One Saturday morning Tillie took her old wooden easel out to the back yard, under the pomegranate tree, which was beginning to lose its fruit. She had tried eating some of the seeds, but the tree hadn't been watered enough to make them juicy. The ground was littered with broken shells from previous years, the color of dried blood, the insides pocked from their former bounty.
The easel carried like a suitcase. Unfolding its long legs, which had been left compact for years, Tillie felt as though she were releasing a yogi from a meditative pose. She raised the framework that supported the canvas and slid open the drawer where her old tubes of paint were nestled. These would still be perfectly good; however, she thought she'd use the paints Hooper had given her. It was the least she could do. He'd bought her a new palette as well, but the clean surface was too austere. Rooting about in the office closet, she found her old one, mottled and bumpy around the edges from countless smearings of old paint, and a little dusty. One of her professors, she remembered, had once told the class not to worry about thoroughly cleaning their palettes, not to scrape all the paint off after every session. “Let it build up layers, like an archaeological site. It will take on a life of its own.”
Hooper would be at rehearsal for another couple hours. She set up her palette as she had been taught years ago. From the eight small tubes, she gently squeezed out paint in dollops across the top and down the side of the board. The colors gleamed, thick and rich like pudding, like blobs of colored mud. She was intentionally more generous than she needed to be. Hooper had bought her a little bottle of linseed oil, which she poured into a metal cup that clipped onto the palette. The gumtine, which smelled interestingly of astringent orange, went into another cup. The ritual unfolded more easily than she had expected.
She was going to work from a photograph. Her professors would have discouraged that: photos flattened contours and reduced the potentiality of movement and the sense of texture. However, the composition of this one appealed to her. Cosmo lay on top of her doghouse, the roof of which was slightly pitched, so that her back end was raised up and her haunches and legs were splayed at odd angles. The dog filled the frame. Studying the photo for several minutes, Tillie noted the way her fur fell in a part along her back, the whorls on her chest, the fine puppy hair on her ears that shone in the sun.
With a thinned ocher she made a sketch. Planning to make this a gift to Hooper, she envisioned a kind of cartoon dog, something that might make him laugh. She squeezed out two big blobs of cadmium yellow, light and medium, because she knew already she would call this Yellow Dog. Cosmo wasn't yellow, of course. She was sort of a strawberry blond, more auburn in some spots and whiter in others. Someone once called her taffy, which seemed fitting, an old-fashioned color. Nancy Drew, Tillie recalled, was a titian blond, a refined sort of color. But here Cosmo would be explicitly yellow, as yellow as a Goofy's floppy shirt or Dick Tracy's coat, maybe with bluish shadows for definition around the head and haunches.
She finished the sketch and stepped back. Loosely defined, the dog floated before her, the color of earth. Something about it was off, but she couldn't identify what. She dabbled some more. Against her better judgment—for she knew she should start with the background—she dipped a brush into the cad yellow and slapped it on the dog's chest. More along the dog's back. Random dabs on the face, the ears: it was flailing nonsense. Suddenly panicked, she tossed her brush on the easel. She had no idea how to do this.
She heard Barry's back door slide open. As he stepped outside and pulled a blue tee shirt on over his head, she picked up a rag and wiped the yellow off her canvas. He hadn't noticed her yet. He stretched with his full body, arching backward; then he put his hands on his hips and watched a noisy mockingbird in the fig tree.
Quickly, Tillie took a clean filbert brush and dunked it in gumtine, then marine blue. With this thin mixture she made a gesture drawing of Barry, in simple, flowing lines that blended from blue to olive green. He stood quietly for several moments, as though listening, then abruptly turned on his heel, went into his house, and re-emerged.
She was wary, expecting him to stop and talk, but he strode past her with a cheery, “Hi Tillie!” Waving a letter in his hand, he left by the front gate.
***
Donna pulled up to her aunt's house and her heart sank. Purse in hand, Ellen was just opening the door of her old Monte Carlo; apparently she had forgotten Joey was coming over today. Joey leaped out of Donna's car called out a greeting. His Grandma stopped short, and in that moment of slight hesitation Donna read annoyance.
“Hi, Aunt El. You're not trying to ditch us, are you?”
“Of course not,” Ellen said gruffly. “It just slipped my mind that you were coming.”
“I'm sorry; I should have reminded you. It's just that another waitress asked me to cover for her at lunch today so she can go to a wedding.”
Ellen shut her car door. “Yes, I remember now. I did promise.”
“Where were you off to?”
“Angela just called me. She seemed in a state.”
“About what?”
“She wouldn't tell me. You know Angela, she loves a crisis.”
“Well, if it's serious, then you should go,” said Donna.
“And what about Joey? No, I'll call her. She's probably over whatever it was by now anyway.” She went into the house.
Donna hated to come between her aunt and her friend Angela, but who else would look after Joe? Crash was too irresponsible, Walt would be off with his girlfriend, Beth was out of town, and Joey didn't know her other friends well enough. She couldn't ask her mother, who would see this as proof of Donna's irresponsibility. There was Tillie next door... but she couldn't impose.
“Is she mad?” asked Joey. “I don't know, honey. Maybe.”
“Can I come to work with you? Donna squatted and gave him a hug.
Just then the gate on the other side of Tillie and Hooper's yard opened and Barry appeared. His hair was disheveled; he must have just gotten up. Or maybe he'd been up a while and was busy writing the letter he slipped into the mailbox. He raised the red flag and greeted them.
“Here to see your aunt, Joey?”
“Yeah, but she wants to go someplace.”
“She was on her way to see a friend,” said Donna. “But she's supposed to look after me,” Joey said. “She just forgot, Joey. She doesn't usually.”
“Do you need a sitter?” Barry asked. Donna was caught off-guard. “No, Ellen said she'd stay.”
“I can look after him.”
“Oh, no. I couldn't.”
“Sure, why not? I'm not doing anything today. What do you say, Joey?”
“Yeah!” Joey said. “Okay, Mom?”
“Oh, my God, Barry, you'd be doing us such a big favor. I hate to impose on Aunt El all the time, and I really do need to get to work. Oh, but—no, I couldn't. Never mind.”
“I'd like to. We'll have fun.”
“Are you sure? Absolutely?”
“Absolutely.”
“He'll want lunch, though, in an hour or so.”
“Peanut butter sandwich okay?”
Joey shouted his agreement and Donna tried once more to give Barry a chance to back out, but he insisted.
“Okay, then,” Donna said. “I'll go tell Ellen. She shouldn't be more than a couple hours, so when she gets home you can bring Joey over. I'll tell her that. I'll be back around four.” She could have kissed him, but instead thanked him effusively, admonished Joey to be good, and ran into the house.
“Well, buddy,” said Barry. “You and me. Wanna play some whiffle ball out back?”
“I don't know how.”
“I'll show you.” They started walking back together. “Hold on a sec, Joey.” Barry went back to the mailbox, lowered the flag, and pulled out his mother's letter, which he'd received just yesterday. He was so happy he started to skip, and Joey skipped along, too.
***
Daydreaming during the rehearsal, Hooper was thinking about his first performance in elementary school, as a snowflake in the Christmas show. How exciting it had been to look out into the dark auditorium, cavernous and murmuring with adult voices; how beautiful to be on a stage full of papery snowflakes who whispered and shuffled their feet, without any music to guide them for a few moments; and how sublime, finally, to be a small pool of light in the galaxy. Even though that was their only performance, he wanted to do it again and again. When he said so to his mother, she smiled and said, “I know.”
He wondered if his parents had been happy. They had seemed fond of each other, but because they had died seven years ago, it was getting harder to picture how they had been as a couple. As a kid—even as a teenager—he had been fairly oblivious that his parents were autonomous beings with personal histories, a woman and man who loved each other. When he thought about his mother, what first came to mind was that she sighed a lot. It was hardly a charitable memory, but it stuck. If he asked what was wrong, she would simply say, “Oh, nothing,” as though unaware she'd made any noise at all.
She didn't seem to know how to relax, but had to be doing something useful like cleaning the kitchen, folding clothes, or paying the bills. She would say things like, “I just cleaned the house and now it's dirty already,” or, “I just did laundry and now the hamper's full again,” but if anyone offered to help her she would refuse. At dinner she'd scarcely sit down before she popped up again to fetch a carton of milk or more napkins. Trying to please her, Hooper completed his chores and even did extra work, but although she was appreciative, he never felt like it was enough.
He wanted to remember another side of his mom, though, the one who would take him with her to the garden shop in the spring. Here she was lively and chatty, exclaiming over the flowers, naming them all. Spring in Buffalo came late; it was more like early summer before things started warming up. As soon as she could, she'd putter around outside, wearing, as Hooper used to tease her, an eccentric lady's outfit: a pair of chinos that were baggy and too short, one of Dad's old shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and a tattered straw hat. Living in the city, they didn't have much space to work with, so she squeezed impatiens, ageratum, and stock among the daffodils and tulips in the front yard, and carefully trained some climbing roses over a trellis at the side of the house. Around back was a hedge of lilac bushes, white peonies with shaggy, old-fashioned blossoms, and a forsythia that burst into brilliant yellow. She also tended a flotilla of whiskey barrels, full of tomatoes, squash, marigolds, and herbs; she got Dad to wheel them into the middle of the yard for the best sun. There wasn't much room for the boys to play—thus the tree house in the elm.
This was the mother Hooper had thought he took after: she who loved plants and working with the earth. But lately he caught himself sighing for no particular reason, and he wondered if it was a genetic propensity. More likely, he was working too hard. Tillie had said so, too. He had a couple new clients for yard maintenance—nothing challenging, but the extra driving around in traffic sucked up a lot of his time. He should think about hiring a college kid to help out. That wouldn't solve everything, however. He'd always thrived on hard work, and the cooler fall weather usually energized him, but lately he felt lethargic, as though he had some disease for which lazing on the couch were the only remedy. One day, while trimming someone's mesquite, he sat down and stared up at the branches for a long time, like an old man who wonders why they keep serving him reconstituted potatoes for dinner, and forgets what fresh food is like.
When one of the actors asked him a question, he had to repeat it under his breath three times to understand what it meant and where he was.
***
Tillie wiped away her oil sketch. The rag was smeared with yellow, green and blue, and now her hands were, too. What a waste. A friend of hers had once remarked that he avoided getting discouraged by planning to paint enough bad paintings to fill up a football field. “I just say, Well, there's another one for the football field.” Tillie wasn't yet so charitable with herself. All that unused paint on her palette. Grabbing another rag, she wiped the board off so it wouldn't harden to unworkable blobs. She quickly cleaned her hands and brushes in the kitchen, then tucked the palette and canvas away in the shed to dry before storing them again in the closet.
As she closed up the easel, she noticed a piece of lined yellow paper on the ground, the kind she used for notes in college. It must have fallen out of the drawer. Taking it into the house, she unfolded it and met with her own handwriting. It was an excerpt from an interview with the painter Richard Diebenkorn; she recognized it immediately, for she used to read it over and over.
Of course you can't paint. Nobody can paint.
I can't paint. You just go ahead and do it anyway.
It is the marvel of the enterprise that you
set out to do something utterly impossible...
You stand there putting it on and scraping it off
until you achieve the impossible. That's how it works.
She'd copied that out of a journal—who knew how long ago? Years. Eons. Another life. It had been inspiring and romantic to her then, when the attempt to do the impossible had seemed like an adventure, an ethic, a choice. Now, she thought, letting herself succumb to tears in the bedroom, the impossible was only that—impossible—and for her it meant failure. Her sorrow was that it was so mundane.
Hooper sat listlessly through rehearsal, letting the actors stumble along without his usual prodding and teasing. It all seemed so tedious. He didn't hang around afterward to chat, even though a few of them invited him out for a beer. On the drive home, he looked forward to being with Tillie, reaching out to embrace her, settling into her reassuring presence. He thought he might talk about trifling things, like how Dad used to take him for a hot dog at Louie's, or how his mother bought him batteries for his flashlight so he could read under the covers at night, even though he wasn't supposed to. He might even seek her encouragement to call his brother.
When he walked in the kitchen, though, he saw that her eyes were red. He asked what was wrong, and she said, “Nothing.”
He sighed. “Tell me.”
She balked at his peremptory tone. “I'm just tired, I guess.”
He wasn't up to this right now. She might give him a clue if he pressed her, but he hadn't the will. Tillie asked about rehearsal; he answered briefly. He didn't give a crap about rehearsal or the theater either. Leaning against the counter, arms across his chest, he watched as she assembled a pan of lasagna for dinner.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“No, thanks.” At last she moved to give him a hug. They both lingered, needing contact, then released each other and turned away.
At odds, he turned on a football game and put his feet up on the couch. There was nothing he liked about football. All that thwarted shoving back and forth, the grotesquely bulky bodies, the potential for maiming. Tom had played football in high school, which was antithetical to his otherwise calm, reserved character. He played quarterback, no less, and Hooper had witnessed him making some amazingly graceful plays. The football on the TV gradually metamorphosed into a telephone that the players passed, fumbled, and kicked, and he resolved to call Tom if someone made a touchdown. But the game was soon over. Turning off the TV with the remote, he lay back on the couch, opened the newspaper, and dozed off.
***
After work, Donna stopped first at her aunt's house and was surprised that Barry had not returned Joey. Ellen said she had been home since twelve-thirty.
Donna felt her gut lurch. How stupid she was to abandon Joey like that. She hardly knew Barry: how could she have trusted him with her one beautiful boy? After the lunch rush, she'd thought about calling to check on them, but she hadn't asked Barry for his number and couldn't remember his last name, if she ever knew it. And then she just forgot. Her impulse now was to tear out the door, but she didn't want her aunt to know how anxious she was.
“How's Angela?” she asked. “Still in crisis?”
Ellen shook her head. “She's too much. Sometimes I wonder why we're even friends.”
“What'd she do?”
“Oh, she's got these plans for tonight, but she wouldn't tell me what. Just that she had to look nice and needed something new to wear. She wanted to go shopping at Margaret's Place for something fancy, but I talked her out of it because I know she has a closet full of nice things. So I sat there with her while she tried on every outfit she owns, I swear.”
Donna laughed, but her aunt was still annoyed.
“Seemed like hours. She was digging into clothes way at the back of her closet, things that fit her twenty years ago. Then she started on the cedar chest, and I'd had enough. I said, Call me when you've decided something.”
“Good move.”
“Well, she makes me crazy. Acting like a schoolgirl with no sense. It's got to be her brother-in-law. One of her former husband's brothers. She told me she ran into him.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, he's all right, I suppose. But I'm afraid she's going to do something foolish and regret it.”
“Love's a funny thing,” said Donna. Ellen answered with a kind of grunt. “Well, I'm going to go pick up Joey now. Shall we come for dinner tomorrow?”
“If you don't mind a casserole.”
“That'd be great. I'll bring a salad.” Donna kissed her on the cheek and left. She couldn't open Tillie's gate fast enough. Racing across the yard to Barry's house, she stood for a moment outside the sliding glass door and peered in. One adult, one small person. Now she could breathe.
“Hi, Mom!” Joey shouted as she knocked on the door and slid it open.
“What's going on?” She tried to sound nonchalant, but when she picked him up, she hugged so tightly he squirmed.
“We're making tracks!” he said as she set him down. “Come on, Mom! You do it.”
The floor of the living room (which, Donna could tell, also served as a bedroom, the couch being a futon) was covered with sheets of blank newsprint, and on the paper were small blue footprints and big wide orange footprints. Joey's bare feet, cheeks and clothes were splashed with paint.
“He got some paint on your skirt, I'm afraid,” Barry pointed out.
“It's okay. This is so great, really.” Her relief burst out as enthusiasm. “How'd you come up with this?”
“My mom and sister and I used to do it on snowy days in Minnesota. Where I grew up. Well, of course it's not snowing today, but—”
“Take your shoes and socks off, Mom! See, you step in there.” Joey pointed to a couple of aluminum pans with a thin layer of paint in them. “Then you walk around like this. You can do hands, too.”
“I see. Where'd you get all this paper?”
“They're end rolls from the newspaper. You can go down to the Star and pick them up. I use them in labs sometimes, for students to illustrate their experiments or do graphs or whatever.”
Donna kicked off her thick-soled shoes and hitched up her skirt to remove her black stockings.
“Let me pour some more paint,” Barry said. “I'm afraid I only have two pans, though, so blue and orange are it.”
“Let's mix them!” Joey said.
“Joey, when you mix blue and orange, I think you get brown,” she said, but he had already planted a foot in one pan and then dipped it in the other. He stepped on the paper.
“Neat.” He crouched down to look closely. “It's all...” Not having the words, he wiggled his body and snaked his arms back and forth.
“Swirly?” she said. “Squiggly?”
“Yeah. Come look. Look, Barry.” All three squatted like anthropologists on a dig. The footprint—so small a foot, Donna thought, to be carrying around such a creature—was marbled and rippled in orange, blue, and, when they looked closely, brown.
“It's beautiful.” She glanced up to see that Barry's face was not six inches from hers, and he was grinning a shy goofy grin.