Art on Fire (5 page)

Vivian chose two clingy blouses to try on, both of them a happy and youthful size eight. She could not refrain from prancing back and forth across the wide room in her underpants and blouse, frowning in the wall-to-wall mirrors and tugging to no avail at a threadbare blanket of flesh across her middle.

The dressing room clerk wore a Danskin top that accentuated—rather cheaply, Vivian thought—her eager, young nipples.

“Nothing today,” Vivian handed her the blouses, then zigzagged through the busy aisles to Linens. She flipped through crunchy, plastic packages marked for clearance and squeezed into the formica bins until she—finally!—stumbled on an affordable lavender bedspread onto which were printed swollen heads of wisteria connected by leafless brown branches.

On her way to the register she was distracted by a soft terrycloth robe, virgin white, wrapped around a mannequin. She pulled the price tag out from inside the sleeve and gasped, incredulous. The point, she rebuked herself, was to buy for Francesca. Isabella had not asked for a bathrobe.

Vivian stopped the car just shy of the garage, beeped twice, then held down the horn until Francesca appeared in the doorway. “C'mere!” she called.

Francesca skipped down the stoop, then hesitated when she reached bottom. She walked toward her mother slowly, then stopped and fingered her initials in the dirty hood.

Vivian held out a shopping bag.

“What is it?” Francesca asked, passing the parcel from hand to hand. She lifted it to her ear, then wrapped it into a tight package.

“Surprise,” Vivian shrugged. “Go inside and open it. But wash your hands first.”

After Francesca had gone, Vivian removed the other bag from the front seat and carried it by its sophisticated wire handles. She followed at a distance into the antiseptic kitchen, then put the second package on a kitchen chair and tucked the chair into the table. She took a new pack of Larks from the potholder drawer, slapped the top several times on the counter, expertly unraveled the plastic belt, opened the foil corner, and shook a cigarette from its tight space among the others in the dark, red pack.

Francesca returned from the bathroom with moist hands. She never bothered drying them, something Vivian found crass and, inexplicably, unhygienic. But she wasn't going to carp at Francesca now, when the point was to make her happy.

Francesca unfolded the heavy bag, splitting her gaze between its contents and the handles of the other package, which peeked over the tabletop. She reached inside the bag and felt stiff plastic wrapped around a rectangular shape.

“Jesus, Francesca, it's not going to bite you,” said Vivian.

Francesca pulled the bedspread out from its sleeve and looked at it. “But it's not purple.”

“It's lavender,” said Vivian, prepared for Francesca's lack of enthusiasm. “Unfold it.”

Francesca shook open the big square of fabric, gritty as sugar. “I asked for a purple bedspread.”

“Purple is not a suitable color for a bedspread, Francesca. Why don't you give it a chance? Try it out on your bed and see how it looks. I think it'll be lovely at night with all your glowing stars.” Vivian smiled eagerly.

Francesca attempted to refold the bedspread into its original, impossible dimensions. She gave up and stuffed it into the bag. “What's in that one?”

“Never mind,” said Vivian. She rested her cigarette in the cradle
of the ashtray and pulled a head of iceberg lettuce from the fridge. She tore off the cellophane. When next she looked up, Francesca was in the hall, clutching the wire handles of the fancy package. For a quick moment, their eyes met.

“Francesca,” Vivian said. “I'm warning you. Put that down.”

Two at a time, Francesca ran up the stairs, her ears hot as tiny burners. The door to the attic closed behind her, the latch clicked securely.

Vivian followed. “I'll count to three. One . . . Two . . .” She ran up the stairs and rapped on the attic door, then jiggled the latch up and down, kicking at the bottom panel of the door with the hard tip of her shoe. “Goddammit. Francesca, open the door.”

Francesca held the gleaming robe high in front of her. It smelled clean, felt cool as fresh snow. This is how it would feel to be Isabella, she thought, imagining her mother spotting the robe, after she'd already purchased the bedspread on sale. The beautiful white robe off to the left, lit a clean blue by the filtered afternoon sun, draped over a stately mannequin.

She pulled off her Captain Kangaroo sweatshirt and the blue T-shirt she wore underneath, dropped her rust-colored corduroys to the ground, yanking each leg free with the opposite foot, then removed her socks in the same fashion. She stood naked but for her white, cotton underpants dotted with generic pink flowers. Slowly, she pushed her right arm through the heavy, terrycloth sleeve, felt the soft fabric on her skin. She lifted the heavy collar to cover her neck, rolled the sleeves up an inch or so, and pulled the girth tight around her, wrapping the long belt twice, and double knotting it so no one could slip it off when she wasn't looking. She felt like a movie star, like Rock Hudson or Gary Cooper.

Splayed diagonally across the bed, her belly pressed into the bumpy blue blanket, a twinge shot through her groin. She pressed her hips into the mattress and felt the swells of her breasts against the padded springs. Her hands found the warmest spot between her thighs and settled there. “I'm a genius. I'm a genius,” she snickered.

Lisa Sinsong visited Isabella again the following Saturday. The day was drizzling and chilly and, confined to the white room, a friendly game of chess between the two girls morphed into a marathon. Each time Lisa won, Isabella cleared the board and insisted on a rematch. “It doesn't count,” she'd say, claiming her game had been compromised by a headache, the need to pee, or the rhythm of Francesca's record player tapping at the ceiling.

“Checkmate,” Lisa yawned after the fourth game, too bored to gloat.

Isabella's eyelids twitched above the desolate board. “I'm hungry,” she whined. She gathered all the tiny wooden men, dumped them into the storage compartment, and clapped the two sides of the board together. “How 'bout some Yodels and lemonade?”

“Sure.”

“Be right back.” Isabella lifted the chessboard by its wooden handle, slipped out of the room, and stampeded down the steps.

Lisa lay back on the white bed, her stomach growling, and stared up at a brown water stain on the ceiling, the only imperfection in the white paint. She could hear Francesca's record player, like rain on a tin roof.

Quiet as mist, she stepped out of the room and walked down the hallway. She hooked her pinky around the “F” on the nameplate and pressed her ear to the door, inhaling the dusty insides.

“Hello?” Lisa asked. The music stopped. “Hello?”

Francesca opened the door. She towered over Lisa from the second step, fingering her puka shell choker.

“Hi,” Lisa waved.

“Hi.” Francesca peered into the hallway, expecting her sister to jump out from a corner or behind a door.

“Can I come in?” Lisa took a small, suggestive step forward.

Francesca shrugged and climbed the steps backward, then moved aside and watched as Lisa's white party socks came into view. “Aren't you having a good time with my sister?”

“Mostly we play chess.” Lisa shrugged and sat on the bed. “Over and over and over. It drives her crazy because she can't beat me. Not to brag, but I am the National Champion. Anyhow, I'm exhausted.” She said this like an old lady, followed it with a grand yawn—her eyes filling with tears—then shook her head hard to finish it off. “What have you been doing?”

“Reading a book.”

Lisa nodded. “The encyclopedia?”

“No. It's about fish.”

“Oh.”

“I'm going to ask for a fish tank for Christmas.”

“That would look good up here.”

“I want to put it right there, in the corner.” She pointed to an empty space, between her bookcase and the small window that faced the backyard.

“I used to have a goldfish,” Lisa said. “But it died. Then I got another one. But it died, too. So I gave up.”

“They always die.”

“I know,” Lisa said. “I like your name.”

“Thanks.” Francesca stood against the desk, her feet crossed at the ankles. This was the moment she dreaded, the one where she could think of nothing to say. What did one do with a friend? “I built a hut,” she said suddenly.

“A hut? You mean like what Indians lived in?”

Francesca nodded. “It isn't a specific kind of hut, just something I made out of branches and mud.”

“Can I see it?” asked Lisa, trying to seem equally intrepid: A girl so tall, with such dirty feet, who lives alone in an attic, surely is afraid of nothing.

When Isabella returned, holding two glasses of lemonade, two yodels stuffed in her pockets, and a magnetized chess set under her arm (she hoped this one would bring her better luck), the white room was empty.

Immediately, upon stepping off the reliable pavement and onto the bumpy ground, Lisa regretted her feigned insouciance, her cavalier “Can I see it?” when Francesca mentioned a hut. She imagined savages, bears, gorillas. Her father had said of the woods, in that spooky tone he used to shake her: “You go in, you never come out.”

She positioned her feet sideways and moved down the embankment in baby steps, searching for grooves and ledges. Francesca moved nimbly ahead, the distance between them increasing. The incline stiffened and Lisa felt her body hurtling forward even as she tried to slow down. She grabbed for a branch or a vine, something to steady her, but her fingers clutched a switch of prickers instead. She screamed and tumbled the rest of the way down the embankment, landing in a crusty mattress of leaves at the bottom. Tall trees blocked the lightness of the sky. Sharp rocks popped out like broken bones. The screaming of black birds cut through trees. She tried not to think of how much trouble she'd be in—defying her father, soiling her new sneakers. She turned and searched for the DeSilva house but could see only the treetops swaying like giant, wagging fingers.

There had been days of rain and what was normally just dirt had become a bit of a swamp to wade through. Francesca, who was used to navigating the woods in all sorts of conditions, had already made it through the murky puddles.

“Are you alright?” She squatted down and lifted Lisa's wounded hand.

“Look,” she whispered and pointed to a nervous chipmunk at Lisa's left, a bright yellow stripe down its back.

Even Lisa could see the beauty in that. Nothing threatening in that. “Cute,” she tried to smile. She followed Francesca, who now maintained a mindful distance as they stepped into the swampy terrain. Cold, pasty water crawled inside Lisa's sneakers. She resisted screaming as things stringlike and slippery tickled her ankles and focused instead on the back of Francesca's head, the thick helmet of hair, the dipping, rising shoulders, hands flapping at her sides for balance, like a penguin.

Finally, they made it to the other side. Lisa wiped damp hair off her forehead.

“Tada . . .” Francesca imitated a game show girl, pointing to a drunken structure camouflaged into the woods, its walls covered in evergreen switches, its base built from stones fitted together and shored up with dry mud. An occasional burlap scrap plugged up a stubborn hole. PRIVATE was painted in black on a plywood post stuck into the sandy ground, the “E” squashed to fit.