by Hilary Sloin
Isabella was most perturbed by Robert Michaels.4 The others, it was apparent, were no match for her. But something about this boy: the way he took root with his thick arms and tree-stump legs, a mess of red hair atop his elongated head, his squinted eyes and freckled face. Sadistic, she thought. The kind of kid you hate just from looking at him.
“I’m going to high school next year,” he announced in a voice like onions hitting hot oil. “Are you?” He poked Lisa Sinsong, a small Chinese-American girl dressed in ill-fitting black pants and a white turtleneck. She shook her head and glanced at her father.
“Me neither,” said Isabella who had the loudest voice and took up more space in every way. She put her hands on her hips and stared him down. “You’re uglier, Sluggo,” she said.
“Isabella!” scolded Vivian.
“Oh please.” Mrs. Michaels pressed Vivian’s knee. “He’s a handful. Besides, if we were responsible for everything these little ones said, well . . .” She stopped, the rest being obvious.
After dinner, fortified by two pieces of lasagna and a generous scoop of chocolate ice cream, Isabella waited until the mothers had finished clearing the table and spread out beside the fathers on the sectional sofa. She dragged a small end table into the center of the room, put her Panasonic tape recorder on the floor beside her, took a deep breath, and climbed onto the table, waiting for everyone’s full attention. Vivian stood behind Alfonse, squeezing his shoulders.
“I,” Isabella spoke at a slight downward angle to reach the microphone, “am Anne Frank. I was born in Germany, but my family migrated to Amsterdam during the Nazi regime. After a small, brief period of living like a girl, i.e., being an exceptionally bright student and having boys fall in love with me everywhere I went, my family was forced to live in the small annex of a factory building. An attic, really. For those of you who don’t know your German Fascist history, I’ll make it simple: the Nazis were scary blond-haired, blue-eyed men who busted down the doors of people they felt were inferior, which was basically everyone who wasn’t German—particularly Jews and homosexuals—poked guns in the chests of terrified individuals just going about their daily business, and said—” (here she shoved her index finger hard at Robert Michaels) “COME VID US OR DIE.”
The performance continued, a tossed salad of fact and fiction, until Isabella reached the arrival of “Mr. Dussel,” with whom Anne was forced to share a small room. “All night long, like a train in my head, I heard this terrible, nasty man breathing as if through a kazoo, in and out, the snoring loud enough to knock me out of my bed.
“Then, of course, there were the other times, when I would be awakened by some odd groaning and I’d turn to see him, covers rolled down, wearing just his underclothes, pleasuring himself.”
“Isabella!” Vivian shouted.
Quickly, Isabella continued. “But the most devastating consequence of being trapped in the attic was the isolation. Being a small girl, an adolescent girl who is not even allowed to step out into the world, to have normal adolescent girl experiences, who day after day, month after month, is trapped in a tiny little room while before her the world changes and people fall in love and die and do their laundry and cook dinner together and go to amusement parks and take the golden retriever out for a walk and listen to the Beatles sing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and rake their leaves before the first snowfall . . .”
Alfonse had stopped paying attention. This is the fascination with Anne Frank, he thought. She is trying to tell us that she is unhappy. That she wants to be normal.
“. . . and try out for cheerleading and smoke cigarettes and kiss boys—well she did kiss Peter, and actually did more than that! But it wasn’t as if she got to choose whom she kissed; for chrissakes, he was the only boy she’d ever meet for the rest of her life!”
Vivian clapped urgently; the others followed suit. Isabella glared at her mother, bowed once, and hopped down from the table.
I have failed both my daughters, Alfonse thought.
“Very impressive,” said Robert Michaels’ father.
Robert Michaels was tired of everything about Isabella. He leaned over toward Lisa Sinsong. “Your mother killed herself,” he whispered.
“So,” said Lisa.
Isabella overheard and stepped closer to where they stood by the breakfront. “What did he say?” she asked Lisa.
Lisa gazed at Isabella with shiny brown eyes. “My mother killed herself. Big deal.”
Isabella tucked a strand of hair behind Lisa’s ear and whispered “Come up to my room.” She turned to her parents. “We’re going upstairs for a few minutes. I’m going to show Lisa my room.”
“What about the others?” Vivian pursed her lips and opened her eyes wide, demonstrating her disapproval. “That’s not nice.” She mouthed the words so only Isabella could see them.
“I’ll show them later,” Isabella flashed a phony smile to the other guests and ran up the stairs. Lisa followed behind, glancing back at her father as he faded behind the wedged wall of the staircase.
Lisa stepped into the center of Isabella’s room and rotated slowly, taking in the white bed, white walls, white curtains. Every single thing in the room was white. Even the stuffed animals, yellowing from age, had once been white. “How come there are no colors?” she asked.
“Nice, right?”
“I guess. It’s clean,” she said politely.
“Exactly. Nothing interferes,” Isabella pointed to her head. “Sit down, take a load off.” She plopped heavily onto the mattress, the springs rocking and creaking beneath her. Lisa perched at the foot of the bed and dangled her thin legs over the edge.
“How did she do it?” Isabella asked, shifting closer and mimicking Lisa’s delicate movements.
“Jumped off a building.” Lisa stared at the white wall, her face stripped of expression.
Isabella pictured it: a small Chinese woman falling from a building. Lisa Sinsong, only larger. With glasses. A pocketbook. Wearing a ladies’ coat. Camel color, the skirts of it flying up over her head as she cut through the air, buttons popping off, panels busting open. Flapping her coat like wings, soaring over the tops of buildings until, without warning, she began to drop, down, down, down, then crashed into a parking lot.
“How come she did that?” Isabella blinked from having seen it all. So vivid.
“She was depressed,” replied Lisa for the ten-thousandth time. She hopped off the bed and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. Isabella sat calmly, waiting for Lisa to return. Instead, she heard a brisk knock and the voice of her mother, ordering her back to the party.
Woman and Stool, 1988
In what is perhaps Francesca deSilva’s most revered painting, Woman and Stool, the artist depicts her mother, Vivian DeSilva, a formidable, unflappable figure, seated precariously on a spindly barstool, clad in a high-collared, pressed, navy-blue dress, with a thick belt around her small waist. Her form is pressed so far to the back of the canvas as to be quite small in relation to the slick, orange floor upon which the stool rests. The subject squints against an intense brightness, as if outside a meteor had moments ago exploded or a mushroom bomb made contact with the earth’s floor. Such strange, unearthly incandescence is a signature of deSilva’s work: “Her subjects seem, collectively, to struggle against an unidentified, intrusive light.”5
The painting is four feet tall by three feet wide, vast and stark. Excepting the shiny, papaya-colored floor and the chalky yellow walls, there are only five disparate images: the woman; the stool; a prominent white door in the left hand corner of the room; a child’s book, My Side of the Mountain, strewn on the immaculate floor (so incongruous is this object, it appears to be an oversight, as if, having forgotten to put the book away before beginning to paint, the artist simply decided to leave it in); and a small, framed photograph of a young girl with cascading brown curls, thought to represent Francesca’s older sister, Isabella, to whom the mother was deeply, some have said psychotically, devoted.
Lucinda Dialo, in her book Women Paint!, describes deSilva’s portraits as deeply psychological in their “depictions of individuals trapped inside distorted realities.”6 Dialo says of Woman and Stool, “deSilva has undertaken and succeeded at the ultimate task of the disenfranchised artist: to forgive the source of her suffering—in this case, the mother—by immortalizing her, infusing her portrait with compassion and objectivity.”7
Chapter Two
Lacking specifics, Isabella fashioned her own history of Mrs. Sinsong and how she came to take her life: Before plummeting through the air at 90 mph and crashing into a construction scaffolding, Mrs. Sinsong had been employed by the Little Maiden Bra Company, a sweatshop on 34th Street that sprawled over three levels of a factory building with warped floors and windows that could not be opened. The monotonous job of sewing hooks on the backs of bras had left her brain stiff as dried-up putty. She’d resorted to reciting old recipes to hone her mnemonic skills. The rare highlight of her ten-hour workday was when, instead of the usual box of nude bras with lace around the edges, an unexpected carton of black or, best of all, hot pink ones squeaked past her station.
For her lunch breaks Mrs. Sinsong walked up 7th Avenue to 36th Street, bought a falafel and a Sprite from the Arab on the corner, and sat on the steps of a vocational high school to eat. Each day at 12:28 she returned to the dark factory building with its green linoleum floors, and popped a mint into her mouth. She stepped inside the elevator car and gazed at the metal doors, then pressed the number three. Her body disappeared as the car ascended the narrow canal at the building’s core.
It was an intervention of fate perhaps, or some unconscious act of will, that caused her finger to slip one rainy April day and land on the number 13, the only button on the panel that still lit up. At once the doors crashed shut, the cage hopped in the air, rushing by the first 12 floors as if there were not a moment to spare, then landed quiet as a spaceship, bounced a moment, and came to rest.
Mrs. Sinsong stepped out. Cool air roused her skin. Below her the city was a speedy, gritty haze. Below her, freedom rushed and honked and picked the pockets of disoriented foreigners. She walked to the tarred ledge of the roof and peered down into the busy office of a publishing company on the other side of the street, then farther down at tiny people busy with lunch hour destinations. Everyone is so busy, thought Mrs. Sinsong. But where is there to go?
Then she threw herself from the building. The End.8
Still, Isabella longed to ask many questions. Prurient, inappropriate questions that she knew to keep locked inside her mouth. She was infinitely intrigued by Lisa’s vast, impossible tragedy, her quiet, perfected indifference. She neglected Anne Frank, instead pored over Vivian’s shelves of shiny paperbacks on raising a gifted child, finding particular solace in a chapter entitled “Is There No One Like Me in the World?”9 Here, the author suggested that any difficulty a genius child might have in finding suitable companionship—no matter how enduring—was appropriate. She shared this passage with her parents, pointing emphatically as she read aloud: When the intense, passionate genius child finally makes a friend, the parents must not interfere.
“In other words,” she said, gleefully, “Butt out!”
Vivian could not understand what it was about this small, plain child that so captivated Isabella. It occurred to her that it might have something to do with the mother’s unfortunate demise, but she couldn’t bear the idea that Isabella’s preoccupation with dead women would go so far as that. “Why that girl? Why not the little Cohen girl?” she asked Isabella. “She seemed like a lot of fun.”
She felt, for the first time, unnecessary. It was one thing for Isabella to be obsessed by Anne Frank, who was rendered harmless by extinction, but quite another to see Isabella so enraptured by a live person. Isabella seemed less interested in sharing the riches of her genius with her old mom. She came downstairs only to grab a Hostess snowball or Ring Ding and to exchange one volume of psychobabble for another. Vivian walked around all the time feeling as though she might cry, that the least little complication—a flaccid head of lettuce in the refrigerator, a knocking noise in the car’s engine—could reduce her to a blubbering mass.
Lisa Sinsong was scheduled to visit on a Saturday afternoon. That morning, Isabella sprung from bed while it was still dark outside. She ran her hand along everything she passed—countertops, banister, coats—her fingertips tingling for no good reason.
Vivian prepared magic tunafish for lunch. Isabella divided her surveillance between her mother and the sluggish minute hand on the kitchen clock. “Come on already . . .” she muttered, snatching a celery stick. She took a bite and put it back. Finally, the doorbell rang! She smoothed the front of her white sweater and skated in socked feet to the foyer, her happiness so huge, she wished she could scream or bite down very hard on something. She threw open the large door and pulled Lisa inside, helped shake off her small, pink peacoat.
“Come on.” Breathless, she pulled Lisa up the stairs.
Isabella had melted the bottoms of several birthday candles and stuck them to a plate. She lit them now in a solemn ceremony. She produced a thick bar of white chocolate from her nightstand and undressed it slowly, peeling off the wrapper as if she were changing a baby, then snapping off a triangular slab with the tips of her teeth. She offered the piece to Lisa, then sucked avidly on a larger shard, studying Lisa’s metal black hair, powdery cheeks, widely spaced eyes, her delicate, stick figure frame, the slivers of bones threatening to tear through the light cloak of skin.
“I thought Americans don’t stare,” Lisa said.
“Who told you that?”
“My father,” Lisa replied, suspecting he’d once again given her bad information.
“It’s not true. But, anyhow, I wasn’t staring. I was looking at you. Because you’re pretty.”
“Oh. Thanks.” She forced a smile.
They sat facing the same wall, legs swinging. The digital clock flipped its number once, then again. The chocolate was gone. Isabella swallowed loud as a drain sucking down the last of the bathwater. She could think of nothing to say, no acceptable questions to ask; she wasn’t in her usual, inferior company, so she knew better than to brag. And she’d promised herself that Lisa’s mother was off-limits.
“What’s that?” Lisa tilted her head toward the ceiling, listening.
“What? That?” The tiny, muted rhythm of Francesca’s record player ticked through the plaster ceiling. “That’s my sister.” Isabella rolled her eyes. “She lives in the attic.”
“Why?” Lisa looked up.
“Because she likes it. She could have had this room—I wouldn’t have minded living up there, though in the end I’m glad to be here. It would have been hard to make that room white.”
“I’ve never been in an attic before.” Lisa cocked her head, angled her chin upward.
“You want to go up there?” Isabella considered it. She was running out of polite things to say. And after spending a few minutes with her sister, Lisa would surely be anxious to return to the white room. “Okay, sure. If you want. But I’m warning you, she’s a real weirdo.” She led them out into the hallway, dragging her hand along the bumpy flowered wallpaper, then knocked politely on the attic door.
“I knew it was the Beatles!” Lisa leaned closer to the door. She examined the yellow lucite Francesca in cursive writing, tacked to the wide-planks with two fat-headed nails.
Isabella pounded. “Helloooooo!”
Finally, Francesca opened the door. Behind her a smoky light, thick with the aura of afternoon rain, shrouded the pointed room, darkening the edges of her tall form. She hovered at the top of the three steps, arms folded across her chest. Her bell-bottoms fanned out over her dirty, bare feet. She looked past her sister into Lisa’s dark eyes.
“What,” she said.
“This is Lisa. She wanted to see the attic,” Isabella said.
Lisa waved tentatively. She peered over Francesca’s shoulder into
the attic, smelled the dark, damp wood, noted the sloped ceilings and exposed beams covered with tiny, glow-in-the-dark stars arranged in perfect imitation of the solar system.
“Can we come in?” Isabella asked sweetly.
Francesca shrugged and stepped out of the way.
“Lisa’s mother committed suicide,” Isabella whispered as they entered, as if this somehow explained their arrival.
“Just now?” Francesca asked.
“Four months ago,” said Lisa. Her eyes dusted the hodgepodge of objects: the soiled, yellow beanbag chair; frayed curtains with little puffballs hanging from strands of white yarn along the hem; the sunken double bed on a gray metal frame; a yellow nightstand, its surface captured beneath the ceramic base of a huge lamp. A folded metal chair was pushed into a metal desk and tucked into a corner. There was a pile of wire-rimmed sketchpads on the desk, several pencils, and one of those gummy erasers Francesca had molded into a dog. At least, Lisa thought it was a dog.
Lisa scanned the worn books that were piled willy-nilly in the small black bookcase: The Phantom Tollbooth, My Darling My Hamburger, The Pigman, the entire Nancy Drew series. An incomplete set of the World Book Encyclopedia from 1962 lined the bottom shelf. My Side of the Mountain was placed, reverently, on top of the bookcase.
“Is the anatomy page still in there?” Lisa jutted her chin toward the encyclopedia.
“Yup,” Francesca said. “That’s my favorite page.”
“Mine, too!” Lisa cried out unexpectedly.
“Mine, too,” Isabella blurted, though she’d never seen the anatomy page.
Francesca knew much of the encyclopedia by heart. Every paragraph of information had been reviewed, until she’d carpeted her head with facts, just to have them there, to fill the space. She loved knowing things, even things of no consequence. She’d committed to memory, for example, all the lyrics to “I am the Walrus,” even the goo goos, and how many there were before the joo joos came in. She knew that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD and that LSD stood for lysergic acid diethylamide and that it could alter the entire world and make it seem, suddenly, interesting. And she knew entire paragraphs from My Side of the Mountain, Squanto: Friend to the Pilgrims, and Miracle Worker. Anything that moved her, she attempted to memorize.