Art on Fire

by Hilary Sloin

  “I’ve read almost all of these books,” Lisa smiled at her, revealing a dimple in the center of her chin. Francesca noticed immediately that Lisa’s smile was the opposite of her sad, tense face, everything pointed up instead of down, emphasizing her finely etched eyes, the arc of her eyebrows, her long pale lips. “Which is your favorite?” Lisa asked.

  “My Side of the Mountain,” Francesca said at once.

  “Mine is The Phantom Tollbooth,” Lisa offered. “After I read it, I tried to drive through the bedroom wall in my wagon!”

  “You what?” shouted Isabella, appalled.

  Lisa sat beside Francesca on the bed. She measured the length of her own dangling legs against Francesca’s longer, thicker ones. “How come your room isn’t one color?” she asked Francesca, looking hard into her eyes.

  “Why, is yours?”

  “Mine? I don’t even have a room. I sleep in the living room.” She pointed to Isabella. “But she has a white room. Don’t you want a white room?”

  “Are you nuts?” whined Isabella, “She has no aesthetic sense. Let’s go.” Isabella hopped down the steps on one foot and out into the hallway. “Lee-sa,” she demanded.

  “I’d want a purple room,” Francesca said suddenly, imagining the whole oddly shaped room coated an inky purple; thick, porous paint on the rough walls and beams.

  “Me too!” Lisa bounced up and down on the bed. “How come Francesca doesn’t get a purple room?”

  “Because I’m a genius,” Isabella shouted.

  “Oh.” Lisa nodded, as if that explained it. She spanned the breadth of stars and orbs on the ceiling. “Is that the solar system?” she asked.

  Francesca nodded.

  “Do they glow?”

  “You have to hold a flashlight on them for a while before you go to sleep.”

  “Lee-sa. Mother made magic tuna fish,” whined Isabella.

  “I hate tuna fish,” Lisa whispered. She looked down at her feet in white, narrow tennis shoes and compared them to Francesca’s bare ones, ashen dirt darkening the creases. “Do you know how to play chess?” she asked.

  Francesca shook her head.

  “Too bad. I’m the national champion. Which means I’ve never been defeated. By a girl,” she added with obvious bitterness.

  Isabella climbed the steps and leaned into the room. “My mother slaved all morning over this tuna fish. This is not like a can of Bumblebee in a bowl with mayonnaise. It’s a secret family recipe.”

  “She’ll be right there,” Francesca said firmly.

  Lisa stood up and took a final whiff of the dusty room. She walked to the edge, where the floor dropped off into three steep steps. “Maybe I could teach you how to play chess,” she said.

  “Okay,” Francesca shrugged, as if it made no difference one way or the other.

  After the girls had eaten, Vivian scrubbed the insides of the kitchen drawers with Fantastik and a sponge. The silverware and utensils were laid out on the surface. Francesca entered, silent as a panther, took a sandwich from a plate on the counter, and sat down.

  “Mom,” she said. “Can I paint my room?”

  “Jesus!” Vivian dropped the plastic bottle, put her hand over her heart. “Francesca! You scared the hell out of me!” Her fingers were sweating inside flannel-lined rubber gloves. She turned and leaned her back against the counter, tossed her head to throw a strip of hair off her left eye. “Now what is it?”

  “I want to paint my room purple,” said Francesca, pressing the thin rubber flap of a spatula against her palm.

  “You do, do you? And I’d like to paint mine . . .” Vivian looked in the air and rolled her eyes extravagantly, “Oh, I don’t know . . . polka dots.”

  “Okay.” Francesca smiled.

  “Stop it, please. I’m busy. Why don’t you girls ever play outside?” She returned to her task, shaking her head.

  “I have an aesthetic sense too,” said Francesca, rather forcefully.

  “You have a what?”

  “At least, I’d like a purple bedspread. Isabella has a white bedspread.”

  “Listen, Sarah Heartburn, I let you put up that poster. And those little stars—”

  “The solar system,” said Francesca. “It’s a re-creation of the solar system. Done precisely to scale.”

  “And that’s very impressive. You did a good job with that. But I don’t want you to paint the room purple. It would ruin the wood. The thing—” Vivian scrubbed harder, the friction making a tiny, high-pitched sound, “—about painting raw wood, is that you can never go back.”

  “But I wouldn’t want to go back,” said Francesca.

  “Francesca, I appreciate your creativity. I really do. But some girls have nothing, you know. Look at that poor little Chinese girl,” she whispered, shooting her eyes toward the ceiling. “You could be her.”

  “Well, what about blue? Could I paint it blue?”

  “What sort of blue?”

  “Light blue. Cloud blue.”

  Vivian stopped cleaning for a moment. She recognized the opportunity for a compromise. She stared ahead, as if picturing it. “Oh,” she said. “I really need to think about it. I don’t like the idea of painting that room. What if we need to sell the house? What if all your father’s work dries up and we need to move into a tiny apartment in downtown New Haven? A mother worries about these things. It’s not your job to worry about them, but someone has to. I don’t think so, honey. Sorry.” She tipped her head and shrugged, then tore a fresh sheet of towel paper from the roll and spritzed some Fantastik into the potholder drawer.

  Francesca put the spatula down. She let her hands fall hard onto the table. “Forget it,” she said. She stood up and walked through the side door, slamming it behind her, out into the gray afternoon. Under the rhododendron bush she found a green tennis ball. She tossed it in the air, each time higher and higher, gazing up at Isabella’s window. When she tired of this, she began throwing it against the house, but no one noticed. Finally she threw the ball at her sister’s window and ran away, across the street and down the hill to her hut.

  After Vivian deposited the Chinese girl at her decrepit apartment building, she drove to Loehmann’s, where a sale on linens was in progress. She’d decided that purchasing a lavender bedspread for Francesca would satisfy both of them: Vivian could not stand unadulterated purple. But lavender—a more feminine, subtler hue—was still in the purple family, and so ought to mollify Francesca. After all, Vivian decided, this was less about color than it was about sibling rivalry. By procuring the bedspread, Vivian would acknowledge Francesca’s rightful place in the family and encourage her importance as a separate, autonomous being. Anyhow, this nonconformity was something she admired in each of her daughters—even if Francesca seemed to possess more oddness than talent.

  The bedspread would be a present, a gesture of affection, and it would honor what was, after all, a fair request. Isabella asked for and received multifarious white items as well as writing utensils and rare manuscripts about Anne Frank and other dead heroines. And Francesca asked for pretty much nothing. Plus, Vivian wanted to be a kind mother, to love both her daughters with the same force, even if that didn’t always come easy. She loved them, of course, and she told herself that she loved them equally. For example, she often imagined running into a burning building for Isabella (easy!) and for Francesca (of course!), knowing that, as their mother, her instinct to rescue them would prevail over any consideration of her self-preservation. But she knew whom she would rescue first. She could not escape the feeling that Isabella’s life was just the tiniest bit more valuable than Francesca’s, what with the certain contribution Isabella would make to scholarship, her quick wit, her worldly grace at such a tender age. She loved her daughters differently, rather the way a man loves his wife versus how he loves his mistress. Francesca received the wifely love—dutiful, steadfast, a bit stolid; but Isabella occupied Vivian’s thoughts with the force of a paramour, like Léon obsessed Emma in Madame Bovary.
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  She parked the Valiant in a space designated for the handicapped, crossed the lot, and stepped onto the rubber mats, forcing open the automatic glass doors. She’d worked in this store as a dressing-room clerk during high school, just after it became Loehmann’s and not whatever it had been before, something sprawling that sold lawn furniture and cheap housewares. Working at Loehmann’s had been her least favorite job. Worse than working without pay in her father’s auto parts store. Each time she’d enter the brightly lit, low-ceilinged dressing room, trying not to look at the women cramming their bodies into designer clothes, their skin reddened by triple-hook bras, highwaisted underwear and girdles, she’d feel sick with dread, as if she were witnessing her future. The cruel fluorescent lights accentuated every scar and wrinkle and birthmark, every roll of flesh and riverbed of stretchmarks. And the lack of privacy created an atmosphere of frenzy, the women hurrying to get the clothes off and on before anyone could take note of their imperfections.

  Vivian chose two clingy blouses to try on, both of them a happy and youthful size eight. She could not refrain from prancing back and forth across the wide room in her underpants and blouse, frowning in the wall-to-wall mirrors and tugging to no avail at a threadbare blanket of flesh across her middle.

  The dressing room clerk wore a Danskin top that accentuated—rather cheaply, Vivian thought—her eager, young nipples.

  “Nothing today,” Vivian handed her the blouses, then zigzagged through the busy aisles to Linens. She flipped through crunchy, plastic packages marked for clearance and squeezed into the formica bins until she—finally!—stumbled on an affordable lavender bedspread onto which were printed swollen heads of wisteria connected by leafless brown branches.

  On her way to the register she was distracted by a soft terrycloth robe, virgin white, wrapped around a mannequin. She pulled the price tag out from inside the sleeve and gasped, incredulous. The point, she rebuked herself, was to buy for Francesca. Isabella had not asked for a bathrobe.

  Vivian stopped the car just shy of the garage, beeped twice, then held down the horn until Francesca appeared in the doorway. “C’mere!” she called.

  Francesca skipped down the stoop, then hesitated when she reached bottom. She walked toward her mother slowly, then stopped and fingered her initials in the dirty hood.

  Vivian held out a shopping bag.

  “What is it?” Francesca asked, passing the parcel from hand to hand. She lifted it to her ear, then wrapped it into a tight package.

  “Surprise,” Vivian shrugged. “Go inside and open it. But wash your hands first.”

  After Francesca had gone, Vivian removed the other bag from the front seat and carried it by its sophisticated wire handles. She followed at a distance into the antiseptic kitchen, then put the second package on a kitchen chair and tucked the chair into the table. She took a new pack of Larks from the potholder drawer, slapped the top several times on the counter, expertly unraveled the plastic belt, opened the foil corner, and shook a cigarette from its tight space among the others in the dark, red pack.

  Francesca returned from the bathroom with moist hands. She never bothered drying them, something Vivian found crass and, inexplicably, unhygienic. But she wasn’t going to carp at Francesca now, when the point was to make her happy.

  Francesca unfolded the heavy bag, splitting her gaze between its contents and the handles of the other package, which peeked over the tabletop. She reached inside the bag and felt stiff plastic wrapped around a rectangular shape.

  “Jesus, Francesca, it’s not going to bite you,” said Vivian.

  Francesca pulled the bedspread out from its sleeve and looked at it. “But it’s not purple.”

  “It’s lavender,” said Vivian, prepared for Francesca’s lack of enthusiasm. “Unfold it.”

  Francesca shook open the big square of fabric, gritty as sugar. “I asked for a purple bedspread.”

  “Purple is not a suitable color for a bedspread, Francesca. Why don’t you give it a chance? Try it out on your bed and see how it looks. I think it’ll be lovely at night with all your glowing stars.” Vivian smiled eagerly.

  Francesca attempted to refold the bedspread into its original, impossible dimensions. She gave up and stuffed it into the bag. “What’s in that one?”

  “Never mind,” said Vivian. She rested her cigarette in the cradle of the ashtray and pulled a head of iceberg lettuce from the fridge. She tore off the cellophane. When next she looked up, Francesca was in the hall, clutching the wire handles of the fancy package. For a quick moment, their eyes met.

  “Francesca,” Vivian said. “I’m warning you. Put that down.”

  Two at a time, Francesca ran up the stairs, her ears hot as tiny burners. The door to the attic closed behind her, the latch clicked securely.

  Vivian followed. “I’ll count to three. One . . . Two . . .” She ran up the stairs and rapped on the attic door, then jiggled the latch up and down, kicking at the bottom panel of the door with the hard tip of her shoe. “Goddammit. Francesca, open the door.”

  Francesca held the gleaming robe high in front of her. It smelled clean, felt cool as fresh snow. This is how it would feel to be Isabella, she thought, imagining her mother spotting the robe, after she’d already purchased the bedspread on sale. The beautiful white robe off to the left, lit a clean blue by the filtered afternoon sun, draped over a stately mannequin.

  She pulled off her Captain Kangaroo sweatshirt and the blue T-shirt she wore underneath, dropped her rust-colored corduroys to the ground, yanking each leg free with the opposite foot, then removed her socks in the same fashion. She stood naked but for her white, cotton underpants dotted with generic pink flowers. Slowly, she pushed her right arm through the heavy, terrycloth sleeve, felt the soft fabric on her skin. She lifted the heavy collar to cover her neck, rolled the sleeves up an inch or so, and pulled the girth tight around her, wrapping the long belt twice, and double knotting it so no one could slip it off when she wasn’t looking. She felt like a movie star, like Rock Hudson or Gary Cooper.

  Splayed diagonally across the bed, her belly pressed into the bumpy blue blanket, a twinge shot through her groin. She pressed her hips into the mattress and felt the swells of her breasts against the padded springs. Her hands found the warmest spot between her thighs and settled there. “I’m a genius. I’m a genius,” she snickered.

  Chapter Three

  Lisa Sinsong visited Isabella again the following Saturday. The day was drizzling and chilly and, confined to the white room, a friendly game of chess between the two girls morphed into a marathon. Each time Lisa won, Isabella cleared the board and insisted on a rematch. “It doesn’t count,” she’d say, claiming her game had been compromised by a headache, the need to pee, or the rhythm of Francesca’s record player tapping at the ceiling.

  “Checkmate,” Lisa yawned after the fourth game, too bored to gloat.

  Isabella’s eyelids twitched above the desolate board. “I’m hungry,” she whined. She gathered all the tiny wooden men, dumped them into the storage compartment, and clapped the two sides of the board together. “How ’bout some Yodels and lemonade?”

  “Sure.”

  “Be right back.” Isabella lifted the chessboard by its wooden handle, slipped out of the room, and stampeded down the steps.

  Lisa lay back on the white bed, her stomach growling, and stared up at a brown water stain on the ceiling, the only imperfection in the white paint. She could hear Francesca’s record player, like rain on a tin roof.

  Quiet as mist, she stepped out of the room and walked down the hallway. She hooked her pinky around the “F” on the nameplate and pressed her ear to the door, inhaling the dusty insides.

  “Hello?” Lisa asked. The music stopped. “Hello?”

  Francesca opened the door. She towered over Lisa from the second step, fingering her puka shell choker.

  “Hi,” Lisa waved.

  “Hi.” Francesca peered into the hallway, expecting her sister to jump out from a
corner or behind a door.

  “Can I come in?” Lisa took a small, suggestive step forward.

  Francesca shrugged and climbed the steps backward, then moved aside and watched as Lisa’s white party socks came into view. “Aren’t you having a good time with my sister?”

  “Mostly we play chess.” Lisa shrugged and sat on the bed. “Over and over and over. It drives her crazy because she can’t beat me. Not to brag, but I am the National Champion. Anyhow, I’m exhausted.” She said this like an old lady, followed it with a grand yawn—her eyes filling with tears—then shook her head hard to finish it off. “What have you been doing?”

  “Reading a book.”

  Lisa nodded. “The encyclopedia?”

  “No. It’s about fish.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to ask for a fish tank for Christmas.”

  “That would look good up here.”

  “I want to put it right there, in the corner.” She pointed to an empty space, between her bookcase and the small window that faced the backyard.

  “I used to have a goldfish,” Lisa said. “But it died. Then I got another one. But it died, too. So I gave up.”

  “They always die.”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I like your name.”

  “Thanks.” Francesca stood against the desk, her feet crossed at the ankles. This was the moment she dreaded, the one where she could think of nothing to say. What did one do with a friend? “I built a hut,” she said suddenly.

  “A hut? You mean like what Indians lived in?”