by Hilary Sloin
Then, late one afternoon, she awoke from a long nap to the first dusting of snow. She stretched her body so tall that her feet hung over the edge of the top bunk. Her eyes spanned the circumference of the room, as if seeing its contents for the first time. There were clothes piled on a chair in the corner. The stove was ticking rapidly, sending waves of heat in all directions. Her paintings waited like patient lovers, untouched for weeks. The cabin was oddly clean, the floors swept, the dishes put away, ashtrays emptied. Obviously, amid her stupor of grief and isolation, she’d managed to tidy up, though she remembered none of it. The only thing she recalled was endless, pervasive sadness and the interior of Lisa’s car.
Francesca sat up and pressed down on her stomach, trying to quell a sick feeling of hunger. She spotted a Snickers bar in a basket, on top of the chest where she kept her clothes, and hopped down from the bed, tore off the wrapper, and began to eat. Within moments, she was chewing with abandon, making espresso on the stove, rigging up her favorite Laura Nyro song, “Brown Earth,” on the cassette player. Then, as she waited for the coffee to spit and cough and threaten to pour in a frenzy over the sides of the espresso maker, she found Lisa’s bottle cap on the counter top and put it in her pocket. She turned to face a blank canvas stretched and stacked against the wall. At once, without permitting a reprisal of despair and inertia, she lifted the canvas up onto an easel. She opened a window and stoked the fire, shed her heaviest layer of clothing, stripping down from three sweatshirts to two, and lit up a smoke.
Outside, snow had sprinkled the tracks, salted the dying grass that surrounded the cabin. Lisa’s Volkswagen was parked alongside the wall of the cabin; the Styrofoam smiley face rammed onto the antenna bounced about in the winter wind. Francesca brought her bicycle inside the cabin and laid it against the wall, then crossed the room and lifted a brush from its resting spot on the palette. Worms of paints had dried on the metal plate. She squeezed out a fresh bit of blue, mixed black and white to create a snowy gray, added a tawny shade for depth, and began to paint a portrait of the pay phone. Who knew more about the secrets and suffering of man than a pay phone? Who encountered more strangers in crisis; people in love; panicked children needing a ride home? News of lovers’ suicides? What object ran smack into the human condition with such frequency? And what was the ratio, wondered Francesca, of plain calls—“I’m sorry I’m late. I’m stopping at 7-Eleven. Do we need milk?”—to—“I still love you, even if you are fucking her.”
What was the percentage of good to bad, tragedy to glory, pedestrian to momentous? As she painted the soft shades of the body, she felt Lisa. Not in the cabin, not in her fingers, not even in her heart: in the colors and shape of the pay phone. Lisa seemed to be the paint Francesca used, into which she dipped her lean brush, messing with it, busting open its sleek shape, spreading it across the canvas, thinning it, turning it into something else. Lisa was spilled like blood onto the painting, staining Francesca’s fingertips, sticking to strands of her hair.
She lightened the black coal of the road that flew past the pay phone, softening its shade until the tar resembled ashes from a cigarette, creamy and smooth. It was nighttime; this she communicated by a violet sky, a creamsicle moon, the lit sign reading PHONE, and its Bell Atlantic branding below, all glowing the soft blue shade of deep water. She prodded the pay phone to life, capturing its particulars: the rounded wear of its push buttons, the scratches on the change slot. And then, after she’d detailed her subject and its surroundings, but before she added the human figure seated curbside, she painted in white graffiti on the gray asphalt, I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.
Chapter Twenty
November 30 was the first bitter cold day in 1988. Evelyn, having once again eluded her nurse, Crystal (a.k.a. Pistol), stood outside the Stop’n Shop in her housecoat and slippers, metal clips dangling from a wasp nest of hair, her naked ankles blue and chapped from the cold. She conversed animatedly with other shoppers—though they pretended not to notice—and clutched a bag of unpurchased groceries (Pop-Tarts, orange juice, peanut butter). She’d just finished releasing onto the pavement a hot stream of urine that, having missed her red orthopedic shoes, followed two nuns and their carriage through the lot. No one looked as Evelyn straightened herself, adjusted her moist underwear, and pulled it from where it had gathered in her crack. Nor did anyone seem to notice the ambulance drifting quietly through the parking lot with its lights spinning. Shoppers fitted keys into car doors and transferred bags from metal mesh carts into neatly packed trunks. No one noticed the moment when Evelyn’s life began to wind down like the end of a carnival ride, the music distorting, the horses rising and dipping in slow-motion yawns.
The double doors at the back of the white vehicle opened out and Evelyn stared as the paramedics hopped heroically from either side of the van. Like the opening to a TV show, she thought.
Vivian and Alfonse pulled up alongside the ambulance in Vivian’s car, their emergency lights flashing. Vivian wished she’d eaten breakfast. Her mouth tasted like the inside of a dark, sealed box. But there had been no time for food. The last forty-five minutes had been devoted to string-pulling and brown-nosing, doing anything she could, with the help of Joycie Newman, to get her senile mother admitted to the Jewish Home. Kasselbaum Senior had thrown his weight around, and, ta-da, Evelyn rose like curdled milk to the top of the list.
Alfonse hopped out of the car, ran to Evelyn’s side. “Mama,” he took her thin arm. Evelyn glared at him, her eyes watery and red. “Here,” she said, and handed him the bag of groceries. They watched the EMTs readying the back of the van. Vivian stepped out of the car, shivering, arms wrapped around herself. She seemed wispy in her light blue sweatsuit and brand new running shoes. Her hair was held off her shiny face by a matching blue headband.
“Who is that?” Evelyn barked.
“Mama, you know who that is.” Alfonse sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He placed the bag of groceries on the pavement.
Evelyn allowed herself to be led up the two steep metal steps into the ambulance, then seated on the hard gray bench. Finally, someone was helping her. Alfonse sat on one side of Evelyn; the female EMT sat on the other. Evelyn was relieved to be in the middle of two able-bodied people. “Dopey,” she said to no one in particular, sighing deeply, then looked at her daughter propped on the edge of the opposite bench. Vivian’s eyes were tearing, either from the cold or sadness; who could tell?
“What’s the matter with her?” Evelyn snapped.
“I think it was the largesse of her gestures that made them call,” Vivian ignored her mother, spoke directly to the EMT. “Thankfully, the manager knew her.” She’d always wondered what it would feel like to speak of her senile mother while she was in the room. Like so many other events in her life, it was, in the end, anticlimactic.
Evelyn’s glasses had fallen from her face when she’d bent over in the parking lot. They hung idly from a chain and rested over a stain on her navy blue polo shirt. She turned to the sturdy woman next to her. “This is asinine,” she said. “I know exactly where I am. I’m at the Stop and Shop. It’s Passover and I’m going to make matzo ball soup. Ask him,” she indicated Alfonse. “He loves my matzo balls.”
The vehicle began to move. Evelyn knew what was happening, even from inside the thickness of the bubble. She had named it the bubble, a plastic film formed between her and the world. Occasionally it seemed even to separate her from herself. At first, it had frightened her, but she’d grown used to its way of making things unreal, and, thus, less upsetting. Everything was far away and foggy, but some part of her understood that she’d just stepped into the final phase of her life. It was a strange and welcome sensation. “Whew,” she sighed. She was so very tired. And she hated that horrible Pistol. White people, she’d decided, are lousy nurses. They were innately less kind.
Anyhow, thought Evelyn, twenty-nine years alone is enough. She’d had enough regret and heartburn and root canal. At first her friends had been a comfort. But now
they were dead, one by one, without explanation, as if abducted. No one even bothered to call anymore to deliver the news. Unless she heard otherwise, she just assumed they’d all passed away: Sylvia, Gert, Molly, all her favorite ladies. And now, riding in the bumpy rear of the ambulance, she remembered Yitzchak’s heart attack, how she’d screamed at the driver to go faster, be careful, faster, be careful, knowing that she was contradicting herself, unable to stop.
“Twenty-nine years.” She sighed and turned toward the window.
Vivian looked at the EMT. “She’s thinking of my father. He died twenty-nine years ago, almost to the day.”
“Poor Mama,” Alfonse patted her knee.
Evelyn could remember, though not so well anymore, when her life hadn’t included these people. “That’s right,” she said, pointing at Vivian. “You weren’t even born.”
“That’s not true,” Vivian smiled at the EMT, then faced the window, her expression turning to stone.
Evelyn watched New Haven snap past the small windows at the rear of the ambulance. She knew what happened to ladies like her, old ladies still subject to an occasional fit of youth, the urge for a tantrum or to dance across a long room barefoot, toenails painted bright red, perfume on the pulses. She’d volunteered at the Jewish Home, brought cards and chocolates, watched adults invert into helpless, frustrated babies. As the age between her and the patients grew less distinct, she came to fear the Home, its waxed floors and fingers of dust on the molding. It appeared in her dreams amid other incongruous locales: The nurse’s desk waited at the end of a long corridor in Sheridan High School; an orderly pushed a cart stuffed with dirty linens into the deepest part of her own basement. Eventually, she’d stopped volunteering on the floor and requested a job in the gift shop.
“And you’ll have a TV, a beautiful view of the Sound, and a lovely roommate. What’s her name, Viv?” Alfonse asked cheerfully.
“What?”
“The roommate. Mama’s roommate. That nice lady.”
“Mrs. Knoblovsky,” said Vivian.
“That’s right,” he snapped his fingers. “Mrs. Knob—”
“Mrs. wha—?” She glared at Alfonse, as if it were his fault. “What is that, Polish? I thought this place was for Jews.”
“Not everyone in the hospital is Jewish, Ma,” said Vivian.
“Why not? It’s a Jewish hospital,” Evelyn replied.
“Well, she may very well be Jewish. Some Polish people are Jewish,” said Alfonse.
“That’s ridiculous.” But Evelyn could not remember what they were discussing. “You remind me of my granddaughter,” she said to the woman next to her. She patted the woman’s hand, then wrapped her bent, veiny knuckles around it. There they remained. Vivian and Alfonse looked at the woman and they, too, recognized a similarity to Francesca—the Francesca of yore, the one they remembered, not the one they had seen in a newspaper photograph. Each of them realized—separately, always separately—that they knew nothing of Francesca today except the few facts they’d read, that she was alive and even thriving and seemed to suffer no ill effects from their deficient parenting. Vivian liked to think she’d done a pretty good job after all, and had in some way set the stage for Francesca’s success.
The ambulance arrived at the gate of the Jewish Home and idled behind several wide American cars, all awaiting entry.
“See that?” Alfonse patted Evelyn’s knee. “For security.”
“Forget about what’s outside. I’m worried about what’s inside,” Evelyn scowled, her heart pounding wildly. Like being awake for major surgery, she thought. Locally anesthetized, seeing them cut you open and manipulate your innards. Not that she’d ever had major surgery, but she’d heard enough about it from the ladies to know.
“They’d better be Jews,” she said. “And I don’t just mean the doctors.”
“I’m sure some of the nurses are, too,” said Alfonse reassuringly.
“That’s asinine,” Evelyn waved him away. He’s so stupid, she thought. He’s always been stupid. She turned and peered through the meshed windows of the ambulance at the cinder-colored building. Poor Sylvia, she thought. Now she understood how terrifying it must have been for her best friend, newly widowed, still stiff with tan and salt from the Florida sun, to be captured at the airport and dumped here. No wonder she’d died the next day.
Reality Has Intruded Here
New Haven, 1989
Reality Has Intruded Here, 1989
Ten feet tall, suspended from a thick wooden beam, Reality Has Intruded Here is a huge, throbbing work, set apart from the other paintings in the FdS museum, lit from behind by a spotlight. The trees, drawn by dark ropes of paint, suggest a deep, dead winter: the red, thick sky recalls tensely knit hats and down jackets, scarves wrapped again and again against the white cold.
deSilva created the huge and beguiling Reality Has Intruded Here after several weeks of isolation. It is an odd, anomalous work, particularly as it launched her final year of painting, during which some of her greatest pseudo-realistic pieces were completed (Woman with Stool and Bunyan are other extant works from this period).
Upon a door confiscated from the remains of a neighborhood Cape that she watched being torn down, deSilva tossed and splattered bright, thick colors. Lines, dots, splashes fill the door in an assault, even a war against what lies inside, namely privacy. In the lower right quadrant of the door is a bullet hole, a central detail that is, ironically, missed by many who view the painting (and, it would seem, fail to read their brochures). The hole appears to be simply a surface defect, perhaps the result of water damage or a neighborhood bully’s BB gun. Only she who succumbs to curiosity by pressing her eyeball to the hole in the door is treated to the truth of the painting, i.e., what deSilva needed to say. At this point, the painting takes on the properties of sculpture. Beyond the bullet hole, visible only when the eye is flush to the aperture—a disconcerting sensation in itself—a small shoebox contains a diorama, such as a child might make in grade school.
Inside the shoebox appears a kitchen similar to Evelyn Horowitz’s: a small table covered by a checked cloth, four metal chairs with vinyl covered seats, and a Tupperware of baked goods set out on a placemat. An old woman—created from a skeleton of pipe cleaners—is seated at the table alone, drinking coffee. Puffs of frantic gray hair rise in a cloud around her head. This world, unlike the cold, violent one around it, is calm and small, if strained with expectation. The woman’s bent posture and cramped quarters seem to be trapped in time, as though she’d given up on anyone ever visiting, awaiting only the incontrovertible arrival of death.
Lucinda Dialo noted, “This is a painting that must be confronted; even the title is aggressive. deSilva wants the viewer to step up and assume the role of the intruder; as in Virgin and What She Found, she has us experience the scene from both sides. In Reality Has Intruded Here, we are peering salaciously through an old woman’s peephole. What we see inside is so ordinary and private—the inevitable indignities of old age—that, in hindsight, our curiosity feels that much more prurient, as if, having peeked, we have violated a basic tenet of respectability.”83
Reality Has Intruded Here seems to blatantly, even desperately, defy description at the same time that it makes an “accurate interpretation” (were such a thing to exist) impossible. The painting refuses to provide a definitive narrator or an inhabitable point of view. “The truth is, this is not simply an abstract painting,” asserts Dialo. “The title prevents it from being such. If we are to be true to the artist’s intentions, we must ask ourselves, what reality has intruded? We are the reality. We are intruding upon the small life behind the opaque door. We may not have made the hole; but we peer inside it. And to what end? So that we may know everything. So that we may steal from this poor old woman her solitude, her self, and finally, her home. This work is concerned with existential crisis, the moment in time when one recognizes that not only hasn’t she fought to relieve the despair of those around her, but she has become
a proponent—no matter how reluctant—of that anguish. She has ceased to be an agent of change and become, instead, a part of the problem.”84
Chapter Twenty-One
It was the hub of night, the richest, thickest hours. Francesca’s favorite time to work. Charlotte rapped on the cabin door.
“Your mother called,” she said. “At 3 a.m.” She shrugged. “She claimed it’s urgent. She wants you to call back right away.”
“How did she find me?” Francesca put down her paintbrush, thick with gray oil. Her body froze, as if after all this time on the lam, she’d been discovered.
“She saw the article in the paper and tracked us down. She said she’s been meaning to call anyway. But now this . . . whatever this is.”
Francesca shrugged and reached for her cigarettes. Without another word, she adopted a nonchalant gait and headed toward the door. She had a feeling something like this would happen, what with the publicity in The New Haven Register. She was asking for trouble by agreeing to do the New Haven show, inviting, if indirectly, the reentry of her family into her life.
“I’ll wait here,” Charlotte said, yawning. She ducked her head and sat on the bottom bunk, checking for cobwebs overhead.
Francesca entered the booth of the pay phone. She wiped her forehead on the sleeve of her jacket. The panels were open, the bottom buttons of her shirt were unfastened, and she pressed her naked stomach to the metal phonebook shelf. She still remembered the number.
“Hello?” It was Vivian.
“It’s Francesca.”
“Francesca! Oh, goodness. Honey, thank you for calling back.”
“Charlotte said it was an emergency.”
“Well . . . your grandmother. I’m afraid your grandmother—”