by Ann Packer
I left the studio. It was cold out, and I hurried to my rental car. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time and saw that I’d received a text from Ryan. “R says u should b there by now. Good luck.”
R says. He meant Rebecca, of course, but oh, how it had always bothered me, the three R’s and me left out. I started the car and turned on the heater. I wasn’t about to leave without securing my mom’s agreement on the house, but I wasn’t going right back into the studio, either. For the past fifteen years Taos had been my mom to me, of no interest and vaguely offensive, and as I sat in the parking lot and felt the mountains behind me, rising dark and abrupt from the desert, I knew I couldn’t see it clearly, though I understood it was beautiful. When I told Celia about South America and how restless I’d been there, how indifferent to the place, she said, “We’ll go together someday and it’ll be different because you’ll be different.” Maybe that would be true of Taos, too. I couldn’t wait to see her.
R says. How hard would it have been to come up with another R? I could have been Roger, Randolph, Ralph. Imagining wishing you’d been named Ralph!
“We really liked James,” my dad always said when I raised the R issue, and when I was little he would follow this statement with a recitation of the A. A. Milne rhyme “Disobedience,” which I loved, especially the ending.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he;
“You must never go down
to the end of the town
if you don’t go down with me.”
I was easily distracted, and this usually worked. “Say it again,” I’d cry, “say it again!” At three or four years old I believed I could take great care of my mother. I wondered where the end of the town was and asked her every time we went out. “Is this the end of the town? Is this?” There were a couple years when she and I were alone together for hours every day. We spent a lot of time in the car. This was before car seats, and I had the vast backseat all to myself. I pretended to be a dog and scampered around barking or sat on my hind legs with my tongue hanging out the window.
Once she left me in a store. I was carrying on about something and after we’d faced off for several minutes she turned and walked away. When she didn’t come back I began racing up and down the aisles screaming and looking for her. I attracted the attention of the store manager, who lured me to his office with a promise of candy. He sat me down in his desk chair with a handful of jelly beans and announced over the loudspeaker that there was a lost little boy waiting to be claimed. I always remembered that phrase: “waiting to be claimed.” I hoped she would come faster than anyone else who might want me.
But she didn’t come fast. It was a full ten minutes before she came back. That phrase stuck with me, too: “a full ten minutes,” spoken by the manager. She told him I needed to learn my lesson, and for years afterward the whole concept of lessons, and therefore school, upset me.
“She made a mistake,” my dad said repeatedly over the next few days. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
I looked out across the New Mexico desert. In just a few minutes the sun had flattened completely, and now it sank below the horizon. I went back into the studio.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Whatever.”
“No, I am. I am. We got off on the wrong foot. I did. And now I’m stuck—you don’t want to tell me about your life, and if I tell you about mine I’m just like old times, completely selfish.”
I shrugged, unwilling to take the bait.
“I guess we can talk about everyone else. What’s Walt like?”
“Nice enough guy. A little stiff.”
“She told me they didn’t have a real wedding.”
“They didn’t. Or at least she told me the same thing.”
“I would have gone.”
Just before I’d gotten out of the car at the San Francisco airport that morning, Rebecca had said, “Leaving the house out of it, don’t you think it’s good that you’re getting this done?” I said, “You make it sound like a necessary step before some inevitable future event can happen.” And she said, “Well, some things in life are inevitable.”
“I don’t know what you want,” I said to my mom now, “but so help me, if you’re secretly dying and wanted me to come so you could—”
She smiled. “I’ve never been better. A little creaky in the mornings, but I’m the picture of health. I walk, you know. Five miles a day. Let’s go out to dinner. Honestly, that’s all I want. Just time to talk. Rebecca said you aren’t spending the night?”
Rebecca had made my travel arrangements: reserved the car, bought the plane tickets. I’d flown from San Francisco to Phoenix to Albuquerque, and the next day I’d fly from Albuquerque to Salt Lake City to Eugene. She’d also given me five hundred dollars. “This is really costing you,” I said, and she said, “The money’s the least of it. I’m also going to have to spend hours in my analysis talking about what I’m trying to do. Or undo.”
“I have an early flight,” I told my mom.
“Do you have anything warmer to wear? It’ll be below freezing tonight.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
It was the off-season and the restaurant was only half-full, of people she said were mostly locals. The proprietor knew her, and she waved at one or two groups as we were shown to our table. We talked about Taos and how much it had changed in the eighteen years since she first visited. She asked about Sammy and Luke and Katya, and I told her a few stories from my two weeks in Portola Valley. As time passed, the hard edges and lines in her face seemed to soften. I asked if working with heavy-gauge wire was difficult, and she laughed and held out her hands. She had cuts and scars all over the backs of her fingers, and calluses on her palms.
“No more egg noodle bags, huh?”
“You know, it’s funny. I did those assemblages for years. Then when I got here and learned how to make them smaller and they started to sell—well, I got tired of them. Wire talks back. I have a dialogue with it. Broken teacups don’t have a lot to say. Why are you smiling?”
“If your wire is talking to you, you might want to call Rebecca. They may have a pill for that.”
She smiled. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Midway through our meal, two older men stopped at our table to chat with my mom, and she invited them to join us. They were a couple, transplants from Boston, one a painter and the other a retired CPA. I felt like an idiot deflecting their questions, so I began talking about Eugene. I even made a reference to the Barn, and the men asked me to explain.
“Wait,” the CPA said. “What’s to stop someone from taking advantage? He’s happy to have everyone come work in his backyard, but somehow he’s always busy when the work is elsewhere?”
The painter said, “Ignore him, he’s airing his issues.” His name was Todd; the CPA was Carver. “So is it all families?”
“Except me.”
“You’re single?”
“Guilty.”
“Wait,” Carver said, turning to my mom. “Is this your youngest? The one who . . . travels a lot?”
“I guess my reputation precedes me.”
“What could I have told them?” she said. “I know nothing.”
“You’ve heard about the doctors and the teacher?” I said. “I’m the other one.”
We’d moved on to dessert, and the men ordered drinks. Carver told us he was flying to Boston the next day for a funeral. Not someone close—his ex-wife’s second husband.
“He’s just going to support her,” Todd said.
“I’m a classic caretaker,” Carver told me. “My ex-wife is very needy. Horrible to be married to her, not to mention the obvious, but we’re great friends now, except when she drives me crazy.”
I thought of Celia and David and whether they might
be great friends one day. They weren’t great friends now, but maybe that wasn’t a good predictor. Would I want them to be?
“Did you hear what happened at Benjamin’s opening?” Todd asked my mom. “Benjamin came up and said to me, ‘Would you like to meet Carol Fishman? She’s letting me bring a few people over to say hello.’ ”
My mom laughed, and Todd rolled his eyes.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“It was a put-down,” she told me.
“A one-up,” Carver said. “Unintentional.” He explained that Carol Fishman was a locally famous sculptor whose work was sold in one of Santa Fe’s most exclusive galleries. “The thing is, Todd already knows Carol. Quite well. He introduced her to her dealer.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Benjamin thought he was extending this largesse to me,” Todd said. “That he was doing me a big favor. It demonstrated his perception of me as lowly and striving.”
“And made you feel lowly and striving,” Carver said. “It was a narcissistic blow.”
“I’ve recovered,” Todd said. “Barely.”
“You’re very strong,” my mom said.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s a narcissistic blow?” They all looked at me and I felt stupid, the little kid who knows nothing. “I guess I shouldn’t be so ignorant, having a shrink for a sister.”
“It’s a wound,” Carver said. “An assault to your self-esteem. Something that makes you feel bad about yourself.”
“So what’s something that makes you feel good about yourself?” I said. “A narcissistic blow job?”
Carver and Todd laughed, and my mom gave me such a warm, fond smile that I felt a lurch of affection for her.
But somehow that made me think about what a bitch she’d always been. Completely selfish, as she’d said back at her studio. Worse, though. Cold. Hateful. “She’s changed a lot,” Ryan told me right after my dad died. “She’s gotten mellow.” “So mellow,” Robert said, “that she didn’t even feel the need to come to her husband’s funeral.” This was maybe two weeks after the service, a week after we spread the ashes. We were all at the house, where we kept gathering for dinners. We never ate at Robert’s, never at Rebecca’s. Obviously never at Ryan’s. Every day, one of them showed up with groceries at around six and began cooking. I was the only one sleeping there and the only one never to cook. On that particular evening, Marielle and Katya had stayed at the shed and Jen had fed the boys early and taken them home. It was only us Blairs. We were in the living room, looking through photo albums.
“She couldn’t come to the funeral,” Rebecca said.
“Because she was getting ready for a show? Please.”
“Emotionally. She couldn’t manage it.”
“That’s what I mean,” Ryan said. “She’s mellowed.”
“Wines mellow,” Robert said. “Then they turn into vinegar.”
“She’s less defended,” Rebecca said.
I was only half listening, focused instead on the albums and what a little ham I was in every picture, striking a silly pose or making a face. The rest of the family was of a piece, even my mom with her distracted or sour look, and then there was James: blond, big-boned, bursting. I was the kid who entered your house at a run and knocked over the crystal vase on the sideboard without a backward glance. If you left an important document out, I found a Magic Marker and scribbled all over it. If I wanted a Popsicle, I took the last one, left the empty box in the freezer, and ran off without closing the door. A misfit if a misfit had no idea he was a misfit.
But I knew. I knew.
“You know,” I said to my mom, looking from her to Carver and Todd and back, “thanks to you, my whole childhood was a narcissistic blow.”
She began to cough. “Oh,” she gasped, “oh,” and she reached for her water. “Sorry, wrong pipe.” She pressed her napkin to her lips and hurried from the table.
“Oh, dear,” Carver said.
“Families,” Todd said.
“We’re very fond of your mother,” Carver said.
“I’m glad someone is.”
She was gone for a long time. Carver and Todd worked to keep a conversation going, but as soon as she returned they said it was time to call it a night. She signaled for the check. It was after eight, and I was beyond exhausted. The airport in Albuquerque was two hours away, and I was torn. Should I make the drive tonight so I could sleep in, or find a place to stay in Taos and set an alarm for five a.m.?
“I’m not upset by what you said,” she told me once we’d settled in her car. “I had a good time tonight. Thanks for coming.”
“You’re not upset but you’re also not sorry.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. For all the good that’ll do you.”
“You’re not exactly saying it.”
“I’m sorry about my . . . distraction.”
“Your distraction? You despised me!”
She looked at me through the dark. “James. I didn’t despise you.”
“Let’s not talk anymore.”
We made our way to the main road, and she turned in the direction of her studio. I realized I didn’t even know where she lived.
I said, “So you’ll sell the house?”
“Of course. Nothing’s changed, I want my own place, just like three years ago. I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry when I told Rebecca I wanted to see you first.”
We continued in silence. In under twenty-four hours I’d be in Eugene, settling back in, counting the minutes until I could see Celia. Talking to her on the phone from the airport in Phoenix, I’d felt enveloped with relief that the last six months, the deception, would soon be over. I knew it would be hard on Theo and Cesar, but what Rebecca had said about trauma had stuck with me. Celia and I would watch them carefully and get them help if they needed it.
We pulled into the parking lot and my mom cut the engine. “It hasn’t been so awful, has it?” she said. “You’re good company. You’re very funny.”
“It hasn’t been so awful.”
“That was all I wanted. For it to be not so awful.”
“Lofty goals,” I said, and she smiled. “Show me your stuff,” I said impulsively. “Before I take off.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
The studio was very cold, and she turned on the lights but didn’t bother with the thermostat, saying it would take too long for the place to heat up. She had an electric kettle, and she turned it on, for mugs of tea that would warm our hands while she showed me around.
“At first,” she said, “it was really about the wire. I did things like this, pretty small-scale but occasionally bigger and more complex.” She was walking me from one small sculpture to the next, basically loose balls of wire twisted in different ways.
“They kind of look like Brillo pads,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t get as far away from your old stuff as you thought.”
She smiled. “Then a couple years ago I started moving away from pure abstraction. Here’s a piece I made last winter.”
It was a small wire swing set with delicate wire people, the three-dimensional equivalent of stick figures. Triangles on legs, they were obviously women. In place of a head each was topped by a tiny plastic television set the size of a sugar cube, its screen occupied by an image of a woman’s face.
“Whoa, this is weird,” I said. “Did you make this little TV set? It’s so perfect.”
“Dollhouse furniture. I did a series of these and they sold so fast.”
“I kind of love it.”
She looked pleased. Her hair was shoulder-length and completely gray, and because of the light fixture hanging from the high ceiling, I could see how much it had thinned. “Look,” she said, “this is what happens when they get bigger.” She led me to a large piece with a central braided trunk resting on three heavy-
gauge wire feet, and a canopy that looked like a giant bird’s nest. I stared up into the canopy: there were hundreds of figures like the ones in the small sculpture, wire women with tiny television heads. Each screen displayed the face of a woman from another age, with a stiff hairdo and dark lipstick and an intense look of pleasure or pain.
The kettle whistled, and she poured water into hand-thrown mugs. I thought of her ceramics and how fascinated I’d been by the kiln she got when I was in first grade. Whenever I was home alone with her I wanted her to take me to the shed, and she said only if I stayed quiet and didn’t touch anything—neither of which was remotely possible.
“I’m not sure how you’ll feel about this,” she said, “but I’m working on something new. I haven’t even decided if I like it myself.”
She led me to a table that was scattered with tiny television sets, dozens of them, most with tiny black-and-white photographs glued to their screens. Here was Rebecca’s sixth-grade school picture, the first in which she wore glasses and as far as I knew the only picture of her in existence that had made her cry. There was Ryan standing in his crib; my mom had cropped out everything but his face, but I knew the photograph so well that I could see the crib. Robert gazed dolefully from a missing piano in one and smiled up from an absent bathtub in another. The table was heaped with photos, familiar shots from our family albums but smaller and in black and white, many with their fingernail-size faces already cut out. Beyond the pictures was a row of little wire stick figures, still headless.
“So they’re going to go like this?” I said, sliding a TV with a picture of Ryan to a wire boy.
“I didn’t do you yet,” she said. “I didn’t know how you’d feel. Actually, what am I saying, I did. If you don’t like it, I won’t use it. I may not use these at all. People like the women. They want the facial expressions explained, though, and they want titles.”
“Mom.”
She opened a covered Tupperware, took out another tiny TV, and laid it on the table. There I was at about age four, squeezing my eyes shut and smiling a huge fake smile. I knew the photo: just outside the cropping I was holding Dog. It was a picture I’d always disliked, my face moonlike and empty.