Authors: Sue Miller
‘What was Goofy, anyway?’ she asks after a minute. ‘A dog?’
‘Yeah, a dog, I think.’ He makes a face at her. ‘What does it matter, Mom? Why are you always asking questions like that?’
‘Am I? Like what?’ Lottie is surprised.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I can’t explain. You have a very . . . tangential brain, let’s say.’ Someone has started the jukebox, soupy music. Someone like Percy Faith. Yes.
‘A Summer Place.’ ‘But actually, that’s really kind of how I felt. Doglike. They were all, you know, elegant, cynical – the Brits. Very articulate. And I was this
doglike, eager person. I thought things mattered that we were talking about. Doglike. Yes. And that’s really how they treated me. I mean, while being quite puffickly civil. And I kind of
reacted by getting even worse. Even more “Amurrican,” or something like that, there.’ He pretended to swagger in his seat. And then his face opened, painfully. ‘But I have
to say, it was the first time I thought of that stuff, that I saw myself in those terms. And it changed me. It did make me grow up – a lot – to face this sort of version of
myself.’
‘So now what?’ Lottie asks after a minute.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, what do you do with this information?’
‘Fuck if I know.’ He grins. ‘Go back to school. Hang out. Have some brews. Let the river of time wash over me.’ He sobers. ‘I don’t know. I’m not very
happy right now, I guess. And this thing with Jessica. It feels like, in a way, the same stuff.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Aaah, I don’t know. I just . . . proceeded through, you know. I proceeded through. I didn’t ask myself anything.
Why
, for example. Aside from the basic. I’ve been
pretty, well, rapacious, I guess you’d have to say, this last year. In England too. I think I was –’ he lifts his shoulders – ‘using sex, or something. To make me feel
better.’ He’s speaking slowly, thoughtfully. ‘Like I had some control, or something. Anyway. I didn’t look at myself doing it at all. And now all of a sudden I have to. And
it’s like seeing myself again. Like in England. Seeing myself. And I’m glad for it, I suppose. But I also wish it had never happened.’ He’s been twirling his glass on the
table. Now he looks up at Lottie quickly. ‘I mean, of course I wish Jessica’s dying had never happened. But I mean also that I’d never had to see myself.’
‘To grow up.’
‘I suppose.’ And then he suddenly seems embarrassed. ‘Of course, I’m so very grown up now. I’m sure that’s what you’ve been saying to yourself all
summer long, right, Ma? How grown up I am?’
There’s a painful quality to this. He’s really asking her. She reaches a little way across the table and smiles. ‘On alternate days, darling, of course. At least as frequently
as I’m grown up.’ Almost simultaneously, they finish their beers. Lottie looks at her watch. ‘We should get back, honey. I want you to call Cam for me, to be sure he’s still
there. Being good.’ She waves to the waiter.
‘What am I supposed to say?’
‘Say you’re looking for me. Maybe ask him if I’m there, or if he knows where I am, or something.’
As they’re walking out, he says from behind her, ‘How did you get so good at being devious, Mom?’
‘It’s in the genes,’ she says. ‘Look at my dad.’
Back at home, while Ryan calls Cam, Lottie stands grinding her teeth in the front hall, feeling the pain in her filling as familiar, almost comforting.
Ryan sounds natural and relaxed. ‘Mom’s not there, is she? I wanted to know if I could take the car.’ He pauses, then says, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and hangs up. Lottie
steps into the room. ‘He says you might be having a drink with Elizabeth. Otherwise he doesn’t know.’
She looks at him a long moment. ‘You’re pretty good at this devious stuff yourself,’ she says.
‘Hey, they’re my genes too,’ he answers.
Lottie laughs, but she’s also oddly touched by this. She crosses to the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m going to head up, sweetie,’ she says. ‘Don’t stay out too
late. We’ve got the service tomorrow.’
‘I’m not going anywhere tonight anyway.’
‘Oh! This is a first.’
He looks sheepish. ‘Well. You know, it seems like it might be good – I don’t know – just to be around.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen, honey.’
‘Whatever you say, Ma.’
‘Sleep tight.’
‘You too.’
Lottie reads for a while before she turns out the light. But she doesn’t fall asleep right away. She’s restless. She gets up twice to look out the window at Elizabeth’s. Her
light is on until very late, a flickering, dim glow through the leaves outside. She hears Ryan too, several times, walking around downstairs.
Just as she’s falling asleep, she imagines it clearly: Cam moving into Elizabeth’s room the night before, the dark shape that’s Elizabeth on the white bed turning away from
Larry’s humped form, lying suddenly awake on her back with just the sheet over her. She lies very still; she’s hoping only that he hasn’t come to hurt her, to hurt Larry. Cameron
stands there a long time. His breath is ragged but regular. He sees they are naked. It is four-thirty. Light has begun to incandesce in the white things in the room: the sheets, the clothing heaped
in a pool on the floor. He remembers how it felt to lie in this bed next to her, to get up and move through the darkened house on his way out at this time of the night – of the morning. He
remembers how it felt to fuck her when the pressing need for silence made them wilder, as though it were some equivalent to moaning aloud, to crying out. He watches the sheet rise smoothly and fall
again across her breasts; he watches Larry turn slowly away from her, move his legs, the shadows shape-shifting. He is his breathing imagination, frozen and made to see it – and Lottie is
Cam, she feels his murderous heartbeat flutter in her rib cage, seize her breath; and she wakes to a sense of her true self.
She lies in the dark for a few minutes, and then she gets up and pulls a pair of jeans on, tucks her T-shirt in. She picks up her sandals and carries them down the dark stairs with her. Her
purse is in the dining room. She goes outside and stands on the front porch. The porte cochere light is on at Elizabeth’s, but all the house lights are off. There are no cars except her own
parked on the street. She thinks of Cam, walking quietly up the driveway, turning his key in the locked door. Suddenly she is remembering her own craziness each time Evelyn had another stroke. The
calls, the nighttime drives down the dark alley with the headlights off so no one would spot her. If she’d had the key, if he’d been sleeping with Evelyn, mightn’t she have wanted
to look?
What had her drives been if not the same old thief-in-the-night routine? Who is she except Cam’s sister? While others are grappling with the Grim Reaper, Cam and she apparently are
destined to sneak around.
‘It’s in the genes,’ she’d said to Ryan. And for a moment Lottie smiles in the dark at the idea of some kind of nature-versus-nurture argument about herself and Cam.
Is
it perhaps a genetic predisposition? The son and daughter of the thief succumbing to their chromosomal fate?
Or maybe it was simply being raised in a house so bland, so emptied of emotional valence, that is was inevitable they’d be Peeping Toms of the emotions. Sorrow? I want to
look
.
Love? I want to be a fly on the wall.
She disgusts herself. But he is her brother. And she, it appears, is her brother’s keeper.
Lottie gets in the car, starts the engine. Once again she makes her drive through the empty Square, along the dark, glinting river. Here and there in the South End, as she approaches Cam’s
part of it, she sees shadowy figures moving on the streets. At a stoplight she rolls up her window, locks her door, and reaches over to lock the others.
Cam’s car is on the street. She parks behind it and turns off her engine. She slides across the seat to peer up at his windows. There is a light on dimly somewhere deep in his apartment.
She watches, but no one moves in the windows.
For a while she sits in the silent car. She sees the hulked, monster shapes of what she thinks is earth-moving equipment parked behind a chain-link fence under the expressway. Suddenly a tiny
light flares among them, orangy, and goes out. A match, she tells herself. Someone is there, lighting a cigarette. A homeless person, most likely. She is straining. She thinks she sees figures
moving among the backhoes, the bulldozers, a flicker here and there in the shadows. She focuses so hard that they suddenly take on an entirely different aspect; they seem to waver, then disappear,
like the images in heat shimmers. Lottie squints, she tries harder, but they’ve been swallowed by darkness, her eyes can’t pick them out. It seems to her she’s imagined them, her
whumping heart the only evidence that something, someone was there. Though she’s unaware of it, she makes a noise in her throat, a caw of fear.
She sees a lone car swishing by on the expressway, going south. She thinks of her mother, asleep in the nursing home; or awake, perhaps. It didn’t matter, did it? Either way, since
everything she has to live through must have the same reasonless quality of dream life to her. She thinks of Jessica’s mother then, of Dorothea Laver – how she may wake in the morning
and for a second or two, before she remembers, feel whole and right, as though the terrible thing might only have been a nightmare, just a neurological event in her dreaming brain.
She looks up again at Cameron’s window. She’s done everything she can, hasn’t she? He’s here, Elizabeth is there, presumably sleeping soundly. Why should she be the only
one awake, worrying?
She knows this is pointless. But she sits for a long time in the locked car anyway, looking as blank and still as an animal in a trap, waiting, in case something should happen.
It seems initially that all of Jessica’s high school class has turned out. Groups of people that age stand clustered together on the steps of the church; there are long
embraces being shared as Lottie and Ryan pass through the narthex, and Lottie hears weeping behind her. Once she and Ryan are seated, though, she looks around and realizes that there are many more
young women here than men. And that a good number of them are wearing white – the effect is almost like that of some mass ritual wedding.
Ryan has shaved this morning, and a lemony smell rises off him. Lottie looks over at his face. His eyes are skittering back and forth, taking it all in. He looks like a frightened animal. She
leans back against the hard pew and lets her own eyes blur, looking around the room again. The men’s summer sports coats are spots of pastel color – mostly pale blue – and the
flowers mounded in front of the pulpit make hectic splotches. Everywhere, too, are the glistening wood colors – blond and walnut – of long, American girls’ hair, streaking down
their backs in smooth, flat panels. You can hear, scattered through the room, the shallow insucks of air: people sobbing quietly. Lottie’s tooth throbs with her pulse.
There’s a portrait of Jessica propped on an easel just below the pulpit – probably her high school graduation photo. It isn’t precisely unretouched, and the sense of skylike
roil behind her is clearly false, the backdrop in some artist’s studio. Still, it catches something in Jessica’s face that draws Lottie’s attention, something she would have had
no way of noticing, given the nature of her encounters with the girl: a sort of eagerness, but with an edge, a determination. ‘What’s next?’ she might be asking. But even more
important than that, Lottie thinks, maybe also, ‘When?’ Lottie is oddly touched by this. She wants to see Jessica as having, in some sense, begun to shape her own little life –
it’s too pathetic to think otherwise – and the Jessica in the photograph might have.
Ryan fumbles with the program, opens it, pretends to read. Looking over his shoulder, Lottie sees that they’re listening to a prelude by Bach. The pews fill in, slowly. Ryan and Lottie
have arrived a little early because she was worried that she might not be able to find the church. But it was easy. Three high white spires towered visibly over the center of town even before the
approaching road opened on to the green, and she had only to circle the little park once to locate the Congregational church – the largest of the three.
Inside, it feels even more huge. The windows rise tall and narrow in a row on each side, the clear crazed panes palsying what would otherwise be the trees’ slow drag in the light wind
outside. There’s a balcony above and a little behind Lottie and Ryan, and she can hear from the thumps and creaks that it’s filling up also. Looking directly overhead, she sees the
immense dazzle of a chandelier suspended high above them all.
Lottie glimpses a familiar head of hair out of the corner of her eye. She glances in that direction and sees that Elizabeth has arrived. She and the children are walking slowly behind an elderly
woman with a cane. Elizabeth is holding little Emily’s hand, and the boys are behind her in matching navy-blue blazers, white shirts, and ties. Elizabeth has on something darkly vibrant,
striped. Lottie can see only the top of Emily’s head, the brownish-red hair the color Elizabeth’s was in youth. Elizabeth stops by a pew four or five rows in front of Lottie but on the
other side of the center aisle. She gathers the boys toward her with her arm – Lottie sees the gleam of one of her silver bracelets – and they move ahead of her into the pew. When she
sits down, she bows her head forward immediately, as if in prayer.
Finally the music ends; it begins again, with the organ unstoppered. Everyone rises, and in their midst Lottie can see the preacher and several others, these without robes, walking down the
aisle, producing a muffled thunder on the bare wood floor. They step up to the chancel, and when the processional stops, the minister moves forward into the pulpit and blesses the congregation,
says a brief prayer. They all sing a hymn together, they sit down. The smothered sobbing in the room has intensified. Someone opens a window with a loud squeal, then another. Lottie turns slightly
and sees that it’s an elderly man with a long pole, the kind her teachers had used to raise the enormous windows in her grammar school.