Retreat to Love (8 page)

“The person with the suitcase?”

“You got one right, yeah. That was her, moving everything into Ted’s place. She’d figured after they were caught and had the fight, she wouldn’t want to stick around and pack. Pretty practical, if you ask me. Pretty nasty, too.”

“Then what did he do?” Wren again.

“Called a locksmith. Had the doorknob changed and took the old one, along with a couple of things like barrettes she’d forgotten, and bundled it all up in the sheets she’d fucked Ted on.”

“They were never still on the bed?” Lizzy’s face was aghast.

“No, they were. He stuck everything in a box and left it at the campus mailroom for her.” I couldn’t stand to sit anymore, and went to the front door to look out. “They never fought at all, never talked at all, according to her. She told Eva most of it, and he told Zach a little. It was pretty close to the end of term. When they came back senior year they acted like it never happened. Zach saw them around each other a few times and it was as if they were strangers.”

We all were quiet for a while. I sighed. “I don’t know, I mean, I thought it was horrible when Zach first told me about it, but now I know him,” I turned back into the room, “it’s just bad, is all.”

“Bloody hell,” said Lizzy. “And I thought Moira was a bitch.”

“Poor guy. Did Zach say anything else?”

“Nah, he hadn’t even remembered it was Caleb it happened to until I asked him about it. They’ve pretty much been out of touch for years now.”

“Never mind,” Lizzy told Wren, “that’ll give you enough to work with. He’s cautious, dislikes cheaters, and finds long hair attractive.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Where do you get the part about the hair?”

“You said she left behind hair clips, obviously she had to put them in something. I doubt they just marked the pages in her textbooks.”

“Well, I hope it’s true, cause it’s the one thing I know I’ve got going for me.”

“Yeah, I noticed you flipping it all over the place last night.”

“Did you?” Lizzy hooted. “I guess we’re not quite so shy after all, are we?”

She turned red. “Was I obnoxious?”

“No, you were fine.” I smiled and ruffed my own head. “But since I don’t have your advantage I can’t help but notice it in others.”

“Do you think he noticed?”

“Well, he doesn’t have long blonde tresses, either, besides which I think you hit him with it a couple of times, so I’d say so, yeah.”

“Go Wren, you got it, go Wren, you work it.” Lizzy did a little dance to accompany herself. Wren doubled over, but I felt I had to put a stop to it.

“Elizabeth, I must say, your hip-hop American accent is even worse than your regular one. I tell you this only as a friend.”

“Aisling, if you won’t call me that, I’ll try not to offend your Americanized self.”

“Girls, girls, settle down! We don’t need no internecine wars here. I thought we were all united in a common goal.”

“Getting you in bed with Caleb is our mortar?” I asked.

“Hey, whatever works,” Wren replied.

Women artists searching for ways to express their unity or lack thereof with the world, meeting for two months of soul-searching and sharing, and what we had going for us in the way of bonding was gossip and plotting to catch us a man. Fantastic.

Wren poked at me with her toe. “That, and the fact I really like you. Both of you. Wipe the pout off your face.”

I stood and stretched. “I know. I was just thinking of the time. If I’m going to get anything done before lunch duty hits, y’all need to get going.”

“Can’t believe this woman. Comes to a retreat and actually wants to work while she’s here. Have you seen the like?”

Wren shook her head. “Never. Come on, let’s go play and let Ms. Dedication here get her quilting done. We don’t want to stand in the way of progress!”

They gave me hugs and headed out. Alone at last, first time since Saturday afternoon. I was a lot more used to personal space than I’d realized when I moved off on my own and complained of the solitude. Taking the tools I’d snatched from the Main House, I hung some display hooks I’d brought along, and stretched what I had of
Chains of Love
on the studio wall. The patch portrait of Gran was done, and I’d tacked it to a piece of muslin with the strips for the chains weaving their way across it.

Standing ten feet back, I decided to bring the Gran patch closer to center left, the radiant locus of the design. One broken chain for Berneen and Albert would head towards the top left, and the one for Pappa would be smack in the center, the link actually connecting them broken but the ones surrounding them and their life together keeping them always close. I didn’t like the prevalence of gray tones in the chains. They needed to be more vibrant, with some reds and oranges. I sifted until I had floss in the right tones and moved forward to braid them around and through some of the chain strands—the chain would be the last element actually pieced, overlaid on the rest so the chains would not be forging the connections, but reinforcing them.

Nodding, I stepped close to work on their construction, but was stopped by coming face to face with my stitched version of Gran.

She’d become increasingly wrinkled the last few months, and I knew my moving out was more of a strain than she let on. Pappa’s death a decade earlier had slammed home Gran’s own mortality, and the overnight frailties she’d developed as a result of his loss aged her considerably. From the time toddler me had analyzed and memorized her, until that mournful March day, she’d changed only subtly. But with Pappa gone, her arthritis constricted more, her insomnia took hold, and her thirst to always be doing something new turned into more of a sipping acquaintance.

I didn’t think about the time, or my tears, until the knock at my door heralded the gazpacho king. Tracing a finger down the painted Gran’s cheek, I set aside my art and prepared for the crucial work of slicing and dicing.

Lizzy pulled me aside after lunch the next day. “I’ve had an email from my parents. They’re coming. They figured out how fare alerts worked, just so they could show up here unannounced.”

“You don’t seem very pleased.”

“Ashlyn, they’ll be here at the weekend. They want to see my rural Texas home, they want to meet my friends, they want to tell agonizing stories about my infancy.” Her brow compressed. “I need your help.”

Another one. “What can I do?”

“Tell them all about your grandparents, distract them with questions about the old country. I can’t have them talking to Brandon about my first fallen souffle.”

“They’d hardly do that.”

“They would. You don’t know. My parents turn me into a naive girl with a whimsical fondness for big rocks. I may as well not be talented, or adult, or anything when they’re around.”

Lizzy was scraping the toes of her Doc Martens back against the edge of the porch. Her callused hands were buried in the spikes of her hair, her eyes had rounded and gone moist. I sighed. “How long will they be here?”

“A day, they’ve said. Saturday morning they’re driving in from Austin, and I have dinner duty that night so I told them they had to leave by five.”

“Why not just go up to Austin to meet them?”

She shook her head and pushed up her glasses. “If only. They have an agenda. They’re connecting to Dallas and picking up the car, driving past the grassy knoll, stopping in Waco to take pictures of the Davidian complex, and will be in Austin for just long enough to tour the capital and have dinner. That’s all they want out of this state, other than to see me and the artistic little world they’ve sent me to.”

“They paid?”

She nodded briefly. “For the flight, they did. Anything else I do here is on my own punt.”

Wow, the tug of the financial apron string. I’d seen many people hung from it, but never thought someone as resolute as Lizzy would be roped in. “I still don’t know what you’re so afraid of.”

“You may never will. But you’re my friend, you’re half-Irish, and you’re another artist, so if they can corner you for an afternoon I can distract them from everything else. Please just give me this time.”

I supposed there could be worse things. “Saturday?”

She nodded.

“I’m still on lunch.”

“I know. But if I help you make it early, maybe you could ask Caleb to serve and clean up?”

“You’ve got it all figured out.”

She smiled at me. “Desperation brings out the best in me. You’ll do it?”

“Yeah. You explain it to Caleb, though; he’s got the week’s menu planned from some sort of brunch food pyramid, and whatever we make Saturday had better not interfere with his master plan or we’ll never hear the end.”

She agreed, and I headed back to ValeSong for a nap. I’d been up late finalizing the layout of
Chains
and piecing together the top layer, and now was blinking moisture back into my tired eyes every second they weren’t scrunched closed for a yawn. I didn’t even look at it hanging on the north wall of the studio as I zombied towards bed.

In early twilight I woke up, stiff and disoriented and still in my jeans. My left leg tingled as I straightened it, so I staggered to a hot shower. A bit clearer, I plopped myself, towel-draped, on the studio floor.

Outside was dim and the my lights were off, which was just how I needed to view
Chains
. The detail faded to dark and pale patches with a hint of hue, and the beads I’d stitched for hours glinted across the cloth. Viewed as a starscape, the predominate feature were the strands of silver I’d stitched into Gran’s hair, echoes of the same thread dancing in and out of the chains. The black beads in the Irish Sea were ominously broken by the spirits of Gran’s siblings rising from it. The patches from the farm, which were light enough to largely conceal the shining elements, surprised the viewer with the hints of a snail trail up the pear trees and a couple of beetles in the chicken yard.

I used stickers to mark a few places to add beading, then went to get dressed. I hoped to finish the piece by the next day; I had two other projects lined up and had already spent a week and a half of my eight retreat weeks on the first one.

I was late for dinner—not a great loss, since Brandon’s signature dish was turning out to be fried chicken with a side of mac ‘n cheese for the vegetarians. Margie made an unexpected appearance over coffee and a tin of cookies. After raising a suspicious eye at the preservatives in the butter wafers, she sat between Wren and I. The sandalwood musk was an unexpected touch; I wasn’t expecting her to be so formal.

She gingerly set down the coffee mug Brandon had jumped to fill for her when she came in, and reached for the sugar bowl. “Thank you. I hope I’m not interrupting anything?” As she looked at each of us in turn, I noted the way Wren brushed her hair back, Caleb sat up straighter, and Angelica took her elbows off the table to link her fingers across her dessert plate. By the time Margie’s gaze turned to me, I had wiped the smile off my face and crossed my legs at the ankles.

“Well, I just wanted to bring up a few things at this juncture, and give us all a chance to discuss them. First is a general note. There have been a number of occasions on which I have used the laundry facilities only to discover a large build-up of lint in the dryer trap. Now, as we know,” she paused to stir her coffee, “this not only wastes energy, but it adds considerable time to the drying cycle. I’ve posted a notice on the dryer lid, but I wanted to bring it up in person to reinforce the point. I should hope time, for each of you, can be more valuably spent pursuing your art.”

“I’ve always found white noise like the dryer makes helps me think,” Theo said. “I mean, not that I won’t be careful about lint. Just so you know I’m not, I mean we’re all not, just sitting waiting for our stuff to dry and not working.”

Angelica smiled at him. “That’s true. About Theo, anyway. I’ve seen him working in one of those sketch pads while he was doing laundry.”

“Yes. Well. Despite what you and Theo have experienced in the laundry room,” I stifled the laugh until Lizzy caught my eye, “or elsewhere for that matter, thank you Lizzy and Ashlyn, may I continue?” We managed to stop, but not before Wren had let out a squeak. “Thank you. Despite Theo’s white noise theory, the founders did not intend this to be a place in which you spend more time on domestic chores than creativity. Therefore, please help to keep our operating costs down and our lint traps clean.”

The seven of us nodded dutifully. I couldn’t even look at Lizzy, and was unbelievably glad Margie had Wren and I separated. If she was as canny as she was strict, she’d planned it.

“Now, the other thing concerning me is the social interactions I have observed. There has never, in the short history of FireWind, been such factionalism and rejection of the group’s fellow artists. Personally, I don’t understand it. You were chosen from a large pool of applicants, based not only on the artistic merit of your projects, but also on the perceived ability for the eight of you to exchange insight into each other’s work and the very meaning of art.” Again, she looked sternly around the table and we fiddled with our napkins and chair placements. “What I see with you eight—no, let me correct myself—with the seven of you who are here, is an unprecedented level of separatism. The very fact one of you does not feel comfortable enough to sit with the rest of you at meals is an indication.”

I was going to fall out of my chair if she used a contraction. My high school English teachers never spoke with such careful syntax.

“It seems to me you have driven one of your member away, been prone to pairing off and forming other small, exclusive groups, and shown a remarkable lack of interest in each other’s visions. Other groups by this stage in their retreats have staged small shows of works-in-progress, held all night long sessions to discuss the history of art and how it applies to their ideas, and organized field trips to galleries in Austin and San Marcos. I have not seen the eight of you together since the night of orientation, once Ashlyn arrived.”

Of course she looked archly at me. Of course my face burned.

“Why is it bad if a few of us want to do things together and others don’t?” Caleb asked.

“Right, I don’t understand this. Do you want us to stay in our studios and create art, or go gallivanting off on a bus together?” Lizzy added. “And Rafael hasn’t spoken three words to any of us, so it’s not as if we offended him. He’s welcome anytime.”

Wren mumbled, “He was especially welcome last week when I was cooking and cleaning on my own.”

“That’s another thing!” Lizzy leaned forward and flung an arm towards Wren. “No one heard you telling Rafael about the spirit of togetherness when poor Wren was left without a food partner. The rest of us get on fine, but we wouldn’t exactly go arranging slide shows together without inviting him and he’s never around to make us feel as if he cares one way or the opposite about our work, now is he?”

Margie’s coffee whirlpooled for a moment as she set down her spoon. “I am not under the impression you are seven souls eagerly awaiting an eighth to make your union complete. I grant Rafael keeps odd hours, and I am aware of the bind in which he left Lauren, but my point about your unusually anti-social behavior still holds.  The founders and I cannot force friendship upon you, but we can make you aware of the need for greater and more productive interaction and strive for it. I am going to speak to Rafael tonight, and want you all to know I am available to answer your individual or group concerns whenever you see fit to bring them to me.” Pushing back her chair in some magic way that didn’t make the leg scrape against the wooden floor, she stood. “Does anyone have any other questions for me at the moment?”

We shook our collective heads.

“Very well, then. Good-night.”

It took a good two minutes of listening to her take the lake path towards Rafael’s before anyone spoke.

“Well, I want to know who’s been leaving lint in the dryer,” Lizzy said. “My jeans took at least an hour to dry the other day.”

“I vote we have an exhibition in the laundry room,” Angelica added to the laughter, “We can preview each other’s work and figure out who the culprit is at the same time.”

“Oh, I know who it is,” I said.

“Who?” Theo and Angelica asked together.

“Who else? Our recluse. He spends his days wandering the abundant lint-forests of central Texas, and stays up all night eating our left-overs and fluffing things.”

Caleb reached across and took my hand, kissed the big knuckle. “She’s hilarious,” he told Wren next to him. “Aren’t we lucky?” He squeezed my fingers and let them go.

“I wouldn’t mind an exhibition of sorts, actually,” Lizzy said, standing to clear the coffee mugs. “If that’s not falling too much for the party line. I’d be interested in what yous all have to say about what I’ve just finished.”

“You finished it? You rock. I still have a couple day’s more work on
Chains
.”

“Technically, it’s half done. But before I start on the other half I’d take some good critical reaction.”

“I have some things I could show,” Caleb volunteered. “You do, too, don’t you, Wren?”

She nodded.

“I’m almost to that point myself,” Brandon said.

“Theo’s done wonders.” Angelica put in.

“Thanks.” He gave her an absorbed smile. “Your stuff, too. Don’t be modest.”

“Right. So, we’re almost all ready.  How about this? We do a door-to-door thing, each day, say after lunch? We visit one person’s studio and talk about their work. We can start with Angelica’s, then mine, Wren, and so on. Would that give you enough time?” Lizzy asked me. I nodded.

“Brandon?”

“I could swing it. That’s a week for me.”

“Eight days,” she corrected him. “Saturday Ash and I will be unavailable.”

“Do we invite our silent member?” I asked. Quite admirable, the way the woman who earlier implored me to spend a day saving her from direct contact with her parents had become the ringleader and swept the issue of their arrival aside as if it were no more inconvenient than an annual check-up.

“Does no harm to ask him. He doesn’t have to come, doesn’t have to say anything, doesn’t have to let us into his studio.”

“Okay, but please don’t ask Margie,” Wren said. “I couldn’t take what passes for critique from her.”

“Absolutely. Are we agreed? Angelica, will you be ready on the morrow for an invasion of artists into your world?” Lizzy looked at her as if anything but agreement would be ridiculous.

“After lunch,” she confirmed.

“Great. Brandon, finish this washing up, will you? I’m bushed. Night, all.” And with that, she left.

I don’t know if our first meeting about Angelica was stilted because of her work, or the way Theo wouldn’t let us say anything negative, or because despite our growing ease with each other, we hadn’t yet experienced many group discussions about our art, and didn’t know where each other’s biases lay.

She started us off on a porcelain rose, glitteringly beautiful, with had three over-sized and rather fierce aphids crawling up its interior petals. We all (exception: Rafael, not there) stammered at her expectation we’d be carried away on its loveliness, until Theo said, “I think it’s all about the ephemeral nature of beauty and the fragility of life.”