“You’re very kind,” I say. I look down at my own feet. The right toes are a shade darker than the left.
“He was a mistake,” she says wistfully.
“Because he was gay? Sounds like he made the mistake when he went after you.”
She shakes her head. “It was another notch against me. Arthur Miller can marry Marilyn Monroe and that’s all well and dandy, but I go around with a director or a musician, or even silly old Andy Warhol, and my credibility is shot. ‘Poet to the Stars,’ that’s what the New Yorker called me once. Only time I ever made it into that rag.”
“No one thinks of you that way,” I lie.
“People say your choices define you. It’s true, but not the way people think. Your choices don’t shape you, they shape people’s perceptions of you. Even the silliest, most insubstantial decision—someone will use it as evidence of one flaw or another.”
“And where are all those people now?” I ask. “Who are they? They’re no one, and you’re Imogene Woodruff.”
“Poet to the Stars,” she says. “Queen of the Bottle Cap Mural.”
“Jealousy makes people say cruel things.”
She’s staring out the window, toward the treetops. “I want to see them. The bottle caps. I want to see them.”
“Right now?”
“I don’t know how long we have.”
I tell myself she is talking about my mother, about how she wants to take them down. I tell myself we have no other time limits as I guide her toward the steps and wrap my arm around her waist. She leans on me, and I lean on the railing.
We move in a lurching motion. I step down, then support her as she makes the step.
At the bottom of the stairs, she shakes off my arm and reaches for an old walking stick that’s leaning against the wall of the garage. Cobwebs drift off of it and float to the ground. She places it firmly on the concrete, shuffles, places, shuffles her way out of the garage and onto the driveway. She blinks a few times to get used to the natural light and I wonder just how long it’s been since she’s been out in the fresh air.
The bottle caps are in shadow and they don’t look as alive as they did earlier. Still, they captivate Nonnie. She just stares for several minutes before she says, “It’s a bit more beautiful than I expected.”
“In its way.” It looks like a bit of a mess to me, no more sensical than Marcus Schmidt’s color squares. “So—”
“I don’t want to go back inside,” she tells me before I can suggest it. “I made it all the way down those deathtrap stairs, I’m not going to submit myself to a march back up them.”
“Dinner, then.”
I help her into the house. Mom is sitting on the sofa in the sunken living room, her legs crisscross applesauce, a gin in one hand and a book of Dorothy Parker’s poems in the other.
“What’s for dinner?” I ask.
She laughs. “Nice to see you out of your room, Mom. Feeling better than this morning?”
“I’m feeling like I have a tumor on my lung,” Nonnie replies. “Fix me a whiskey sour?”
Mom doesn’t move, so I go to the bar cart, where I hesitate. Nonnie is taking a huge regimen of drugs, and I don’t know if she’s supposed to be drinking. “I don’t think we have any sour mix.”
“Brandy, then. Straight up.”
“It’s in the back,” Mom says. “The one with the crystal square on top.”
I pour Nonnie some but speak to my mom. “We’re all going to have dinner together. Like a family.”
“Do families do that anymore?” Mom asks. “We certainly never did when I was a child. Why, I can’t remember one family dinner growing up.”
“What are you talking about?” Nonnie asks. “We had a million family dinners. Every time we sat down together it was a family meal. Not so light on the pour there, Veronica.”
Mom and Nonnie, that was their whole family. Nonnie had become pregnant as a complete surprise at age forty-four and refused to tell anyone who the father was. It would drive me crazy, but Mom found it charming—or rather, she made it part of her own charm.
Ramona trip-trops down the stairs and into the room. One side of her hair is pulled back with a pink feathered clip, and her fingertips are stained with ink. “Nonnie!” she says with surprise.
“We’re having a family dinner.”
“Really?” she asks. She sits down on the arm of a chair. “What’s the special occasion?”
“No occasion,” I say. “Just because we’re a family.”
“Veronica is being dictatorial again,” Mom says. “Like the time with the picture place at the mall.”
That had been a fiasco. It was in third grade and it seemed like every other kid in the world was going to this new store in the mall for family portraits. It was right in the food court, so everyone eating their lazy food could watch as you grinned at the camera. We wore jeans and white button-down shirts. The photographer, some sort of art-school dropout, directed us with a bored look. Ramona and I sat on the ground, back-to-back, knees to chest. Mom and Dad stood above us, holding hands, each with their other hand on one of our shoulders. The photographer snapped. I grinned like an idiot. The other three looked dead serious. Mom loved it and hung it above the mantel in the library.
“I’m being familial.”
Mom holds the book in front of her. “Dorothy was such a wit,” she says as she turns the page. “She didn’t have any daughters.”
“I have heard that daughters drain a woman’s wit,” I reply.
My mother lowers her book then and arches her eyebrows at me with a wry smile. “You win,” she says. “To the victors go the spoils, and all that. We can have a family dinner. Only we don’t have anything to cook and your father’s at some symposium on campus.”
“No one expected him to be here,” Ramona says. Mom gives her a sharp look but says nothing.
“I need to sit down,” Nonnie tells me.
I help her over to the couch, ease her down, and drape our red afghan over her lap. Once she’s settled, I bring her the brandy I poured.
“Dinner will be served in half an hour. Come on, Ramona.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you’re all I’ve got.”
v.
Ramona and I can’t find an actual meal, but we manage to pull together enough small dishes to satisfy us: crab Rangoon and spanakopita from the freezer (age indeterminate); pickled herring, almonds, and figs from the pantry; and some mushrooms that we sauté in balsamic vinegar with garlic. We find crackers that are only on the cusp of staleness, and even mango sorbet that isn’t freezer-burned that we plan to serve in tiny cups as a palate cleanser.
“It’s ooh-la-la fancy, don’t you think?” Ramona asks. “We should pretend we are the help and we can stay in here and have catty conversations while they eat.”
“What would we have catty conversations about?”
“Oh, all the intrigue of the upstairs folks. Like I hear that young Ramona child is canoodling with the chauffeur.”
“Indeed!” I say. I keep arranging the spanakopita on the tray. It’s like if I look at her, this old version of Ramona might disappear back into the new model. “George is a nice fellow but if he isn’t careful, he’ll lose his position.”
“They say he’s mad for her.”
“Mad for her money, I’d say.”
“The problem is, she won’t get a penny.” Ramona takes the crab Rangoon from the toaster oven and drops them onto a plate. “Her dastardly brother is coming back from overseas and he’s sure to run this family into the ground. We’ll be lucky if any of us have a job.”
“It’s the ponies,” I say. “He’s betting the whole fortune away.”
“Who’s betting on the ponies?” Nonnie asks as she comes in, Mom holding her arm.
“Alistair,” Ramona replies. “He’s up to his old tricks.”
“That rascal!” Mom says. She’s always been able to jump right into these games.
“To the dining
room!” I tell Mom and Nonnie. “Tonight’s meal will be small plates, otherwise known as tapas. It’s all the rage.”
As Ramona and I finish preparing the food, I say, “You should lay off about Dad. He has a lot going on.”
She smirks. “Does he now?”
“Come on, this is turning into a nice night.”
Her shoulders ease down and she turns her head a bit to the side. “You know, we could do this every night. Eat as a family.”
“You mean like we used to?” I ask. I can’t even remember exactly when it was that Dad stopped picking up food at the market for us to have each night. We used to go around the table and share the most amazing thing that had happened that day, only it didn’t have to be true. My stories almost always were, though I did once try to claim that Stephen Hawking had visited our school. Ramona would go on and on with her stories of escapees from the buffalo farm on the edge of town, or how it had snowed from one single cloud, a blizzard that covered the playground slide with a layer of white. Nonnie was the best storyteller, though. You could never tell if her stories were true or imagined, or some amalgamation of the two.
“Only we’d make dinner,” Ramona says. “Really make it, like, not ready-made stuff. We’d cook it. You and me. We should take a class. Like when we did that bracelet-making class at the library. We could take a cooking class. At that cooking school. In Dover, I think. Or Portsmouth.”
“That’s for people who want to be chefs. Like instead of going to college, they go there.”
“I could want to be a chef.”
“You could want to do all sorts of things. But I’m saying that we can’t just show up and ask for a Cooking 101 course.”
“We could cook dinner every night, though.”
“Sure we could. We could also fly to the moon.” I use my hip to push the door into the dining room open. “Come on, Ramona, we have to get this onto the table.”
While I help Nonnie to fill her plate, Ramona serves our mother chilled white wine.
“This is my favorite kind of meal,” Mom says. “A bit of everything.” She breaks a spanakopita in half and manages to eat it without dropping one flake of phyllo dough on herself.
“That’s what happens when a girl is raised on cocktail parties,” Nonnie says. “It was the cheapest way to feed her—just bring her along with me.”
“And if they said no children, I’d do a little dog and pony show for them,” Mom says.
“What do you mean?” Ramona asks.
“She’d recite T. S. Eliot and then insult their wine selection.”
“Come one, come all, see the poetess’s daughter perform!”
“It wasn’t like that,” Nonnie says. “Your wine talks were a public service.”
“That’s true,” Mom says. “Half the time those folks didn’t know the first thing about good wine.”
“How did you know?” Ramona asks.
“I read a lot of magazines,” Mom replies. “Remember that awful Mrs. Finnegan, who said you were teaching me to be a drunken harlot?”
Nonnie tilts her head back. “Lorraine Elizabeth Finnegan, patroness of the arts. So long as said arts were clean, predictable, and not at all appealing to her husband.”
Ramona giggles beside me and helps herself to a crab Rangoon. “Hey, Mom, after dinner can I go up to your studio to look at some of your art books? We’re doing self-portraits and I want to get some ideas.”
“I’ll get one for you,” Mom replies.
“I don’t know which one I want.”
“Sorry. Studio’s closed. Take it up with management.” She forces a smile before taking a sip from her wine.
Ramona turns a spanakopita at a right angle. “I don’t know why you like working alone. I like being in the art room at school, seeing all the other pieces, the buzz, you know?”
Mom doesn’t answer.
“Let’s talk about something Very can relate to,” Nonnie suggests.
“I can relate. It’s like my math class at the college. You’re sitting around discussing solutions. You see how someone else came at it. Maybe you won’t use it on that problem, but you tuck it away for another.”
“Artworks aren’t exactly problems to be solved, dear,” Mom says.
“Don’t you think so?” Ramona asks. “You have your goal, the outcome you see in your head, and you have to figure out the best medium and techniques to use.”
“That’s for assigned art: art you have to do. Real art comes from someplace else, someplace within you, and you follow it.”
“What about commissions?” Ramona asks.
“What about them?” Mom’s starting to get an edge in her voice.
“Now we are talking about something outside of my realm,” I say, desperate to pull us back.
Nonnie glances at me over her wine and nods.
Mom picks up a fig between her thumb and forefinger and drops it into her mouth.
“You know how figs are pollinated?” I ask.
“How?” Mom asks.
“Fig wasps. The female wasp goes into the well, the sort of the bud of the fig, and she lays her eggs. She’s the one that pollinates the fig flowers, too, when she lays her eggs. But getting in, she loses her wings. It doesn’t matter, though, because as soon as she lays her eggs, she dies. The very act of giving birth kills her.”
“This is not the happy story I was expecting,” Mom says. She has her foot drawn up onto her chair, her wineglass held lightly between her fingers.
“It gets worse. So then the nonpollinating females come in and are basically hitching a ride on her work. They lay their eggs, too. When they hatch, the male wasps immediately search for a mate. Then they dig their way out of the fig, and all the female wasps can escape and go lay their eggs in other figs.”
“That’s better. I’ve always liked a hero, even a wasp.”
“But,” I say, “once the male gets out, he dies, too.”
Mom holds the fig up and regards it. “Love, birth, tragedy, death. It’s like this fig contains the works of Shakespeare.” Then she bites it in half. She lifts her wineglass. “To the male wasp, who saves us all.”
“How about a toast to the wasp who gives her life to lay her eggs?” I ask.
“Of course, her, too,” Mom says.
“And to the wasps who get away,” Nonnie adds.
And we all clink our glasses together.
Cheers!
five
i.
WHEN I GET TO school, I find that someone has graffitied my locker. I say someone, but who else but Dominic could have written the lyrics to “Veronica” in red Sharpie on the fire-hydrant-yellow door? The words swirl together like they are ants trailing their queen in a May Day dance.
I’m just standing there staring at it when Haylie, one of Ramona’s friends, comes up beside me. She’s wearing canvas sneakers with sparkling cherries on them. “Is that where your name comes from?” she asks.
I nod.
“Weird,” she says. “That someone would write it on your locker. I mean, like, yeah?”
Haylie always seems to be starting sentences and then finishing them with a string of words that don’t quite make sense.
“You haven’t been around much lately,” I tell her. “You should come by the house. I could drive you and Ramona home if you want.”
She kicks her toe into the linoleum tile and the sparkles on her shoes cast glimmering, dancing red light onto the floor. “So, yeah? I mean, maybe, if you want?”
“Of course. You and Ramona work it out.”
“Right. Okay?”
The bell rings.
“Great. See you later, Haylie.”
“See ya?”
Down the hall in his classroom, Mr. Tompkins seems to be waiting for me. “I have exciting news for you!” He doesn’t give me enough time to prompt him with a What? before he bursts out with “Professor Singh is coming to the Math Around U conference!”
Last year Mr. Tompkins submitted one of my math
solutions and explanations as part of a proposal for a session at a conference. It has a hokey name: Math Around U, and it focuses on teaching math to kids about to enter college, in college, and in graduate school. Anyway, they chose his proposal, and in a few weeks, he’s going to present his methods, and I get to go along.
“Professor Singh was my favorite prof at MIT. She’s brilliant. Brilliant! And I think the kind of math she does will fascinate you. So . . .” He drums his fingers on his desk. “I’ve arranged for the two of you to have coffee. Her schedule is jam-packed, but I explained how very smart you are—”
“Please tell me you didn’t use the L’Hopital’s rule pun again.”
He shrugs and then says, “This is a big deal, Very. She is a big deal. And listen, I’m not trying to pressure you to go to MIT, even though that’s where I went and even though it’s quite simply the best institution in the world for mathematicians, especially one of your caliber, but if you did decide to apply, and Professor Singh put in a good word for you, well, that would be about as close to a shoo-in as you get there.”
“Thank you,” I say. I can picture myself sitting there with Professor Singh, two women mathematicians, in that old vein of student and teacher, like Plato and Aristotle, only with better hair. In my imagination, Professor Singh has waves of dark hair with copper highlights, and we are laughing about a clever proof I’ve done. Laughing, and my soul is at peace because now I’m settled. It’s not so much MIT—or Stanford or even Minnesota—it’s knowing. In this imaginary future world I am happy because at least one huge, looming decision is taken care of.
He hands me a manila envelope. “Here are some of her articles. I was going to give them to you earlier, but I wanted to make sure she was able to come and could meet with you.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course, we’ll have to get a better handle on this silly chemistry stuff for you.”
I take my seat center front, as if being right there will somehow make the information get into my head more easily. Christian comes in a moment later and slides into the seat next to me. He moves like he’s going to kiss me on the cheek, and I duck away. Kisses don’t belong in classrooms.
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