Losing It (5 page)

Three

I stood in a room in Viv's house filled with hanging plates. There was a tall cabinet in the corner, and on top of that was a clock embedded in what looked like a porcelain flower bank. It ticked heavily.

The plates were lined up in sets of four or five, and on each one was a meticulously painted scene. There was a jellyfish, painted in purples and pinks, gliding through the water toward the surface. It was part of a series that had to do with the ocean. Another one showed a craggy turquoise mountain under the sea. Another an underwater city, with clusters of towers and twinkling lights. A school of fish swam through, giving a sense of scale.

A different group showed a bright, teeming garden outside some kind of ominous estate with dark windows. There were twisting rosebushes, sculpted shrubs, and orange paths; flowers spewed out of small pots and the tops of statues. The perspective was all off, as if a child had done it. It was like the ground leading up to the estate was tipped up, slanted wrong. One plate showed the property from a different side, where a gray wall cast a shadow across a birdbath, and it looked like someone had just left a picnic, a golden fork and knife strewn on the ground. They were meticulously detailed. You
could see the designs, some flicks of a thin brush, on the pots, and the small wells of shadows on the statues.

Other plates showed scenes of horses and cowboys, migrating bison and teepees on great plains, a Wild West theme. In another series was a line of camels following a colorful sultan across the desert, their bodies making long shadows across the sand.

It wasn't so hard to see why people would buy these. On each of them were Viv's tiny initials, “V.G.” My favorites, or the ones I stared at the longest, depicted two mice constructing a multi-tiered card house on a red carpet in a dark living room. In the last plate, a mouse was standing on its tiptoes, balancing the final one on top. You could see tiny dots on each card—spades, hearts; it must have taken forever. Next to each mouse was a gold goblet. I stared at them for a really long time.

I then wandered with my laptop into the sunroom, a frayed, faded area with a row of windows you could crank open. There was a pouchy purple velvet couch and a glass coffee table with some craft books stacked on it.

Here was the list I made:

– Take some kind of community class

– Hang around the university or audit a course

– Internet dating

– Go to a bar

– Join a gym

– Go to a sales conference or a convention at a local hotel

– Join a singles-outing group

– Take a language class

– Get a job

– Don't think too much

– Just be relaxed about it

—

I studied the profile picture of a man with the screen name “TheMeeksShallInherit.” He was outside, at what appeared to be an electronics fair, standing next to a table with a neon-orange tablecloth on it. There was another picture of him against the Golden Gate Bridge. Then a picture of him holding a huge kite and giving the thumbs-up.

“He sounds like an alien. Those are the kinds of pictures an alien would put up,” said Grace, my old roommate whom I'd lived with in Tempe and who was now my closest friend.

“Really?” I said.

“To convince you he was human and knows how to do things.”

“Sure,” I said.

I clicked through a few more pictures.

“Well, at least he's not holding a huge pencil at an imaginarium,” I said. “Like, ‘Look at me!'”

“Totally.”

After I'd left, she'd stayed in Arizona and gotten a job at the historic public library in Tucson. I'd been there once. As we talked, I could hear her heels click on the marble floor as she walked around in the giant, day-lit atrium.

“He's sent me a bunch of messages. Lots of exclamation points. He seems really jazzed about everything.”

“Well,” she said, “that's not a bad quality, necessarily.”

I could feel her choosing her words. I'd let her think, over the years, by alluding to it or not correcting her when she made assumptions, that I'd had sex. That I'd been having sex. But there was something about the wide berth she gave the subject that made me think she knew the truth. Once, when she'd visited me, I told her about a flirtation I had at Quartz to keep apace with a story she was telling, and a troubled, questioning look had come over her face.

“So what's she like?” she said. “Your aunt?”

“She's nice,” I said. “She's polite. She's got a kind of inner poise. She's very poised.”

“Okay.”

“She's artistic. She has been to Orlando.”

“Okay.”

“Recently.”

“Got it.”

I heard the shrieks of children over the phone. A school group, bustling by.

“You're really painting a nuanced picture,” she said.

“There's a sort of hard quality to her. Like, if you said, ‘What do I do with this hen that's bullying all the other chickens?' and you were having all these qualms, she would take it from you and snap its neck, just like that.”

“So she has leadership qualities?”

“I'm not
not
saying that.”

“I get it.”

“I do think she'd be a good person to have in some survival situation. Like some kind of space mission that crash-landed on another planet and lost touch with Earth.”

“I'd be like, ‘Might as well rampage through the dessert rations!'” said Grace.

“Me too,” I said. “Except if it was only little boxes of golden raisins. In which case I'd be like, ‘Has anyone gone ahead and tried these cyanide tablets?' Oh, hey, Aunt Viv.”

She stood in the doorway. I hadn't heard her come in.

“Grace,” I said, “I have to go.” I put down the phone.

She was wearing a sheer white cotton overshirt-type thing that seemed to float around her body.

“Hi.” She looked around the room. “I didn't know you'd be in here.”

“Yeah, I— It's nice and calm.”

“I agree.” She tried on a bright smile. “Did you have a nice day? I was afraid you'd be bored.”

“No, I got a lot of writing done,” I lied. “It was great. No, this is just what I was hoping it would be like.”

“Good, good.”

We both looked at my bare feet, which were up on the coffee table. I lowered them. She pinched her ear. “It's my friend Alice's birthday tomorrow. She's having a small get-together. I was wondering if you'd like to come?”

There was a slight quaver beneath her veneer that made me realize that perhaps she, too, had thought our conversation at dinner the other night had been lacking and that she was trying to make up for it, reaching out.

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “What time?”

“Three o'clock. In the afternoon.”

I nodded with a little too much exaggeration. “Great.”

“Great,” she said.

And then, because the moment seemed to require something more, I said, “I really like your plates. The hanging-up ones? In that room? They're really good.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Those are from earlier. When I was first starting.”

“Oh, okay.”

She hesitated in the doorway. Then we started talking at the same time. “So, did you just get home?” I said. She said, “I've actually submitted a few of my latest ones to an art show.”

“What?” I said.

“I've submitted a few. To an art show. I'm doing a series about Arthurian legend. The Knights of the Round Table.”

“Cool,” I said. “Great. Like a local, community type of deal?”

“Well,” she said. I had insulted her. Something shifted between us and I immediately felt terrible. I also realized why Viv's first impulse was to pull back and be aloof, because otherwise her face would unlock and every raw emotion would visibly travel across it. In this case, she flashed with hurt.

“It's actually much bigger than that,” she said. “It's sponsored by the folk art museum of Durham. It's widely known. Have you heard of
Southern Living
magazine?”

“I think so,” I said quickly.

“Well, they do a feature.”

“That's awesome,” I said. “That's really cool. So are you—”

“Well, I'm going to eat something,” she said. “There are leftovers in the fridge.” And then she turned around and walked away.

—

And that was how I ended up driving into town the next day with Aunt Viv in her Honda Civic. It was hot and bright and everything was bursting with full summer lushness, the sky a chesty blue.

“Alice is in the last stages of lymphoma,” she said.

“Oh.” I was picking the sticky protective shield off the screen of my cell phone. I put it down and looked at her. “That's horrible. I'm sorry.”

“Well, she's got a good support system.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Many years,” said Viv. “We worked together.”

She was wearing diamond-shaped emerald earrings and her hair was swept back into an elegant French braid.

She glanced at me. “Have you spoken to your parents?”

“A little,” I said. “They seem to be doing fine. They're, like, meditating every day and doing psychic weaving with a shaman or something.”

This little dash of sarcasm did not seem to go over with Aunt Viv. It was quiet for a while. We passed someone hanging up a row of small white dresses for a yard sale.

“It must be very interesting,” she said. “It must be a very interesting culture. There in South America.”

“Yes. Yes! It must be,” I said, nodding. “So, would you— Is that somewhere you'd want to go?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “I think I'd rather go to Europe. Verona. I haven't really been out of the country much.”

“Why there?”

“The music,” she said. “The opera at the outdoor amphitheater, with everyone holding candles at night.” She sang a tune, a few notes of something, as if she were in a daydream, and then looked at me expectantly. My eyes darted around the car.

We drove along a street with many old Southern mansions set way back from the road. After a while we turned onto a narrower street, with smaller houses, and pulled up in front of a shady, flower-petal-covered walkway.

We got out of the car at the same time as a woman with long, earth-mother gray hair who was carrying some kind of pickled thing leaking out of a plastic bag and so had to hurry in ahead of us.

We were greeted at the door by a large woman named Karen wearing a purple dress with many layers. Her face was filled with happiness, her eyes dancing, her cheeks flushed. “Vivi!” she said, and then gave my hand a vigorous shake.

She led us down a hallway into a living room with zebra pillows and decorative spears on the walls and other foreign-looking artifacts. Viv introduced me around, and then the crowd parted to reveal Alice, swaddled in purple scarves, sitting stoically in a wicker chair like a village elder or seer.

She had a weak chin and warm brown eyes, and a trembling shine about her—like a bulb of water on a leaf right before it breaks. She smiled up at me and said, “I'm so glad to meet one of Viv's relatives.” Viv knelt down beside her and took one of her hands and held it like it was the most fragile thing in the world while her face broke into a smile of bald admiration and sadness.

I said hello and then backed away to give Aunt Viv and Alice
some room, and then weaved back through the house to find something to drink. It felt like I was intruding to stay talking to them longer. I was wearing tights even though it was a hot day, and they were itchy and sagging down and I had an eyelash in my eye.

“This was my aunt Cassie,” said a woman named Diane, who had intercepted me and then led me into a room—it was her house—where she showed me how she'd lacquered old pictures of her relatives onto the top of her desk. Cassie stared sternly out from a rocking chair.