The Guineveres (8 page)

“Hurry up, girls. Vanity does not prevent the lamb from slaughter,” she'd say nearly every morning, which we took to mean we were all doomed from the start.

And that's how time moved on at the convent; days dropped away from the calendar like baby teeth. We'd rise; we'd eat; we'd pray; we'd learn. We were marching toward our destinies, but it didn't feel like marching. It felt like slogging, like stalling, like drowning. Every afternoon, we'd find ourselves in the Sick Ward again, checking the pulses of old folks who were barely there, wiping dribbling food off the chins of those who were, and reading passages from Bibles with spines so creased that pages sometimes slipped out. Our uniforms began to take on the sickly odor of the Ward, but Sister Fran wouldn't let us wash them except on Saturday. “God does not make exceptions,” she explained. “Can you imagine if the Ten Commandments were called the Ten Suggestions?” Her lips pressed together in their usual way, and her eyes widened so she looked like she'd just been pinched on her bottom, which we couldn't imagine was any pastier than the rest of her.

Soon the summer faded and the days grew cooler. Sister Fran brought out our wool sweaters, smelling of mothballs, from the storage closet. I had outgrown mine since last year; the sleeves were too short. I didn't bother to tell Sister Fran. Instead, Ginny swapped sweaters with me, since hers fit a little too big.

Years later, when she had moved to the South, married for a second time, and had three small children, Ginny kept that sweater folded in a small drawer in the bureau next to her bed. She said she pulled it out and tried it on from time to time. It still fit. A little big in the arms, even.

“Why have you kept it after all this time?” I asked her. We hadn't seen each other in years. Over the phone her voice hadn't changed—full of angst that had no language, but was vocal all the same. The convent days had been difficult for all of us, for her especially. She'd always been fragile, and even now that Ginny was an adult with kids of her own, I wanted to protect her.

“I thought I might give it to my daughter someday,” she said. “Tell her the story of the time her mother lived far, far away, like a princess in a big stone castle.”

“Like four princesses,” I said.

“And they all lived happily ever after,” she said. Then there was silence, and I knew what she was thinking. By then we had our own lives. Some of us had been through marriages and children, death and divorce. We'd been hurt, and we'd hurt others; we loved and were loved. Yet sometimes, when we were looking in the mirror, staring back at the grown women we'd become, we still saw those skinny-legged girls in wool uniform skirts, still felt the draft of the convent right down to our bones.

 

Ginny's Revival

After the accident, they told me Dad was a bad seed, but I didn't believe it. And Sister Fran didn't, either. I asked her once if she thought people were born either all good or all bad, and she reminded me of the gift of free will, that we all have the capacity to choose to be either good or evil. She told me God grants us choices.

I choose to love my dad, then, despite everything. I love him more than anyone in the world. I've always known that deep down inside, we're two of the same soul. Maybe two of the same seed, too. He's an artist, and that's what I want to be someday, which is what makes us extra sensitive, this artist gene we both share. We both worry too much and we keep things bottled up, and that's why we feel bad a lot, physically feel bad, like our stomachs flipped or our throats dried out. Artists are supposed to be tortured; they need pain in order to create, and I'm going to make something wild and beautiful someday, just you see.

My dad and I have more than just the artist gene in common. We both have a cowlick that you can only see when we pull back our hair. We have the same hands, too, slender fingers squared off at the tips like they've been flattened. I remember when I was little he'd sit me in his lap and let me dip my finger into the beer he drank out of a frosted mug. I liked the taste of it, unlike anything I'd ever tried. It smelled like bread, and it tickled my tongue and felt warm going down, fizzy like a pop. If I was lucky, he'd let me fetch him another one, and I'd proudly retrieve the can from the refrigerator and then another frosty mug from the freezer. Dad taught me that if you poured with the glass at an angle, you wouldn't get that foam that sometimes looks like the flattops some of the boys at school wore.

Dad's a painter. During the day he went to work painting houses. Dad said a monkey could paint a house, so long as it knew how to hold a brush, and that a monkey might be better at it, too, since their arms don't ever get tired. At night, when he'd come home in stained overalls, he'd stay in the garage until dinner, then change his clothes and go back out after we ate. The garage was his studio. He'd cleared out half of it, and set up some easels with canvases along the wall, and it was there he did his
real
painting. I loved sitting in the garage with him when he'd let me. It smelled like gasoline and turpentine out there. Dad looked serene in these moments, like the fumes were going to his head and making his muscles relax so you couldn't see the worry that usually penetrated his face in the form of wrinkles around his eyes. I was usually not allowed to watch Dad paint, only prep the canvases or mix his palette. He kept his work covered with old drop cloths because he didn't want anybody to see his paintings before they were finished. The magic of art is not witnessing all the work that goes into it, he told me, though sometimes I peeked beneath the covers when he wasn't around. A few times I found some paintings of naked ladies. They weren't totally naked but naked enough that I didn't want Dad to know I had stolen a look.

They weren't all paintings of naked ladies, though. Most of the paintings were these cartoonish portraits that were supposed to mean something else. One was a picture of this angular man holding up some barrels that hung over his head by strings. The man's face grimaced, his lips were diamond shaped, and his tongue was a red triangle inside his mouth. Dad told me the painting was supposed to represent the weight of the world.

“What's the weight of the world?” I asked, wondering how you could ever measure something like that, unless you took a piece of it and multiplied it like we did with math problems at school.

“It's a metaphor, for when you feel like nothing is going your way, or if you've got troubles and nothing seems to work right—that's the weight of the world,” he explained. “It feels heavy.”

I didn't quite understand, and he told me that he hoped I never would.

Mom rarely came out into Dad's studio. She didn't think he should waste time with his “finger painting,” which is what she called it sometimes. I don't think she intended to sound so mean. I remember once, way back when I was just small—smaller, even, than when Dad would let me taste on his beer—Mom agreed to allow Dad to paint her portrait. After dinner, every night for what seemed like a million weeks, Mom would sit on this upturned metal milk crate in the garage. She'd put on lipstick and do up her hair for the occasion. Mom was never one to leave the house without makeup, and she certainly didn't intend to be immortalized without makeup, either. Me and my brother would sit down cross-legged in the studio with them, volleying our heads back and forth, watching Mom unnaturally posed like she had frozen through solid and watching Dad's arms glide with each brushstroke he made.

One night he finally sighed and dramatically blotted the canvas, then, announcing he was finished, turned the easel for us to see his work.

“What do you think?” he asked. His arms were braced on the easel, and I noticed his fingers were tipped dark from blending paint.

Mom's smile dropped as she stood face-to-face with the portrait of herself. “Why am I not wearing lipstick?” she asked. “Why the messy hair and the hollow cheeks?”

“It's your essence,” he said. “It's not you. It's the essence of you,” he tried to explain. Mom glowered in his direction. “That's how it works,” Dad explained. “Your essence is universal, not specific.”

Mom seemed confused, or disappointed. “My essence looks sick with pale lips,” she said, then went inside and refused to sit for him ever again.

Dad painted me once, too. Night after night I sat on that milk crate, watching his eyebrows furrow and unfurrow. His freckles could have been paint splatters; they made his face look dirty, and I wondered why I had never thought about the way everything is really just a series of dots or lines or curves, shapes that could be copied with brushstrokes if you were a painter, like my dad. He saw the world twice, once in real life, and once on his canvas. It's a kind of double vision, being an artist. When Dad finished with my portrait, he said, “Ta-da,” and he turned his easel. On the canvas, he'd painted someone who looked just like me—freckles, red hair—lying in a field of flowers. My eyes were closed, and I was smiling in my sleep.

“You're Dorothy in a field of poppies,” he said.

“Is that my essence?” I asked.

Dad nodded.

“But wasn't the field of poppies created by the witch to stop Dorothy from getting to that old wizard?” I asked, knowing the scene from my favorite book. I'd read it at least a dozen times, and the cover was so beaten that Dad fixed it with some tape he brought home from work.

“Yes—but she was happy at that moment, despite the witch's spell. She was dreaming that she was dreaming,” he said. “That's you,” he added. “The world needs dreamers.”

I didn't care what the painting meant. I loved it, and I told him so.

Aside from a few potluck picnics and a couple of visits to relatives around the holidays, we never really did much as a family. My brother ran around with his friends, and when he was home, like at dinner, he'd talk about wanting to go off to college once he graduated high school, maybe become an engineer or an architect.

“Do something practical, something professional,” Mom said one night in front of everyone at the table. “Choose a dignified career. For chrissakes, don't end up like your father,” she said, by which she meant, I guess, a dreamer, a dreamer like me. Dad set down his fork, politely took his plate from the table, and placed it in the sink. He didn't eat dinner with us much after that.

I never really heard Mom and Dad fight much. Or, I guess I should correct that and say Dad never fought back with Mom. I often heard Mom lay into Dad, saying things like she wished she'd married someone who understood how the world worked, how it
really
worked. She'd mention some guy named Jonathan Andrew who went to divinity school, then became president of some university with his fancy degree, and who asked her once to be his wife, but she had politely declined. At least that's what she claimed. I thought it was funny that Jonathan Andrew went to school to become divine, like divineness was something that could come from a book. Mom said she didn't ever grow up dreaming of being poor and stuck, but she guessed dreams were just something that we did at night to entertain us while we sleep away our real lives. She'd tell Dad that grown men should be providing for their families better—they shouldn't be dawdling in the garage, wasting time and paychecks on silly pictures. Mom would stand mid-rant in the kitchen, fisted hands raised, her face contorted with a sneer, but if someone walked into the room, like me or my brother, she'd immediately turn into Mom again. “What would you like for dinner, sweetheart?” she'd ask, the anger leaving her face and the crow's-feet at her eyes disappearing into her skin.

“Just be nice to him,” I'd say to her when I'd catch her yelling at Dad.

“I'm nice,” she said. “
I'm
the nice one. You don't know the definition of nice,” she'd say, talking to me but looking at him.

“Maybe I should go to divinity school to learn,” he'd say.

“They wouldn't even let you in,” she'd reply.

Dad began working longer hours, and he'd come home from work smelling like paint, but too exhausted to spend any time in his studio. He stopped drinking beer and began drinking whiskey. He'd hold a cube of ice in his big hand and crush it by hitting it with a spoon, drop it with the flick of his wrist into a short glass, then pour the whiskey right over it. I could predict Dad's moods by what he was drinking.

For her part, Mom would sometimes disappear for hours at a time. She said she had joined a crafting group at the YMCA, but she never came home with any crafts that I ever saw. Sometimes she wasn't home yet when I returned from school. She'd eventually appear, dressed in her Sunday clothes, which is what she called her nicest dresses, even though we rarely went to church. She smelled different, too.

And then one day I understood. I came home from school for an early release, and when I couldn't find Mom, I went to her bedroom. The smell hit me first when I opened the door: a light scent of sweat and outside and chili spices. I saw Mom sitting on the edge of the unmade bed with some man I'd never seen before. His dark hair stood up in the back, as though he'd rubbed his head with a balloon to create static, like I sometimes did. Beneath his nose, a mustache looked like twin peaks of a mountain.

“Guinevere,” Mom said nervously, then cleared her throat. “This is my friend Danny. He was just here to inspect the gutters for those birds that keep building nests outside my window. You remember those birds from last year, don't you, Guinevere?” She spoke slowly; her eyelids fluttered. She applied lipstick, casually, but I noticed her hands shaking and her hosiery lying like snakeskins on the carpet.

Danny fumbled as he tied his shoes, clearly in a hurry to leave. Guess those gutters would have to wait. Mom saw him off, then found me in my room, sketching in my notebook, trying to make sense of what I'd just seen. “Let's not tell Dad about Danny. I wanted to clear those gutters out as a surprise,” she said, smoothing her hair with a comb.