by Robin Black
Because sometimes it does. “After you and I separated.”
“You and George?” he asks. “Right after? Back then?”
“Back then. Briefly. And then again. For the past five years.”
His face is mobile now, but in small, twitchy ways, the mouth twisting and shifting, the eyes looking down, then off to somewhere else, closed for a moment, open wide, looking at her, not looking at her. He is struggling to absorb what she has said.
It’s revenge, in part. She knows that. He revealed his renewed friendship with George, and she has rendered that disclosure piddling. But she has also given him a gift. He’s off the hook now. She is no better than he. George too. Look at what they both did to Janet. Just another pair of sinners. Harold can stop feeling inferior. After how many years? She has finally given him that.
“I don’t know what to say, Clara. I should ask questions. Or I shouldn’t. I don’t know what to say. You and George?”
“Yes, me and… yes. But please, no questions.” What other memories of her own might be revealed as illusions? Might be taken from her as casually as Harold has just taken from her a part of George she thought she held? As effortlessly as she has just rewritten decades of Harold’s own life for him? At this table, with this man—her husband once, father of her children, her future at one time—she feels her own history sliding away from her.
“Clara, I don’t know what to say.”
“We don’t have to talk, right now, you know,” she says. “We can just eat our food. It’s entirely possible that we’ve both already said enough.”
He looks at her for a moment, as though he might be ready for a fight, but then he nods.
A MONTH IN, and she’s on to the real canvas now. An art student has primed it for her, and Clara’s done a little preliminary work on her own, using only the sketch, but now John Parker is sitting there, and he’s staring at her. She’s told him he doesn’t have to, she’s only blocking things out, just broad strokes. But still he stares, and for the first time in all these weeks, she finds herself unnerved. The other times, she had insisted he look at her, but this time he seems to be looking for himself. Clara is her eyes, she is what she observes. She doesn’t like being looked at. Before, his eyes had seemed sightless; today she feels exposed.
She avoids his gaze, stepping all the way behind her canvas. She works a bit on the area below his jaw. George used to say she had a therapist’s instinct for invisibility. “I am often whoever my patients need me to be,” he said. “Which is rarely me.”
“I’m not even that,” she replied. “I’m not even in the room.”
She is absorbed in the canvas, actual brushstrokes, the movement of paint, when she’s startled by a sound and looks over. John Parker is sobbing. His head is down, his body heaving. He is consumed by sobs.
“What?” she asks. “What?”
He doesn’t respond. There’s no sign that he has heard.
She puts the brush down and walks toward him, only a few feet, only a few seconds. He’s still turned toward the easel, his elbows on the one arm of the chair, his head lowered into his hands, so all she can see is the yellowed skin of his scalp, the brown spots, the veins, the few strands of remaining hair. She kneels beside him, not knowing what she should do, or what she can bring herself to do, and, kneeling there, is filled with something new, something like guilt. She reaches out and wraps her arms around his body. Shhhhhh. She says it many times, each time she exhales. Shhhh, with every breath.
His head is heavy on her shoulder. He bleats against the cotton of her shirt. He trembles against her flesh. As she holds him, it comes to her, gradually. She knows why he is crying, and she knows why she feels guilty.
John Parker knows. He sees himself leaving, understands about time—as she does. What it is doing to him. And he is grieving, for himself.
She moves her hand up and down his back, feeling the knobs of his spine poking through the shirt, through the wool jacket. She presses her palms firmly onto his body. But she isn’t calming him at all. It isn’t her touch he needs, it seems.
What does he need?
“Shhhhh,” she says.
He had been calm, she remembers, while staring at her. Before she stepped away, hiding from him, leaving him alone. Perhaps it is now unbearable for him to be alone.
She shifts her hands to his face, tries to lift his head.
“Look at me,” she says. “Look at me.” It takes her a moment to remember his name. “Look at me, John. John. Look at me.”
He does, only inches from her eyes. He looks at her, and she is startled by the gaze that she has learned so well, startled to find a living man there, a feeling man. “I know,” she says. “I know.”
He stares at her, still, and it is hard not to read his sorrow as a wisdom of a kind, in this era of loss when knowledge and pain seem intrinsically linked. She thinks that maybe here is someone to whom she can speak all those thoughts, explain what she has been trying to do, what has upset her so, about her work, since George’s death. What stillness means. What time itself means, how it rules us, how it flows away, away. How unkind, how dispassionate it can be. How in the end, for all we are given, we are all robbed blind. Of everything. John Parker understands, she’s sure. He won’t think her sophomoric or pretentious. He’ll recognize her struggles. He’ll know that she, like he, is at war.
But his gaze belies her thoughts. He is too dulled already, too absent to hear her out. John Parker is as unreachable as George. But he is still alive, still needs the comfort he cannot give. His face is drenched with tears and snot, his lips quivering still. She pulls the cuff of her sleeve over her hand and rolls it into her fist as she used to when the children were small. She wipes him clean, careful not to drop her gaze from his for long. “I know,” she says again. “I know.”
Time, she thinks. Both foe and friend. It will destroy John Parker, but it will also soon relieve him of the knowledge that he is destroyed.
It isn’t long before she stands, reaches for his hand, gentles him up, and walks him out into the small sitting area, where they sit, still holding hands, silent, on the couch where he and his wife sat weeks before.
An hour or so later when Katherine Parker walks in carrying a few small shopping bags, Clara says only, “Your husband isn’t well,” and after a moment, the other woman nods.
“I know,” she says, and she too sits, in Clara’s usual chair. “I shouldn’t have done this.” She touches her forehead with one hand, her pale polished nails brushing against the fringe of short white hair. “I’ve upset him. It was too much. I should have known.”
“It can be difficult to know what’s right.”
“I wanted…” Her voice is now quivering, threatening to break.
“You wanted to immortalize him,” Clara says. “You told me that.”
The other woman looks over, blinks, and nods. “That’s right,” she says. “As a present, for myself.”
It can’t be done, you know. Not with any of us. It’s a false hope. A parlor trick. You’ll think you’ve done it, you’ll think you can hold on, but it’s always just a trick. She doesn’t say it, though. “You’ve had him for fifty-one years.” She’s thinking of George, of course, of the twenty-one years they didn’t have, of the miracle of the five they found, of all the pictures of him she never drew, of her attempt to hold him entirely within herself, to preserve him that way, of how Harold proved that impossible, of the legacy of mystery every person leaves behind.
“I was seventeen when we met,” Katherine Parker says.
“It’s your whole life, then.”
It isn’t right, Clara knows, to tell her how lucky she has been, not at this moment, as her husband quivers beside Clara on the couch. It would be unsympathetic to call her blessed, to rush her through grief and insist on the silver lining. Clara won’t do it. But she does envy her. Despite it all, she envies her. It doesn’t matter about the many reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, that one might have stayed mar
ried for half a century. Right now, she can see only all the years.
“I should take him home.” Katherine Parker is sitting straighter now. Clara notices again that veil etched into her skin, over her eyelids, her lips. Beside her, John Parker sighs an almost musical tone.
“If you like,” she says, “I could try finishing it. Without him, I mean. I have enough sketches—I think. I could do it. Not the same way, but something.”
Katherine Parker frowns. “But it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” she asks. “It’s too late. Isn’t it?”
Clara thinks about the stark clarity with which she has been depicting John Parker’s decline. Is it too late? Yes. It is. Of course it is. But arguably, it is always too late.
“No,” she says. “It’s not too late.”
“Oh, it’s terrible. I feel like such a fool.”
“Time makes fools of us all,” Clara says. “Every single one of us. It’s possible we need to ignore that fact. And get on with our lives.”
It is another moment before Katherine Parker nods. “Yes,” she says. “I would like it, still. I would.”
“It will take a week, maybe two. I’m not sure how long.”
It won’t be the same picture, of course, not the one that so interested her. She’ll have to give up on the notion of depicting time itself—as a kindness. She’ll have to pick a point along the continuum of John Parker’s life and stop the clock there, search the evidence of her own observations and try to re-create him, as he was—as though that man were more real than the man he is now, as though there’s a moment in anyone’s life that is the truest one. As a kindness, she will pretend to this belief. A death mask? Perhaps. But also a token thrown to weigh in on the side of love.
Katherine rises, takes a few unhurried steps, then reaches for her husband’s hand, and Clara, who has forgotten that her fingers and his are still interlaced, misses a moment before she thinks to let it go. Then she watches their hands clasp together, loose skin, knobby knuckles. She sees him respond to the familiar, gentle tug, rising easily, as though sensing safety in the air around his wife. The couch cushion exhales; the dent from his weight disappears.
“Let’s go home, John. Let’s take you home.”
They begin to walk away. She will never see John Parker again, she knows.
When Katherine glances back, Clara gives her an encouraging look, a look that promises her the portrait she wants. Clara will do it. She will turn back the hands of time.
Katherine Parker smiles at her, seems almost to laugh, then turns away. The couple moves as one through the glass-paned door, their images visible only briefly, a bit distorted. Gone.
Harriet
Elliot
SHE WAS THE NEW GIRL in our fifth grade. Harriet Elliot. And when she told us that, she told it to us whole, the necessary pause between first and last name, that hard, repeated stop at the end of each, adding to the strangely adult air she carried with her, and signaling her separateness from us.
We were ten and eleven years old. Our parents, all of them friends, our fathers all professors, had started this school, an experiment in learning. We knew nothing of desks. Nothing of mimeographed sheets of paper with empty lines or boxes to be filled. We roamed the large classroom and Expressed Ourselves. We lounged, with books we chose, in beanbag chairs and on the shag rug, which smelled like the dog our teacher brought with her each day, and also like us. We played recorders and African drums. We learned our times tables with dried lima beans. We wore jeans or we wore blue-and-white-striped OshKosh overalls. Sometimes we wore Levi’s cords, though they always faded quickly at the knees, the ridges dissolving into translucent fabric, soft and grubby, like a loose second skin.
Harriet Elliot wore dresses, always clean, and white tights that reached an abrupt conclusion at the start of her black patent shoes. We wore shit-kicker boots and sneaks. When we took them off, our socks rarely matched. Some of us were tall—Freddy Steinberg, Peter Walker, Annabelle Grant. Harriet Elliot was taller. Our hair was shaggy, un-brushed, wild, long. Infrequently washed. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail so tight that, though it sprang from the elastic in a surprising mass of curls, it lined her head without a single ridge, smooth and shiny as a mirror.
We were supposed to know better than to tease. We were taught tolerance by our Quaker teacher at every chance. There was God in each of us—even in those of us, like me, who had been raised to believe there was no God. This puzzle, which puzzled me into contortions, never seemed to ruffle my parents, in their own jeans and overalls, flannel shirts and faded cords. My mother, a philosophy student, cooking our dinner of beans, brown rice, carrot soup, holding the phone head to shoulder, arguing in her quiet, even voice with the other end of the line in favor of Nothingness, an argument she seemed increasingly certain she had won. My father, an archaeologist, shaggily handsome, with a beard he kept well-trimmed, shoulder-length hair he continually touched, and the knack of being central to every situation he was in. Our home, half a brownstone, the division clumsily built, an illogical wall running through our front hall. Our shelves and our tabletops crowded with my father’s Mayan figures of squat, clay women with pendulous, thick-nippled breasts to which I, a ten-year-old girl, was supposed to be blind.
And of course we did tease. We were children, after all.
On the day Harriet Elliot joined our ranks, we set out, as if on the kind of formal assignment that we never were assigned, to make her defend her difference from us. Not in the large classroom, where we first mumbled our greetings as Teacher Margie encouraged us to do and then pretty much ignored her. But during morning break, our daily outing to Rittenhouse Square, where we would run up and down the pavement pathways cutting diagonals across the grass and climb the statuary and draw pink-chalk hopscotch boards on the cement.
Ben Granger began, asking her where she was from, as if the answer might be Oz. She told us that she was from New York. “Manhattan,” she said, hardening the t’s in that, as well. Harriet Elliot, from Manhattan. She clicked when she spoke. And she wore a white, furry coat, though the rest of us wore only long-sleeved shirts.
“Philadelphia’s better,” Peter Walker said. “New York’s full of murderers.” We all nodded. We all believed the same things. Mary Hudson, a kind-natured child, said that maybe they dress different in New York. I looked at Harriet Elliot and thought maybe that was true. Maybe she would come back the next day in real clothes.
“This is probably just your first-day outfit,” Mary said, with a hopeful smile.
Harriet Elliot’s white coat hung longer than her dress. Her white tights stuck out beneath. I thought her black feet looked like hooves on a sheep.
“No. I always dress like this,” she said. “My father tells me I’m a princess.”
And that was that. Of course.
We whispered the word princess daily among ourselves, careful so Teacher Margie wouldn’t hear. We hissed it when we passed Harriet Elliot in the classroom and when we saw her alone in the small lav down the hall. We wrote it anonymously in the corners of her drawings, which were of castles, of unicorns. Which didn’t look like ours.
When our parents asked us how the new girl was fitting in, we shrugged, knowing better than to share our unanimous judgment. We said she seemed okay. We tried to make our faces look as though we had found a glimpse of God inside of her.
As there was God in each of us. Sometimes I would try to find him there. At night, in my room, my eyes closed, escaping the unmistakable tones of an unending parental argument forcing its way up the stairwell through my door, I would stare inside myself. Lying in the dark, in the nebulous shadow of my mother’s beloved Nothingness and in the quandary of my own curiosities, I would look until I slept for the God I had been told did not exist. Or sometimes at school I would peer at a classmate, at Freddy, who had an eye that always ran with yellow ooze, and who couldn’t keep his lima beans from falling on the floor. And I would search, without success, for signs of God.
IN THE
MIDDLE of October came Self-Expression Day. Other schools called it show-and-tell. I only knew this from my sister, who had missed out on the co-op. At thirteen, she was old enough and at odds enough already with our parents to roll her mascara-fringed eyes at breakfast, wrinkle her freckled nose, and say Self-Expression Day with great contempt.
“Why can’t you morons just call it show-and-tell?”
My father, leaning against a kitchen counter, in his jeans and wool jacket, his black turtleneck, suggested I take one of his Mayan women to school. “How about the goddess Ixchel?” He ground a cigarette butt on a plate. “She would be perfect.”
My sister laughed out loud. “Oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you do that?” she asked, her blond hair hanging like window curtains around her face.
I said I thought I’d rather bring the kimono my grandparents had bought me in Japan. I had already pulled it down from the back of my closet shelf.
“Are you sure?” my father asked. “I have a few minutes free. I could write a little something for you to read. What time are you doing it? I might even be able to come.”
“It’s her self-expression,” my mother said, standing up. “Her self-expression,” she repeated, the pronoun poking through like a thorn. “Not yours.”
For a moment no one moved; then my father muttered, “Jesus Christ,” stomped from the room, slammed out of the house. In the silence he left, I heard his car, its old engine rattling down the block. My mother began shifting the breakfast dishes around the kitchen with no obvious purpose and a grasp so tight I thought one would shatter in her hand. For just a second, my sister looked at me as though doing so might help, as though we might be aligned in this. But not for long.
“Thanks a lot,” she whispered across the table. “It’s all your fault, you know. For being born.”
The classroom that morning was cluttered with odd objects, many of them foreign like mine, many borrowed from our parents’ professions, as I had chosen not to do. Since we had no desks, we lined our treasures up against the wall under our coats, which hung in a primary-colored row, broken only by the puff of white Harriet Elliot wore each day. Nobody commented on what anyone else had brought. Nobody seemed interested in anything much, except the empty space beneath her coat, about which we whispered among ourselves with glee.