Art on Fire (2 page)

“I'll give you one hint,” said Bella. “I live in an attic.”

Vivian hesitated, twisting her face in concentration. “Not your sister . . .” she said, blanching with dread.

“What? Are you nuts?”

“Oh! Oh!” Vivian snapped her fingers, thinking fast. “Emily Dickinson!”

“She didn't live in an attic,” Isabella sighed, then brightened. “Okay, really, really, the last hint. Put on your thinking cap.” Vivian gestured as if she had. “I have a boyfriend named Peter,” certain this was the give-away.

Vivian was distracted by thoughts of the lasagna sizzling in the oven, whether Alfonse would return in time to shower, how to get Isabella out of this ridiculous outfit and into her party dress. “I'm sorry, pumpkin. You're much smarter than your old Mom.” She guided Isabella into the bedroom.

“Duh. Anne Frank. I'm Anne Frank.”

“Of course you are! Anne Frank! We should show your grandmother. Did you know she was once in a play about Anne Frank?”

Isabella shrugged, unimpressed. “I've written a play about Anne Frank.” She lifted her arms and waited for Vivian to pull the sweater over her head.

Francesca rode with her body pressed against the car door, the handle digging at her hip. She breathed on the window, made circles with her finger. Already she could smell the ladies' itchy perfume, hear the cracking of mahjong tiles and gum. She imagined her entrance: The game would be underway, so that anything she did would garner a sigh
of feigned exasperation. She'd call out Hi! and run down the hallway to her grandmother's bedroom, throw herself onto the bed, and bury her nose in stinky fake furs. Then she'd hole up in the dark TV room, eyes fastened to the Friday night lineup. During the commercials she'd wander out to the kitchen and stand around coyly, stab melon balls with toothpicks, bite into the Russell Stover chocolates in search of caramels. “Gross,” she'd say when confronted with a dribble of strawberry cream or rum. (One of the ladies would finish the confection so it wouldn't go to waste.) She'd wear her grandmother's bifocals with the rhinestones in each corner, walk around the card table with her hands extended in Frankenstein position, the cool chain tickling her neck.

She did anything for the ladies' attention, doled as it was in scraps between hands. She fetched their pocketbooks and refilled their glasses with Tab, emptied ashtrays, and closed the window if it grew too chilly. They teased her about being a tomboy, pinched and kissed her, made her feel loved and abused at the same time.

“Francesca, what you do in the woods?” Alfonse inquired.

“Nothing.”

The houses in her grandmother's neighborhood were separated by faded ribbons of grass the color of limes, just big enough for a lawn chair, a kettle grill, maybe a dog. Alfonse turned onto the street without signaling. The driver behind him held down the horn, swerved around the left side, waved his middle finger in the air. “Idiot,” Alfonse muttered, imagining Italy where, he imagined, people were civilized, where a little blinking light would not be necessary to inspire common sense. He glanced at Francesca. Her face was turned away from him. He snuck a look at her thick, dark hair, like his, a pointy chin, again like his, and a take-charge body, sturdy and tall, capped off by thick hands and grounded legs.

“Do you play with the frogs?” He glanced at her. “Are you a friend to animals?”

Francesca turned and looked at her father. She felt ashamed, as if he had guessed something simple about her, something obvious. “I like animals,” she said nonchalantly.

“I, too, have always loved animals. When I was a boy, I used to feed the squirrels, which you can imagine went over big with my mother.”

He rolled his eyes. “They're rodents, you know.” He stopped at Evelyn's driveway. “Do you play in the river?”

“Mostly.”

“Alone? Or with friends?”

“Alone.”

“How about I come sometime? We could play in the river together.”

“Okay, sure,” said Francesca, looking up at her grandmother's picture window. The light was on over the kitchen table. She could see it through the threshold. “It's really kind of boring.” There was nothing in life less boring, she knew, nothing so full of possibility, with such a strong pulse. To bring her father there would interrupt the gentle ecosystem. He could not see the hut or he might start to suspect her larger plan. No matter; she knew from past conversations of this nature that he would forget all about this one.

“Hey, I know.” He pounced on the brake. “How about we go for an ice cream?”

“No thanks, Papa.” Francesca hopped out and slammed the door. She could hardly wait to be inside the small, warm house and see what treats her grandmother would produce—always magically—from some obscure cabinet or cubby beneath the oven door.

Stiff as a stick of stale gum in her velvet jumper and white bow tie, Isabella sat at the kitchen table and watched Vivian tuck her head inside the oven to check on the lasagna.

“Sylvia Plath committed suicide that way,” she said.

“That's certainly not what I'm doing.” Vivian backed out at once and wiped her forehead with the silver oven mitt.

Isabella sighed. She pilfered a Hershey's kiss from a tulip-shaped bowl that was filled to the brim, unwrapped the candy, and tried to stand it upside down. No luck. She bit off some of the point to flatten it, then tried again. Some days, this being one of them, she hated to talk. She hated the sound of her voice, the scratchiness at the back of her throat, the feeling of her teeth slamming down on each other.
Other days, there seemed to be a dearth of words in the world. On these days, she'd read entire books aloud, just to hear her voice dip and climb, reveling in her perfect articulation. Then there were the confusing, disorienting days, the ones that started one way, then switched to the other, leaving her breathless, confounded as to how to slow the busyness in her brain.

“Tell me about Anne Frank,” her mother said.

“You know about Anne Frank,” she whined and pulled on her collar. She took two more chocolate kisses, plugged each into a nostril, then an ear, then held them up to her nipples.

“So tell me again,” Vivian turned. “Bella! Stop that. Those are for the company!”

Alfonse opened the back door and wiped his sneakered feet thoroughly over the spiked welcome mat. He greeted them with swollen eyes, giddy from having had a little cry after he'd dropped Francesca off. He'd succumbed to his ever-lingering, rarely conscious feeling of failure as a parent. He was more willing to acknowledge his shortcomings as a husband, largely because he felt he wasn't to blame for the bitter marriage. On the other hand, his inefficacy as a father was only partly Vivian's fault; he knew he was culpable, and couldn't bear it.

“Oh good,” said Vivian. “Isabella's about to tell us the story of Anne Frank.”

“Holy cow. That's terrific!” He patted Isabella's head and ran upstairs to shower before the company arrived.

They filed in at 6:30, children first. Chips and dip, M&Ms, and chocolate kisses were set out on the coffee table for the kids, pinkish port wine cheese in a plastic tub and Triscuits for the adults. The frightened children scattered, fists clenched at their sides, eyes averted—especially from each other—checking every instant for their parents' faces to make sure they hadn't been left behind.

Isabella was most perturbed by Robert Michaels.
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The others, it was apparent, were no match for her. But something about this boy: the way he took root with his thick arms and tree-stump legs, a mess of red hair atop his elongated head, his squinted eyes and freckled face. Sadistic, she thought. The kind of kid you hate just from looking at him.

“I'm going to high school next year,” he announced in a voice like onions hitting hot oil. “Are you?” He poked Lisa Sinsong, a small Chinese-American girl dressed in ill-fitting black pants and a white turtleneck. She shook her head and glanced at her father.

“Me neither,” said Isabella who had the loudest voice and took up more space in every way. She put her hands on her hips and stared him down. “You're uglier, Sluggo,” she said.

“Isabella!” scolded Vivian.

“Oh please.” Mrs. Michaels pressed Vivian's knee. “He's a handful. Besides, if we were responsible for everything these little ones said, well . . .” She stopped, the rest being obvious.

After dinner, fortified by two pieces of lasagna and a generous scoop of chocolate ice cream, Isabella waited until the mothers had finished clearing the table and spread out beside the fathers on the sectional sofa. She dragged a small end table into the center of the room, put her Panasonic tape recorder on the floor beside her, took a deep breath, and climbed onto the table, waiting for everyone's full attention. Vivian stood behind Alfonse, squeezing his shoulders.

“I,” Isabella spoke at a slight downward angle to reach the microphone, “am Anne Frank. I was born in Germany, but my family migrated to Amsterdam during the Nazi regime. After a small, brief period of living like a girl, i.e., being an exceptionally bright student and having boys fall in love with me everywhere I went, my family was forced to live in the small annex of a factory building. An attic, really. For those of you who don't know your German Fascist history, I'll make it simple: the Nazis were scary blond-haired, blue-eyed men who busted down the doors of people they felt were inferior, which was basically everyone who wasn't German—particularly Jews and homosexuals—poked guns in the chests of terrified individuals just going about their daily business, and said—” (here she shoved her index finger hard at Robert Michaels) “COME VID US OR DIE.”

The performance continued, a tossed salad of fact and fiction, until
Isabella reached the arrival of “Mr. Dussel,” with whom Anne was forced to share a small room. “All night long, like a train in my head, I heard this terrible, nasty man breathing as if through a kazoo, in and out, the snoring loud enough to knock me out of my bed.

“Then, of course, there were the other times, when I would be awakened by some odd groaning and I'd turn to see him, covers rolled down, wearing just his underclothes, pleasuring himself.”

“Isabella!” Vivian shouted.

Quickly, Isabella continued. “But the most devastating consequence of being trapped in the attic was the isolation. Being a small girl, an adolescent girl who is not even allowed to step out into the world, to have normal adolescent girl experiences, who day after day, month after month, is trapped in a tiny little room while before her the world changes and people fall in love and die and do their laundry and cook dinner together and go to amusement parks and take the golden retriever out for a walk and listen to the Beatles sing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand' and rake their leaves before the first snowfall . . .”