by Susan Gloss
Josh went to the Colony with her that Sunday afternoon to help cook the meal, which had been expanded to include a handful of other Spanish dishes. He turned on the college radio station, which was doing a bluegrass show, and they chopped and sautéed and filled the room with the scent of garlic and peppers while banjo notes kept up a happy, twangy background sound. Nell was enjoying herself, and Josh’s company, so much that she almost forgot about the huge secret she was keeping from him, to the tune of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. She put it out of her mind for now, though, and hummed along to the music. The lighthearted moments between them lately had been so few and far between, she wanted to savor this one.
Even with all the windows closed and the music playing, Nell could hear the hiss of a welding torch and, every now and then, the clang of metal being moved around—the sounds of Odin working in the garage. No noise traveled from the basement, where Annie was supposedly working, too. The only sign of life coming from down there was the peaty and unmistakable smell of pot wafting up the stairs.
“Do you think I should say anything?” Nell asked when Josh made a joke about the smell. “About her doing that in the house, I mean.”
“What, from like a legal standpoint?”
She nodded.
“Have any of the other artists complained?” he asked.
“No.”
“Possession of marijuana’s been decriminalized in Madison.” He tossed some garlic into a pan on the stove. “As long as she’s not bothering anyone, I wouldn’t worry too much.”
Nell wondered what Betsy would have thought. Would she have cared? Regulars of Gertrude Stein’s studio had smoked opium, a much more dangerous drug, but that was a different place and time. Nell could easily ask Annie to stop just by saying there was no smoking of any kind allowed inside the house. It wasn’t written anywhere, but it seemed like a reasonable enough rule. But she felt silly telling a woman decades older than her what to do and, like Josh said, as long as Annie wasn’t bothering anyone, it probably wasn’t a big deal.
A bigger deal, at the moment, was Paige stumbling into the kitchen with a bulky piece of machinery in her arms. She nearly dropped it onto the wood floor, which Grady had just finished restaining the week before.
“Hey, let me help with that,” Josh said. He turned off the gas burner and ran over to take the load from Paige. “What is this thing, anyway?”
“It’s a tabletop screen printing press,” she said. “I bought it on Craigslist.”
Josh hoisted the machine into his arms. “Where do you want it?”
“Up in my studio,” she said.
“Which is on the third floor,” Nell added.
Josh followed Paige up the back stairs, grunting with effort. “How did you even get this here?”
When he came back down a couple of minutes later, he said to Nell, “You owe me.” But he was smiling when he said it.
“This is fun, though, right?” she said. “We haven’t cooked together in a long time.”
He put his arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze before turning the stove back on. “Remember our first Thanksgiving?”
“I remember you cutting your finger to the bone,” Nell said.
He shook his head. “There’s nothing like going to the emergency room on a holiday to really get an unfiltered glimpse of humanity.”
“Your parents saved the day, as usual. Running out to the store and meeting us back at our apartment with a turkey after you got your hand stitched up, since you bled all over the turkey we’d made.” Nell took a clean fork from the drawer and plucked a bacon-wrapped date from where Josh had arranged them on a plate. She popped it in her mouth and savored the combination of sweet and salty, crunchy and gooey.
The members of Josh’s family never ceased to amaze her with their boundless energy and their easy enjoyment of one another’s presence. When she met Josh back when they were both grad students, Nell didn’t fall in love at first sight. Introduced by mutual friends, theirs was a relationship that shifted slowly, over dozens of cups of coffee and glasses of wine, study breaks that led to late-night conversations and intimacies. Bit by bit, the balance tipped from acquaintances to friends, from lovers to partners.
With Josh’s family, though, it was a different story. Nell fell in love with them immediately. Their house on Chicago’s Northwest Side was the sort of place Nell just knew all of Josh’s friends probably hung out in high school. The house itself was nothing remarkable, just a modest two-story a few blocks from the Kennedy Expressway. But it was stuffed with three decades’ worth of life in a big family, something Nell never had.
If you got chilly and wanted to grab a fleece from one of the pegs in the mudroom, you were sure to find one in your size. There were coats and sweaters in so many sizes and styles that sifting through them was like an archeological dig through the Parker kids’ past. Nell had once found a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with the name of the all-boys Catholic high school Josh attended, hanging beneath a green down vest that smacked of seventies style, a woman’s wool dress coat, and a kids’ raincoat with whales on it.
The refrigerator was nearly unrecognizable, it was so covered with the grandkids’ artwork and sports photos, Save the Date cards for weddings, and flyers for community events. Out in the single-stall garage, bikes in all sizes and states of repair made it impossible to park there, which meant that there were always at least three or four cars in the driveway—the one Josh’s parents shared, maybe one of his sisters’ minivans, and the car of a visiting friend or two.
Once, she and Josh had been visiting when a big snowstorm hit. After the flakes stopped falling, they went outside to help clear off everyone’s vehicles. Josh shook his head as he scraped the windshield of his parents’ old wood-paneled wagon.
“If they’d just get rid of something now and then, or at least do a little bit of organizing, maybe they could actually park their car in the garage,” he said.
But the things Josh complained about were the very things Nell loved about the Parkers and their home. They had a way of making people feel relaxed and welcome. You never wondered if you should take your shoes off or leave them on. The kitchen always smelled like coffee because they brewed it constantly, one pot after another. If you felt the need to go off and read a book or take a nap, it was okay. It was all okay.
“Whatever makes you comfortable,” Josh’s mother, Judy, was always saying. And she meant it.
Nell loved the clutter, the chaos, and the constant comings and goings of neighbors and grandkids. It was all so different from how Nell had grown up. And even now, when she and Josh visited her own mother and her stepdad, Nell tread carefully, never quite sure of the way her mother preferred things these days. Because, with her mother, there was always a right way and a wrong way of doing things, but the line was constantly shifting.
WHEN SHE WAS a very young girl, Nell loved to draw. Her sixty-four-count pack of crayons had not just one but seven shades of blue. She knew that the word “blue” had four letters, but the blues in the big box all had longer names, ones she couldn’t read. So instead she called them the names of the things they reminded her of. There was bedtime blue, like the color of the sky outside her window when she crawled each night under the cotton quilt she’d had since she was a baby. Aquarium blue, bright like the water in the fish tank in Nell’s kindergarten classroom. And disappearing blue, like the color of the faded jeans she remembered her daddy wearing on the last day she saw him.
After he left, Nell’s mom starting bringing things home from the drugstore where she worked as a pharmacist. Little presents like a pack of plastic hair barrettes in the shapes of pastel butterflies and lambs, or a bouquet of Tootsie Pops with red tape wrapped around their paper sticks. Her mom would ask if she could have one and Nell would always give her the chocolate ones.
“You’re so sweet. You know I love chocolate,” her mom would say. She’d sound so proud of her daughter’s generous gesture that Nell didn�
�t have the heart to tell her mother that she gave up the chocolate ones because she didn’t like them. They were just brown inside of more brown. Nell preferred color.
On the day her mom brought home the crayons—the big box Nell had been coveting since she was four—Nell had been so happy, she’d drawn an immediate picture of two stick figures, one tall and the other short, surrounded by the outline of a big red heart. Then she’d written I LOVE YOU MOMMY across the top, pressing so hard she broke off the tip of two different orange crayons—one bright like sherbet and one light, like the striped fur of the neighbor’s tabby cat.
Her mom had thanked her and pulled Nell onto her lap, something she used to do all the time when Nell was smaller, but hardly ever did anymore. “We’re going to do just fine on our own, you and me,” she said.
Nell thought that was a silly thing to say because of course they were going to be fine. Nell’s dad had never been around much, and Grandma was always saying how Mom shouldn’t have married him anyway.
The pictures Nell drew seemed to make her mom happy, and they made Nell happy, too, because she liked the process of creating something beautiful. She liked selecting the colors, running her hands along the rows of crayons before choosing just the right shade for her latest masterpiece, which her mother would display proudly on the refrigerator, secured by an alphabet magnet.
After a while other daddies as old as Nell’s daddy, or maybe even older, started coming over in the evenings. But these daddies didn’t bring their kids. Nell wondered if maybe they didn’t have any. Or maybe their kids lived with their mommies, like Nell did.
On those nights, Grandma would put Nell to bed and read her stories while Mom curled her hair and dabbed tan-colored paint underneath her eyes. Nell didn’t like it. One evening, while they were waiting for Grandma to arrive, Nell clamped her arms around her mother’s legs and begged her not to go out. “I thought we were fine, just the two of us. You said.”
Her mom pried Nell’s fingers off her dress. “Honey, I just put this on and you’ve still got peanut butter on your hands from dinner. I don’t have time to change again. I’m already running late. Why don’t you go wash your hands and go draw a picture or something until Grandma gets here?”
But Nell didn’t feel like coloring. She watched as her mom opened up the top drawer of the bathroom vanity and selected a lipstick from where she kept them, sorted by color, in a special clear container with a spot for each separate tube. It reminded Nell of her crayon box, and how her mom had showed her how to always put each crayon right back where she found it, so that they were tucked in tiered rows like seats in a movie theater.
While her mother was leaning toward the mirror, brushing a fuzzy, clumpy black brush on her eyelashes, Nell got an idea. She grabbed a handful of lipsticks and went downstairs. Her mom liked makeup and also liked Nell’s pictures. What if Nell drew a picture with her mom’s makeup?
Lipsticks in hand, Nell pulled out the bin labeled Paper from the closet, but there wasn’t any paper in there. She searched in the bins labeled Barbies and Blocks, but didn’t find any paper in there, either. Which shouldn’t have surprised her. Her mom liked for things to be in their places, and she liked things to be clean. It was one of the reasons she and Nell’s dad used to fight. But since her dad went away, her mom had taken her cleaning and organizing to a new level. She brought home a label maker, like a gun that shot out stickers with words. Now almost everything in the house had a sticker, from the tray for spoons in the silverware drawer to the basket in Nell’s room where she kept her stuffed animals. Nell tried very hard to follow her mom’s systems and always put things in their places. But because the systems were constantly changing, becoming more categorized and more complex, sometimes Nell struggled to keep up.
When Nell didn’t find any paper in the box labeled Paper, she figured there wasn’t any, anywhere. She went to the kitchen and looked at the pictures displayed on the fridge. Maybe she could take one down and draw on the back of it. But then she thought of something even better.
Nell took down all of the pictures and the letter magnets. Now the refrigerator looked to her like a vast, white canvas. She took the top off a tube of lipstick and began to draw a house directly on the refrigerator door. When she’d ground down that lipstick to a stub, she set it on the floor and opened up another one, this time drawing a rainbow inside the house. She drew other things inside the house, too. Things she thought would make her mom happy. A vase of fuchsia flowers, a new washing machine so her mom wouldn’t have to rattle the knob and say “dammit” every time she threw in a new load of laundry. It felt good to draw on such a big surface, blank and smooth.
Her mother came downstairs just as Nell was finishing her drawing. Her heels clicked on the kitchen tile. But when she saw the streaks of lipstick caked on the refrigerator and the ground-down tubes and caps scattered all over the kitchen floor, the clicking stopped.
“What on earth have you done?” her mom yelled.
Nell had thought her mom would be happy about the picture, but she didn’t look happy now. She had on her mad face, with her forehead all wrinkly and her earlobes turning red.
“My date will be here any minute, and now I’ve got to deal with this.” Her mother gestured toward the refrigerator, which Nell now saw the way her mom did: a bunch of smudgy lines where they weren’t supposed to be.
Nell thought about explaining, but knew it would probably just take up more time and make her mom more angry. So she took the sleeve of her sweater and rubbed it against the fridge to try to wipe the lipstick off.
“No! That will make it worse.” Her mom grabbed Nell’s wrist so hard it hurt. “Go upstairs and change your clothes. And stay in your room until I can get this cleaned up.” She squatted down, balancing on her high heels, and picked up a tube of lipstick.
Nell stood there, watching as her mom picked up another and another, throwing them all away. She wondered if she should get on the floor and help, too, but then her mom yelled, “GO!”
Nell looked at her feet and hurried to the stairs. But she wasn’t fast enough to miss what her mother said under her breath as she sprayed down the refrigerator door with disinfectant: “Sometimes I can’t even believe you’re my daughter.”
From then on, Nell redoubled her efforts to keep things orderly and tidy and, in turn, to keep her mother happy. She stopped creating her own drawings and focused instead on coloring, finding comfort in the straightforward task of filling in other people’s pictures and staying inside the lines. She hung her clothes by order of color and never left her toys on the floor, not even if she was in the middle of building the most magnificent Lego castle she’d ever created. Her mother was all she had, and Nell couldn’t afford to give her any reasons not to love her.
“I THINK THE food is just about ready,” Josh said.
The sound of his voice pulled Nell back to the present. She looked at the stovetop, crowded with a pot of chickpea stew, a skillet of fried potatoes simmering in a spicy sauce, and a big pan of shellfish paella.
“Anything I can do?” she asked.
“Maybe set the table?”
“Okay.” Nell gave him a quick kiss. “Thank you for all this. You’ll stay and join us for dinner, won’t you?”
He nodded and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. “If you’re sure I won’t be interfering.”
She waved off his concern. “I’m sure,” she said. “I want you to meet the artists.”
Nell went into the dining room and opened up the china cabinet. It was hard to decide which dishes to use because there were so many of them in there: French porcelain, English bone china, and German stoneware. But the formal, matching sets didn’t interest Nell much. Instead, an eclectic collection of blue-and-white serving dishes caught her eye. Although all of the platters and bowls shared the same color scheme—a brilliant cobalt blue applied over a glossy white glaze—no two pieces shared the same design. Every bird, petal, leaf, and line had been hand-painted. Nell c
ould see slight imperfections where an artist’s hand had shaken a bit, or the glaze had set unevenly in the kiln.
Nell recognized the majolica style of ceramics, and guessed maybe they’d been imported from Italy or Spain. Maybe Mexico. Regardless of their origin, they’d go well with that evening’s dinner. She picked up the largest piece, an oval painted with an intricate floral pattern, and flipped it over. The underside bore a maker’s mark and a year, 1994. Nell placed the platter in the middle of the table. Under the light of the chandelier, she noticed variations in the shades of blue, where the artist had used more or less pressure or paint. The result was a range of hues on a spectrum from sky to indigo, reminding Nell of all those blue crayons from back when she was a kid, and the feeling of endless possibility that came with them.
Chapter Ten
Betsy
PIECE: Mosaic made from broken ceramic on wood, crafted by Elizabeth Barrett, age ten.
I don’t care what you say, I’m going.” Betsy crossed her arms and sat down on the edge of the bed. Outside, a siren wailed from somewhere beyond the walls of the gated community.
Walt rubbed his forehead. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Another executive was kidnapped last week. The president of a major Mexican bank this time. I think you should stay in the neighborhood.”
“And do what?” Betsy asked. “I’ve already played all the embassy wives in tennis.”
She looked out the window of their rented town house. Mexico City had seemed a grand adventure when they arrived six months earlier—a temporary relocation while Walt opened a new plastics manufacturing facility. Betsy had hoped to travel back and forth to Puebla a few times, just a little over an hour away, to visit a ceramics workshop. The workshop had received a grant from a charity arts organization Betsy was involved with as a board member back in Madison. But a wave of crime and political unrest had kept her, for the most part, encerrada. Trapped within the confines of their insular expat community. She hadn’t made the trip even once, and already she and Walt were scheduled to go back to Madison at the end of the month.