Very in Pieces (14 page)

Ease up.

I do, and soon we're rolling again, off of the highway and onto the long, twisting road that leads out toward the ocean. The speed limit is only thirty-five, so I keep it in third gear, even if the RPMs are up a little high. We bounce over the wooden bridge that crosses the salt marsh, and then the ocean is in view: dark and roiling under the pale blue sky. The scent of the sea comes in through our windows and we each take a deep, full breath.

I park in the lot with just a few other cars. The sun is starting to head down, but it's still bright and warm. Nonnie tucks her sweater around her more tightly, though, as we make our way to the concrete wall that separates the lot from the ocean.

I'm heading for the stairs down to the beach, but Nonnie stops and leans forward against the wall.

The wind is cool against my neck and I find myself touching my skin again, the hint of hair that remains.

Nonnie says, “The first time I saw the ocean, I was afraid. It looked like a live thing to me as a child. A monster. The way it churned and rolled and frothed.” She holds one hand out in front of her as if reaching for the cold water. “People who know the water say you can never really trust it. Fishermen don't even bother to learn to swim. They know there's no use. Not out there.”

I run my palms against the rough concrete. “Well, couldn't they hold themselves afloat at least until their friends could come back and get them?”

“Not with all their heavy gear on. In Ireland the wives knit a pattern into the sweater so they can be identified when they wash up onto the shore. I put that into a poem once. All about the knitting. I even learned to knit for it, though I was never any good, always getting my yarn tangled and dropping stitches.”

Out at the edge of the water a man is throwing a tennis ball into the waves for his dog. The dog races out and brings it back, shaking and panting with excitement. Nothing could make that dog happier than to run into the freezing water and get the ball, drop it at his master's feet, and do it all over and over again.

“You're going to be okay,” she tells me.

I look down at the concrete. Names are etched into the paint.
Roz and Billy 4eva
,
Aimee wuz here
,
Charlie
,
SBJ
,
Tokyo!
They wrote it to assert their thereness, to prove their existence.
I was here. I was here. I was here.
It won't take long for the sun, wind, and sea spray to wash them away, if there's not a fresh coat of paint put on first.

“When I'm gone, you're going to be okay.”

“Nonnie—”

“It's not a question, Very. Not a hypothetical, someday down the road. You are going to be okay. That makes me feel better. Ramona and your mother . . .” She shakes her head.

“Ramona,” I say, letting her name slip out between my lips like a curse.

“She's not like you,” Nonnie says.

I roll my eyes. “I know. She's the creative one.”

Nonnie puts her hand on top of mine. “I mean that she can't look at a problem head-on and just take it as it comes. Like those waves. She can't dive right into them like you do. She has to come at things sideways.”

“You mean she's avoiding the whole situation.”

“The pain . . . that is, if she looked at it straight—” Nonnie begins, but then seems to reconsider it. “Just give her a little time. A little space.”

I turn to look at her and she's staring right at me with the most open expression I've ever seen on her face. Her eyes are begging me. I look away. “We should get you home.”

I steal glances at her as I drive. Her eyes close. A few miles more and her mouth is open a touch. Her breath comes in wheezes that sound like a kitten just learning to breathe.

i.

EVERY YEAR MY MOM
hosts a cocktail party for the visiting artist, and every year Ramona and I are conscripted into service. This year it's no surprise that Ramona is nowhere to be found when we are preparing for the party. On my own I empty six cans of juice into a punch bowl and add peach slices and rum. I arrange a cheese platter. I place piles of cocktail napkins around the lower level of the house, each pile spun into a fan. I am Cinderella, except instead of being banished to the ashes from which I long to escape, I'll be expected to make small talk with my mom's colleagues. First, they will ask me what my college plans are. They've been asking me this since I started high school, and this should finally be the year that I have an answer for them. But I have none. MIT with Professor Singh. That would make Mr. Tompkins happy, and I'd be relatively close for Nonnie. Minnesota with Christian. Stanford is still pulling
me. Then there's that school with the funny name in Southern California. Of course I could tell the people any one of these things and they would coo and tell me that I'm so lucky, a smart girl with the whole world in front of me, and I'll have to smile and say, “Gee, thanks.”

Or they will ask me what I thought about the art, and I'll wish to be back on the college conversation.

All in all, Cinderella didn't realize how good she had it.

But this year I'm not sticking around. I've got my own party to attend. One without crudités. Or napkins.

My phone buzzes. It's Christian.
Want to go see a movie or something?

My fingers hover above the screen of my phone, and then I type:
My mom's party is tonight. Remember?

It's not a lie, exactly. It's the same excuse I used with Britta and Grace.

Mom is stretched out on the sofa with an empty glass resting on her stomach when I come into the sunken living room to check the levels of booze in the bar cart. She has a washcloth across her eyes.

“It's getting late,” I say softly.

“Mmm.”

“I think I've got it all set,” I tell her. “Just checking the liquor in here.”

“Mmm,” she repeats. Then she blinks her eyes. “Nice haircut.” She closes them again.

“Are you sure you're going to be okay?” I ask.

Finally she pulls the washcloth off of her eyes. “I'm just puffy, is all. Puffy and congested. This house . . .” She shakes her head as her voice trails off.

“You look fine,” I say, though in fact, she does look a bit puffy.

“I do wish Nonnie had let me take the bottle caps and the rest of that mess off the garage.”

“She likes them. What's the harm?”

She looks at me and it's like she's too exhausted to even try to explain. “Fix me a drink?”

I look at her disheveled hair and the wet ring mark the glass left on her dress. “You need to get dressed, Mom. Why don't you wait for your guests? I'll have that punch you like ready by then.”

She sits up and runs her fingers through her hair. Her lips are pursed, like when Ramona and I got in trouble when we were little and she was deciding what our punishment ought to be. “Okay.” She stands, and is heading toward her stairs, but looks back over her shoulder. “Dallas is going to be late.”

“Everything okay?”

“Something came up at work. An article he needs to write. Or read. I can't remember. And then there's some advisee in crisis.”

“Well, I'll help as much as I can before I have to go. I haven't seen Ramona, but—”

“Where are you going again?”

“Just a party thing.”

“With Christian?”

“It's not really a go-with-someone kind of a party.”

As if she's scented something, she straightens. “Will that boy be there? The butcher boy?”

“Dominic? Oh, probably.”

“Is that why you cut your hair off?”

“No.”

“Well then,” is all she says. But a moment later she calls down the stairs in a singsongy voice: “The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.”

ii.

The first guest to arrive is Olivia Knotts. She's always the first to arrive. It's like she's still trying to prove herself. “Veronica! Your hair looks stunning!” she exclaims, and puts one hand on each of my shoulders, then stares right at my face.

“Hello, Olivia.”

She rearranges the features on her face into a slight frown. “I'm so sorry to hear about your grandmother.”

So the word has spread out from the English department through the rest of the college. “Thank you,” I reply.

She finally lets her hands drop from my shoulders. “She was such a talented woman.”

“She still is.”

Olivia Knotts, though, will not be put off from her speech. “As a female artist myself, I found such inspiration in her very being.”

In her very being.
I'll have to remember that and tell Nonnie.

The door is wide-open and I can see more cars driving up.

“Now, how are your college applications coming along?”

“I'm still working things out. I've been thinking about MIT, maybe. Or Stanford. Or I hear there are some good schools in Minnesota.”

“Minnesota!” she declares. “But don't overlook good old Essex College. We have some amazing programs, you know. But then, I remember being seventeen, ready to see the world, to soar up and free like an eagle from its cage.” She stares at our ceiling, and I can't help but look over my shoulder to see if perhaps there really is an eagle there. All I see is a dusty cobweb.

From the next car I see Melora Wilkins with the dean of the college. Everyone knows they are together, though the arrangement—intellectual, merely physical, emotional, some combination thereof—has never been entirely clear. Nonnie always insists that he has a wife and family back in Iowa, where he used to teach.

Melora has the calm demeanor and soothing voice of a massage therapist. Still, I like her. She and the dean are walking straight toward us when she suddenly stops, cocking her head. It only takes me a second to realize what they are looking at.

Mom floats down the final three stairs from her wing. “Why hello, Olivia, how are you?”

“Wonderful,” Olivia replies. “This morning I was working in my studio and it was like the clay just flowed from my fingers.”

Mom, though, is looking past Olivia, through the open
door, to Melora and the dean, who stare at our garage. “Crap. I knew I should have gotten that cleaned up.”

“Excuse me?” Olivia asks.

“It's nothing, Olivia. I just need to step outside for a moment.”

She sidesteps Olivia and heads for the door. Given a choice between discussing the work of visiting artist Marcus Schmidt with Olivia Knotts and going outside to see how my mom handles the whole sculpture-on-the-garage thing, I choose outside with my mom.

“Fascinating,” I hear Melora say as we walk up. Most of the side of the garage is covered now with bottle caps, aluminum cans, and pieces of broken glass that seem to undulate in the early-evening light. There is a slight gradation in color, darker at the bottom, and lighter at the top, like looking at a sunset, only the colors are all wrong. The copper poles sway slightly in the breeze, clacking their flowers together. “This is really different work for you, Annaliese.”

“Oh, I didn't do this.” Mom can't bury the hint of disgust in her voice.

“Really? Who is the artist, then? Did you have it commissioned?”

“Commissioned? No, I—” She looks from them to me.

“Actually,” I say, “it's a piece of street art, like Banksy or the Guerrilla Girls. We believe it's a tribute to my grandmother.”

Mom smiles at me thankfully. “Yes. It just showed up.”

“You have no idea who created it?”

“None,” Mom says.

“I find it interesting,” Melora says.

“I'd say that interesting is the kiss of death in an art review,” the dean says.

She nudges him with her elbow. “I need to contemplate it. It's holding my interest. Ergo: interesting.” She takes a step back. “On the one hand, I like the use of refuse materials in the creation of something quite lovely. It's imaginative and fresh. And the craftsmanship is amazing. It's like the bottle caps are growing out of the stucco like moss. Manmade materials used to create something natural.”

Ramona swings down from the old oak tree and comes to watch the crowd that is gathering. She sucks on the ends of her hair.

A few more professors and a handful of students join the group. They move around the sculpture in an elaborate dance. A step forward, a cross to the side, a few steps back. One of the students crouches down. But no one touches it, giving it the respect of a museum piece, at least for the time being.

It makes me feel exposed, as if, rather than looking at the sculpture, they are staring at some disfigurement of our family. I back away and into the garage through a side door, then up the stairs to Nonnie's. She is waiting in her black pants, white T-shirt, and man's suit coat. “I thought you were never going to come,” she says. “I can hear them down there, nattering away about the sculpture.” She reaches out her hand to me.

“Are you sure you want to go down there?” I ask.

She nods. “There's a ghastly wheelchair down in the garage. Grab that scarf, the pashmina, and we'll try to make me look respectable.”

I help her down the stairs and into the wheelchair and arrange the scarf around her. As I am wheeling her out of the garage, a small black convertible snakes up the driveway, temporarily shifting attention away from the sculpture. The man who gets out of the car wears loafers without socks, white pants, and a tight black T-shirt. He all but screams
European!
It is, of course, Marcus Schmidt, the German painter of squares.

Melora goes to meet him and takes him by the arm. “Look at this curious piece of art that's appeared on Annaliese's wall. They have no notion of who the artist is.”

Marcus lifts his sunglasses from his eyes and nestles them into his thick hair. “The artist is irrelevant. Only the art matters.”

“Do you mean that?” Ramona asks.

He turns to look at her. “Yes, of course. Artists die. Art lives.”

“So the motivation doesn't matter?” I ask. “Whether it's a need to be heard or a lust for fame or screaming to be understood?”

“You can want all of those things, but the world doesn't care.”

“The world doesn't care about much, does it?” Ramona asks.

“As it should be.” Marcus smiles. “The artist can't control how the world will see his work, and he shouldn't try. That's what makes art a living and breathing thing, instead of a print
you buy to match your living room curtains. All that matters is what winds up on the canvas, or, in this case, the garage. Does it say something? How does it function?”

“What do you think of it, Marcus?” Melora asks.

He doesn't speak for a moment. “Trash on the wall. Simplistic composition.”

This from a man who paints squares of color.

“The technique is primitive. Like arts and crafts. The colors are not what they seem. I appreciate this work.”

And then everyone knows what to think.

“It's like Baroque with bottle caps.”

“The juxtaposition of the beautiful and the profane is compelling.”

“It's like a pointillist painting, with each bottle cap the dot of a brush.”

“The glass lends an air of danger to an otherwise calm scene.”

I wonder if they can hear themselves. I wonder if they realize how ridiculous they sound.

At least one other person sees the comedy: beside me, Nonnie's laughter rattles low like a car with exhaust problems. When the laugh turns over into a cough, Marcus Schmidt turns his head and the mask of cool slips from his face. His eyes grow wide and he leans in toward her. “Imogene Woodruff?” he asks. He says her name in a languid, sexy way: Im-ah-jean, so it almost sounds like
imagine
.

Nonnie nods as she tries to get ahold of her cough. “I am,” she finally manages to say.

He crouches down beside her. “I know you have no patience for your admirers—a stance I understand, and indeed, I can relate to this problem, the fawning, blah blah—” He waves his hand in the air. “And yet I must declare myself a great admirer of yours. I try to paint the way you write, spare and unflinching.”

Melora takes a step closer to listen to the conversation. Behind her, I see my mother, her eyes shifting between the bottle caps on the house and Marcus at Nonnie's feet.

“Go on,” Nonnie says. With the pashmina blanket over her lap and me at her side like a sentry, she looks like she is holding court.

“You dig in, turn the thing around, try to show a new side? I dig in, deeper and deeper until I show only the smallest piece, the truth of it. You come at a thing straight, but I must come with a less direct perspective, you see?”

Nonnie considers this. “You remind me of Kandinsky,” she tells him.

“His focus on geometry?”

“No. His flop of hair and full lips.”

This makes Marcus laugh. “If you met him, you were a baby.”

Melora places a hand on Marcus's shoulder but speaks to Nonnie. “It's so wonderful to see you up and about. We missed you at the gallery opening.”

“Oh, Very told me all about it.”

Melora looks surprised, but Marcus stands and reaches out
a hand to me. When we shake, he wraps his other hand on top of mine. “Yes, yes. I remember you. You had long hair. This is better. Very, what an unusual name.”

“It's short for Veronica,” my mother says. She has put on her party face again, bright smile, dancing eyes. Marcus lets my hand drop as he turns to her. “Over there is my other daughter, Ramona. I'm not sure where her sudden strand of nihilism came from.”