by Tara Ison
“Sort of hard to imagine that.” She waved her hand in front of her face to indicate heat.
“Ah, this is too spicy for you, this food?” he inquired.
“No no, it’s great.”
“It is hot now, but then unexpectedly will be very cold. Bernadette helps me with the house every year, now. I am too old to do this all alone.”
“Oh, you’re not old, Avery.” She guessed he wanted her to say that.
“I am sixty-four!” he announced. “Bernadette and I are married forty-two years.”
“Congratulations.” She toasted him with the last of her beer. She got up, looked again in the refrigerator, although she knew it was no use.
“Tell me, you are seeing Pearl at Emily’s? Her hip is better now?” he asked. Yes, she told him, Nana’s hip is good, much better. And yes, Nana will be coming home next week. Very soon. Just a few days. Coming back to Rockaway, back to her own house. Sarah looked over Avery’s bald head, at the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall, a giveaway from the pharmacy on 116th Street. It still showed August—a picture of a robust, cheery octogenarian in a deck chair, holding a kitten and a bottle of Centrum Silver—but no, Sarah remembered, it was actually September. September 5th. Almost fall.
“Well, that is good, Pearl coming home. I am missing her.”
“Yeah, Nana’s great.”
“A wonderful woman.”
“She’s so sweet, letting me stay here all this time.”
“And her return is good for you as well, then! You will be going home, too!” he declared. “You must miss your own home, with your family. Eat more, the spicy food is good in this heat.”
He reached to spoon out more curry, but she got up again, hastily, almost knocking over the rickety little table, and told him she was full, thanks, the trip back from Connecticut was really tiring, a train, a subway, a bus, all just to get home, or get here, a long day, sorry, she really just needed to go to bed. Looking in cabinets as she said it, searching, There’s something, she thought, thank God. She said good night to Avery; he shrugged, and pleasantly, silently nodded good night. She dropped her beer bottles in the trashcan, stood awkwardly until he moved his dishes to the sink, his back to her, then, reaching into the cabinet, grabbed the dusty, unopened bottle of cooking sherry. As she left, suitcase in one hand, sherry in the other, she saw Avery lean to reach into the trashcan; he removed her bottles and dropped them into the glass-recycling bag with a dull double-clink. She saw him retrieve out the photo album, and open it again on the empty TV table. He started right back at the beginning wedding photo, turning and smoothing the pages very slowly. The cellophane crackled after her up the stairs.
STILL IN HER sleep T-shirt, she makes herself coffee with the last of an expensive bag of beans. She counts them out into the grinder. Twenty-nine beans. She can’t believe it takes twenty-nine beans just to make one cup of coffee. It seems excessive, wasteful. She finds rye bread dusted with hoarfrost in the freezer, but there is no milk. The butter she’d left in its dish on the counter has gone rancid in the heat. She will have to go shopping, ride the pink bicycle into town. Maybe stop at the bakery for a fresh seeded rye. Or a challah. No, wait, it’s Saturday, they’ll be closed. Should’ve brought a loaf of zucchini bread back from Emily’s. The thought of going anywhere, doing anything, of pedaling thirty torrid blocks just to buy food, exhausts her. And what’s the point, you’re leaving soon, why spend the money, why bother stocking up on food? She inspects the refrigerator again, wishing she’d saved one of the Heinekens. She breaks off a slice of frozen rye bread and gnaws at it, presses it against her overhot cheek.
The house is very still. Avery, he’s working at the dime store, she thinks. She looks out the kitchen window, toward the ocean, sipping her coffee. Bitter. Probably that weird tap water here, all those minerals, God knows what’s in it. She brushes a caraway seed from her chin. Maybe go for a long walk if it cools off later, if the beach isn’t too crowded. Maybe even go swimming, if the jellyfish aren’t bad. You can’t leave here without even once going in the ocean, how crazy would that be? What a waste. Nana’s coming back soon, you’ll have to leave soon. Go home. Go somewhere. Tick tick tick. It’s so hot, the air so airless and flat. Why didn’t Avery ever install a ceiling fan in here? She could call Emily, see how they’re all getting along. How the baby’s doing. If they’ve planned for his Bar Mitzvah yet, if they’ve started his college fund. She could unpack, do laundry. Then start repacking. She spots the wall calendar again, August still hanging. She tears off the old month, crumples up the page, and tosses it in the bag of paper recycling. There, September, 2001. A photo of a trim, business-suited mother doling out One-A-Day Vitamins to her orange-juice-sipping children. You have been here almost four months. The clamshell she found on the beach her first day is still on the kitchen sink, now cradling a dirty-looking, flesh-colored sponge.
She returns to her room with her coffee, brims the cup full from the bottle of cooking sherry. She changes into shorts and a bikini top. She brushes sandy grit from her feet—I’ve always been so careful, she thinks, how does all this sand still get in here?—puts on a pair of sandals. Not too many days left, for walking on the beach, for swimming. You should do that, take full advantage of your last days here. You should call your parents so they know you’re alive, so they’re not hysterical. You should call the gallery woman, give her an update. Tell her how well things are coming together. How focused and expressive and defined you and your work are, now. How interesting. Maybe ask for more time. Maybe she’ll give you more time.
She gathers and stuffs a load of berry-stained clothing into Nana’s relic of a washing machine. Why bother doing laundry, she thinks, you’re leaving soon, Nana’s coming back in a few days, she’ll want her house back, she’ll kick you out. You’ll have to go, have to go somewhere.
She sips her coffee-sherry, washes the Connecticut vegetables in the cloudy, lukewarm kitchen faucet water, contemplates making bruschetta. Shouldn’t waste all that fresh basil. Can’t blame Nana, it’s her house. You should call United, schedule a flight home. Why didn’t you do that earlier, it’s going to cost a fortune to book a flight this late, and you’re almost out of money, anyway. Your parents’ll be so happy, you’ll stay with them, of course. There’s nowhere else to go. Just for a little while. Then you’ll get your things out of storage, get a new place to live, get a new job. Start over, all over.
She leans against the kitchen counter, feeling breathless. You can balance their checkbook, change the smoke detectors, all watch TV together. Make up for lost quality time. The least you can do for them. Make them happy. She pictures them at the dining room table, the three of them, eating a heart-friendly casserole. Many, many casseroles. She will cook them casseroles every night, night after night. She will live in her old room, her little-girl room, sleep in her girlish twin bed. You should start packing everything up. All your things, get all those blank canvases to UPS, the unused tubes of paint, send it all home. She hears the house phone ring—There they are, waiting for me, she thinks, they are sitting there hungry and nervous and waiting, I’ll call them later, later, there’s still time—and hurries outside.
It’s already searingly, blindingly, headache-inducing bright; families in bathing suits are already trudging past the house with coolers and folded lounge chairs, noses creamed white with zinc oxide, heading for the beach. Kids clutching plastic buckets and shovels, dragging their garish beach towels in the road. September, fall is coming, is here, enjoy what’s left of your summer, kids. She wonders if they would let her build a sand castle with them, collect whatever broken shells are left.
Down at the intersection of her street with the boulevard she sees other families walking on their way to the synagogue at 135th Street, the men in their heavy black suits, the women wearing flowered pastel dresses, nylons and pumps, and summer straw hats. Strolling on shabbes. How can they dress up like that in this heat? she muses. Nylons, probably wearing slips, too, under those
long dresses, oh God. She tries to imagine the life of these people living here forever, trapped in Rockaway, for twenty-five years in a creaky, warping house on the beach, the consuming roots of it, the loud neighbors, the deadening fray of children, hurrying for challah on Fridays and steaming in synagogue on Saturdays, the boggy sponge of time rising up slowly, slowly over their heads. Like quicksand. Like compost. She wonders why they aren’t all gasping for air.
She wishes she were still in Connecticut, tweezing ticks off the dog, knitting baby-sized thousand-dollar sweaters, making a lifetime of pesto for Emily’s family, an outline of her life traced onto theirs and leaving her to live in all that clean, empty space in the middle.
She wishes she were in Russia, France, Spain, wandering around and studying other dead people’s garishly framed paintings, sweating in sex with revolving, negligible men, all of her lightweight unrooted life packed neatly, disposably, maplessly, in one tote bag, one nylon knapsack.
She wishes she were in Cuba with Julius, sipping a seventeen-dollar banana daiquiri at Hemingway’s favorite Havana bar. She’d be sweet and fresh as mint, wearing an oyster-colored linen dress, sipping her drink, cool and dewy, Julius whipping out a credit card, ordering cracked crab on ice, more drinks, everything done and decided for her, the whole world focused down to that sustained moment, and she could live there, in that endless moment, forever.
Maybe maybe that little-girl bed, yes, maybe she can crawl back between those smooth blank sheets, back under the coverlet and stay there, go back to sleep, go back. What did that coverlet look like? She tries to remember the bedspread, the one she slept under all those childhood years, ate all those paper-plate dinners on top of, but suddenly can’t. Was it flowered, embroidered, eyelet? She can’t even remember the color, but it’s there, waiting for her, it must be. She can’t remember the smell of the room: plastic purses and jewelry, licorice candy, fruity adolescent make-up, waxy crayons, acrylic paints? She can’t summon up any of it, as if it’s been erased, scraped from her mind with a palette knife, scumbled over with a thick layer of titanium lead white. She wishes she could vanish entirely now, too, like in a cartoon where the disappearing thing takes its black hole with it.
A kid zooms past her on a beribboned Schwinn—Hey, watch out, lady!—startling her up onto the curb. She peers down the street one last time, looking. She goes back into the house.
“GOOD MORNING, Medical Office.”
“Hi, it’s Sarah Rosenfeld? I’m a patient of Dr. Brandon’s? I wanted to leave a message for her?”
“Oh hi, Sarah. Hold on a sec, she’s in today, I can get her for you . . .”
“Oh, okay. Thanks.” Sarah waits. It’s even hotter upstairs, here in her room. She takes a warm sticky swig from the sherry bottle, looks out the huge picture windows, at the florid color plates she ripped from her shell book and scotch-taped over the faces of Nana’s family, at the shells still laid out on the dresser like flatware, at her wood case of fat paint tubes, her abandoned canvases and color-gobbed palette. Her palette knife. Her one begun painting, ivory and iron oxide black, still propped up on the easel, waiting.
These are timid choices, Sarah, her professor had said. Barely choices at all . . .
“Hello, Sarah?”
“Hi, yeah, Dr. Brandon. I didn’t think you’d be there.”
“I’ve got office hours on Saturday mornings now.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Sarah says. “You shouldn’t work on Saturday.”
“Just until noon. Everything okay?”
The smell of her oil paints is getting to her. Queasy stomach. Dull pain at the back of her head, just inside her skull, tapping to get out. She gulps sherry.
“Sarah?”
“Oh, yes, I’m fine, it’s just, I’m out of town, I’m away on sort of a retreat, you know, I’m a painter and . . .” She tries to steady her voice, stay focused, “. . . and anyway, I brought four months of Ortho-Novum with me, because that’s how long I thought I’d be away working here, getting ready for this big exhibit? But I’m thinking about staying away longer? Not coming home yet? I’m just thinking maybe. I’m just trying to figure out my plans.”
“No problem, I’ll put Bonnie back on, just give her the number of a pharmacy wherever you are, she’ll call it in.”
“Okay. Uh . . .”
“Anything else?” Dr. Brandon sounds pleasant, as always, preoccupied, unconcerned.
“Yeah, I just . . .” She swallows again from the sherry bottle, sets it carefully on the floor. “Well, we talked once about if I ever wanted to have kids, remember? And I said no, I didn’t, but you said if I ever did it wouldn’t be any problem for me? Remember?” She wanders closer to her easel, stumbles, grips the wooden frame. She tries to steady herself.
“That was a while back, but . . .” Sarah hears papers shuffling. “Hey, did you get married, Sarah?”
She thinks she hears Dr. Brandon smile, happiness for her in her voice. “Oh, no, nothing like that,” she says, quickly. “I’m not getting married, or anything.” She makes ha ha noises into the phone. “I’ve just been thinking. You know, you have a kid, that’s really what your whole life becomes all about. Feeding the baby, taking care of the baby. Being totally focused for years and years on this other little person you’ve created. Serious, important cycle-of-life stuff, right?”
“Sure, yeah. Well, let’s see, you’re how old now?”
“Almost thirty-five.”
“Well, let’s not worry yet. Just go off the Ortho-Novum and try for a few months. Let’s see what happens.”
“Well, no, I don’t want to try.” She leans, peers at her canvas, her little shell.
“You don’t?”
“I just want to know what my options are. If it’s an option, still. Like, yes or no. So I know.”
“I can’t really tell you that, at this point.”
“Yeah, but that’s what I’m trying to figure out. If I just waited and stalled and did nothing for too long, and now it’s too late . . .”
You’re too frightened of color. You’re too dependent on a monochromatic palette.
“. . . and now it’s all over and decided for me. If it’s that black and white.”
You think it’s safe, staying there, don’t you? You think it’s bold.
“Or if, you know, if I still get to choose my colors.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like crayons in the box, remember that? When you were a kid?”
“Oh, right.”
“You’d open the box and all that color’s waiting for you. It’s like a thousand pointy little rainbows in there. You know you can draw anything. You can draw the whole world. You want to grab every one of them and start scribbling.” She laughs again, a little. “I probably sound so painterly, right? So, whoa, crazy artist, here!” She feels dizzy, closes her eyes, tries to breathe deep. “I’m sorry, Dr. Brandon, what did you say?”
“I said, why don’t you come see me when you’re back in town? We can run some tests.”
“Tests?”
“But it’s too soon to worry about anything. So, don’t worry. Okay?”
“I’m not worried,” she says. Of course, she thinks, this woman is a scientist, not an artist, how can she possibly understand? She’s been feeling my ovaries, groping my insides, for fifteen years, and thinks she knows me, thinks that’s an answer. Don’t worry. Sure, just don’t worry . . .
“Sarah?” She hears impatience in Dr. Brandon’s voice. You shouldn’t be bothering her, she has important scientist things to do.
“Yeah, okay.” She reaches, touches her abandoned palette. The blots of dried color feel like plastic. Aureolin yellow, rose dore madder, dioxazine purple, viridian, pthalo blue, all a waste. “Whatever. I’ll just call you when I get home. Thanks, really. Bye.” She hangs up. She is so thirsty, thick-tongued, where did she leave the sherry bottle? So expensive, these paints. Old Holland Series VI, a hundred and sixty-five dollars a tube. When she bought them for
herself she’d pictured old men grinding away at the madder by hand, dribbling in the linseed oil on a marble porphyry table, painstakingly filling the tubes just for her, for all her important work. She’d thought it was worth it at the time. Their purity, their intensity is what makes them valuable, gives them such strength. Those thick tubes in her wooden case could’ve gone far, lived a long, long time. Created so much. She feels pain at wasting them; she feels guilt that she left them all to linger in this heat and dry up and die. She closes her eyes, feels her professor wrench the brush from her hand,
I don’t care if it works or not, if it clashes. Get your hands dirty, Sarah. Mess it up. That’s what’s bold.
She sees him violently squeezing tubes, smearing her canvas,
Otherwise you’ll never have any depth. You’ll have no true perspective. No harmony. You’ll have nowhere to go.
She hears her phone ring. Twice, three times. She needs a drink, needs to drink some water. That’s what you need, a glass of fizzy, cloudy water. She realizes she has clenched her fists, feels her fingernails digging in her palms, makes herself stop. She flexes her sweaty hands. She feels the sour heat of a headache. It’s fall, summer is over, why is it still so hot? She feels her blood is bubbling, in a simmer. Her mouth is dry. She opens her eyes, sees the bottle of sherry on the floor, grabs, takes a final swig. The last drops are horribly warm and syrup-sweet in her mouth. She needs some water.
The phone rings again, the house phone this time. She wishes it would stop.
She picks up her palette knife, crusted with dead red paint. Crimson, scarlet, burgundy, cerise. She grips the smooth wooden handle. She touches, presses the blade to the tips of her fingers, a dull blade, not meant to cut, but its edge is steadying. She presses harder and looks at her painting on its easel, the insignificant little shell. Nothing but some charcoal scratches, a few sad ivory and bone black dabs. No harmony, no depth. She scrapes the corner of the knife along her inner arm, where the skin is so pliant, so fragile and thin. She admires the faint white skin-scrapes, like foreign-language letters, faded skywriting, cuneiform, hieroglyphics on papyrus. An indecipherable message, a hidden wisdom. She pushes the tip against her wrist, senses the pulse there, ticking. She angles the blade, scrapes the full length of her arm, stretching skin. She’d stretched all her canvases so carefully before leaving for Rockaway, scraping her elbows and knees by crawling around the harsh cloth on all fours, using the frame and stretcher she’d built herself to make all those perfect, hopeful, stretched-taut squares. She glances at all those canvases, pushed into a stack in the corner of the room. Their backs are to her, now, rejecting her. Only the one canvas on her easel, her one painting. Insignificant little empty shell.