by Aimee Bender
All was in reach. If I was willing to drop the framing job, if I was willing to unframe everything else with it, including the regular schedule of my nine-to-five days, then something else—I did not know what—might happen.
* * *
—
During the daytime, while I considered all these possibilities, I walked to my job, which was located twelve blocks away in a strip mall on Victory, sharing space with a bagel shop, a taqueria, and a box/mailing store that I thought was wildly overpriced. I had been working at the framing store for almost a year, and there, I assisted customers with all their framing needs, on this day writing up the measurements and notes for, in part, the mounting of a desertscape, a family collage of photographs, and a vintage movie noir poster of a woman in vinyl boots holding a whip. A woman in a cargo vest brought in a purple watercolor squiggle her three-year-old had made that she said, laughing, she wanted forever. An expressionless man presented to me the cardstock Italian food menu we all got on our doorknobs every day and insisted he wanted it framed, soon, please, in oak. Was it his restaurant? I asked, writing down the notes. No, he said, unoffering. I brought the stacks of order forms to Edwin, who did all the framing work in the back, and then returned to my counter. The day was feeling long, longer than usual. The summer sun filled the windows and turned them white with light, and the radio playlist circled through the same batch of songs, soggy with pep, and my boss came and went with her clicky open-backed heels, waggling fingers at me as I sat on my stool.
During the slowest hours, I scrolled around on my phone underneath the ledge, but I was finding myself newly uninterested in replying to the different messages and few invitations coming my way from people I did not really know very well. A friend from college invited me to a beach gathering, and I told her thank you but I was going out of town for a little while, and when she said where? how fun! I just said Portland, which was not true, and left it at that. In a way, it was true, in another way, in another sort of travel modality, as I’d been thinking of my mother all week as she tried out this new medication, me imagining her in her room, or at the piano, or sitting in one of those lime green silk chairs, staring out the window at the feathery ferns of the city. I organized the rows of frame corners yet again. I ate my lunch at the worktable in the back room. This new medication, according to my aunt, had done well in its most recent trials, and had minimal side effects compared to some of the others, so as I finished my sandwich and chewed up my apple slices, I wondered about how she might be when we spoke to her on the phone on Sunday after our meal, and I also thought about the nature of politeness, as I’d just experienced with the beach party gathering exchange, and how you had to tell a person just enough information to get them to stop asking. What a delicate balance it all was. I was feeling relieved, bundling up my paper bag and tossing it into the trash, washing my hands in the sink, clearing apple peel from my teeth, because the Portland statement about the beach party gathering had been the right calibration. The friend had sent me a smiley face emoji, and with that, the encounter was done, nothing dangling.
That same afternoon, when I was back at my counter, eyes heavy with after-lunch sleepiness and boredom, daring myself not to look at the clock, a woman came into the store to the tinkling of the entrance bell and walked right up to my desk. She was wearing large red hoops in her ears and was carrying a crumpled paper bag that looked a lot like the lunch bag I’d just thrown into the trash in the back room. She shook it out, and a beetle tumbled onto the black cloth display square at the front of the counter. It was a beautiful sharkskin green scarab June beetle, small, with gleaming wings, and a geometric body. She told me she had found it, dead, on her travels to Spain, just lying on the sidewalk like an abandoned jewel. It had been in this bag in her to-do pile for years, and she couldn’t believe she was actually here getting around to it. “Stunning, isn’t it?” she said, as I lifted it with silver tongs and we looked at it together on a square of white muslin. The memory I had of my beetle, the stag beetle I had first seen illustrated on a test, and then held in my palms in my sleeper car, and which I had dropped, years later, onto a bus, rose with a flash of intensity, though this particular memory did not emerge in any kind of full form—it came to me in parts, in fragments and pieces, tugging at the corners of my thinking like a half-captured dream. “Wood?” asked the woman, peering at the rows of decorative right angles chevroning the walls, “Or maybe silver?” I pulled down a thin gilded frame, which contrasted so well with the shimmering green, and we matched it to the corners until we found the best width, and the woman smiled happily as I added it to the work pile. “I will cherish it,” she said warmly. She thanked me twice and went to pay, but it all still felt like such a show to me; one of the reasons I didn’t like my framing job was because at the yard sales I came across so many of these framed items dusty on tables, piled in stacks, long forgotten. It was hard to imagine this bug doing anything but disappearing into its wall. My shift was up, and I waved goodbye to my boss over at her side desk, talking on her phone, and went to get my backpack from the back room, which now smelled strongly of peanut butter. Plus, I thought, shouldering the backpack, it was just unnerving to think of this bug soon under glass, when it had once been crawling on the ground doing its bug life in Barcelona. As I turned the corner and began to walk home down Victory, a necklace of red and white tract housing looping through the soft curves of the Verdugo hills, a squirrel darting across the sidewalk dragging a half-eaten fig, it did strike me how opposite it was from the dead butterfly that had emerged from the lampshade at the babysitter’s apartment, or the dead beetle that had exited the paper on the train, or the dried roses, so many years later, that had dropped from the curtains at Deena’s. Three visitations. Three events. I passed the homeless man with his painting display of still lifes, and the dancing person wearing a giant arrow suit, pointing to the television and video game console store across the street. I had not spent much time thinking about these episodes since that terrible visit to my mother’s facility ten years back, when I had sent her over the back of a chair, but as I pressed the button for the crosswalk, I thought, for a moment, for the length of the red flashing hand, that it might be worth my own time, through some other way, to consider them again.
The light changed, and I moved myself between the yellow lines, past the row of humming car grilles, past the pool supply store and foam mart, thinking about the shop, and how I might improve my speed of delivery, and admiring in my mind the new pale green ceramic sugar jar and creamer I’d found that weekend at a yard sale in Sherman Oaks, and what sort of background might best showcase their most delicate porcelain beauty.
10
“Come,” said my uncle. “Come sit on the steps and wait with me. We have a little time,” looking at his watch, “before she can come out and get you. Do you want a mint? Have you ever been to her apartment? I’ve always preferred the train myself, to tell you the truth. I took it to New York City from Baltimore all the time. There’ll be a dining car, I’m sure. Big windows. Ocean view.”
He picked up a stick and drew a line in the dirt at the side of the steps. “You’re here now…” he said, pointing at a pebble nestled in the grass, and then dragged the stick down the dirt at a rough angle that slightly resembled the coasts of Oregon and California until it rested at the foot of the steps, “…to here.” He picked up another pebble and placed it at the end of the stick. We looked at the pathway together, from one pebble to another.
Then he hopped the stick eastward and poked a gray gum blob on the walkway. “And, Vegas!” he said, laughing, before he pulled out his phone to begin making calls.
11
The tent itself came into being due to some comments initially from Vicky. On Sunday, a few days after the sighting of the scarab beetle at the framing store, I took the bus down Magnolia as I usually did to my aunt and uncle’s home for our weekly dinner together. This had been a standing date on t
he calendar since I’d moved out of their house for college and beyond, and always included that call to my mother after the meal to check in. Her sentence wandering during the last week’s phone call had led to my aunt paging the facility psychiatrist, which was the usual routine; it was always my aunt who took on this task. Their parents had died years before, but even when alive, they had not ever taken charge of their eldest daughter’s care with my aunt’s level of detail and rigor. She had a small coral pink notebook on her desk with lists of medication names and amounts, and a series of files marked E on her computer. Doctor numbers on her phone. New doctors listed after the old doctors left. Printed articles about new treatments on tables and countertops, with bolded, underlined sentences to ask about on her next call.
She’d been on hold at Hawthorne House for a while last week, so I’d gone home while she was still waiting on the phone, and Vicky had reported to me that when she had finally completed the call, the medication had been changed, and my aunt retreated to the sofa in the living room with a glass of wine that remained undrunk, just staring at the off TV, breathing, unmoving, as we’d seen her do after similar interventions so many times before. The sense I always had of her in those times was of a person allowing a stress to physically pass through her. We knew not to talk to her. The wine was a prop that made it all look more presentable. Uncle Stan, also according to Vicky, had come home late from his job on the crew of the second sequel of the action film series that had been financially stabilizing for years but that was currently in production and taking up a lot of his extra time, and when he saw my aunt there, he quietly undid the dishwasher, and then went upstairs to talk to Vicky about a pool party that had been a source of familial war all week long.
That afternoon, I entered the house, and after I greeted my aunt and hugged and thanked her, giving her the carton of blueberries she’d requested, while she chopped up zucchini and onions to the sounds of news radio and waved me and my offer to help away, I went up the stairs to Vicky’s bedroom, past the Vermont lamb/goat drawings, and the small framed sketches of jumping figures that my mother had drawn many years ago in an art therapy class in which the teacher had praised her sense of joy. Someone—most likely my aunt—had recently vacuumed, and on the stairs and at the landing, slanted sections of carpet showed areas of darkening purple, then lighter, then darker, in parallelograms of carpet fiber. Somewhere across the house, a vacuum bag rested beneath a plastic handle, puffed with the tiny bits of their lives, fingernails, dust, pretzel crumbs, hair.
Vicky, at that point, was soon to start twelfth grade. Already she was busy preparing for the school fall play, as lead lighting designer, and also making a list of schools to apply to, all of which had strong theater departments, though she had explained to me that she was not sure if she would rather do lighting design, or act, or write plays, or possibly stage-manage, or maybe direct. Any of the above, she’d told me. All of the above. The college application process was already stressful, and earlier in the week, she had sent me the three latest possibilities for her essay—one about her love of theater, another about her brief and frustrating interlude with soccer, and the third, her favorite, the one that her English teacher had liked best. I liked it too. It was a good essay. It was about her sister, who was really her cousin, who joined the family at the age of eight due to a spike in her mother’s mental illness, and how she had made the family more interesting, and provided Vicky with true inspiration in her life.
“Come in!” Vicky called when she heard my footsteps on the stairs.
For a moment, I hovered at the landing. After I’d moved out, my bedroom, next to hers, had swiftly reverted to its role as half-office/exercise space, and I took a step closer and peeked inside. The bed was still in there, covered now with piles of books and clothing, and the printer began whirring from its new spot on the desk where I’d never done any of my homework, preferring always to work in Vicky’s room instead. The old painted rainbow/cloud on the wall was now covered by the return of the rolled yoga mats and a secondhand standing bicycle I’d bought for my aunt a few years back at a sale in Van Nuys which she seemed to pedal happily on the rare rainy days.
I found Vicky cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open. “Printing a new copy for you right now,” she said, glancing up. “I just looked at your site. It looks really good. Are those new bracelets?”
She darted up to grab the pages. I went to her computer to scroll through the site, to see how it looked on her screen, and when she came back told her how I’d found the bracelets dust-encrusted, in a jangle of jewelry in a pile just down the block at a surprise sale, not even really planning to look. They’d been a dollar apiece, and I was selling them, clean and sparkly, for twenty each now. One already had been bought by a woman in the Florida Keys.
Vicky listened carefully, with her gold-colored eyes, as she usually did. A ponytail sprouted from the top of her head.
“Two thousand percent markup,” she said. “Not bad. Is it true you’re going to quit your job?”
“I think so. I think I’m making enough.”
“Amazing,” she said. I had already settled into my usual spot at the end of her bed, and she sat down next to me, hitting her foot against mine. “You’d be your own boss,” she said.
“Exactly. Aunt Minn thinks it might be a bit rash—”
“She thinks everything is rash. You should totally do it.”
We sat facing her door, with the edges of all her old door stickers visible, just the white sticker back left, pictures gone. It was like she was already leaving, had already left. In a year, I’d be showing up to Sunday dinners with my aunt and uncle and sitting across the table from them, alone.
“Essay?” I said.
Vicky handed over the printed pages and pulled up the file on her computer.
“Knock yourself out,” she said, tossing over a pen.
We sat side by side, working. I read quietly and circled some words, and she tapped around on her laptop. When I was ready, we went through the essay twice together, her reading parts aloud, us reordering a paragraph together and strengthening some of the word choices. At a natural pause, she opened a spreadsheet to show me where she was planning to apply; she’d made a careful list, with each college and its requirements and deadlines and the things she liked best about what she’d read or seen. These were schools located all around the country, none in Los Angeles, as I’d suspected: New York, New Haven, San Diego, Berkeley, Austin, Michigan, more. She highlighted one of the lines and quickly typed in some information she’d learned about financial aid. Below us, the salty smell of baking cheese drifted up from downstairs.
“Do you remember the story of the butterfly?” I asked, watching her letters fill the open slots.
“Of course,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week.”
“Which part?”
“All the parts. And some other parts.”
“Anything new?”
“It’s just been bubbling up,” I said. “The beetle too. I’m not sure why.”
Her eyes blinked at me, the way they did sometimes, friendly but also tunneling in, ready to bulldoze me with devotion, and to my relief, Aunt Minn called us down to set the table. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Vicky said, in a low voice, as we tripped down the stairs. “It’s been extra rough with her with Dad out so much and this party coming up. All week long. I think it’s getting worse.” “It?” “She. I don’t know. You know what I mean.” She went to gather forks and spoons from the silverware drawer, while I folded paper towels into napkins. Aunt Minn, lips pursed as if already trying to hold words inside herself, brought in the zucchini casserole between hands padded by oven mitts, and after I lit the tall candle in its silver boat, the three of us sat down to dinner. Uncle Stan was working overtime for at least two more weeks.
Aunt Minn and Vicky spoke in clipped t
ones, pass the zucchini, please, pass the rice, please, thank you, the hostility peppered with courtesy like balloons tied to lead weights, and as we ate, to offer some relief, I told a few stories about the yard sales I’d recently visited, including the man who’d tried to sell all his old mix tapes for two dollars apiece, and the woman in Alhambra who had probably a hundred different tangled extension and USB cords spilling from a gigantic box. They both listened closely. It seemed to be helping ease the tension at the table, and my aunt smiled with warmth in her eyes, eating slowly, which was a good sign because sometimes when worried she forgot to eat at all, so I kept going and started talking next about the babysitter’s porcelain soap dish, and how I’d just had a thought the other day about how it had been shaped like a little dinghy, and how lovely it had been, with its graceful bar of lavender soap inside. “She had such a beautiful apartment,” I said. “It was like a fairyland to me.” “Did you ever visit her, after you moved?” Vicky asked, and I said no, though she’d sent me a few cards here and there. “Sometimes a birthday card,” I said. “I think.” The two of them kept their eyes pinned on me. Vicky spoke about lavender, and why it was her favorite smell, and my aunt joined in and said she also very much liked lavender, and then Vicky said she thought maybe she preferred rosemary, and I laughed a little at both of them, and then Vicky said, circling a long string of cheese around her fork, that it was true that whenever I talked about my Portland memories, they did have this sticky, three-dimensional quality to her, like they could be washed off, or picked at.