Chasing Sylvia Beach (13 page)

On her way out, she passed the makeup counter. Even in the thirties, the beauty zone was intimidating. Lily knew nothing about potions and compacts and powders. She’d spent her teenage years under the florescent light of the library, not caring how she looked. She preferred to spend extra time in the morning reading or lying in bed rather than applying makeup. Now, as a grown woman, she was adrift among feminine accoutrements. Still, a lipstick might help her blend in. What was the French word for lipstick?

A salesgirl with a tight roll of curls flanking her cheeks noticed Lily. She strolled over. Her makeup was applied as if she were going onstage, heavy and dramatic. Her bright red lips mouthed something that Lily didn’t understand. Lily stammered and blushed.

“J’ai besoin de . . .” Lily gestured around her lips as if applying lipstick.

“Rouge a levres,” the woman filled in. “Suivez-moi.”

She led Lily around the maze of counters and displays. At the lipstick tray, she eyed Lily, squinting and surveying her clothes. She inspected Lily’s light coloring, her small mouth, the slight dimple in her left cheek. She seemed to be studying a painting or something she wanted to know the secret of. Lily’s shoulders relaxed. The woman glanced back and forth between Lily and the palette.

“Voilà!” she exclaimed. She plucked one of the tubes out of the holder. The lipstick was a pinkish brown color, mashed in at the top. The woman dabbed her pinkie into it and approached Lily’s face. Lily reared back slightly. People didn’t use their fingers at cosmetics counters back home. She was disgusted at the thought of where the woman’s fingers had been, what other women’s lips she had touched that day. As the woman’s finger came closer to her face, Lily surrendered and let her apply the makeup with small, sure dabs. The woman’s perfume and minty breath floated over Lily and she relaxed. At home she looked forward to her quarterly haircuts just to feel the stylist’s fingers working the shampoo through her hair, hosing the warm water over her head. She might need to get a haircut here, merely for the feel of someone’s hands on her head.

When Lily was a girl, her mother liked to fix her hair. Lily would fall into a sort of trance, her thoughts melting away with the strokes of the brush on her head. She’d hated the way her hair tangled and her mother worked the knots out, but she’d give anything for a second of her mother’s attention now.

Claire Heller, dressed in her gardening clothes, stood at Lily’s shoulder. “Do you really need lipstick? Shouldn’t you be saving your money for food? You never wore lipstick at home.”

Lily shook the thought off, talking back in her mind.
I’m not at home, am I? I’m in France, and I’m older now, and I want a lipstick.

The woman finished with the lipstick and stepped back. She squinted at Lily, nodding with satisfaction. Lily felt like a living canvas, there merely for the woman to ponder. The woman handed Lily a heavy art deco hand mirror lined in silver. Lily regarded her face, pursing her lips, kissing the air. Her mother’s face looked back at her. With the lipstick, she was transformed, more mature. Lily’s mother had given Lily her delicate features, though she’d kept her blond hair to herself. A wave of goose bumps passed down her spine.

“Ça vous va?”

She continued to stare into the mirror, pressing her new lips together before nodding. If her mother didn’t care for lipstick, she knew both her mother and father would be proud of her resourcefulness.

For a year after her mother’s death, Lily had lived in Chicago with her father. In an attempt to get away from the grief that haunted them both, Lily moved to Denver after several months, leaving her father to carve out a life with his new girlfriend, Monique. Her mother’s garden fell into ruin, and when Lily came for her first visit she cried at the desiccated rose bushes and wilting lilac trees. The backyard was the same sad scenario, and when she saw the brown beds where flowers had once bloomed, she yelled, “Why don’t you just sell the house?”

“I have,” he said, glancing at Monique, who had accompanied him to the airport to pick Lily up. “That’s why I wanted you to come. You’ll have to clear out your room. You can have whatever you want from the house.”

Lily slumped onto a chair at the kitchen table. She wanted the whole house, the way it was when she had left for France. With her mother in it, not some woman who wore artfully applied makeup and pastel sweater sets. She scanned the kitchen, seeing the scene as a soon-to-be extinct ecosystem. The appliances lined the back counter: coffee grinder, blender, food processor, toaster oven. She wondered how much her father used them. Monique wasn’t the homey type. The house already felt different now that she knew it would be hosting another family’s petty squabbles and dinner smells.

Lily expected her mother to emerge from the pantry with a stack of cans for dinner. She loved making casseroles, challenging herself to see how many cans she could use—green beans, diced tomatoes, chicken broth, and tuna—for a strange, quasi-Italian casserole. During the months after her mother died, Lily had spent most of her time engrossed in cookbooks and recipes, cooking her way out of her grief.

Standing at the wine rack, choosing a bottle, her father spoke. “It’s hard for me, too.” “Would you like some wine?” He stabbed the corkscrew into the cork.

Lily took down two wine glasses and set them on the tiled counter between them.

“Lily, in case you didn’t notice,
you’re
not the one surrounded by the memories. You don’t have to walk by her closet every day and know she’ll never wear those stupid gardening clogs again.” He poured the wine. “You haven’t seen the garden slowly rot and thought . . .” He stopped, unable to finish the thought.

She handed his glass to him and they toasted. The cabernet was an attack, the first taste sharp and tough. She sat down at the kitchen table. Her dad joined her, bringing the bottle. His chair moved across the tile with the familiar squealing sound. They took tentative steps toward discussing their new lives without the house. He told her about a penthouse suite he had seen and liked. With his busy work schedule at the stock exchange, a condo would be easier to maintain. Lily wanted to ask if Monique was moving in with him, though she didn’t want to think about her father as an eligible bachelor with new prospects. He could get a new wife but Lily couldn’t get a new mother.

“I’ve got to start packing up your mother’s belongings. I was hoping you could help. You might want to take some of her things.”

Lily didn’t want to go through her mother’s things. It was an invasion of such a private person. Yet she didn’t want Monique in there with her red fingernails.

“Of course,” she said.

They ordered a feast from Thai Palace—spring rolls, jungle curry, pad Thai, extra spicy with prawns, and tofu plus mango rice for dessert. After dinner, Lily went upstairs to bed. At the top of the stairs she went into her parents’ room. On the nightstand by her mother’s side were a pair of reading glasses and a trashy paperback that surely wasn’t her father’s. So Monique was staying here. She stepped past the bed and into her mother’s walk-in closet. Nothing had changed here, the rarely worn heels propped on the back shoe racks, the dresses sheathed in plastic from the dry cleaner’s. The scent of her mother lingered. A garden scent—essence of rose paired with the crumbly smell of dirt, with a tickle of sharp fertilizer. The clothes she wore all the time—the chinos and jeans, the oversized plaid shirts—were at the front, ready to be released from the hangers, ready to head down to the backyard. Lily brushed a hand along the sleeves and suppressed an impulse to press her face against them.

She turned to a chest of drawers that had been there forever. She’d always wanted to know what her mother kept there. The top drawer held an assortment of accessories: a pair of gold square cuff links lying against each other, a collection of white jewelry boxes, a few small handkerchiefs embroidered at the edges. The kind of things she’d never seen on her mother or her father.

She pulled the drawer open further, rooting around the back. Behind the stack of hankies was tucked a blue velvet jewelry box. Inside, a ring nestled in the cleft—an opal sitting in a crowned gold setting. It fit her left ring finger perfectly. She spread her fingers and held her hand away from her, winging it back and forth. The colors in the ring pulsated with each movement—first pink, then green, then a shimmering blue. Lily had never seen this on her mother—ever.

Backing out of the closet slowly, she headed to her own room. The bed and dresser seemed smaller. The months she stayed here after her mother died had left no trace. But it was still her room. She searched for things she might want to bring back to Denver: the framed Renoir poster, the thick pink rug.The ugly dresser and too-small desk did not interest her. At the window, she looked out into the backyard.

Her mother used to joke that she wanted to be buried under the lilac bushes that formed a hedge around their backyard. She’d pull her Adirondack chair over to them in May and sit there, soaking up their scent and delicate petals. Lily watched from her bedroom window. Her mother’s face would soften, finally, into something like love. Her eyes would close, as if she were listening to an exquisite piece of music from far away and deep inside her. Lily wanted to pull up next to her mother, to sit at her knees and rest her head on her leg. She contented herself with watching from the window.

Another time, she had lingered nearby while her mother crouched in the vegetable patch, arranging mulch around the leafy basil plants. With her folded legs splayed out to the side, she looked like a large insect. Lily sat nearby, under the oak tree with a book. She was reading a short story about a man who had a shoe fetish. She wanted to rename the character but didn’t know what name to give him. All the ones she tried, Harvé, Pierre, Mack, didn’t work.

“Mom, how did you give me my name?”

Her mother paused, her trowel dangling from her hand, staring into the tiny purple and white flowers on the basil leaves. “It was early spring and you were about to come,” she said. “I didn’t have a name for you. I was so desperate for my garden, for the green, that I’d lie awake at night going through the flowers in my mind. I would catalogue them and go over their ideal conditions, what they signified, and what time of the year they bloomed. It was a garden in my mind. I made up a contest—best flower. I gave categories, and went through all of them. Each one won a prize for something or other. And when I came to lily, it won the prize for most elegant flower, most noble.” She paused, sitting back on the ground by the tomato cages. Lily realized how her mother got the mud flap impressions on her jeans.

“Suddenly it was clear—the name for you was Lily. It bloomed right there in front of me. Everything I wanted for you was contained in that name—elegance, class, beauty, fragility.”

“Fragility? Why would you want that for your daughter?”

Her mother broke off a stem of basil. “So you’d always remember how precious life is.” She sniffed the basil, her eyes closed, a look of ecstasy smoothing her face.

“Well, I don’t think I’m any of those things.” Lily felt anything but elegant in her tank top and running shorts. She felt like an oaf, clunky and clumsy. But she favored her mother’s features: the reddish-blond hair, the round face, the small lips and chin. She was her mother now, or as close as she would get.

“Oh, but you are. You just don’t know it. You’ll see it someday, trust me.”

Lily pulled herself away from the window and headed for a shower. It was easy to cry under the water, her sobs masked by the flow.

The next morning she and her father were in the closet, packing her mother’s clothes into a big box. Every time she moved, she snuck a look at the ring.

“I see you found that,” he said.

She held her hand out, admiring it. She liked to think her mother had some sense of femininity, that even if she didn’t wear the ring, she at least had it.

“I love it. Would you mind if I take it?”

“Not at all. It was your grandmother’s.”

“Why didn’t Mom wear it?”

“I don’t know. Probably because of the gardening.”

They continued folding the clothes without speaking much, Lily’s mother in between every fold, every decision. Lily was sick at the thought of her mother’s clothes being worn by some poor stranger who shopped at thrift stores. She struggled to not cry but tears blurred her vision. The ring kept catching her eye, filling her with its color.

“Did Mom get along with her mother?”

Her father knelt at the shoes.

“She was estranged from her family. They had an argument when Claire was in college and never really reconciled. She was a good woman, your grandmother, but a bit ‘out there.’ Always reading books. You get that from her.”

Lily liked that she was wearing a book lover’s ring. It belonged to her.

“Your mother loved you, you know.”

“Dad. She loved her garden.”

“Lily, don’t.”

Lily yanked a couple of flannel shirts off their hangers, rolled them up, and threw them in the box. She just wanted to be finished with the folding up of her mother’s life.

“She loved you very much and she gave up her dream to have you.”

“What dream?”

Her father stuck his hand into a black dress shoe. It was new; Lily had never seen her mother wearing it. He put the shoe and its twin in the box with the other shoes.

“She was a brilliant student at Princeton. She wanted to be a biologist, and I think she could have done it.”

“But she married you instead and became a wife.”

He flinched slightly and kept packing the shoes.

“So she gave up her dream for you, not for me,” Lily continued.

“She gave it up for both of us.”

Lily had reached the end of the rack. The wall that had been hidden behind the clothes held a wisp of cobwebs. Lily stared at it, hoping a pattern would appear and reveal something about her mother. She closed the lid on the box.

“Was she ever happy?”

“She was happy in her garden. She had that.”

“Are you happy?”

He closed his box. The closet was now off balance, filled with his suits and dress shoes on one side, empty and haunted on the other side. They only had the dresser and the gardening shed to clear out, and that was it. So much for a life, Lily thought.