Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  She took up jogging. She jogged all of Garland, looking for help-wanted signs, for any sign that she could use to change her life. She jogged until she knew he would be gone. Then she went home to the safely empty house to shower before heading out to T.J.Maxx.

  She was jogging around the Wynne estate one morning and she stopped at the water spigot by the office for a drink. She stared at the four-columned white mansion surrounded by cottonwood trees while she caught her breath. She hadn’t been inside the house in years. The Wynne House had been so normal, so boring to her as a child. Now she realized that the house was full of newly interesting antiques. She touched her forehead and sniffed under her arms. She was fine to go in. It was just Garland.

  An old woman was sitting just inside the front door reading a large-print Thomas Friedman book. Grace startled her. “Oh, hello there!” the woman said. “Did you want to take the tour?”

  “Yes,” Grace said. “But I was just out running and I don’t have any money—”

  “It’s a suggested donation,” she said. “You can make it up next time you come.”

  “Thanks,” Grace said. “I will do that.”

  The woman got to her feet. She came up only to Grace’s chin. She wore dark blue polyester pants and a sweater with pears on it. “Well,” she began, clasping her hands. “First I’d like to welcome you to the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate. Is this your first time here?”

  Grace shook her head.

  “Well, the estate was built in 1804 and renovated by the family in 1824 and 1868. It has been owned by the Wynne Trust since 1951, and in 1960 it was renovated slightly for public viewing. That’s when the velvet ropes went up, et cetera. Josephus Wynne was one of the most important figures in Tennessee history, and the most important in the whole history of Garland. He was a judge, politician, and skilled orator, and he was a member of the Whig Par—” She began to cough. “Excuse me. He was a Whig.”

  She led Grace through the rooms, telling her about the Mexican-American War, nineteenth-century table manners, the Tariff of Abominations, and tuberculosis, but Grace’s attention was on the stuff. The furniture was mostly American Empire and Sheraton style with some Hepplewhite mixed in, though she didn’t know all that yet. She wanted information about what she saw, but the docent knew little about the pieces themselves. Grace asked her about the bird’s-eye maple secretary, and the docent only nodded and said, “Yes, all the pieces are original to the period, though not necessarily to the family, except for the wax fruit.”

  Grace took in the mahogany pier table with acorn feet, the trumeau mirror with the carved wreath relief, the needlepoint footstool. The docent chattered on: Two thousand people came through the Wynne home each year, and the tours were entirely guided by community volunteers, and the estate housed one of the most important collections of nineteenth-century French porcelain clocks in the southeastern United States.

  Two thousand people in a year? That was less than half of the people who entered MoMA in a day.

  Even years later, when Grace looked back on that first visit to the Wynne House, she was sure she had meant no harm. But she went back three days later, with a camera.

  There were four other people on the tour this time, a couple and their teenage children. They had stopped in Garland on their way to Memphis to see family, a visit they evidently wished to delay. Grace took pictures of every room from every angle, and the docent, this time a yellow-sweatered man in his seventies, was delighted by Grace’s knowledgeable questions, and Grace was grateful for his reaction. She had learned a lot working for Donald. Looking through the photos that night, she felt excited for the first time since she’d come home. It would take her months to identify everything in the Wynne House.

  “But why?” Riley asked her when she’d been at her research for three nights. “What are you going to do with this?”

  Grace shrugged. “Show them a report, I guess.” Maybe the Wynne people would give her a job. Maybe they wanted a researcher. Did they know, for instance, that the silver bowl that held the wax fruit was a John Wendt, probably from his early Boston years, and that Wendt identified himself as a “silver chaser,” which sounded like a burglar but was actually a term for a metalsmith who used the techniques of repoussé and embossing? Did anyone want to know that? Or that even the wax fruit was kind of important, and not quite contemporary? That the apples’ curly stems indicated that they’d come from Rayhorne Table-Effex, a decor manufacturer from the mid-1970s that supplied all the wax fruit for the Four Seasons hotels? And that the company dissolved in 1981 when the EPA discovered they had dumped tons and tons of DDE waste into a local river? And that the wax fruit, which had originally sold for eighty cents apiece, now brought more than thirty dollars per dingy banana?

  Who would ever care?

  • • •

  For a few weeks after Anne Findlay cut his check, Riley had felt special, above the other art students. He was a local celebrity who wouldn’t be local for much longer. But in January, Findlay had a new artist up in her gallery, and Riley was a student again. Grace, usually adept at consoling him, was too unmoored herself to hold his ego together. He had started a new piece, this one of the courthouse, to Grace’s silent dismay. Yet, her recent convictions about the ideas and experiments of artwork seemed both hysterical and snobbish now. She looked at the watercolor portrait he had painted of her, delicately taped onto the wall of their bedroom, and felt impotent.

  Riley puttered among his canvases the way he always had. He sat in the basement amid the party detritus and abandoned half-built bicycles with lamps aimed at him from four directions. He listened to Les Claypool and leaned forward in his chair, muttering to himself or to his canvas, carrying on a long, low-stakes conversation that always ended in agreement. Grace would sneak downstairs under the pretense of looking for something and watch him as he smoked and talked to himself. She watched him paint the highlights on a sunny patch of sidewalk and tried to believe.

  She made him sandwiches.

  She cleaned his brushes.

  She repeated these exercises of love, desperate for a sign of divine clemency.

  • • •

  One evening in February, Grace drove home from T.J.Maxx, where she had stayed late cleaning up the sticky chocolate milk that a toddler had spilled in the handbag racks, and found a black Jaguar sitting in the driveway. Riley had bought the car from a Knoxville dealer on a whim and Greg’s you-only-live-once advice. The Jaguar was six years old and had 140,000 miles on it. She and Riley had had a dozen joking conversations about what he might buy with the Findlay money (a pontoon boat, a show dog), but she had not realized how susceptible to shitty ideas he really was.

  Thus caught by surprise, that was unfortunately exactly how she put it to Riley.

  “What, you think I won’t let you drive it to T.J.Maxx?”

  He had not paid in full for the car. He had spent all his remaining Findlay money on it and gotten a loan on the spot for the rest, around fifteen thousand dollars. He knew he’d made a mistake but wouldn’t admit it. Grace was embarrassed for him. They’d become so unhappy, and the surface failures, small though they were, seemed rooted too deeply to express. Disappointment stuck in the back of their throats like pills swallowed sideways.

  He sold the Volvo to a pregnant graduate student from Lexington and put the thirteen hundred toward the auto loan. Now Grace would have to drive the Jaguar to Pitchfield. She parked it far from the strip-mall storefront, not wanting her coworkers to see.

  Not two weeks after Riley bought the car, Grace was driving home from work, doing a responsible fifty-five on the Dry Valley Parkway just after six o’clock, when she found herself seemingly suspended in air as she abruptly slowed to the speed of a bicycle. She shoved down the gas pedal and then yanked her foot right back, yelping, when she heard what sounded, impossibly, like an explosion. A wide white pickup rushed up on her from behind, horn screaming on the two-lane road, and Grace wrenched the steering wheel all the way t
o the right, drifting onto the shoulder like spreading molasses. The truck swerved into the oncoming lane, just missing her.

  She didn’t want to pop open the hood, because she knew a teenage girl alone on a country road at dusk with her hood up might attract uncharitable attention, to say the least. She locked the doors, smashed one of Riley’s hats over her hair, and sank down in her seat to call him. She watched the thick ribbons of smoke coming from the hood and prayed that this was not her fault.

  Riley got there forty minutes later with Alls, driving Greg’s car. It was pitch-dark already and freezing.

  “What happened?” Riley shouted.

  “Nothing!” she said. “I didn’t do anything! The engine light wasn’t on. Everything was fine!”

  “Jesus,” he said. “You didn’t even look at it?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m a girl.” This didn’t say at all what she’d meant. He snorted.

  Alls was not watching them. He already had the hood up. “You smell that?” he said. “Look at that hole, man. You don’t even want to know.”

  • • •

  The car had thrown a rod. There was a hole in the block. Grace didn’t know what any of this meant, but she could see the hole just fine. It was the size of a Coke can. Riley didn’t believe Alls, even when he showed him, but Alls said that fixing it was beyond him anyway.

  Pat, the mechanic the Grahams always went to, said they were looking at twenty-five hundred dollars minimum, and that was the friends-and-family price.

  Riley bent forward, his hands on his knees, groaning and laughing at the same time.

  “You still got the Volvo?” Pat asked.

  Grace shook her head. Riley shook his head too, but at his shoes.

  “Who’d you get this from, anyway?” Pat asked. “This comes when the oil ain’t getting changed.”

  They had the car towed home, where it sat in the driveway like a big dead bug. He agreed to sell it, but there were no takers. And now she had no way to get to T.J.Maxx. She and Riley had each gotten something they’d wished for.

  Shortly thereafter, Greg’s father cut him off. Grace learned that Mr. Kimbrough had made this threat at the beginning of the semester: Greg was ruining his chances of getting into any law school, and if he didn’t pull in a 3.0 that term, his parents would “withdraw their support.” Grace subsequently learned the extent to which the Graham and Kimbrough parents had subsidized the rent and utilities on Orange Street, where she, Riley, and Alls each paid only $150 a month. Greg had not believed his parents were serious.

  If those things had not happened just like that, right on top of each other, and if they had not all become so lost and unglued from their plans, they each might have struggled through. None of them could tell their families what had gone wrong. Their problems were all too juvenile, too embarrassing. Grace knew they had only themselves to blame—they had all been too comfortable in their seats. With the exception of Alls, whom she despised for different reasons, the boys had not realized how insulated they’d been by privilege. She too.

  18

  Research brought Grace her only satisfaction, and she could do it safely from their bedroom, avoiding Alls and also Greg, whose regular brattiness had curdled into unpredictable nastiness. He’d never been broke before. Riley wasn’t mean, only muddled. He’d thought his optimism was a quality of his person, not a consequence of his upbringing. Without it, he was lost even to himself.

  Three framed Audubon prints hung in the Wynne House, all of them songbirds, and so Grace made a careful table of Audubon values. Original paintings were of course the most valuable, then completed but unpainted drawings, then sketches, then limited-edition prints, and mass prints at the very bottom. Dr. Graham had a framed Audubon something—she wasn’t sure if it was a print or a poster—in his study, some pheasants and quail. She’d ask him about it; he would like that.

  She did hope, though she hated to admit it even to herself, that such research might help her spot treasures at yard sales and flea markets, like the people on Antiques Roadshow who found themselves millionaires after picking up a “pretty picture” for twenty dollars. Who didn’t hope that would happen to them? Instead, her research led her to an old news story about some college boys in Lexington who had stolen rare books and original Audubon sketches from their school library and attempted to fence them at Christie’s. She laughed, with both delight at their bravado and pity for their mistakes. If you were going to pull a stunt like that, you wouldn’t steal art. To steal anything one of a kind would be to steal a tracking device. And they’d Tasered the librarian. The thieves had been caught in a matter of weeks.

  The spoons she had rescued from the Upper East Side bachelorette estate—that was the kind of thing you should steal. They were rare enough to be worth something, but they would be easy to sell without raising any eyebrows. Without violence, resources, or experience, one could take only unguarded, underappreciated treasure. Silver. Small clocks. Prints that were signed but not numbered. One couldn’t steal them from a museum, with its deep records and security guards, or even a library. Not from someone’s house, where the missing family heirlooms would be wept over. Not from a store. You’d want to take them from somewhere like the Wynne House.

  She looked for the flaw in her logic. There had to be one; otherwise the historic houses all across the country would be treated like ATMs. But she couldn’t find the tangle. Her pulse quickened.

  Grace could probably get a job cleaning the place and slip one thing into her pocket at a time. But when something went missing, people always accused the cleaning woman or the poor kid. She could hardly see setting herself up as both.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Grace put on a flouncy skirt that had deep interior side pockets.

  If she met one of the same docents, she would just take the tour again, pretend it was for school, and go.

  She rode her bike there, propped it against a crabapple tree, and went up to the door. The old lady who opened it was a woman she recognized from the Grahams’ church. Grace didn’t know her name, and the woman didn’t recognize her.

  She followed the docent through the rooms, nodding and smiling, taking notes in her small field book. The library was easily the room most crowded with stuff. Returning to these rooms after she’d studied them in photographs was eerie, like going back to a place you had lived years ago. Everything looked both better and worse in three dimensions. On the desk sat a bronze inkwell in the shape of a lion. Grace imagined how it would feel in her pocket.

  The docent gestured outside toward the peony garden. “They bloom in May and June,” she said. “But it’s been a warm winter this year, and I’m just worried it’ll—” She then leaned forward, her nose almost touching the glass, and Grace’s right hand darted from her body to the bronze inkwell, which was far heavier than she’d expected it to be. The docent turned around and smiled. “Sorry, I thought I saw a rabbit. They do terrible damage to the little spring shoots, and sometimes right in the middle of the day. Just brazen!”

  The bronze was heavy on Grace’s thigh, and she worried it would drag down the waistline of her skirt. She still had her notebook in her left hand. She crossed one arm over the other and told the docent that the rabbits in her parents’ yard would practically eat out of your hand. Together, they shook their heads.

  Outside, Grace mounted her bicycle and positioned the pocket of her dress to hang between her thighs instead of on the outside, and she rode home slowly, the cold, heavy weight swinging beneath her, her ears pounding with the thrill of what she’d just done.

  Alls was home, eating cereal on the couch and watching a Seinfeld rerun.

  “Hey,” he said without looking up.

  “Hi,” Grace said, too brightly.

  “What you got there?” He nodded at one side of her skirt, which hung a good three inches lower than the other. Next time, she’d need a better receptacle. She took out the inkwell. She felt better than she had in months—good enough, ev
en, to look him in the eye.

  “I got it at Lamb’s,” she said. “Sixty percent off.” She set the inkwell down on the coffee table. The lion had an oversize head atop a tiny, cublike body on a square marble base. She lifted the lid, the top of the lion’s mane, and looked into the bottle. “See, that’s where you pour the ink.”

  “What ink?”

  “The ink,” she said. “I’ll have to put something else in it.”

  “Weed,” he said, chewing toward the TV screen. Whenever they found themselves alone together, he was resolutely stupid toward her.

  The inkwell was sitting on an open bill. Grace reached for it. “You’re never home right now,” she said. It was Alls’s car insurance bill.

  “I need another job,” he said.

  “Are they cutting down your hours? Is that why you’re home in the middle of the day?”

  He nodded. “I need eighteen hours a week, and I can only get twelve with my practice schedule. They pay me sixteen an hour, though, and I’m not going to do better than that around here.”

  “Do you have time for a second job?”

  “Fencing is thirty-six hours per week plus travel. Class is sixteen plus the actual work. It’s true that I’m sleeping a luxurious forty-two hours per week. Maybe there’s some fat to cut there.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Why don’t you just get a loan?” she asked him.

  “Never going to owe anybody anything,” he said.

  “But you can’t possibly—”