by Robin Wells
“And maybe that’s exactly what I need.”
Ralph and Eddie exchanged dubious looks. But then, they didn’t know what my life was really like—how isolated and shut off and rudderless I’d become. You couldn’t even say my life was adrift, because drifting implied movement. My life was stuck on a sandbar and completely fogged in.
“Look—I’m working as a temp. My sublet is up in two months, and I don’t have a clue where I’m going to move. My friends are all married and busy with their families or else they’ve moved away, and jobs in the art world are harder than ever to come by in this economy.” I was voicing things I hadn’t even allowed myself to think. Depression had kept me catatonic, but apparently I’d subconsciously been fretting about my future, because relief flooded through me as I talked. The prospect of getting out of Chicago and helping Gran sort through her belongings gave me a sense of direction, of meaning, of usefulness. “This is perfect timing. Helping Gran would help me.”
Eddie sighed. “Hope, honey, do you remember what Mom’s house looks like?”
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you looked in her attic and storage shed and garage and closets?”
“It’s been a few years.” Maybe even a decade. Come to think of it, I might have been twelve the last time I was in the attic.
“She’s only continued to add things to them. Every square inch is crammed and bulging.”
“Well, it has to be tackled by someone. Might as well be me.”
“You can’t simultaneously sort out the house and take care of Mom. We don’t even know what level of care she’ll need.”
Ralph thoughtfully rubbed the auburn stubble on his jaw. “We can hire home health care workers.”
Eddie and Ralph exchanged another long look, the kind of look that’s a whole conversation. I felt a burst of longing; I’d never been that closely attuned to anyone. Certainly not to my husband, not even in the early days, back when I’d thought things were good.
Eddie ran a hand down his face. “Hope, honey—you’re tired. This is a huge commitment, and it doesn’t need to be decided right now. Go to the house, take a good look around, and sleep on it.” He reached in his jacket pocket, pulled out a key, and handed it to me.
“You need sleep, too,” I said, noticing the shadows under his eyes. “Why don’t we take turns staying here with Gran tonight?”
“Nah. I’ll be fine. I can sleep like a log anywhere.”
“That’s true,” Ralph said, kneading the back of Eddie’s neck. “He fell asleep at a Warriors game last week and nearly slid off the seat.”
“You can’t blame me.” Eddie tilted his head down to give Ralph better access to his neck. “Our team was twenty points ahead.”
“My point is, he can nod off in a chair just as well as on a bed. Maybe better. He’ll be sawing logs as soon as his butt hits a cushion.”
Eddie nodded. “It’s one of my many mad skills.”
Ralph ended the neck massage and swatted Eddie’s butt. “And you have very many, very mad skills.”
Eddie playfully elbowed him in the ribs. “Not in front of the children.”
I laughed, but felt more wistful than amused. Eddie and Ralph had been together for more than a dozen years and shared the kind of warm, easy affection I’d hoped for in my own marriage.
“I, on the other hand, require a prone position,” Ralph said, “so I’m off to the Mosey On Inn.” Ralph was allergic to dogs, and Gran had a shaggy mixed breed named Snowball, so Ralph and Eddie always stayed at the town’s only inn whenever they visited Wedding Tree.
Eddie hugged him good-bye, then kissed my cheek and turned toward the door to Gran’s room.
“Sure you’ll be okay here alone?” I asked.
“I won’t be alone. I’ll have Mom for company.”
“Not to mention his grandmother on the ceiling,” Ralph said dryly.
Eddie rolled his eyes. “I’ll chalk your insensitivity up to sleep deprivation this time, but it better not happen again.” He turned the “Visitors Welcome” sign on Gran’s door around to read “Patient Sleeping—No Visitors Allowed” and made a shooing motion with his hand. “Now get on out of here, you two. I need my beauty sleep.”
I peeked in as Eddie entered the room. Gran was sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling. Eddie plopped into the bedside recliner, kicked back the footrest, and closed his eyes. Satisfied, I backed out. Before the door even closed behind me, the soft snuffle of Eddie’s snore rose from the chair.
3
hope
I always wax nostalgic when I first see Gran’s house after a long absence, but this time, I steeled myself against it. I’d watched quite a bit of HGTV over the last few months, and I’d learned about the importance of curb appeal. I would try, I decided, to view the house through the objective eyes of a potential buyer.
My heart sank as I pulled my rented Sonata onto the familiar herringbone-patterned brick driveway and gazed at the gabled two-story house. I’d been here at Christmas, but my eagerness to see Gran and my sentimental attachment to the place apparently had obscured the fact the house was in need of an extreme makeover. Well, maybe not extreme, but at least substantial; the gingerbread trim needed painting, the gray wooden siding was dingy with mildew, and the railing on the wraparound porch looked like a gap-toothed fighter who’d lost a few rounds.
The landscaping wasn’t any better. The gardenia bush on the west side hulked over the living room window, the azaleas in the front bed gasped for fertilizer and a trim, and the centipede grass had been hijacked by dollarweed and dandelions. The only spot of color was a large patch of tulips blooming in the front flower garden.
I climbed out of the car, grabbed my bag from the backseat, and headed toward the house, noting additional needed repairs with every step. A board on the third porch stair shifted under my foot, the paint curled and flaked off the porch railing, and the screen door sported several tears and dents. The hinges squeaked as I opened it and inserted the key into the faded red front door.
The lock tumbled, and I pushed the door open. The scent of Gran’s house—of a million home-cooked meals mingled with floor polish and old furniture and the lavender potpourri she always kept by the door—flew out to greet me, sweeping me up in a whirlwind of olfactory-borne memories. All attempts at objectivity abandoned, I stepped through the door and into my past.
Funny, how almost all of my childhood memories were based here. I’d only visited Gran at Christmas and during summer vacations, yet my recollections of this place were sharp and clear, while memories of most of my childhood in Chicago were blurry or nonexistent.
Maybe it was because this was where I’d felt most alive, I thought, dropping my keys on the bureau in the foyer. Gran’s house had always buzzed with possibilities, with wonderful things just about to happen—Christmas presents waiting to be opened, cake icing needing to be licked from beaters, long summer days stretching out like magic carpets, as full of promised delight as the stack of canvasses Gran always bought me.
Mom used to fly me down to Louisiana when school let out in early June, then pick me up again in August. While she managed portfolios and brokered big deals in Chicago, I ran barefoot, frolicked through schedule-free days, and indulged my passion for painting.
Gran has always been my biggest fan and supporter. She’d noticed my love of art when I was about four years old and she caught me sitting cross-legged on her white chenille bedspread, staring at the print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night that hung over her high oak headboard. I told her that if I looked at it long enough, the stars seemed to spin.
“Would you like to paint a picture like that?” Gran had asked.
I’d nodded, and that very afternoon, Gran had taken me to the store, bought me paint supplies, and set me up with a little easel on the back patio. I worked out there until nearly bedtime, when
I’d declared my painting finished.
“That’s beautiful, sweetheart,” Gran had said.
“It’s very nice,” my mother had remarked when I’d proudly shown her the piece a couple of months later. “But shouldn’t the big star be on the other side?”
“Oh, I wasn’t copying,” I’d said. “I looked at the sky myself.”
“That’s my girl.” Gran’s laugh had vibrated against me as she enfolded me in a big hug. “Don’t ever stop viewing the world through your own eyes, sweetie.”
“Who else’s eyes would I use?” I’d asked.
Gran had laughed again. “You’d be surprised, honey. You’d be surprised.”
To my delight, Gran had hung my painting right over the Van Gogh print in her bedroom—and she’d taken to framing and hanging each summer’s crop of paintings in the “art gallery” between two of the three bedrooms upstairs.
“You shouldn’t encourage her,” I’d overheard my mother say one evening years later, between my sophomore and junior years in high school. She and my grandmother had been sitting in the kitchen, and I’d been in the dining room, sketching a mural on the wall. I was listening to my CD Walkman, but I’d pulled the headset off for a moment, and the solemn tone of my mother’s voice had made me put my ear to the door. “She needs to start thinking about colleges and majors, and art isn’t a serious career.”
The words had knifed me in the heart. My mother was an investment advisor, all about P&Ls, track records, and potential.
“She seems pretty serious about it to me,” Gran had said.
“Come on, Mom. There’s a reason the word ‘artist’ is usually paired with the word ‘starving.’”
“She could always teach.”
“Then she’d be starving for sure. Traditional female roles don’t allow a woman to make a decent living.”
“Well, dear,” Gran had said, “making a living isn’t the same as making a life.”
I’d failed at both, I thought now. My shoulders slumping, I left the main door open so air could circulate through the screen, shuffled into the living room, and flipped the switch for the overhead light. The old chandelier cast a soft glow over the cypress floor, the floral chintz curtains, and the hodgepodge of furniture that ranged from inherited Victorian antiques to 1980s-era “modern.” My eye went to the crowded collection of photos that covered the walls—a rogue’s gallery of my family, with a special emphasis on my mother and Uncle Eddie as children.
Centered over the sofa hung an old sepia-tone photo of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. In the manner of old photos, they were formal and unsmiling. Next to it was a photo of them sitting on the back porch, playing cards and laughing. If Gran hadn’t told me who they were, I never would have recognized them as the same people.
Gran had taken the porch picture with a Kodak Brownie when she was seventeen. She’d told me she’d hidden in the bushes and caught them unawares so that they wouldn’t stiffen up like a couple of corpses.
As long as I could remember, Gran always had a camera handy. In the back of the house, she’d had a darkroom, where she used to let me help develop close-ups of flowers and bugs and leaves. I inhaled deeply as I stepped further into the house, hoping to detect a hint of darkroom chemicals. No such luck.
I’d once told my mother how I loved the smell of Gran’s darkroom.
“Oh, I don’t,” Mom had replied. “I think it smells like thwarted dreams and female repression.”
My mother had been big on female empowerment. Gran said she was a women’s libber, although Mom preferred to think of herself as a feminist. She was certainly a glass-ceiling breaker, a role model for women who wanted more out of life than a home, a husband, and children. She’d told me that Gran had worked as a photographer for the New Orleans newspaper during World War II and had dreamed of being a travel photographer, but she’d been the victim of a “misogynic era” and a “chauvinistic husband.”
My mother had been talking, of course, about her father.
According to Mom, he’d been withdrawn and silent, always hiding behind a newspaper or a TV program. When he did talk, it was usually to offer some kind of “helpful” criticism, usually about her appearance or demeanor. She needed to smile more and study less. Her hair always needed combing, or her clothes needed pressing. He was dismissive of her deeply held political convictions or even her stellar grades. “No man wants to marry a know-it-all,” he used to say.
Mom said he lacked respect for women. Gran said he was just old-fashioned and stubborn and sincerely believed that he knew best. He’d been raised to always please his parents, and he couldn’t understand children wanting a life beyond their family and hometown. Gran said the fact he was paralyzed in his late twenties had left him out of touch with the changing world. My mother said there was no excuse.
He’d died before I was born, so I don’t have any memories of him. I do have a memory of Gran and my mom visiting his grave when I was about five. They’d taken some roses, and I recall Mom crying as if she were trying to squeeze her soul out of her tear ducts as Gran laid the bouquet on the headstone.
The savagery of my mother’s grief had scared me. Mom was always in control, always logical, always practical. I thought she was above sentiment. Where had this storm of emotion come from? What could I do to make it stop? Was it somehow my fault?
Years later, when I was a teenager—I must have been fifteen, because I was driving my mother’s Mercedes and she was in the passenger seat, and the only time she willingly relinquished control of the wheel was when I’d been a student driver—she said something disparaging about her father.
“If he was such a jerk,” I’d asked, “why did you cry so hard that time we visited his grave?”
“Because I never had a chance to impress him.” She’d smoothed her already-smooth hair, which was an unusual thing for Mom to do.
“You wanted to impress him?”
She’d lifted her shoulders. “‘Impress’ might be the wrong word. I wanted to—oh, I don’t know. He just always made me feel . . .” My mother, who was always so sure of herself and never at a loss for words, had an uncertain wobble in her voice. “. . . inadequate.” She’d clamped her lips together and turned her head to the passenger window. I’d kept my eyes on the road. I was afraid she was crying again, and the thought of my always-together mother crying scared me to death.
Mom never said that her father was the reason she disliked spending time in Wedding Tree; she said Gran loved to visit us in Chicago and that there was a lot more to see and do there, which was true enough. Besides, she’d always add—Wedding Tree was too rural, the people too nosy, and the pace of life too slow.
Which were the very things I’d always loved about Wedding Tree. The community was like a fuzzy blanket—it made me feel safe and relaxed and cozy. In Chicago, I always felt hurried and pressured. Maybe it was because Mom packed my after-school life with activities and appointments and play dates. When we were at our apartment, she was always working on something, and I felt like I had to be constantly productive, too. “It’s important to make something of yourself, to become someone,” Mom used to say.
“Isn’t everyone already someone?” I once asked.
“You know what I mean,” she’d said. “Successful.”
Yeah, I knew what she meant. Success to my mother meant academic achievements, professional accomplishments, and important titles. A type-A overachiever, Mom went from high school valedictorian to summa cum laude MBA graduate at Northwestern to vice president at a publicly traded investment firm at a time when female executives were unheard of. She’d wanted her only daughter—the daughter she’d had at the age of forty-two—to follow in her footsteps and benefit from all the inroads she and her fellow female type As had made in the seventies and eighties.
The problem was, my idea of success didn’t jive with hers. I didn’t w
ant to become an attorney or doctor or high-powered executive. I didn’t want to wear designer clothes or go to power lunches or board meetings. I just wanted to paint—to lose myself in a flow of creativity, to produce art that captured my thoughts and feelings.
Mother never said I was a disappointment, and I know she didn’t want to make me feel like one, because her father had done that to her. But deep inside, I’m pretty sure I disappointed her all the same.
Pushing aside my thoughts, I opened the front windows to let in a breeze—it was a cool day in late March, not warm enough to warrant air-conditioning—then went upstairs to my mother’s old bedroom, the room where I always stayed. I dropped my bag on the floor, peeled off my clothes, and took a long shower in the vintage black-and-white-tiled bathroom. When I came out, I rummaged in my bag and threw on a pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt. I thought about taking a nap, but it was getting late and I felt kind of wired. I decided to look around the house and see just what I was getting myself into. I wandered downstairs into Gran’s bedroom.
It looked the same as it always had. Gran’s big oak bed with a curved footboard sat against the wall opposite the door, the large, elaborately framed print of Starry Night hanging over the high oak headboard, my smaller painting, in a simpler frame, hanging above it.
I smiled and focused my gaze on the Van Gogh print. I still love it, but now I appreciate it for different reasons. Now I love the way Van Gogh lets you see his brushstrokes, how he didn’t try to hide the effort, how he lets you see where he dabbed and dawdled and meticulously layered color on color, where he reworked the parts that weren’t right until they matched the picture in his head.
Even in a print, you can tell that his paintings are uneven and textured and layered with paint, and you just know that there are probably different colors under the colors you see, and maybe even a whole other picture under the picture you’re looking at. The underneath picture is probably just as beautiful as this one, but he needed it as a base to build this one on, so it’s okay that you don’t get to see it. It’s enough to know it’s there.