An Unexpected Grace (8 page)

Lila stepped over Grace's foot, and in the middle of the day she climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her ears. Now she and Grace were stacked on top of each other with a mattress between them, double-decker refugees from the world.

“C
ome on, Grace.” Standing by the open back door, Lila pointed to the yard.

Under the claw-footed kitchen table, where Grace had been keeping her distance all morning, she blinked at Lila as if she were addressing her in Coptic.

“You need to go out.” Lila pointed again. But after ordering Grace to eat and getting no response, Lila didn't expect the dog to carry out her wishes. “Look, I want to paint. I'm going to sit at that table. Nothing personal, but I refuse to get so close to your teeth.”

Grace rested her chin on her paws, closed her eyes, and announced that she did not intend to interrupt her morning lounging.

Refusing to let her Pleaser bow to a dog, Lila snapped her fingers. “Out.”

Probably tired of being nagged, Grace limped through the kitchen, out the back door, and down the steps toward the tree ferns. Lila was ready to start a watercolor study of the first painting in
Openings
, her oil series of windows, gates, and doors. She pulled a chair to the table and told herself to focus, as she'd never have been able to do if Grace's teeth had remained under the table.

Today's painting would be of clouds through Cristina's kitchen window. But unlike René Magritte's fluffy white clouds, the ones in the sky that morning were stormy and dark. Thor was up there, swinging his hammer and thirsting for a fight, as lightning and thunder gathered to express themselves. Maybe Lila was drawn to the clouds because they reflected her dark, hostile grudge against Yuri Makov.

She fumbled with a roll of masking tape and anchored corners of paper to her pine watercolor board. Then she sketched the kitchen window's rectangle with a soft-lead pencil that made a comforting scratching sound. She unscrewed the caps of crimson, black, and Prussian blue paint tubes and squeezed pea-size lumps of watercolor on her palette—and the kitchen filled with an earthy smell of hope. When she dipped her brush in a mason jar of water, the handle clinked against the glass, as cheerful as a ringing bell. She sloshed water on her palette, pushed in small amounts of paint, and mixed till she had swirls of interesting colors.

As Lila slid her brush's bristles across the rough watercolor paper and painted a delicate trail of purple wash, she slipped into the vast, exquisite world of creativity and listened for the urgings that would tell her where to put on color and what to leave alone. Her inner guide nudged her to layer on more purple and show the clouds' dark mood, but leave contrasting patches of the paper white to define shapes. Finally, after more dabbing and swishing with her brush, she spritzed on water to haze the clouds' edges, and a cool mist blew in her face.

For a more blurred image, she spritzed again—but she misted too much and her clouds puddled. She put down the bottle, wishing she'd not lost control. Painting was a safe place to let loose, and nothing terrible happened; yet you had to rein in the freedom, or you could wreck your work—as the puddles showed.

So many things could hijack a painting. As an artist, resistance had been Lila's constant companion. She'd first been up against it when her father tried to stop her mother from registering her in an after-school art program in junior high. He'd bought Lila encyclopedia software and a lacrosse stick and insisted, “Look up the Krebs cycle and the Weimar Republic. You're drawing in your room too much. Go outside more.”

Lila looked up the Krebs cycle and the Weimar Republic, and she played lacrosse. But she painted and drew, and her father grumbled and stood in her way. When she was in high school, he explained why: Artists starved, and he wanted to protect her from crawling home, impoverished, with an empty rice bowl in her hands. Still determined to be a painter, though, she got an art degree in college—and he turned out to be right, because poverty became another obstacle.

In Lila's low-rent apartments, mice were her roommates, and she ate daily hot dogs—boiled, deep-fried, simmered with chili or cabbage, buried in a sweet-and-sour sauce, wrapped in crescent rolls and baked. Furnace heat in winter was Lila's distant dream; health insurance, a mirage. She got used to deprivation because she loved what she was doing. Still, her father disapproved.

When Lila started dating Reed, she painted a slightly surreal series,
Odd Juxtapositions
, which joined incongruities on canvas. She painted a 1968 Thunderbird parked on a lily pad, a watermelon slice zooming through the Milky Way, a diamond-scaled Chinese dragon curled up in a laundry basket. Next, she depicted flowers, and, true to odd juxtapositions, she painted cherry blossoms floating in a giant cup of tea.

By then Lila's paintings were selling in galleries but not earning enough to live on, so one hot summer afternoon she took her work to a Palo Alto fair. She spread a quilted blue bedspread on the dirt and set out her cherry blossom painting with others in the series. Gnats buzzed around her eyes as the sun beat down and filled her head with visions of lemonade, which she couldn't afford. In her pocket was $18.29, all the money she had in the world.

A woman in jeans and pointy-toed red sandals looked down at Lila's work, darkened by her shadow. “Could you make those flowers orange?”

“Orange?” Lila bent back her head to look into the woman's pie-shaped face.

“You know, like the fruit.”

No one had ever asked Lila to compromise her work. “Why orange?”

“I have orange chairs in my dining room.”

“Those flowers are cherry blossoms. They're pink.”

“You could paint over them. If you don't have to start the painting from scratch, that would keep the price down, wouldn't it?”

Lila could relate to how a flat tire felt. She heard her father whisper in her ear, “Orange? Pink? What difference does the color make when your rent is two weeks late?” But she'd intended for the petals to be a pink flash of beauty before the tea muddied them brown. She'd wanted to capture a vision of grace that was vulnerable and easily ruined. Only pink could convey that; orange would be too harsh. She couldn't bring herself to change the color.

Lila pictured the woman's dining room, a meeting place of Sears and the Alhambra: Ornate, velvet-upholstered orange chairs would circle a matching ornate Moorish table. In its center, on dark walnut veneer, a wicker cornucopia would spill out shriveled squash left over from Thanksgiving—under a chandelier raining down plastic, sawtooth-edged teardrops.

Lila stood to her nearly six feet, muzzled her Pleaser, and frowned down at the woman, a moral pygmy who was baiting her to lower her standards and who didn't understand the importance of integrity in art. In her head, Lila heard her father urge his usual, “Don't be stubborn! Yield!” Nevertheless, she said with a blink of determination, “Maybe you could match your chairs with a sunset painting. This one isn't
about
orange flowers.”

As the woman turned away, Lila shook hands with destitution. The woman's footsteps made puffs of dust, but Lila refused to let them cloud her spirit. The woman called back, “Forget it.” But Lila would not forget it. She told herself that she would fight resistance harder to keep doing the work she loved, and she would wear the fight as a badge of courage. She would never go down in defeat.

Now at Cristina's table, Lila picked up a sponge and resolutely mopped the puddle to salvage her clouds.

 

Absorbed in painting, Lila barely noticed the raindrops pinging on the skylight. She went to the window to check on Grace, sitting by the ferns. Apparently, rain had been falling on her for a while, because her fur had matted and darkened to a dingy, sodden ash. Her red bandana, now maroon, had drooped around her neck.

Grace must have known that Lila was at the window, because she turned and looked at her. Though Grace was drenched, her eyes had the proud glimmer of spaniels in eighteenth-century portraits, sitting on velvet pillows beside ermine-dripping kings. Her eyes announced,
You may think I look like an urchin, but I can take any cold and wet the world has to give. Far be it from me to beg to come inside.

Lila could never leave Grace shivering in the yard. If she'd been chained to a tree, she'd endured rain and cold. Though sharp-toothed and bipolar, she did not deserve to suffer more. Lila went to the door and called her. She climbed the stairs slowly, as if to let Lila know that bounding gratefully into the house was beneath her. When she came through the door, she brushed against Lila's legs and got wet gold fur on her black twill jeans. Grace walked through the kitchen and left muddy paw prints, like calling cards, across the floor.

“How does anybody live with a dog?” Lila moaned.

Grace bristled her eyebrows, which consisted of a few coarse hairs. With what looked like indifference at the trouble she'd caused, she lapped water from her bowl and ignored Lila wiping up the paw prints with a paper towel. Uncouth was what Grace was. An unmannered beast, like Adam Spencer's Irish wolfhounds.

Grace padded to her living room outpost, which was an oriental rug beside the sofa. She closed her eyes. The stage curtain dropped, and she geared up for a production of her one-act, solo performance piece:
The Napping Dog
. She began to snore. In minutes she was really into it, fully committed to a loud, blockbuster rendition of “Adenoids in Trouble.” As she inhaled, she sounded like rusty machinery grinding in a Jean Tinguely sculpture. When she exhaled, her lips puffed out with a blast of air.

Grace often changed sleeping positions, each of which showed that moping was her art form. First, she curled into a ball and pressed her nose against her tail, as if she were trying to disguise herself as a dejected pumpkin. Next, she lay on her side with her legs stretched out in front of her so her body made a large, despondent
U
, perhaps for melancholy “underdog.” Finally, she rolled onto her stomach and closed her eyes so she looked like she was contemplating life's sorrows. No matter how she sprawled, her body always seemed to say,
I am sad.

Though she'd messed up the floor and Lila's jeans, Lila wished Grace had had a better life. But when Lila went back to painting, Grace's snores distracted her; then Lila realized she was breathing in sync with Grace, like they were connected, two parts of a whole. Unwilling to let Grace interfere not just with her art, but also with her breath, Lila stalled it to alter her rhythm and breathe to the beat of her own drum.

 

Lila could have blown a hair dryer on her clouds to get back to painting, but she did not want the loud, metallic whine to startle Grace awake and put her into bite mode like the mutt at Walmart. While Lila waited for the paper to dry, she went to the computer, surrounded by peace lilies in the den. With single-minded right-hand fingers, she typed “going postal” for a Google search.

One article began with Patrick Sherrill, who in l986 shot and killed fourteen employees, wounded six others, and shot himself at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma. Though a few workers had killed people in post offices before, Sherrill was the first to murder on such a grand scale. “Going postal” was coined for what he did.

Lila leaned toward the computer screen and stared at his photo. In a checked sports shirt, he smirked at her. He had jug-handle ears, his eyes made him look sneaky, and his eyebrows turned up at the outer ends like a villain's twirled mustache. Yet just like Yuri Makov's photo on TV, this picture did not hint at what Patrick Sherrill would become.

According to the article, when he was growing up, neighborhood kids had called him “Crazy Pat,” and he'd started going bald in high school. He lived alone with his mother until her death, after which he was caught peeping into neighbors' windows and making obscene phone calls. Acquaintances labeled him an “odd duck” and believed he was lonely, but shy and gentle, the last person to kill anyone. That was exactly what Lila might have said about Yuri Makov before he shot ten people.

Sherrill's boss had reprimanded him for spraying Mace on a barking dog behind a locked fence, and then suspended him for leaving parcels and mail unattended and delivering five hundred letters late. On the day before Sherrill went postal, his supervisors also criticized him, and he had felt they were documenting his mistakes in order to build a case to fire him.

Sherrill was a classic example of what Dr. Leibowitz had described on the TV news. Had Yuri also been? If he'd been upset about his job, though, Rich and Joe would have discovered it and not come after Lila for an explanation.

With bitter resentment, she glared at Patrick Sherrill's rodent face.
What were you thinking? How could you have done something so awful?
If Sherrill had never existed, Yuri might not have thought of shooting people.

According to the article, soon after Sherrill shot his Oklahoma colleagues, other U.S. postal workers copied him. One hostile postal employee commandeered a light plane in Boston and shot up his workplace with an AK-47. Another employee wounded three and killed two, including himself, in a Dearborn, Michigan, post office on the very same day that still another postal worker killed his mother, then two colleagues in Dana, California. The article theorized that all those murders boiled down to rage.

Could rage have driven Yuri? Once again Lila asked herself, what was he so mad about? And what about her own anger at him for shooting
her
? If he were standing in front of her, would she be mad enough to kill him? Probably not, though she might not be sorry if someone else did.

She leaned back in her chair to put distance between herself and the photo of “Crazy Pat.” What were you supposed to do with anger? You couldn't burn it because it was already fire. Burying it wouldn't do you any good, because it would just dig itself out one day and come after you, stronger than ever. If you tried to drown it, it would pull you below the water's surface too. There didn't seem to be any way to get rid of anger. For the rest of your life, you had to live with it, or work around it, or pretend it wasn't there.