Wallflowers (12 page)

She always wanted to move back to Ohio. Does it give her too much credit to believe we stayed in Quebec because she didn’t want to uproot us? I think we should have tried harder for the health centre in Maine.

Guess what? The U.S. Department of Agriculture has activated a Fall Foliage Hotline. 1-800-354-4595. An automated voice informs callers of the country’s colour peaks. The leaves in the New York and Pennsylvania Allegheny Forest should be exquisite. I head there tomorrow.

Unique New York Unique New York,

Sidney

OCTOBER 15

Remember the lightning storm that summer we camped on Lake Kipawa? Before the trees burned down, they were backlit by this glorious blaze. The trunks loomed scarlet and the colours were divine. Well, the sun glows behind the hickory trees as I write and the likeness is striking.

Are you familiar with the botany behind fall foliage change? In late summer the leaf’s base develops a layer of cork that plugs its veins and prevents the entrance of moisture and minerals. Our Symphonie des Couleurs
is a tree weaning its leaves off water.

Two weeks tomorrow is your opening. I hate myself for missing it. Good luck. Remember the liquor licence. Don’t be nervous. The collectors will line up around the block.

Your Sidster (Ha, ha, ha)

PS—I think she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I think this is what redeemed her. She lived by a wild, unreasoned, breathless devotion to beauty. And not just her own.

PPS—My contact with humanity has officially reduced to you and muffler men.

OCT. 17

The bitch stole my boots! The pearl-coloured, full-quill, ostrich-skin Tony Lamas I won from the Montreal
Gazette
’s “Wild West” poetry contest in 1986! The pearl-coloured, full-quill, ostrich-skin Tony Lamas that vanished a month later, that I scoured the house for until the hardwood bruised my knees, that I just found in the original box underneath the passenger seat when I reached to find my fallen crust of pizza. I am parked on the William Flynn Highway, outside the Store Shaped like a Stealth Bomber, and I’m fuming in both French and English translations of the word. Will write more in Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh. I think the worst thing about our mother was the way she looked at us. She watched her children as she might a painting. Like she wasn’t expecting us to stare back at her. And worse still, she watched us as
her own
painting. We failed because she was venomously self-critical. And worse than that, we failed because she did not craft us. You and I were the dice that spilled from chromosome Yahtzee, and how could that compare with Tarbell’s
Mother and Child in a Boat
?

At least you went to art school. I think my decision to stack books for a living prompted her second relapse.

Tomorrow I try my luck in Tennessee.

Don’t be bashful, Nashville.

Sidney

OCTOBER 18

Spence,

I opened the trunk. Which is to say, I spent two weeks in our dead mother’s car
without
opening the trunk until three hours ago. I was “booting it” (they still fit) down the Pennsylvania Turnpike when the roadster met its ninth hole and burst its first tire. (“Pennsylvania: where winter eases driving because the potholes fill with snow.”) I popped the back for a spare and found my: velvet riding helmet, patent leather Mary Janes, scarlet beret, flower press. Your: rock collection, private school blazer, clarinet, kaleidoscope. The buck antlers you found up north, a tambourine, and what looks to be the fourth floor of my Victorian dollhouse.

The roadster’s at Esso getting refurbished. I’ve decided to spend a second night in Pittsburgh.

Sidney

OCT. 19

Spencer,

After two cups of jasmine tea, a bowl of won ton soup, and three hours inside an infinity of crimson dots, I’m going to Cincinnati. (In regard to the third point—there’s an Infinity Dots installation at the Pittsburgh Mattress Factory.) No more bashful Nashville, no “Tennessee Waltz”; it’s tin soldiers and Nixon on the I-70 to Ohio. I write from a hoisin-smeared booth at Lai Fu Restaurant, waiting for the bill and picking cabbage from my teeth with the fork my waiter gave me when he saw my attempt at chopsticks.

Do you think it’s naive to believe her theft of our treasured childhood items implies a maternal sentimentality?

The bill’s here. John Ruskin is inside my fortune cookie. I don’t know what’s odder—the quote’s relevance to my travels, or the fact that an English art critic has replaced Confucius.

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.”

Sid

OCTOBER 20

Spencer,

On the road to Cincinnati I passed three sunflower fields with flowers oily and yellow and spread-eagled beneath the sun, and then I passed a field of dead sunflowers, their heads bowed to the dirt like burned-out street lamps. (This fourth field would make a great finale to your set.)  I passed a manor with a chimney and eaves that bled Virginia creeper, and then I passed the World’s Largest Amish Buggy, and the World’s Largest Horseshoe Crab, and the World’s Largest Apple Basket, and the World’s Largest Washboard, and the World’s Largest Crystal Ball, and the World’s Largest Gavel, and the World’s Largest Mortarboard Graduation Cap, and an animatronic Smokey the Bear. I alighted from the roadster at a chestnut tree near Lancaster and collected nuts in the front of my sweater. Then I stopped for coffee and a slice of cherry pie at a rest stop a few hundred metres away. But they didn’t have cherry pie, so I ordered coleslaw and a burger, and the trucker on the stool to my left told me that what I collected were buckeye nuts, not chestnuts, and what I stopped at was a buckeye tree, the state tree of Ohio.

I spent last night at a Comfort Inn Over-the-Rhine. I aimed to be at the Academy of Art by now, but instead I’m on my third paper cup of coffee. What if they don’t remember her? What if they have no clue?

Continued:

I met the academy dean, who sent me to the curator of the Childlaw Gallery, who sent me to the curator of the Pearlman Gallery, who told the student at the welcome desk to type something into a computer. So now I have an address for the patron who bought Mom’s self-portrait, which struck me as a breach of privacy, but it’s amazing how far you’ll get with the right driver’s licence and a death certificate. Our patron is “Ms. Izobel Moss” of Jerseyville, Illinois.

So. To Illinois.

OCTOBER 22

Spencer,

Five hours and the state of Indiana after my last letter, I pulled into a driveway littered with autobodies, a mile or so outside Jerseyville. At the end of the drive was a house the colour of a recycling bin. It looked freshly painted and under the sun gave the impression of melting. A chain-link fence enclosed a leafless pear tree, a plastic kiddie pool the same wet blue as the house, and a two-legged picnic bench angled between dirt and sky like a seesaw. A woman with three arms emerged from behind the tree. One swung against her hip as she walked into the shade of the trunk, the second was bent ninety degrees and perpendicular to the ground, and a third budded from that one like a flexed lobster claw. I asked if her name was Izobel Moss, and when she stepped from the shadow, her claw became an owl. A mid-sized owl the height of my forearm, with plumage like tweed and a chain that tethered him to the woman’s wrist. She said, “Who wants to know,” which felt so Hollywood that I said I had the ruby slippers, and she said, “Well, that’s a horse of a different colour. Come on in.”

Except that didn’t happen. She said, “Who wants to know,” and I didn’t reply right away because she stood at the tip of the tree’s shadow on the grass and really, really resembled its crowning Christmas ornament. Then the owl raised his wings and flapped, and flew the length of the chain and flapped, and hung suspended in the air like a helium balloon, and I said, “Sidney Marion. I think you bought my mother’s painting. The self-portrait. She died a few weeks ago, and I wondered if I might see it.” She didn’t respond so I offered to show her the death certificate, but she said, “No need,” and led me into her house.

And there she was. Our mother. In her ankle-length sealskin coat. You paint like her, you know. In the portrait, she wears a cloche hat, but her hair is slung over her shoulders, the ends corkscrewed and long enough to be stuffed into the coat pockets. I remember those pockets were deep enough to fit hardcover books and tins of licorice. Mom painted her skin pale except for the cheeks, which look rouged from the cold or physical exertion. Her eyes are cast toward the unopened umbrella she clutches with both hands, and her lips press together as if to keep from laughing. The portrait is exactly how I wish I could remember her.

I went back outside where Izobel and her owl waited for me on the porch, and without any sort of premeditation I asked to buy the painting. I hadn’t planned to buy it. I didn’t think I wanted to. I’m sure I didn’t want to. She said it wasn’t for sale. I said, “I’ll pay you double.” She said, “I don’t need the money,” and I said, “But she’s my mother!” Then the only sound was the chortling of the owl. Izobel’s eyes washed over me and she rotated the metal cuff from the chain around her forearm until her stare settled at my feet. “What size are your boots?”

Bitch steals my boots even from the grave.

I called the foliage hotline last week—reports for the Mark Twain National Forest look optimistic. I operate the gas in my socks because I can’t find the shoes I brought with me. Mom rides shotgun.

Sid

OCTOBER 24

Spencer,

Mark Twain did not disappoint. Missouri’s reached the third wave. Sweetgum and oak, black tupelo and elm: they all look dipped in ketchup.

Last night I bought three quarts of milk from the Hazelwood Grocery. I didn’t know the optimum fat percentage for milk baths, so I got one carton of skim, one 2%, and one homogenized. I filled the tub with milk and hot water and rosehips I picked from the wild bush behind the motel. Now my skin is silk and I feel like Marie Antoinette, or Cleopatra, or our mother.

I miss you, Spence. If I leave tomorrow, I can be home for your opening. The Lost Maples of Texas will still be there next fall. And Mom would look fine in your studio.

Time to get my drive on Route 55.

Love Sidney

L'Étranger

 

 

After my master's degree in England, I moved to Marseille to let my hair grow. I lived with a Ukrainian woman in an apartment with stick-on floor tiles that peeled from the corners of the walls. I tried to not look at the corners too closely. Or the walls themselves, which were tacked with ribbed, oily paper. The apartment was ground level: when it rained, slugs slinked under the gap in the door. These weren't banana slugs from B.C., but slimmer and nut orange. Their trails shone in the glow of my cellphone when I walked to the bathroom at night. I used my cellphone for light so I wouldn't need to touch the walls for the light switch. Irina carried hers for music: Beyoncé while she cooked or bleached her underwear in the bathtub. I always knew where in the apartment she was standing.

Every week, Irina boiled potatoes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She peeled the potatoes into the sink and left the skins in the drain. I had to scrape the peels to the side of the basin before I could rinse my lunch plate. Because I washed my hair on the same days, I started to see the potatoes as her detachable body parts. The potato halves like heels she unscrewed from her feet, or milky lobes she plucked from under her knees.

 

=

 

She had, let's say, certain tics. She hid dish detergent in the cupboard, though I bought a bottle when I moved in. She kept her own forks and spoons in a coffee can, her own sponge in a plastic punnet for grapes. I used to leave spare toilet paper on the tank, but the rolls disappeared. I moved the pack to my wardrobe. Every morning, I carried squares to the bathroom with me like a camper. Most days, we did not speak. She knew English—I heard her on the phone with her boyfriend. But she avoided the common rooms. When she accidentally entered the kitchen while I cooked, she walked around me to the kettle, then circled out again. Once, I sat at the breakfast bar and ate my couscous as slow as I could. I read the newspaper. I tried the French crossword. When I left, her bedroom door opened as soon as I tugged mine shut.