Going Away Shoes (12 page)

“I loved him
very much,” Martha said that day, and Ann wanted to say the obvious —
I know. He loved you, too
—but then
she heard Sally’s voice way up in the plastic pink-and-yellow cage, calling her name, screaming for help, and then the whole meeting and exchange was behind her, fuzzy like a dream, Martha saying she well understood that cry and pushing her in the direction of the crazy twisted tubes. Ann could hear Sally clearer now and the cries made her crawl faster, for a moment forgetting her own claustrophobia and grief and focusing only on the length of tube in front of her, the arms reaching out for safety. When she pulled Sally close to her, all crying stopped, and they began their descent with fussing, impatient children trying to push past them; Ann looked down and saw Martha staring up at the tubing, Jonah on her hip, but when they finally made it to the bottom and back into real light and air, she was gone.

“Ann?” Jimmy calls
down in a singsong voice. “It’s a joke. You know? Like old times.” She resists the urge to keep him waiting and turns to the sound of his voice. There is something in the damp darkness and familiar smell that brings an odd sense of comfort and, with it, the knowledge that there is nothing more frightening than lost and crippled years. There is nothing scarier than
not
being willing to look into the unknown. She feels her way, small secure steps, until she sees her brother at the top of the stairs, young and boyish in the red skeletal glow of the flashlight he holds under his chin.

HAPPY ACCIDENTS

I have always
been big on the end justifying the means, the karmic shuffle of it all —a path that allows for missteps and interesting discoveries, mistakes and second chances. A person who has made a lot of mistakes in life would be a fool to profess otherwise, and though I am a lot of things, a fool is not one. My desire to see a wrong turn become something wonderful is why I have long been a disciple of the television painter Bob Ross. I am a devoted follower. You may know him only as the man on PBS —
The Joy of Painting
—the pleasant-faced man with the Afro or Jewfro or Latinofro —whatever his origin might be —who speaks in such a kind and gentle voice about happy little clouds and little creatures hiding there in the nature he is
painting. And yes, I know he is dead, but when I pop in a video it is like
poof
—resurrection. Bob said you could
use
your mistakes, like an accidental drop of black paint might become something beautiful or mysterious, the mouth of a cave or the shadow of a mountain.

I love Bob Ross and I also love the cheap substitute of paint by number. It’s therapeutic and what I like to do when I don’t want to think at all. As a result I have lots of shitty paintings all over my house —kittens with balls of yarn and puppies with gnawed-up shoes, horses with big butterflies alighting on their arched tails. These are cute enough, or would be if I was still eleven and waiting for good things to happen to me. Paint by number is an art form that jumps from the preadolescent to the elderly; it’s an art form designed for BL (Before Life) and AL (After Life). I am just forty and should be In Life, right in the middle, and yet I remain a devoted follower.

I have gotten so fast with the process, ripping through those little plastic pots of oil paint, that I had to look for bigger and bigger paintings in hopes that they would hold me for awhile. Everyone who is into PBN knows that the biggest kits are always intricate whaling ships and
The Last Supper
. I did a whole harbor full of ships right after Stuart and I split up —I called it
The Fucked-Up Fleet from Hell
. I thought if I painted one more sail, I’d need to drink some arsenic and put myself out of my misery. So, I broke down and bought
The Last Supper
. Dark, dreary, and
depressing. If somebody had offered me a little silver to sell them all out, I would’ve done it. And I certainly would have sold Stuart out in a flash, too, except for the fact that he sold me out first and not for what should have been my fair market value. I didn’t even get the chance to say
Here’s your hat but don’t hurry
before he was clean across town and in a brand-new life with a brand-new girlfriend, this one without children, which didn’t surprise me a bit. He wasn’t good with his own child —why would he even care to try with someone else’s?

“I mean it’s not like we’re married or anything,” he had said. “It’s not like I’m his father.” He looked out the window to where Andrew was pushing the wheelbarrow, the handle about as tall as he was. “We both know we have hit the dead end.” I watched those words coming out of his mouth and knew that he was right. I did know, had known, had a lifelong habit of picking dead ends because they were familiar to me, not good, just familiar, like the way an ex-prisoner starts to feel better —free and living on the outside —with the furniture pushed up against the wall and the floors hosed down and swept. It’s not a pretty sight but it’s dependable as clockwork. A life without any surprise is safe in its own way. You know if you stay within the lines and don’t glom too much paint on your brush, your paint-by-number picture of a seagull squatting on a rugged post will turn out okay. Do you want to look at it for the rest of your life? Does it make you happy? Now those are different questions altogether.

I keep thinking that if I do enough paint by numbers and keep watching my tapes of Bob that my artistic ability will take shape. One day I will wake up and instinctively know how to create light on the water, wind in the mane, deep furling creases in the robe of Judas. So far this miracle has not occurred. And I guess things like artistic talent cannot be easily explained. You can’t explain talent just like you can’t teach the ability to love. People are forever asking about my quilt designs, which by the way, actually earn me good money when I settle in and do them. I am known for my crazy quilts and the good eye I have for piecing together colors and textures that people would never think of combining. In one of my prize-winning quilts, I cut up Stuart’s tuxedo he’d left hanging in my closet and coupled it with scraps of antique barkcloth from the drapes that had hung in my grandmother’s bedroom for seventy-five years. I named it
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
. I cut the satin lapels from the tux into circles, like pupils —some dilated, others not —and sprinkled them onto other fabrics —bits of an old butter-colored chenille spread my parents owned, worn soft flannel from my own Lanz nightgown. The centers of the pale pink peonies —some white, some yellow, from my grandmother’s drapes —also resembled eyes, dappled and searching. I never explain the name I give to anything. I never told how every bit of fabric laid out there had been witness to the life of a bed. These fabrics knew the routines, the cries and murmurs, of three generations. These fabrics held
secrets that I myself would never know, ones I didn’t want to know. I was both drawn to and repulsed by the thought. I didn’t want to imagine my grandparents’ naked bodies entwined in the darkness those rich-colored peonies had shed, and I didn’t want to picture my parents beneath the soft warmth of that chenille, a fabric that completely betrayed the real texture of what was a sad and hopeless relationship, two people light-years apart but choosing to share the same space. I was the glue that held them together. I was the mistake that shaped the rest of their lives: her sad attempts, his bitter regret.

Divorce would have been such a gift for my parents. I wanted that for them. When I was eight, the music teacher at my school got one and it seemed to make her really happy. People whispered about her but she didn’t act like she cared; she just kept singing and looking beautiful, like a plump, black-haired Julie Andrews. I remember sitting on Santa’s lap late one December afternoon in front of Taylor’s Hardware on Main Street. He said, “What do you want, little girl?” My first thought was to move next door with the beautiful Palandjian sisters; I wanted their exotic name and sweet fun-loving mother for my own. There was a boy dressed like a gunslinger pointing his six-shooter at me like I better hurry up so I leaned back against Santa’s warm padded chest and tilted my mouth near his ear. My parents were standing right there in front of a stack of snow shovels that nobody in this neck of the woods would ever need, looking tired and bored —she was
probably wishing she was over at JCPenney trying on clothes that would make her look like a teenager and he was wishing he was out drinking something and working on that old Thunderbird he swore would someday be a prize but never was. “A divorce,” I whispered in his warm creased ear and then lay my head down while the cowboy made sounds like he just shot a whole round into my heart.

“What?” Santa sounded surprised and tried to look me in the eye but I held onto him another minute. He smelled good and I liked his fat body. “What did you say, honey?”

“Thumbelina,” I said then. “The little one, and also Incredible Edibles.”

Stuart was wearing
his tuxedo when I first met and fell for him. How can you not notice a handsome man in a tuxedo sitting in a little elementary school chair, his long legs stretched way out into the room. It was back-to-school night. I am the school nurse and I had just given a presentation about what constituted the need for a parent to come and take somebody home: fever over one hundred degrees, severe sprains and broken bones, vomiting more than once. I explained how sometimes a child might throw up out of pure excitement or one too many times around on the whirligig or as part of a chain reaction set off by another child’s vomiting in the cafeteria. However, I stressed, beyond such spontaneous and event-prompted nausea, it is very
important for a sick child to be sent home. Not only is a vomiting child contagious but he also feels humiliated stretched out and moaning on a cot for others to see.

I tried to remind the crowd of parents seated in the cafeteria what it felt like to be a child. I believe that whole thing about those who don’t remember history are forced to repeat it. I have a poster like that in my office right beside one of a frightened kitten hanging from the limb of a tree with the caption hang in there. I think if a parent can remember what it felt like to be frightened and alone then maybe they can protect their kids a little bit better, keep them from having to go through all the bad shit they did.

“Life is scary enough,” I told them, “without being sick on top of it.” I looked up and saw Stuart was now leaning into the open doorway, tie undone, overcoat open. He was right beside a traffic poster that said,
LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE CROSSING. WHEN IN DOUBT, DON’T
, and I should have remembered that a half hour later when he came up to me, juice and cookies in hand, to suggest we go get a real drink somewhere before he headed out to his black-tie event. His little girl —a second grader who had never been sick at school and thus was unknown to me —lived with her mother full-time. He only showed up at these things to “fuck with the ex a little,” let her know he wasn’t entirely out of the picture. It was a negative hidden picture, like if Bob Ross had painted a rattlesnake down in the bushes beside the front door
of your painted house instead of a tiny nest of sparrows. I should have taken heed. I knew better even as I accepted his invitation and all the ones that followed.

“Why don’t you realize that I, like most humans inhabiting this planet, am not inferior to you,” I once asked when he was explaining at great length how I
should
have done everything I’d done that day from wash the clothes to cook the meal to wear my hair. We had been together for about a year and this was a pattern. Stuart is one of those people you marvel at —not because he’s so great but because he thinks he’s so great. People who meet him for just little encounters are fooled for a long time. Those who actually get to the end of the prerecorded infomercial —who he knows, where he’s been, why he’s admired by so many —realize that there’s nothing else there. That’s it. Th-th-th-that’s all folks. What you see is what you get. No surprises hiding there after all. If Stuart was a paint by number, he’d be
The Last Supper:
dark, depressing, swigging wine, eating way too many carbs, and, of course, betraying. Constantly betraying. Not me so much as himself. Stuart wants to be loved and wanted by everyone and he wants to accomplish this by doing nothing. Whenever I mentioned his daughter and how nice it would be for him to plan something for her, a trip to the zoo, dinner out, how I would go, too, if that made it easier, he would say
good idea
or
yeah, sure
or any number of those quick replies people give when they want you to shut up and leave them alone.

By then, of course, I noticed her all the time —Charlotte —a thin little girl with dark curly hair and big brown eyes. Every day at recess she sat in the same swing, the same little red-haired boy beside her, and every day her mother, far more attractive than Stuart had painted her, was waiting on the sidewalk to walk her home. Stuart had told me that he and his ex often went weeks without speaking, that it was like living in a tomb and sleeping with a corpse. And all I could think was how much better then that this child is no longer breathing their stale bitter air. How wonderful it must be for her to wake and find her mother alone in the bed.

Children who grow up in such a household learn early how to clown and try to make everyone happy or they learn to apologize for things they didn’t do in hopes of ending the tension so a kind of normal life can return. And some parents let them do this —soak up blame and responsibility like a sponge when what they really need is for someone to pick them up and wring out all the toxins they’ve absorbed. It isn’t theirs to carry. They are the emotional placentas, struggling to protect their own vital parts while sucking up and storing others’ neglectful nasty habits.

When I saw Andrew for the first time, his warm wet body placed atop my stomach, cord still connecting us, I promised him that I would do my best. That I hoped to always admit my mistakes and try to make up for them. That I never wanted to dump my problems on him. That I wanted to try and explain things in
a way that made sense, try and explain what’s beneath the surface of it all. Now, I show him how before I do a paint by number, I usually paint a message onto the canvas first, just in case anyone ever bothers to look or more so just so I know it is there, like a worry stone or lucky penny in your pocket, a wish that repeats itself in your head. Or I take out my plastic brain mold, which I have used to entertain him and kids at school every Halloween and other holidays, too. It’s a Jell-O mold and if you buy Berry Blue or Grape and add just the slightest bit of cream, it comes out a perfect brainy gray. I put messages within the brain, little notes wrapped in Saran Wrap that he discovers like fortune cookies:
MY MOTHER LOVES ME TO PIECES, OR, I AM GOING TO BE A GREAT POET, OR, BEWARE! IGOR GRABBED THE WRONG BRAIN
!