by Lila Savage
“It’s okay,” he said, still smiling that strange smile. “The memorial will be on Tuesday in Denver. I’m going to drive, and I’m trying to decide if it’s crazy to try to bring Jill. We’ve taken road trips in the relatively recent past, and she’s fine in the truck for long periods of time. But what happens when she needs to go into a ladies’ room without me?”
Ella knew he couldn’t send Jill in alone. She tried to picture him bringing her into the men’s room at a truck stop or a rural McDonald’s and there was something profoundly humiliating and wrong about the image, far worse than a woman bringing a disabled husband or son into the ladies’ room. It made her feel protective of both of them. She wanted to shield them bodily from the curious glances of imaginary cowboys at urinals. She wanted to take Jill to the ladies’ room herself but knew it would be impossible.
Ella had heard of Bryn’s mother, of course, that she had moved into a nursing home near where Bryn’s sister had ended up, in Denver, and that she had been in her nineties, and that her health had been poor. She knew her name was Clara. She did not know if Bryn loved her or missed her. She did not know if Jill had gotten on well with her mother-in-law, or if Clara had been a comfort after the accident, if she had been capable of offering meaningful support in her eighties, or at any time in her life, for that matter, but then, Ella had never asked.
When Ella did ask Bryn questions, they were about the work he’d done before he retired or about his childhood. She rarely asked about Jill, and when she did, she again felt like a daughter whose mother had died before she was old enough to know her, as if she was stepping into this complicated mourning that was more absence than loss, or, rather, loss experienced as Bryn’s, as opposed to her own. When he answered her gentle questions, she would respond shyly, as though invited into a tender place, even though their language was unemotional and Bryn’s tone suggested that his grieving lay far in the past. Ella knew it wasn’t so. His grief was there, in his tense jaw, in the cords of his weathered throat, in the knuckles of his rough hands, in the corners of his mouth and the furrow of his brow, in his laugh. The strength it must have taken to contain that suffering, so that only the edges showed, so that a stranger’s glance wouldn’t exactly read them but might snag on something ambiguously raw in his bearing or his voice, it amazed Ella. It also put her in the peculiar position of being able to let the whisper of it fall into the background when she didn’t have the energy for empathy.
Later, at home, Ella felt pleased that she hadn’t overstepped her role, hadn’t tried to draw him out, make him talk to her about things that weren’t any of her business. Why would he want to tell her? Who was she to him? Just a girl who came over so he could leave to buy groceries. She was pleased she didn’t have to be embarrassed now, didn’t have to cringe in blushing regret, remembering how he had flinched away from her attempts at comfort. Except she wasn’t glad, not really. Relieved, but not glad, because maybe this kind of regret was worse, not regret that she had been her usual bumbling self, trying to force things that couldn’t be forced, but regret that she hadn’t tried, hadn’t risked minor awkwardness out of kindness. He could hardly ask her for comfort, even if he were the sort of person who would; it was, presumably, outside of the scope of her job description. She should have hugged him, whether he’d wanted her to or not, because that’s what you do when your friend’s mother dies.
If she had, she suspected, he would have been stiff, uncomfortable with her touch. They never touched each other; they never even sat next to each other on the love seat or the sofa. This seemed almost chivalrous on Bryn’s part, like he was always aware, in a generational sense as much as anything, that they were a man and a woman, and he didn’t want to make Ella uncomfortable. Even when they were both standing in the den, the space seemed too small, Ella would feel eager to tuck herself out of the way, into a chair or a corner. Bryn was tall, it was true, but it was more than the scale of him. His presence took up space, and he seemed to require a buffer zone, although not with Jill, he was affectionate with her in an easy, friendly way, scratching her back as you might that of a puppy, holding her hand, kissing the top of her head.
Ella also felt disinclined to touch Bryn. It would be like being thirteen and hugging her friend’s dad, it would maybe give her a weird feeling, the unavoidable contact of her breasts with his body, him tense with the fear of being misread as lewd. This was actually how Ella thought of Bryn, sort of, like a friend’s nice dad, one she might chat with when fetching a glass of water from the kitchen; he would ask how school was, how her mom was doing, and if he was driving her home and the friend couldn’t come, the conversation would be easy. He would always be perfectly appropriate, and Ella would get that weird feeling only if she didn’t put a bra on right away in the morning after a slumber party. Not that he would look, but there would be a prickly sort of shame in the room with them, if her nipples were poking through her tank top, if her full but adolescently pert breasts moved when she walked past him. They were both infinitely happier if they weren’t forced to recognize her nubility, and the specter of maybe not his susceptibility but that of older men in general. Ella tried never to let that specter into the room with them, so perhaps that was why the den felt too small, from a mutual fear that proximity might be misread as intent. Misread being the key word, for it felt improbable that Bryn would actually be attracted to her, since Ella imagined his type to be more mature, certainly, but also fit and outdoorsy. It was not improbable because Bryn’s virility didn’t seem in any way compromised by age and disappointment. That would have felt far safer. His masculinity was as much a part of his presence as the quiet hum of his sadness; Ella could hear, or maybe feel, the twin currents, even when her back was turned to him, both tugging at her, softly, disconcertingly.
· 15 ·
After a year of creative spurts and lulls, Ella had finally finished a painting. She knew it was done because she couldn’t think of anything else to do to it. She had worked from a photograph she had taken several years earlier of her grandfather and a friend, small figures walking away from the observer into a gray winter afternoon. Her grandfather was by that time already well into the shuffling of Alzheimer’s, and as crude as Ella’s painted figures were, she believed you could see the affliction in the awkward stoop of his posture, his coat too large and his hat obscuring his face and head from the back, so that he contrasted with his friend, who stepped tall and graceful beside him, white-haired, his indistinct face turned toward the smaller figure.
“It’s done,” she called to Alix, and she listened for the sounds of Alix putting clean dishes away to stop. Alix, a blue checked dish towel still in her hand, walked over to the sunny corner of the bedroom where Ella’s easel faced the window. Alix looked at the painting, and Ella looked at Alix looking at the painting. “I love it!” Alix exclaimed, and Ella exhaled a bit. Alix would compliment almost anything anyone wore to make friendly conversation, she would compliment mediocre cooking and forgettable decor, but she never lavished praise on art she disliked. Art mattered too much to her for pretense, and her feelings about what made art good were too intrinsic to her being to allow her to misdirect people. It would violate her integrity, although she wasn’t likely to articulate this in such a way. It was simply a kind of sacrilege for her to praise work that she found false or pretentious or lazy.
“It isn’t very skillful,” Ella said. “I’m not very good at figurative rendering. You can tell from the figures that I don’t draw that well.”
“I think the naïveté is core to the poignancy and sincerity of the work,” Alix replied. “There’s a sweetness that isn’t cloying or manipulative. There’s love for your grandpa in the lines of his form, there’s love of birches and pines and snow in the lines and curves of the landscape he moves through. It’s wonderful.”
They stood quietly and looked at it together for a long moment.
“You really need to paint more,”
Alix said, and they both knew what she meant: it seemed like Ella might be able to do it well, but they would never find out if she didn’t put in the time. A frequently neglected painting every one to three years was the path of a hobbyist, with hobbyish results. Ella was still satisfied with the painting, though, because while it fell short of her artistic vision, it had successfully translated her emotional vision into something tangible.
This seemed especially significant because virtually everything Ella owned was secondhand, had originally been chosen by somebody else. It was never the pitcher or afghan she would have chosen out of all pitchers or afghans; they were merely quirky gifts the thrift gods had left for Ella to find. They worked for her because they were lovely, they were well made, they were carefully combined, they had taken many hours of searching, they had cost very little money, but Ella had never set out with a specific vision of what her ideal afghan would be; likely, at the time, she wasn’t even searching for an afghan—she had just walked into Goodwill looking at every item for something beautiful.
That sort of aesthetic was almost the opposite of custom-made, while her painting was the definition of custom-made, it was made up of the images and the colors and the composition chosen by her out of infinite options, hindered only by lack of skill and the limits of her imagination.
* * *
—
Bryn and Jill were back from the funeral, and Bryn had said little about it. Ella was quietly concerned about him and had been pleased when he’d said that he would frame her painting for her, she had asked if they could do it in barter for her hours, and he had agreed readily enough. She had thought about this for a little bit, and then said she would, of course, pay for the supplies, and also that it shouldn’t be an even exchange, because his work was so much more skilled and taxing than what she did with Jill. “It should be an even exchange” was all he said, and that was that.
When Alix drove her to work with the painting, it sat in the back with the image turned toward the seat because Ella imagined it was safer that way, although from what she couldn’t say. She removed it from the car and carried it across the street with the image also turned toward her body, and when Bryn opened the door to let her in she hesitated briefly on the threshold. “Well, here it is!” she said, and, recognizing it was unavoidable, she flipped the canvas to reveal her work. Bryn’s gaze didn’t linger long on the painting, but Ella scrutinized his expression nonetheless. There wasn’t any discernible trace of softening or smiling in his dark eyes, there was nothing in the hold of his mouth or lines of his forehead to suggest appraisal or contemplation. There wasn’t even a polite muster of moderate enthusiasm, a searching for something, anything to admire, as one might for the enthusiastic but meaningless scribbling of a small child. Finally he commented on how big the canvas was.
This didn’t bother Ella much, not just because she knew the painting wasn’t great but also because not much in his house was to her taste. She liked the furniture he had made because he had made it, because it was beautiful wood pieced together with tremendous precision, because she liked to picture him in happier times, absorbed in the task of creating, but most of it had a Zen quality that didn’t speak to her. The one piece she loved was damaged: a pretty credenza missing a chunk of one exquisitely crafted sliding door. She grieved a little for that missing bit of wood each time it snagged her eye.
Ella had thought Bryn would buy some simple pine boards, cut them into thin strips, stain and attach. Done. Instead, he told her he’d dug through some treasure trove of wood scraps, she didn’t know where—were they from his own old woodshop?—and found just the right length of birch. It looked like valuable wood, but Bryn wouldn’t put a price on it, wouldn’t let her pay for it. He had to take it in his truck somewhere with commercial-grade machinery to split and cut it and miter the corners, which he somehow managed to accomplish even though, as he had gravely informed her, the canvas wasn’t properly squared. (She had apologized shamefacedly for her inexpert stretching.) Each step was explained to Ella over the course of several shifts, until the day she came and found Bryn set up in the yard oiling the gorgeous, naked wood in a patch of sun. Nick was there that day doing laundry again, and he and Ella stood and watched his dad work through the picture window. Bryn had told Ella that it was requiring several applications, but that it was really letting the beauty of the wood show through. She wondered, a little uneasily, if Nick had watched him do this with each coat, repeatedly walking out to the makeshift table, stooping to coax a sheen into the wood with the friction of his hands. It seemed suddenly like far more than she deserved, she felt embarrassed to see it through Nick’s eyes.
Why did Bryn’s dedication to the project discomfit her? She had hoped he would enjoy it, enjoy the chance to make something pleasingly solid. She had tried, again and again over the months, to encourage him to pursue some sort of hobby, to join a support group, consult a grief counselor, get a gym membership, build something, read something, see a movie, go for a hike or a bike ride, anything to get him out of the house and, ideally, out of his head. It was true that he puttered in the garden, but the growing season was short in Minnesota. There was the Community Ed class he had been so enthusiastic about during the interview, although in reality it had taken months for him to work up to even looking at the registration forms. Now he was doing something, and with pleasure, just as she had hoped. So she was the lucky beneficiary of his effort; why should she feel defensive? Perhaps because her painting wasn’t really good enough to warrant such loving craftsmanship.
“Is that my mom and dad?” Nick asked, glancing at the painting where it leaned against the wall. She supposed it could be Bryn and Jill, the tall, white-haired man guiding the shorter, hunched figure; still, it seemed a little presumptuous somehow, as though the hours she spent working there weren’t enough, and her creative work must also be consumed by them. “Oh, no,” she said with a smile, to soften the denial. “It looks like it could be them,” he offered, a friendly observation. Perhaps it was his way of including Jill in this creative collaboration that was more truly about Ella’s private painting, Bryn’s patient labor; a friendship that Jill sat in the center of without actually being able to join in.
When the frame was finished and the painting snugly inserted, the effect was terrific. The frame had the austere beauty of a Shaker chair or bureau, perfectly complete in its simplicity, the natural wood grain gorgeously emphasized through the oiling. It was the ideal aesthetic for the scene it contained, the wintry trees echoed in the coolness of the unvarnished blond wood. Even the depth and thickness of the frame filled Ella with a wonderful sense of inevitability. Only this frame could so utterly belong to this painting, it was custom-fit, not only in its dimensions, which corrected the slight warp of the stretcher, but in the sensitivity of all its particulars. Even if Bryn didn’t care for her painting, he had succeeded in making it entirely more successful.
They looked at it together, Bryn quietly gratified and Ella effusive. Would Bryn like to do more for barter? Ella had only one or two more paintings that were maybe worth framing, though there might be more in the future. No, he would rather not. Ella tried not to sound disappointed in her response—she had only hoped he would want to, she didn’t wish to pressure him. She had hoped this would be a solution for both of them: for her, beautiful frames; for him, something to do and a way to save money during his time away from Jill. She felt, a little sickeningly, that it had been more work than he’d anticipated and less pleasurable than she’d allowed herself to believe. She stopped there, with her guilt and disappointment, reluctant to ask herself why he might have done more than he had the energy for, or why it had seemed to give him pleasure.
Bryn drove her home that night with her painting carefully wrapped and secured. As they made their way through the darkening streets in silence, Jill unhappily squished between them, Ella thought, still chewing her uneasiness, Probably he did all of that wo
rk because he said he would, that’s the kind of man he is. Probably he did such an unnecessarily artful job because that’s the kind of craftsman he is. And then her thoughts slid to Alix, and what she might be making them for dinner.
When Ella carried the painting in, she placed it quietly on the sofa, image facing out, before joining Alix in the steaming kitchen. She thought, I’ll just leave it there until Alix sees it—no need to make the frame into a big deal. But Ella frequently decided not to say anything and infrequently held to the decision.
“Well, Bryn finished the framing,” she said while looking into the empty teak salad bowl that sat on the counter.
“Oh?” Alix said, closing the oven and pushing back her damp bangs.
“It’s on the couch,” Ella said, and followed Alix into the living room.
Alix looked at the frame, her expression unclear.
“It’s nice. Though it’s kind of old-fashioned, the way you think that art has to be framed and hung formally on a wall.” She turned back toward the kitchen, saying, “Will you fix the salad?”
· 16 ·
Jill sat on a chair in the yard surrounded by autumn leaves, slack but not entirely passive. Bryn and Ella stood, combs and scissors in hand, and strategized inexpertly about where, and how, to start cutting. Bryn rested one hand reassuringly on Jill’s shoulder and spritzed her dense bangs with a spray bottle. She recoiled, complaining inarticulately, though offered only minimal resistance. Ella pulled the comb through the ragged mass and snipped timidly as dull clumps of hair tumbled free. These days Jill’s hair always seemed to look like a dirty wig, something one might wear to play the part of a homeless person. These periodic efforts to shape it prevented Jill’s vision from being obscured but did little to help her appearance. The lack of skill applied combined with the constant movement would have rendered their efforts farcical if the results didn’t matter, but somehow, to Ella, they did.