Waking Beauty (31 page)

The Healing Art Center was a short walk away on Berkshire. I was expecting some kind of stand-alone building, but the center turned out to be a large storefront between a used-clothing store and a Home Hardware. The window was full of paintings, soapstone sculptures, macramé plant holders, clay ashtrays, and a few clumsily constructed birdhouses. There were price tags on most of the items, ranging from five to fifty dollars. Written in paint along the bottom of the window:
Please Support Emotional Expression and Healing Through Art
.

A bell rang when I walked in. One woman looked up and smiled. No one else looked up. Everyone else kept doing what they were doing, which was sitting on benches at long plastic-covered tables, painting or drawing or mucking around with lumps of clay or chunks of soapstone. “Love Shack” by the B-52s was playing tinny on the radio. The smiling woman approached me.

“Hello,” she said. “Welcome.” She was about fifty years old. Pudgy. She was wearing a T-shirt that had a cat’s face depicted on it in fabric paint and sequins. The eyes were googly. Sewn on. The woman smelled like Elmer’s white glue. “Can I help you?” she said. Something about her made me want to explain the situation. So I did. “Well, I’m thrilled to be the one to introduce you, but don’t expect too much, okay? Jeannie is nonverbal, and a wee bit…antisocial. She doesn’t really care for new people—that is, it takes quite a while before she’ll respond to someone she doesn’t know.”

“That’s all right.”

“And even then sometimes…”

“I understand.”

The woman took me by the hand and led me through the labyrinth of tables in the surprisingly deep room. Some of the paintings I glimpsed as I walked by: a giant eyeball leaking fat blue tears; a house falling down; an angry red man with sharp fang teeth and black paint exploding from his mouth. She steered me to the back of the store where a woman was working alone at a card table. She was painting on paper, the right hand a blur of brush strokes. And I recognized her! Yes, I did. A cold shiver wowed through me, vibrated all through me as I realized that this was the hideous-looking woman with the layered sweaters and the rubber boots and the kohl-lined lemur eyes who had been hovering over me in the park that day when I fell asleep after meeting Fiona at McDonald’s.

“This is Jeannie,” said the woman in a cheerful voice.

Jeannie looked up from her painting. Wary. Today she didn’t have greasepaint flowers big on her cheeks, and I could detect the resemblance between us. Not the eyes. No. The huge eyes were foreign. But the mouth, the shape of the face, the stringy hair, the squat, bloated body…

“Jeannie, this is Allison. She came to meet you!”

The kohl-lined lemur eyes fixed on my face, and I was being scrutinized in a most unusual way, as if those animal eyes were taking the full measure of my soul. I took one cautious step closer. I smiled. I wanted to say something, at least hello, but it was all I could do to keep my mouth from trembling, to keep my breath relatively steady, to keep from falling apart and sobbing crazy. I had imagined this happy moment so many times over the years. Now it had arrived, and I couldn’t find the words, words I had rehearsed over and over, again and again. I could feel an escaped tear trickling down my face into the corner of my mouth, and those kohl-lined lemur eyes took it all in, wide and watchful.

Then finally, after who knows how long, she did something.

And it was nothing like I had imagined or hoped it would be. My mother didn’t open her arms and fold me warm into her bosom and say:
Daughter, how I’ve wondered and missed. Daughter, how I love love love
.

No. It was better than that. More tender.

My mother reached for my right arm, took me lightly by the wrist, and pressed the paintbrush gentle into my hand.

15    

I spent the next three days at the Healing Art Center
. I really should have been out looking for work, but I was enjoying my time with Jeannie. We would paint together at the card table at the back. I would bring good things for lunch, and if it wasn’t raining, we’d go to the park to eat. Olga, the woman who ran the center, said it was amazing how Jeannie had responded to me, how she’d never seen anything like it, and how wonderful it was. It
was
wonderful. Apart from Nathan, I had never experienced such a strong undercurrent of connection with another human. Jeannie and I clicked. I felt strangely peaceful in her presence, painting away at the card table at the back. At night, I was restless, depressed, and had trouble falling asleep, my brain feverishly trying to formulate the speech that would make Nathan change his mind. But while I was painting with Jeannie at that card table at the back, I felt calm. Even good. I decided to support emotional healing through art. I bought one of Jeannie’s canvases to hang in my bedroom. All of her work was Matissely colored, garish and naive, but oddly powerful. Or maybe I was just projecting. Olga said Jeannie’s paintings were popular and sold regularly (and that the money was
turned over to Maureen, Jeannie’s guardian). The one I bought was a rectangle divided into sixteen squares. Each square had a different-colored background, and on each background was a different-colored heart with something in it. A blue heart with a green tree on a yellow background; a green heart with a red flower on a pink background; a yellow heart with an orange cat on a blue background. Then there was the square in the lower left-hand corner, the one that made me wonder and worry about Maureen: a black heart with a white cigarette on a gray background.

By Wednesday, I had started to cultivate a sort
of Movie of the Week
fantasy about Jeannie starting to speak again. To me, of course. Only to me. It didn’t happen. I would talk to her, or sing along to the songs on the radio, which she seemed to like, but she didn’t utter a word. Still, I nursed the fantasy.

On Thursday, Olga introduced me to a young woman who had come to the center to volunteer. Olga told the teenager that I was Jeannie’s daughter, a “wonderful daughter.” I experienced a warm glow that rapidly dissipated. On Friday, I didn’t go straight to the center in the morning. Instead I went to check on my adoptive mother.

I found her passed out in the just-for-show living room, lying under the white piano in her Brazilian Ball gown (I peeked through the window after she didn’t answer the bell). It scared me at first, until I noticed the framed pageant photo on her stomach, rising and falling with her breath. I fished out the spare key, the one she didn’t know I knew about, from the barbecue, called her usual caregiver at the Bellwether Rehab Center, and packed a bag. As I maneuvered her out of the house and into the yellow Audi, she slurred and cursed in a voice too loud.
What the heller y’doin? / How th’ fuck joo get in here anyway? / Where we goin?! / I want my goddamned car keys, missy, d’ya hear me? / Where th’ fuck is Allison? / She’s ’posed to take me shopping…
. I told her that Allison had found her birth parents and had gone to live with them in Vancouver. I told her that from now
on she’d have to find someone else to chauffeur her around. “That bitch,” she moaned. “That selfish little cow!”

After that I looked forward to Jeannie’s silent communication.

After that I thought: Who needs words?

16    

I made a lasagna
.

I couldn’t find a recipe that involved fresh artichokes, but I found one that called for five kinds of cheese and much Italian sausage. On Saturday, I shopped and prepared the sauce. On Sunday, an absurdly hot day, I tackled the construction. It turned out to be an arduous, steamy task, and I kind of screwed it up. I had laid out the noodles on paper towels to dry (as per instructions), but the decorative towels adhered to the pasta, and I had to peel and scrape each noodle—some less successfully than others—before layering them into the massive pan. Then, somehow, even though I checked the baking lasagna every ten to fifteen minutes, I still managed to char the surface brown with black edges.

Oops.

The thing weighed about seventy-five pounds when it was done
—Yield: serves six…thousand
—and took several hours before it was cooled down enough to wrestle into a taxi. I arbitrarily punched in the door code for someone named J. Luscombe when I got to Nathan’s building. “It’s me,” I said. And J. Luscombe buzzed me in. So far so good, I thought as I lugged the lasagna to the elevator and pressed the button with my forehead. I waited. I waited some more. It was hot in the building, and the lasagna was making it hotter. I set the pan on the floor and hammered on the elevator button. I stretched my arms.

“Is broke,” said a man in a Tyrolean hat who’d emerged from his apartment with a cane in one hand and a small bag of garbage in the other.

“What? No! You can’t be serious.”

“What floor you go?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Is bad,” said the old man, shaking his head and shuffling slowly down the hallway. “Is very bad.”

And it was. Very,
very
bad. Like hauling anvils up Everest in the middle of hot August. I needed a Sherpa, and by the time I got to the twenty-second floor, a shower. I was literally drenched in perspiration, and there was a band of tomato sauce across the bottom of my shirt where the pan had rubbed. I lowered the thing onto the mat outside of Nathan’s apartment and collapsed into a rasping heap beside it. My plan was to leave the lasagna at the door—a wordless, somewhat burnt offering—but Nathan must have heard something (my head hitting the wall as I collapsed, my gasping for breath, my quadriceps screaming in pain?) because he opened the door and looked down at me.

“…elevator…broken,” was all I managed to pant out.

Nathan crouched down and lifted the foil wrap off the pan. He stared at the charred lasagna. Then he leaned in and scrutinized one of the brown noodles. “What is that?” he said, pointing to the copper-kettle pattern that had been baked onto the surface. “Is that paper towel?”

I nodded yes, shrugged sorry. “I can explain….” I wheezed.

“No, I know, it’s when you leave the noodles there for too long.”

“No, I mean about other things.” I wiped sweat off my face and noticed that it was streaked with tomato sauce. I felt like an idiot, a loser, but in retrospect I think the paper towel / tomato sauce helped me out.

Nathan stood up and gestured for me to enter.

We sat at opposite ends of the hideous velveteen sofa. Far away in a small room. Nathan stared at the floor while I explained as best I could about George, my adoptive dad, and why I had gone to the cottage. It was tempting to tell about torching the club; I even considered divulging the Morph, which would’ve gone a long way in justifying my dodgy behavior, but I held my tongue. Maybe someday in the future when things were solid, when Nathan could be reasonably assured that I wasn’t a raging pyro or any other brand of maniac, I could spill secrets. Now was not the time. I was there to patch things up, not tear them further asunder, so I merely stated my case, apologized for my actions, and asked for his forgiveness. I told him that I would absolutely earn his trust if he could see around to giving me another chance.

Nathan didn’t respond when I was done. He stared at the floor. He chewed on a hangnail. Finally he said, “It’s just too odd.”

“What?”

“You going to all this trouble to see me again. I mean, why? Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Look at you. You have to admit it doesn’t make sense.”

“It may not be typical, but it does make sense.” I inched closer to him on the sofa. “You’re smart, funny, talented, kind—”

“Stop, please.”

“Honestly, Nathan, it wouldn’t make sense for me to not want to see you again.”

He sighed, wiped sweat from his curiously shaped forehead, and continued to stare at the hardwood.

“Listen, do you want to try some lasagna? I think if we cut away the surface burns, it’ll probably be really good.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t.”

“Oh.” A storm cloud settled in the center of my chest.

“Yeah, actually, I have to, um…I have to be at my parents’ place for dinner in, like, half an hour.”