by Amina Cain
Every day I did my dreaming, but as usual I forced myself to do it practically, to imagine not that I would be a known writer whom many people read, but that I would publish one book at the end of my life. I knew that even this would make me happy. And I knew how lucky I was; I could have had to work at a glue factory.
ONE NIGHT THAT SEASON I woke suddenly, my stomach nervous. I sat up, and when I looked around, I saw the walls were empty: not a single thing. The windows were enough, I had always thought, but Antoinette had again been right. Now I wanted something warm. I pictured the autumn leaf on my table, its brown veins, my own veins blue, the length of my arm.
I didn’t know where the nervousness might be coming from, so I sat at my table, a blanket around me, and I wrote with some anxiousness in the middle of the night. I tried to go right into it because I thought I might be able to come out on another side.
The people in the painting are huddled together as if for protection, as if freezing cold. Only some of the figures are distinguishable; the rest form a mass, that strange oval. They seem to be looking upon the devil with fear, not exhilaration or worship. The ones with their mouths open appear shocked or perhaps they are screaming. Some of them are wearing bandages on their faces; only their eyes peer out, white points of astonishment. One figure appears peaceful—a young woman who sits on a chair while everyone else is on the ground. She wears a muff on her hands and her face is soft, though her eyes you cannot see.
There I was, a single candle in front of me; nervousness was new. Now I am used to it. I think it must surround me, everyone able to see it, the way I am able to see what surrounds them.
Back in bed, when I couldn’t write anymore, I read aloud from a book to try to settle into a different feeling, a different kind of thought.
It’s my pleasure, I heard myself say in my mind. I consider you my friend.
CHRISTMAS CAME and on Christmas Eve I gave Antoinette her present, which I had wrapped in pretty paper. We had just finished working for the night, our cleaning things put away and arranged neatly in the supply closet.
“But there’s nothing for you,” she said, surprised.
“I don’t want anything.”
“Oh my God,” she cried, when she saw what it was. “Did you steal it?”
“Of course not.”
“How did you afford it, then?” She seemed unsure of what to do, if she should accept it, but she held the blouse up to herself and asked, “How do I look?”
Outside the museum, the streets were full of people. Some of them were lining up for Christmas Eve mass in front of the cathedral, talking loudly, dressed in their church clothes. Others were going in and out of the shops. When I was young, my parents had taken us to a church that was small and drafty; I had always felt I was sitting outside. The colorful wall hangings had scripture on them. Women and men stayed on opposite sides of the room. It’s not that the church was bad, but I wasn’t meant to spend my life there.
Antoinette and I went to a restaurant, warm and bright, and ordered dumplings and borscht. It was the first time we had eaten together in a place like this, and while we waited for our meal, we sat a bit awkwardly together. But a candle was burning at our table, and every other table too, and I focused on it to steady myself.
A cucumber, melons, butter lettuce, an apple. Why is what we have left on a table worthy of being painted? No matter. It waits for our return, for when we will take it up again. Now I will eat once more.
“Are you comfortable?” I asked Antoinette.
“Not completely.”
We smiled at each other.
“I feel more comfortable looking at restaurants than sitting in them,” I said.
“I know what you mean.”
But when we started to eat, something came over me and I relaxed and even became confident. I didn’t care anymore if anyone looked at us; I didn’t care what people might have seen in our faces, or in how we sat in our chairs. I was sure some of them sat in their own chairs quite conceitedly, as if they were meant for restaurants like this.
Antoinette ate her food carefully, in small bites, and this made me want to eat like a pig.
THE NEXT MORNING I awoke well rested, ready to spend the day working at my table. A great deal was written in my notebook and I wanted to think about what it meant. I wanted to go further into what I had written, but I didn’t yet know how to do it. The words sat there so innocently. Other words were still meant to surround them.
I fixed my black tea and oatmeal. When the dishes were washed, I sat down again with my thoughts. I can’t write when things are dirty, when things are scattered around. I need everything to be clear. I need them to be clean.
I can’t say I wrote well, but I put down my words and phrases all the same, well into the afternoon. So different from any Christmas I had spent before. For one thing, I was alone. Without trying to, I saw those Christmases past, chopping carrots for my mother, chopping onions, my face a blank. Sitting around the table, so much larger than this one, so much messier.
The woman in the painting is holding a book in pink-and-gold cloth. France is behind her. Round trees and then mountains are seen through the open window. I want France to be behind me too.
It began to snow. As I watched from my window, I felt it might carry me somewhere different, at least inside my mind. It did, yet I read what I had written and I knew it was stupid. The snow had not changed my writing or anything else.
Maybe I was writing only a commonplace book. Maybe what I thought and said was most suited for the dump.
I didn’t want to clean the same things my whole life. I didn’t want to clean at all. But if that is what I was meant for?
I thought and wrote and by evening I had managed only a single good paragraph. Another person would have written five pages. But I liked that paragraph and that gave me hope.
And maybe more important, I began to feel that I could see my writing—not the words or the paintings—somehow in between. That I had made a new thing.
I CONTINUED LIKE THIS and soon it was the last day of the year. I had to work, but I felt a sense of something else. I wondered what the New Year would bring me.
I mopped and then ate my lunch outside, even though it was windy and the leaves were falling from the trees; now they were dead. It looked as if it might snow again, but it didn’t.
Before I had finished my soup, an older man came and sat near me. He wasn’t eating; he appeared to be doing nothing at all. He looked at me, then looked again. Men looking at women like that are truly horrible. Especially when they are so much older, when they are nearly dead themselves.
After that, the winter dragged itself through its January, its February, its March, with its dirty snow and frozen mud. I felt I was dragging myself through as well. I hated March more than any other month, with its promises of warmth that never came.
My writing was not unlike that. I would write, then read out loud what I had written and realize I was not any closer to a book than I had ever been. I began to hate writing, though I also still loved it.
I thought if I spent time in the country every day I would be able to write. Walk in the morning, write in the afternoon, walk again in the evening, then write again. Late at night, read. Then write again. Sleep.
One day I looked for a while at a small painting and saw something in it. A man and a boy in muted suits doing their engraving work, the background behind them completely dark. We are not meant to see anything beyond this task, their concentration on it. Yet we want to know, it is only a scrap. What is in the darkness?
This was my slogging through. Until spring came.
HERE IN THE COUNTRY I look at children’s books when I go to the library because there are no good novels. There are no good books of art. If I’m honest, I’m comforted by their illustrations; something in them reaches me.
It rains in a drawing, and if the drawing is good, you feel wet. The hard rain falls on the umbrellas moving slowly down the street.
> Maybe I have always needed things to be softened, as things are softened for children. If I were honest about who I am more of the time, I would write more honest things.
When I was younger, I felt everything around me; one summer this was especially true. It sounds simple, but it was because the town where I lived was empty. I can’t say why the emptiness was so nice; maybe because normally so many people were everywhere. When they were gone for the summer, that emptiness made space for me. I was aware of my future, and I could also relate to myself as a child. That was when I was fourteen.
But I take my evening walks here now. I begin just as it is getting dark and then walk into that darkness. It is the best time. The plants are hard to see, but sometimes a leaf or a flower is glowing in a bit of light from the window of a farmhouse. The scent of the flowers is more refreshing then, not heavy with the day, and the day’s sun.
Everything in this house is warm right now: the hand soap, the towel, me. Even the fan blows warm air here in this country summer.
IT’S STRANGE MY HUSBAND NOTICED ME, but he came to the museum to see the paintings of Caravaggio and then of Goya, and the third time I was mopping the floor of the coatroom when he came for his jacket and umbrella. We stood together near the coats for some time, talking, and then he walked me home.
“Aren’t you embarrassed?” I asked, and he said he was never embarrassed by anything.
We were married at the start of summer and hardly anyone attended—a few of his friends, a cousin from Brazil. No one I knew was there. While our vows were being said, I looked at him and wondered, Who are you? I thought I could see something different in him that I had never seen in someone with money, and this made me feel comfortable.
I didn’t tell Antoinette. I didn’t even say goodbye.
I don’t know how it was possible, but I felt natural in the rooms of my husband’s house, and I walked around feeling that they were mine. Even when I saw them from the outside, the tall windows, curtains drawn, the rooms lit beautifully. I liked looking at them, knowing I could go in.
At first my husband wanted to have sex all the time. I liked being naked in our bed. When I had to get dressed to entertain, I was resentful. I wanted to tell our guests that I had just had sex with my husband, but things are more formal than that. I wanted to sit quietly in front of the window as the cat did. I wanted to show my excitement like the dog.
Life went normally, I guess. In the mornings when my husband got up, I got up too, though there was nowhere I had to be going. My husband would kiss me goodbye, then from the window I would watch him leave. I didn’t feel I could go look at paintings; I was much too sheepish for that. I would see Antoinette.
I should have been honest with her. I felt it would be crushing, though maybe it would have given her hope, that I had found a rich husband, that things could change. But how would it have been for her to see me in my dresses, a newly wealthy woman?
I couldn’t go to the market because I wasn’t someone who did her own shopping, though I think I would have liked it, now that I had money to choose what I wanted. I had never had the opportunity to look at a nice loaf of bread, for instance, and say to myself, I will get it. But it appeared now in the house. Everything appeared there.
I wouldn’t have to clean anything, and this was a relief, but I also felt guilty watching another person tidy up after me. I’m sure Solange didn’t enjoy cleaning our toilets, as I also hadn’t enjoyed cleaning toilets, but maybe she was at least happy to have a job, as I had been. My husband was nice enough, and to be honest, I wondered why he hadn’t simply married her. She was beautiful and he was handsome and obviously didn’t mind marrying beneath him. It would have been more convenient than marrying me, but I suppose people do not marry their own maids. And perhaps he had been able to see my ambition, however abstractly, and found it attractive. But when I told him I wanted to be a writer, he tried to persuade me otherwise.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” he said over dinner, some kind of fancy stew. “You’ve been working since you were twelve. Try to enjoy yourself.”
The sound of my fork on my plate was loud. I made it louder. Now I was eating a salad. “I am trying to enjoy myself.”
“Well, then try to relax.”
“I’m afraid I’ll get bored.”
“Then get bored. You deserve it.”
I had never felt I deserved anything, and if I was to begin, I couldn’t start here. Still, I ate my stew. I ate my salad. In a way no one would have predicted, I began to consume my husband, but it would be a long time before either of us understood any of that.
I WROTE, THEN, when my husband wasn’t at home, and sometimes I was able to do so for several hours, but then inevitably someone would arrive, some other young woman, and I would have to force myself to talk to her. “It’s so delightful to have you here,” etc. Unconsciously, I would see Antoinette’s face transposed where the other face was meant to be. Or I would think back to a book I had been reading earlier that morning, and then—“Are you even listening?” The question was inevitable.
“Of course. It’s just that I started to feel a headache all of a sudden, a migraine.”
A migraine. Sometimes I had a sore throat. Or cramps. Then, excused from the visit, I would try to work again in my writing room.
Or I would go to the library to find novels to bring home with me, as I had before, though my husband insisted I buy any book I wanted.
I bought the ones I loved best, on orphans and ghosts and maids and revolutionaries, and I stacked them on top of the desk I was supposed to use to write letters, but that I used instead to write to myself. It still helped to be around those other books, to see the work of writing. I’m sure my husband would have found my book choices strange, but he never looked at them; I could read whatever I wanted.
From the outset, I thought I would like to be friends with Solange, but she kept herself protected from me; at least it felt like a kind of protection. I couldn’t get her to talk in any way other than submissive. I tried speaking with her after breakfast, for instance, but it never went well. She only wanted to discuss the menu, what we would be needing for our meals in the week ahead.
“Do you like it here, Solange?” I asked.
She answered that she liked it very much. This was puzzling.
“Where is your family?” I tried again.
“I’d rather not talk about them, madame.”
“You don’t have to call me that, Solange. You see, I—”
“I should get the washing done now. There is really so much of it.”
She hurried off. You see why I couldn’t be friends with her; she never gave me the chance.
WHEN I COULDN’T WAIT ANY LONGER, I went to the museum. I wanted to see Antoinette and I wanted to look at the paintings; it had been almost six months since I was last there. Again it was Christmas and I walked the route from where I now lived feeling nostalgic for the year before, for that other route. It’s not that I wanted to return to it exactly.
There was the music, there was the light shining out into the snow, there were the paintings and drawings. I had brought my notebook, I had worn my plainest dress, and I walked through the galleries looking for Antoinette. In every room I thought I might find her, but every room was empty.
I began going to the museum regularly and wrote again my descriptions of the things I saw there. I wrote about Seven Works of Mercy and Portrait of a Woman as Saint Agnes, and I still didn’t know what I would do with these descriptions, what their purpose was, but filling the pages of my book was satisfying. I felt I must be filling myself too.
The more often I visited without catching a glimpse of Antoinette, the more I missed her, but I was afraid to make my inquiries, to enter the part of the museum for the people who worked there. I saw other young women scrubbing the walls or mopping, a few I remembered, but whom I had never gotten to know. We didn’t say anything to each other.
I thought back to a night that previ
ous winter, when in our wandering Antoinette and I had discovered a small tavern tucked in next to the lake and dared each other to go in. It had been foggy on the lake that night and so it felt as if one side of us were a void. Be yourself again. Inside, the tavern looked like a country inn, everything in wood, the walls and the floors, and at a long wooden bar sat many men. We wanted to get drunk, but we couldn’t afford to. Sharing a single glass of something cheap, we listened to the music of a band playing in the corner. It too was all men; still, it was good. Someone was playing a fiddle.
“May I have this dance?” Antoinette asked, surprising me.
We danced in that place that was like a country inn, only one other couple dancing with us. I held Antoinette’s shoulder and waist, self-consciously as always, yet some other part of me was relaxed. We kept smiling at each other, laughing. It was almost as if we were in a play, and it’s true that everyone was watching us. Most people will watch two women dancing together.
Now, without asking where Antoinette might be, I would never know how to find her; I didn’t even know where she lived. She might as well be lost in that void. So finally I got up my nerve. I went to my old employer, and he told me coldly that she was gone, that she hadn’t worked hard enough, and so they had had no choice but to let her go. Other girls wanted to work, and so they were.
Antoinette my dreamer. I should have known.
I tried to speak to my old employer even more coldly than he had spoken to me, but he was a tough match. “How unpleasing you are,” I said. “Like a tooth that hasn’t been brushed in years and is growing hair on it.”
My walks around the city were for Antoinette then, with the hope I might see her, looking into shop windows, throwing crumbs for the birds.