by Ann Hood
“I’m ignorant,” she said.
Willie was crouched beside the heater. His silver hair reflected the orange from it, like a halo.
“No,” he said. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”
“Listen,” she said. “You don’t know me. You have no idea. I had never heard of Ernest Hemingway until I was eighteen years old.”
“Ernest who?”
“In school I used to cut classes and drive to the beach and drink Tango, this bottled orange juice and vodka. I’d drink that and smoke cigarettes and pick up seashells from the shore. My room used to be full of them.”
“Why is it better,” Willie said, “to have read Hemingway than to have studied the sea and collected shells?”
She looked back at the painting.
“Why not just paint a picture of a heart?” she said. Her voice sounded harsh. She wondered if she was trying to make him go away.
Willie dropped the fabric from another painting.
“‘Winter,’” he said.
Amid the black and gray paint, along the bottom of the canvas, ice blue paint stood in fat strokes. Down the center ran a single red line.
“Once,” Daisy said, keeping her gaze focused on the painting, “a man at a party asked me how I liked Updike. I thought Updike was a dry cleaner back in Rhode Island.”
“Maybe he is.”
Daisy faced him.
“Oh,” she said, “he is.”
“So you were right.”
He kneeled in front of the heater, rubbed his hands together. They glowed orange, like an eerie nuclear light.
“This ‘Winter’ one,” Daisy said, “seems kind of sexual.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?”
“That’s what I had in mind. That’s why I didn’t paint snow-covered pine trees and children skating. It’s a different kind of winter.”
After Alexander had discovered she hadn’t read any Hemingway, he’d bought her a set of his novels, paperbacks in pastel covers. She’d only read one, the one whose title she’d liked the best, The Sun Also Rises. “All these people,” she’d told him, “seem silly.” “You missed the point,” Alexander had said. But for weeks Daisy had pretended to be Brett and that every man was in love with her.
“I should take a class,” she said, her voice soft and doubting.
“What kind of class?”
“I don’t know,” Daisy said, and lifted her hands to her hair, touching it lightly.
When she and Alexander had lived in New York, she had taken a literature class at NYU. She was pregnant then, self-consciously pregnant. The name of the class was “American Classics.” Daisy had bought all the books that were required and lined them up on the shelf that used to hold her seashells, an old wooden shelf that she had painted lilac. She put the shells in a box in the closet, then arranged the books, first by size—the tallest all at one end—then, dissatisfied with that arrangement, alphabetically by author, then by size again. At night, in bed, the books tormented her, their unfamiliar names taunting her. In the morning, she rearranged them again, this time by color, in the order of a rainbow, the purple covers followed by the blue. She used an old shoe, a sparkling red pump, as a bookend.
She had gone to only one class, where she sat in the back cradling her belly, slouching low in her seat. A girl named Nadine had stood up. She had on a T-shirt that
Said A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE … AND THE SENATE. “I resent the lack of women authors on this reading list,” Nadine had said. “What about House of Mirth? Or A Good Man is Hard to Find?” Daisy never went back. Later, after Alexander moved to Boston without her, she had found the box of seashells, crushed like a bunch of old bones and dust. The biggest shard, a wavy white and purple piece, she had kept and used as an ashtray.
“Then again,” Daisy said to Willie, “I never do well in classes.”
“You don’t need a class,” he said. “I’ll teach you. We’ll go to the National Gallery right now.”
Daisy’s heart pounded. She wondered again when he would leave her, and hoped that it wouldn’t be in the museum.
They sat in a crowded bar called Bullfeathers on Capitol Hill. Even sitting at the table people pushed against them. Outside, a freezing winter rain fell hard against the windows and pavement. The bar smelled of wet wool and beer.
Daisy’s feet throbbed in their high-heeled silver pumps. Willie had walked her through room after room of the museum. He spoke quickly, excitedly, as he explained styles, themes, color.
Suddenly, here at the bar, Willie and Daisy seemed shy together, like a couple on a first date. She ordered a margarita on the rocks with extra salt and nachos. He ordered a Budweiser. They didn’t speak.
Finally Willie said, “I’m surprised you don’t have a husband or boyfriend somewhere.”
Daisy shrugged.
“Or do you?” he said.
She watched the people at the bar in their rain-soaked suits and dresses, matted hair and faces shiny from the cold. Her own toes started to tingle as they warmed. Willie picked up a nacho and smelled it before he popped it into his mouth. She thought of Alexander, the way he liked to sniff new books.
“Do you?” she said.
“What? Have a husband?”
Daisy frowned.
“I’m divorced,” Willie said.
She nodded.
“You too?”
“Oh,” she said. “No.”
Willie leaned across the table and moved her face toward him. His calloused thumb and forefinger held her chin.
“I like you,” he said. “That’s why I’m asking. You are so vibrant. And alive. Not like all those people at that party last night.”
She twisted her head free and leaned back, away from him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m one of those deformed women by that painter.”
“Who?”
“You know,” she said.
“Tell me.”
She took a deep breath.
“deKooning,” Daisy said.
Willie smiled.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Your place.”
Daisy stood, and let herself think, for just an instant, that maybe he would stay after all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“SAM,” JOHN-GLENN SAID, “that’s your basic monarch. I have a million of those. At least.”
His voice, high and tense, woke Mackenzie from a muddled dream. Snowflakes clung to Aunt Hope’s bedroom window like rock candy. The room smelled of Aunt Hope’s sweet perfume. Mackenzie sniffed. Shalimar, she thought, and smiled at how easily she remembered the scent. Every Christmas she and Alexander gave Aunt Hope Shalimar perfume and talc. She snuggled under the covers. Everything in the room was in pastel colors, the soft greens and pinks and yellows of Melt-away mints repeated over and over in the curtains and bedspread, the throw rugs and bureau scarves.
“Those are cabbages,” John-Glenn said. “You can get them easy in the spring. They fly around in flocks of two or three dozen and you just scoop them up.”
Mackenzie stretched, John-Glenn’s voice oddly comforting.
“I think,” he said, “that the American painted lady is the most beautiful of all butterflies. What do you mean? Look at it, then I dare you to tell me no.”
The digital clock beside the bed clicked and a number dropped. Ten-twenty-one.
“The mourning cloak has nothing on the American painted lady, Sammy boy.”
Mackenzie pulled on her jeans and a sweatshirt and walked across the hall. John-Glenn and Sam sat on the floor of John-Glenn’s bedroom, surrounded by butterflies pinned to poster board. Sam looked up when she came in, and waved.
“Oh, it’s you,” John-Glenn said. “Just when we were having fun.”
“You can still have fun,” Mackenzie said.
Pens and pencils stuck out from the pocket of
John-Glenn’s red flannel shirt. The top of one was shaped like a rocket. The eraser of another was a Lady Smurf.
“Where’s your mother?” Mackenzie said.
“Which is the most beautiful butterfly?” John-Glenn said. “The most magnificent?”
Sam held up a large one for her to inspect. Its wings were trimmed in yellow and purple. There was chocolate smeared across his cheek.
Mackenzie glanced at the powdery butterflies, frozen as if in flight.
“They all give me the creeps,” she said.
“Come on. Come on. Pick.”
She pointed to one, a swirl of bright orange and yellow.
“Aha!” John-Glenn shouted. “A red barred sulphur. Very showy. A big show-off. Like you.”
“Be quiet,” Mackenzie said. She winked at Sam and left the room.
In the kitchen, she searched the cupboards for coffee. All she found was flavored instant. Irish Creme. Dutch Mocha. Chocolate Orange.
“Yuck,” Mackenzie said.
She opened the lids and sniffed each one.
In New York, she bought small brown bags of coffee beans and kept them in her freezer. Every morning she ground enough for a pot. If Jason was with her, he scalded milk and ladled it into the coffee with caramelized sugar and a dusting of cinnamon. Right now, she thought, he’s probably in his bathtub, reading the Times. The tub sat in the kitchen, painted a bright China red.
Jason wrote mostly at night. As if acting out the part of a tortured writer, he paced the apartment, unshaven, drinking black coffee and muttering to himself. He told her that all day, no matter what he did, he felt guilty for not writing. “My typewriter,” he said, “screams at me. ‘Get out of that tub, you bum.’ ‘Put that newspaper down!’”
Mackenzie had sat through readings of his plays in church basements and lofts in Tribeca and dusty spaces overlooking the Hudson. He always sat in the back, his head bent as he scribbled notes onto a yellow legal pad. Yellow pages of ideas and changes littered his apartment, covered the countertops and tables and floor.
“That,” John-Glenn said, “is my father. He was a famous Latin American musician whose plane disappeared over the Atlantic while his band was on tour.”
Mackenzie took her cup of Dutch Mocha coffee and went back into John-Glenn’s room.
He had pulled out a large box, the kind a department store might put a new coat in. The box was overflowing with stuff. John-Glenn held up a gold-framed black and white picture of Ricardo Havana and the Havana Hoochie-Coo’s.
Sam looked impressed.
John-Glenn tossed the picture back in the box and pulled out a trophy.
“This was your father’s,” he said to Sam. “Little League.”
Sam took the trophy from him. A gold baseball player swinging a bat sat on top of an imitation marble pedestal. The plaque beneath it said: 1961 LEAGUE CHAMPIONS.
“You haven’t seen this stuff?” John-Glenn said to Sam.
Sam shook his head. He clutched the trophy with both hands.
John-Glenn began to pull things from the box.
“We’ve got merit badges from the Scouts. A yearbook. And look at this picture. That’s your daddy dressed like a girl for Halloween.”
Mackenzie didn’t have to look at the photograph to know exactly what it was. Alexander in a long blonde wig and cashmere sweater, puffing on a black and rhinestone cigarette holder borrowed from Carmen Havana. That same year, Mackenzie had been a pumpkin, stuffed so fat with newspapers that she hadn’t been able to sit all night.
“Where did you get that?” she said.
“What? This picture?”
He held it up. it was just as she had remembered it, except that the image in her mind blazed in full color. The platinum blonde wig. The rhinestones against ebony. The soft pink cashmere. And in her mind, Mackenzie could see what the picture didn’t show. Alexander also wore a pink and black poodle skirt and flaming red pumps. To his right, just out of the camera’s eye, stood an orange human pumpkin.
“All of it,” Mackenzie said. “Where did you get all of this?” Her throat felt dry and she sipped at the sweet coffee to moisten it.
Sam’s mouth opened in silent laughter as he looked at the photograph. His eyes scrunched shut and he threw his head back in a noiseless guffaw.
“We’ve got some ticket stubs here,” John-Glenn said, burrowing through the box’s contents. “Young Rascals. Herman’s Hermits. All from the Rhode Island Auditorium.” He picked up a handful of creased and torn tickets. “Big deal,” he said.
Mackenzie felt like Alexander was somehow being violated.
She slammed her cup down on the night table, beside a plastic Mickey Mouse cradling a bright yellow telephone. The coffee made a watery brown puddle.
“Stop it,” she said.
“There’s a couple report cards. Seventh grade. Tenth grade.”
She grabbed his wrist hard, gripped it until the yellow report card dropped from his hand. Mackenzie saw her mother’s neat, private school signature on the back, three times.
“Where did you get this?” she demanded.
John-Glenn twisted his wrist free from her hold.
She began to pile things back into the box. Papers, photographs. Alexander’s writing and his face flew past her like an animated slide show.
“How would you like it,” Mackenzie shouted, clutching the big box to her chest, “if I threw all your goddam stupid butterflies into the street and laughed while people pawed at them? How would you like that?”
The three of them watched as a piece of paper slipped out of the box and floated to the floor.
“Don’t you dare touch it,” Mackenzie said.
“Fine.”
Mackenzie brought the box into Aunt Hope’s room and put it on the bed. In purple script on the sides it said Cherry and Webb, Your Kind of Store. Behind her, in the hallway, she heard John-Glenn’s voice.
“Some people,” he said.
The box and its contents seemed a pathetic remnant of her brother’s life. Every part of her ached and strained to conjure more of him than an old report card or ticket stub. His laugh rang in her ears, distant and faint, fading.
Gently, Mackenzie sat on the bed and peered inside. Poking through the papers, Mackenzie saw a black box covered with colored seashells.
“Oh, no,” she said, as she lifted it out.
It was an old cigar box, painted a shiny black that had now dulled. Alexander had taken small oval shells and painted them in bright colors, then glued them to the box in neat, even rows. A few had fallen off in the years since he’d made it, and left hard white spots of dried glue where they had been.
Mackenzie opened the box. In thick red paint on the inside of the lid, Alexander had printed:
TO MY DEER DEER SISTER
HAPPY B-DAY
LOVE 4 EVER & EVER ALEXANDER PORTER
1961
She remembered that birthday, her cake a snowman dressed in coconut and jellybeans. The box had held, at first, her gum machine rings, a sand dollar, and a starfish. Later, she hid her diary there. And lipstick she was forbidden to wear until she turned thirteen. Goodnight Slicker, by Yardley. Its pink striped tube pushed to the back beside a purse size bottle of Tigress perfume, also forbidden. Finally, in high school, she forgot about the cigar box and kept on her bureau a box made of ivory, with a delicately etched scene on its lid, a waterfall and low blossoming trees.
A shell, painted a vivid yellow, fell off the cover and onto the bed. Mackenzie picked it up, tried to imagine Alexander at ten, his hair cut short and bristled on top, painting these tiny shells, writing the message on the lid.
4 EVER & EVER.
She took the stones Sam had given her the day before on the beach and placed them in the cigar box.
Had she once, she thought, years ago, reminded Alexander of this gift he’d made for her, his deer deer sister? Yes. She had teased him, laughed at his sense of colors and the symmetrical design the shells made. “Not to menti
on,” she had laughed, “your terrific spelling.” “I had to work with what I had,” he’d said. “That glue that came in those jars that you had to get out with a ruler and then plop it down on a piece of math paper. If you ever find that box again, the shells will probably have turned white or fallen off. Or both.”
But here it was. The colors bright, almost all of the shells still in place, and smelling still of Tigress and, slightly, of salt.
“She said she was going to throw all of my butterflies into the street,” John-Glenn shouted.
The front door slammed shut.
“Let me get my breath,” Aunt Hope said.
Mackenzie went into the living room.
Aunt Hope had on a large fur hat and a black coat with a snap-on fox collar. The animal’s head sat right under her chin, staring out from glass eyes. She had two shopping bags on each arm, decorated with red and green abstract Christmas trees.
“She said people would touch them and stomp on them,” John-Glenn said.
Aunt Hope removed her hat and placed it carefully on the coffee table. It looked like a big, furry muffin.
“Mackenzie is not going to do that,” she said.
“I didn’t say I was going to throw them into the street. I asked you how you would like it if I did.”
“Same difference,” he said.
“The mall,” Aunt Hope said, “was packed.”
She took off her coat, revealing a plaid wool suit that Mackenzie recognized as her mother’s.
“What is going on here? Are my family’s things just common property?”
“Well,” Aunt Hope said, “excuse me. Your so-called ‘family’ up and left everything. Things in the attic, in the closets. Everywhere.”
“She yelled at me because I have a box of junk that belonged to you-know-who,” John-Glenn said. “You might think he was a saint or something.”
Aunt Hope sighed.
“Mackenzie,” she said, “you have got to let go.”
Mackenzie closed her eyes. She stood in that room with her aunt’s furry hat and John-Glenn panting beside her and Aunt Hope’s Shalimar on her mother’s Pendleton’s suit and she tried, not to let go, but to hold on.
“Here,” she heard Aunt Hope say. “This will cheer you up.”