by T. Greenwood
The man, Seamus, looked around the room suddenly, as if he had just woken up and realized where he was. “The house is the same,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure nothing has been done to it in the last thirty-five years,” I said, laughing. Then it struck me. He’d been in the house before. What on earth would he have been in this house for? “Have you been here before?” I asked.
He nodded, slowly. His mind was elsewhere. “A long time ago.”
“Your wife didn’t seem very happy about us moving in,” I said.
He looked at me, his eyes peering intently into mine.
“You haven’t happened to find anything . . . any photographs?” he asked.
I thought of the box of film now in Wes’s darkroom. I thought about the pictures blown up and hanging in the dining room. I felt caught.
Upstairs, I could hear Avery swinging. The squeak, squeak of the swing.
Suddenly, I felt panicked. Uncomfortable. What on earth would this man, in his expensive socks and hand-knit fisherman’s sweater, want with the photos I’d found?
“No,” I said. Not a lie exactly. Negatives weren’t photographs.
“Oh,” he said. “Of course, they were probably disposed of.”
“What?” I asked, confused. “Did a photographer live here?”
“Listen, I’m so sorry to take up your time. I just wanted to apologize for not being more welcoming before. And to thank you for the pie.”
I nodded. He stood up abruptly and walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the foyer like someone who knew the floor plan of the house. Like someone who had been here many times before.
He sat down on the bench by the door and quickly put on his boots, grabbed the coat from the rack, and thrust his arms into the sleeves. It was suddenly as if he couldn’t get out of here fast enough.
I heard Avery jump down off the swing. Of course she’d want to see where he was going.
“We’ll have you over some time,” he offered.
“Sure,” I said, shrugging.
The moment I closed the door behind him, I grabbed my phone and dialed Gus.
Straight to voice mail.
“Hey Gus, it’s me. I was just checking to see if Wes had had a chance to develop that film yet. Maybe, if he’s able to get it done before Christmas, you could bring the negatives with you when you pick up Avery?”
And I went to the dining room, studied the photos. The insistent gaze of both female subjects. I wondered, when the photographer captured these photos, if he or she had known what they’d caught. But then it dawned on me, ridiculously, that whoever took these pictures had never gotten them developed. For all the photographer knew, every photo taken could have been out of focus, overexposed, underexposed. They had no idea what they had captured, and yet they’d clearly spent a whole day at the beach studying, preparing, shooting. Watching the young couple, waiting for what might happen between them. To what end then? It baffled me. Why would someone work so hard only to let these images sit undiscovered in a box for thirty-five years? How could the act of taking the photos be enough? It would be like painting a picture in the darkness of night and then destroying it before the sun came up. Why bother to put film in the camera at all? It made me think of the sand castles Gus and Avery had made one summer when we drove out to Coney Island. All afternoon they spent building an elaborate castle replete with moats and turrets and drawbridges. Then the tide came in and took it all away. It had made my throat grow thick to watch their hard work decimated by the crashing waves, but neither one of them had seemed even remotely disappointed. Avery, as a matter of fact, had laughed and laughed, thrown herself down onto the sand where the castle used to be. Such unadulterated joy, such bliss.
It seemed like a contradiction. Photography was meant to seize a moment, to hold onto it. These moments, these thousands of moments had been captured, only to be stored away in tiny little time capsules in the basement of this house.
Art Brut
They weren’t in my art history textbooks, not as anything other than footnotes anyway. They call them outsider artists. Artists who existed only in the margins of those pages. In the margins of society.
Helen Martins was a South African woman who meticulously, almost religiously, transformed her parents’ home using crushed glass to decorate the walls, which were reflected by mirrors, illuminated by tinted windows and candles. Outside she built a private garden of sculptures made of concrete and glass. When her eyesight began to fail due to years of exposure to the crushed glass, she killed herself by drinking caustic soda. Her home, The Owl House, once derided by the locals in her village, became a museum after her death.
Adolf Wölfli, a Swiss man who was physically and sexually abused then orphaned, spent almost his entire life within the walls of an asylum after he himself was convicted of child molestation. Psychosis, hallucinations. He was driven by madness to create a forty-five-volume epic comprised of 25,000 pages and 1,600 meticulous illustrations.
Felipe Jesus Consalvos, a Cuban-American cigar roller, created an 800-piece body of work (a collection of collages made of cigar rings), which was discovered at a yard sale.
Miroslav Tichý, a Czech photographer, fashioned his cameras out of cardboard tubes, empty spools, and tin cans, using road asphalt to seal out the light. He created lenses from Plexiglas, sanded and polished with toothpaste and ash. He was a voyeur, using his homemade cameras to covertly take photos of women in his village, about ninety images per day. He printed the photos using a homemade enlarger, but as soon as they were printed, he discarded them like the waste from which they were made.
Henry Darger was a Chicago custodian who wrote and illustrated an obsessive 15,000-page, fifteen-volume work, In the Realms of the Unreal, which remained undiscovered until just before his death when his landlord found the treasure trove.
Most of these artists are self-taught, naïve, insane. Compulsive, prolific, and secret. Poor. Many outsider artists’ work isn’t discovered until after their deaths. Sometimes it’s referred to as “visionary art,” as though these people are not only artists but seers. I always preferred the term the French use: “art brut”—raw art. Art like an open wound.
Christmas
A very and I crafted homemade Christmas gifts for everyone. She made drawings, which I covered in thin sheets of Plexiglas before framing them in her homemade Popsicle stick frames, hand-painted and covered in glitter glue. I drew single-line portraits of each of my parents, of Gus and Avery together. I made frames for my drawings out of some reclaimed wood I found in the shed behind the house.
Two days before Christmas, we loaded up the car with our creations, locked up the house, and drove to the ferry. It had been nearly a month since we’d left the island. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a newspaper. I occasionally checked CNN online to make sure we hadn’t gone to war or the plague wasn’t sweeping the country, but there was something liberating about becoming completely and absolutely untouched.
While I loved going to my parents’ house for Christmas, part of me was dreading what I knew was going to be an inevitable conversation about the case, about what would happen once the DNA results came back, if the court granted the motion for a new trial. I knew there would be a visit from Larry. In the guise of holiday cheer, he might stop by with a tin of fudge before beginning his entreaty.
I tried not to think about this as we drove over the river and through the woods. I tried instead to think only of being in my childhood home. Of Avery being the one to hang the angel I’d made in the sixth grade at the top of the tree (my parents had insisted on waiting to put up and decorate the tree until we got there). I tried to think only of my mother’s kitchen: the coconut cherry bars, the gingerbread men. I tried to focus on the smell of pine. A fire in the fireplace. Plumbing that worked. Gus.
I missed him. While I had hoped being separated (truly separated) from him would help me to get the distance I needed, instead it just made me ache for h
im. For us. For me and him and Avery together. The longer I was away, the more uncertain I became. The less assured that I was doing the right thing.
I held my breath as we flew down Route 9 and sped past the Rousseaus’ yellow farmhouse. I flinched but did not slow down as the same dog chased us again, and I glanced only once at the rearview mirror, to see it standing in the middle of the road behind us, barking.
And by the time we pulled into my parents’ driveway, my heart and hands had steadied again. I could do this.
My father was at the woodpile, grabbing an armload of wood. He set it down and came to the car, opened the back door and lifted Avery out and into his arms.
No circle of long-lost friends and distant relatives looking at me with sad eyes. Just my dad with the smell of trees on his coat and cold candy canes at the ready in his pocket.
In the kitchen, my mother was cussing at the piecrust. My mother had never, ever been able to make a decent piecrust. Yet she persevered.
“Gahhh,” she hollered as the dough stuck to the rolling pin. “Goddamn. Goddamn.”
“Gawd. Language, Mom,” I said as Avery climbed up onto the counter next to her.
“You need to put tights on the rolling pin, Grammy.”
“That so, Muffin?”
“That’s what Pilar does. You put tights on and it doesn’t stick.”
“Well, good thing you’re here then!” she exclaimed. “Can I have these?”
Avery, despite the subzero temperatures outside, had insisted on wearing a dress and tights. Cowboy boots with no treads whatsoever. And a hat that looked like a moose, the stuffed antlers jutting out from her head. She looked like she’d been swallowed by Bullwinkle.
Avery giggled as my mother tickled her knees, the tights with the snowflakes threadbare where her skinny bones poked out.
“When does Mark get here?” I asked.
“You mean Maronica?” my father said, coming into the kitchen, followed by Husky, their terrier.
“Maronica?” I asked.
“Mark and Veronica,” he said. “It’s their ship name.” My father spent too much time around teenagers.
“Eww.”
“I know,” my mother said, reaching out and squeezing my arm. “Wasn’t she just such a B-I-T-C-H when he was in high school?”
“You two are terrible,” my father said. “She’s a nice girl now. Very sweet. A good mom.”
Something was burning.
“Crap on a cracker,” my mother said. And she opened the oven to a cookie sheet filled with charred gingerbread. “This is not my day.”
* * *
My father had chopped down a tree from the woods behind the house; the tree had been leaning against the garage for days now waiting for our arrival. When he dragged it in through the front door, I was so overwhelmed with nostalgia, it felt like an almost physical thing, sentimentality an illness. Waves of it, like seasickness, rippled through my body.
And I remembered the trips with my father to pick out the perfect tree. He and I would set out, me carrying the thermos of cocoa, him swinging the ax. We only traveled across the backyard, but in the winter, when the world was made of snow, it felt like we were in the wilderness. I liked to pretend I was Laura Ingalls Wilder out with Pa on the prairie. We’d spend the next hour or more in the woods, examining the prospects, narrowing our choices down to one or two. Then he’d let me pick. My mother preferred the spruces for their lovely branches. But I liked the smell of the Scotch pines. My father would swing his ax, hacking away at the trunk, hollering, Timber! into those quiet woods. And I loved the soft hush as it fell. This was a moment of grace, though I didn’t know to call it that then. And together, we’d grab the trunk and drag the tree back across the field. The sun sometimes readying itself for bed by the time we made our way out of the woods and home again.
But after what happened with Robby, I never went into the woods with my father again. It was unspoken, this decision. I remember watching him from my window, as he disappeared into the forest. And later when he returned. Watching him drag the tree across the field made my heart ache.
When I was little, Christmas Eve at our house was never the stuff of storybooks. Quiet all through the house, nothing stirring, all that. Instead, it was loud. With all sorts of creatures stirring. My parents loved to throw parties, and our house was the obvious place to have them. On Christmas Eve, they made a vat of spiked eggnog and invited anyone (and everyone) in their various social circles who wasn’t leaving town for the holidays to come join us: the faculty at the high school, my mother’s artist friends. Neighbors, my parents’ many, many childhood friends who, like them, had grown up here and never left. Everyone drank too much, including my parents, and danced hard. I distinctly remember the headmaster of the high school getting so drunk he climbed up on the second story roof and sang “O Holy Night” at the top of his lungs. One year, Mrs. Wharton (my pre-K teacher) wouldn’t stop kissing people under the mistletoe my mother had hung, including our neighbor, Mrs. Babcock, who smacked her in the face with her beaded handbag. I remember seeing Breakfast at Tiffany’s when I was in college and telling my friend that was what my house was like at Christmas, pagan, hedonistic. I loved it.
But after that summer when I was thirteen, they stopped having parties. My father’s colleagues didn’t know what to say or do, and celebrations of any sort seemed inappropriate. I remember that first Christmas feeling lonelier and sadder than I had ever felt before.
Of course, over the years, they returned to a new normalcy, inviting a few friends over to help trim the tree on Christmas Eve, for my father’s famous lasagna for dinner. But those wild, wonderful parties were a thing of the past.
This Christmas Eve, the only guests were Maronica (funny, how easily that rolled off the tongue), Mark’s best friend, Joey Fannan, his wife, and their new baby, and my parents’ friends, the Dickinsons. The Dickinsons had known my parents since college. They were mainstays at our Christmas parties, as well as just about every other holiday celebration at our house.
Avery put on her sparkly red dress, the one I’d bought for her to wear when Pilar took us to see The Nutcracker at the Met last year. It was too small and wouldn’t button up the back, but she insisted, so I’d jerry-rigged it together with safety pins. She also had, somehow, talked my mother into buying her a pair of sequined silver boots that looked like miniature disco balls on her feet as she ran through the house.
“Here,” my mother said, handing me a board with a giant cheese ball balancing precariously on it. My mother was notorious for her cheese balls. One year, she’d made one as big as a basketball and so filled with rum I’d gotten drunk for the first time after spreading it across a handful of Wheat Thins.
“What a modest cheese ball this year,” I said, chuckling at the softball-sized ball.
“Well, I figured since it’s just us.” She winked.
Mark and Veronica arrived with Joey and Christina in tow. Veronica’s towheaded daughter clung to her leg shyly before Avery grabbed her hand and said, “Let’s go play upstairs. I have Legos.”
Veronica didn’t look anything like I remembered her, but what did I expect—for her to show up in her Haven High cheerleading outfit? She was still pretty but had rounded out, softened. Aged. My father said her husband was shot down over Kabul four years ago; she’d given birth to her daughter while he was deployed. He never even met the baby.
My mother swooped in on Joey and Christina’s baby like some great bird of prey, leaving Christina wide-eyed with disbelief as my mother plucked the new baby out of her arms.
“I just want to put you in my mouth and carry you around in my cheek all day,” my mother cooed to the baby. “Oh my God, I want to eat this baby,” she said to Joey.
“I read an article about that,” Christina offered. “That feeling of wanting to nibble on their legs. It has something to do with the way babies smell. It activates some chemical in a woman’s brain. Like certain foods.”
“Well,
whatever it is, I am going to start with the toes,” my mother said.
“Hi,” Mark said, leaning into me for a bear hug. He was ten years younger than me, and it was really only in the last few years he had grown from a pudgy teenager into a man. A big man. With huge shoulders.
“Nom, nom, nom,” my mother said.
“Hi,” I said to Mark. “Want a drink?”
“God, yes,” Mark said, taking off his coat.
While everyone settled into the living room with my mother’s cheese ball and all the other relics from her Betty Crocker cookbook (fruitcake and tangy Swedish meatballs, pineapple upside-down cakes and a pile of salvaged gingerbread cookies), Mark and I hung back in the kitchen for a shot of Irish whiskey.
“So, how’s Maine?” His cheeks were already red. We were one-quarter Irish on my father’s side. That Irish blush came out whenever he had even a bit of alcohol. He could never get away with drinking in high school because his cheeks gave him away. I think that’s why he started smoking weed.
“Maine is strange. It’s beautiful and quiet. And cold,” I said, feeling the whiskey warm my chest in the way only whiskey can.
“Gus came to see you?”
“He came to see Avery,” I said. I knew my family was holding out hope Gus and I would somehow make amends. They loved Gus. They might have been as much in love with Gus as I was.
When Gus and I started dating, Mark was only nine or ten. He was like a brother to Mark. Like the older brother he’d always wished he’d had. When Gus and I split up, Mark actually cried. Like a little boy. It had broken my heart.
“And he’s coming tomorrow?”
I nodded.
Mark grabbed the bottle and poured another two shots into the empty glasses. We clinked our glasses together and threw our heads back. This one went down like fire.
“I’ve got a ring in my pocket,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Like a diamond?” I said, in disbelief.
“Not like a diamond. An actual diamond. And shhhh . . .” He leaned toward the doorway to make sure nobody was eavesdropping on our conversation.