Life Drawing (23 page)

“Well, it’s a little different for a painter,” I said. “It’s all so visible. I doubt you’d have liked it if the other customers at the coffee shop had been reading your every word.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There were days when I could have used the critique.”

“You had lots of company there, didn’t you?” Alison indicated the painting of Ida’s shop.

“I did. And actually I loved the hubbub. But nobody had the least interest in what I was doing. I’ve rarely felt more invisible in my life.”

“I would feel like an intruder,” Nora said. “I couldn’t.”

By then, mid-November, her hair was noticeably longer than when we’d first met. Like her mother, she always wore a little bit of makeup, barely visible, almost as if more a reminder of her femininity than anything else. That night, she had on jeans through which you could see her hip bones when she stood, and a long-sleeved black top, through which at moments you could see her nipples. The shirt collar fell just at the level of the cross, so the cross would slip beneath the cloth, only the occasional glint of that very fine chain remaining visible, although once you knew the cross was there, you could see that too.

As she protested that she couldn’t impose, I knew that she would. And there was something about the openness with which this all unfolded that made it seem churlish to object. He was mentoring her. She was in need of a positive male role model. Alison repeated these phrases to me all the time. Owen spoke elliptically in the same terms as if it were an assessment of their dynamic to which we had long ago agreed. And I said nothing to object.

As Thanksgiving drew near, I knew Alison assumed we would join them and was wondering how to demur when I learned that Owen had already agreed on our behalf. They would do most of the cooking. I would bake a pie or two, if I didn’t mind. “Neither of us is much of a baker,” Alison said. We would supply wine. These details came out over dinner at Alison’s house, and I found myself smiling and saying, “Of course, of course. I’m so glad it’s all settled.”

But then, as we walked home, I said, “Thanksgiving, Owen? Really? It’s a brave new world, indeed. You didn’t think you should consult me?”

“I can’t count all the meals we’ve had with her that you just assumed I wanted to have.”

“But we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, remember?”

“A person can cling too hard to his principles,” he said, a comment that left me with no response.

I
crossed paths with Jan at my father’s that week and thought of inviting her and Letty. I had been serious about wanting them in our lives more; and maybe too I wanted some ballast to the gathering. But I knew they had annual plans and I couldn’t stand the
thought of the
no
I would certainly hear.
I thought you and Owen were too politically high-minded for such things?
She wouldn’t say it, but I was certain it would be there in a raised brow, the tilt of her head. For all that we were more in touch than we’d been, I had no illusions that the lifetime of prickles between us would be magically gone.

T
uesday of Thanksgiving week was the last day of the farmers’ market until spring. Only a few years before, I’d been told, it always shut down the week before Halloween, but it just wasn’t that cold anymore, not usually, and the burst of shopping before the holiday made wearing some extra layers worthwhile. I’d been avoiding the place since meeting Kathleen Mayhew, sensing that if she ever did want to share family lore about Jackie, I didn’t really want to hear it. I was having a hard enough time without the notion of Mayhew family members looking over my shoulder. But I needed a baking pumpkin, the big, pale, fleshy sort that the grocery store didn’t have, and Alison had her usual list, though longer than usual, including a turkey, freshly killed and plucked, so we went together, just us, doubtless leaving Nora trailing after Owen.

I saw Kathleen before she saw me. She stood alone behind the old wooden table, under the worn canvas roof, arranging a set of bright quilted potholders held on a line with laundry pins. There were no customers nearby and her face, I realized, was a private one, different from what I’d seen as she’d sold Alison vinegar. Different too from the puzzled features registering my strange mention of her boy uncle, long deceased. She studied the potholders, frowning at their arrangement and changing it, noting an improvement I could not detect except in the evident approval of her unfurrowing brow, her untightening lips. It was probably how I looked as I painted, I thought. Absorbed in something others can’t perceive. Aiming for some effect that doesn’t yet exist.

She looked strikingly like Jackie, as she worked. Whatever the dubious quality of my portraits, I had memorized his face by then, and the resemblance seemed much stronger than the first time I’d seen her. As if by learning his features more thoroughly I had cracked some kind of code.

When she noticed me watching her, I waved, and she waved back. I hadn’t been anxious to speak to her, but it seemed rude to walk away.

As I approached, I said something about the potholders looking nice. “It’s an eye-catching display,” I said, then realized the comment would sound more sincere if I bought one. “I’d love to have the black plaid.”

“They’re always big sellers at Thanksgiving.” She unclipped it from the line, rearranging the others to fill the empty space. “I know I always manage to burn a few once there are enough pots on the stove. Sooner or later, I get careless and leave one too close to the flame. I suppose everyone does.”

As I fished out my eleven dollars, I asked her if she made them herself, and she said she did not, that her older sister did. “But she doesn’t like coming to the market. We’re very different that way. I hate sitting inside sewing. She hates being out in the world.”

“Sisters can be pretty different,” I said.

I hadn’t thought I would mention my visit to Jackie’s grave, maybe not even mention him at all, but perhaps through some set of associations, the talk of an older sister changed that. “I went out to the cemetery after I was here that other time,” I said, as she handed me the potholder in a brown paper bag. “Your family’s, I mean. I hope that doesn’t sound too intrusive. I’ve just felt strangely close to your uncle since starting this project of mine, and I wanted to see where he’s buried. I wanted to pay my respects.”

She frowned, and looked at me for a few moments, silent. Then she shook her head. “He isn’t there,” she said.

I thought she was going to add something religious, maybe
talk about his being in heaven; and I regretted having brought it up. She sat down on the wooden folding chair behind the counter. “He isn’t anywhere. He was …” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them as she exhaled. “It was a grenade,” she said. “Some kind of explosion. There was nothing left of the boy to bring home.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry. I saw a grave … I just assumed.”

“Believe me, he isn’t there. That was part of the story my father told and told and told. That poor Jackie had been blown up beyond … That he was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Just like God, my father would say.”

“That sounds …” I thought of how frightening it must have been for a child. Not just young death, but the gore of it. And that conflation of a decimated body with God. I wanted to say the right thing. But another customer had appeared beside me, and I knew the subject had to be shut down. “I really am sorry,” I said, once again. “And I’m sorry if bringing it up …” But Kathleen shrugged that off.

“It’s nothing new,” she said. “An old story, believe me. And truly, it isn’t right for me never to remember him, if only for my father’s sake. Like you said, to pay my respects. God knows, my children are barely aware he ever existed. After me, me and my sister, it’ll all be forgotten.”

“I understand that,” I said. “The remembering, I mean. How much it matters. I really do.” But I felt impatience begin to rise like steam off the other customer, now a step closer to the booth, so I just wished Kathleen a good holiday, and she wished me the same, and I went off to find Alison.

T
his is me, on the day before Thanksgiving:

I am making the pies, first cutting the pumpkin in half, scraping out the seeds and stringy fibers around them, soaking all that
in a bowl of water. I cut the halves into pieces and bake the chunks, then cool them, then scoop the soft flesh from the skin. I have done all this before, years and years before, with my father’s older sister, my Aunt Anna—called Antenna by us, behind her back—at whose home in Maryland we celebrated the holiday when we were all young. She taught me to cook her specialties and though it has been years since I have done so, years too since she’s died, a physical memory I haven’t known I possess remains in my hands, in my arms, in all my senses. It is there as I reach into the bowl of water and strip the seeds from the muck around them, there as I fish them from the water and lay them on paper towels to dry. And it is there too as I know from the smell alone that the pumpkin has cooked to softness; as I know exactly the texture of crumbled butter in flour to make a perfect crust.

I haven’t wanted to be glad we were having Thanksgiving. I’ve wanted only to feel angry that Owen’s indulgence of Nora, or whatever I was to call it, has led us to break a pact we made decades ago. But in fact I am more than glad as I carry the two perfect pies from the oven to the marble cutting board put out for them. I am elated to have discovered this other self still dwelling within my molecules. And I am curious too, as I stand there admiring the perfect sheen of each pie, the slight fractures, lightning bolts at the centers, where each has risen, then fallen flat, curious about what other selves I carry but have forgotten. It is as though I have somehow discovered a new light in which I can detect the palimpsest that is me, the Gussies layered on top of one another, some faded, others all too visible.

“Those are beautiful,” Owen says when he comes in. “Another hidden talent.”

“My aunt, Antenna, taught us all how to bake them,” I say. “I don’t know why I never did it before. It’s not the law that pumpkin pie is only for Thanksgiving, I know. I just never thought of it.” It is like so much else, I realize. Another part of the past that
I have blunted or hidden or jettisoned because I lack some normal, innate understanding of how to carry experiences and even capabilities with myself through time.

“Maybe I’ll bring my father some, later this week,” I say. “He might like that.”

Owen looks at me curiously. “I’m sure he would,” he says.

O
n Thursday morning, I decided to set the table in white, almost entirely white. White lace over white linen. White napkins. White china—or as close as I could find among our strange collection. White candles set into old silver candlesticks. I wanted a canvas for the meal. I wanted to experience the table filling with food as I experienced a painting coming together. The only exception I made was for a handful of leaves, still moist, orange, red, that I cut into thin strips and scattered, confetti across the whiteness, ribbons of autumn itself.

B
y the time Alison and Nora arrived and then arrived again and then again as they carried dish after dish across the hill, I had dressed in an old, soft, gray dress that I hadn’t worn in years, one Owen had long loved, and I’d brushed my hair loose, putting Charlotte’s tiny emerald earrings into holes I’d half assumed had long ago closed.

I stepped out of the way as Alison, in black, and Nora, in violet, managed the business of warming or cooling their food, in my kitchen. I watched them from the doorway, mother and daughter, moving around one another, choreographed perfectly for life. I could see the beauty of it just then, just for those minutes, the warp of envy for once set aside.

“Who’s ready for a drink?” Owen called from the living room.

Everyone was.

A
s we sat at the table, I watched Nora bow her head, murmuring the prayer she spoke at every meal; or maybe a special one for the day. I wanted to ask her about it. For the first time, I felt a genuine, nonjudgmental curiosity about what all of this praying and believing meant to her. But I didn’t say anything, in part because for so many weeks I had needed to be ever vigilant that I not speak to her harshly. And though I would have asked the question respectfully this time, it was a question I might in another mood ask with belligerence, which was how I thought Owen would hear it no matter what my tone; and so I said nothing.

The meal itself was traditional—turkey, yams, stuffing, green beans—which Alison attributed to her being a foreigner. “It’s all very well for you Americans to use Thanksgiving as an excuse for culinary explorations, but I had to learn to do it right. I have to prove myself.”

“It’s delicious,” I said, and it was; though there were also moments when all I could taste was the discrepancy between this meal and the ones we’d had those many decades earlier, meals it had never occurred to me to miss, but that I suddenly longed to relive.

Across the table, Owen sat. Eating. And drinking.