by SUZAN STILL
Also for good measure, she stopped by Madame Zola’s. As luck would have it, Madame Zola had time to give her an appointment. She was right in the middle of giving herself a dye job and her hair was wadded up under a plastic cap with little rivulets of black dye running down her forehead that she kept wiping away with a wad of Kleenex. She set a timer, so she wouldn’t keep the dye on too long and then she pulled out her Tarot deck and rummaged through the cards, pulling a few.
She looked at them for a long time and then she said, very gently for Madame Zola: “Go home, Angela. Stop worrying. Say your prayers for this baby that’s coming. Everything’s going to be fine.”
In retrospect, they don’t know why they worried so much. Bernie and Myrna are like two halves of one whole. Myrna’s smart as a whip and is even thinking of going back to college to get her MBA. Bernie’s so strong that anything little Myrna can’t do, he can. And they’re so tender with one another, it would make anyone just cry to see it. Together, they make a great team.
So it must have been the same with their genes – Bernie threw his good, strong, handsome ones into the pot and Myrna put her big brain ones in – and Presto! Out came little Mikie, cute as a bug, healthy as a horse and already lifting his head and smiling at them all like it’s Christmas.
So now, the kids come over for Sunday dinner every week with the new baby. It’s a wonder anyone has time to eat because they’re all just fighting over who gets to hold Mikie next.
So, Buddy and Angela stand on the porch after dinner and watch them go down the walk. Myrna is carrying Mikie and Bernie is carrying the diaper bag and the car seat and crooning some lullaby of his own composition to the baby, who is crooning back.
Bernie helps Myrna arrange the baby in the back seat. Then, he opens the door and helps her into the driver’s seat and gets her all buckled in behind the special controls she uses because her feet don’t touch the floor, and then he comes around and gets himself buckled in. They both turn and wave, just as they start off down the street at a snail’s pace.
Buddy turns to Angela and he has a little smile, which is always a good sign with Buddy. “Angie,” he says proudly, “I think I see some fishing trips in my future.”
“With Bernie, too?”
“With Bernie, too.”
And he whacks her on the bottom and gooses her and she starts to giggle and he grabs her and waltzes her across the kitchen toward the bedroom, with her squealing, “No! No!” But meaning yes. Yes.
“I have to stop now. I’m kind of choked up.”
The others are so quiet, Betty looks around for the first time wondering if they’re all asleep. But they’re just staring at her.
“I’m sorry,” Betty says, mopping her eyes. “Everything’s making me cry right now.”
“What, exactly, is making you cry?” It’s Heddi’s voice, full of her clinical authority.
Betty’s caught off guard. “Well...I don’t know...I...”
“But you do know. You know perfectly well what’s making you cry right now.”
Betty looks around, kind of embarrassed. What must the others think? She looks at Heddi, beseeching her, but she’s adamant. She just stares at Betty like she does during their sessions. No one else makes a peep.
“Well, I guess I’m crying because I’m happy for Angela and Bud. And for Bernie and Myrna. And Mikie, too, of course.”
“Really.”
And that one word cuts right through to this place where Betty’s emotions are like feet standing on slippery, slimy rocks full of crawdads. It’s a stranded place that she just wants to get to shore from, but first she has to wade there – and try to keep her balance at the same time.
“I...I...” she stammers.
And then up it comes, like bad food. “I guess what I’m feeling is...I wish that it had ended for Larry and me the way it did for Angela and Bud. I wish Larry, just once, would of said how pretty my flower arrangements are... and danced me around the kitchen.
“I guess I’m really scared and it feels just raw and terrible that my family doesn’t even know where I am or what’s happening to me...or even care, as far as I can tell.”
And then Betty can’t talk anymore because all she can do is sob.
Erika
Wow! This Heddi plays hardball. She just reduced that fat chick to tears. If Erika could learn to hit people that hard right in the gut, she could rule the world!
Between bouts of pain and with Sophia’s help, Erika’s been trying to get her cell phone to work – but nothing. She needs to call her office and let them know she’s alive. Talking to somebody official like the police wouldn’t be bad, either. Gently nudge them to come and fucking rescue her!
Sophia got her laptop set up for her, but WIFI isn’t working, either.
That fucking deal in Berlin’s gonna go down without her! Man, that’s a burn! She worked her ass off on it and now Lathrop’s gonna get all the credit.
These women and their stories are about to make her puke. Who gives a rat’s ass? Now everybody’s clustering around, giving Betty hugs.
Yuck!
There’s one good thing about being shot – everybody leaves her alone. They let Sophia deal with her and that’s fine with Erika. Sophia doesn’t get all touchy-feely.
All she wants is to get out of this fucking hellhole and get on with her life. Every hour she spends in here is costing her money.
Ondine
Everyone’s taken a break and now they’re settling in again. Heddi whispers, “How do you think things are going?” Ondine tells her she thinks her idea is brilliant.
“You go next, then,” Heddi whispers.
“Me? What will I say?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you want. Tell them about your aunt’s house in France.”
“What about it?”
“Anything. I doubt anyone else in this room has an 18th-century house on the ocean. Anything you tell them about it will be interesting.”
So Ondine agrees and Heddi gets everyone settled in again.
What on earth should she say?
“Heddi says I should tell you about my aunt’s house in France. I inherited it when Tante Collette died two years ago.
“I just came from there. Just now...when...all this... Well, anyway...
“I’ve been staying there for a month, trying to decide if I want to live there permanently or not. I’ve had it for those two years, but until now I’ve never really thought that I might want to live there.
“I love the house. I love the area it’s in – on the Atlantic seaboard, you know. And I love France. So I’m not sure why I can’t make up my mind. Anyway, let me tell you about the place...”
It’s an old house, from the early eighteenth century, and it breathes at night – random creaks and pops and groans, and there’s a kind of shush, like a velvet coat being dragged across the floor behind someone invisible.
In the night wind, it sighs as if it’s remembering.
Ondine likes to think that its history, deep in its bones – in those dry, hand-hewn timbers and sleeping stones – is dreaming. And she’s the current dream; this woman recently arrived with her leather mason’s satchel of mallets and chisels, a folding French easel and jars of raw pigments.
The house likes her, she thinks. It’s waking up, popping its eyes open in curiosity, asking, What century is this? Is that a mistress to King Louis? Old Marie with her chamber pots and brooms? Does she wear bustles or an apron or beaded flapper gowns? When she cooks, is it cabbage that fills the air or roast meat? What manner of occupant is it, this time? What’s her station in life and what’s her rhythm?
The floorboards already know her. She walks briskly but lightly, sometimes tripping when her foot catches the edge of the parquet. She doesn’t mince, or drag along, old and weak and tottering – and neither did Tante Collette, by the way. Her stride was always slow and stately.
The windows tremble in the night wind like muted tapping on a drum. A tree branch scrapes
against the slate roof with the sound of an old woman sweeping, feeble and irregular.
There’s marble dust in the studio – a faint, crystalline powder sparking in the moonlight, lying in the grooves of the planking like pale ribbons of vapor. On the easel, the black lines leap forward in the silver light and colors recede, leaving an inky, tangled calligraphy where image was. Shadows run like ink along the baseboards and pool in the corners.
The stairs click and sag, remembering a dozen generations of feet; small and bare; large, heavy and booted; satin slippered; slow and labored in wooden clogs. The old walnut wood remembers, by emitting a faint scent, the hands with veins like grapevines, patient and firm, that rubbed in beeswax and lavender oil.
In the master bedroom, the bed is a carved and tangled garden under an antique silk canopy. Old Turkistan carpets gleam like an enchantment when stroked by the moon. And two matched Louis Quinze bombé dressers with pink marble tops lift their smooth knees in a courtly nocturnal dance.
When she awakens, the morning sun is enflaming the rose-colored plaster of the walls. There’s a sweet odor of apples rotting in the orchard and the squabble of sparrows. She is, momentarily, both dreamer and dream.
She has to lie still and remember: this is Tante Collette’s bedroom, not the cathedral-ceilinged one with the view of the southern California beach. She’s alone in bed, not lying tense, wondering if he is awake, too. A day stretches its morning stretch, all hers. It won’t be chopped into appointments, arguments or shopping mall feeding frenzies.
Alone! She’s gloriously alone!
Ondine can’t tell them the relief!
When she gets up, the house unwinds before her as she moves toward the kitchen. There’s a long hall with a Persian runner, family portraits, yellow ochre plaster; then the dining room, pulsing with morning sun. She’s put apple branches there in a huge apothecary jar to force them into bloom, on a table carved with the initials C.B. – by Charles Baudelaire.
Finally, there’s the swinging door, nine feel tall and paneled. The kitchen will still be sleeping in shadow. It’s cold and smells of mustard and asparagus. There’s a blue-enameled cast iron cook stove hunkering against a wall of cobalt tile. A massive butcher’s block at center stage, with its heavy turned legs, reminds her of a squat old woman with her hands on her hips, defiant, like some ancient kitchen deity.
She’s still vague about the layout. It’s all dreamy, as if the rooms move around in the night. Twice, looking for the bathroom, she’s blundered into the linen closet.
Little Ondine – the barefooted version of herself, ten years old with wildly curly auburn hair down her back – remembers it still differently. I think the library’s in there, she’ll say, directing Ondine, instead, into the music room, where Paderewski’s edition of Chopin’s mazurkas still lies open on the music rack of the Bösendorfer. Deep indigo toile drapes are gathered back. Behind them, Alençon lace sheers mute the brilliance of the day outside, where bare branches hold shards of sky in their black fingers. The stillness in this room is deep, as if the walls were still straining to hear Tante Collette’s long, magical fingers trilling.
The house is a dreamscape partly because of Tante Collette’s long association with the Nabis, the French Symbolist movement of which she was a part – colors in odd juxtapositions, a certain sense of enchantment, nature honored and invited in, books everywhere, paintings, and upholstered chairs in little coveys, seeming to gossip.
“A sensual atmosphere of mild tristesse and pure lucidity,” as Tante Collette once described it.
“This house is the Keeper of Hours,” she told Ondine that summer long ago. “Dawn, rising sun, day, dusk, and night, with its moon and stars – Matins, Lauds, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline – every room is canonical. You will see.”
Why does a person retain such a comment for three decades? It was full of mystery then and mystifies her still. But she sees the sun already moving through the dining room, as she enters with steaming café au lait in hand – moving from left to right, pushing the room’s blue shadows westward like sands in an hourglass flowing horizontally.
And last night’s moon was one long beam angling through the bedroom French doors, an hypotenuse of light. Tante Collette would have plucked the string of that geometry of wildness, producing a pure note that vibrated with the feral perceptions of the Nabis.
“Strength is not in the arms,” she said to soothe ondine, the day she fell out of an apple tree because she couldn’t chin herself on a limb like the neighbor boy. “Strength has other muscles that articulate in the soul. It means being able to endure what we know as women. To be ligamentous. It means being able to stand and live.”
Her blouse, Ondine remembers, was aqua silk cut velvet patterned in leaves, soft and sensual as a cat, with a large pink cameo at the throat. Little Ondine looked up the length of her aunt’s long, kelp-colored skirt, as if it were a tower and listened, uncomprehending.
Even so, she remembers. This time, when she returned to Quatre Vents – that’s the name of the property, Four Winds – she thinks she may have gotten a small inkling of what Tante Collette perceived: how her whole life was washed in the flat white light off the Atlantic and moved by it, the way music moves to a metronome.
“You must keep the sea always in your heart,” she told Ondine on the summer of her fifteenth year, when she was struggling to birth her nascent feelings into poetry. “Once you’ve mastered the cadences of the sea, the spark of salt crystal, the coilings of the fog and the dirge of the wind, then poetry will live in you – and you in it.”
Not much has changed, really, since that long-ago summer. The house scarcely shows the passage of time. Its edges were rounded then, its stairs scooped into parabolas by generations of feet, its windows a hand-rolled waver of lustrous glass semé with sparks. And so they remain.
Only the garden seems to mourn Tante Collette’s passing. A ramshackle pergola of roses needs pruning; fruit trees haven’t seen a long-handled saw in several seasons; the walkways of hewn limestone are furred with long grass fanned across them by last winter’s heavy rains.
The fountain in the shape of Pan – Tante Collette called it her fauntain – splashes into a pool clogged with last autumn’s black, viscous leaves. Roses and Vigne Vierge lattice the music room windows.
The entire place – house, garden, orchard – holds a stillness that’s both serene and highly energized, as if a gong had been struck and even though its note has disintegrated past hearing, it still vibrates in the air. It’s like a sleeping princess awaiting a reviving kiss.
At ten, Ondine’s daydream was to live there, chaste and pure, to write and paint and sculpt. She imagined her sculpture stand out under the willow tree in summer and in the studio – the converted dairy – in winter. She envisioned laying out her chisels, files and mallets on the crude workbench and the stone, half roughed-out, sitting solidly in its ruff of dust and chips.
The place itself inspired such visions in Little ondine, with its framed photos, grainy and dreamlike, of Tante Collette’s friends, the Nabis, painting in her garden, or in smocks and berets, wielding hammer and chisel in the studio. These artists of the French Symbolist movement became Ondine’s friends, too, in the imaginary land of her childhood.
It seems impossible that Tante Collette’s life bridged theirs and Ondine’s. The artists of the Nabi are like the knights of some distant quest to Ondine – lost in time. It was Tante Collette’s father, really, who was of that generation and who made his reputation painting as a Symbolist, while young Collette appeared in many of the artists’ paintings as a lithe and lively model, and served as their resident femme inspiratrice.
She was Ondine’s great aunt, actually, which is hard for Ondine to believe because Tante Collette seemed, even in great age, so young. Ageless. Preserved in some inner aqua vitae of joy...
“I...I really miss her!” Ondine stops to dab at her eyes with a hanky dug hastily from her bag.
The wom
en sit quietly, their attention unblinking.
“Can you really be interested in all this stuff?” She gazes around her, with tear-glossed eyes.
Heads bob. She sighs, and then continues.
Tante Collette lived in a manner that was part affectation, part fiscal necessity and in large part the manifestation of her inner aesthetic and creative force. Her sensibilities were too refined for the rough-and-tumble of public life. She belonged, Ondine always felt, within the magical confines of her high garden walls, behind her thick portal doors. Like some exotic animal, she needed them as bulwarks against extinction...
“I see you giving me that look, Heddi. I can hear you thinking, Projection, projection, and projection! Well, maybe you’re right. I do feel safe there. Safer than... well... anyway...”
The gatehouse – a majestic structure with massive double street doors on one side, the garden gate on the other, and stone benches in deep shade along each inner wall – sports a classical pediment in gray stone over each portal, netted in climbing roses. There Tante Collette kept an ancient, balloon-tired bicycle for mundane travel.
“I love this elderly conveyance, with its willow basket,” her aunt once told her with great dignity, when Little Ondine teased her about it. “The bicycle is a noble invention – it requires balance, rigorous effort all of one’s own and the willingness to brave the natural world – not unlike art. Or life.”