Or at least anger and pain were what I saw in her eyes. But I didn’t say a word, waiting to hear how my daughters might react.
Very softly, Cassie said, ‘Mom, your stuff has always been good, but this is marvelous. A masterpiece.’
Cautiously, I admitted, ‘It’s different.’
Maurie said, ‘Gadzooks! This is what the gadzooks was about, isn’t it, Mom? Where did it come from?’
Cassie had an eye for excellence in art, Maurie for deviance from the norm. I smiled, proud of both of them, but I told Maurie, ‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Yes, I do want—’
I interrupted, but fondly. ‘You two jetted down here to check on me, right? To see whether I’m slipping? Because my phone calls have been a bit bizarre lately?’
They didn’t speak, but their very still faces answered me.
Nodding, I assured them, ‘If that’s the case, then believe me, you don’t want to know all about this painting – not yet. Just stick around for a day or two, and you’ll see. How long are you staying?’
Cassie looked at Maurie. Maurie said, ‘We have a flight back on Wednesday morning.’
‘Then we have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday!’ Appreciating their busy lives, I told them quite sincerely, ‘That’s wonderful.’
Cassie and Maurie followed their mother down the yard to see the ‘duck pond,’ as she called the excavation in the backyard, before the customary afternoon thunderstorm moved in. Walking across more weeds than grass, behind their mom’s back they exchanged glances, but it was too early to arrive at any consensus, not even a silent one. Cassie thought Mom seemed fine – maybe a bit too fine. Mom wore the air of one who has just received an advanced degree or found religion. There was no more dithering in her; she seemed to have become quite sure of something.
‘I think they put her over here to keep her from contaminating the well water,’ she remarked as they arrived at the raw wound in her yard.
Maurie looked around, anywhere except at the grave. ‘Such a superfluity of bricks,’ she said, sounding so bored and scholarly that Cassie knew at once her sister felt as uneasy as she did.
‘Enough to hold her down,’ Mom said, freakily matter-of-fact.
Silence threatened; Cassie hastened to speak as banally as she could. ‘What are you going to do about filling this up, Mom?’
‘I’m going to plant a tree here.’ Mom made this a pronouncement, but then her voice softened. ‘I haven’t decided what kind yet. Something indigenous, like a magnolia maybe. Let’s get back inside the house before we get rained on.’
During the rainstorm they sat at the table – sure, there was a living room, the front room, with a comfortable sofa and chairs, but their family has always sat at the kitchen table to talk – and they caught up about Maurie’s professional honors and her husband’s promotions within his law firm, Cassie’s business frustrations, the logistics of Mom’s skeleton. It wasn’t long before Maurie, while still chatting, started cleaning away this and that, slipping off her chair to pick up bottle caps and Mardi Gras beads. Cassie watched her with amusement, and so did Mom, who observed, ‘Maurie, you certainly take after your father.’
‘Well, why did you leave this catastrophe lying around?’
‘I was busy with the painting. Anyway, this is the South, baby. Relax.’
‘The South would drive Dad crazy,’ Cassie put in. ‘He would want to trim the jungle around your house into rectangles.’ Her father had been a mechanical engineer with a nearly religious commitment to the straight line as the shortest distance between two points.
Mom laughed. ‘Wisteria doesn’t rectangulate very well.’
‘What about those jigger-jagger monstrosities?’
‘Spanish daggers? Jim would have hated them.’
Her voice issuing from beneath the table in an oracular way, Maurie said, ‘You’re free to go your own sweet solitary way, Mom, now that he’s gone.’
‘Honey pie, I always did what I wanted. Most of what I wanted when Jim was alive was to give him—’ Mom’s voice suddenly lost momentum.
‘We know, Mom,’ said Cassie. Give Dad happiness, support, indulgence and just plain love was what Mom had always done but couldn’t bring herself to say. She communicated better in paint than in words.
Finished with the detritus on the floor, Maurie popped her head up above the edge of the table like something from The Muppet Show. ‘Mom, would you like me to hang these origami birds from the ceiling for you?’
‘Yes, by all means! You’re tall enough so you won’t have to climb on top of the table.’
Before Cassie could ask whether her mother had actually risked her aging bones in such a reckless way, Mom disappeared toward the bedroom end of the house. Immediately, Cassie consulted her sister with her eyes. Maurie shook her head.
‘But she seems OK,’ Cassie murmured.
Maurie shook her head harder. ‘That painting,’ she whispered, but then she heard Mom approaching, and grew still and hushed. Mom reappeared bearing scissors, an ancient glass mayonnaise jar full of paper clips and several balls of rug yarn in different bright colors. She had always kept her craft things segregated from her art things, as if fearing some sort of cross-contamination. Back in her office, so called because her computer lived there, most likely she also had crayons, markers, rubber stamps, beads, potholder looms, flowers made out of Styrofoam egg cartons, who knew what.
‘I don’t have a stepstool,’ she chirped.
‘You’ve never in your life had a stepstool, Mom. We should get you one. And a cell phone, for God’s sake.’
‘I have a cell phone, dear, in the Volvo’s glove box, just in case of emergencies.’
Probably an ancient flip-open cell phone with a dead battery, Cassie thought.
‘But I’m in the house most of the time, and there’s no signal out here.’
Rolling her eyes, Maurie climbed on to a chair, Cassie handed her a yellow origami swan and a paper clip, and Mom passed along a length of red rug yarn and offered instructions. So they continued until all the ‘flittercritters,’ as Mom called them, were colorfully hanging from the ceiling where she wanted them. Then Mom exiled the yarn, paper clips and scissors to the office again, and the rain had stopped, and it was time to go out for supper.
They went to a Chinese buffet, as Maurie flatly refused to eat at Waffle House. As if Southern-style Chinese food – meaning peas, carrots and gravy – was better, Cassie thought, picking at her sweet-and-sour chicken while listening to Mom venting about Kim and the rejected book and how she felt as if her career was over without warning, how she had expected to keep on keeping on indefinitely and what was she supposed to do now – get herself a pair of cowboy boots and go line dancing? Maurie appeared bored by Mom’s monologue, but Cassie felt a pang of loss; what had happened to the mom who had always taken care of her? Who was this disappointed and needy little old woman?
‘Mom,’ Cassie told her, ‘that portrait you just finished, please send it to me. I’ll display it in the cafe, and I guarantee you’ll have the New York galleries wooing you in no time. They trawl my place for talent, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Mom, you’re not too old to start over as a mainstream artist.’
‘Gadzooks,’ added Maurie.
Mom became thoughtfully silent. Maurie signaled the waiter and asked for the check.
When they got back to Mom’s house, Cassie got her suitcase out of the rental car and lugged it inside to the guest room; Maurie did the same. Both of them dumped their luggage on the floor because there was nowhere else to set it; the guest room also served as a junk room for abandoned exercise equipment. The handlebars of the stationary cycle, or similar portions of the treadmill, would perhaps be useful to hang clothes from. Meanwhile, both of them stared at the double bed they had to share.
Cassie broke silence. ‘Just don’t go grabbing me in the middle of the night thinking I’m your husband.’
Mau
rie snorted. ‘I’m more likely to grab you thinking you’re not my husband. Would you prefer to sleep on the couch?’
‘I’d rather sleep in the bed and you sleep on the couch, indiscriminate grabber. I bet you snore, too.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘How would I know? I’ve never slept with anybody in my life.’
‘Why do I not believe that?’
Tired from travel, they wrangled merely pro forma, as siblings, meanwhile ambling to the front end of the house to see what their mother, who had strangely become elderly, maundering and short, was doing.
When they saw, they forgot to bicker anymore, but stood like brunette meerkats, watching as their mother tenderly removed the portrait of a child from her easel and slipped it into a cardboard portfolio. Then Mom seemingly set up the easel for another artwork, but not in her usual way. She placed a large sheet of cheap sketch paper on the easel, and left more of the paper scattered around the easel on the terrazzo floor. Then she took her ugly old jug full of cherished brushes and disappeared toward the back of the house.
Cassie and Maurie looked question marks at each other. Cassie spoke first. ‘She’s up to something.’
Maurie said, ‘She’s dangerously close to the edge of gaga.’
Their mother reappeared with a clump of plastic-handled craft brushes, a big box of crayons and a margarine tub full of markers. Cassie asked, ‘Mom, what are you doing?’
Without answering, she put the chintzy brushes where the other ones had been, then set the crayons and the markers on the smooth concrete floor in a haphazard way along with the randomly placed sheets of paper.
‘Mom,’ said Maurie in the tone of one taking over, ‘does the worm in your brain have a name?’
‘Not yet.’ She shooed her offspring toward the living room with her plump old paws. ‘Never mind. We’ll see what’s what in the morning.’
SEVEN
As usual, I woke up at the butt crack of dawn that Monday, but instead of feeling annoyed, I felt wide awake and ready for action. It took me only two or three blinks to realize why I was so unusually alert: I had set up an experiment of sorts, leaving those blank sheets of paper in the studio, and I wanted to see whether anything had happened.
But, confound it, I couldn’t go look, not if I wanted to prove anything to my daughters about what had been going on in my house. The results (if any) needed to be found by them first.
So, wide awake and wryly aware of the irony that I was wide awake, I made myself stay in bed until I heard the sounds of bare feet in the hallway, the toilet flushing and water running in the bathroom sink. Twice. I wanted both Maurie and Cassie to witness that I was not up before them. Just in case.
When it sounded to me as if they were finished in the bathroom, I all but levitated out of bed, covered my sleep shirt with a caftan and toddled out of my room, all my arthritic joints creaking. ‘Good morning,’ I told my daughters through the doorway of their room.
‘Coffee,’ Maurie responded, still in fashionable fishy-print pajamas, brushing past me and heading toward the kitchen. Cassie zipped up her jeans, blinked a smile at me and trailed after her sister.
I, of course, needed to go to the bathroom. But a couple of minutes later, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard what I kind of expected: one of my daughters screamed, and then they both yelled, ‘Mom!’
I rinsed my mouth before I put on my slippers and shuffled out to the kitchen, where I could smell coffee starting to brew. Through the Florida room, I could see Maurie and Cassie at the threshold of the studio, standing abnormally close together and looking spring-loaded, eyes wide, hands to their mouths as they stared toward the sheets of paper I had put out for bait the night before.
I took a look myself, then joined my daughters, squeezing between them, an arm around each waist. ‘Dang,’ I remarked, ‘I knew it. She had to go and use my paints; forget the crayons and markers. But at least she didn’t throw a fit and trash the studio.’
‘Who?’ gasped Maurie.
‘Now, that is the question.’ Although I myself had few doubts anymore. Unmistakably, the paintings had been done by a child, because kids nearly always painted that way, grabbing the paintbrushes in a ham-fisted grip and scrubbing colors on to the paper, making laborious outlines with paint rather than filling in forms, and wreaking utter ruin upon the bristles of the paintbrushes, which was why I had put my good brushes away.
All of the sheets of paper had been used. On the easel, the paper had been turned sideways to accommodate four rudimentary people in a row, stick figures with balloon heads and flaring skirts: baby girl, small girl, not-quite-so-small girl and a towering woman with a wide-open mouth, looming over the three children. The gesture was unmistakable: she was yelling at them, arms raised; from one hand dangled something brown and snaky.
As for the pictures that lay overlapping on the floor, I wanted a closer look at them, but as I stepped forward, my daughters cried out and grabbed me to hold me back. I stopped and turned around to calm them down. ‘Shhhh. Chill, you two. Now you know why I was so freaked out when I phoned you, but I’ve gotten used to it, and I’m pretty sure she’s harmless.’
‘Who?’ Cassie whispered, wide-eyed.
‘Well, it has to be the little girl from the backyard, don’t you think? It started the night I found her.’
Cassie stared. Maurie’s hands flew up as she cried, ‘Mom, that’s crazy!’
‘What exactly started?’ Cassie asked in the same stunned whisper.
I gestured at the evidence du jour. ‘This sort of thing.’
Maurie burst out, ‘It’s just somebody playing tricks! It’s got to be.’
‘Honey, think whatever you want to think; it is what it is.’
Staring at the painting on the easel, Cassie breathed, ‘The children have no hands.’
‘Huh?’ I turned to take another look.
‘The children have no hands. That means they have no power.’
That was a lightbulb moment for me. ‘The child feels helpless! That explains—’
Maurie interrupted, giving every indication of feeling helpless herself. ‘You are both being gullible imbeciles!’ She stamped her foot, gesticulated wildly, then took off running. A moment later, I heard the guest-room door slam.
‘Explains what, Mom?’ Cassie asked.
‘Explains why she is so angry.’
‘My pissy sister?’
‘No, the … you know … the child. She stomped my beads, ripped up my origami – and look at these.’ Maurie’s outburst hung around me like a cloud, but I knew from long experience that she needed to be let alone for at least ten minutes before I tried to talk to her. So I allowed myself a mental shrug, then bent to study the other pictures the child – or whatever – had done, the ones on the floor. I picked them up one by one. Crudely painted – or drawn in paint – point blank and without perspective, they were somewhat ambiguous to interpret. One appeared to be a rounded sort of white rectangular object with jagged, ferocious flames shooting up from it. Another looked like a squat H … no, with a stick figure reclining on the crossbar, it had to be a bed, and above it hung a purple cloud dripping torrents of cobalt rain. The other pictures all showed the same object in various colors – at least it seemed to be the same object or nearly so, but it was hard to tell because each time it was nearly obliterated by a large, heavy black X.
Cassie had continued staring at the easel. ‘They don’t have any mouths, either,’ she said, her tone still stunned. ‘Not even sad mouths. The only one with a mouth is the mother, and she’s yelling.’
So she, too, felt that the large figure was the mother. Oddly, my own daughter’s intuition set my mental boat to rocking more than the latest manifestations of the inexplicable did. Beckoning for Cassie to follow, I fled to the kitchen. Coffee. I needed coffee and could tell it was ready; it had stopped dripping. Blundering to find three clean mugs, I figured out why Cassie’s reaction had put me off balance; it resonated with my own far mor
e than I had expected. She was supposed to be my pragmatic child, not the brilliant, insightful one. Maurie, not Cassie, was a scholar.
As if she heard me thinking, Cassie remarked, ‘I’ve been studying graphology for years, Mom. I just never told you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because half the time I was analyzing your work.’
My eyes opened wide and my mouth likewise, to spew questions, but Cassie headed me off. ‘Not now, Mom. We need to figure out what to do about, you know, your nocturnal visitor.’
‘Please, one crisis at a time.’ I poured coffee, thus taking care of the first crisis. ‘I was just waiting for Monday; I have a plan. Right after breakfast.’
Even before she slammed the guest-room door, Maurie had made up her mind: there was no point in her staying here, at Mom’s house, a minute longer, not when Mom had tricked her into this visit with puerile stunts, seeking attention like a spoiled child – because, of course, this morning’s paintings were Mom’s goofy idea of a prank; there was no other rational explanation. To think otherwise was just plain insane, frighteningly so, and fright made Maurie angry. That, and the thought of her important academic time wasted due to other people’s stupidity, and having been made a fool of, however briefly, determined her to withdraw from any further involvement forthwith. Mouth clamped, Maurie rationalized that, were she to stay, she might say or do something hurtful to her mother. She had gotten her clothes on and was packing quite rapidly but not in a panic – no, not at all – when her sister yelled from outside the door, ‘Berthe! Breakfast!’
Maurie unclenched her teeth to speak with what she considered admirable calm. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘OK! Don’t kill the messenger!’ Cassie’s footsteps retreated.
Moments later, rental car keys in hand and luggage trundling at her heels, Maurie reported to the breakfast table – but not to eat. ‘I’m out of here.’
Over their cereal bowls, Mom and Cassie stared at her like a pair of clueless first-year students from the same sorority.
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