Life Drawing: A Novel

by Robin Black

  “Alison.”

  She turned at the sound of my voice. A rivulet of red ran from her scalp to her jaw. I reached for Owen’s arm. “Call 911.” It seemed obvious she had not.

  “She’s trying so hard not to die,” Alison said. “I can’t believe I did this.”

  “It happens, Alison. It happens all the time.” Owen had stepped away, but I could hear him giving our location. I sat among the fallen leaves on frozen mud. “Your head. You have a cut. Owen,” I called. “An ambulance. Be sure.”

  She started to sob, her face lowered into her hand, so the blood smeared her cheek, her palm. I put my arm around her shoulders. The doe was young, I saw. And seemed to be looking at me. I touched her with my other hand, just behind her ear, so that we, the three of us, made a circuit, complete, a current of life rasping unevenly through. I wanted to encourage the shattered animal to die. I wanted my touch to convey somehow, somehow, that soon the others would arrive, with lights, with efficiency, procedure, protocol. That being alive would be no gift.

  Beside me, Alison’s body shook with sobs.

  “They’re on their way,” Owen said.

  “Maybe she won’t die,” Alison said. I tightened my arm around her.

  “It happens all the time,” I said again.

  A siren in the distance. Lights flashing at the next bend in the road. I took my gaze from the doe, and while I watched the ambulance approach, the animal died.

  The moments, minutes, after that were just as I’d imagined them, except that where there had been a life, there was only the body of a deer, left on the ground while an EMT took charge of Alison. The cut was deeper than I had thought, deeper surely than Alison had known. She might have been concussed as well. There could be internal injuries. She had to go to the hospital for observation. They laid her on a cot, covered her with a sheet that was soon bloodied, small dark patches, spreading. They strapped her down.

  “I’m fine on my own,” she said, when I offered to go with her. “I’m suddenly so tired.”

  A policeman walked up to us, stern, almost angry. “You women got that close to a dying deer? You’re lucky the animal didn’t kick your heads right open. Those things are mean as snakes when they know that they’re goners.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Sincere. Like a child who’s crossed the road without looking, and knows that she’s done wrong.

  We drove home mostly in a silence thick with what wasn’t being said.

  “I told her it could happen to anyone,” I finally said. “And it could. But the fact is she drives like a maniac, and that has to raise the odds.”

  “That has to raise the odds,” Owen said. “I agree.”

  By the time Nora arrived the next morning, I had already fetched Alison from the hospital where she’d spent the night, and set her up in our living room—not because she needed much tending, but because it seemed wrong to leave her by herself with memories, with images of the accident. There had been a mild concussion, the doctors thought, and the gash on her head had required twelve stitches. Everything else seemed to be okay, just bruises everywhere, but she was badly shaken. By tacit agreement neither of us mentioned the doe, speaking only of headaches and sore muscles, exhaustion, the sterility of hospitals, the good fortune of her injuries not being worse.

  Alison had called Nora and told her what had happened, but still Nora’s face jumped as if electrically shocked, at the sight of her mother on our couch, bandaged and pale. “Oh my God, Mom. Oh my God.” She sat beside her, finding a space on the cushion’s worn edge where no space had been before. Alison’s eyes closed; her lips relaxed into a slight smile. I felt like the intruder I was and left the room.

  I didn’t see much of them over the next few days, and neither did Owen. After Nora and I bundled Alison up to go home, the two of them stayed huddled there together. That was how I pictured them, never apart. I dropped their mail on their porch, and it disappeared. We had our first snowfall, close to half a foot. Owen shoveled our walk, and then did theirs, cleared both cars off, but no one emerged to thank him.

  During this period, a new quality of fragility seeped into my understanding of who they were. The car accident had undoubtedly been a turning point for me, Alison’s bravado and daring seeming more like recklessness and desperation now. And as enviable as I found their bond to be—how could I not?—I had a far clearer sense of the shakiness of any ground on which they stood, so when I looked across the glistening white hill, I saw most clearly the shabbiness of the house, the shutters that were askew, the missing porch rails.

  And as for the revelation that Owen and Nora had been in touch, that faded from my list of worries. He had used their contact to make me feel bad, a meaningless revenge for Laine’s visit, to which he was arguably entitled. Maybe it had helped him get past his anger to bask in Nora’s adulation a little bit. I could deal with that. Life felt both big and precious during those soft, snowy days. There was room enough for the petty to be seen as exactly that.

  I kept to a regular work schedule then, trying not to get too discouraged. It would have been so easy, I often thought, just to cover up the soldiers entirely, transform these canvases into nothing more than a series of portraits of rooms in my house. But I didn’t let myself.

  Over time, Alison and Nora emerged and our lives began again to intertwine. Dinners for four. Walks for two—sometimes three, as Nora occasionally joined her mother and me. More often, though, I would see her heading to the barn.

  And those visits to Owen didn’t go unexplained. They weren’t surreptitious. She had admired the space, the churchlike atmosphere—the very quality I had thought only I perceived—and he had told her to feel free to join him. She could read or she could write. She only had to be quiet. The invitation was extended over dinner at our house, this time bread and cheese and ham in the living room, nothing like our first, elaborately prepared meal.

  “In the city,” he said, “I always liked to work with other people in the space. It jogged my brain somehow. It’s Gus who can’t bear having anyone around.”

  “Well, it’s a little different for a painter,” I said. “It’s all so visible. I doubt you’d have liked it if the other customers at the coffee shop had been reading your every word.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There were days when I could have used the critique.”

  “You had lots of company there, didn’t you?” Alison indicated the painting of Ida’s shop.

  “I did. And actually I loved the hubbub. But nobody had the least interest in what I was doing. I’ve rarely felt more invisible in my life.”

  “I would feel like an intruder,” Nora said. “I couldn’t.”

  By then, mid-November, her hair was noticeably longer than when we’d first met. Like her mother, she always wore a little bit of makeup, barely visible, almost as if more a reminder of her femininity than anything else. That night, she had on jeans through which you could see her hip bones when she stood, and a long-sleeved black top, through which at moments you could see her nipples. The shirt collar fell just at the level of the cross, so the cross would slip beneath the cloth, only the occasional glint of that very fine chain remaining visible, although once you knew the cross was there, you could see that too.

  As she protested that she couldn’t impose, I knew that she would. And there was something about the openness with which this all unfolded that made it seem churlish to object. He was mentoring her. She was in need of a positive male role model. Alison repeated these phrases to me all the time. Owen spoke elliptically in the same terms as if it were an assessment of their dynamic to which we had long ago agreed. And I said nothing to object.

  17

  As Thanksgiving drew near, I knew Alison assumed we would join them and was wondering how to demur when I learned that Owen had already agreed on our behalf. They would do most of the cooking. I would bake a pie or two, if I didn’t mind. “Neither of us is much of a baker,” Alison said. We would supply wine. These details came ou
t over dinner at Alison’s house, and I found myself smiling and saying, “Of course, of course. I’m so glad it’s all settled.”

  But then, as we walked home, I said, “Thanksgiving, Owen? Really? It’s a brave new world, indeed. You didn’t think you should consult me?”

  “I can’t count all the meals we’ve had with her that you just assumed I wanted to have.”

  “But we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, remember?”

  “A person can cling too hard to his principles,” he said, a comment that left me with no response.

  I crossed paths with Jan at my father’s that week and thought of inviting her and Letty. I had been serious about wanting them in our lives more; and maybe too I wanted some ballast to the gathering. But I knew they had annual plans and I couldn’t stand the thought of the no I would certainly hear. I thought you and Owen were too politically high-minded for such things? She wouldn’t say it, but I was certain it would be there in a raised brow, the tilt of her head. For all that we were more in touch than we’d been, I had no illusions that the lifetime of prickles between us would be magically gone.

  Tuesday of Thanksgiving week was the last day of the farmers’ market until spring. Only a few years before, I’d been told, it always shut down the week before Halloween, but it just wasn’t that cold anymore, not usually, and the burst of shopping before the holiday made wearing some extra layers worthwhile. I’d been avoiding the place since meeting Kathleen Mayhew, sensing that if she ever did want to share family lore about Jackie, I didn’t really want to hear it. I was having a hard enough time without the notion of Mayhew family members looking over my shoulder. But I needed a baking pumpkin, the big, pale, fleshy sort that the grocery store didn’t have, and Alison had her usual list, though longer than usual, including a turkey, freshly killed and plucked, so we went together, just us, doubtless leaving Nora trailing after Owen.

  I saw Kathleen before she saw me. She stood alone behind the old wooden table, under the worn canvas roof, arranging a set of bright quilted potholders held on a line with laundry pins. There were no customers nearby and her face, I realized, was a private one, different from what I’d seen as she’d sold Alison vinegar. Different too from the puzzled features registering my strange mention of her boy uncle, long deceased. She studied the potholders, frowning at their arrangement and changing it, noting an improvement I could not detect except in the evident approval of her unfurrowing brow, her untightening lips. It was probably how I looked as I painted, I thought. Absorbed in something others can’t perceive. Aiming for some effect that doesn’t yet exist.

  She looked strikingly like Jackie, as she worked. Whatever the dubious quality of my portraits, I had memorized his face by then, and the resemblance seemed much stronger than the first time I’d seen her. As if by learning his features more thoroughly I had cracked some kind of code.

  When she noticed me watching her, I waved, and she waved back. I hadn’t been anxious to speak to her, but it seemed rude to walk away.

  As I approached, I said something about the potholders looking nice. “It’s an eye-catching display,” I said, then realized the comment would sound more sincere if I bought one. “I’d love to have the black plaid.”

  “They’re always big sellers at Thanksgiving.” She unclipped it from the line, rearranging the others to fill the empty space. “I know I always manage to burn a few once there are enough pots on the stove. Sooner or later, I get careless and leave one too close to the flame. I suppose everyone does.”

  As I fished out my eleven dollars, I asked her if she made them herself, and she said she did not, that her older sister did. “But she doesn’t like coming to the market. We’re very different that way. I hate sitting inside sewing. She hates being out in the world.”

  “Sisters can be pretty different,” I said.

  I hadn’t thought I would mention my visit to Jackie’s grave, maybe not even mention him at all, but perhaps through some set of associations, the talk of an older sister changed that. “I went out to the cemetery after I was here that other time,” I said, as she handed me the potholder in a brown paper bag. “Your family’s, I mean. I hope that doesn’t sound too intrusive. I’ve just felt strangely close to your uncle since starting this project of mine, and I wanted to see where he’s buried. I wanted to pay my respects.”

  She frowned, and looked at me for a few moments, silent. Then she shook her head. “He isn’t there,” she said.

  I thought she was going to add something religious, maybe talk about his being in heaven; and I regretted having brought it up. She sat down on the wooden folding chair behind the counter. “He isn’t anywhere. He was …” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them as she exhaled. “It was a grenade,” she said. “Some kind of explosion. There was nothing left of the boy to bring home.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry. I saw a grave … I just assumed.”

  “Believe me, he isn’t there. That was part of the story my father told and told and told. That poor Jackie had been blown up beyond … That he was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Just like God, my father would say.”

  “That sounds …” I thought of how frightening it must have been for a child. Not just young death, but the gore of it. And that conflation of a decimated body with God. I wanted to say the right thing. But another customer had appeared beside me, and I knew the subject had to be shut down. “I really am sorry,” I said, once again. “And I’m sorry if bringing it up …” But Kathleen shrugged that off.

  “It’s nothing new,” she said. “An old story, believe me. And truly, it isn’t right for me never to remember him, if only for my father’s sake. Like you said, to pay my respects. God knows, my children are barely aware he ever existed. After me, me and my sister, it’ll all be forgotten.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “The remembering, I mean. How much it matters. I really do.” But I felt impatience begin to rise like steam off the other customer, now a step closer to the booth, so I just wished Kathleen a good holiday, and she wished me the same, and I went off to find Alison.

  This is me, on the day before Thanksgiving:

  I am making the pies, first cutting the pumpkin in half, scraping out the seeds and stringy fibers around them, soaking all that in a bowl of water. I cut the halves into pieces and bake the chunks, then cool them, then scoop the soft flesh from the skin. I have done all this before, years and years before, with my father’s older sister, my Aunt Anna—called Antenna by us, behind her back—at whose home in Maryland we celebrated the holiday when we were all young. She taught me to cook her specialties and though it has been years since I have done so, years too since she’s died, a physical memory I haven’t known I possess remains in my hands, in my arms, in all my senses. It is there as I reach into the bowl of water and strip the seeds from the muck around them, there as I fish them from the water and lay them on paper towels to dry. And it is there too as I know from the smell alone that the pumpkin has cooked to softness; as I know exactly the texture of crumbled butter in flour to make a perfect crust.

  I haven’t wanted to be glad we were having Thanksgiving. I’ve wanted only to feel angry that Owen’s indulgence of Nora, or whatever I was to call it, has led us to break a pact we made decades ago. But in fact I am more than glad as I carry the two perfect pies from the oven to the marble cutting board put out for them. I am elated to have discovered this other self still dwelling within my molecules. And I am curious too, as I stand there admiring the perfect sheen of each pie, the slight fractures, lightning bolts at the centers, where each has risen, then fallen flat, curious about what other selves I carry but have forgotten. It is as though I have somehow discovered a new light in which I can detect the palimpsest that is me, the Gussies layered on top of one another, some faded, others all too visible.

  “Those are beautiful,” Owen says when he comes in. “Another hidden talent.”

  “My aunt, Antenna, taught us all how to bake th
em,” I say. “I don’t know why I never did it before. It’s not the law that pumpkin pie is only for Thanksgiving, I know. I just never thought of it.” It is like so much else, I realize. Another part of the past that I have blunted or hidden or jettisoned because I lack some normal, innate understanding of how to carry experiences and even capabilities with myself through time.

  “Maybe I’ll bring my father some, later this week,” I say. “He might like that.”

  Owen looks at me curiously. “I’m sure he would,” he says.

  On Thursday morning, I decided to set the table in white, almost entirely white. White lace over white linen. White napkins. White china—or as close as I could find among our strange collection. White candles set into old silver candlesticks. I wanted a canvas for the meal. I wanted to experience the table filling with food as I experienced a painting coming together. The only exception I made was for a handful of leaves, still moist, orange, red, that I cut into thin strips and scattered, confetti across the whiteness, ribbons of autumn itself.

  By the time Alison and Nora arrived and then arrived again and then again as they carried dish after dish across the hill, I had dressed in an old, soft, gray dress that I hadn’t worn in years, one Owen had long loved, and I’d brushed my hair loose, putting Charlotte’s tiny emerald earrings into holes I’d half assumed had long ago closed.

  I stepped out of the way as Alison, in black, and Nora, in violet, managed the business of warming or cooling their food, in my kitchen. I watched them from the doorway, mother and daughter, moving around one another, choreographed perfectly for life. I could see the beauty of it just then, just for those minutes, the warp of envy for once set aside.

  “Who’s ready for a drink?” Owen called from the living room.

  Everyone was.