LILY
WHAT DID I DO, WHEN I wasn’t working? My days off were lazy and without purpose. I couldn’t remember when I had ever had so much free time. In high school, I’d loved dragging a chair down to the beach and setting it up at the water’s edge so that the waves washed over my feet, but I had done that once so far since I’d been home and it felt like a mistake. I remembered why I’d avoided visiting my mother the past four years: everywhere I could see my father. I looked out to the jetty and saw him there, standing barefoot on the cold rocks and casting his line out into the ocean. He’d taught me how to hold the other end of a drag net, the two of us stepping in time in the shallows. We picked the flopping minnows from the black netting and plopped them into our bait bucket, and I felt the pulse of the little fish in my hand.
One good thing came out of my boredom: I had taken up drawing again. I found myself sketching these images from my girlhood—the minnows gasping on the shoreline, bright shocks of seaweed that washed in on the tide. I liked making the loose scribbles, the meditative act of slowly, through line and shape and shading, distinguishing what something was versus what it was not.
Across the street from our porch, where I was sitting with a pencil and notebook in hand, an older woman backed her long silver Cadillac into the driveway. I’d seen her before, in passing—gathering the morning paper in her giant sunglasses, swaddled in a navy bathrobe—but we hadn’t spoken.
“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” she called. “Could you help me lift this?” I crossed the street, blood rushing to my head from laying still for too long. “Thank you so much! I just bought all of these plants and someone at the nursery helped me lift the bag of potting soil into the car, but I didn’t even think about what it would be like to lift it out again. I don’t know why they only sell this stuff in fifty-pound bags.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but even I had trouble heaving the bag out of the trunk. I used to go to exercise classes almost every morning in the city, but I had fallen out of shape quicker than I wanted to admit. “Where should I put this?”
“Oh, inside the garage, please, dear.”
I dropped the bag and shook my arms to relieve the strain.
“That’s perfect, thanks again. Can I offer you a glass of iced tea? I just brewed it.”
“Oh, I’m okay, thank you.”
“No, really. Come in, I insist. Just one glass.” She put a perfectly manicured hand on my arm. “Now, your mother tells me you are here for a little while? From the city?”
My mother rarely mentioned the neighbors, but I supposed she and this woman might have chatted now and again.
“For now. Just the summer.” Walking through her garage door and into the kitchen, I was struck by the smell of her house. A combination of Windex, cigarettes, and kitty litter. “I’m sorry—I don’t know if we’ve met before. What’s your name again?”
“I’m Mildred. But you can call me Mil. Mildred is such a miserable name. You’re Lily, right? Your mother has told me all about you.”
“Yes.” I blushed. I wondered what my mother had told her. Chances were that any achievements my mother had bragged about were now out of date.
“Now sit there, and I’ll be right over with something to drink. I bet you miss the city. I used to go up there every fall and spring for the fashion shows.”
“You did?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised.
“For a long time I owned a boutique on Pacific Avenue, back in the fifties and sixties. Oh, I carried the best stuff. Furs, beaded handbags from Belgium, Ceil Chapman dresses, the most drop-dead gorgeous shoes. Marilyn Monroe once bought a sweater from me when she was in town. Poor thing didn’t know it was still pretty cold here in May.” She eyed me up and down, a wry little smile coming into her face. “I still have a ton of the stuff upstairs, if you ever want to look. My grandkids all live in Washington so they’ll never get to see it.” I could picture the closets packed with thick velvet dresses. Beaded cashmere cardigans. Tweed suits in pastel colors. “Had to sell the store off, though, in the seventies. They were saying things were bad then, that the casinos would turn it all around. And get a load of them these days. Now there’s no one to turn them around. Anyway, while you’re here, you should come upstairs and have a look at some of these things. Follow me.”
“Oh, really, thank you, but I couldn’t.”
“Oh, come on. You’d make an old lady’s day.” She got up and left the room, and it seemed I had no choice but to comply. It made me nervous to watch Mil go up the stairs, though for a woman her age she was pretty quick on her feet. She opened the door to a room she must have used as a spare bedroom. It had a green chenille bedspread and a large art deco dresser, the top crammed with old perfume bottles, and I suspected no one had visited in a while. The vanity mirror was furred with dust.
She opened the door to the closet, and I was shocked to see that it was almost as big as the bedroom itself. She yanked the chain, and a light bulb mounted to the bare wood of a rafter cast a yellow glow over rows of garment bags. She started to unzip them and clacked through the hangers, pausing every minute or so to wrestle a piece from the bag and hold it to the light.
“Cute, but not right for you, perhaps. Let’s see … I think there’s another one like it but without the pleats.” She mostly seemed to want to talk to herself, hold her own council. I could picture what she had been like as a shop owner. Authoritative without being bossy. Never afraid to step in with a recommendation, but not too pushy either. I was scanning the rest of the closet, trying to add up how long it would take her to sort through all of the bags, when I saw that there were frames propped against the wall. I could only make out their bottom edges—someone had draped white sheets over the tops. I hesitated, pinched a corner of the sheet between my fingers. She had been so insistent on showing me upstairs that I figured she wouldn’t mind—just a look.
While Mil unzipped more garment bags, I lifted the fabric and took a small, almost involuntary sip of breath. I had expected some horrible 1970s paint-by-numbers, a velvet painting depicting a Playboy-esque nude, a tacky crewel made from fuzzy, fraying yarn.
I’d found instead a painting of a man with a bandage over his eye. He was seated, and it took me a moment to realize that he was in a wheelchair, but then I noticed the arms of his chair at the bottom of the frame, the handles jutting out behind him. His gaze was turned away from the viewer, and his expression gave me the feeling that he hadn’t wanted to be seen, that he felt ashamed, even. I crouched to look at the brushwork: precise and delicate on the face, while the broad strokes of his shirt gave the impression of haste. The discrepancy made his expression all the more intense, the evasion in his eyes all the more legible. Behind me, Mil was saying something about box pleats versus kick pleats. I lifted the rest of the sheet: another portrait, of a woman, in what looked like an old nurse’s uniform. Her hair fell in limp curls around her chin, and even though, unlike the man, she stared straight out of the painting, there was something withholding about her, something crimped about her expression. As though she were pinching herself outside the frame. Mildred turned, holding out a belted navy dress.
“Oh, you found the pictures, I see. My husband collected them.”
“What are they? Who did them?”
“Someone around here, I think. The ones you’re looking at are portraits of patients from the Thomas England Hospital, but there are others, too. My husband used to buy them from a friend of his. I don’t know who the artist is, though. Wonder if they’re still around. Not much left to paint, I guess.”
I didn’t know where to begin with the questions. “Wait. The what hospital?”
“Oh, it’s been torn down for decades. It’s where Resorts is now. But it was the largest hospital in the country during World War II. My husband was a vet, so he was most interested in the history of the hospital. Those were the first ones he bought, and then it just expanded from there. He kept bringing them home. Didn’t bother me, because I don’t think he pa
id much, and they made him happy. You like them? Those hospital pictures are so depressing.”
The portraits made me feel melancholy, wistful, even a little bit angry. I was looking at a third that showed a man—no, a boy, he had a boy’s apple cheeks and dense, sun-bleached eyelashes—with a line of stitches along his cheekbone, holding his hand to his chest. The tips of his fingers were missing. I lifted another sheet. This one showed a woman in a bathing cap, with a smile that edged toward a grimace. She was turned to the side with a slice of crowd behind her, and she had reins gathered in her hands, beads of water running down her face like tears. One of the girls who used to ride horses off of diving platforms on the boardwalk and land in those shallow pools. The thought of the impact made my teeth ache. Boardwalk and street scenes, façades of shops and billboards that had been torn down for years. Woolworth’s. Planters Peanuts, Irene’s Jewelry, the Schmidt’s Beer clock. A woman with her mouth painted into a perfect cupid’s bow and a Miss America sash draped across her chest as she looked out across a stage, wringing her hands.
“I love them. I mean, they are sort of depressing. But they’re so … human. Vulnerable.” I thought of the artists Philip Louis had been signing at the gallery the past few years. The post-modern, post-beauty, post-meaning types. Everything they did was ironic, arch. I had almost forgotten that painting could make you feel like this. That the right work brought you into it, then sent you back out into the world, ready to reinvest in the details of your surroundings. They were so different from so much of the work I was seeing in the city: These paintings were simpler, unafraid of approaching sentiment, of asking people to feel something. They didn’t give me the sense that I’d had when looking at a lot of contemporary stuff, like I wasn’t in on the joke. After everything with Matthew, I craved that kind of earnestness.
“No argument there. A little too human, if you ask me. I prefer landscapes and still lives, myself. Snowy woods and fruit arranged nicely in a bowl, all that, thank you very much. But you can come look at them some time, if you’d like. There’s more in the other bedroom.”
There was a signature on the bottom right corner of each canvas, but I couldn’t make it out, just the swoop of an S at the beginning of the last name. Most of them had dates, too, ranging from the eighties to the late nineties, but nothing since. “Have you ever showed them to anyone?”
“Other than you?”
“Like a professional? They’re really interesting, Mil. Someone might want to buy these. Maybe even a museum. Or the Atlantic City Historical Society?”
“Oh, I doubt that. He bought them for nothing, a few dollars each, I think. They don’t have any value. God, I wish this was one of those Antiques Roadshow situations. I’d get myself a nice little condo in Palm Beach in a second.” She turned and rustled through another garment bag. “Aha! Here’s what I was looking for.”
She held up a red gingham sundress with a halter neck. It looked, I thought, more like a tablecloth than something to wear.
“Take this. It will look adorable on you. Perfect for this time of year. Now all you need is some handsome boy to take you on a beach picnic.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the dress, the old cotton supple and soft. I didn’t bother to tell her that I was planning on staying away from handsome boys for a while. “It’s been really nice talking to you, Mil. I hope … Would it be okay if I came back later this week? I’d love to talk more, and maybe look at the paintings again.”
“I would love that,” she said.
As I crossed the street back home, I felt a familiar hum in my nerves—one that reminded me of sitting in my first art history course freshman year, watching slides of paintings click by, color-struck, nearly twitching with excitement. I tried to recall all of the portraits one by one. The man with the tattered ears and slack jaw who operated the roller coaster out on Steel Pier, a cigarette pinched in his fingers. The woman with a flower pinned to her lapel and a piece of yellow carbon paper crumpled tight in her hand. The man with a prosthetic arm from the elbow down, the way the artist had emphasized the mechanical gleam of it in the light.
This painter wanted people at their weakest or their greediest or their most pandering selves. I wondered how I could find out more, if that swooping S in the signature gave me enough information to start with. Here, I thought. Here is where everything changes, the upswing. This is when I start inching my way back to who I’m supposed to be.
* * *
IN CONTRAST to the buzz of excitement about the paintings, my shifts at the spa had been brutally dull. I had forgotten the reality of service jobs: the stretches of hours spent both waiting for something to happen, for customers to serve, and also hoping that you wouldn’t have to do anything at all. Or the exhaustion of having to be subservient to the customers who did come in, the brutal self-effacement it involved. Yes ma’am, of course, sir, please, allow me. My pleasure my pleasure oh no it’s really my pleasure.
By the end of every shift, I felt numb and empty. On my way out I often stopped at the bar, exhausted, ordering a drink or two because it felt like something to do, because it felt good to be the one who was waited on, who got to make requests. Then, walking lazily through the rows of slot machines while I waited for the drifty, buzzed feeling to wear off, I watched men in VFW hats and women wearing fanny packs that bulged like exterior organs smoke Marlboro reds and sigh at their bad luck.
I saw the prostitute with the peach tattoo every now and then: sucking on an ice cube at the bar, crossing and recrossing her legs every time a man walked by, then relaxing into a slouch when he looked away. Rubbing her eyes as she sat on the curb waiting for the jitney, her stilettos in her hands. Once I walked past her in the hallway near the Guest Rewards lobby. I braced myself for her to mock me again, but when she saw me staring she just frowned, then reached into her pocket for a packet of Sweet’N Low, tipped her head back, and shook it into her mouth. She always wore the same style dress, and I could usually see the stem and the leaf of the tattoo peeking above the fabric. Once she had styled her hair in a dramatic swoop over her face, but when she turned I could see that underneath it she had a black eye.
Clara didn’t come back to the spa until my sixth week there, early in the morning, while I was alone at the desk. She wore a purple bandana tied around her head and a matching purple halter top, a belly button ring with a dangling charm in the shape of a flower that glinted and jiggled as she walked.
“Good morning, lovely.” No sign of the worried girl I had left behind in the shop. She made it look so easy—smoothing over the rough parts of her life. “How have you been lately?” There was a bemused curl to her lips that suggested she knew the way I had fallen apart on the boardwalk as soon as I’d walked out of her door.
“What did you do to me?” I asked, leaning toward her so that I could whisper. Speaking with her about her gift, as she had called it, made me feel insane.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you sound crazy. Do you mean the reading?”
“Shh! Yes … you … you did something to me.” Maybe she had been angry about what I had seen. I understood that—the desire to punish anyone who witnessed your pain. Hadn’t I done the same to people who had known me here, after Steffanie died? If only for a moment, to make yourself feel as though you weren’t so weak.
“Like what?” She smirked. “A hex? A curse? You broke a nail?”
“No, I …” I thought about trying to explain to Clara what I’d felt on the boardwalk. Like I was in the grip of a vise, the light-headedness, the breathlessness, the wild, jostling thing that was my heart. Eventually a woman had come out of one of the nearby souvenir shops and offered me a cup of water. It had helped, not so much the water, but feeling seen, her hand tentative and gentle on my back. “Never mind, okay. Why are you here?”
“I want to use the spa.”
“Clara, you know I’ve been warned not to let you back there.”
“I’m a paying customer.” She wiggled her
fingers into the pockets of her shorts and produced a crumpled fifty-dollar bill.
“Doesn’t matter. Number one, I don’t think you’re even eighteen years old yet. Number two, even if you pay, I’m not supposed to let you in. Emily said you stole the hair dryer the last time you got back there.”
“How would I do that? They are screwed into the wall.”
“She said your nails were bleeding when you left.”
She shrugged.
“Would you please stop doing that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Shrugging like that. Like you have no idea what’s going on, what anyone is talking about. What you’re doing … you know everything. I don’t know how, but you do.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see a trio of women coming down the hall, Swarovski shopping bags slung over their arms. I guessed that they were a 10:00 appointment, and Emily would be in any minute. I believed in Clara, but I didn’t want Emily to see that I did—Emily, who found it so easy to shoo her away like a fly. She would think I was stupid, weak.
“Please go, Clara.”
She sighed. “You should let your hair down. Literally. You look like a librarian.” I winced. Matthew had always liked when I looked a little stern. Or rather he liked undoing it—pulling my hair out of a bun, stripping me out of my pencil skirts. With Matthew, my seriousness had made me feel important, like I could anchor his more impulsive, erratic qualities. The unpredictable schedule. The disregard for paperwork, his lack of interest in grocery shopping, of simply making sure there was milk for the coffee and bread for the toast and soap for the shower. There were times when I resented it, a little bit, but he could always sense that. He had a habit of naming my poses as though I were a sculpture he had made: Lily Chopping Onions. Lily Scrubbing. Lily, Arms Crossed. Some of my anger would unravel then, but I wished now that it hadn’t. Maybe that anger would have protected me.
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