‘Gosh! That will keep him busy.’
Laura Jansen’s bearing toward Charles veered between the deferential (as if he were an eminent CEO, and she a demure, obedient secretary) and mildly condescending (as if he were a precocious student who conceived of grandiose projects for himself, and she was too kind to point out his delusions). Flannery sympathized with this duality; the glare from Charles’s reputation sometimes made it hard to see the actual shape of the work he was doing, and you could not tell whether you were shielding your eyes from the brightness or the bluster. ‘He’s constructing a giant head made of molten old kerosene lamps, car headlights, torches . . . It’s called Enlightenment.’
She and her mother exchanged ambiguous expressions.
‘It sounds important,’ Laura said faintly.
Flannery tried on occasion to enlist her mother in sharing her frustration at the ways Charles was so erratic in his attentions as a father and a husband; but as Laura had never had a man for any length of time in either capacity, she generally retreated into a mute uncertainty about what was to be expected. She adored her daughter, while not fully understanding her, and carried that same slightly baffled doting on to her granddaughter. Those were the constants.
‘Grandma, can we play Candyland?’ Willa asked, coming into the kitchen with a game box slathered in pictures of candy canes and gumdrops. Flannery’s teeth hurt just to look at it.
‘Of course, honey.’ Laura brightened. She was great at playing board games with the little girl. Flannery had a terrible habit, tsked over disapprovingly by her daughter, of reading a magazine, or checking her phone, between turns. ‘Let’s set it up.’
Flannery’s mom gestured to the table, though the notion of the garish, psychedelic board being spread out on its suave, gray-on-gray surface was a jarring one.
‘Can we play on the floor?’ Willa said, collapsing onto the nearby Gabbeh rug. ‘It’s softer.’
‘Sure. Flan? You joining us?’
‘Why not?’
So, in varying degrees of comfort, the three generations sat cross-legged together on Charles’s elegant, cinnamon-colored carpet, guiding their plastic pieces through the Lollipop Woods and Peppermint Forest, as they tried to reach the Candy Castle and victory.
35
The ways kids nose things on the air, like dogs sensing plates shifting before a quake, or catching the scent of explosives in luggage. Children’s senses are sharper, attuned to frequencies adults have elected to forget. Willa felt a gust blowing between her father and her mother. There was a new gap there; she sought to close it.
‘Can we go to Dad’s studio?’ Willa asked one warm October afternoon as Flannery was strapping her into the car seat after school. Soon, with a couple more inches on Willa, there would be no need for such equipment. Flannery could hardly wait. She had jettisoned the gear of each stage of Willa’s childhood (bottles, cribs, strollers) with a bolt of joy, as Willa got closer and closer to being a regular person, whose constraints in the world would be only virtual, rather than plastic fiddly things you had to fasten.
‘Today?’ Flannery was caught off balance.
‘Yeah. It would be fun.’
Would it?
‘OK!’ Flannery chirped, that false cheerfulness parents put on to hide discomfort. Willa probably heard that, too. ‘Sure we can.’
For Willa, her father’s studio was an emporium of wonder. For her mother, it was impressive, alarming, and fascinating in equal measures. Its dangers were everywhere — blades, nails, poisons, and machines that could pierce, melt, sever, flatten — yet from its noisy stench and brain-wrecking cacophony great entities were born. Though as both child and adult, Flannery herself leaned toward quiet, it pleased her that her daughter was learning not to be afraid of noise; or at least that interesting things could come out of it.
The immensely spacious aluminum-roofed warehouse was in a flat, southern part of the city known as Dogpatch. When Flannery first told Willa this strange name, her daughter said, ‘Oh, like pirates!’, an association strengthened by the studio’s proximity to the city’s shipyards. But Dogpatch was one of the many parts of San Francisco getting altered now by tech money, which nurtured new kinds of businesses — laptop case makers or recycled rubber goods boutiques. Willa’s clear favorite was the bespoke chocolatier who had moved in to a small storefront around the corner from Charles’s studio, suffusing the neighborhood with a divine cocoa aroma.
‘Sarah said at her sister’s birthday party they had a chocolate fountain,’ Willa said conversationally, as she climbed out of the back seat. Once on the sidewalk the kid inhaled dramatically. Flannery sensed that a cookie stop had been part of her daughter’s master plan all along. ‘But I don’t believe her.’
‘Well . . .’ Flannery considered Sarah’s parents, who had organized pony rides to celebrate Sarah’s birthday the month before. ‘It’s possible.’
‘Really? That’s something you can have, a chocolate fountain?’
They were inside the store by then, standing in front of a glass cabinet filled with cookies and brownies as well as more grown-up concoctions (chocolate truffles with chilli pepper, or alcohol). ‘I’ve never seen one,’ Flannery admitted. ‘But I’ve heard of them. Like a unicorn, I guess.’
‘Yeah, but unicorns aren’t real.’
‘So you say. Do we know for sure?’
The woman behind the counter smiled patiently at this exchange then helped mother and daughter to two warm cookies, each in a tidy paper bag, and Flannery thanked her. Flannery considered her conversational Jekyll and Hyde as a mother — her wish to establish, when she was with Willa, I don’t only talk about unicorns, you know; paired with her equally strong urge, when she was in some shop or bakery without her daughter, to smile with extra indulgence on other people’s children, to show that she was on the side of people with kids.
‘Mmm. Warm chocolate. Is there anything better?’ Flannery said to her daughter as they ambled up the street together. Flannery was content. She gave Willa a sideways hug. She was traveling east in less than a fortnight, and was just beginning to feel the pull of a near-forgotten freedom.
36
Flannery opened the heavy metal door and stepped inside with Willa. They were not, for the first instant, seen by the men at work. Flannery always wondered at the collaborative nature of Charles’s creations, which made them seem almost more like pieces of theater or film. Her own prose sculpting was so solitary: just her chipping away at the hard, rough rock of language. She often felt, when she and Willa came to the studio, that it clarified the ways her daughter’s and her husband’s inventive leanings were related: their interest in substance and implements, matter and how to shape it. They shared a wish to ex-plore balance and space, a passion for the third dimension. Flannery’s safe, deskbound work was a long, silent, effortful endeavor to build a world in two.
Within the wide, high-ceilinged room there were materials (stacks of wood; bins of reclaimed metal; long steel rods and columns; a ‘fabric hamper’ Willa loved to play with, that contained rags and samples; a treasury of adhesives; toxic paints and fixatives of all sorts); hand tools (a fantastic gallery of hammers, pliers, wrenches, drivers, that seemed almost like living creatures, with faces); two workstations of enduring industrial steel, with beat-up clamps attached at points; and the power instruments (drills, blowtorches, soldering devices). Willa’s father’s studio was a serious, less primary-colored version of the worlds created by Richard Scarry in his brilliant depictions of work and construction, picture books that Willa loved to pore over, still. For Flannery, who had known Seuss’s wide-eyed rhyming creatures and Sendak’s mad underworld dreams, Richard Scarry had new information. How to build a road! The way you wire a house, and plumb it! This was, of course, the tenth or hundredth beauty of loving someone new: you were introduced to books you had not read before.
The high-pitched whi
ne of a saw over a base layer of radio, atop a track of give-and-take insults: this was the soundscape of the team assembling and affixing the pieces of Charles Marshall’s Enlightenment. In a cluttered corner, sandy-ponytailed, laid-back Baer was skillfully eviscerating what looked like a hurricane lamp, as a transplant surgeon might save what he could from a cooling corpse. Baer was a twenty-seven-year-old with the flexibility and muscle to assist Charles without buckling, as previous assistants had.
Standing more uncertainly, at a nervous disadvantage, was an etiolated boy named Lowell, the seventeen-year-old son of one of Charles’s friends, who had the idea that assisting in an artist’s studio would be cool, and incidentally look good on his college applications. At seventeen, as Flannery well recalled, you did not always get into situations with your eyes open; you dove down, eyes closed, nose blocked, into the cold and wet, then waited to find out when and where you’d surface afterwards. Lowell looked convincing enough, in an ironic T-shirt advertising a fifties cleaning product over skinny jeans with ragged knees. However, the task he had been set — sorting scrap from several outsized bins — seemed to bore him. Distracted, surreptitiously checking his phone, he looked up and was the first to spot Willa and Flannery. His eyes widened and he moved to get the attention of his boss, who was using a powerful table saw to do something shrill and violent to a sheet of metal. Charles looked up in sharp irritation at Lowell for bothering him, a fraction before he saw the reason why.
The aproned artist powered down the saw, which brought instant aural relief, then flipped up his safety visor. ‘My girls!’ He came over to envelop Willa in a thick embrace of sweat and affection, before doing the same, only slightly less effusively, to his wife. Whatever else went on, when the tap was open, the flow of the man’s warmth was a good thing. ‘What brings you out here to the Patch of the Dog?’
‘Someone wanted to see their dad,’ Flannery said, ‘and possibly also score some chocolate. Hi, Baer. Hey, Lowell.’
Baer nodded at them, his hands full, and Lowell gave a shy half-wave before turning to wander over to where Charles had been working.
‘Art and chocolate,’ Charles said, wiping sweat away from his nose. ‘Two of life’s essentials.’
‘Have you ever heard of a chocolate fountain, Daddy?’ Willa stood looking up at her father, her arms crossed, an endearing smear of the stuff at the corner of her curious mouth. ‘Like a fountain, that’s made of chocolate?’
‘I told her it was in the same category as a unicorn,’ Flannery said. ‘Maybe fantasy, maybe real.’
‘Oh, they’re real,’ Charles stated. ‘They’re just overrated. But look at this, Willamuffin!’ He gestured proudly to the evolving creation that took up the center of the studio. The assembled jumble already stood taller than Willa.
‘See what I’m making?’ The use of the singular pronoun to describe his work came naturally, as if Baer and Lowell were mere ghostwriters. ‘Pretty cool, right?’
Willa could only agree, as she stared at the form taking shape from other forms. She touched it, tentatively. ‘Is it . . . a head?’
‘You got it!’ Charles laughed and then ruffled the top of hers with his oily hand, a gesture his daughter had told him repeatedly she did not like.
In his corner, Baer was intently focused on his dissected lamp, getting ready to solder a reclaimed piece of metal onto a long, powerful ledge of what was probably this metal giant’s jaw. He was putting a pair of goggles on as he sang along, loud and tuneless, to the rock song blaring from the old transistor radio that stood on a low, wide sill.
The sun shone for a full minute. Then there was a brief sudden whirr of a motor from the opposite end of the room, and Charles turned his ferocious attention to the high school kid, in shadow.
‘Lowell!’ he bellowed, rending the air. ‘What the FUCK are you doing?’
37
Lowell leapt back, as if from a live wire. He was over near the table saw.
‘Sorry . . . I just . . .’
‘Get out of there! You fuckwit.’
Baer, across the wide warehouse expanse, flipped up his goggles to see better, and stopped singing. He had been around his boss long enough to know when a dressing-down was on its way, and he did not intend to miss it. Everyone with any connection to Charles had been through this. There could be a sinister gratification watching it happen to someone else.
Flannery, however, felt differently. This explosion was the opposite of therapeutic for her, vibrating with memories of all the times she was the one receiving his nasty slapdown. The occasions had been both large and small, at home, or on the road: when Charles felt Flannery had poorly handled a press call for him (‘It was just incompetent, that’s all. You need to stay away from my professional dealings’), or lost it one evening about a dinner of chicken tenders Flannery had cooked (‘Jesus! I don’t want to eat this crap. What am I, four?). Here they came, in sequence: Charles’s spit of contempt, the percussive slapping of hand against table, like a butcher’s cleaver, and Flannery had no schadenfreude at all. She just felt sorry for the kid, in his torn jeans and Brillo tee, standing with his arms folded, head down, his pale face peachening with embarrassment. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘Were you listening to me at all when I explained to you how to be safe around these machines? Are you in grade school? Do you even understand circuitry?’
Not only that, there was Willa.
The little girl took the dancing dog she had brought in with her — a soft, cross-eyed toy whose tinny music, prompted by pushing a button on its fluffy leg, simultaneously delighted children and enervated adults — and folded herself into her mother’s arms for ballast. She was familiar with these storms too, of course. She petted the brown and white dog to reassure him, though she did not press the button. If she had, a decelerating voice — the batteries were wearing out — would have started singing, Dream dream dream dream dre-e-e-e-eam, and Willa had the good sense to know that might push her father over the edge.
‘Charles.’ Flannery approached him, hand outstretched. Willa slid away from her arms and retreated to an aluminum stool near the door. ‘Look, Lowell didn’t get hurt. It’s OK. He’s not –’
‘He wouldn’t have gotten “hurt”,’ Charles barked. ‘He would have lost a couple of his fucking fingers. You have any idea how bloody that is? No? Well, guess what? I do. I’ve seen it. It happens in two seconds when morons ignore basic safety principles and get their clumsy hands on serious equipment.’ Charles’s face was livid, the color of a beating heart. ‘This isn’t nursery school here, Lowell. The blades are sharp, the poisons are toxic, and these tools aren’t pretend. They’re the real fucking thing.’
‘OK, OK.’ Flannery’s own face was becoming red now. She knew she had to get Willa out of here, but she wanted to try to calm Charles. She put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t you think –’
He whipped his arm away from her angrily. ‘Stay out of this, Flannery.’ Charles’s face was transformed: curled lip, narrowed eyes, high choleric cheeks. In this state, Flannery had had the thought before, he looked like a drunk. ‘This is my studio and I know how to run it. For Christ’s sake. You think this is a playground, a place for chocolate and chit-chat and stuffed animals. You don’t have the faintest fucking idea of what’s going on around here. You never have.’
Flannery turned her back on Charles, and his crew. ‘Come on, Willa honey.’ Her voice wanted to waver, but she would not let it. ‘Let’s go home.’
Charles was not about to dissuade her. He returned to the matter at hand, hollering and humiliating. Flannery couldn’t save the young man. It was women and children first: she had to get herself and her daughter out.
38
‘Are you crying?’
They were back in the car, Willa strapped in to her seat, the automotive throne of childhood.
Flannery was indeed crying.
‘No
t really.’ She wiped her face clean. She attempted a watery smile, but could see in the rearview mirror her daughter’s flatly skeptical face. It was wrong to lie into it. ‘I mean, maybe a little,’ Flannery admitted. ‘I just . . . I don’t like it when your dad talks to me like that.’
Willa nodded.
‘And I don’t think it’s that great for the people who work with him, either.’ Though, thin ice: don’t disparage the other parent to your kid. Everyone knew that, no matter their background. Even if their own dad had been a spacey hippie living down in San Miguel de Allende. ‘We just –’ Flannery tried to fix this — ‘have different ways of doing things, Dad and I, and so sometimes . . . we . . . disagree.’
Willa was silent.
‘And . . . it’s upsetting. At times.’
Silent a bit longer. Then:
‘Why did you marry him?’
Flannery nearly swerved into a turquoise taquería at the question. Her daughter was known to be direct, but this was exceptional. To stall for time, Flannery laughed, as if it were a joke. ‘Why? ’
‘Yeah. Why.’ Willa, a patient judge, remained serious.
They drove up and over Potrero Hill, an elevated area of nifty restaurants and sloping stores. Flannery was considering her answer. The only way to frame it honestly was in terms of her daughter.
The origin story. You should be able to tell it to your child — whether you were married or not, in a couple or not — shouldn’t you? Every kid wanted to have one. Your father was presented as a boy from a good background, with decent prospects, and I was supposed to produce for him an heir. Or: your mom and I went down to the fertility clinic and selected a donor together. Or: we were so in love with each other that we whispered in the dark, on the beach, I want to make a child with you, and that is what happened. Or: we had intense and accidentally unprotected sex, and I found out I was pregnant.
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