by Pamela Moses
“Fine. Busy, I guess.” I rocked nonchalantly on my heels, but my voice sounded wispier, shakier than I had intended.
Sanjeev smiled and nodded. “It’s a busy time of year.” Then his eyes flickered as if with a sudden question. And my heart rushed, a drumming I could feel in my ears. But before he could continue, a girl’s voice sang his name from across the quad. A petite brunette in a rosebud-pink rain jacket bounced on her toes under Wayland Arch.
“Hi.” Sanjeev twisted toward her then back to me. He seemed suddenly befuddled, as if he’d lost the words on the tip of his tongue. He cleared his throat, searching for what he had wanted to say. The girl in pink remained under the dry of the arch for some moments, then eventually, seemingly impatient, opened a fuchsia-handled umbrella and headed toward us. Beneath her coat she wore navy leggings. Through the clingy material, I could make out slender thighs, narrow knees, ankles I nearly could have encircled with my forefinger and thumb. In just a few seconds, she would be standing beside us, fluttering her eyes, rubbing Sanjeev’s arm in greeting with her doll hand. So without waiting for Sanjeev to regain his composure, I muttered something about my morning schedule. Then I hurried off, my boots striking the ground with purposeful claps that would have made my fellow BREMUSA members proud.
• • •
When there had been trouble between Mother and Father, long ago, I sometimes caught her watching him from across a room. Adjusting the clips in her hair, or the neckline of her blouse so that it dipped more becomingly across her chest, waiting for something from him—something she believed would make everything good again. But couldn’t she see that Father’s mind was far away, that he was not even noticing her?
“What are you doing, Mother?”
“Oh, Franny. Things you’ll understand when you’re all grown up!” she’d laughed, surprised by my question, I could tell, but without turning to me.
But I was older now. And I had no interest in the lessons Mother had expected me to learn. I continued on to Skylar’s, at every step refraining from glancing back.
UNNECESSARY BURDENS
(Opal’s Story)
• 1992 •
In the fall of my senior year, Mother uprooted again. This time to Tempe, Arizona, with Sebastian, the new man in her life. Her life was a whirlwind, she said, between the demands of her latest work designing jewelry and the renovations to their new home. For two months, I’d heard nothing from her. When she finally called, I kept my voice blasé, cool as ocean water. If she thought I would bubble with excitement or tremble with emotion, she was in for a sorry surprise.
By this time, my suitemates were beginning to settle their future plans: Setsu taking a position as a research analyst at a bank in Boston; Francesca would be off to Europe. Ruth, among other options, was considering a connection through a family friend to some prominent international organization. Other classmates, I knew, had applied to medical schools or for internships at law firms in cities where they had friends or family. Kimberly Anderson, who’d lived next door to us both junior and senior year, was hoping to be accepted into Emory’s business program, closer to her parents in Coral Gables, Florida. I watched as they breezed through the halls in suits or skirts, heels and stockings, their faces set as they rushed to various meetings with recruiters from prestigious corporations. But none of the printed cards that arrived almost daily in my campus mail or banners that stretched like oversized bedding across the entry to Faunce House announced opportunities I could begin to imagine for myself, few of them applicable to art history majors anyway.
In Brown’s career services office, I flipped through binders thick with applications for positions in research, in sales, in communications. Boring, boring. Blah, blah, blah.
Then one afternoon, Kimberly mentioned a friend of her mother’s in Naples, Florida, who was in need of an assistant for her art gallery. “I can put you in touch with her if you like. I think you would be just right for this,” Kimberly said, showing me a clipping from a Florida paper: Seeking Responsible Employee with Art Background to Assist in Managing Gallery and Health Bar. In smaller print below was added: Enjoy a peaceful work atmosphere. Bask in the southern sunshine.
Yes, the position seemed designed for me, and so I accepted Kimberly’s offer to pass along my résumé.
• • •
F lorida? All by yourself? I know Kimberly will be nearby part of the year, but it’s home for her.” Ruth and I were seated on the new spring grass of the Green, putting off our Ancient Greek Poets reading.
“I suppose it’s no different from anywhere else,” I laughed. “Actually, I spent a few months there with Mother just after I turned fourteen.” And I had done my research on the owner of the gallery and learned she was beginning to establish a bit of a national profile for some of her recent exhibitions. “Choices are limited with a degree in art history,” I told Ruth, “but I think this could be a good opportunity. . . .” Anyway, what did I have that was holding me here? Why suffer through another New England winter, months of cold that left my skin dry as parched earth, made my hands and ankles swell?
“No, it makes sense. I guess it’s just hard to believe we’ll all be scattered next year,” Ruth said. “But traveling has always been part of your life. I wish I had half your spontaneity.” Ruth dropped her neck back, gazing up at the daytime moon, so lacy thin it seemed almost translucent. And she sighed in a way I knew she was wishing for what, after four years together, she still imagined my life to be. “I know you won’t lose touch, though. You’ve promised . . .”
But I wondered if Ruth was naïve to think the pact we made years before would last beyond our time at college.
“Of course not,” I said.
And then, near the close of our final term at Brown, I sent my signed employment contract to Ms. Amara Silver.
When I first opened the door to Art of Life Café and Gallery, a bell tinkled softly. Amara emerged from a back room in a filmy white blouse and pants that rippled as she walked. Through the thin material, the lean curves of her silhouette were visible. I guessed she was no younger than Mother, but her figure seemed firmer, more perfectly proportioned than what I had ever been able to achieve, despite my years of dieting and daily jogs.
“Oh, come on in, Opal,” she said as she approached. In one hand she held a glass of some pale iced liquid, in the other a stack of papers. She lifted these up, a silent gesture of apology for not greeting me with a handshake. “So,” she laughed, “I guess you’re undaunted by a tropical summer or you wouldn’t have accepted the job.”
I nodded.
“Me neither. The heat cleanses the system, don’t you think?” When she laughed again, white flashed against her olive skin. Her square teeth were large, as were all of her features—her mouth broad, her nose prominent, her cheeks wide, her gray-streaked hair swept into a thick twist, a solid mass at the back of her head. Nothing about her face was classically pretty, but the angles were so unusual, so bold, that I imagined people stared at her as they might gaze at someone beautiful.
When she had found a place for her drink and her papers, Amara showed me around. The gallery and health bar shared the single front room, its walls pale, pale blue—the color of sky through a fine mist of cloud. Two of the walls displayed evenly spaced, framed watercolors—all of the same oval pond, at its center a tiny rock island dotted with grass and wildflowers—the hues varying slightly from one to the next. “Faye Hallowell’s work, a resident here in Naples,” Amara said. “She’s beginning to gain some recognition. I just love her style, don’t you? It’s so subtle.”
Amara showed the work of artists from all around the southern U.S. and had recently begun to feature some South American works as well, but she was particularly drawn to local artists and, whenever possible, gave them opportunities. She had shared this during the course of our correspondence the previous spring, explaining her process of selecting art that she deemed not only of high quality but which complemented her space. And, yes, I ad
mired the paintings, too, I told her. I loved the symmetry of their composition and the way each differed just a shade from the one before so that the overall effect was of completeness, the fullness of a day. I stopped before the final representation in the series: dusk—the island and its grasses mere silhouettes, reminding me of the Asian drawings with their delicate, evocative lines I had found myself attracted to in art history courses, their negative spaces leaving room for reflection. A year ago Mother and Antonio had taken a weekend in New York, and I made the three-hour train ride south to meet them. Visiting the Metropolitan Museum, we had strolled through the Asian wing. “It’s so peaceful in here, isn’t it?” I said to Mother. When we reached the Chinese scroll paintings, I told her I could spend all day studying them. But Mother found them excruciatingly dull: “We might as well return to the hotel and stare at the toile wallpaper, for God’s sake!” She and Antonio wanted to make their way to the modern wing. Mother loved the Expressionist paintings with their tornadoes of color. I knew their mad-dream visions were artistically important, but I found them disturbing. And it bothered me that they inspired Mother, her eyes shining as she drank in a darkness I imagined might manifest itself not only in her painting—which had suddenly begun to take over hours of her day—but in her very being.
But now Mother was immersed in her jewelry making, in her new life in Arizona with Sebastian—whoever he was. And I assumed she had not touched a paintbrush or pottery wheel in months, though at one time she’d claimed each to be her passion, her raison d’être. She had always been that way—plunging into something and swimming through it, then emerging onto dry land in search of some other pool.
“I love what you’ve done here,” I told Amara. There was an easy lightness to the gallery, a cleanness like the cherry blossom scrolls of Chinese art. It seemed the space of someone who understood calm, understood contentment, making me hopeful that coming here had been a right choice.
The café—or health bar, as Amara referred to it—took the center of the gallery, creating three sides of a rectangle, or a “U” with corners. The counters were of beveled glass topping the pale-wood structure, ten bamboo stools placed around them. Inside the “U” of the bar stood a lemon-yellow board listing a range of fresh vegetable and juice drinks, salads, fruits in season. Behind the counter, I could see that the drink-ware and plates had been arranged neatly along one shelf, equally ordered stacks of plastic to-go containers filling the shelf opposite.
At the back of the room, a pair of louvered doors led to a small workspace. A young woman in a cotton skirt, several wire-thin silver hoops piercing her right ear, sat at a low table studying art catalogs, one of them from a Florida auction house whose name I recognized.
“Calliope’s with me just two mornings a week, when she’s not in classes,” Amara explained, introducing us. “But she’s been immensely helpful. Faye Hallowell, whose work we’re now displaying, was Calliope’s find.”
Calliope tugged at the bottom hoop in her ear and smiled, her eyes wide with pleasure from Amara’s praise.
During the remainder of the morning, Amara introduced me to my various responsibilities. The health bar was a snap, really self-explanatory. In terms of the gallery, I would be expected to be well versed in the work of whatever artists we were showing, of course. Most customers came in for the café and to browse, she supposed, but some clients were serious buyers, a few were dealers. What she hoped most from me was that I had a good eye. She expected I would, given my background. She was pleased with my response to Faye Hallowell’s work. As I would soon learn, she said, many artists would approach us directly with their work. Others she and Calliope had discovered at festivals or street fairs, even at work with their easels by the beaches. “So keep your eyes wide open for talent!”
“I will!” In fact, I was eager to get started, I told her.
But just before noon, Amara excused herself. She had some figures to go over with Calliope. “Last month’s business,” she explained. “There’s no need for you to waste your time.” So, though it was only my first day, I was given permission to leave early.
“Are you sure? I’m happy to stay.”
But Amara swatted the air with a folder she held in her hand. “Go enjoy yourself.”
So I stepped out into the small, only half-filled lot that provided parking for Art of Life as well as for Lily’s Shoes, Sunshine Stationers, and Petra’s Hair Salon. And, retracing my route of that morning, I made the ten-minute walk along Hibiscus Drive to Everglade Avenue until I reached the painted sign that marked the entry to Emerald Cove, where I had found a modest one-bedroom rental. If I’d been honest with Amara, I’d have told her I didn’t mind the extra hours in the gallery. Save for the whir of the AC, my apartment was almost noiseless, especially in the late afternoon. The wind hardly stirred the palm fronds of the tree outside my kitchen window, and there was little in the way of distraction—an occasional car on the complex’s sleek winding road, a tomato-faced cyclist swabbing perspiration with the back of his wrist. But perhaps Amara would have thought it odd, a request for added work. And the last thing I wanted was to start off on the wrong foot.
I changed into running shorts and sneakers with the thought that I would head toward the beach, a chance to combine a jog with my first bit of research for the gallery, scanning the area for any interesting artists at work. As it turned out, though, the path near the beach was empty aside from a few other runners and walkers. None of them seemed to be melting quite so much in the weather as I was, still not yet adjusted to the southern heat. But making my way down to the shore, I ran what I judged was another mile and then another, listening to the rapid, steady rhythm of my feet on the packed sand interspersed with the slower rhythm of the sweeping waves.
• • •
Aside from jangling earrings and a chunk of purplish stone that hung from a cord around her neck, Amara dressed with none of the ornamentation most women her age—Mother’s age—favored: her face was absent of added color, her nails unpolished and trimmed close. The preening other women undertook in order to catch the eyes of men held no interest for her; the attentions she gave to her appearance seemed solely for her own gratification. When I worked up the courage to question her on the subject, she rolled her eyes, clearly humored.
“Oh, Opal, men can make life so much more complicated than it needs to be, don’t you think?” She tossed the fringed end of her gauzy scarf over her shoulder. She had once been married, but it was long ago. “In another lifetime,” she sighed, as though the very memory bored her, “when I was young and thoughtless, before I knew what was good for me.” She dropped trimmed strawberries and cubes of pineapple into the blender. “I live a life unfettered now,” she laughed, and loosed a few strands of hair from the clip holding it in place. “A simpler life.”
And after I had been with her for a few weeks, I began to learn the ways Amara kept herself free. Not infrequently, men who entered the Art of Life made requests for her phone number, for her work hours, murmuring to her across the counter of the health bar—as they often did with me—only pretending to take an interest in the art on display as they ordered fruit shakes or vegetable drinks for youthful energy. Some were Amara’s contemporaries, others mine, more than one with a strip of untanned skin around his finger where a ring, quite obviously, was normally worn. A few were artists themselves, toting portfolios of their work, but even this seemed sometimes an excuse to own Amara’s attention or mine, to stand beside us, heads bent together. As each of these men exercised his particular charms, evenings spent awkwardly at Mother’s elbow returned to me. But while Mother had fluttered her eyes invitingly, Amara offered smiling excuses, and the men would shrug their shoulders or twist their lips sourly, as if to say they had meant no harm. Once their backs were turned in retreat, she would wink at me, and I would flush at having been included in her amusement.
So Amara would never sob over a man until her face was puffed and mottled as I had seen Mother do more tim
es than I could count. Never would she attempt to swallow sorrow, calm her nerves with rounds of tall rum drinks that left her moaning with sickness. No, she was too independent to let someone else turn her life upside down. And the more I watched her, the more I felt I could learn her strength. If I wanted to believe in fate or destiny, maybe it was for this reason I had come to Florida, more than for any career opportunity.
• • •
In the summertime, the off-season for tourists, Amara explained, patronage of the gallery as well as of the health bar was lighter than during the remainder of the year. So she and I often had hours of unoccupied time, and we sat at two of the bamboo stools, sipping blended shakes of celery, carrots, parsley, wheatgrass, or whatever concoction Amara had most recently discovered, as she described for me the vitamins and nutrients of each ingredient. Just as I did, Amara adhered to a vegetarian diet, but she had stuck with it for years and was a font of knowledge. She understood how to balance a meal precisely, how to complement proteins or roots or berries for maximum nourishment, how to stop eating before fullness set in to prevent the storage of excess fat. “I believe in conditioning the interior as well as the exterior of my body, don’t you?” Amara asked. She agreed to come running with me along my route by the water one afternoon. “I don’t know how people can stand to live in cold climates,” she said once we’d found a matching stride. “This is heavenly, isn’t it?” And she held out her arms as if she were drawing the beauty of our surroundings into herself.
My breath was too heavy in the sticky air to speak much as we ran, but Amara talked of the gallery, of the artists whose work she’d been lucky enough to show. It was really a matter of being discerning, she thought. There was so much done in the name of art these days that was crass, sloppy, wasn’t there? “But art is like anything else in life, isn’t it? There is a purity, a harmony in that of highest quality.” Did I agree?