed chain restaurants, she’d do commercials for them verbatim, in a mocking tone. And she quoted her father to Alan constantly. He understood that this was because she was anxious about how she might be betraying him by living with this new father, himself; but he sometimes felt like slapping her when she commented about the way he was doing something by comparing it to the way her father did things.
Alan was a veterinarian. He’d met Claudia when she brought her dog to his office. It was an emergency, and he’d driven in from home to the clinic after the answering service called him. Claudia was parked outside in a big, new-model station wagon. He’d helped her carry the injured dog inside. It had been hit by a car. Claudia stood by the examining table. “Is she going to die?” she asked Alan. She was wearing a pretty flowered sundress smeared with the dog’s blood, and she clutched the stained blue bedspread they had used to carry the dog. The animal lay panting, in shock, on the glistening stainless-steel table.
Alan could see that if the dog survived at all, it would be seriously damaged. But he was careful with Claudia, as he usually was with his clients. He felt it was their responsibility to make the final decision, to weigh the pain against what pleasure might remain in life for the animal. “Well, I think we can save her,” he’d said. “But it depends on what you want. I mean, there are some people, they have a dog that’s maybe blind in one eye, or limps, and they feel like it’s nothing, she’s fine, she’s still getting a lot out of life. But other people feel differently. You just have to decide.”
“So she might limp?”
“Minimally, she’ll have a limp. We might actually have to amputate in the end. And the eye’s gone, that’s pretty clear.”
Claudia turned away for a moment. Alan watched her throat try to swallow. Her face averted from him, she said, “Well, I think I’d like you to put her down then.”
Alan’s heart went out to her. “You’re sure?” he asked.
Now she nodded firmly. “I guess I’m one of those people who’s more concerned, I think, with … the quality of life, or something.”
Alan lay on his back, watching Claudia undress. She was talking animatedly about their children and how the evening, their first evening all together, had gone. The year before, the two of them had been alone at Christmas. Her children had gone to their father’s, and Jody had had his three at home. This year Claudia, who didn’t work, had spent weeks preparing for a real family celebration. She had brought to it the same painstaking, passionate energy she invested in everything she did, from sex to cooking. She had even conferred with Jody several times about what presents the kids might need or want.
Now, even though her talk was of the series of inconsequential events that had made up the evening, Alan felt that her gestures, her motions, were all directed at him. He couldn’t help thinking for a moment of Jody, her exhausted collapse into bed at the end of the day, often still wearing half the clothes she’d had on all evening. What she did take off, she dropped on the floor around the bed. Coins sometimes rolled noisily out of her pockets to the corners of the room and stayed there weeks, months, before she picked them up. Alan could remember the way they felt when he stepped on them unexpectedly—so cold he’d think for a minute that he’d burned himself on something. In the mornings, all Jody had to do to get dressed was swing her legs out of bed and pull on the jeans she’d left on the floor the night before.
Claudia made a ritual of removing her clothes one item at a time and putting them carefully away. She had delicate underwear and lacy brassieres. Sometimes she wore a garter belt and stockings; and even though they still made love almost every night, she always wore a nightgown when she came to bed. Lifting the hem of the gown, pushing it above her breasts, were gestures which never failed to trigger a sexual response in Alan.
Now she sat at her dressing table, wearing a fragile-looking robe and brushing her hair. With every stroke her breasts bobbled gently. From the living room, where several of their children were still talking, came dim music, a felt bass line rather than a heard melody.
“Marie-France seems sweet, doesn’t she?” Claudia was saying.
Marie-France was an exchange student, a friend of Claudia’s older daughter, Carol. She was staying through Christmas Day with them. Then she’d go to another friend’s house for New Year’s. She was grave and pretty. She spoke with a thick French accent, and perhaps also a slight lisp. Twice during the evening she’d excused herself to go out to the front steps to smoke a cigarette. Both times Jeremy, Claudia’s son, had gone with her, saying that he needed the air.
Alan had noticed that both of his sons had also sprung to a kind of attention around Marie-France; but in David this was marked by a resolute turning away from her, a lack of focus. Alan had found himself irritated with David because of this. Why couldn’t he try harder to get what he wanted, fight for it a little? It was as though he thought he could protect himself from pain by not wanting anything. He ought to have outgrown that idea by now. What was it they said: No pain, no gain?
Alan couldn’t remember whether David had been so self-protective before the divorce. But once, shortly afterward, Jody had called him at night, after an evening he’d spent with David. He and Claudia weren’t married yet, but her kids were with their father for the night, and he’d called her to come over as soon as he’d returned from dropping David off. When the phone rang, he’d reached for it with hands that smelled of her, and throughout the conversation with Jody the air he breathed was weighted with the scent of Claudia’s sex.
“How come you brought David back so early?” Jody had asked.
“We had dinner,” he said.
“I thought it was dinner and a movie, or some time anyway. Some time alone with each of them each week, you said.”
“He didn’t seem to want to go to a movie, Jode.” He tried to keep his voice from sounding defensive.
“What do you mean, ‘didn’t seem’?”
“I mean, I read him the list, and about all he said after each one was ‘unh huh.’”
Jody was silent a moment. Then she said, “Well, you know David.” And suddenly Alan was flooded with guilt. As soon as she said it, he did know David. He remembered that David would have needed his sheltering enthusiasm in order to risk wanting to go to a movie. And he’d had it in the back of his mind all evening that if he could just get away early enough, he could be where he was at that moment: in bed with Claudia.
Now Claudia lowered the hairbrush to her lap. “I think Jeremy’s madly in love with her,” she said.
“With Marie-France?” he asked.
“Yes. Apparently he’s been to visit her a couple of times at school. He took her out to dinner once, Carol said. And he was sure pretty obvious about it tonight.”
“Steven too,” Alan said. But he was thinking of David, who had talked patiently and attentively to Claudia and Stephanie through dinner, and had been awkward whenever Marie-France spoke to him.
“But that’s different,” Claudia said. “He knows he’s too young for her.” And then she frowned abruptly. “You know, I’m never going to be able to sleep with that music going. Can you get them to turn it down?”
Alan stiffened slightly. He knew Claudia was speaking of his kids. On their own, Jeremy and Carol rarely used the stereo. Claudia had given all her children Walkmans several years earlier for just that reason. Sometimes in the evenings when they were home, they would all sit in the living room with their earphones on, in a silence broken only occasionally by their little moans as they hummed along for a second or two.
He got out of bed, put on his robe, and moved noiselessly down the carpeted hall to the top of the stairs. As he passed the open door to Stephanie and Carol’s bedroom, he could hear Stephanie doing one of her oddly inflected imitations: “Yes, I just love my hair this way, sticking out all over like I’ve had some electric shock. And I just love pretending it’s super-curly when everyone knows it’s not.”
His throat cottoned, a
nd he had to clear it several times at the top of the stairs before he called out, “Dave. David.”
His son swung around the corner from the living room, his face lifted, and with the angle up, uncharacteristically open. Alan’s heart caught, his voice softened. “Turn it down a bit, would you, son?”
“Sure,” David said, and disappeared. The music quieted nearly instantly and Alan could hear Marie-France’s thick accent: “But, David, it was just my turn to dance with you.”
On the way back to Claudia, Alan stopped at Stephanie’s door. She had heard him on the stairs and was turned to face him, her round face whitened with embarrassment.
“And can you girls hold it down in here too?” Alan said loudly. His heart was pounding. “Your mother and I are trying to sleep.”
When he got back to the bedroom, Claudia had turned off the light. He put his robe on the chair in the dark and slid into bed next to her. She stayed turned away from him, and Alan knew she had been hurt by his tone in the hall when he spoke to her daughters.
Thursday afternoon, Christmas Eve, it started to snow. Claudia had taken all of her children on a last-minute shopping trip. Through the afternoon the thick flakes fell steadily. By five it seemed to have slowed a little, and Alan asked David to shovel the walk. Andrea went out to help him for a while. Alan was in the kitchen making oyster stew, something he’d always done on Christmas Eve at home, and he could hear Andrea’s shrill voice outside as she badgered David. After twenty minutes or so, he heard the front door bang shut, and then she stood in the kitchen, her long hair limp and wet, her cheeks flushed.
“He’s no fun, Dad,” she said. “Will you come out and have a snowball fight?”
Alan looked at the little pools of water collecting at her feet. “Why isn’t he any fun?”
“’Cause whenever Marie-France is around he gets all serious. It’s boring. He never wants to do anything.”
“Marie-France is outside?”
“Yeah. She’s helping him shovel.”
Alan went into the dark dining room and looked out the window. Against the whited ground, the two figures moved side by side. Marie-France seemed delicate, female in her wool winter coat, like the girls of Alan’s youth. Every fourth or fifth shovelful, she and David stood and faced each other for a moment, talking. Their voices were audible only as a murmur, but Marie-France gestured with both hands dramatically when she spoke. Then she’d hook her hair back over her ears and they’d bend to work again; and the distant ringing of the shovels’ alternating music would float once more into the warm house.
He went back to the kitchen and told Andrea they could have a snowball fight after dinner.
Claudia and her children came back about six, and the younger girls began setting the table for dinner. Alan and Claudia were sitting in front of the fireplace in the living room with cocktails when Jeremy walked in. Alan offered him some wine or beer, but he refused. He seemed distracted. He sat down and started leafing through a magazine. His mother began to tell him where the wrapping paper was for the presents they’d bought that day. Steve and Carol came in; Steve had challenged her to a game of backgammon before dinner. He was enthusiastic about Alan’s offer of a beer. He went to the kitchen and returned with two bottles, one for Carol.
“Glasses too, please, Steven,” Claudia said.
“Oh, right,” Steve answered cheerfully. And he went out again while Carol set up their game. Alan felt a momentary jealousy at Claudia’s ease with his children. He wondered why he couldn’t feel that comfortable around hers.
Only a few minutes before Alan was going to get up to serve the stew, the front door opened and Marie-France came in, followed by David.
“Where have you been?” Andrea brayed from the dining room. “You’re supposed to be helping. It’s not fair.”
Marie-France laughed and began to take off her coat. “I’m coming immediately,” she said.
Jeremy stood and walked closer to the doorway to the hall. “Where were you?” he said quietly to Marie-France.
In spite of himself, Alan felt a moment of pleasure in Jeremy’s pinched voice. David. She’d chosen David. Then he was ashamed of this quick pull of his blood. He looked at Claudia, but she was talking to Steve.
Marie-France didn’t look at Jeremy. “Don’t worry,” she said, shaking her coat. “We’ll do more than our share. We’ll do the dishes, yes, David?”
Alan couldn’t see David, who had crossed out of sight to the coat closet; but his voice was light, tense with an unfamiliar joy when he answered. “Whatever Andrea says. She’s the absolute boss.”
“At least the dishes,” Andrea said, standing in the doorway. “Stephanie and me had to do the whole table, plus the salad. It’s not fair.”
Stephanie came and stood next to her. Her hands rose to her hips in imitation of Andrea’s posture. “Yeah,” she said. “We had to do everything.”
Alan looked sharply at her, but there seemed to be no contempt, no distance in her echo, and when she and Andrea went back into the dining room, he heard their voices rise and fall animatedly, their mixed laughter.
Alan and Claudia drank a bottle of wine at dinner, and when Alan began to put on his parka afterward for the snowball fight with Andrea, Claudia came out to the coat closet and said she’d join them, something Jody would never have done. Stephanie and Carol, then Steve, decided it would be fun too; and suddenly the front hall was full of their children, talking loudly to each other, threatening each other cheerfully as they pulled on boots and their puffy nylon coats. Alan, sitting on the stairs to tighten his laces, shut his eyes and listened to them. The whole house seemed to ring with their energy, their goodwill, their togetherness. When he opened his eyes, Claudia stood before him, smiling down at him with deep pleasure, and his heart lifted in gratitude to her.
They poured out of the house onto the front lawn, and began to heave gobs of the wet snow at each other in the glowing light from the downstairs windows. Their footprints crisscrossed the yard as they ran after each other and ducked behind trees and the two parked cars. David and Marie-France came outside when they were finished with the dishes, and finally Jeremy too; and the dark yard echoed with their cries until the falling snow had turned to sleet, then rain, and their mittens and hats were soaked through.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Alan woke abruptly. He heard a noise outside, then a whisper, a cry from downstairs. Claudia muttered in her sleep. She’d been a little drunk when they made love; they’d all had eggnog after the snowball fight, and when they came up to bed, they’d left the four older children and Marie-France still awake, wrapping presents and talking in the living room by the subdued, fragmented light of the Christmas tree.
Alan got up and put on his robe. He shut the bedroom door carefully behind him and walked to the top of the stairs. Just as he started down, he heard a moan in the hall below him. Then Marie-France’s voice said, “Oh, stop. Oh, please. Stop.”
He hesitated a moment, then continued down. The hall light was off, but he could see Marie-France standing at the front door, by herself. The heavy wooden door was swung in, and she was looking out through the glass storm door. Alan came up behind her. She started and turned to him. Tears stood in her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Griffith, oh, please,” she said, and gestured to the door. “They are drunk. We are drunk,” she said.
Alan stepped up to the glass. Outside, the night had cleared, and a cold moon rode high above the sloping yard. The snow was silvered with a layer of ice. Sliding across its glistening surface were David and Jeremy in shirtsleeves, each holding the other up, each swinging wildly at the other.
“Oh, please,” Marie-France whispered. Her breath smelled rich and sweet, rummy.
But Alan stood frozen, watching the strange silent drama.
David had dropped to one knee now. He held Jeremy around the waist. Jeremy awkwardly hit him several times on the head, while they moved together a few feet down the yard’s gentle incline.
David struggled
up into Jeremy’s embrace. His hands rose to Jeremy’s head, held it almost lovingly. Alan watched, unable to move. It wasn’t until after David’s fist landed on the side of Jeremy’s face that he yanked the door open.
They turned to him, startled, drunk, holding each other as though they’d been dancing. Alan stepped outside in his bare feet and the cold slate burned at his soles.
“Get in here,” he cried out. “Get in here, you boys.”
Then Jeremy let go, and slid away from David. Awkwardly he turned to the house and began to shuffle toward it, as though he were skating. When he opened the storm door behind his stepfather, Alan could hear Marie-France inside, weeping softly.
David was slower, limping. As he passed his father, Alan saw a narrow line of dark blood running from one nostril. He reached out to touch his son, to do something; but David shrugged away from him, as though he were proud of his injury, his pain. “It’s fine, Dad,” he said. “Don’t worry.” His voice had the same unfamiliar quality of life and tension Alan had heard in it earlier. “It’s nothing,” he said, and he moved beyond Alan into the dark hall.
About the Author
SUE MILLER is the acclaimed author of five novels, including The Good Mother. She lives in Boston.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Sue Miller
Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories
The Good Mother
Family Pictures
For Love
The Distinguished Guest
While I Was Gone
Copyright
“Inventing the Abbotts” first appeared in Mademoiselle under the title “The Lover of Women.”
“Leaving Home,” “Tyler and Brina,” and “The Quality of Life” first appeared in The Atlantic.
