Twenty-Two #2
A sound escapes me, bitter, surprising. I say, “Women like Carol have to make a choice. I’ve made the safer one.
” And then I can’t look at her, stand suddenly and turn to the door, overcome by what I’ve just shared.
How fast and easily it slipped out, how dangerous it feels.
Like I’ve risked everything. “I’m getting a cigarette. Want anything?”
Her voice is calm when she says, “I’d take a cigarette, sure.”
“All right.”
Inside the kitchen, I open my hands flat, press hard on the countertop.
She doesn’t know my last name, doesn’t know a thing about me.
No connection to my sisters, nothing to do with the plant.
She saw the book under my arm. It’s why she talked to me in the first place.
She was glad that Therese and Carol ended up together.
I take cigarettes from the coffee table and go back outside.
She’s still there where I left her, turning to me when I appear in the doorway.
We fall into friendship like people fall into love.
A magnetism to it. We meet after work for drinks, on the weekends for gallery shows and films. Nearly everywhere we go she knows someone and someone knows her, and still, it’s me who she calls to go with her to the opening of an artist she likes, to try out a new bar she’s heard about.
We read Gwendolyn Brooks and Walt Whitman.
We hunt obscure novels at Pickwick’s, criticize the magazines, browse the shops in Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
Plenty of unspoken rules there as to who is welcome in and who isn’t, but by Elise’s side there’s never a question, not even a second glance.
We act as though we own the world and no one challenges us.
One day I see a set of six blush-pink dessert cups in a shop window, frivolous, expensive beyond reason.
“I want them,” I say.
“Get them,” she says. “They’re absolutely darling.”
That night at home, alone, the children still away and Felix on the train, I unwrap the brown paper that protects them and line them up on a shelf. Milk glass and delicate, rippled along the edges. Look at your life, they seem to say. What a strange and wondrous thing it’s becoming.
A few days later, I’m outside in my yard when a honk comes from the street and her voice calls my name. I open the gate to find her wrestling a paint-splattered easel from her car.
“There’s more,” she says. “We’ll need to make a couple trips.” After the easel we go back for long thin pieces of wood and a heaping armful of linen sheets. “I cleaned out my closet. Time to get you painting bigger. I did this with Joan once. Let’s see how much I remember.”
We build a frame, around two by three feet. I use my sewing scissors to cut the linen and we fold one side over the frame, set a staple in the center of the wood.
“Now we’re going to work our way to the corners,” Elise says.
She pulls too hard and a small rip appears near the staple.
“Shit. Okay. It can probably withstand a little tear but not much more. You try.” I pull, but it’s too loose now, puckered when we turn it over.
“God damn it to hell,” she mutters, and I laugh.
We start again with a new piece of linen.
We mess up again, we swear like sailors. And then, finally, it looks right.
“Moment of truth,” she says.
“How can we know?”
“You flick it.”
I do. The linen bounces back with a twang, like a drum. We’ve done it.
And then it’s August and the children come back, leaping from the train into my arms and I can’t get enough of them, keep kissing their faces, make them pancakes in the morning, serve them ice cream in the new pink dessert cups, listen to their stories of New Orleans, imagine them on the streets I used to walk.
Crepe myrtle and humidity and jazz. Hattie doesn’t live with her parents anymore, so Clément and Nathalie have their own rooms at the Laurent house—Clément in Cyril’s old one and Nathalie in Hattie’s, a pain under my ribs picturing them tucked into those beds, waking to Mama Laurent wrapping them in hugs, walking them to the refrigerator saying, “What you want, my babies?” Still hugging them as she says it, like she did for me during the short time that I lived under her roof.
“Incredible,” I say, marveling. “You two have whole lives of your own there.”
Elise comes around less now that they’re back, but we still meet after work, have long late-night phone calls once the kids are sleeping.
She never invites me to her house and I never ask why.
Instead, I stretch the phone cord to the kitchen table and we page through the new art magazines, discussing the industry gossip from our separate homes, breaking down the works and the interviews.
“So. The Kessler article,” she says one November night.
I find the page. “‘Nature, Nakedness, and Nihilism,’” I say. “Quite the subtitle. It was fascinating, though. The Renoir is probably too romantic for your taste but it’s one of my favorites. His use of light.”
“I would have to be dead inside to not love the Renoir.”
“Want to hear something embarrassing?”
“Always.”
“I went to a figure drawing class on the night we first met, and when the model dropped his robe I was shocked. The teacher actually had to tell me to draw the model’s entire body.”
She laughs and laughs and we turn our pages to look at the next painting, Naked Figures in the Open Air. “You never paint people,” Elise says.
“That’s true. I love drawing them.”
“What holds you back?”
“I don’t know.”
I ponder it as time passes, as department store windows fill with green and red and gold and Christmas tree lots pop up on street corners.
Who would I paint, and how would I paint them?
I fill my sketchbook with drawings of the children and Felix and my sisters and Al and Bernard.
At Lionel’s house one day, I sketch him by the coop with his birds, and I can tell that he likes it.
He stands still for me, raises his chin, holds a bird tenderly in his hands.
But at night, alone, it’s Delphine’s face that I see.
I close my eyes and she’s in the garden.
Pink dress, bare feet, berry mouth, fawn eyes.
I go to draw it but the image comes out all wrong.
Proportions off, eyes too far apart. It leaves me tired and sad and I almost give up until I look in the bathroom mirror one morning and decide to paint myself.
I draw my first self-portrait in mid-December.
Keep drawing them. Learn for the first time exactly what I look like.
I go to sleep and wake up contemplating color and light and mood.
My sisters and I take the children shopping and stand in a long line to meet Santa.
We get all of the cousins together in a picture, Baby Sebastian eyeing Old Nick with trepidation, Rudy smirking at the pageantry, Titter and Bobby and Nathalie and Clément grinning ear to ear.
Afterward, they unwrap candy canes. Clément nibbles his like a bunny. Nathalie licks hers sharp.
Felix heads back on the train after Christmas and the children are out of school until the New Year but I finally have a vision for my painting and I don’t want to lose it.
They read children’s novels by the fire, play Go Fish and War and pick-up sticks.
I paint outside but it gets dark early so I move my easel into the living room, throw a drop cloth over the rug and sheets over the sofa.
I’m painting myself as a mother, on my knees in the center of a circular rug with a toy train beside me.
In the background, the light from a window cast on the wall, a hint of the world outside.
Love and isolation. Devotion and restlessness.
Charcoal and cream and pink and yellow. There’s a tightness in my chest as I work—so much to hold in my mind’s eye.
“We’re hungry,” Clément says, appearing in the doorway.
“Open a can of soup,” I say. “I’ll come and heat it.”
A minute later: “Ready.”
I set my brush down, empty the can into a pot, start the flame.
Dish it into two bowls. Nathalie and Clément get their spoons and napkins and take their places at the kitchen table.
I return to my painting but the color on the brush doesn’t make sense anymore, the images on the canvas vague, too hazy to grasp.
I knew where I was going but it’s lost now.
It takes so much time to find my way back.
The next afternoon, it starts to rain. I go through the house shutting windows.
The kids play in puddles outside but soon return, restless, hovering in the living room. “Want to paint with me?”
They do.
The shadows on my canvas need to be flatter, the daylight on the wall warmer. More folds in the dress. But first: Finding a surface for them to work on. Cutting open a record jacket for cardboard. Choosing a brush for each of them. “We need a still life,” Nathalie says.
“Why don’t you two arrange one while I get you set up?”
I sift through my tin of paints, feeling ungenerous, knowing they’ll use too much, fearing that if I give a color away I won’t have it when I need it. I can’t make myself choose. I set aside what I’m using right now and bring them the rest. “You can pick five. Put your heads together and decide.”