Paint Me a Monster (23 page)

Evan pops some salted nuts into his mouth and snickers.

“That’s the idea,” Liz says. “No thinkee, no sadee.”

“Do you think it’d be rude to go upstairs?” I ask.

“Yes,” Liz says.

“Rude or not, I’m going for a walk.” Evan stands, reaches into the candy dish, and fills his fist with cashews. “Emergency rations,” he says. “Want to join me for a rush of Arctic air?”

Liz shakes her head. I want to go, but if Liz stays, I need to stay.

A shrunken lady with a black dress and a rainbow-colored hat hobbles into the room, arm in arm with Gaga.

“These are Rose’s children,” Gaga says.

We stand and introduce ourselves.

“My, you’ve grown up. I remember when the three of you sat for this picture. Your mother bribed you to sit still with cashews.”

It’s Mrs. Clark, the woman who painted our portraits.

“I don’t know how you captured the children, Julia, but I love it,” Gaga says.

“It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, Eva.” Mrs. Clark uses the wing chair for support and straightens the picture frame. “I put irregular pieces together and create artistic harmony.”

“Did she just infer we’re odd?” I ask Liz.

“You are!” Liz mumbles and grins.

“I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake on the sweet table,” Sandy says. “Your mother adored baking them.”

“Probably M.I.A. out of deference to Aunt Rose,” my cousin Jeff says. “Everyone else’s would pale in comparison. I’ll never forget the Thanksgiving she brought cherry pies instead of cheesecakes. I’m sure the pies were delicious, but our side of the family was so disappointed we wouldn’t even taste them. Your poor mother! But there wasn’t as much to be thankful for without an Aunt Rose cheesecake.”

“Mom took pride in her cheesecakes, that’s for sure.” The oohs and aahs quenched Mom’s thirst for attention. A jumble of ideas flash through my mind, but like fireworks, dissolve before I’m able to grasp them. It’s about Mom and thirst and . . .

“Please pass the pitcher,” I say. Maybe watering my memory will help it grow.

“She was a fabulous baker,” Sandy says. “You guys must have loved it when she made desserts, yummy beaters and bowls to lick.” Sandy picks a corner off a brownie, leaving a trail from the tray of cookies to her napkin.

“Loved it? That’s not the word I’d use,” I say, pushing brownie crumbs into a tiny pyramid. “Dreaded it is much more like it.”

Sandy’s face goes blank. “What do you mean?”

“Mom believed in R and R—rules and rituals,” I say. It’s strange my cousin who’s been around longer than me doesn’t have a clue about life with Aunt Rose.

I begin. “First, Mom read the list of ingredients to Verna, who lined the ingredients up in a row, like foot soldiers. Then Mom inspected her troops, commenting on their freshness.” She was a general contemplating her next maneuver.

“That’s the sign of a cook who cares,” Sandy says, shrugging.

“Mom could make cheesecake in her sleep, but she always insisted on having the recipe in front of her.” I continue. “If Liz, Evan, and I even rolled our eyes, we got a dishonorable discharge and immediate dismissal from the kitchen.”

“Wow! I always think of your mom being more like Betty Crocker,” Sandy says. “You know, ‘I love being in the kitchen and baking for my family—lick the bowl, kids!’”

“That’s
your
mom,” I say. “
My
mom baked three times a year and made a year’s worth of desserts each time. She just acted normal in public.”

My cousin crunches forward with her hands locked together between her legs. “What are you talking about?”

I think of Mom, in her beautiful, shiny, dignified casket, hugged by walls of wet earth. I wonder if she can hear me. When she gets to heaven, will she tell God I ratted on her the day of her funeral? I go on.

“When Mom made cheesecakes and they were in the oven, she ordered, ‘Only tiptoeing! No noise until the cheesecakes are baked and cooled. They could fall.’ Can you picture it—everyone in the house bound and gagged by cheesecakes? Mom shushing everyone for hours?”

“Come on! It couldn’t have been that bad,” Sandy says. “It’s sort of funny, don’t you think?”

“If you only knew,” my raised eyebrows sigh silently.

Sandy places her elbows on the table and leans into them. “Hmmph,” she says as though pondering Einstein’s theory of relativity.

I want to lift my hands above my head and push the weight of memories away.

“I had lots to be thankful for the Thanksgiving Mom made cherry pies,” I tell Sandy. “We did have lip lickin’ good pie.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Sandy says.

I nod with a sideways sort of grin. Cherry-pie day cast its own spell. The air heaving with the scent of warm pastry and sugared cherries wrapped us in comfort. That smell would make an awesome perfume. I remember Verna stood at the breakfast table surrounded by mounds of white freezer paper. Next to her were towers of freezer paper-wrapped cherry pies. Verna and I carried twenty-eight pies to the basement and stacked them in the freezer, rearranging trays of pecan rolls. The freezer was Mom’s monument to cherry growers everywhere and proof she could cook. Verna and I built muscles that afternoon.

“Wow, twenty-eight pies,” Sandy’s voice drifts off.

“If you only knew how funny it sort of was, Sandy, I could make you laugh till you cry.”

“Anyone want coffee?” I ask, squeezing past my cousins to get to the kitchen. Except for two women I recognize, but don’t know, the kitchen is vacant. They smile at me, and I smile back. “Thank you for coming and helping us,” I say.

“Are you Lizzie or Rinnie?” one of the women says. “Look how grown up you are.”

“I’m Rinnie. Liz has curly hair.”

“Lovely,” her friend says. “I remember when you were no bigger than a minute. My, how you’ve grown. You look like your mother, same blue eyes. Tsk tsk.” They shake their heads. “We were just off to join the others in the dining room. Call if you need anything.”

Glug. Glug. Glug. The coffeemaker burps in response. China cups line the counter. The scent of hazelnut and coffee is so mouthwatering I swallow each inhalation. A tray of frosted raspberry-filled cookies is piled as high as the saucers. Before I realize it, my tongue caresses the roof of my mouth with a finger-full of frosting. Liquefied silk. Its long-forgotten pleasure dissolves into another time; a time of patting dough into circles with floured hands, a time of peppering dough with cookie-cutter shapes, a time in a happy kitchen with Verna, laughing and licking beaters. I remember her words, “Pat the dough nice and flat, cut a cookie just like that!”

I close my eyes and take a choppy deep breath. I want all the raspberry cookies. Gooey, flaky, chewy, crispy, crumbly. Anything but crunchy. Raw vegetables are crunchy. Thank goodness for coffee.

My brain is thick with other people’s conversation. I excuse myself, and Liz joins me.

“Liz, I’m going upstairs. I need some alone time. If you need me, knock on the door.”

“Are you OK, Rinnie?”

“Yeah, sort of overwhelmed. Mom’s really gone.” I start to go up the winding staircase.

“Rinnie. Things don’t make sense to me either. Maybe we can talk later.”

“OK.”

I smile and thank God for my sister. What would I do without her?

I snuggle into the blue chair and watch the indigo lines of the cushion bend and sink beneath my body. I’m upstairs in the blue room. What’s left of the funeral party lingers downstairs.

Liz, Evan, and I have named all twelve rooms in Gaga’s house after colors. When Liz and I first began to stay here during exam week, I was in the ninth grade.

“Because I’m the oldest, I get first dibs on a room,” Liz said.

She chose the pink room. Liz prefers the woven rug, thick with embroidered roses and ribbons of gold and green, to the plain carpets in the other bedrooms. A curved high-back chair covered in pink velvet soft as the satin-sheathed down quilts on the beds faces the doorway. Liz is queen of the pink room, and the chair is her throne.

Liz wants to be the queen. I don’t mind. Her room is next to Gaga’s, and Gaga snores.

When Evan spends the night, he stays in the caramel-colored room at the back of the house. It belonged to Uncle Matt. From the windows, the swimming pool, rose garden, and landscaped patio create a golden triangle.

My room is the blue room. Blue cornflowers sway in an imaginary breeze across the papered walls. The furniture is painted the blue of a summer sky at noon. Milky blue pleats of curtain blend into the walls. Only the carpet is white. I feel like I am wrapped in a cloud when I’m in this room—a cloud of tranquility.

The blue room used to be Mom’s room. But now the photograph of her in her lace wedding gown, emerging like Aphrodite from a veil that billows on the floor, is the only reminder that she once lived here. I try to imagine her putting makeup on in this room, dreaming of boyfriends, travel, and one day having children.

What declares
my
existence in this room? Textbooks, the desk piled with exam notes, stacks of possible exam questions I wrote, hair clips, a blue tunic and white blouse in the closet, my favorite writing pen on the night table, peach body wash, zit medicine in the cupboard. On the wall hangs a picture of the Grand Canyon I painted in the eighth grade. Taped to my bedside table are two biology tests.
Excellent
reads one.
Superior work
reads the other.

I yawn and crank open a window to let in some fresh air. The smell of winter’s dampness curls off the frost-brushed bushes below like smoke. It’s the smell of wood snapping in fireplaces. But I think of the summer roses and smell Joy, Mom’s favorite perfume. She was a Rose and a Gardener, but she didn’t tend herself, and her thorns were sharp. Mom’s presence in this room, like her Joy, is no longer.

It’s quiet here. Peaceful. And an image of Gaga, Liz, and me at the breakfast table swirls in my head like the smells of the hot buttered toast and café au lait that swirl up the spiral staircase and wake me when I sleep here. At breakfast, Gaga sits between Liz and me.

“I’m glad you’re here. Did you sleep well, dears?” she always asks.

I know the hiding places in this house, the contents of every closet, the boards that squeak in the attic, and which drawers stick when they open.

The giggle of two girls as they walk across the lawn draws my attention. Their blue and white uniforms label them as Cincinnati Girls’ School students. “Everyone thinks we CGS girls are so smart,” I say to myself. If they only knew how hard I work.

Mom’s voice hijacks my thoughts. “You’re impossible, Rinnie. . . . Stop asking so many questions. . . . You’re driving me crazy. . . . Let the boys beat you in games. . . . Miss Smarty-Pants . . . you’re not so great. Let me tell you something, you don’t know it all. Your IQ is ninety-five. That’s how smart you are.”

Like a jockey’s crop snapping horse flesh, the words smack. There’s no rest. I gallop and gallop and run.

And when I stop, Mom is always at the finish line.

How many times did Liz warn, “Mom’s on a rampage?”

Wasn’t it last month Liz said, “Better check your room.” I close my eyes to obstruct the thought, but I see my bedroom, the drawers upside down, empty. T-shirts, underwear, sweaters, pants, empty hangers, pencils, paper, erasers, pens, and markers strewn over the bed, the floor, and the chair like a poorly sewn patchwork quilt. I hear the conversation.

“You, too?” I ask Liz.

“Oh, yeah.”

“What did we do this time?”

“We’re unappreciative spoiled girls who make Mom spend money she doesn’t have to keep us satisfied.” Liz mimics Mom. “This will teach you to take care of your things. Put them away neatly or else!”

I remember wishing. I wish she’d die. . . .

I lay on the bed in the blue room, stiffly so my black dress won’t wrinkle. Stiffly, like a corpse.

You didn’t make her die, I tell myself. You didn’t make her die.

I close my eyes, and an image of hands fill the darkness—like the hands in the famous Durer painting Mrs. O’Claire showed in art class. Only these hands aren’t praying. These hands are open, translucent, and the palms are the color of raspberries. They are Mom’s hands, red from her grip on the hospital bed rails. Hands, afraid to let go. Afraid to lose control, afraid to lose life. My stomach muscles clench with sorrow, fist-like, then rebound and thrust pity and sorrow upward, into a reservoir that fills my heart and splashes over the boundaries of my world. It’s difficult to stay afloat. I want to go back, but there is no back to go back to.

I look at Mom’s photograph. Happy eyes stare into real life. The bride is radiant, expectant. I find a piece of myself in her face. It isn’t the oval shape that is caressed by wavy hair, or her Greek nose, or even the freckles hidden beneath her powdered skin. I see her, I feel her, from the inside out. Disintegrated dreams and expectations, crumbled under her gown of hope.

I wear Mom’s hand-me-downs: Demands to be heard, listened to, loved. My arms wrap around my chest and clutch fragments from our past.

“One, two, three, four, five.”

Mom counts each stroke of color she brushes on her right eyelid. We’re in her bathroom, and she’s getting ready to go on a date. The left lid hovers over her bottom lashes like an aircraft carrier until called into service. One, two, three, four, five. Both lids are ready for takeoff.

I remember her insistence on perfection.

“Rinnie, do you think my eyes are even?” she asks me, her makeup consultant. I watch as she slides maraschino cherry-red lipstick over her thin lips. The lips that so often frowned in my direction. The bright color highlights her straight teeth. Even the nicotine stains don’t mar Mom’s beauty.

Warm air from a floor vent moves along my dark stocking-covered legs. Stocking-less, they are as pink and freckled as Mom’s legs were in the height of summer. Summer meant swimming. The memory of her legs, smooth as ice cream, pumping me through the cold water, sails by. We almost played together. I swung on her legs, my seahorses, and Mom sat on the edge of the pool and talked to her friends.