While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  I didn’t stop to ask myself why, what it was I thought I was doing, but I came later to feel it had to do with a sense that perhaps once again I was settling too soon, rushing into something I thought would solve all my problems—work this time, instead of marriage. And running from something, too, some deep fear that connected to Dana and her violent death. But I didn’t examine this. What I felt then, all I felt, was rapacious, ridden by a scouring sexual appetite.

  And when those waves of impersonal appetite seemed completely over, it was Daniel I was thinking of. Daniel, with whom I had spent one evening.

  He was surprised, and then delighted, to hear from me. We had three or four conversations by telephone, each of which lasted several hours. I remember it, stretched out on the bed, talking in my tiny apartment. The maple branches brushed against my window with a gentle scraping sound—I watched the pale undersides of the leaves lift and lower—and we talked. We compared job markets, veterinary medicine versus the church. We talked about how we saw our careers playing out. We discussed families, children, the power of mothers in our lives. I told him about my painful, unresolved feelings about my father, dead at sixty-four, about my parents, how they’d met when my mother came straight from secretarial school to work for him. We talked about animals, how we knew them, how we felt about them. I told him about Dr. Moran and his wonderful hands, about a snake I’d actually become fond of. Daniel had been in charge of the family chickens on the farm and had hardly a good word to say about birds. We agreed on dogs and cats. We titillated each other with references to other relationships, hints of our sexual histories. My ear would hurt when I hung up.

  Finally we arranged to see each other, to come to New York. We met at an expensive restaurant he’d chosen for us, though we barely bothered to finish the meal we ordered. Thickheaded and nearly speechless with desire, we took a cab back to my faded hotel near the 92nd Street Y and joined what seemed like an army of German tourists in the tiny and ancient elevator. It groaned, it rumbled. It stopped on every floor. People got off, got on. The languages changed. Years passed. I heard French, and then what I took to be Portuguese. We’d been in front, by the elevator doors, at the start of the trip, but by the time it was nearly over we’d shifted around so many times to accommodate others that we were now wedged together at the back, our bodies pressed to each other along one side. I was trembling, I couldn’t bear to look at him.

  “Now, this, on the other hand,” Daniel said in a conversational tone, “this is a very slow elevator.”

  We were married six weeks later, and I would say we have lived happily, if not ever after, at least enough of the time since. There are always compromises, of course, but they are at the heart of what it means to be married. They are, occasionally, everything.

  But of all the compromises marriage requires—and in particular, marriage to a minister—perhaps the most difficult for me has been putting my life and my concerns aside when someone else’s life and concerns are occupying Daniel’s mind. It isn’t just that he’s busy when this happens, as an architect might be, or a lawyer or a stockbroker or a professor; it’s that he’s taken up emotionally too.

  In those days after I’d seen Jean Bennett and Arthur and heard Eli’s name again, Daniel tried to sympathize with me. At dinner on Tuesday night I talked about it all, as I hadn’t in years. I called up the old names from my life in the Cambridge house, and he wondered with me about the others—I’d kept up with none of them. How funny it was, he agreed with me, that it should be Eli, the one I knew least—the one all of us knew least—who had reappeared in my life. How strange it all was.

  “Do you remember my premonition?” I asked him, resting my elbows on the table.

  “What premonition?”

  “You know—I told you—that sense I had yesterday of dislocation.”

  “Oh, the admonition.” He smiled.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Now we know it was a premonition.”

  “Do you think so?” he said. “Well, I’m just sorry you have to feel any of it again.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, and then he asked, “If it was a premonition, what was it a premonition of, exactly?”

  I realized I had no idea, and laughed. “Well, maybe it was an admonition.”

  Meanwhile, of course, Daniel had active grief, recent death—Amy’s—to contend with. As well as a service and a burial to arrange, and all the logistical problems around that. We’d have several of Amy’s relatives from out of town at our house Thursday night, so even I would be part of it at that point, though I had this aspect of my involvement in Daniel’s life down to a science: the girls’ beds and the guest room off the kitchen were always made up fresh. I had casseroles frozen. I’d buy a baked ham. On Wednesday afternoon I’d hit the gourmet shop for take-out food and rolls, for scones and breads for breakfast. I’d set up the ten-cup percolator, rarely used, and buy half-and-half and whole milk, extra orange juice, fruits and jams, butter and margarine. My job was to recede and leave food and comfort behind, and I’d learned how to do that without much cost to myself.

  From time to time over these few days, Daniel gave me his distracted attention: “How are you holding up?” “When this is all over, we’ll sit down and really talk.” “This must be terribly hard for you.”

  Was it? Was it hard?

  I suppose, in some ways.

  Most of all, though, it preoccupied me. I saw Jean once more, on Wednesday evening, when she came to pick up Arthur after his round of steroid injections. There was no real change in spite of three doses, but I gave her the pills and some Valium I’d started him on because he seemed anxious. She told me I’d hear from Eli over the weekend. I was anticipating that, then, thinking of how it would feel to speak to him, to see him again; as well as thinking often about Dana. Not just Dana as she’d been in life, which came back to me primarily in ways I’d revisited over and over through the years, certain familiar scenes; but Dana as she’d looked when I discovered her—something I’d successfully not thought of for a long time. Though even here I’d reviewed my own terror so often at the start that it, too, seemed oddly distant now.

  Newly preoccupying, though, in a repetitive, pressured way—like the oddly riveting details and images from a dull movie you thought you’d forget instantly—were certain ancillary scenes. I hadn’t recalled the cleanup, for instance: that came raw and, yes, hard when it returned. Or our bitterness and shame over being exposed in the papers, over having exposed Dana. I recoiled inwardly in a new way from these memories. I was puzzled briefly by their fresh power.

  Until I realized that they came because of Eli, because it was he who had reentered my life and not one of the others. Because it was he who had been unable to touch Dana’s blood, who had watched me weeping on my knees in the pinkish mix of soap and Clorox and blood and gone upstairs to throw up, over and over. And it was he who had seemed most shocked and upset at the useless and irrelevant exploitation of what had been made to seem sordid in all our lives. It was Eli’s perspective that made it hard, when it was hard.

  I found myself thinking, too, of my life, of what I’d made of it since then. In the first years after Dana’s death, I would call up her face when I felt lost or uninspired or hopeless. I’d remind myself of how young she’d been when everything was taken from her. I’d use her loss as my scourge, a prod to rise above my own misery. How lucky I was, after all, just to have gone on. To be living, to have my work, my husband. Even to be feeling despair was, I’d remind myself, pure good luck. Grace, as Daniel would call it.

  At some point, though, I’d stopped. I’d stopped feeling that intimate connection to her death. My life changed and I changed. Time folded over those events and that story. Other deaths, other griefs, replaced my grief for Dana and reshaped my thinking about how life got lived, how death got faced. How we accounted for our time on earth.

  Now it had come back to me, but with some of that sense of remove I felt looking at the group photo of us on the porc
h steps, seeing myself there in my long hippie hair and my bell-bottom jeans. Remove, and a kind of shame for having forgotten so much I’d sworn always to remember. It seemed to me then that if there was an admonition, it was simply this: we have no right to let go of so much that shaped us; we shouldn’t be allowed to forget.

  When I got home Thursday evening, there were three cars besides Daniel’s pulled into the yard around the kitchen. I parked in front of the house, so everyone could get out easily, and made two trips in with the extra groceries. Before I’d left home in the morning I’d set out fruit and cookies, sherry and wine with a corkscrew and glasses, coffee cups, and the percolator, ready to be plugged in. I noted with satisfaction as I moved into and out of the house that the smell of coffee filled the kitchen. I could hear people walking around upstairs. There was no sign of Daniel.

  I put cheese and crackers out now and set the oven on preheat. Then I crossed the twilit yard. I entered the open barn and went through the dark to Daniel’s door, where a knife of bright light gleamed along the bottom. “Open up,” I called.

  In a few seconds the door opened. Daniel had his glasses on, and his chin doubled as he looked over them at me. He held a pen and some loose papers.

  “Checking in before the fun starts,” I said.

  “Lovely.” He bent and kissed my cheek quickly, then moved back around his desk and sat down.

  “You’re working on Amy’s eulogy?” I asked. I sat down opposite him, on a daybed he used when he napped or read. The room was slightly overheated. I slid my coat off.

  “Actually, Sunday’s sermon. I saw a connection and wanted to make some notes.” He slid the papers on his desk around. He took off his glasses and poked fiercely at his closed eyes. Then he lifted his head and looked at me. “How was your day?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Crazy. I did some really neat surgery, though.”

  “Ah! What?”

  “A degloving. On a cat. The owners wanted the leg saved, and I got to do it. Mary Ellen assisted.”

  He looked blank.

  “It’s when the skin is accidentally just peeled off”—I gestured peeling a glove back from the arm—“so much that there’s no hope it’ll ever regrow. Usually you just remove the leg when that happens, but these people didn’t want that, so there’s a kind of elaborate but wonderfully commonsense surgery you can do—I’ve only just read about it before—where you open the fur on the side of the cat and bend the leg back under it.” I had been excited, actually, while I did this, and Mary Ellen and I had talked eagerly to each other through the fussy procedure. “You make a kind of pocket, I guess you’d say. And then you stitch the fur back over the leg. In a little while, voilà! the skin attaches itself to the leg, so you can open the pocket up, release the newly furry extremity”—my voice put quote marks around this phrase—“and stitch the flaps back together, sans the leg piece. Which also gets stitched together.” I sewed in the air for him. “It pulls kind of tight, but cats are stretchy guys. This one was.”

  “Stretchy guys,” he said, and laughed. I felt a bloom of pride at pleasing him. Daniel.

  Then he stopped and shook his head.

  “What?” I said after a moment.

  “Sometimes all that effort for an animal just seems nuts to me.”

  I was suddenly defensive. “Love is love, Daniel, wherever it lands.”

  “I know, I know.” He seemed weary, old suddenly, with his pale skin, his eyes reddened where he’d rubbed them. There was a nervous steady pulse in one lid.

  “What’s the program tonight?” I asked. “How can I help?”

  “You’ve done enough. More than enough, with the food and the bedrooms. Everyone’s going to Amy’s for dessert around eight-thirty, so we’ll be out of your hair then. Till bedtime anyway.”

  “I will be invisible at bedtime. In that I will be in bed.”

  “Not invisible to me, my darling.”

  “I hope not. But where’s the rest of the family eating?”

  “Well, the immediate family’s at home, with her parents. But I think quite a few are coming here—I told them we had plenty.”

  “We do.”

  “Some are headed for the inn.” He shrugged. “Probably worried the minister wouldn’t serve enough booze.”

  “They hadn’t heard about the minister’s wife, apparently.”

  He smiled. “Just as well. We need to have our secrets.”

  “So if everything’s ready by—what? Six-thirty?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I’d better get going, then.”

  He stood and began to rearrange his desk. “I’ll be right over to help.”

  “You don’t have to,” I called back as I shut the door.

  The barn was a gloomy void after Daniel’s warmly lighted study. I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes get used to the dark and smelling the barn’s old, deep must. Piano music drifted to me from the house, the player picking out a piece Cass had done in recital once, a Mozart sonata. I went to the open doorway and looked across the shadowy yard. The windows were all lighted, and the house itself seemed flattened and two-dimensional in the twilight, as artificial as a stage set.

  Someone—it was an elderly man—caught my eye, moving haltingly through the living room. After a few seconds, he reappeared in the kitchen and stood bent over the food on the table. As though it were his house. As though we had never been. As though he, and the person making music, and the woman I saw upstairs now, silhouetted for a moment in a bedroom window, were sufficient here.

  I was aware, suddenly, of feeling canceled out, lost. I had a moment of what I suppose I must call grief, a powerful sorrow. For myself and the girls and Daniel. For what had been our life in this place and was already—this is what I felt—passing. Had always been passing.

  And then I forced myself to walk forward through the dark yard to the back door, putting a warm smile on my face, getting ready to be the minister’s wife.

  It wasn’t until Beattie mentioned the date at work the next morning that I realized it was Halloween. I’d done nothing to get ready. I skipped lunch with her so I could drive to the drugstore in another tiny mall, closer to town, and buy treats. The bags of small candy bars made expressly for this holiday were heaped in bins by the register. I bought two of them—forty treats in all. Surely enough, I thought. But then, just as the heavy adolescent girl at the register had finished ringing me up, I reached back and grabbed another bag of twenty. On Halloween, people drove in from the countryside and parked around the green, to move from house to house in town. Out where they lived, everyone was too widely spaced. The checkout girl—Melanie, her plastic name tag told me—sighed in irritation and started her process again.

  At the end of the workday I hurried home, but I could see as I pulled into the driveway that the little halting figures in groups of five or six were already making their way in the dark, some carrying flashlights—their beams skittered and leapt wildly here and there. I’d probably missed quite a few.

  Quickly I set up. A big bowl to dump the treats in. Four or five candles lighted in the front hall and on the stoop—we hadn’t had a pumpkin in years, not since we found ourselves carving it alone in the kitchen, the bored girls having drifted off to TV or the telephone or homework. The bell rang almost right away, and I answered it, squealing in energetic fright at a small monster in a store-bought costume, the oldest of his troop and therefore the leader. I distributed candy to them all. Two of them were tiny children, toddlers really, who’d been utterly silent as their older siblings brayed “Trick or treat!” and who seemed not to know what to do now in front of this strange, noisy woman. (“Hold your bag up, dummy!”) Both of these little ones wore their masks tilted back on their heads for greater comfort, like beanies with faces. Their mothers were waiting on the walk, chatting with each other, pretty young women. They called out “Thank you!” and “Happy Halloween!” as I was shutting the door.

  When they’d gone, I went to the clo
set off the living room and recovered my own mask—Olive Oyl. I prized it for its expressionless innocence. It also made my life easier. I could just make Olive Oyl’s high squeaks as I distributed treats—ooh, ohh, mmm—and be liberated from true conversation.

  Daniel came home around six-thirty, and we had a quick supper, just sandwiches. We took turns rising to answer the bell several times. I asked him about the funeral, how it had gone.

  “Harrowing,” he said. Apparently the oldest child, seven, cried loudly through the whole thing, sometimes even calling for her mother. I imagined it, Daniel speaking calmly in his rich, soothing voice and the child answering, filling the air with her desperation. There could be no comfort for anyone else in the service—not in its solemn sorrow or its shared rituals or the old consoling words—with such scorching and entirely reasonable pain on display. Daniel seemed beaten, physically smaller, the sharp bones in his white face more pronounced than ever.

  After supper, he left for church to go over the Sunday service with the choir, who were at Friday-night rehearsal.

  As the evening wore on, the numbers of kids dropped off and their ages went up. Now I had children ten or twelve—big children, unaccompanied by adults, in elaborate costumes they’d made themselves: swathed in bloody gauze, dolled up as a French tart, swaggering in wide lapels and homburg as a thirties-era gangster.

  By eight-thirty I had no candies left. Quickly I gathered up and put in Baggies all the cookies in the house, left over from last night’s company. When those were gone I gave away all the apples and oranges and pears. Still the tricksters came. A few sullen teenagers rang, costumes replaced by thuggish behavior. I should have realized that since Halloween fell on a Friday this year, it would become the evening’s activity of choice for many more kids than usual.