Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (13 page)

Isabelle turned to tell Lillian, and there, suddenly, she saw something she remembered in the new softness in Lillian's face, the look—part hopeful, part sad—in her eyes. Isabelle recalled the visit to her own doctor's office so many years ago, his pronouncement, his eyes watching for her reaction while she did her best to produce an expression of elation or even pleasure while inside her mind was racing—how do I do this, I don't know how to do this, I'm not ready to be a mother. It wasn't until the second baby that she had been able to greet the news with unrestricted joy.

“Ahhh . . .” Isabelle said. She put a hand on Lillian's stomach.

Lillian's eyes filled with surprise, then tears.

There was a noise at the kitchen door. The two women turned, Isabelle's wet handprint still visible on Lillian's shirt, and they saw Tom standing in the doorway, confusion and then knowledge splashed across his face. Before he could speak, Abby passed him, coming into the kitchen.

“Mom, you're the guest of honor—you shouldn't be cleaning up!” She swooped the bowl from her mother's hand and set it in the drainer.

“Now, scoot,” she said, “out to your guests.”

•   •   •

CHLOE WAS CLAPPING
her hands to call the group to attention.

“Okay,” she said. “It's time for an adventure. Follow me, everybody.” And Chloe led the way out the back door.

As she walked onto the back porch, Isabelle looked out toward her garden. In front of it stood an object—but what would you call it? Isabelle wondered. A throne on rails? She had seen pictures of things like that in books, the seated people looking like royalty, or, at the very least, rich and powerful.

But Isabelle had to smile at how utterly different the throne-thing before her was from others she had seen, which had looked more like intricately decorated boxes enclosing their occupants in curtains and mystery. This chair was open to the sky, strong and tall. And decorated. Good heavens, it was decorated. Painted blue waves rolled up its legs, clouds rose up the back and disappeared off the top rail. The vertical back supports had been turned into two pine trees, reaching for the sky, while blue and green and silver streamers fluttered from the tops. The rails that ran underneath the chair were painted with images of geese, their necks outstretched, wings wide.

“There are two steps to the ritual,” Chloe was explaining. “Isabelle, if you could take your seat.”

Chloe walked Isabelle over to the throne, where Isabelle lifted herself onto her toes for height and then sat on its brightly painted seat, her feet swinging slightly above the ground. Like a child, she thought. All she needed was balloons.

Lillian arrived, carrying the white bowl, which she set at Isabelle's feet. Isabelle could see the blue flowers along the rim, something white inside. Milk? A lot of milk. Too much for Cheerios, that was certain.

“Now,” Chloe explained, “one of the most important parts of this ritual is caring for our elders.” She reached forward and undid the Velcro closings of Isabelle's purple tennis shoes. Isabelle recalled learning how to tie her shoes—her father, bending over her laces, telling her the story of the bunny running around the tree and going down the hole. She could still smell the blue scent of his aftershave, the starch in his white Sunday shirt. She could remember her own hands, years later, this time teaching her children, their faces looking up at her as if she was a magician as she pulled the loops tight. How could she still see her hands moving through time and space, every detail sharp and clear as an instructional video, and yet not be able to do the action itself? She wanted to cry with the frustration of it.

She and Chloe had bought the purple shoes a few months ago, after Chloe had come home to find Isabelle sitting in her white chair, her fingers cramped from trying to tie her laces. Chloe had taken Isabelle on a shopping trip and they had both bought tennis shoes with Velcro closings, Chloe laughing and telling Isabelle they were built for speed now. Which was nice of her, of course, and for the most part Isabelle appreciated Chloe's tact, but sometimes it felt like covering a broken chair with new upholstery.

Chloe removed Isabelle's shoes and socks, leaving Isabelle's feet naked in the afternoon light. The veins stood out, the bones of her toes visible through the skin like the ridges of a topographical map. It astonished Isabelle, every time she saw them now. Over the years, she had gotten used to her hands, the way aging seemed to move over them like a tide, loosening skin, expanding knuckles. But feet hid, coming out only rarely and then usually in a rush to bed. There was a time when her feet had been plump, ripe, her toenails red (what was the name of the color? she couldn't remember), just a bit of the big toe flirting out through the opening in her black pumps, catching Edward's eye at a college dance. He hadn't danced with her then, but he had watched her, his eyes a source of gravity coming across the room until it took a conscious effort not to look past her partner and meet his gaze, which asked for—what? She hadn't known exactly, which made it all the more attractive. He was so certain, there had seemed to be no need for her to know.

She started to tell all this to Chloe, but as Chloe lowered Isabelle's right foot into the bowl, the thoughts slipped out of her mind, replaced by the sheer luxury of hands on her skin, the milk cool, softer than water, thicker. Her own milk had been thick, rich. One time, when she had been nursing Abby, she had put some in a glass and tried it herself, although she had never told anyone. It astonished her, what she had created.

Chloe's hands moved gently over the knobs and arches of Isabelle's feet, the moons of her toenails. Canary red. That had been the color.

“Now,” said Chloe, toweling Isabelle's feet dry and sliding on a pair of soft, new socks. “Everybody ready?” The Rorys and Al and Finnegan came forward, each standing next to one end of the throne rails.

“Um, I don't think so,” Chloe remarked dryly as she looked over at Finnegan's towering height. “Lopsided.”

“I've got it,” Abby said, stepping in. “I think I can carry my own mother.”

Finnegan moved out of position, taking a place next to Isabelle, who reached over and patted his arm.

“Don't you worry,” she said. Chloe sent them a look.

“One, two, three,” said Al, and the throne went up into the air, making its way around the garden, through the gate, and out, into the neighborhood.

•   •   •

ISABELLE RODE ON HER THRONE
holding on to its arms, feeling the jostling of the chair settle into a more predictable gait as the carriers adjusted their strides to each other. As she grew more comfortable with the motion, she looked about her, astonished to be seeing the world from such a new perspective. She had thought she was done with all that. Over her life she had grown taller, and then, more recently, shorter. But this was different, a sudden stretch to an unexpected elevation. Suddenly she was seeing the buds on the cherry trees around her; she could feel the energy packed within them, a bouquet of fireworks whose fuse had already been lit. She could smell them, too, a subtle essence of pink and lollipops, the sweetness deepened by the scent of the slowly warming earth below them.

She looked over at Finnegan, who was walking near to her, their eyes at almost equal heights.

“Welcome to my world,” he said with a grin.

As they walked down the street, neighbors came out of their houses to watch the procession, the grown-ups making comments quietly to each other. Children called to her, delighted, asking for a turn, wanting to be where she was. She looked at them, awed. They moved through the world and moments spun around them, light as dandelion seeds. Some stuck, some didn't, and they had yet to learn to care. Isabelle thought it deeply unfair that you could start to lose your memories without also losing that desire to keep them. Although that, of course, was coming too.

It struck her sometimes, the effort it took for her to keep holding hands with the present. At times it felt as if her mind simply unhinged—an image of her mother's flowerbed mingling with the blue eyes of the grocery clerk in front of her, a sudden, undirected feeling of lust running through her as she stood in the shower. Sometimes it took a while before she realized she had been gone. She wondered in those moments how long it would be before the hinge on her mind would simply stay open.

It wasn't so much the occasional mingling of past and present that was the problem as it was the unyielding anxiety that she was not doing what was expected of her, the drag of the now-world with its requirements to follow the cluttered trail of a conversation, or put a milk carton back in the refrigerator. It reminded her, in an odd way, of those days when she was younger, married, when she would put on stockings and make Edward's dinner when all she really wanted was to place her hands into the children's paints and feel the cool moisture slipping between her fingers, the resistance of the thick brown paper against her palms.

But she understood now, as she did then, the expectation that filled the faces of those around her, remembered, too, the exhilarating feeling of body and mind moving forward together in a world that made sense. So she took the pills that Chloe lined up in brightly colored boxes on the kitchen table, even as she knew that they were not a solution, that they only held her artificially aloft and that one day she would plummet, Icarus-like, into an unnavigable sea below.

She had made a resolution to stop it all before she hit the water and was gone—the pills Chloe gave her were not the only ones she had access to. The problem was, there were no notes left behind from those who had gone before her, no helpful explanations to tell her when the break point would be, that last exquisite moment of engagement with the world before you fell, leaving only a body for others to care for. If, in fact, there was a moment, a definitive before-and-after point. She was coming to believe more and more these days that her mind was like a boyfriend who would show up with flowers just when you had decided you were ready to dump him, the hope of the bouquets overriding the knowledge that they were getting smaller and smaller each time.

But even if there was a moment of recognition, would she be able to do it—make the decision, leap before she fell? She hadn't left her husband, after all. She had stayed, even as she felt herself disappearing—she always said it was for the children, but by the time Edward actually left, they were all well into college. She had never taken a voluntary exit, but once the door was opened for her and she stepped out, she found she was greedy for every minute of her own life. Which, of course, made the prospect of willingly turning her back on it now, when she might have even one more moment left, all the more difficult.

Isabelle looked down at the people around her. Interesting, she thought, what a difference a few feet made; she could see them all so much more clearly from up here. Her Rory had gone quiet, Abby's body practically sending off sparks in his direction; Tom and Lillian hid on opposite sides of the throne, looking at anything but each other. Chloe was walking next to Al, laughing at some joke he had told, actively ignoring Finnegan. They were like ingredients that had become chemically incapable of mixing with each other, or perhaps had simply forgotten how, when she knew it wasn't the case and didn't need to be. Didn't they realize that a day like today, this ritual that Al had found, was more about all of them than it could ever be about her?

She wanted to tell them, but as she started to speak, she spotted a woman she thought she should recognize, standing on the sidewalk, staring at Chloe and Al with such hostility that Isabelle had to look away. When she looked back, the woman was gone.

Who was she? Isabelle wondered. She knew she should know, but it was the anger she recognized more than the woman, and it sideswiped her into memories. Edward introducing his secretary like a prize he'd won at the county fair. Edward coming home from work and propping himself against the kitchen doorway, his eyes taking in the scene in front of him as if he was the manager of a corporation with one employee, her, and a raise was not forthcoming. She would feel his scrutiny and think of her day, the children roiling around her like a sea of eels, the housework piling up into towers, the way she had managed to settle the water, turn it all into a sweet domestic scene before his arrival so he would find a calm and lovely wife wearing makeup and a neat, trim dress in the kitchen preparing his meal.

She hadn't even known how much she'd hated it until he was gone. The day the divorce was finalized, she had wandered through the uninhabited rooms of their home and realized that every memory of her children was still being filtered through Edward's eyes. It wasn't until the house was sold and she was on the road that she could feel her love for her children, her life, flowing through her like a clean, cool river.

She looked down at Rory and Abby, each holding up one of the front rails. Her children.

It was going to be hardest on Abby, what was coming. For all that Abby had yearned to be a grown-up when she was a child, the aspects of adulthood that she seemed to treasure most, ironically, were the ones that held her to the ground instead of letting her go. Abby was truly comfortable only when she could contain and shape a memory, a plan in her own hands. She held on so tightly to an idea of family that she often overlooked the people within her own.

More than once, Isabelle had envisioned herself as a balloon in Abby's life, helping to lift her daughter off the ground she clung to so desperately, although Isabelle doubted her daughter saw the value in this. But now Isabelle wondered, as she sat on the jostling chair—what would happen if there were no balloon pulling her daughter upward? Perhaps gravity might seem less attractive if it wasn't helping you hold something else to the earth. Perhaps you could simply, finally, let go.