by Sue Miller
I suppose it would have been easy enough to tell her. Why didn’t I, then? Tell her about growing up in a university town in Maine. Tell her my father had been a botanist, a sweetly distracted, cerebral man much older than my mother. Tell her that he’d died when I was ten. Tell her that my brother and I had raised ourselves in a kind of emotional silence weighted with high expectations. That my brother had met them by becoming a botanist, too, by marrying and having children. But that I had chosen not to. That I had turned away from expectations.
I didn’t tell her—because I was Licia Stead now. Instead I mixed bits of the truth with half-truths and lies, so that later I couldn’t remember everything I’d said and would make mistakes. Sometimes when I talked about myself, I’d catch Dana looking at me quizzically and know that I’d slipped up again.
I thought about this afterward, about the lies and what made me tell them. Partly, I think, it was in order not to talk about my life, not to have to think about it, the decisions I would have to make about it soon. But partly, too, it was because I didn’t like being who I’d been, because I wanted a different history. Or maybe no history. It was, after all, that time in the world when history seemed about to be swept aside. And though I was about as apolitical as one could get, I think I embraced for myself, personally, what people like Larry were embracing politically.
Toward the end of that painting day, Duncan came down the hall and stood in the doorway to my room. “God, it’s like entering someone’s mouth,” he said, looking around at all that pink.
“But, Duncan, that used to be one of your most favorite things,” Dana said, and then she bit the air in his direction with a sharp clack together of her teeth.
“God, Dana!” he said, and I turned away, embarrassed and shocked that she would say something so intimate in this casual way in my presence.
But this kind of candor was, as I discovered, a matter of policy with Dana. Everyone in the house knew whom she’d slept with and when, and, often, the particulars of what they’d done together. She’d grown up in Chicopee, Massachussetts, famous, she told me, grinning, for the world’s largest kielbasa. She lived in a tight Polish community, where gossip had the power to shatter lives, and her defense against it had been scrupulous and overweening honesty. No one could say about her anything she hadn’t already said about herself.
She was the youngest of eight children, the oldest of whom was more than twenty-five years her senior. “I was raised by about six or seven sort of parents,” she told me once. “And on the other hand, there was nobody in charge. My real parents had quit the parenting business by then, and my older sibs had their own lives to contend with. Every now and then someone would say, ‘How are your grades this year, Dana? And who’s that hoody guy who keeps coming around?’ But that was about it. I just couldn’t be bad enough to get anyone’s sustained attention. Believe me, I tried.”
She’d started at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and then quit and come to Boston. She was a part-time student at the Museum School now, in sculpture. To support herself, she modeled for life drawing classes and worked in a jewelry store, doing repairs and making rings and pins and earrings after the owner’s designs. Her own sculpture consisted of odd small pieces—bronzes. They seemed to be based on various prehistoric, extinct animals. Or maybe they were entirely imaginary. In any case, to me they looked fetal, embryonic, and I couldn’t decide whether I found them intricately beautiful or simply repugnant.
Sometimes I felt I was doing research at the house, research on how I could live, on what life was supposed to be. Sometimes I felt as much an observer as Eli, though I knew the others didn’t see me this way. Dana was the most important source of information for me, at least in part because she willed this to be the case. But the others, too, seemed put there to show me something, to teach me.
When Duncan talked about his and Sheree’s freedom to sleep with others, I needed to understand it.
“What’s there to understand? I love her. She loves me. That doesn’t mean we own each other, does it?”
“No,” I conceded. We were both just home from work, lost in the deeply sprung couches in the dim living room, smoking cigarettes and whispering across to each other in order not to wake the sleepers above us. Our feet were nearly touching on the wooden box.
“So if she wants to ball someone else, why should that have anything to do with me?”
“Well . . . ,” I protested.
“Grow up, Lish,” he told me, and I thought, smiling, of the bartender, Eddie, at the Ace of Spades, saying the same thing to me.
I wondered how Larry could be so sure of his political convictions, and he leaned forward over the kitchen table, bulked up and cheap-looking in his tight T-shirt, his greasy hair, and gave me his passionate argument about witnessing the spiritual corruption that wealth brought with it.
Sweetly Sara explained to me her wish to escape the confines of ordinary linear thought, to experience other ways of understanding the universe. And then she offered me a variety of choices from her stash of pill bottles, in a variety of hues. What were they? Gee, she didn’t know for sure.
And when I asked Dana about her future, she told me she didn’t hope for anything in particular beyond this. “I like my life exactly the way it is. I mean, I’d like to eventually get the degree and maybe someday show some stuff. Sell it, even. God, how great, to make some money from my work! But I wouldn’t change anything, even if I got rich. I mean, what could be better than this?” She gestured around herself in a long, articulated sweep of her arm, her fingers arching separately—a gesture I can never forget, for its grace, for its dancer’s beauty.
But what it indicated was our nearly empty living room. Was the secondhand furniture covered with Indian bedspreads, the odd collection of possessions we shared, the fake mantel, the Scrabble board permanently set up in the corner on a card table, the records sitting in cast-off milk crates.
It made me laugh. Then, I laughed.
But later I would dream of it sometimes, those days and the house, and in these dreams the open bare rooms led from one to another through secret passages with such a sense of promise, of imminence, that I would instantly recognize Lyman Street. Oh, not by any physical resemblance to my memory of it, no. But by the sense of excitement, of possibility—of youth—that the dream itself mysteriously carried.
CHAPTER
4
The evening after Jean Bennett brought Arthur to my office—the evening after I heard Eli Mayhew’s name for the first time in almost thirty years—I went upstairs, through Sadie’s room, to the attic in our house. It was really an unfinished extension of her room. You bent down and crouched your way through a kind of large cupboard door and then stood up again in what seemed like a photographic negative of the space you had just left—the walls and floors dark, unfinished wood, the only light from one bare bulb hanging, à la Philip Guston, by its own cord from the ceiling. How could it even smell different, when one partition wall alone separated it from Sadie’s talcum-scented realm? It did, though. It smelled like mildew, a woody damp odor.
In a box there, under the syllabi and work for courses in vet school and letters from that period, I found the photographs I had remembered. There were two, both worn at the edges, one actually folded at one time across the middle, so that a jagged white line of the fuzzed underpaper bisected the image.
In the first one, the house members sit lined up in two neat rows on the steps of the porch at Lyman Street—neat, that is, except for Larry, who forms the curved close of a parenthesis at the right side of both rows. It was his camera. He’d set it up on a timer and come running over and sprawled down across the steps with us.
Behind us, the out-of-focus front doorway yawns blackly open. Also out of focus and too large, like strange floppy white blooms in the foreground, are my bare feet and John’s, sticking out from the front row, along with Larry’s darker and outsize motorcycle boots. Eli, also in front, has his knees bent, rests his elbows on them. W
e are all wearing the odd costumes of the time—frayed bell-bottom jeans (patterned fabric in the inserts of mine), loud rhythms in the shirts of John and Duncan. Dana has on a wide-striped T-shirt, Eli and John have shoulder-length hair and sideburns.
The dutiful front row—John, Eli, Larry, and I—are focused on the camera, smiling falsely as we wait for the delayed click. In the back row, though, something is happening. Sara, seated in the middle, is looking with interest at Duncan, who has turned in profile to Dana, who sits on the other side of Sara. It seems he has just spoken to her. Dana stares at the camera, not attending to Duncan, and the wind has blown her hair partially across her face, curtaining her expression. Still, you can see she’s not smiling. She seems isolated, unconnected to any of us or to the activity of picture-taking.
The other photograph is of her alone. Larry had caught her sitting in the kitchen, her long legs in wheat jeans, a loose man’s shirt hanging to mid-thigh. The shot is taken from an angle just above her. She’s slightly out of focus, laughing, her hand in motion as a pale blur by her forehead, as though it were moving to push her hair back. Her face lifts to Larry and his camera a little helplessly, like someone surprised by the camera, someone who really doesn’t want her picture taken but yields to it. What else is in her face? A sweetness, a gaiety, an openness, that makes me think of Sadie. A spirited, beautiful girl, frozen forever at almost Sadie’s age. It’s this picture that bears the crease—crookedly, across Dana’s bosom. On the back, in what must be Larry’s writing: Dana Jablonski, spring ’68. For Joey. Larry gave it to me later, after he knew my real name.
When I was first getting to know Daniel and telling him my confused story, I said it was Dana who’d taught me how to love with enough recklessness and generosity to make it real. “I wish I could thank her, then,” he said. Tears had sprung to my eyes.
But at the time, it was occasionally odd for me to feel so chosen by Dana, odd and uncomfortable, and I still don’t understand everything that was at work in her. I wonder if perhaps even our physical resemblance had something to do with it: perhaps Dana needed to learn to love herself most of all, and loving me was a kind of rehearsal for that.
Though that’s not what she said.
“Why do you even like me?” I asked her one night. “Why do you want to know so much about me?” We were walking home from a movie in the late-summer dark. The air felt dry and smelled dusty and faintly of garbage.
“Because you have so much dignity, Licia. You have just what I want.”
“Is that why people like each other? Because they want some part of the other?”
“You don’t think so?” She sounded ready to change her opinion, if that’s what I required of her.
“I don’t know. I’m really asking. I’d like to know.”
“Well, it’s why I like you. No one I’ve known has been so dignified. Unless they were just worn down by life, like my parents. They had this kind of exhausted dignity.”
“I think you’re mistaking a lot of other qualities, or attributes, or whatever, for this vaunted dignity.”
“Hmm. Like . . . ?”
“Caution. Suspicion, even.”
Dana looked puzzled for a few moments, as if giving the matter much thought. Then she turned to me in the night and smiled her open, dazzling smile. “Still, it’s awfully nice to say a word like vaunted, isn’t it?”
There was a possessiveness about her affection, though, that sometimes disturbed me. As when Larry gave me the chair. I’d been complaining about the emptiness of my room, and he appeared in my doorway one evening holding it up—a beautiful chair, such as I’ve never owned again. It was Queen Anne, the wood worn to a satiny finish, the seat ancient cracked black leather. It came from his parents’ basement, he said. One of a set.
“Won’t they mind?” I asked.
“They’ll never even notice,” he said. “Which is why you should have it.”
“Where’d you get this?” Dana asked when she saw it.
“Larry,” I said.
“I’m jealous,” she said. There was a silence. Then she said, “God, I’m jealous. Are you attracted to him?”
“There’s a rule, Dana. I’m not allowed to be, am I?”
“But you are?
“Larry?”
“It could happen. And I want you to love only me.” She laughed hoarsely, but I could see there was a way in which she meant it. “Wait a sec,” she said, and disappeared.
When she came back she was carrying a lamp, a gooseneck lamp she’d had on her own desk. She’d decorated it herself, adding two bulbous, lidded eyes to the rounded metal shade on top and, on the base, a strange flat body whose spiny tail coiled round and round itself. Now she set it on my desk and, in spite of my protests, plugged it in, turned it on. And after this I would find other gifts—in my room if I’d left the door open, or on the floor outside my door if it was closed—all extracted from the variety of things she collected and transformed and kept around her.
Her room was cluttered. A worktable—a hollow-core door over two dented file cases—took up one end of it, and the wall above this was covered with images that appealed to Dana: dinosaurs, primitive raptors, copies of old Audubon prints. There was a series of photos of the same dirty child making one face after another. Her niece, she said. There were various charcoal sketches of herself, naked, from the life drawing class—here curled on her side, there on her back with her legs spread, the dark patch shadowed and suggestive between them. She’d tacked an enormous and elaborately patterned snakeskin over her bed, and next to it was another publicity shot of Duncan’s girlfriend, hung there, she told me, “to teach myself humility.” She had two chairs she’d found on the street and made slipcovers for out of coarse white fabric. On them she’d drawn two lush female figures, so that you sat held in their wide laps and thick arms, nestled against the rounded drooping breasts. Each sported a tiny cushion of looped yarn where pubic hair would have been.
From her collection, she gave me over the months a decorated cigar box, a large shell you opened to find a minuscule diorama she’d constructed of life on the ocean floor, a pair of earrings she’d made, a sheer scarf bought at Goodwill. Occasionally, when she was sitting in my room, she’d pick up something of mine—an ink doodle, a Blake poem I’d copied out, a flower I’d carelessly let dry in a glass. “Do you want this?” she’d ask. “Could I have it?”
It became a kind of joke. I teased her with it sometimes, it shames me to remember it now. “Why don’t you just build me a shrine in your room?” I’d ask. “Larry can take a picture of me, and I could give you things like toenail clippings. Locks of hair.” She actually blushed before she laughed.
It’s impossible, I think, not to respond to such fierce wooing. I suppose I could have been repulsed or even angered by it—and occasionally I was, a bit, out of fear more than anything else. But mostly I learned to love her in return. Not without caution, not without reserve. But I think I needed Dana too. In order to feel love, to risk responding, I needed someone who would throw herself against me, encircle me, and Dana was such a person. I’d grown up with a parsimonious sense of love. I’d made a marriage in which love was in many ways an afterthought. I suppose that like Dana, I wanted what I didn’t have—what she had, in fact.
But it frightened me, too, and I was glad, I discovered, for the sense of distance from her that all the lies I’d told gave me. I don’t know at what point I might have confided in her, at what point I might have been willing to let go of Licia Stead and introduce her to Jo. But for as long as I knew her, I wasn’t ready.
One night Dana stopped by the bar where I worked to pick me up—with Larry, which meant we’d have a ride. Cappy, the bartender, liked Dana and usually gave her and whoever was with her a free beer or two while I finished cleaning up.
The group playing on this particular night was a blues band from Chicago, with a nearly elderly lead singer and harmonica player, John Ayers. He had suggested to me several times through
the evening that we get together after the show and have our own party, he’d show me what a good time was all about. I told him, finally, that I was married, I couldn’t go out with him.
He saw me talking to Larry at the end of the evening and came over. “This here’s your husband?”
“Yes,” I said, maybe too quickly. “This is Larry. Larry, this is John.” I gestured beyond Larry. “And Dana. John. Dana and Larry are waiting for me,” I explained.
John looked Dana up and down, smiling, nodding. Then he said to Larry, “Man, you are surrounded by beautiful women. How come you got these two women and I ain’t got a one? If you was even near kind, you’d give one of these fine women to me.”
Larry tilted his head. “Well, see, neither of these women is the sort you can just give away, if you know what I mean.”
John laughed. “I do know what you mean. I know what you mean.”
In the car on the way home, Dana said, “You’re a mighty fine liar, Lish.”
“What do you mean?” There was so much I’d lied about that I’d already forgotten the little lie to John Ayers about Larry.
“Larry’s your husband. Snort, snort.” I was in the back seat, unlacing my Frye boots. My feet ached. Dana was in front, next to Larry. She hadn’t turned to me.
“Well, it worked,” I said. “The guy wouldn’t hear no until he thought I was married.”
“All I mean is you have a kind of gift for it.” She said this very quietly, and Larry looked over at her, sharply.
“And what does that mean?” I asked.
“Just that there are all these little contradictions all the time in what you say.”
“Leave Lish alone, Dana,” Larry said.
“Why? We’re friends. Why shouldn’t I ask her to clear some things up?” She sounded angry now, but with him.
“Like what contradictions, Dana?” I asked.
“Jesus, don’t get into it with her, Lish.” Larry looked back quickly at me. “No one has the right to behave like this. She’s like the fucking CIA or something.”
