I walked through the gathering crowd of students outside the student union. Westmore was not known for its intellects or even its sportsmen. It was known for being an affordable commuter school, good for a four-year degree in subjects such as marketing or health-care consulting. The Art Department, like the English Department, was a condescended-to anomaly staked out by a variety of types whom Natalie and I alternately thought of as losers or geniuses. The school’s founder, Nathaniel Westmore, had been an artist and writer before his Thoreau-like disappearance into the woods of Maine. As a result, both departments had remained comparatively independent from the rest of the campus.
Westmore students wore the off-price version of the clothes that were worn in New York a decade ago. On the few occasions I’d brought Sarah with me to the campus, her presence had caused a stir. I had always been proud that my daughters lived in other states and chose to make their lives away from home even if, very often, I wished I could drive down the street and sit in their houses. But I would never do that to either one of them. One saving grace in my own life was that my mother was never capable of a pop-in.
I walked up the wheelchair-accessible ramp and passed through the heated momentary hush of the double doors, and there was Natalie, among the sea of students thirty years’ our junior. She was sitting at a round booth by herself, over near a wall of windows that looked out on the swampy undeveloped land. From the student union, the old oak tree wasn’t visible, only the reedy grass that soon, after the next frost, would turn color and, as winter came on, make an ushering sound as the dried-out stalks beat against one another in the wind.
She was looking out into the distance, perhaps out over the highway, where the large traffic signs were nothing but small green flecks and the cars were impossible to see.
I would not tell her, I realized. How would I phrase it? I had said the words so far only once. “I killed my mother.” I wondered at this new lexicon I had entered. I killed my mother. I fucked your son.
I walked over to her, barely aware of the students bearing food on trays as I passed.
“Natalie.”
And there were her eyes, Natalie’s light-brown eyes, which I had looked into since childhood.
She was dressed in one of her faux Diane von Furstenberg dresses that Diane von Furstenberg would never have put her name on. The material consisted of an inscrutable pattern that seemed to adorn many women’s bodies at middle age-a sort of dazzle camouflage designed to keep the eye from being able to focus on the actual shape inside. The wraparound dress was in a style we’d agreed was perfect for disrobing but that I had abandoned. At some point, seeing those dresses hanging in my closet had begun to depress me-their light cloth and indistinguishable patterns made me think of endless suits of wasted flesh.
“Hi,” she said. “You can finish this. I’m stuffed.”
I sat down opposite her, and she pushed the pale orange-flecked cafeteria tray over to me. On it was half a cheese danish and a yogurt left untouched. We had always been like this. She ordered too much, and I ate what was left.
“Where were you yesterday?” she asked. “I called your number half a dozen times. I even called the Bat Phone twice.”
“At my mother’s,” I said.
“I had a feeling. How is she?”
“Can we not talk about it?”
“Coffee?”
I smiled at her.
Natalie stood with her cup. The cafeteria cops never stopped us when we walked backward through the line and got a refill. We were tacitly granted the same privileges as the teachers.
I wolfed down the half-eaten danish and peeled back the foil on the top of the yogurt. By the time Natalie returned, I was halfway done with my secondhand meal. The coffee-hot, watery, weak-obliterated what was left of my appetite.
“What’s with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem sort of nerved-out somehow. Is it Clair?”
I thought of deflecting mechanisms. I could have commented that not everyone ends the night with half a bottle of wine and a sleeping pill or that not everyone was secretly fucking a construction worker from Downingtown… but I didn’t. I would tell as much of the truth as I could.
“Jake showed up,” I said.
It was as if she’d heard a gun go off. She slapped both her hands down on the table and leaned in toward me.
“What?”
“You know how I told you he used to wake me when the girls were sleeping? With pebbles from the neighbor’s geranium pots?”
“Yes, yes.”
“He woke me up this morning at about five a.m. He was standing inside the fence of my backyard, tossing rocks. We spent the morning together.”
“Helen,” she said, “it is now my opinion that you are not acting nerved-out enough! What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Hamish?”
“Since when do you care? How’s Jake?”
And so I told Natalie that he currently lived in Santa Barbara on the estate of a software mogul whom he had never met. That he was doing some sort of installation there. That he had a female dog-sitter for his dogs, Milo and Grace, and that he planned to travel to Portland soon to see Emily and the children. I realized, as I said the few things I knew, that I didn’t know very much.
“But why did he come to see you?”
It rang in my head: I never wanted the divorce.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. I held the cup of hot coffee in my hands and pretended I was warming them up. When Natalie looked at me, a certain lifelong look that said “You’re not telling me the whole story,” I could feel the shakes start where my elbows met the table. A second later, I had spilled the full and scalding cup.
Natalie stood up from the booth. The coffee had gotten on the sleeve of her dress, but most lay pooling on the table or seeping into my jeans. I did not move. I felt the hot water burning my thighs. It felt right to me. I saw the clock across the room. It was 9:55.
“Time to go to class,” I said. I heard it in my voice. It was suddenly flat. I had always told Natalie everything, and now, within twenty-four hours, I had done more, I saw, than it might be possible to repair between even the oldest of friends.
Briefly I thought about what it would be like if I asked Natalie to come with me somewhere, to go away together, move to another city, maybe open the clothing store she had always dreamed of. She was adjusting her dress and daubing off the coffee from where it had splashed onto the outside of her purse. “Remember riding bikes together?” I wanted to ask. “Remember that nerdy guy who lived on your corner and had a bell on his handlebars? How he used to ring it all the time?” I thought of having seen Mr. Forrest that morning. And suddenly saw Mrs. Castle talking to the police, her arms arching in the air as she spoke. Had I seen that? Or had she been calmly talking to them? Were they taking notes? Or just listening to her talk? I tried to remember the number of police cars that had been there. Two on my mother’s side of the street and one around the corner. The coroner’s van and the ambulance that had pulled up to Mrs. Leverton’s. I could call the hospital to find out what was wrong with her, but Jake wouldn’t approve of that. It would tip my hand.
“He’s really gotten to you,” I heard Natalie say.
I looked up at her. My vision was fuzzy around the edges, and her voice suddenly seemed a long way off.
“Well, it’s time to go get nude,” she said. She was reaching for my hand. We had said this phrase to each other for fifteen years.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m leading you, woman,” she said, “and we are going to sit down after this and talk men. I’ve got some news of my own.”
This helped. It made me feel good that Natalie planned to tell me about the contractor. It was what I used-that still-to-come confidence of my friend-to make my legs work and stand up.
We walked from the student union, down the sloping asphalt pathway that led from it to what was commonly called the Art Hut. I had never understood this nickname because, more than anything else, the building itself looked like a failed attempt at an industrial office complex. One that had never gotten past the first two floors and then had been cruelly sheared off and roofed with a patchwork of composite and tar. Inside, however, were the huts. Dark, warm corners in the large studios, where many of the art adjuncts would spend the night, as the conditions in the art building were often better than the places they rented in the surrounding neighborhoods-especially as winter came on. In the Art Hut, you could crank up the heat, and the bill went to the university. As we were walking through the doors and up the three stairs to the first-floor hallway, I thought that maybe I would come and live in the art building. Surely there had to be a blanketed warren to spare. What I hadn’t quite put together yet was that I was already churning. Half of my mind had now begun to plan an escape.
I saw Natalie retreat with a wave into Room 230-the Warm Room. I thought it was unfair that Natalie so often lucked out and got assigned to it, and had wondered if there was a silent favoritism shown toward my friend on the part of the room assigners at the start of every semester. I could see why. Neither Gerald, the other model, nor I brought muffins or wine over to the administrative offices. We never put Halloween pencils, with erasers shaped like counts or pumpkins or ghosts, in the secretary’s mailbox.
Gerald, I suddenly thought, was someone I did not want to see. He had lost his mother in a fire the previous year. She had gone to bed and left a cigarette lit, and the next thing Gerald knew he was falling to the floor and gasping for air. He barely got out alive, and his mother, they said, was dead from the smoke before she burned. Since then, when I ran into him, he would say, “My mother died,” in the middle of talking about the weather or about what poses we were doing for various classes. Natalie had always thought he was a little dim-witted, and this new habit seemed finally to have confirmed it, but as I walked down the hall to my own classroom, all I could think of was his genius. How did the firemen know it was her cigarette left burning on the bedside table?
“Hi, Helen. You look great!” one of the students greeted me. She was a girl named Dorothy, the best student in the class even if also an insufferable suck-up.
I could feel one or two other students take note of me then. They were adjusting their easels, which were battered and stained from years of undergraduate use.
I made my way to the three-panel screen, behind which I dressed or undressed. I noted only vaguely what was set out on the platform or pinned to the curtain that lay to its rear. There was a basin. There was a washcloth and comb. And on the curtain there was a large picture of an old-fashioned bathtub. It barely made an impact. I thought, Bathtub, and then I stepped behind the screen and sat down on the painted black wooden chair to take off my shoes and find my bamboo flip-flops to place on the floor.
Just as I had clung to the idea that Natalie was planning to tell me about the contractor, I now was helped along by the sharp scent of bleach coming off the former hospital gown hanging from a metal hanger on the back of the screen. The woman who did the laundry for the art building was afraid, Natalie and I both thought, of live-model disease. As a result, she used so much bleach that it quickly ate through the gowns we used and left them as thin as tissue paper after a very short time. But the scent of her fear, made palpable in the bleach, served to startle me to my task. I heard Tanner Haku, a Japanese printmaker who had ended up in Pennsylvania after twenty years of teaching around the globe, enter the room and greet his students. He began talking to them about individual style in the depiction of the nude.
I took my sweater off over my head and shoved it in the small hutch beneath the window beside me. I placed my shoes in the hutch below. I sat in the chair in my mother’s slip and my black jeans. On the other side of the screen, I heard Tanner Haku quoting Degas: “Drawing is not form; it is the way we see form.”
But he did not credit Degas. If he credited Degas, he would have to explain who Degas was and what Degas meant to him personally. It would be that much more of his soul he would have to sacrifice to the classroom.
I unbuttoned my jeans and stood to take them off.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I heard the reed-thin voice of a boy say.
I could feel the thud to Haku’s chest. After this many years, even though I was only the model, I could usually feel the thud to mine. But this boy’s confident assertion in the face of a hundred years of history made no impact on me now. In a way it made me see that no matter what happened, things would go on just as they had been, with or without me. Gerald would come, and he would say, “My mother died,” and the students would nod uncomfortably, but he would stand on the platform, and they would do slightly altered assignments-Man on a Pedestal instead of Woman at the Bath-and then they would turn them in and Tanner would listlessly grade them as he blasted opera and drank gin.
“And Helen will do a series of poses of women at their toilet,” he said.
I heard a few titters as I put my rolled-up jeans beside my sweater in the hutch. Ah, he is baiting them, I thought, and this gave me another jolt to stay on my feet.
As he explained what this meant, I knew he would be pointing to the basin and washcloth on the platform and to the picture of the old-fashioned tub. I knew I should hurry to disrobe. In just a moment, Tanner would say, “Helen, we’re ready for you.” But I stood in my mother’s slip. I felt the old silky fabric against my skin. I stepped out of my underpants and then undid my bra, pulling it through the spaghetti straps of the slip. Briefly I thought of Hamish waiting for me. Pictured him stretched out on the couch in Natalie’s living room. Then the vision changed, and his head was awash in blood. I put my underwear in the hutch just above my pants and sweater.
Everything about disrobing at Westmore had a rhythm. I walked into the classroom, said hello to a few of the students, glanced at the platform, and went behind the screen. I started undressing as the professor arrived, and continued as he began the patter that preceded my posing. Each article of clothing had its place in every room. In the room where Natalie posed, there was an old metal locker salvaged from the renovated gym. In my room, there were hutches and a painted straight-back chair. As I ran my hand over the material of the rose-petal-pink slip and felt my chest, my stomach, the slight curve of my hip, I thought of my mother. I thought of what a refuge Westmore had always been. I came, stripped away everything, and stood in front of the students, who drew me. I had never been quite so foolish as to believe that this meant they actually saw me, but the methodical disrobing, the stepping up on the carpeted platform, even the shiver in my body, often felt revolutionary to me.
I heard the students opening up their large sketch pads to a clean page. Tanner was coming to the end of his useless mini-lecture. I took the slip off over my head and stepped into my bamboo flip-flops. I placed the slip on the chair for just a moment and took the hospital gown from the hanger. Quickly, I covered myself.
“Helen, we’re ready for you.”
I saw the slip. It was my mother in the chair. I wanted to cry in horror, but I didn’t. Was I thinking self-preservation at that point? What was it that made me do what I did? As if it were one of the small objects in my house that I discarded, I balled up my mother’s slip in my hand and shoved it behind the hutches against the cinder-block wall. There it would stay, I knew, for a long time. Natalie had lost a ring there once, and months later a professor, bored to the point of rearranging the furniture in the middle of his own class, had found it.
I walked out from behind the platform, holding the hospital robe closed at the waist, my flip-flops and the shifting of the students the only sounds. I climbed the two stairs up to the carpeted platform, and Tanner handed me a little book. It was one with which Natalie and I were very familiar. Not much larger than my palm, it was part of a series of small art books from the late 1950s and had been kicking around the classroom for years. This one featured fifteen color plates of Degas and was titled simply Women Dressing.
“I’m good,” I said, keeping the book held out so Haku would take it away again.
“We’ll cycle then,” he said. “Give them a three-minute pose. Ten, Nine, Seven, Four, and ending on Two, which you can hold a bit longer if you like. You know the plates?”
“I do,” I said. Ordinarily I would have shot back their names in the order he’d asked me to do them, but I was not paying attention to him anymore. Instead, I set my energy toward Dorothy, the best student in the room. I decided that for Dorothy, I would wear my mother’s murder on my skin.
For my first pose, my back would be turned almost all the way to the classroom, so I pivoted around as Tanner stepped away from the platform. I saw the picture of the tub pinned to the curtain behind me, peeled back my robe and placed it in my right hand to pretend it was the towel in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself. I leaned, as she did, to the side and tilted my head down to a half profile. Immediately the room was filled with the sound of furious undergraduate sketching, as if they were cameras and I a subject to be caught in flight. Very few, like Dorothy, had the skill of consideration.
Three minutes was a concession to the students. Eventually, by the end of the semester, they would be working in two. But I was fine with much longer poses, and always had been. Staying completely still was something I’d taken to from the start.
“It’s like you were born to do this,” Jake once said.
He was my teacher then. He was my Tanner Haku, and for all I knew, I was his Dorothy. But I did not have Dorothy’s talent.
“You have such lovely skin,” Jake had said.
And I clung to it. Almost as if, if he said it again, something would break inside me. And he did. He said it when he noticed I had grown so cold that I was almost shivering. He’d come over to me-I had been lying down and had a cramp in my side-and had stood, watching me. I worried every moment that he was going to say, “You know, I was wrong. You’re hideous. This was all a mistake.”
“You’re turning blue with cold,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, keeping the chatter out of my teeth as best I could. I was eighteen and had never seen a man nude, much less been nude in front of one.
“Relax,” he said.
He went behind the screen in the studio and threw a blanket over the top of it. It landed on me. The scratchy wool was like an assault, but I was too cold to complain.
“I’ve turned the kettle on,” he said. “I’ll make tea. I’ve got some ramen noodles if you want.”
Ramen noodles as aphrodisiac. I had asked Jake later if he had known he would make love to me.
“I had no idea. When you walked in in that silly pink suit, I almost laughed at you.”
“It was coral,” I corrected him. It had taken all the money I had.
“When you took it off,” he said, “I fell in love.”
“So it was a good outfit?”
“When it hit the floor,” he said.
I was huddled in the scratchy blanket when he returned with two mugs of tea.
“Thank you, Helen,” he said, and placed the mug by me. I remember I was still too cold to even reach for it. “You did an extraordinary job today.”
I was silent.
“And your skin,” he said. “It’s lovely, really.”
I started crying. Something about how cold I was and how much snow there was piling up outside and how far away I was from home and from my mother. He put down his tea and asked if he could hold me.
“Um-hmm,” I said.
He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my head on his shoulder. I was still crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
How could I say what seemed ludicrous even to me? After having dreamed of getting away from her, I missed my mother. It haunted me during that first semester like an ache.
“I’m just so cold,” I said.
“Change!” Haku barked.
The students put their final touches to what was most obvious in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself but not to what many of them were still too self-conscious to sketch-my ass. Whenever I looked at the drawings from freshman classes, the attention to detail was always focused on the props. On the one occasion I modeled for the Senior Center, there was no such fear. Both the women and the men dove right in, knowing time was limited.
“Woman at Her Toilet!” Tanner announced proudly. There was no laughter now. The students were serious, and I, dropping the towel née robe onto the platform, leaned over the metal basin that had been left upon a chair and took the sea sponge in my right hand. I pivoted now toward the classroom and cupped my breasts in my right arm as I reached the sponge up under my left armpit, as if I were washing myself.
I had always found this pose awkward. It forced me to look toward my armpit and made me all too aware of my own body. As the years went by, I could see more sunspots on my chest and shoulders, and the resilient skin with which I had been blessed had slackened no matter what inverted poses I was able to do in yoga. Flexibility did not, in the end, trump gravity. I lived on the borderline between a Venus just holding it together and Whistler’s mother in the buff. I thought suddenly, as the dry sea sponge scraped against the tender skin of my armpit, that if I were less flexible, less in shape, I would not have been able to commit either of the crimes of which I now stood guilty. Lifting and hauling my mother would not have been possible. Being attractive to Hamish, unthinkable.
“Helen?” I heard Tanner say. He stood close to the platform. I could smell the garlic capsules he took every day.
“Yes?” I did not break my pose.
“You seem to be shaking. Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Focus,” he said. “Two more on this one,” he announced to the class.
Five years ago and very late at night, Tanner had wanted to draw the skeleton of a rabbit he’d seen in a dusty showcase of the old Krause Biology Building. He had taken me to an art opening, and the evening had ended with us stumbling around without a flashlight in a building that had yet to be renovated. We found many a display case but not the right one, and we had frozen like misbehaving children when we heard the creak of the exit door below us, and Cecil, the elderly security guard, calling into the darkness, “Is anyone there?”
During the renovation of Krause the following year, I walked by and saw bones sticking up out of a Dumpster. Not caring who might see me, I hiked my skirt up and climbed onto some cinder blocks that had been lowered by crane and were still bundled in steel ribbons, so I could see inside the Dumpster. There lay the rabbit skeleton on its side.
It sat now, as pristine as I could have hoped, as the centerpiece of a collection of found objects that Tanner had placed on the long, high windowsill that ran the length of the room. It was the first thing I saw sometimes when I entered the space-the delicate bones of the rabbit next to rocks of various shapes and sizes, a God’s eye made by a student’s child, and an endless collection of sea glass he picked up on his solo journeys to the Jersey Shore.
Now I felt the menacing bones of this rabbit behind me and could not strike the image of my mother rotting in layers until she too was bone. There was something in the idea of it, this slow molting toward yellowed calcium that must be pinned together to prevent collapse, that I found both frightening and comforting. The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. I wanted to laugh in my awkward pose at the inescapable nature of it. Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one’s whole life. Had I thought it would be simple? That her substance, demolished, would equal myself avenged? I had made her laugh by playing the fool. I told her stories. I paraded around as a fool at the mercy of other fools, and by doing this I guaranteed that she did not miss anything by choosing to turn her back on the outside world.
By giving up my life to her on a global basis, I bought small moments away. I could read the books I liked. I could grow the flowers I wished. I could drive to Westmore and stand nude on a platform. Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.
“Change!” Haku barked. I could hear in his tone an admonition to work harder on my pose.
A godsend, this one, after the awkwardness of the last. I sat down sideways on the chair, knowing that the students would have to imagine the edge of the tub beneath me. How my ass would be rounder instead of squared off by the seat of the chair. Again, I reached for the hospital gown and used it as a towel. After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck always allowed for a quick massaging squeeze or two to my shoulders before I grew still.
I heard a few students grumble about a lack of time. How they wanted the poses to be longer. There was one boy I particularly disliked, even if I knew myself to be uncharitable. When I was introducing myself in the first week and telling them about myself, describing my daughters-where they lived and what they did-the boy had said, “So you’re, like, as old as my mother.” I had answered, because my pride knew no danger, that I was forty-nine. His two-word response, I told my mother, laughing, was “Vomit city.”
“I tried to seduce Alistair Castle once,” she had said to me. I stopped and stared. Early in her eighties, she’d begun to tell me things I’d never known. How she was touched inappropriately by a friend of her father’s. How she had stopped having what she called “relations” with my father after his accident. How she didn’t care much for Emily, though she enjoyed Sarah’s failed audition stories. “Imagine having to audition to be a waitress,” she’d said, loving that in New York a restaurant job could be so competitive it involved callbacks.
With each of these unexpected revelations, I grew numb, an art I had perfected over time in order to extract the truth behind the flashes.
“And how did your seduction go?” I had asked my mother, my head spinning with the pain this must have caused my father if he’d known.
“Vomit city!” my mother responded, looking into the empty fireplace, whose bricks were painted black. “Marlene Dietrich had it right,” she said. “For about ten years, you can glue rubber bands to your head and pull your skin tight, but after that, it’s about hiding out. At least then you have mystique.”
I wanted to tell her that in terms of mystique, she’d won the lottery. From Billy Murdoch to her blanketed escapades, her mystique was bulletproof, even if it was more about being creepy and strange than unattainable.
She looked from the fireplace to me. She assessed. “You should get plastic surgery. I would if I were your age.”
“No, thanks.”
“Faye Dunaway,” she said.
“Tits, Mom,” I said. “If I get anything done, I’m going to get huge monster tits. I’ll serve dinner on them, and you can eat off the right tit and I’ll eat off the left.”
“Helen,” she said, “that’s disgusting.” But I had made her laugh.
I stood to draw the blinds before turning on her PBS shows for the evening. As I lowered the blinds all the way and then went to the television in the opposite corner, my mother landed her spear: “Besides, Manny and I were talking, and we both think it’s your face that needs work. Your body is still fine.”
What I wanted to say was “I’m glad to know Manny wants to fuck my headless body.” Instead I said, “It looks like Wall $treet Week has been preempted by Live at the Boston Pops.”
Days later, the rest of her story came out.
“Hilda Castle was in the hospital, having a hysterectomy,” my mother said. “I offered myself.”
The phrase repelled me.
“You what?”
“I tried to seduce him.”
I was holding the large bath towels I used to mask her way to the car, and she was delaying us as she always did when we had to go to the doctor.
I stood just inside the front door and unfolded the first towel, draping it across her shoulders like a shawl. This was the backup. If, for some reason, the towel that was protecting her head and face should fall, she could quickly grab the shawl towel and replace it.
She peered into my eyes, the algae green of the towel darkening her papery skin.
“Does Sarah fuck?”
I knew enough to ignore her.
“We are late for your date with the machine,” I said. My mother was scheduled for an MRI and was deathly afraid. For weeks beforehand, I had arrived to find her lying on the floor of the living room with a ticking alarm clock by her head. “What are you doing?” I’d ask her. “Practicing,” she’d say.
Going to the doctor was one thing I could not do by proxy for my mother. It was her body they needed to poke and prod, not mine. Twice the man my mother still called “the new doctor,” though he had taken over the office of my parents’ original physician in the 1980s, had encouraged her to try a sedative. It was an attempt to make leaving the house not so excruciating for her. She had nodded her head as if she found this sage advice. I watched her as she creased the dutifully written prescription once down the middle and then continued folding it over and over again. By the time we reached the car to head home again, the prescription would be the size of her thumbnail, even smaller than the notes I remembered finding in Sarah’s room when she was a teenager. “Mindy screwed Owen under the bleachers,” Sarah’s notes said. “Xanax 10 mgs. As needed,” my mother’s said.
As her daughter, I could fill her prescriptions, and though she would not medicate herself, I often popped a pill before I had to wrestle her into the car. I was sanguine about it-if, by taking a sedative, I crashed the car and killed one or both of us, life would be easier as a result.
“Emily must fuck because she’s married,” my mother said, but by the end of the sentence I’d put the towel over her head and muffled the sound. It was actually better if she got onto a topic like this. Her aggression was strength and therefore preferable to the alternative, which was her moaning in fear as I guided her down the front steps and toward the car.
I had done this too many times to worry about what the neighbors thought. I learned from Manny that many of the newer neighbors assumed my mother was a burn victim and that the blankets and towels were meant to hide her scars.
“But she’s a really nice old lady,” he’d said. “I was surprised.”
“Right,” I’d said, and then Manny went down to the basement for some unidentified chore for which I’d have to figure out what to pay him.
“Alistair Castle just stared at me,” my mother said as she sat next to me, under her towels. “He stopped coming around.”
“And Hilda started,” I said.
“He rejected her after the operation. We had that in common.”
“A hysterectomy?”
“No, sexual rejection,” my mother said. She had lifted the towel up just enough to make sure she was heard.
“Got it,” I said.
“Change!” Tanner barked.
I heard the students growing restless. Three poses was usually the max of their attention spans. The adjustment for Woman Washing in Her Bath was minimal. I had to lean farther over and replace the hospital-gown towel with the sea sponge, which I would hold at the back of my neck. My shoulders ached now but in ways I was long familiar with. Quickly, I glanced up to find Dorothy at her easel. She stared intently back at me.
Jake had come from a family that prayed. Emily had taken up the call by covering all bases: New Age spiritualism, Christian revivalism, and an ecumenical inclusiveness that bordered on the sublime.
I thought of my father tending the sheep in a graveyard for a church he had never been in. Churches spooked him, he said. “I prefer it out here, with the dead.”
In the weeks following his suicide, I had freighted that sentence with more meaning than it had most likely deserved. I did this with everything. I remembered the particularly sweet kisses he had laid on the heads of Emily and Sarah in the days before. I was struck by how all his suits were hung perfectly in the closet, with one Jake had complimented freshly dry-cleaned and ready to wear. And I went searching in his workshop for a photo I had found there as a girl.
It was still in his tool drawer. I stared at the boy who would become my father and who would kill himself in the end. How far back did it go?
I had held on to the picture as I dialed Jake’s number in Wisconsin. His work was just beginning to garner attention. He was in the midst of applying for a Guggenheim to travel abroad. He had only recently left the temporary faculty housing we’d shared and was renting a house outside Madison-the carriage house of a mansion on a lake.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
“I can’t.”
I had managed to blurt out the words, not yet able to use the more exact word of “suicide.” So Jake described the water on the lake. How the back door of his house opened onto a short flight of concrete stairs that led directly to the water; how, depending on the season, the water came to within inches of his door.
“Where are the girls?” he asked.
“With Natalie,” I said. “I’m in the kitchen. Mom’s upstairs.”
I clutched the cord of the phone so tightly that my nails turned white.
“Say anything,” Jake said. “Just talk.”
I moved over to stand in front of the window. I could see my father’s workshop and the Levertons’ backyard.
“Mrs. Leverton’s grandson was outside, weeding the flagstones,” I said. “It was Mrs. Leverton who called the police.”
I felt the clutch in my throat but strangled the sob. I was blindingly angry and confused. I hated everyone.
“I thought of him this morning, once, just a half thought really. I was driving the girls to the Y. Emily got her Flying Fish Badge yesterday, and I heard music coming from the car behind me when I stopped at the light. It was Vivaldi, the sort of overdramatic stuff that could make my father smile. Mr. Forrest would know the exact piece.”
I dragged the red step stool away from the wall and put it in the middle of the kitchen. I could sit there and look out through the dining room and across the street.
“He used my grandfather’s old pistol,” I said.
I could hear, if I let myself, a momentary crackle on the line or the hum of Jake’s breath-the baffled noise of the distance between us. I told him everything I knew, how my father had looked when I’d come in the door; how my mother had seemed almost erased, I had such difficulty focusing on her; how the police and the neighbors had been so decorous, so kind, and all I’d wanted to do was rip off each face and throw it, fleshy and wet, onto the floor where my father lay.
Finally, when I had talked for a very long time, Jake spoke. “I know he loved you.”
My mouth hung open. I thought of the vodka in my freezer at home. I wondered what medications-sedatives and pain-killers-might lurk upstairs in the bathroom cabinets and the dresser drawers.
“How is this proof of love?” I asked.
Jake had no answer for me.
I thought of the Catholic minister. My father told me that the minister had never gotten his name right. “He called my father David instead of Daniel when he saw him tending the sheep.”
“Helen?” It was Tanner. He was close to me.
I heard commotion at the back of the classroom. Painfully, I sat up from my bending position on the chair.
“Here,” he said, “put this on.”
He draped the papery hospital gown over me. “There are men here to see you,” he said.
“Men?”
“Police, Helen.”
Over Tanner’s shoulder, I saw into the back of the room. Standing just inside the door, and trying not to look in any one direction for all the drawings of my nude body they might see, were two men in uniform. Beside them, just as ramrod straight but in a sport coat and slacks, was another man. He had thick white hair and a mustache. He looked once around the room, his eyes coming to rest on me.
“Class,” Tanner announced, “we’ll end early and pick up next time.”
The easels jostled while sketch pads were collected and charcoal was put down. Knapsacks were opened and cell phones were turned on, emitting songs and beeps and whistles to let the students know that yes, just as they’d thought, something more exciting had been going on while they’d been locked inside the classroom.
I thought of a handmade felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent me in Wisconsin one year in the middle of July. It was meticulous in every detail, from the sewn-on beads in the shapes of ornaments, no two alike, to the loop at the top, which had been braided from silk floss. The card, tucked inside the box, had said, “I made this. Don’t waste your life.”
As the students filtered out, the man in the sport jacket came up to the platform. “Helen Knightly,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Robert Broumas, Phoenixville police.” His hand hung in the air, and I motioned toward my own hands, which were clasping the gown in front of me.
“Yes?” I said.
“I’m afraid we have some disturbing news.”
“Yes?” I thought about how to prepare for it, what to say. The surprise party without the surprise was coming, and I had no idea how to behave.
“A neighbor of your mother’s found her this morning,” he said.
I stared at him and then at Tanner.
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s dead, Mrs. Knightly. We have a few questions to ask.”
I could not form an expression of any kind. He watched me intently, and I could do nothing but look back at him. To rise or leave the platform felt cowardly to me, an admission of my guilt.
If I could only have willed myself to faint, that small slice of oblivion would have been welcome, but I could not. I had wanted to faint upon seeing my father, but instead I had heard my mother’s voice. “She’ll help me clean up,” she’d said to the police officer nearest her, and not knowing what else to do, I had gone straight to the kitchen, filled his old hospital sick bowl with water, and returned to the hallway to find my mother standing barefoot in my father’s blood.
“He finally did it,” she said. “I never thought he would.”
I had wanted to hit her, but I was aware of the officers watching us, and in my hands I held the bowl.