Very in Pieces (9 page)

“But that's a different school,” I say, then bite my lip. Nonnie will survive through this school year. She has to.

“I'm sure we can work something out if you really want to stay at Essex High School. You know I moved my senior year and I survived.”

“But you
hated
it.”

“Yes. I hated it here.”

I can tell the conversation is over. Ramona has been watching us like a Ping-Pong match, and now she starts slowly retreating. Mom spins and heads again toward the house. Her mind is not on the bottle caps, but on oils and brushes in her locked studio.

I stay outside in the warm afternoon air. The sky is dotted with big, white puffy clouds—like something out of a child's drawing. As one of them moves across the sun, the light hits the bottle caps just so and makes them look like they are moving. Like the wall is alive.

I turn to say something to Ramona, to point it out to her, but she is gone.

iii.

I had to explain it three times to Britta on the phone, and then she finally said, “I'm coming over. Call Grace and tell her I'll pick her up.”

Now we all stand and stare at the side wall of the garage. The big oak tree casts a shadow on the house, and the bottle caps have lost their shine.

“So someone snuck up to your house and glued them on?” Britta asks. “You realize that's creepy, don't you?”

“You have no sense of adventure.” Grace squats down and looks at the ground as if there might be more bottle caps there.

Britta inspects the wall more closely. “I wonder who would do something like this. I mean, to sneak up here and put bottle caps on your house, either the person is crazy, or it's personal.”

“My mom thinks it's a message to Nonnie. Because of her ‘Detritus' poem.”

“Right, of course,” Britta says. “It's like all the lost caps are showing up here.”

“She's not too happy about it. My mom, I mean.”

“What does Nonnie think?” Britta asks.

“I haven't told her yet.”

“We should tell her now,” Britta says.

“I think she's sleeping.”

Britta has always been nervous around Nonnie, even when we were younger. It's like just hearing that Nonnie was a poet—a writer of books—made Britta's mind reel, and she always mumbles and bumbles around Nonnie, which Nonnie both loves and hates.

Grace hops up. “What we need to do is have a stakeout. I mean, clearly that's the proper course of action here.”

“Where are we going to stake out?” Britta asks.

“Very's house, of course. We can hide out back behind the garage there. We'll take turns sleeping. We'll need binoculars. I've already started looking for clues, and I can say with some assurance that the perpetrator left no footprints.”

“On the paved driveway?” Britta asks.

“Correct. You know, I'm realizing that on cop shows, there's an awful lot of soft dirt ground for the criminals to leave their rare and unusual footprints in.” She regards her own shoes, sparkling Converse that she purchased in the children's department of Target. “You know, maybe Nonnie did it herself.”

“That is a ridiculous idea,” Britta says. “Imogene Woodruff would not have stuck bottle caps onto her own house.”

It would not have been such a ridiculous idea if it weren't for the fact that Nonnie couldn't get up and down the stairs to her room by herself. We tried to move her into the main house, but she refused.

Grace is undeterred. “Maybe she's trying to tell you something, or leave a message for when she's gone. It could be hints that will lead you to some big discovery. Like maybe it will reveal who your mother's father was. Oh! Or maybe your grandmother, like, arranged for all of this, like, what's that book?
The Westing Game
? And she's left you your inheritance to find.”

“Stop,” Britta says. “Slow down. Okay, now let's step back onto the conveyor belt of reality.”

“I don't like conveyor belts. Like those moving walkways—I'm always afraid I'm going to get sucked down into them somehow. Escalators, too.”

“I don't think a stakeout is the best idea,” I tell them. “We don't know if whoever did this is going to come back, and anyway in the dark we might not see them.”

“Fine,” Grace sighs.

“Very's right. We need a more organized approach. If we could figure out what they are trying to say, then we could maybe figure out who would want to say it,” Britta suggests.

“Dude, we are totally like Nancy Drew,” Grace says.

“You are not Nancy,” Britta tells her.

“Why not? Because I'm Chinese?”

Britta sighs. “No. Because this is Very's house. And Very's grandmother.”

“Nancy Drew solved crimes at other people's houses.”

“Nancy had Ned Nickerson, who's an awful lot like Christian.”

“Fine,” Grace says. “But then I'm being George. I'm not going to be wimpy-ass Bess.”

“All right,” Britta says. “When you're done being twelve, we need to help Very figure this out.”

“You know,” Grace says, tucking her arm through Britta's, “some people thought that George and Bess were a lesbian couple.”

“You wish,” Britta replies, and laughs. “Focus on the details. We'll figure this out. We're smart girls.”

Smart girls, all right, but those bottle caps glinting in the sun were not about to give up any secrets.

iv.

“Bottle caps?” Nonnie asks. “On the house?”

“Glued there, I think.” I'm holding a bottle of pink nail polish, my toes spread out, and I'm trying not to slip and paint my skin.

“Just right on the stucco?”

“Yep. Scattered around. I don't see any pattern. All different kinds, too, but mostly Moxie.”

“How strange,” she says. I can tell she is pleased. The Moxie is the clue: this is in her honor.

“Mom's pissed.”

“Livid,” Nonnie corrects. “Or irritated. Affronted, perhaps. But surely she is neither drunk nor urinating on the house.” She pauses. “Well, certainly not urinating.”

“Livid,” I choose. I've done the right side, and now it's time to put the second coat on the left.

“Do mine,” she says.

“Your what?”

“My toes,” she says. “Though pink is not my first choice. Have you got any other colors?”

I shake my head.

“Pink, then.” She sits up and throws the covers off her legs. She's still wearing her trademark black narrow pants. She folds her body in half to peel her socks off her feet and when she moves like this—graceful as a bird—it's hard to believe she's so ill.

Her skin is white with lines of sharp blue like rivers through ice. Her toenails have a yellow hue. “Ghastly,” she says, shaking her head.

“They're the most beautiful feet I've ever seen,” I tell her.

She carefully repositions her body so her feet are at the edge of the bed. I begin with her right foot. I cup the heel in one hand as I paint the toes. The pink looks like cotton candy next to her pale, pale skin.

“Did I ever tell you about the young film director?” she asks. “The one who wanted to cast me in his movie.”

Her foot twitches and I paint a bit on her toe, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“Such a bad boy he thought he was. I told him
Rebel without a Cause
had already been made so he might as well just go curl up and die.” She laughs. I think of Dominic in his jeans and black Doc Martens. I can't imagine telling him to just go curl up and die. He would probably laugh and tell me I was funny again. “Are you sure you don't have any other colors? Red, perhaps? Or orange? My skin did always look nice with a touch of orange nearby.”

“I've got six different shades of pink, Nonnie. What can I say?”

“The first thing I'll do when I can get out of this bed is go get you some red nail polish. Red nail polish and red lipstick. Every girl should know the precise shade of red lipstick that's right for her face. If you have red lips, you don't need any other makeup. Especially with eyes like yours.”

“Red lipstick is garish.” I want to tell her that she can get out
of this bed, can go downstairs. I'll even drive her into town. We still need to make that appointment for a haircut. But I know that she means something more than just getting out of bed, something bigger, something that just isn't going to happen.

“Don't try to distract me with perfect words. This pink makes me feel like a little girl. And not in a good way.”

“Next time I'll bring fuchsia. Other foot.”

She lifts her other foot and I hold it in my hand. She has a small bruise under the nail of her big toe. It's black and more solid-looking than the mottled green-and-blue one on my face. She gets bruises so easily now because of one of her medications.

“As I was saying, the film director. He used to paint my toenails for me. I think he had a bit of a foot fetish, though of course I never said anything about that to him.”

This was unlike her, not to name a thing. “Why not?”

“Why, he might have stopped painting my nails. He was quite good at it. In fact, I'd wager he enjoyed it more than the other thing we did together.”

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

“Nonnie.”

“You are seventeen; your prudishness alarms me. At any rate, all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if his interests lay elsewhere, as it were. His rebelliousness could have been a front he put up to hide his homosexuality.”

“Nonnie, just because a man likes nail polish doesn't make him gay.”

“No. But not enjoying sex with a woman is quite the clue.”

I drop the brush back into the bottle. “Done.”

Nonnie tilts her head back and looks at the job I've done. “Thank you. Of course it's not as good a job as the James Dean impostor did, but I'll forgive you.”

“You're very kind,” I say. I look down at my own feet. The right toes are a shade darker than the left.

“He was a mistake,” she says wistfully.

“Because he was gay? Sounds like he made the mistake when he went after you.”

She shakes her head. “It was another notch against me. Arthur Miller can marry Marilyn Monroe and that's all well and dandy, but I go around with a director or a musician, or even silly old Andy Warhol, and my credibility is shot. ‘Poet to the Stars,' that's what the
New Yorker
called me once. Only time I ever made it into that rag.”

“No one thinks of you that way,” I lie.

“People say your choices define you. It's true, but not the way people think. Your choices don't shape you, they shape people's perceptions of you. Even the silliest, most insubstantial decision—someone will use it as evidence of one flaw or another.”

“And where are all those people now?” I ask. “Who are they? They're no one, and you're Imogene Woodruff.”

“Poet to the Stars,” she says. “Queen of the Bottle Cap Mural.”

“Jealousy makes people say cruel things.”

She's staring out the window, toward the treetops. “I want to see them. The bottle caps. I want to see them.”

“Right now?”

“I don't know how long we have.”

I tell myself she is talking about my mother, about how she wants to take them down. I tell myself we have no other time limits as I guide her toward the steps and wrap my arm around her waist. She leans on me, and I lean on the railing.

We move in a lurching motion. I step down, then support her as she makes the step.

At the bottom of the stairs, she shakes off my arm and reaches for an old walking stick that's leaning against the wall of the garage. Cobwebs drift off of it and float to the ground. She places it firmly on the concrete, shuffles, places, shuffles her way out of the garage and onto the driveway. She blinks a few times to get used to the natural light and I wonder just how long it's been since she's been out in the fresh air.

The bottle caps are in shadow and they don't look as alive as they did earlier. Still, they captivate Nonnie. She just stares for several minutes before she says, “It's a bit more beautiful than I expected.”

“In its way.” It looks like a bit of a mess to me, no more sensical than Marcus Schmidt's color squares. “So—”

“I don't want to go back inside,” she tells me before I can suggest it. “I made it all the way down those deathtrap stairs, I'm not going to submit myself to a march back up them.”

“Dinner, then.”

I help her into the house. Mom is sitting on the sofa in the sunken living room, her legs crisscross applesauce, a gin in one hand and a book of Dorothy Parker's poems in the other.

“What's for dinner?” I ask.

She laughs. “Nice to see you out of your room, Mom. Feeling better than this morning?”

“I'm feeling like I have a tumor on my lung,” Nonnie replies. “Fix me a whiskey sour?”

Mom doesn't move, so I go to the bar cart, where I hesitate. Nonnie is taking a huge regimen of drugs, and I don't know if she's supposed to be drinking. “I don't think we have any sour mix.”

“Brandy, then. Straight up.”

“It's in the back,” Mom says. “The one with the crystal square on top.”

I pour Nonnie some but speak to my mom. “We're all going to have dinner together. Like a family.”

“Do families do that anymore?” Mom asks. “We certainly never did when I was a child. Why, I can't remember one family dinner growing up.”

“What are you talking about?” Nonnie asks. “We had a million family dinners. Every time we sat down together it was a family meal. Not so light on the pour there, Veronica.”

Mom and Nonnie, that was their whole family. Nonnie had become pregnant as a complete surprise at age forty-four and refused to tell anyone who the father was. It would drive me crazy, but Mom found it charming—or rather, she made it part of her own charm.