Very in Pieces (2 page)

It is a relief when my father comes in. He enters like a dancer, walking in time to the emaciated jazz that plays unobtrusively in the background. He crosses the gallery to my mom and slips his arm around her waist before pulling her close for a kiss. Like moths, Ramona and I are drawn to them, and join them from our opposite corners of the room.

My father, Dallas Sayles, works at Essex College like my mom. He is a music professor—jazz and rhythm and blues and whole seminars on people like Bob Dylan and the Beatles. He was one of the first musicologists in the country to take hip-hop seriously, and he teaches classes in its history, politics, and
development. He is the cool professor. I know that his students get crushes on him. I've watched them, read the emails they've sent, trying to be coy. Once people see our mother, though, see the two of them together, well, even those college girls know they don't stand a chance. You can tell just by the way he looks at her that he is infatuated.

I turn to Ramona to share a satisfied smirk, but she's looking at the floor. So I hand my dad the watch and he smiles. “I knew I could count on you, jelly bean.” As he slips on the watch, he nods at Ramona and says, “Nice shirt. Dinosaur Jr. Maybe we can get our alt-rock on later.”

“Maybe.” She slides her hands into her back pockets.

“You,” he goes on, talking now to my mother, “look stunning as always. I could ravish you right here.”

Mom sips her champagne and plucks at a stray thread on his tan suit. “Thank you, love.”

He glances at me next. I shift in my ballet flats. “And you, my dear, reliable Very. She who actually reads the notes left on the refrigerator. Thank you for getting them all here.”

“No problem.” Suddenly my outfit makes me feel like a child playing dress-up.

“So this is your visiting artist?” he asks with a frown at the colored squares.

Oh thank God
.
I'm not the only one who thinks these paintings are ridiculous.

“Marcus Schmidt,” Mom says. “All the way from Germany.”

Dad nods, then says, “It's really daring work.”

I look again at the nearest painting. This one is a blue square on a square canvas.

“What do you think of it?” Mom asks Ramona.

She sucks in her cheeks. “It's like the ocean. Like just one small square of it, right up close.”

“Ah,” Mom says. “The essence of abstraction.”

“Nice,” Dad says. He puts his hand on my shoulder, bare except for the thin straps of my dress. “A second opinion?”

I pause, and feel myself starting to sweat again, even in this heavily air-conditioned room. There is a small group of people around us, students, mostly, and a few other professors. My parents being who they are means that the crowd is listening, even if they don't want to appear to be eavesdropping on the magnetic couple and their children. It's like I am being called upon to perform, only the expectation is that I will
not
perform, not be up to the task of commenting on the art.

I clear my throat. “I guess I don't think it's the ocean.”

Olivia Knotts, a potter who's been the junior member of the art faculty for seven years, is fiercely chewing on her lip while the department chair, Melora Wilkins, swirls her champagne.

“I mean,” I go on, “the paint is too even. The ocean, though, it's made up of hundreds and hundreds of colors.”

“That is true,” Mom says, “about the actual ocean.”

Isn't that what Ramona was talking about? A few heads in the small crowd nod—Olivia Knotts looks about ready to sob for me—and I wonder what I am missing. They can't all see the blue of the ocean. It isn't even the right shade: it is royal, not
dark like our ocean, or turquoise like the Caribbean.

“Well, I just think there might be other interpretations.”

“There are always
other
interpretations,” Dad says. His hand slips from my shoulder.

“Some people argue that's the beauty of art,” Mom says.

“You'll still be having your party, won't you?” Melora asks Mom, and just like that I'm forgotten.

“Oh yes, of course,” Mom says, placing a hand on her boss's arm. Every year Mom invites the whole art department up to our house for cocktails, food, and more cocktails.

“Perhaps you'll show us some of your new work there?”

Mom smiles slightly, a bewitching twist of the lips. “We'll see. You know how these things go, Melora. It's coming along, but—well, the best way to say it is that I'm evolving along with it.”

“As long as we can see it on these walls, Annaliese, that's what matters.” They begin walking toward another canvas. “Be sure to send me the date so I can get it on the department calendar.”

When they move on, I look at the small typed description.

Oceanic.

Acrylic on canvas.

It's possible that Ramona checked the title, but I doubt she ever looks at those gallery labels. She would consider that cheating.

Yet she knew. She knew without hesitation, as if the knowledge had been deposited in her brain before birth. Nonnie always says that if everyone in the family were an artist, we'd never eat or have clean clothes. “Everyone has their role to play, Very.”

I'm sick of mine.

iii.

The gallery is too much. Too bright, too square, too white, too many bubbly champagne-drinking sycophants.

I slip out a side door of the main room and descend the stairs to the lower level of the gallery. The walls down here are gray and there's no light jazz playing, just the sound of the air conditioner whirring.

The New Hampshire High School Art Exposition is on display. This art, at least, makes sense to me. There are paintings of vases of flowers or landscapes—the White Mountains, mostly. Silver gelatin print photographs of buildings or blurry people. Crooked ceramic mugs.

A wall at the back is reserved for the best of the best, and as I walk toward it, my eye is drawn to a large-format photograph of two girls. They are sitting with their bodies twisted into each other and their faces pressed together. They are both white girls, like me, and the photographer has made them even paler, as white as the dresses they are wearing. One is a brunette, the
other a redhead, and the color of their hair seems to pop against all the white. Their lips and eyes, too, are unnaturally saturated.

They are beautiful. Like angels or fairies or ghosts. They are not real girls.

Only they are real, and I know them. Callie and Serena. They're in my grade at school, going into our senior year. I look at the attribution, and I recognize the name of the photographer: Hunter Osprey. The three of them are inseparable, a triumvirate, and I never felt that I really knew anything about them. Callie, Serena, and Hunter. Now, though, I want to touch the picture and feel if their skin is as cool and smooth as it seems.

I want someone to see me as Hunter sees these girls. Unnaturally beautiful. Tempting as the quince in Eden. Dangerous.

I don't have to go far for a reminder of how I'm really seen, for there, on the adjoining wall, nestled among the also-rans, is Christian's portrait of me. Christian, my steady-in-every-sense-of-the-word boyfriend, and I had taken Intro to Art to fulfill our arts requirement. I was terrible, which delighted Mr. Solloway, but Christian was decent. We had to pair up and sketch portraits. Mine of him looked like some demented cross between Albert Einstein and Yo-Yo Ma. He sketched me leaning forward, pencil in hand, sucking on my lower lip as I worked through a math problem. Everyone said it captured me entirely: driven, studious, intense, blah, blah, blah. I used to love it, but now seeing the gray lines on small white paper compared to the glorious photograph of the girls, I want to tear it from the wall and smash the frame.

Behind me a man clears his throat. I imagine that I'm not supposed to be down here, and I wonder if I should explain who I am—Annaliese Woodruff and Dallas Sayles's daughter, Imogene Woodruff's granddaughter—but when I turn, I don't see a docent or a security guard or a man at all. It's Dominic Meyers, the closest thing my high school has to a juvenile delinquent. The rumors are that he's a small-time drug dealer, pot mostly. He's standing there looking the part in dark jeans, white T-shirt, and black Doc Martens.

He stares at me with deep green eyes and I wonder if he even knows who I am, that I go to his school, that we're both seniors. Our school is small, only 130 people in our graduating class, and yet I can't recall a single time we've interacted. Our lives slip by on lines that don't intersect, and it's possible he's never even noticed me.

“Quite the photograph.” He nods toward the picture of Callie and Serena.

I glance back as if I hadn't even noticed it, at the same time sidestepping to put myself between him and Christian's sketch. “I guess so.”

“People say that Serena's slept with half the hockey team.”

So at least he seems to know that we go to the same school. I heard the rumor, too, as it ricocheted around the halls. I thought it was disgusting, and not just because Christian was on the half of the team she hadn't slept with. There is something in the way Dominic looks at me—the glint of his eyes, the twitch of his lips, even the curl of his dark brown hair—that
seems like a challenge.
Good girls don't talk about sex.
So I say, “It seems to me that it's the hockey team that has the problem, not Serena.”

“What's their problem?” he asks.

“A lack of imagination.”

He laughs at this, which makes my body relax and shiver at the same time. He looks past my shoulder and I turn to block his view, hot in my cheeks at the thought of him seeing Christian's portrait of me.

“A general laziness,” he agrees, “like lions jumping on the gazelle once one of them has already brought her to the ground.”

“It's not like they've devoured her. She's still there.”

He raises an eyebrow. I've never really looked at him before. I mean, I know his general outlines, the way I know everyone in school, but I couldn't have said before this moment, for example, that there seems to be a faint scar in that raised eyebrow, a thin line where no hair grows.

“There's something I've always wanted to ask you, Very Woodruff.” Hearing him say my name is a small thrill, a question answered: he
knows
me. His voice is low and almost like a whisper. Instinctively, I lean in to hear him better.

“What's that?”

“Why do they call you Very? What is it that you are very—very what?”

My name is number two on my own personal list of frequently asked questions, right after “What's it like to be Imogene Woodruff's granddaughter?”

“It's short for Veronica,” I explain. “I'm named after the Elvis Costello song.”

He looks at me blankly.

“You know, ‘Veronica.'” Usually people either have no idea what I'm talking about when I explain my name, or they fawn all over Elvis Costello like he's God's gift to pop music. But Dominic just shakes his head. I sing my own name back to him, off-key and warbling.

He grins crookedly, of course, and I can't help but wonder if he practices the rakish expression. I can just see him standing in front of a bathroom mirror:
Too cocky. Too sly. Too menacing. Ahh, just right!

The air-conditioning is cranked up in the lower gallery, and I'm suddenly very, very cold, goose pimples and everything.

“For what it's worth, I like that one better.” He points to Christian's sketch behind me.

“That's not me.”

“It seems a pretty fair representation.”

“No. I mean that's not who I am.”

“Well then, who are you?”

“This gallery isn't open.” The voice comes from behind Dominic: a security guard.

“We're here for the exhibit opening,” I say.

“Upstairs,” he replies. “This floor is closed for the evening.” His eyes shift from Dominic to me, back and forth, as if we're up to something illicit down here. Hardly.

“Right,” Dominic says. “Our mistake. Sorry.”

The security guard waits for us to move. Dominic holds the door open for me like he's a proper gentleman. Just as I'm walking through, he leans in close enough for me to feel his breath on my neck, and asks again: “Who are you, Very? Very what?”

I step around him. “See you around, Dominic.”

He laughs so loud it dances through the empty gallery. “Sure you will.”

iv.

“Sylvia Plath had the right idea sticking her head in that oven,” Nonnie declares.

“Nonnie.” I'm perched on a wingback chair pulled up next to my grandmother's bed, where she sits with pillows propped behind her like some sort of Middle Eastern royalty in a storybook.

“It's true. Sylvia, Anne, they're both famous as much for their deaths as their poetry.
Oh that beautiful, sad Sylvia. Oh that sexy, psychotic Anne
. If I had known it was all going to end like this, I would have done it myself long ago. I should have just walked into the ocean with stones in my pockets like Virginia Woolf.”

She coughs and I tilt toward her, ready to—what? Catch her falling body?

“Yes, I should have let go back when I was lithe and beautiful like you. I thought about doing it. Before them. After them.
It wasn't like I was jumping on the bandwagon. Bandwagon. God-awful word. Things were different then for women. Women writers especially. You're lucky to live now.”

“I know.” Sitting here across from my fading grandmother, I don't feel fortunate. Seven months ago, she was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lungs. She is dying.

She wipes her thin wrist on her forehead. “At least couldn't I be dying of something gorgeous like consumption?”

“Consumption is tuberculosis,” I tell her. “You would die coughing up blood.”