Family Dancing by David Leavitt Page A

lips have flattened out.
    I consider starting up a conversation, but as we pull into the driveway I, too, feel the need for silence. Our house is dark and unwelcoming tonight, as if it is suspicious of us. As soon as we are in the door, Charles disappears into his room, and the world of his mind. Nina sits at the kitchen table with me until she has finished her book. It is the last in the Narnia series, and as she closes it, her face takes on the disappointed look of someone who was hoping something would never end. Last month she entered the local library’s Read-a-Thon. Neighbors agreed to give several dollars to UNICEF for every book she read, not realizing that she would read fifty-nine.
    It is hard for me to look at her. She is sullen, and she is not pretty. My mother used to say it’s one thing to look ugly, another to act it. Still, it must be difficult to be betrayed by your own body. The cells divide, the hormones explode; Nina had no control over the timing, much less the effects. The first time she menstruated she cried not out of fear but because she was worried she had contracted that disease which causes children to age prematurely. We’d seen pictures of them—wizened, hoary four-year-olds, their skin loose and wrinkled, their teeth already rotten. I assured her that she had no such disease, that she was merely being precocious, as usual. In a few years, I told her, her friends would catch up.
    She stands awkwardly now, as if she wants to maintain a distance even from herself. Ugliness really is a betrayal. Suddenly she can trust nothing on earth; her body is no longer a part of her, but her enemy.
    “Daddy was glad to see you today, Nina,” I say.
    “Good.”
    “Can I get you anything?”
    She still does not look at me. “No,” she says. “Nothing.”
     
    Later in the evening, my mother calls to tell me about her new cordless electric telephone. “I can walk all around the house with it,” she says. “Now, for instance, I’m in the kitchen, but I’m on my way to the bathroom.” Mother believes in Christmas newsletters, and the forces of fate. Tonight she is telling me about Mr. Garvey, a local politician and neighbor who was recently arrested. No one knows the details of the scandal; Mother heard somewhere that the boys involved were young, younger than Charles. “His wife just goes on, does her gardening as if nothing happened,” she tells me. “Of course, we don’t say anything. What could we say? She knows we avoid mentioning it. Her house is as clean as ever. I even saw him the other day. He was wearing a sable sweater just like your father’s. He told me he was relaxing for the first time in his life, playing golf, gardening. She looks ill, if you ask me. When I was your age I would have wondered how a woman could survive something like that, but now it doesn’t surprise me to see her make do. Still, it’s shocking. He always seemed like such a family man.”
    “She must have known,” I say. “It’s probably been a secret between them for years.”
    “I don’t call secrets any basis for a marriage,” Mother says. “Not in her case. Not in yours, either.”
    Lately she’s been convinced that there’s some awful secret between Alden and me. I told her that we’d had a fight the night of the accident, but I didn’t tell her why. Not because the truth was too monumentally terrible. The subject of our fight was trivial. Embarrassingly trivial. We were going out to dinner. I wanted to go to a Chinese place. Alden wanted to try an Italian health food restaurant that a friend of his at work had told him about. Our family has always fought a tremendous amount about restaurants. Several times, when the four of us were piled in the car, Alden would pull off the road. “I will not drive with this chaos,” he’d say. The debates over where to eat usually ended in tears, and abrupt returns home. The children ran screaming to their rooms. We ended up eating tunafish.
    Mother is