Thank You for the Music (7 page)

It took at least a month of sitting for this one painting, and near the end my mother knocked on Anne's door, then stormed in before Anne could answer, my youngest brother asleep on her shoulder.

“At least show me the painting!” she said. I hadn't noticed anything brewing in her; in fact, I hadn't noticed her at all lately. I watched her now with shame; she was in a housecoat, her hair full of silver clips, her white calves fat, I suddenly saw with a pang. My brother's undershirt looked gray.

My mother stood and looked at the painting, while Anne, her concentration broken, went to the kitchen in her black smock, saying, “I'll make us some tea,” her voice soft with defeat.

“That doesn't look a thing like you!” my mother whispered, smiling, relieved, it seemed to me.

“She's not even a realist!” I whispered back.

“But you look like a mental patient!” she said, her voice rising, lips compressed to hold in laughter.

“You don't understand! Just be quiet!”

Anne called us for tea; the orderly kitchen was like another painting we could step into. A smooth black rock sat on the sill over the sink. The sky pressing its blueness up against the screen like it wanted in. The grains of the wood in the table, swirling.

“So Gracie tells me you're not a realist,” my mother said, smiling.

“Right,” Anne said. She seemed a bit baffled, as if she'd just come away from a long, solitary swim.

“Why do you need Grace to sit for you then?” my mother said. Anne looked down into her tea and said she was using me as a starting place. That she worked with planes and angles and ideas. Combinations of things.

We sat and drank our tea in uncomfortable silence that was broken by my brother waking up in tears. “What's wrong, little boy? You got a fever? We'll leave these two alone now,” my mother said, getting up.

“Don't forget where you live,” she added.

She rushed out.

“Maybe you're spending too much time here,” Anne said.

“No, no, no,” I said. “I don't think so. Really.”

So we went back to work.

Back to the shifting perceptions of my own body in the chair, back to Anne's blue eyes behind her glasses, her bare feet or worn moccasins, the sunlight or gray light in the room. I remember her serving ginger snaps on a red plate one afternoon, and being startled because they were so mundane, unlike her usual offerings. I remember she played the song “Standing in the Shadows of Love” on her record player once, and that I imagined the song made her remember an old love, a man who had died young in Paris. She asked me all sorts of questions about school, and my lost Ohio friend, and I answered them happily in great detail, amazed at how interesting I could sound in the presence of her genuine curiosity.

It was a little more than a year, this kinship, and my mother hated it, and I didn't care. I felt that year like my mother was a box I was clawing my way out of. When my mother and Lorine watched
Guiding Light
on summer afternoons, too alert on percolated coffee, they'd wait for commercials to tease me as I walked through the living room.

“So what are you doing with the rest of your day? Let me guess. You're gonna go sit on your ass across the hall for another painting they can hang up in Western Psych!”

“Whatever you say, ladies.”

“At least get some fresh air once in a while.”

“Maybe I'll avoid fresh air and normal things for the rest of my life.”

“She's gonna turn out like Francie Bartusiak!” Lorine yelped, and the two of them laughed, and I bit my tongue so I wouldn't ask who Francie Bartusiak was.

“You two can be so revolting,” I mumbled, but the power of the real disgust I felt alarmed me.

I had sudden moments when I missed my mother, whoever she had been.

“Hon, we're just jaggin' you,” my mother assured me.

But I knew she was angry and hurt that I'd pulled away. I'd always been her girl. My father wasn't around much—a man of his time, he worked and he went to the bar and he slept, and if he didn't sleep he read the paper, and you better not disturb. He wasn't a bad man, just tired, so tired all the time. He had a way of squinting at the mess in our apartment as if he'd never seen it before, as if it were completely baffling to him. “I need to get out of here,” he'd say to the air, and then he would, he'd get out of there.

So I had been my mother's confidante, the one who watched late-night movies with her in her bed with bowls of rice pudding, the one who she took shopping downtown with her when she bought a new dress, valuing my opinion over anyone's, even Lorine's. I was the one who gave her back rubs at the end of the day, her deepest pleasure, no doubt. And now I wanted nothing to do with her. I would not get near her; I was afraid she was contagious. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom late at night, sit on the edge of my bed, and watch me sleep, though I was only pretending to sleep, and my whole body was clenched in anger, feeling her presence as a terrible invasion of my privacy, my body, while I prayed for her to disappear.

One day I had taken a bus to the South Side with Albie Rooch, the middle of the blond Rooch brothers. I had admired Albie from afar for years, had entertained all kinds of fantasies about him, and now, here he was, an eighth-grader, walking beside me on train tracks, his usually bare feet in faded black high-top sneakers. Trees made sparkling green walls on either side of us. Albie wore a muscle shirt and cutoff jeans and was talking in his long-winded way about the war mongrels who ran the world, and I was agreeing with everything he said, nodding encouragingly, like a girl.

That's when I saw Anne and another woman walking toward us. They seemed so out of place I thought I must be imagining it. The other woman I'd seen twice before, in Anne's apartment, but I'd forgotten her name.

“Hey,” Albie Rooch said. “There's the lezzy.”

“That's Anne,” I argued. “Don't say that.”

“You don't know she's a lez?”

Now Anne and her friend were approaching us.

“Hi, Anne!” I said, my heart pounding.

“Hi,” Anne said, smiling. “Remember Margie? Margie, this is Grace and this is . . .”

“Albie,” I said, and he was looking off into the sky, arrogant, disdainful, and bored.

Anne said something benign about the beauty of the day, and I looked at her with new, suspicious eyes, and saw that Albie was right, and it hit me all at once, in the stomach. No man in her life, no makeup, this friend with the haircut like a man's. How had I not seen it all before?

“Not much to say today, Gracie?” Anne said, because I looked down at my feet, hating that I hadn't known, hating that I'd associated myself with her, that she'd meant so much to me, that she'd done all those paintings of me.

“No, not much to say,” I said, too loudly, and off I ran with Albie, down the tracks. We wandered up into the trees, where he got a hungry kiss, as if kissing him that way could somehow obliterate whatever I felt for Anne.

“So you finally got tired of Anne, I see,” my mother said one August night. The little kids were in bed, Lorine was in Sea Isle City with her kids visiting her sister, and my mother and I were up late watching
Marcus Welby, M.D.

“Yep,” I said.

It was dark in that living room, the windows were all open, the heat of day had given way to cool breezes. My mother was in an armchair and I was sprawled on the gray couch. It had been a long time since we'd watched anything together. We lived with a huge distance between us, and most of our talk consisted of her yelling for me to help with my brothers, or me yelling to her that I was going out.

“I don't think you're being fair to her,” my mother said.

“To who?”

“Fair to your friend Anne. You can't keep lying and saying you're busy. You two were good friends. I don't like to see you drop a friend like that, even if she wasn't my favorite person.”

I kept my eyes on handsome Steve Kiley, the motorcycle-riding doctor that shared Marcus Welby's office.

“You never struck me as mean, Gracie, and this is mean.”

“Why do you care now? You and Lorine talked about her like she was a weirdo, and you were right!”

“No, no, I was wrong. And Lorine, you know her, she's Lorine. She's had a hard life.”

“No, you were right! Anne's queer! She's a lesbian!”

A silence filled the living room.

My mother finally said, “There's certainly worse things.”

“How can you say that? In that tone? Like it's no big deal?”

“Oh, Gracie,” my mother said. “So what? She treated you nice. Remember that old friend of mine you met in Philadelphia? Theresa? She's a lesbian. I've known her since she was eight. So what.”

“So what! I don't want to be her friend anymore! It is a big deal!”

“Well then, you'll have to tell her that. I will not lie for you anymore. Anne's a human being and she deserves an explanation. Every time I see her she asks about you. I really think you need to talk to her.”

“I can't!”

“You're a big girl.”

“Oh sure, I'm so big I can walk up to her and say, ‘I don't want to come over anymore because you're a lez.'”

“I won't lie for you,” my mother said. “And the word is lesbian, Gracie.”

I didn't tell Anne anything. Lorine and her kids came back lobster red from Sea Isle, and another school year started, and I kissed Albie Rooch every day in the alleys of town, or on the playground at night. My father continued to work and drink and read the newspaper, my mother tended to the little kids and kept her distance. She didn't come into my room and watch me fall asleep anymore.

When I wanted to leave the apartment, I'd sneak a look into the hall, making sure Anne wasn't out there.

One day I saw her in the bakery. It was Sunday morning; I was out on my own, buying donuts. I took my number and waited in the crowd, when suddenly I heard her voice.

“Hi, Grace,” she said. I turned and she was right next to me, wearing her black coat, her steady eyes devoid of the warmth I had known. Somehow in my arrogance, when I'd imagined running into her, I had envisioned she'd be more forgiving.

“Hi,” I said, my face crimson and warm, and sorry.

“I've missed you,” she said, “but I understand how busy you are.”

“Yeah,” I said, stupidly. “School and stuff.”

Anne sighed with relief when her number was called. “See you,” she said, and approached the lit counter. Watching her back as she waited in that bakery I was filled with shame.

It was a month or so later when I overheard my mother and Lorine one Saturday evening after the kids had all passed out on a mattress in the living room. I had been out at the playground with Albie and a bunch of other kids, and I'd come back in to check my face before we all headed to get some pizza uptown. I stood in the darkness, watching the sprawled children sleep, and listening. The pitch of my mother's voice alarmed me.

“. . . and then he comes home and passes out and stinks up the room and snores beside me in the bed so that I plug my ears and hear my own scream bounce off the walls in my head. I used to go out to the couch before the kids ruined it. Now there's nowhere. Nowhere. I lie there with my fingers in my ears, trying not to breathe, knowing he doesn't love me anymore, if he ever did. Night after night, Lorine. And the days are no better.”

Lorine sighed. “God, I wish I knew what to say,” she said. I stood there, body frozen, heart beginning to pound throughout my entire body. I was waiting for more, dreading more, but they were silent now. What my mother had said should've been obvious to me, and would have been had I ever had the courage or inclination to extend my imagination toward her then. And yet, what I'd overheard felt both shocking and inevitable, like something I didn't know I'd always known. Now it was taking root in my heart, and beginning to break it.

“Next time around we'll be lesbian painters,” my mother said, breaking the silence. “Weird lesbian gals with big white pianos and no kids.”

They laughed together.

“And we'll freak out little girls like Gracie,” she added.

Another laugh.

“Poor Gracie,” Lorine said, sounding unlike herself. “She's got it all ahead of her.”

I tiptoed past the kitchen, back to the bathroom. I would not sort it out. I'd let my mother's sorrow sit inside me, a heaviness, an ache I'd outrun. I was busy, I had places to go, I did not need this horrible interference. I yanked on the chain that turned on the bulb above the mirror. I didn't look so bad, really, I thought, reapplying my cherry lip gloss and forbidden mascara. I gave my long hair a defiant fifty strokes. My heart slammed inside me. I washed my hands, and bent to take a drink from the faucet, gulping down the cold water as if it could break through the new knowledge stuck in my chest.

I went back quietly through the living room.

“Who's that?” my mother said.

I didn't answer her then, or ever. I'd grow up never mentioning that I'd heard a word she said. I walked quietly to the door, opened it, and ran breathlessly down the stairs and into the night, as if I were free, as if after so deliberately turning away from another's suffering, the darkness of summer could ever look the same.

M
Y HUSBAND AND
I
WORKED TOGETHER
so that the house would be presentable for our only son and his new girlfriend. “It's serious, this time,” our son had told me. “I think I've found my life.” Life, he said, not wife. But really, he'd found the whole package.

Jude, my husband, was a newly retired art professor, and an artist—working in oil and acrylic—and over the years our entire house had turned into a studio. We had paint thinner on the back of our toilet, smocks on the railing, art magazines piled into the corners of the dining room. I told myself this was inevitable: How could a man like Jude be contained in one room? Even the front porch had been conquered by his old cans, the dried brushes piled in a heap below the swing, the scrappy canvases he never seemed to move out to the curb for the trash collectors leaning against the wall by the door. (I'd given up.) In his art he was somewhat successful; the best galleries in Philadelphia had shown his work, and Jude was gratified by a number of fellow artists who seemed to think he was some kind of genius. Articles in the seventies about his early neo-Expressionism said as much. Though he'd never admit it, and often made the joke that he was a has-been that never was, I knew Jude
needed
to think he was a genius. In his heart he still wrestled with that tiresome affliction that most men trade in for a kind of reluctant humility by the time they turn fifty. Jude, at sixty-four, was still going strong, sometimes painting all night long in the attic, Billie Holiday or Bach for company, a view of the skyline out the window.