by Deb Caletti
“No, I’m sure.” I wasn’t sure. Maybe this wasn’t even the class Elijah took.
“Nathan, he’s a sculptor. Likes to change it up. Elijah, he’s about your age. Parrish High. Incredibly talented.” Now we’re talking. “He comes to lessons with”—yes, yes, yes!—“his sister, Millicent.”
The film version plays in my head. We’re all driving somewhere in a convertible, laughing. Henry’s behind the wheel, and I’m in the seat next to him. Elijah’s in the back, wearing his scarf, which is blowing in the wind, and Millicent—wait. Millicent is dressed like a pilgrim, or maybe someone Amish. A dark dress, a prissy mouth. She’s wearing a bonnet and sensible shoes.
“With a name like Millicent, she should have a bun,” I say.
“Oh no. She’s got blond hair down to here.” Jenny gestures to her shoulders. “She’s beautiful.”
Redo image. Henry is driving, and Millicent is beside him, wearing a body-hugging dress. I’m standing at the side of the road with my thumb out. They pass me by, not even seeing me through their chic sunglasses. I stop the film fast, before I start running after them and waving my arms.
“Oh,” I say.
“Looks aren’t everything,” Jenny says, which, thank you for the life advice, is something I already know. I try to determine if she means something by this, if she’s telling me something about Millicent or anyone else, me even, but she’s unfolding the legs of easels and setting up for her class, and I can’t see her face. She’s old, but she’s strong. She’s flinging those things up and whipping out large canvases from cupboards and hauling chairs.
“You need help?”
“Drag that stool over here? I like to keep the space clear for my own work, but it means hauling everything out each time.” She’s huffing a little. Hopefully, she doesn’t have a heart attack or something. The funny thing is, every now and then, she does something that’s a little familiar. The way she tilts her head when she laughs, for example. It looks just like Dad. Or the way she sets her chin in her hand when she’s thinking. I’ve been so busy hating him that I forgot how much I love him. He hasn’t always been the father who ditched me on some strange island after my mother died, and he’s not just an irresponsible pot smoker who left it to me to take Mom to her appointments because it was too intense for him. He took me for long bike rides when I was a kid and set up a taste test between Ho Ho’s and Ding Dongs. He read me stories using all the voices and made us a blanket fort that took up most of the house, and later, he helped me with my history homework, because he loved that stuff. His-story, he’d said. Or her story. Point is, it’s all great stories. He took me to the bank to open my savings account, although I think Mom made him do that. He taught me how to change a tire.
“Who was Dad’s dad?” I ask. I don’t know why I’ve never stopped to wonder about this before. It’s like this whole side of the family didn’t exist. We never even really talked about any of these people, and it was one of those weird things that become so normal that you forget it’s weird. The question is out of my mouth before I consider whether it’s intrusive or not, but Jenny doesn’t even flinch. She just goes on taking jars and stuff out of cupboards and setting them on the long counter at the back of the studio.
“Maxfield Sedgewick. He left us when your dad was in kindergarten.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s too bad.”
“I don’t know. What if it was a worse too bad if he stayed?”
I’m not sure how to reply, so I keep my mouth shut. “What’s that one?” I nod my head toward a large painting against the far wall. It’s as tall as me and twice as big across.
“What do you think it is?”
Great. Trick question, I’m sure. Abstract art and poetry—they always involve a trick question. Honestly, I don’t get it. I like those very realistic paintings that look like photographs, or novels that are so much like actual life that you feel understood. But poetry—all those wombs and leaves falling and oranges on plates—whatever. Same with modern art. Splotches you’re sure you could do yourself if someone gave you a couple of cans of Benjamin Moore and an afternoon.
I take a guess. “A tree.” I don’t want to be impolite. What I think is that it’s brown and green smears, but I kind of like it anyway.
“It is a tree. And ground. Earth, life, renewal, all that.”
“ ‘The Circle of Liiiife . . .’ ” I sing that Disney song.
She smiles. Does Dad’s head tilt. “Pretty much.”
“That’s no tree.” I point to a thin sheet of canvas rolled out across a small desk at the back of the room. It’s held flat by a glass paperweight and a cup of pens. The image is of two faces, I think, nose to nose. Beautiful faces. A mirror image, anyway.
“That’s Elijah’s.”
It’s interesting and odd. But I don’t have much time to think about it. “I hear a car,” I say.
“They’re here. Do you mind running in and grabbing me a water bottle from the fridge?” she asks. “That bacon made me so thirsty.”
“No problem.”
I want to run back to the house anyway, do an Insecurity Check on my makeup. I’ve barely worn any since Dad and I started out on this trip, but the whole Henry hope-thing made me do it up this morning. Now I’m just nervous to see Elijah again and to meet Millicent. In spite of the fact that I’ve been rudely ignoring all calls from home, I’m actually excited to be with people my own age.
I dash upstairs, brush my teeth again. I run back down. I give the abandoned Vito, who’s lying on his hairy dog bed, a pat on his head. I grab a couple of water bottles from the fridge. I’m on my way out of the kitchen when I see it. A piece of paper. It’s got a phone number on it. Dad’s number. But there’s also a second number written there, under a name. I don’t know what I’d been thinking, because I’d imagined him at some log cabin or something, sleeping and getting high and staring at nature, I don’t know. Having time in the wilderness to think about what it means to lose my mother and where we’d go from here. And so I now must add another member to the inner crew. There’s the manipulator, the teacher’s pet, and, let’s not forget, the utterly deluded big fat fool.
Mary, the note says.
* * *
They are all painting wildflowers that Jenny has hastily shoved into a glass jar. It’s a painting class cliché. I want to elbow someone and crack up, but there’s no one. Mom would get this joke. I’m in this painting class cliché all by myself, and it gets worse, because I’m holding a brush. I’m sitting in front of an easel. I’m sitting in front of an easel with a big smeary splotch on it, made by yours truly. Sometimes you just have those moments when you wonder how in the hell you got where you are.
She looks over my shoulder. “Rule number one,” I tell Jenny. “Colors mixed together equal brown.”
“Just have fun with it,” she says.
“Fun is my middle name,” I say, which isn’t exactly true. I’m showing off a little for Elijah and Millicent, who are sitting next to each other, painting with concentrated expressions. Millicent held her hand out to shake mine when Elijah introduced us, same as he had, and now she is biting the end of her brush. She does have long blond hair and blue eyes and tiny, perfect features, and green shoes with little embroidered flowers, which means she has the money for green shoes with little embroidered flowers. She’s wearing a blue skirt and a red T-shirt, and none of this sounds like it goes together, but it does. I never know how people manage to create those don’t-go-together outfits that actually do go together. When I try it, I look like I’ve been in a Marshalls dressing room during an explosion.
I laugh a little too loudly in a shameless move to get Elijah’s attention. The plan is, they’ll notice what a great time we—me and Henry and them, of course—could all have together. But they don’t even look up. It’s starting to remind me of those horrible paint-your-own-pottery birthday parties you think are going to be fun until everybody suddenly acts like they’re creating the Sistine Ceiling.
“Max told us he didn’t want to go to sleep because it’s boring,” Nathan says. “He obviously doesn’t remember his dreams. Last night, I was in a parade in a mall with Paul McCartney and Snoop Dogg right before a tornado hit.” I like him right off. He has a rumpled-bed look—old Levi’s, T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, shaggy brown hair. He’s slipped off his shoes, so his bare feet are on the canvas drape below him. He’s pals with Margaret, the old lady with the sweet blue eyes and fluffy hair; they drove in together and sit next to each other. Nathan helped her find a place for her purse and gave her a hand taking off her sweater.
“Dreaming is lovely,” says Cora Lee, who is about a million years old. Her voice sounds like fluttering leaves. Her hand is shaking so hard, she has to hold it with the other one to keep it still. Yet I can see from where I sit that her painting is precise, and each purple petal looks like a purple petal. She’s even put a chip in the neck of the jar exactly where one really is.
“My Eugene used to sleep like the devil,” Margaret says. “A freight train could barrel through the room and he wouldn’t stir.”
“That’s how Jim is,” Joe Nevins says. “Even when we were kids.” He’s got a plaid short-sleeve shirt stretched over a round stomach.
Then everyone is silent again. Jenny walks around and murmurs advice. She points her old finger and says, “Good” or “Balance” or “Fullness” or “Notice how . . .” as I sneak glances at Millicent’s manicure, the kind where the nails are white at the tips, same as candy corn. It has a name, but I can’t remember it. My manicure knowledge is on the slim side.
Wait. French.
“French?” Elijah says.
Did I speak out loud? Tell me I didn’t speak out loud. Jenny has placed me next to Elijah, which is so helpful, because that allows him to see the extent of my artistic talent that much better.
I think fast. Thinking fast is not something I’m great at. “The flowers,” I say. I am such an idiot.
“Provençal,” Margaret says. “Giverny.”
“Majolica Jar with Wild Flowers, Van Gogh,” Nathan says. “French, absolutely.”
I want to kiss them both. I think I love these people.
“Purple is the color of the spirits,” Cora Lee whispers.
“Oui,” Jenny says, and winks at me, as if we are sharing a joke. I don’t know if we are sharing a joke, though. I don’t really know her. I don’t paint. I’ve never been interested in painting. I am suddenly filled with the most intense longing for home. Home the way it doesn’t exist anymore. Home where Mom would come home from work with a couple of fat bags of groceries and we’d unload them together. She’d say, I got that yogurt you like. I’d give anything to just hear that.
I stare at my painting as if pondering my next creative move, but I am really counting up how many minutes my mother lived. Sixty minutes in an hour; one thousand, four hundred, forty minutes in a day; and 525,600 in a year. I dip the brush in the paint and do the math on my canvas. Forty-two years, which is 22,075,200 minutes or so. I write the number 22,075,200 again in purple, the color of the spirits. It looks so large, but it isn’t. It’s not nearly large enough.
Jenny claps her hands together. Everyone is coming out of their trances and shuffling things and standing up. Elijah stretches as if he’s just run a mile, but his painting doesn’t look all that different from when he began. There is the snapping of paint-box clasps, and Millicent has her perfect back toward the room as she stands at the sink and cleans up. “If I have to paint another flower, I’ll scream,” she says. Funny, I didn’t see the armed gunman who was forcing her to use that brush, but maybe I missed him.
Elijah holds his canvas carefully between his palms and carries it to the long counter, where he sets it beside the others.
“So weird running into you last night,” I say to him.
“Parrish Island, population three thousand, and a good lot of those don’t live here full-time. You always run into people.”
“Oh,” I say. He’s smashing any image I had of a Meaningful Coincidence. It’s starting to happen again, the vast conversational wasteland. I realize something, though. It’s happening not only because those perfect blue eyes intimidate me, but because he’s not all that friendly. Truthfully, he and Millicent are a pair of icebergs. Still, I can’t forget another set of eyes, ones I’ve been seeing every time I shut my own. I can feel that hand around my wrist right here and now as I stumble for something to say to this boy, who happens to be smiling a billboard smile—large and perfect, but fake. “Your friend Henry seems nice.”
“Henry is weird,” Millicent says without turning around.
“Henry’s not weird,” Elijah says.
“I like weird,” I say.
“Mill, hustle up. I’ve got to be at work in ten.”
I try again. “Where do you work?”
“Hotel Delgado?”
I shrug my shoulders. I’ve been here all of two days.
“He’s a waiter,” Millicent says. She holds her hand in the air as if she is carrying a tray. “Baked potato or fries with that?”
“Fries,” I joke, but they are too involved in their own sibling rivalry to notice.
“At least I have a job, loser,” Elijah says. “I don’t sit around all day reading magazines and slathering on more sunscreen, my hand out to Mommy and Daddy when I need a little cash.”
“Who’s the loser? Summer is for rest and relaxation, not for hot grease and cleaning up gross stuff under high chairs. Stupid brother.” She flicks him with her thumb and forefinger. “Well, see ya,” Millicent says to me.
“See ya,” I say.
“Later, Jenny,” Elijah calls.
So much for hanging out tonight. So much for us all going over to the Hotel Delgado, wherever that is, to share dessert. So much for a chance to see Henry again.
Margaret is struggling to get her sweater back on, the one lone sleeve darting around like a fish on a line. I catch it and help her aim. That old arm has a map of veins on it. Maybe it’s all the turns taken and not taken over a lifetime.
“Thank you, my dear,” she says. She actually says “My dear,” just like you think old people do. “It was a pleasure to meet you.” But then she crooks her finger, and I lean down. “Don’t let it bother you,” she whispers. “Those two think their you-know-what doesn’t stink.”
* * *
I’m on a roll. Jenny will get the wrong idea of me now, because I’m trashing her students, whom I just met. Generally, I’m an open-minded person. A benefit-of-the-doubt-giving person. Death has made me easily fed up.
“Would it kill them to be friendly? Could you get your nose higher in the air? I mean, why does she even take the class if she doesn’t like it?”
“I think she likes it a lot. Terminally bored is just her way of being in the world.”
“Her way of being superior in the world! And what’s with the two of them, anyway? They seem awfully close. Close-close. Hey, I read my mother’s old copy of Flowers in the Attic.”
“It’s nothing personal, Tess,” Jenny says. “You have to remember, hundreds and hundreds of tourists visit during the summer. They go on their whale-watching tours and stay in our B and Bs and then they go home and we all go about our regular lives. You don’t expect to bond.”
“ ‘We,’ ‘they,’ ” I say. My voice sounds too sarcastic, even to me. Bu
t I don’t like her tone either. Or maybe I don’t like that she’s joining them in “we” and leaving me all alone out here.
She holds up a hand. She actually steps away from me. “I’m not your enemy.”
“Could have fooled me.”
Jenny gives me a long stare, the kind Mr. Shattuck used to give the mouthy potheads in Algebra II. We’re still in her studio, and she heads over to her desk and starts shuffling stuff around, as if she’s done with this conversation. She puts on the glasses she wears on a chain around her neck and studies a small stack of glossy photos of what looks like her own art. Well, sure. Of course she’s loyal to these people. This is her life. She’s known me, her own flesh and blood, all of five minutes.
This is not going the way I expected. Jenny is obviously not the fountain of grandmotherly love and understanding I thought she might be. And she is not bowing at the altar of my grief like she’s supposed to either. Her jaw is a granite slab, immoveable and almost defiant. It’s Dad’s look. It’s my own; I hate to admit it. We’re a generally optimistic lot, but we’re fond of our own views, let’s just say. Sure of our own position. “Stubborn” is another word for it.
Well, my mother was too. She and my father could face off like a pair of boulders.
“I’d like to get out of here, if I’m allowed,” I say.
She opens her desk drawer, grabs her keys, and tosses them to me. In the film version, I catch them neatly and stride off, with my hair flowing out behind me and my shoes clip-clipping their displeasure. In real life, she makes a bad throw, and I make a worse catch, and the keys go sliding across the floor and I have to retrieve them from under Cora Lee’s abandoned chair.
“There you go, Rapunzel,” she says. “First gear sticks.”
It’s official: I hate it here.
chapter seven
Sesamum indicum: sesame. The sesame seed is one of the oldest spices known to man. The most famous reference to sesame seeds came in the tale of Ali Baba and his forty thieves. “Open sesame” was the magic password, which unlocked the door to the robbers’ den. The phrase was used because ripe sesame pods are so delicate that they can burst open and scatter their seeds at the slightest touch. Call them overly sensitive.