Marcos scowls at her and slopes off to his room.
Lupe rolls her eyes. “Have another beer. And try the salsa, it’s my mother’s recipe. She always makes this one with the first tomatoes from the garden.”
MANON HAD TAKEN the branches from the park to her studio, and this morning she carries a canvas knapsack full of left-over roof pebbles to join them. The strap is heavy on her aching shoulder. She isn’t strong enough yet not to feel the pain of work. Spilled on the wood floor the stones, some as small as two knuckles, some as big as her fist, look dull and uninteresting, although she chose them with care. Next to the twisted saw-cut branches of manzanita and red madrone, they look like what they are: garden trash. She kicks them into a roughly square beach and tries binding the branches with wire, an unsturdy contraption that more or less stands on its own, footed in pebbles. She steps back. Weak, clumsy, meager. The word keeps recurring in this room. Meager.
She has to teach a class.
Life drawing is about volume and line. She tells her students to be hasty. “Throw down the lines, capture some space, and move on. Be quick,” she says. “Quick!” And then watches them frown earnestly over painstaking pencils while the model sits, naked and patient, and reads her book.
“Look,” Manon tells them. She takes her pad and a pencil and sweeps her hand, throwing down the lines. “Here, here, here. Fast! A hint, a boundary, a shape. Fast!” Her hand sweeps and the figure appears. It’s so easy! See the line and throw it down.
They don’t get it. They look at her sketch with admiration and dismay, and are more discouraged than before.
“Start again,” she says.
They start again, painstaking and frowning.
After class she goes back to her studio and takes apart the pathetic bundle of wired twigs. Meager! She doesn’t get it either.
LUPE HAS A meeting, Marcos has soccer. Manon spends some time in her garden bed, weeding herbs and carrots and beans. She uncovers an astonishing earthworm, a ruddy monster as thick as her thumb that lengthens absurdly in its slow escape. Mr. Huang from the second floor comes out and gives her a dignified nod as he kneels to weed his mysterious greens. Manon’s mother always planted carrots and beans, but Manon’s carrots don’t look right, the delicate fronds have been seared by the sun. Mr. Huang’s greens, like Lupe’s tomatoes, burgeon amongst vivid marigolds. The blossoms are as orange as the eyes of the pigeons Lupe strings netting against thieves worse than raccoons and wandering goats. Manon’s tidy plot is barren in comparison. She has planted the wrong things, planted them too late, something. When she goes in she finds a message from her sister on her telephone.
Sorry I missed you. It looks like I might not be coming after all...
ONE OF THE other art teachers has a show opening in a gallery across town. Manon finds a note about it in her box in the staff room, a copied invitation, everyone has one. She carries it up to her studio where she is confronted by the mess of branches and stones. The madrone cuttings have begun to lose their leaves, but the red bark splits open in long envelope mouths to reveal pistachio green. She picks up a branch, carries it around the room, pacing, thinking. Nothing comes but the reminder of someone else’s show. The teacher is one she likes, an older man with a beard and a natural tonsure. She has thought about asking him for advice on her classes, but has not, yet. He was on her hiring committee. She knows he did not invite her especially, but it would be rude not to go. She puts the branch down and digs into her bag to consult her trolley timetable.
She cuts brush in the park again this afternoon, and is relieved to find that her vision of layered space and interstitial depth repeats itself. Branches crook and bend to accommodate each other, red tawny gray arms linked in a slow maneuver, a jostle for sky. She thinks back to her studio and realizes she has missed something crucial. Something. She works her shears, then wrestles whole shrubs out of the tangle without stopping to cut them smaller, determined on frustration. When, on their break, Edgar asks if she is going to join the rest of the crew for a beer after work, she tells them she has a friend’s opening to attend. Then berates herself, partly for the ‘friend,’ partly because now she will have to go.
SHE WEARS HER favorite dress again, the long blue one patterned with yellow stars, the one her sister gave her. The trolley is crowded, the windows all wide open. She stands and has to cling to a strap too high for her, her arms and shoulders hurting, the hot breeze flickering through the armholes of the dress. A young man admires her from a seat by the door, but she would rather be invisible. The trolley car sways past lighted windows, strolling pedestrians, a startled dog that has escaped its leash. She has never been to the gallery before. She only realizes she has missed her stop when one of the bright windows blinks an image at her, a colorful canvas with the hint of bodies beyond. She eases past the admiring boy, steps down, and has to walk back four blocks. She remembers how tired she is, remembers she won’t really know anyone there. The sunwarmed bricks breathe up her bare legs in the darkness.
Karl, the artist whose show this is, is surrounded by well-wishers. Manon gives him a small wave, but cannot tell if he sees her. The gallery is a remodeled house with many small rooms, and there are many people in each one. Every corner sports an electric fan so the air rushes around, bearing odors of bodies, perfume, wine the way the waiters bear trays of food and drink. They are casual in T-shirts and jeans, while most of the guests have dressed up, to be polite, to have fun. The people stir around, looking at the canvases on the walls, looking for friends, talking, laughing, heating up the rumpled air, and they impart a notion of animal movement to the paintings. Karl works in pillows of color traced over by intricate lines. Nets, Manon decides, to keep the swelling colors contained. She likes the brightness, the warmth, the detail of brushwork and shading, but recognizes with a tickle of chagrin that she still is more fond of representative than abstract art. Immature, immature. She takes a glass of wine and then wishes she hadn’t. She is thirsty for water or green tea, for air that has not been breathed a hundred times. She decides she will pay her respects to Karl and go.
“Hi!” one of the waiters says.
“Hi?” Manon says, and then realizes the young man with the dark face glossy with heat is the counterman from the ice cream store. “Oh, hello.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,” he says. He rearranges glasses to balance his tray.
“Of course I do,” she says, then wonders why of course.
“Big crowd,” he says.
“Yes, it’s good.”
“Good for business. We do the catering, my family I mean.”
Someone takes one of the full glasses on his tray and he rebalances the rest.
Manon looks for something to say. “I teach with Karl. At the art school.”
“Who’s Karl?”
“The artist?”
“Oh.” They both laugh. He says, “I’m Luther, by the way.”
“Manon.”
“It’s nice to meet you.”
She smiles.
“Well, I’d better get back to work. I’ll see you around, huh?”
“Yes.”
Luther raises his tray and turns sideways to slip between two groups of talkers, then glances back at her. “Manon?”
“Right.”
He grins and eases himself into his round. Manon smiles. A lot of people don’t get her name the first time around.
She works her way into Karl’s circle and he introduces her around as ‘the brilliant new artist we managed to snare before some place with real money snapped her up.’
LUPE DECIDES TO make a pond for the roof garden with left over plastic sheeting and stones. She and Manon dig out a hollow in the dirt, line it with plastic, fill the bottom with pebbles from the left-over pile. Ira the landlord, who is impatient to sow some seeds, points out that it will have to be filled by hand in the dry season. Lupe smiles with implausible sweetness and says she knows. When he bustles off on other business, Lupe goes downstairs to fill the buck
et at the garden tap, leaving Manon to haul it up on the pulley. The first time, Lupe fills the bucket too full and gets a muddy shower when Manon starts to pull (her swearing sounds more fiery than her salsa) so after that she only fills it halfway, which means Manon is raising and carrying and pouring and lowering until dark. She doesn’t mind. The sky is a deep arch of blue busy with evening birds, and there is something good about working with water, which has voice and character but no form. The wet pebbles glow with color and the water swirls, the pond growing layer by layer, dark mirror and clear window all at the same time. She goes to bed with that image in her mind.
AT THE END of winter Manon and her sister dug out the stream at the bottom of the tobogganing hill, as if by their excavations they could hasten spring. The packed toboggan run stood above the softer sublimating snow, a ski-jump track grubby with sled-marks. They walked down this steep ramp, stomping it into steps with their boot soles, and at the bottom frayed their wool mittens by terrier digging. The ice revealed was a mottled shield over mud and sand. Suspended brown leaves made stilled layers of time out of the fall’s spilling water. Although Manon and her sister would never drink from the summer stream, they broke wafers of ice free from the edges of stones and reeds and melted them on their tongues. There was always a muddy, gritty taste. The flavor of frogs, Manon’s sister insisted, which made Manon giggle and squeal, but did not prevent her from drinking more ice. She always looked, too, for the frogs buried under ice and mud, waiting, but never saw them. The first she ever knew of them was their tentative peeping after dark in the start of spring.
LUTHER IS BEHIND the counter when she returns to the ice cream store a day or two after Karl’s opening. He has a cheerful smile for the succession of customers (the store is busy today) but lights up especially when he sees Manon standing in line.
“Hi!” he says. “Vanilla, right? It’ll be just a second.”
“I’m in no hurry,” she says. He has lovely eyes, dark and thickly lashed.
“So, Manon,” he says when he hands her the dish, “can you stick around for a little while? My dad’s out on a delivery, but he wanted to talk to you, and he should be back soon.”
“Talk to me?”
Luther grins. “We have a proposition to make.” Then, as if worried he has been too familiar, “I mean, about work, about maybe doing some work for us. As an artist.”
There is a boisterous family behind her deciding on flavors. She smiles and shrugs. “I’ll be around.”
“Great,” he says. “Great!” And then the family is giving him their requests.
Engaged by curiosity, she doesn’t mind sitting at the narrow counter shelf at the back of the room. She feels as if last night’s work, last night’s idea, has turned a switch, shunted a trolley from a siding to the street, set her running back on the tracks of her life. A happy feeling, but precarious: it is, after all, only an idea. Even good ideas sometimes die. But this idea inside her head has met its reflection (perhaps) in the ideas of the ice cream family, and this, she feels, is a hopeful thing. Hope, like inspiration, is fragile, and she tries to think of other things while she eats her ice cream and waits for Luther’s dad.
He arrives not long after she has finished her bowl. The store has emptied a little, and after a brief word with his son he comes around the counter and suggests she join him at a table. He says his name is Edward Grant. “Call me Ed.”
“Manon.”
“That’s French, isn’t it?”
She nods.
“I’ve got a cousin in New Orleans.” He shrugs that aside. “Anyway, about this proposition. We’ve been working to expand our catering business, but we haven’t had much to spare for advertising. Word of mouth is pretty good for the kind of business we do, but lately I’ve thought even just pamphlets we could hand around would be good. I know Luther said you’re a real artist, so I hope I’m not insulting you by asking. I just thought how everyone can use whatever work they can get these days.”
“I could use the work. I mean, I’d be happy to, only I don’t know much about graphic design,” Manon says regretfully. “That’s computer stuff, and I’m pretty ignorant.”
Ed shrugs that off too. “We’ve got a computer program. What I was thinking was maybe you could come up with a picture for us, not a logo exactly, but an image that would catch peoples’ imaginations, and then,” he takes in a breath, as if this is the part that makes him uncertain, and he is suddenly very much like his son, “maybe you could paint it for us, too, here in the store. So what do you think?”
Manon eyes the melting-sherbet walls. Luther takes advantage of a lull and comes out from behind the counter to wipe down the tables. He leans over his father’s shoulder and says, “So what do you think?”
“We can pay a flat fee of five hundred dollars,” Ed says. “And materials, of course.”
“Well actually,” Manon says, “I was thinking maybe we could barter a trade?”
Ed looks doubtful. “What kind of trade?”
Manon smiles. “How about some space in your freezer?”
AFTER THAT, EVERYTHING becomes folded into one.
The savor of Ed’s cinnamon rolls mingled with the watery smell of acrylic paint and the electric tang of the first trolley of the cool and limpid morning.
The busy hum of her classes, that she feels she has stolen from Karl’s, except he gave his advice freely, as a gift.
The gritty sweat of work in the park, sunshine rich with sawdust, and after, the cool of conversation and bitter beer.
The green sprout of tough roof seeds, careless of season, and the plash of birds bathing in the pool that has to be filled by hand, and the recipe for Lupe’s mother’s salsa that calls for cilantro fresh from Manon’s garden bed.
The cold enfolding fog of the freezer and the chirp and crackle of ice as another layer of water gets poured into the wood and plastic form.
Vanilla, dusk, and Luther’s smile.
And somehow even time. The southwest corner of the park has been cleared to reveal a terrace floored in rumpled bricks and roses. The tree of winged fruits and ripening birds burgeons on Ed’s and Luther’s wall. The form in the freezer is full. And there is a message on Manon’s telephone. I can come, I can come after all! The train arrives at dawn, call and tell me how to find you...
MANON’S SISTER ARRIVES on the first trolley from the station. The early sky is a blue too sweet to become the furnace glare of noon, a promise that delights though it does not deceive. The demolition crews have taken their jackhammers to another street, leaving quiet and a strange soft carpet of turquoise where the pavement used to be, the detoxifiers that will leach spent oil from the earth. Manon walks to the trolley stop, happy to be early, and then stands amazed when her sister climbs down, balancing a belly and a bulging yellow pack.
“Elise!” cries Manon. “You’re so big!”
Elise laughs and maneuvers into an embrace. “You’re so slender! Look how beautiful you are, so fit and tanned!”
“Look how beautiful you are!” Manon says, laughing back. The sister’s known face is new, round and gently shining, warm with the summer within. Manon takes the pack and says, “You must be so tired. Are you hungry? Or do you just want to sleep? It’s only a couple of blocks.”
“What I really need,” Elise says, “is a pee. But we can wait if it’s only a couple of blocks.”
“Two and a half,” Manon says. And then, “We!”
They link arms and laugh.
While Elise sleeps, Manon walks to the ice cream shop where Ed and Luther are waiting. Margot, Luther’s mother and Ed’s wife, is also there. She and Ed have collaborated on a feast of a breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and peppers, fresh bread and rolls, peaches like soft globes of sunrise, cherries like garnet jewels. There is so much food they can feed Edgar when he comes with the park crew’s truck, and Lupe and Marcos when they finally show up, almost an hour late. Edgar can’t get over Manon’s tree on the sherbet-colored wall, he keep
s getting up to stand with his back to the counter and stare at it all over again. “There’s something new every time I look,” he says. When Lupe arrives she stands next to him to admire Manon’s work, while Marcos slumps sleepy-eyed over the last of the eggs.
It takes all of them to lift the form full of frozen water. They crowd into the freezer, breath smoking extravagantly, and fit poles through the pallet that makes up the bottom of the form. Edgar opens the freezer’s alley door and the back of the truck, and in a confusion of warmth and cold the seven of them jockey the heavy thing outside and up onto the truck bed. Margot and Lupe massage their wrists. Edgar, in the back of the truck, leans against the crate-like form and says, “Wow!” Manon grins in secret relief: she had wondered if they’d be able to shift it at all. But now everyone except Margot and Ed pile into the truck that farts and grumbles its anachronistic way through the green streets to the park.
ELISE DECLARES HERSELF to be amazed at the city. “I thought it would be all falling down and ugly. But look!” She points out the trolley window. A grape vine weaves its way up a trellis bonded to tempered glass and steel, drinking in the reflected heat of noon. “It’s like that game we used to play when we were little, do you remember? Where we’d pretend that everyone had vanished from the Earth except for us and everything was growing back wild. Remember? In the summer we used to say the old barn was the town all grown over in blackberry canes.”
Manon remembers. “Like a fairy story. Sleeping Beauty, or something.”
“Right! And I’d make you crawl inside and wait for me to rescue you.” Elise laughs. “And we’d get in so much trouble for ruining our clothes! Good thing no one ever knew where we were playing, we’d never have been allowed.”
The trolley drops them at the northeast corner of the park. Manon leads her sister through the half-wild tangle of chaparral and jungle gyms.
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