Chapter 14 Lily
LILY
WHAT DID I DO, WHEN I wasn’t working? My days off were lazy and without purpose.
I couldn’t remember when I had ever had so much free time.
In high school, I’d loved dragging a chair down to the beach and setting it up at the water’s edge so that the waves washed over my feet, but I had done that once so far since I’d been home and it felt like a mistake.
I remembered why I’d avoided visiting my mother the past four years: everywhere I could see my father.
I looked out to the jetty and saw him there, standing barefoot on the cold rocks and casting his line out into the ocean.
He’d taught me how to hold the other end of a drag net, the two of us stepping in time in the shallows.
We picked the flopping minnows from the black netting and plopped them into our bait bucket, and I felt the pulse of the little fish in my hand.
One good thing came out of my boredom: I had taken up drawing again.
I found myself sketching these images from my girlhood—the minnows gasping on the shoreline, bright shocks of seaweed that washed in on the tide.
I liked making the loose scribbles, the meditative act of slowly, through line and shape and shading, distinguishing what something was versus what it was not.
Across the street from our porch, where I was sitting with a pencil and notebook in hand, an older woman backed her long silver Cadillac into the driveway. I’d seen her before, in passing—gathering the morning paper in her giant sunglasses, swaddled in a navy bathrobe—but we hadn’t spoken.
“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” she called. “Could you help me lift this?” I crossed the street, blood rushing to my head from laying still for too long.
“Thank you so much! I just bought all of these plants and someone at the nursery helped me lift the bag of potting soil into the car, but I didn’t even think about what it would be like to lift it out again.
I don’t know why they only sell this stuff in fifty-pound bags. ”
I didn’t want to admit it, but even I had trouble heaving the bag out of the trunk. I used to go to exercise classes almost every morning in the city, but I had fallen out of shape quicker than I wanted to admit. “Where should I put this?”
“Oh, inside the garage, please, dear.”
I dropped the bag and shook my arms to relieve the strain.
“That’s perfect, thanks again. Can I offer you a glass of iced tea? I just brewed it.”
“Oh, I’m okay, thank you.”
“No, really. Come in, I insist. Just one glass.” She put a perfectly manicured hand on my arm. “Now, your mother tells me you are here for a little while? From the city?”
My mother rarely mentioned the neighbors, but I supposed she and this woman might have chatted now and again.
“For now. Just the summer.” Walking through her garage door and into the kitchen, I was struck by the smell of her house. A combination of Windex, cigarettes, and kitty litter. “I’m sorry—I don’t know if we’ve met before. What’s your name again?”
“I’m Mildred. But you can call me Mil. Mildred is such a miserable name. You’re Lily, right? Your mother has told me all about you.”
“Yes.” I blushed. I wondered what my mother had told her. Chances were that any achievements my mother had bragged about were now out of date.
“Now sit there, and I’ll be right over with something to drink. I bet you miss the city. I used to go up there every fall and spring for the fashion shows.”
“You did?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised.
“For a long time I owned a boutique on Pacific Avenue, back in the fifties and sixties. Oh, I carried the best stuff. Furs, beaded handbags from Belgium, Ceil Chapman dresses, the most drop-dead gorgeous shoes. Marilyn Monroe once bought a sweater from me when she was in town. Poor thing didn’t know it was still pretty cold here in May.
” She eyed me up and down, a wry little smile coming into her face.
“I still have a ton of the stuff upstairs, if you ever want to look. My grandkids all live in Washington so they’ll never get to see it.
” I could picture the closets packed with thick velvet dresses.
Beaded cashmere cardigans. Tweed suits in pastel colors.
“Had to sell the store off, though, in the seventies. They were saying things were bad then, that the casinos would turn it all around. And get a load of them these days. Now there’s no one to turn them around.
Anyway, while you’re here, you should come upstairs and have a look at some of these things. Follow me.”
“Oh, really, thank you, but I couldn’t.”
“Oh, come on. You’d make an old lady’s day.
” She got up and left the room, and it seemed I had no choice but to comply.
It made me nervous to watch Mil go up the stairs, though for a woman her age she was pretty quick on her feet.
She opened the door to a room she must have used as a spare bedroom.
It had a green chenille bedspread and a large art deco dresser, the top crammed with old perfume bottles, and I suspected no one had visited in a while. The vanity mirror was furred with dust.
She opened the door to the closet, and I was shocked to see that it was almost as big as the bedroom itself.
She yanked the chain, and a light bulb mounted to the bare wood of a rafter cast a yellow glow over rows of garment bags.
She started to unzip them and clacked through the hangers, pausing every minute or so to wrestle a piece from the bag and hold it to the light.
“Cute, but not right for you, perhaps. Let’s see …
I think there’s another one like it but without the pleats.
” She mostly seemed to want to talk to herself, hold her own council.
I could picture what she had been like as a shop owner.
Authoritative without being bossy. Never afraid to step in with a recommendation, but not too pushy either.
I was scanning the rest of the closet, trying to add up how long it would take her to sort through all of the bags, when I saw that there were frames propped against the wall.
I could only make out their bottom edges—someone had draped white sheets over the tops.
I hesitated, pinched a corner of the sheet between my fingers.
She had been so insistent on showing me upstairs that I figured she wouldn’t mind—just a look.
While Mil unzipped more garment bags, I lifted the fabric and took a small, almost involuntary sip of breath. I had expected some horrible 1970s paint-by-numbers, a velvet painting depicting a Playboy-esque nude, a tacky crewel made from fuzzy, fraying yarn.
I’d found instead a painting of a man with a bandage over his eye.
He was seated, and it took me a moment to realize that he was in a wheelchair, but then I noticed the arms of his chair at the bottom of the frame, the handles jutting out behind him.
His gaze was turned away from the viewer, and his expression gave me the feeling that he hadn’t wanted to be seen, that he felt ashamed, even.
I crouched to look at the brushwork: precise and delicate on the face, while the broad strokes of his shirt gave the impression of haste.
The discrepancy made his expression all the more intense, the evasion in his eyes all the more legible.
Behind me, Mil was saying something about box pleats versus kick pleats.
I lifted the rest of the sheet: another portrait, of a woman, in what looked like an old nurse’s uniform.
Her hair fell in limp curls around her chin, and even though, unlike the man, she stared straight out of the painting, there was something withholding about her, something crimped about her expression.
As though she were pinching herself outside the frame.
Mildred turned, holding out a belted navy dress.
“Oh, you found the pictures, I see. My husband collected them.”
“What are they? Who did them?”
“Someone around here, I think. The ones you’re looking at are portraits of patients from the Thomas England Hospital, but there are others, too.
My husband used to buy them from a friend of his.
I don’t know who the artist is, though. Wonder if they’re still around. Not much left to paint, I guess.”
I didn’t know where to begin with the questions. “Wait. The what hospital?”
“Oh, it’s been torn down for decades. It’s where Resorts is now.
But it was the largest hospital in the country during World War II.
My husband was a vet, so he was most interested in the history of the hospital.
Those were the first ones he bought, and then it just expanded from there.
He kept bringing them home. Didn’t bother me, because I don’t think he paid much, and they made him happy.
You like them? Those hospital pictures are so depressing. ”