Authors: Jill McCorkle
You might look
at me now and wonder why I didn’t get sucked on down Misery Canal. Why did I not become my sad shell of a mother taking pills for ailments that likely didn’t exist and hiding behind racks of clothes to try on and hoard while tired sales ladies on commission told her she was beautiful? Why didn’t I pack a bag and flee as Stuart had from his marriage and then from me, as my father might as well have done all those years ago when he sat in a dark garage in a car that would never move again? Flight. Escape. It’s such a simple and common story. Why am I not sitting off somewhere saying
I’ll be quiet
or zonked out of my gourd or living a total lie? Well, for one thing I have a
good job surrounded by children who need me, and I have projects it will take me years to finish as I practice the teachings of Bob Ross, and I have Andrew. Above all else, I have Andrew.
It was when I was pregnant that I discovered Bob. I was told that his voice would soothe and ease me into sleep better than trying to read the Bible, which was another recommendation for insomnia that I had received. Bob was better than NyQuil or Benadryl, neither of which was even an option while pregnant. Bob lulled me to sleep each afternoon, me with eyes barely held open searching the pines off at the edge of the mountain for the little nest of birds he assured me was there while Andrew paddled his little limbs within, his tight round rump twisting and pushing against my ribs. “Happy creatures,” Bob said. “There to find if you look real hard.” I wanted to live in Bob’s world. I didn’t even crave that much —light, air, occasional laughter. I would lie there like beached blubber murmuring, “goddamnit Bobby, I want happy clouds. I want to be a happy creature.” What he could do every day with a blank canvas amazed me. It was like painting all of one little number of paint at one time in a PBN without having the box to show you exactly what you were doing. What’s more, Bob’s technique of applying one color right on top of another was called “wet on wet,” which I found so erotically charged even there in my condition. Wet on wet sounded to me like slick skin-slapping sex, the quality of which I had not experienced nearly enough in my life. I love how Bob never abandoned
what began with wet on wet even when it was looking messy. In Bob’s world there were no mistakes, only “happy accidents.” Take that smear of yellow where the reflection of your sun looks stupid and unnatural and turn it into a giant sunflower. Take your deformed-looking dog and just smear it all out into a little tranquil pond. Bob could dive into a pile of shit and come out riding a silver pony.
Andrew is eight
now and expressed very little emotion when Stuart packed up and left. “It’s not like he’s my real dad,” he said, and he looked at me as if I might give him more information about his real father, the fiction I have created to fill the void of what is not entirely known —a kind but otherwise really boring mechanic who taught me what parts to point to under the hood so I wouldn’t be taken advantage of, the medical student doing a month’s rotation in ophthalmology when I was finishing up nursing school, the married landscape designer who spent half a summer wandering the grounds of my apartment complex, taking in and examining the various women who lived there the same way he did the grade and slope of the terrain. He was famous for complimenting women on their buds and bushes. And of course we all thought he was totally full of shit but too completely good-looking for his own good, or our good I guess. For all I know he’s still hoeing rows and planting seeds, like an old mule who only knows one path of dirt.
But Andrew’s father —by my account —was a brilliant young man who after being in the Peace Corps for two years became a war correspondent during the Gulf War. No sooner did we marry and have a beautifully memorable honeymoon in the Galapagos Islands (I saw a television special on this and knew all I needed to know) than he was reported missing and presumed dead. The only question Andrew asked was why we didn’t use his father’s last name, Perdue —we were in the grocery store when he asked —and I said it was just too painful a reminder of the life I almost had but then didn’t. I told how his father was an only child whose parents had both died when he was young so we were all that was left of his family. When Andrew wanted to know where his dad was buried, I pulled out a photo of my childhood home and pointed where the sun was about to drop behind the thick pine woods between my house and the high school. “I sprinkled him here,” I said. “It’s where he proposed to me.” I told him how you can’t see it in the photo but if you walk there in the woods there is an old rusted-out buggy where as children his dad and I sat and pretended we were heading west to find gold and eternal happiness. I told him how wonderful it was to be hidden there in the trees.
I’d be lying
if I said I wasn’t a little angry when Stuart left, even though it was inevitable and I was glad it happened. It was more about feeling responsible for what had failed. I had
spent my life feeling that way and
that
is what really made me angry. I was sick and tired of making other people’s mistakes look good when no one was helping out with mine. “How did this happen?” my mother asked when she saw me pregnant with Andrew. “What on earth am I going to say to people?” She spoke with great authority and arrogance as if she might be the mother equivalent to the
Mona Lisa
.
Painting is a very good way to handle things like anger. Sometimes, I paint like a maniac while I go over things in my head. Sometimes my head is XXX rated. I do things in my head that would get me the death penalty in this state. And that’s harmless, right? Paint a little on Jesus’s beard while imagining all that will never happen but
could
. All the ways I might force people to see and hear me as I really am, all my parts and all my layers.
I am someone who needs to be aware of what is under the surface. My grandmother’s old quilts, I found, often conceal a quiltface under the one showing. I am intrigued when a painting is discovered under another. And I love those little Russian nesting dolls —something inside of something inside of something. A secret message tucked back, layered for a later revelation. It’s history —the organs beneath the skin —the heart. It’s the belief that there is something out there that will save me.
“Nothing lasts forever,”
Stuart said when he left. It scares me to think so, but I think there was a time I would
have begged him to stay, changed myself into something I wasn’t to avoid conflict and change. I likely would have taken the blame —a problem I have wrestled with my whole life, so conditioned to assume that I didn’t deserve anything better, that once I messed up I was out of the game, like misspelling a word in a spelling bee or severing a main artery out in the middle of nowhere. I was asked by a shrink once what my worst fear was, and I didn’t even have to think to answer. “My worst fear,” I told him, “is that I will stumble upon a crime and confess that I am responsible.” I am someone desperate for resolutions, a sense of completion and well-being. I want to tell people how everything is going to be okay, to reassure them that there is light up ahead even when they can only see the darkness. The glass is half full. When you find yourself neck deep in shit, there is bound to be a pony nearby.
“That’s fairy tale bullshit,” Stuart told me on more than one occasion, when I expressed the hope of what was waiting for me out there in the future.
“There’s no brass ring,” my father often said. “One bad turn just leads to another. You automatically sink lower than you might have been with no hope of getting back.” He looked at my mother as he said this.
If there is a hell
and I am forced to go there, then I will be surrounded by negative and pessimistic people. I will hear
them complain and whine, judge and sentence everyone and everything around them. And in between their tirades I will be presented with books missing their final chapters, movies that blip out just before the final scene, elaborate recipes that don’t tell what temperature the oven should be. No situation will have a resolution; there will be no glimmer of a future.
But for now
, I love nothing better than sitting on the little cot in my office, my fingers smoothing tangled hair and tear-stained dirty faces. I tell them that they will feel better very soon. The fever will break and the bone will heal. Their parents would never forget to pick them up. “There’s traffic, so much traffic,” I say. “There is nothing on the whole planet they love any better than you.”
Some might say that my life has been one long series of mistakes and accidents, but Bob Ross has taught me otherwise. I can take myself and turn me into something really good. He has taught me that it’s important to know what’s possible. He was only fifty-two when he died, though his show continued to play day after day long after. Some might have seen these repeats as a sad thing, the long good-bye. But I saw and continue to see them as a wonderful resurrection. Day after day, he springs back to life with the promise of something new. He’s a lot like Jesus when you think about it —the second chance, the promise of something better, the beard.
Now when I paint, I leave little spaces in the trees for Bob. I like to think he’s back up in the woods there painting up a frenzy. Or he’s cooking a nice gourmet meal for the two of us to sit and enjoy at the end of a long day. We are just friends, of course, bound by our artistic sensibilities. He has a wife he loves and I really am not attracted to him in that wet-on-wet kind of way, though I am not above thinking he might have a friend he wants me to meet. He’s there thinking of all the nice things he will say when he sees me: How he sees beneath my skin and bones to my very soul. How I deserve so much more than I have seen thus far. He says the trick is to go just one little brushstroke at a time, that what I am making of Andrew —that little wet-on-wet happy accident —is a great work in progress and worth every minute I spend there. He tells me to look before crossing, to hang in there. He says every day is a good day to be alive.
VIEW-MASTER
The ex-wife’s picture
hangs among others near the radiator in Roger’s office. Theresa has trouble
not
looking at the photo even though she has studied and memorized every detail with a kind of tormenting curiosity. The other photos are linked to Roger’s commercial real estate business —photo after photo of Roger shaking hands with local celebrities, the mayor, the anchor for the local news, and Tripp Trout, owner of a seafood franchise who has never been seen without his fish mask. There are probably twenty such photos.
Beside the ex-wife is a younger, leaner Roger with dark hair and no lines around his eyes. He’s smiling, and there is not a trace of worry or discontent; his hand cups the bare shoulder of the
woman beside him: his wife, his mate. Her blond hair is shoulder length and feathered back from her face; her jeans are worn and flared, her feet bare, and she rests one leg over his. She leans in so their heads are touching. His other hand, wedding ring visible, is on her thigh as he hugs her close. He’s wearing an old flannel shirt he still owns, one Theresa used to toss on in the middle of the night or after showering. She has not worn it since recognizing its connection to the past.
His daughter, just a toddler then, is in a little pink jacket off to the side. Her hair is yanked into high pigtails, something Theresa has heard Roger laugh and tease her about when they talk on the phone —“Those tight pigtails did something to your brain, honey,” he always says. Now the daughter is in college on the West Coast. Theresa has not met her, though they have chatted on the phone in a friendly but awkward fashion until he is able to pick up —about Roger’s work or the weather or Elsa, the old golden retriever who was just a puppy at the time of the divorce. The ex-wife, though several relationships and houses and careers beyond the marriage, continues to call and check in.
In the photo, they are a family of three on vacation in the mountains; dark shapes looming behind them in late-afternoon light. There is a history behind them and several years still ahead. Theresa looks once more at their entwined limbs, their child, the place Roger has said
they
should visit sometime. It was where he
had spent his childhood vacations. It was
his
place first. Theresa holds eye contact with the ex-wife and thinks: I
am here and you are way back there
.
But Roger is in both places.
“Oh, you wouldn’t
have liked me then,” Roger said when he caught her studying the photo. She wanted to ask him why he kept it hanging, but before she could figure out how to ask, he was already telling the story of the day, his daughter covered in poison ivy by the end of it, the oatmeal bath and calamine lotion he bought and brought back to the motel room, where his wife was studying for either the LSAT or to go to graduate school in library science —he couldn’t remember which. She never pursued either one. What he could remember is that she didn’t want him to watch the ballgame on television or touch or talk to her. He described a perfectly awful time, and yet the photo remained like a door left wide open. Theresa wanted to ask,
Would you go back and fix it all if you could?
Before Roger, most of her relationships were built on convenience, the result of sporadic and fleeting moments of boredom or lust. She had resisted an early conventional union that might —with good health and luck —lead to a golden wedding anniversary, and she had resisted repeating her own unhappy childhood by not having any children of her own. Instead she had thrown all her time and energy into her work, assuring herself
that someday she would find what was right for her, comforted by the idea of comfort.
“No one has everything,” she was reminded countless times by friends who were getting married and having children. They were trying to emphasize her successful landscaping business, which is how she met Roger. She went from selling small window box and herb garden designs at the Farmers’ Market to landscaping bank buildings and city plazas. Her brief engagement and a couple of meaningless relationships were all mixed up in her mind with abelia and dwarf gardenias and the Bradford pear trees all over town whose varying sizes documented her career.