Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  And when Katy and Sara returned, Josie steered Katy away, suggesting she help Katy find shoes to match the new dress. When Katy hesitated, Josie squeezed her hand. “James will play with the girls. Let’s find you some shoes.” And Katy nodded dumbly, sensing—despite the display of elegant heels—that something had been taken.

  Afterward, her father walked in the city with his arm around Katy. Then he walked with Josie: you could see that with Josie he was happy, but as Katy followed behind with the girls the remaining lightness seeped from the day, and in its place the familiar despondency took hold. Finally, what did they have to do with her? In three months she’d begin college: wouldn’t they grow closer, she further away? Delia tugged, “Listen—are you listening?” A Rollerblader wove through Copley Square, a guy in a tank top and shorts, dodging cars and pedestrians, as if none of them made a difference. James said he’d booked a reservation for Italian, and drove them to the North End. When they returned to the condo, Josie took the T to what she called her “old place.” But at James’s place she was present in the small details, the fluted coffee cups, framed photographs—an apple tree in bloom, a white farmhouse—potted basil in the kitchen window, the orchid James tended. When had he ever cared for plants?

  And when Katy later described the visit to Tim, Tim seemed to her obtuse, if undeniably hers. “He’s still your dad,” Tim said. But she could not find the right words to convey the dress and the shoes and the awkwardness, and the thick sorrow she’d felt the next morning at the condo, sorrow that in other moments had sparked fights with her father. James kept offering her waffles and eggs, which made it worse. She poured orange juice for Sara and Delia, but couldn’t drink any herself, or eat ordinary toast. She’d brought her math textbook with her and retreated to the sofa while the girls ate. The math final, she told her father, was the hardest one. Very very tough. No, no eggs, no toast. She’d eat something later. No thanks to applesauce. Right now, she wasn’t hungry. Sometimes, math could be like that.

  HOUSE V

  As if the rooms contained more space, the air seemed clearer, easier to breathe, after Katy left for college, though no one spoke of it aloud. But Katy’s tom-tom thuds abated. Static abated. Bright chill days on the beach; cold nights, the coldest black spread thickly with stars. Nora would make hot chocolate and read at the table while Sara and Delia finished homework and drew, or layered blankets on the sofa and watched movies. The girls now traveled from room to room without hesitation, the house more fully theirs.

  Though a house that appeared more ragged: Nora repaired the roof and managed a loan for a new furnace, but the siding was badly worn, one of the outer banisters split (for a time held together by white polyester rope from the marina). Inside along the carpeted stairs and upper hall, a flattened gray path darkened; accumulated coffee and ice-cream stains wore into the sofa fabric. The dingy walls she could repaint on weekends when the girls visited James. More window quilts, in blue and white; the framed black-and-white baby photos still on the kitchen wall above the side windows. Weekday evenings, while the girls slept, she’d use the big oak table to do Ben Sundlun’s accounts.

  The beach adjoining the house had lost almost a yard over the past decade, but the town repaired a half-mile stretch of seawall, including their section, and dredged the pond of storm debris; for several days the displaced swans congregated on the shallows of the bay, a white cluster shifting back and forth, sometimes brilliant, sometimes cream or tinged with pink or violet. You could watch them from the living room windows, or bundle up and head down to the beach, and pick up bits of sea glass or gray stones ribboned with white.

  With Katy’s move, Rome, too, seemed less present. For the first time, each of the Murphys who’d returned from Italy now lived separately from the others; say each carried a spinning interior Rome, a shifting interior Molly, that intensified in the presence of the others, receded in their absence; the sorrow rarely alluded to—as Rome, or Molly, and meaning precisely neither—also seemed to recede. Perhaps, too, each Murphy carried an interior blueprint of a house in Blue Rock—for Nora saturating waking life, indistinguishable from the current house—arising separately in each of their dreams, a denser, smaller eastern star.

  When Sara wandered the house, she listened for the older silence, at times imagining a drifting patch of space, a persisting disquiet veiled by ordinary salt air, scents of coffee and soap, exchanges over breakfast, as the patch slid like light beyond the visible spectrum. It seemed—as it had always seemed—she could not apprehend the form. Anything could be a clue; anything could be the answer. Though not for Delia, who claimed to hear plain silence. She said what disturbed the air was low-tide kelp.

  Sara studied Nora more deliberately; this Delia also did. Often now, while Nora worked outdoors or downstairs, Sara snuck into her room. On the dresser: a lace doily, a wooden jewelry box, a blue glass bowl of white stones. Beside the bed, shelves of novels and art books and shoe boxes. In the corner, a locked file cabinet, a small writing table, a cup of pens. A queen-sized bed that seemed like a small lake—pale green duvet, white pillows. In the closet, familiar wool blazers and pants and low-heeled shoes Nora wore to the office. Back of the closet: fancy party clothes, sleeveless satiny things, a black off-the-shoulder dress with rhinestone buttons, black patent-leather heels, backless silver sandals. A portfolio with Nora’s drawings.

  Delia would comb through the jewelry box and touch the rhinestone buttons and try on the silver sandals; on rare days, she’d try on a silk dress. Sara returned to the bowl of stones and the shelves beside the bed. The boxes held Nora’s postcards and small reprints: Vuillards and Vermeers, Magdalens—a La Tour, a Caravaggio—Van Ruisdaels, Turners, a few Hoppers, a few photos by Cartier-Bresson. These Sara examined repeatedly and sometimes briefly filched. A Morisot, a Hopper. For several days, a Vuillard. For several days, a Raphael.

  AWAY

  Perhaps because Katy could easily visit the house and find her room as she’d left it, at first she did not miss Blue Rock. Nor did she consider the consequences of absence, the changes in daily life that would accumulate without her knowledge or implicit permission. She trusted Blue Rock to remain the Blue Rock she’d known. On the quaint campus outside Boston and through its leafy suburb, she ran in the mornings, and every day she spoke to Tim; on days off he visited campus, and on weekends she’d take a bus to Boston and stay in his shared Kenmore Square apartment. During his shifts she’d study, and after they’d drink beer and hazily make love. On Sundays they’d lounge in bed, his hands on her, stroking her, his fingers inside her, mouth at her breast; the day a-spin with jolting pleasures, the room for a time no longer the room, the city having peeled away, and he’d enter her then, and the room was Tim, dense muscle, exquisite rippling of light that was both a rising and a descent into him, as if she had moved beyond his skin, beyond his rib cage, into a place of liquid and muscle and bone. A salt tang, a pale gray drifting until the air cooled, until he stretched and curled around her for another hour, and she was not lonely.

  In that first, elating year, when she visited Blue Rock the girls ran to her. Nora fussed over her. Those moments seemed precisely right and therefore went unremarked. But in summer, when she again lived in the house, the girls paired off and fell into private communication, or immersed themselves in books and solitary games, ignoring her. Why would they ignore her? Had they ignored her in the past? (She thought not. She did not consider her own preoccupations.) She’d coax them out with treats, which they’d accept, but soon enough they’d return to their twosome, or their solitary pursuits, or play with neighborhood kids. The girls’ ability to engage with Katy for a moment, then disengage for hours disturbed her. Her resulting agitation had the cast of a low-grade fever, those small confused moments bloating, their sting persisting and leaching through the day. It did not occur to her to ask if something was wrong (though in the past she’d asked about their disquiet); it did not occur to her that these might be established habits. Her tone with
them became sharp, surprising everyone. When she looked after the girls, if she enforced house rules, they’d talk back. It happened when Nora was out. No, Katy said, no more television; no, the sea was too choppy today for a swim. Perhaps they would stare at the whitecaps and shrug, and compromise by wading in the shallows. Perhaps they would balk, suspecting an arbitrary decision. One afternoon, Delia rushed ahead of Katy toward the beach road and the parked ice-cream truck—not in the road but near, and running. And when Katy yanked Delia back, it was with an excess she could not stop: her manner too stern, her hand braceleting Delia’s bicep too tightly. Delia yelped.

  “It’s too close to dinner,” Katy lied. Having lied, she found herself insisting. Delia swung her free arm back and forth like a pendulum, coins still clutched in her fist. Squinted at the sand. “You don’t live here,” she said.

  “Oh yes I do,” Katy said. Not for the first time, Katy’s body seemed to be in charge; she grabbed Delia’s swinging hand and forced the coins out, then marched the girls back to the house. At dinner, they pointedly ignored her: the next day they both insisted on staying in the house and reading and playing jacks. By then one panic had blurred into another. Nora returned the change to Delia and announced broad ice-cream hours (a short pre-dinner exclusion). Privately, she told Katy, “Oh, it’s summer. Let her have what she likes.” It took days and games on the beach with Katy and Tim for Delia to become, again, affectionate.

  And of Nora herself? There was never enough. After the girls’ bedtime, Nora would type medical insurance forms and calculate accounts and houseclean until she disappeared behind the closed door of her bedroom. Daily she and Katy spoke, Nora noting the weather and town events, sorting out the child care, asking when to expect Tim at the house—but Nora might have been speaking to anyone. Apparently Katy-as-Katy had the presence of a cereal box. When Katy mentioned taking time together—say, when Sara and Delia next visited James—Nora would say, “Sure,” and smile and call her “doll.” For a few days Katy would hope—lunch in Boston? a picnic and a walk?—the hope gradually fading. Nora made no plans, and eventually Katy’s café job hours increased; her nights with Tim increased.

  Each successive season, each semester, a flickering uneasiness about Blue Rock intensified, as if she were slipping toward its fringe; or as if the house itself were slipping away from her. By Katy’s third year in college, the feeling rarely abated. On weekends when she stayed in Blue Rock, Katy sensed that while she occupied the space—even her bedroom remained unchanged—she was not inside. As if there were—after all these years—secret rooms to which she had no access, or as if a separate identical house existed within the house, this second one occupied by Nora, Sara, and Delia. She studied the girls—sometimes affectionate, sometimes contrary, Sara more silent, Delia blurting. It was then that Katy too began to roam and search the house: one afternoon, Sara found her napping on Sara’s own bed. After another visit, the girls found their comic books and novels disarranged, bookmarks set at the wrong pages.

  Katy too rummaged and sifted in Nora’s room, checking Nora’s closet, Nora’s dresser, as if the clothes racks and drawers held a nameless elusive part of her mother. Once, when she was sorting through the plain white bras and plainer underwear, Nora walked in.

  Her eyes focused on Katy, assessing. “Katy, what do you need?”

  Katy froze, confused, deflated. She was wearing a thin cotton sundress. “A slip?” she said. “Something.”

  TRUCK REDUX

  Until Sara was twelve, the Rome stories were hardly stories at all, only truncated phrases of Nora’s: accident or traffic accident and, later, a traffic accident, and then she was gone. This last phrase Sara would sometimes recast as two separate incidents: a four-year-old Molly strolls the piazza (pink sundress, matching shoes) while on a nearby street (sometimes paved, sometimes cobblestone) two cars collide. At impact, a cracking boom rings out, and Molly absents the piazza. Pink smoke drifts. The drivers gesture extravagantly as they argue on the sidewalk. How easy then to imagine Molly reappearing elsewhere, lost but vibrant and intact. Long after she knew accident implied horror, Sara retreated to this picture.

  To her, it had seemed Molly was always and never at the Blue Rock house. Not the ubiquitous lack Sara had grown accustomed to, but not entirely separate. Privately she’d speculated about who Molly might be now, were she still Molly, how like or unlike Theo or Katy, or Delia, her baby look-alike, or Sara herself. Whether, if Molly were still Molly, Sara would exist at all: she’d concluded she would not. So maybe, she thought, the missing thing was the gap between who Molly had been and who Sara had—or had not—become. The price of living, she wondered, because someone else did not? Could the space you occupied be fully your own? Born after the fact, yes, but it seemed she was still implicated. And although Delia was the youngest, Sara never wondered about Delia’s existence. To Sara, Delia was rooted and permanent, definite in ways that she herself was not. Nor did Delia worry about her resemblance to Molly. They were sisters: they looked like it. But even at twelve, Sara was not fully visible. As if her body had less density or clarity than her siblings’. As if part of her were somehow in Italy; as if she’d been too faintly printed.

  She and Delia had just been to the mall; now Katy was driving them home. Near the highway exit for Blue Rock, traffic halted, then crept forward. Flashing blue lights: a squad car, and beyond it an ambulance and another rescue truck, and two partly ruined cars, empty of people. Difficult to tell how ruined the people might have been.

  “Who was driving?” Sara asked. As if Katy and Delia would also be thinking of Molly; as if all accidents led back to her.

  Katy squinted.

  “In Italy,” Sara said.

  “Oh. No one,” Katy said. “Well, the truck driver.”

  And then the picture changed, the two-car collision and the flawless girl in pink now and finally swept away, replaced by a screeching truck and simultaneous thud, the body of a girl for one instant airborne, the next thrown to the ground. Sara first accessed the sounds, then the increasingly detailed images. The question of what happened to Molly’s body became immediate and splintered into more precise and graphic questions and the unstoppable—compulsive—speculation about what Molly felt (did shock protect her?), and what she might have known.

  Katy turned onto a secondary road and changed the subject to swim practice. Back at the house, a pitcher of lemonade sweated on the counter. On the living room sofa, Nora sorted coupons and read the news.

  For months, Sara replayed the scene in Rome, which emerged more vividly as Katy let drop more details of the story: a church, the bright hot air when they emerged. Nora, Katy, and Molly together. Theo and James out on the street. A sports car—parked. Molly running. In those months, Sara and Delia frequently compared notes, occasionally found moments—in the kitchen or on the deck at a holiday gathering—to corner a vaguely responding Aunt Meg. With Nora or James, they brought up Molly only rarely, usually through the back door of Newton. From the living room cabinets, Sara dug out photos of Molly, some of which Delia took and hid in the pink lacquered box where she kept her swim badges and birthday cards. Years later—and from Theo—they learned of Katy holding Molly’s hand. The waving? That came sooner, and from Katy, a muttered aside: Why did they wave?

  On a subsequent weekend, Nora let Sara and Delia take a North Shore commuter train to meet James. It was winter; there had been snow, which stretched untouched over the fields beyond the tracks, blanketing the rooftops. Just as the train arrived at the stop, James pulled up to the loading zone across the tracks. Half a dozen other cars steamed in the parking lot, engines running, hazards blinking. As James emerged from his sedan, he waved to Sara and Delia, and Sara imagined another wave, in that other city, to that other daughter, the one who did not disappear in pink smoke.

  “Hey, there’s Dad,” Delia said. She’d already waved back. She jumped.

  REPRODUCTION

  Interior: Woman before a Window

  E
douard Vuillard (c. 1900)

  FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

  On the far side of the living room, she faces the long window, her dress a curving pale pink column leading to the paler curve of her neck, the dark upswept hair, the white cap. A wall of curtain sheers, wide white brushstrokes. Beyond the window, beyond the canvas, Paris, which appears as blocks of color—the blue windows of a nearby building, the white sky. Surrounding the woman and the window, opening out toward you, the airy salon: the sofa and chairs upholstered in white-and-gold striped fabric, a vase of white roses, ochre walls, all flooded with light. A tapestried carpet spills across the right front quadrant of the canvas; indigo, sepia, milk-blue blossoms and vines over a carmine plain. From the upper right, the frond of a potted palm reaches toward her, the glass-framed city, the light. Not unlike a viewer, happening upon this color field—from one’s own glassless window, waiting for the woman to turn.

  Say the woman—a certain Madame Fontaine—gazes out not in waiting but in reverie; or if she is waiting, waiting not for the arrival of guests, but of thoughts, a greater clarity. The room is blissfully quiet. Perhaps she waits for another life to unfurl.