Circle of Three (19 page)

I think the reason I wanted to be president of the women’s club was to see, before I’m a hundred and it really is too late, if my disguise worked. I come from backward people. My father was a drunk. I carry on like I belong in this house, this town, like faculty parties don’t faze me, but I never know for sure if people are on to me. The fact that I lost the election to Vera Holland doesn’t prove anything, unfortunately. All it confirms is that I’m over the hill.

I wonder if I shouldn’t have married somebody like Calvin Mintz, poor Helen’s husband. More in my class. Which one of us is meaner, Cal or me? Which one of us would’ve won? At least it would’ve been interesting. If we’d survived.

When I thought I could sleep, I turned out the light and settled on my side, facing away from George. Our rumps bumped. I scooted away an inch, still mad; I didn’t want him touching me.

Here’s how morbid I am lately—I think about waking up in the middle of the night and finding him stiff and cold in the bed beside me. I’m afraid to touch him. I call either Carrie or 911, I’m not sure which. Carrie, I guess, then
she
can call 911. The paramedics come. They knock at the door, blue and white lights flashing around the yard, the street, and I show them upstairs in my bathrobe and slippers. They do things…the fantasy gets less real there. The way a dream can start off hard-edged and then get vague, finally tapering off into nonsense. I never imagine any of the emergency people saying, “He’s dead, ma’am.” No. It never comes to that.

Time is turning me into somebody I can hardly believe in, I can’t seem to make real.
Old lady
. Do other people who are old
feel
old? I always thought they did, they must, but here I am turning seventy any day now and I’m no smarter, no
wiser, no happier, no more satisfied or fulfilled or content or enlightened than I was at forty. In fact, less.

I could live to a hundred
, I thought, shutting my eyes against the moonlight seeping in around the curtain. Willard Scott could say my name on TV. Who knew, George could live to ninety-eight in the other wing of the nursing home. The
Morning Record
could run a picture in the Lifestyles section of us shriveled up in our wheelchairs, holding each other’s knobby hand, cutting a sheet cake.

Foolishness. Why would I want to stretch out marriage to George for thirty more years? Didn’t the last fifty teach me anything?

I don’t believe in hopelessness, it goes against my raising. But the trouble with hope is it springs eternal. Crazy old ladies think miracles can still happen. George turned over in his sleep and butted his knee up against my rear end. The warmth felt good, so I stayed still, didn’t poke him to move. See? He’s good for something. That’s hopeful.

A
LLA PRIMA.
I
N
painting it meant
at once
, applying all your pigments in one sitting, not layering them on over time. Van Gogh probably painted
Bedroom at Arles alla prima
, they say. The advantage over a more painstaking, considered approach was supposed to be excitement, intensity, fluidity. I must be doing very exciting work these days, that’s all I can say. It was good to have an arty foreign word for it, too,
alla prima.
So much nicer than
slapdash
.

Wet otter fur. How did you paint wet otter fur? If I were using oils or acrylics on a good stretched canvas, I would start with a neutral base of ultramarine, Payne’s gray, maybe raw umber, some titanium white. If I could afford it I’d use a Richeson no. 10, series 9050 brush, laying in the basic darks and lights first, trying to imagine the otter’s body as a landscape, skin, muscle, and bone as hills, valleys, and ridges. I’d compose him in an appropriate setting, maybe climbing onto a log after a dip in a stream. The elements in the composition would provide perspective and proportion; we’d know how big the otter was by the size of the objects around him. He’d be gray, basically, but not drab because I’d put him behind autumn leaves (raw sienna, vermilion, Venetian red, Van Dyck brown) and in front of the wet fallen stump (burnt sienna, ultramarine, lamp black). I’d switch to a Richeson
no. 3 brush, series 9000, for the fine work, the detailing and refining of his fur, whiskers, eyes, eyelashes, toenails.

I wasn’t doing any of that. I was using a midgrade True Value exterior semigloss ($20.99 a gallon), in a grayish brown shade called “Farewell.” I was laying it on with a three-inch nylon and polyester brush over what I hoped was an otter-shaped cutout from a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter-inch polystyrene foam insulation. It was a handicap.

But not an insurmountable one. And I wasn’t working completely
alla prima,
anyway: after the gray latex dried, I’d add white and black highlights with a small red sable round brush, my one indulgence, to enhance the sharp, sideways V shapes I’d decided clumped wet otter fur looked like. The trick was lifting up on the brush quickly when you got to the end of the hair shaft; otherwise the point wasn’t fine enough. If I had time, I’d redo his eye with acrylics; I’d have liked to roughen the edge of his pupil, lighten the bottom of his iris with Turner’s yellow and some more white. Because I’d decided the light would be coming from directly overhead.

I wouldn’t have time, though. God gave Noah 120 years to build the ark, and He threw in the animals for nothing. Eldon Pletcher had given Landy, who gave Jess, who gave me and my “helpers,” about three months to stock a three-story ark with, if you included fish, reptiles, and insects, approximately seventy-eight separate animal species.

Landy said pinning the old man down to seventy-eight wasn’t easy, and I could believe it. At first some of his choices struck me as arbitrary. He’d insisted on the antelope but not the caribou, for example; wolf but not coyote; moose but not elk; mole but not shrew. Leopard but not puma, dog but not dingo, donkey but not mule—and so on. It made sense when you thought about it: between similar animals, he had consistently chosen the one that was either more immediately recognizable or else more—likable, for lack of a better word. People liked mice, they didn’t like rats.

I approved of Eldon’s list, on the whole. I was especially
looking forward to making a chimpanzee. And an octopus—that would be a mechanical as well as artistic challenge. Landy was going to ask his father if I could have a little discretion with add-ons, because I loved slow, lumbering animals, and his list didn’t include possum or manatee. But even if he said yes, I wouldn’t have time.

It wasn’t altogether a bad thing, the absurd May seventeenth deadline we had no chance of meeting. It allowed no time for second-guessing. My left brain, if there was such a thing, had been all but silenced; by necessity, I was going on uninhibited instinct. I’d never worked that way before. I was like a newspaper reporter who had to finish the story in time for the early edition. It was faster, obviously, but was it any good? I didn’t know—I was afraid to hope—I thought it might be. But either way, I was having the time of my life.

The job was seducing me, in spite of all the restrictions and eccentric conditions Eldon had attached to it. It was swallowing me up the way a boa constrictor swallowed a rabbit. (I had been reading up on boa constrictors; Eldon wanted them to represent the snake category—the recognizability factor again.) When I worked, I almost sank into a trance. Not like the miniature flower arrangements trance—that was like sinking into a coma, and this was more like being hypnotized. I was aware of my surroundings, the chilliness of the space, the mooing of a cow outside, the oil, gasoline, and dead grass smells, the hum overhead of the fluorescent lights Jess had hung, along with an inadequate propane heater on the wall, when the barn became the official ark animal assembly area. But nothing distracted me, nothing got between me and what I was working on. It was as if I bled into the paint, and the paint bled into the surface and the surface bled into the object—in this case an otter. Extraordinary! It was the boon, the prize, it was the best part of making art. I used to feel it, but I barely remembered it. I never thought I’d get it back.

Landy broke my concentration, saying, “Sorry I got to go so early today.” I jumped. The smooth line of my brush
took a hitch upward, like a lie detector printout catching somebody in a whopper. “Oh—’scuse me—I thought you heard me!”

I laughed. We’d been working in Jess’s barn since lunchtime, and even though our work areas were fairly close together, I often forgot Landy was there. It wasn’t just my own absorption: he was such a quiet man, content to work indefinitely without saying a word.

“Good,” he said, leaning over, peering down at my otter. “Looks just like one.”

“I haven’t finished the fur. Is he too gray? Think he needs more brown?”

“Hmm, could be.”

“I’m using these photos and those drawings.” I pointed to my otter reference materials, wildlife calendars and a couple of naturalists’ journals. “Yes, more brown, I think. Otherwise he looks like a baby seal.”

“No, no, he doesn’t look anything like a seal.”

I believed him, and let that particular worry go. Landy was my trusty, most reliable critic. He was always polite, but he never lied: if my pig cutout looked like an armadillo, he found a nice way to tell me.

“Are you going to see your father?” I asked.

He nodded. “Sorry I got to go so early, and so much still to do, but this is when he likes me to come.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Eldon was in the hospital again, for chest pains and fluid on his lungs. “How’s he doing?”

“Better. They say he can probably go home in a coupla days. Tuesday, they’re saying.”

“I’m so glad. He’s a tough old guy.” I hadn’t met him yet, but that seemed safe to say.

“I got done six sets of wheels, I set ’em right over there. Sorry it’s no more.” He stretched his hands out and flexed his knobby, arthritic fingers. “Not such a good day today.”

“It’s the cold.” I wore fingerless gloves when I worked, but Landy wouldn’t, said they made him clumsy.

He buttoned his plaid jacket to the chin and jammed on
his dirty orange hunter’s cap. “Did two sets for the elephant, like you said. Front and back.” He’d spent the afternoon attaching wheels to heavy wooden bases sawn from four-by-fours, because Eldon wanted to roll the animals onto the ark via a ramp. He could
just see it
, he said.

“Great. Think the brakes will hold?” I asked. We bought wheel sets with little foot-activated brakes; ridiculously expensive, but we got a deal by buying in bulk.

“I reckon. What’re you doing after you finish coloring that otter?”

“Oh, I’m going to have some fun,” I told him. “Today is elephant day.”

His eyes crinkled almost shut when he grinned. “Wish I could stay and see that. You’re having a pretty good time, huh?”

“I guess I am.”

“Why’d you decide to help out? This sure ain’t nothing to do with you, Carrie.”

People kept asking me that; I ought to have had a better answer by now. “It crept up on me,” was the best I could do. “I didn’t think it would get this far. I thought I’d pitch in once or twice, help get things started.”

He laughed his shy, wheezing laugh. “That’s what happened to me! Hell, same with Jess, too. Pushovers is what we are. Are you sorry?”

“No. But ask me if I’m
tired
.”

“Hoo, don’t I know it! Say, the Finches told me they can come back one night next week, and then again next Saturday. If that’s any help to you.”

I hummed, noncommittal. The Finches, two elderly Arkist sisters, both spinsters, sincerely wanted to help me, but they were hopeless—on so many levels, it would’ve been mean to list them. Color blindness was one, though; another was decrepitude. But the worst was that they had
ideas
; they made
suggestions
. I hadn’t known how proprietary I was getting until last week when Miss Sara Finch said the cow should be a Brown Swiss and Miss Edna Finch agreed with
her. No, no, no. No. The cow was a black-and-white Holstein. Period. This was not a democracy.

“Just wish I could pay you somehow,” Landy mumbled with his head down. “Here it is a Sunday, you could be home spending time with your fam—your daughter. Wish I could pay you back some way, that’s all.”

It really bothered him, I knew because he said it so often. “Maybe you can, Landy. When things settle down, maybe you can help me with a couple of projects around my house. Things I can’t do by myself.”

He beamed. “I’d be glad to do that, I’d be pleased. Anything I could do, it would be my pleasure. We’ll count on it.”

“Good.”

No one knew, not even Landy, how much money old Eldon had socked away. He had to have some, or he wouldn’t have made his playground equipment offer. (Would he? That was a thought. What if he were pulling one over on the whole town? I wondered if Jess had considered that. I’d ask him.) In any case, Landy wanted the ark effort to be as frugal as possible, because he said it was draining away his mother’s inheritance. His, too—but he honestly didn’t seem to consider that. He said he didn’t want the old man’s obsession to impoverish his mother once his father was gone. That was why I was using the cheapest good paint the hardware store sold, and slapping it on polystyrene instead of wood. It was why Landy and Jess, whose combined boatbuilding expertise wouldn’t have covered a matchbook, were designing a 119-foot ark in their spare time, with only Arkist help and no professional guidance. I couldn’t figure out whether Eldon was crazy like a fox or just crazy.

I said good-bye to Landy and turned my mind to elephants.

Everybody liked them, everybody was soft on them. To my generation they were what dinosaurs had been to Ruth’s. But kids outgrew dinosaurs—nobody outgrew elephants. Well, ivory merchants, presumably, but nobody with a soul. There was something about elephants, and I wanted to try to
capture it. Their sweetness and shuffling intelligence, their persistence and indefatigability. Honesty.

Like all the animals, I was doing this one life-size—a small elephant, granted, but life-size. The him-her, two-sided idea seemed to be working, although I hadn’t succeeded yet at crafting two different
poses
on either side of the cutout silhouettes; I’d only been able to vary the two genders of the same animal with color. But I’d keep trying. I worked with four-by-eight insulation sheets, and until now that had been more than adequate; in fact I often got two small animals, both sides, out of a single sheet. It wouldn’t be enough for an elephant, though, so I’d hot glued two sheets together, width-wise, edge-to-edge, then glued two more sheets, one on each side, across the seam to strengthen the joint, and finally glued four two-by-eight half sheets, top and bottom on each side, to fill in the gap. Now I had an eight-foot square of foam two and a half inches thick. Later I’d cut out ears, trunk, and tail, and glue them on separately for added dimension.

It was Chris’s brilliant idea to use the polystyrene sheets. In a past life, she designed stage sets for amateur theatrical productions. Plywood, she pointed out, was heavier, more expensive, harder to work with, and buckled when wet. Polystyrene sheets glued together beautifully, cut with a craft knife instead of a band saw, and took latex paint like a dream. Chris only knew Landy from what I’d told her about him, but it tickled her to think how much money her suggestion had already saved him.

I usually drew the basic outline of an animal with the foam sheet flat on the floor, but that wouldn’t work with an elephant; too big. Unless I crawled around on my hands and knees, but then I’d probably puncture the foam, which was strong but not indestructible. I stacked my eight-by-eight sheet against the wall, looking around for a box to stand on to reach the top. After dozens of practice drawings, I’d decided on a foreshortened three-quarter profile, so he’d be mostly head, trunk, and massive left flank, facing forward
and fixing us with one small, kind, wrinkled eye. I wasn’t drawing freehand, I was transposing proportional sections from grid to grid, final drawing to foam sheet.

Feet. Consider the function, I learned a million years ago in art school. The function of an elephant’s feet was to hold up several thousand pounds of elephant. Big, round, platform feet at the ends of massive shapeless leathery legs, skin sagging down in bags around what would be ankles on another animal. Great folds of skin at the backs of the shoulders, too, wattlelike, and I hoped that was realistic—would an elephant that small have skin that wrinkled? Well, he was a little old elephant. He was born small. His parents were small and he was a chip off the old block. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The trunk was almost five feet long, curving in at the bottom, toward the dainty mouth. He was an Indian elephant, so his back was the highest point, higher than the shoulders, and arched slightly. The ears were big but not gigantic, not the flapping, sail-like ears on an African elephant—who, sadly, wouldn’t be boarding the ark. Exclusions like that really gave me pause. I felt sorry about my choice of the grizzly bear, for instance (again, on recognizability grounds), over the black, brown, silver-tip, Kodiak, sloth, sun, Atlas, and spectacled bears. I liked to think old man Pletcher was, too, when he’d picked the walrus but not the seal, and when he’d decided to let the shark represent the entire fish kingdom.
Poor goldfish, poor salmon
, I hoped he thought;
poor speckled trout
.