Art on Fire (4 page)

Isabella pounded. “Helloooooo!”

Finally, Francesca opened the door. Behind her a smoky light, thick with the aura of afternoon rain, shrouded the pointed room, darkening the edges of her tall form. She hovered at the top of the three steps, arms folded across her chest. Her bell-bottoms fanned out over her dirty, bare feet. She looked past her sister into Lisa's dark eyes.

“What,” she said.

“This is Lisa. She wanted to see the attic,” Isabella said.

Lisa waved tentatively. She peered over Francesca's shoulder into the attic, smelled the dark, damp wood, noted the sloped ceilings and exposed beams covered with tiny, glow-in-the-dark stars arranged in perfect imitation of the solar system.

“Can we come in?” Isabella asked sweetly.

Francesca shrugged and stepped out of the way.

“Lisa's mother committed suicide,” Isabella whispered as they entered, as if this somehow explained their arrival.

“Just now?” Francesca asked.

“Four months ago,” said Lisa. Her eyes dusted the hodgepodge of objects: the soiled, yellow beanbag chair; frayed curtains with little
puffballs hanging from strands of white yarn along the hem; the sunken double bed on a gray metal frame; a yellow nightstand, its surface captured beneath the ceramic base of a huge lamp. A folded metal chair was pushed into a metal desk and tucked into a corner. There was a pile of wire-rimmed sketchpads on the desk, several pencils, and one of those gummy erasers Francesca had molded into a dog. At least, Lisa thought it was a dog.

Lisa scanned the worn books that were piled willy-nilly in the small black bookcase:
The Phantom Tollbooth, My Darling My Hamburger, The Pigman
, the entire Nancy Drew series. An incomplete set of the World Book Encyclopedia from 1962 lined the bottom shelf.
My Side of the Mountain
was placed, reverently, on top of the bookcase.

“Is the anatomy page still in there?” Lisa jutted her chin toward the encyclopedia.

“Yup,” Francesca said. “That's my favorite page.”

“Mine, too!” Lisa cried out unexpectedly.

“Mine, too,” Isabella blurted, though she'd never seen the anatomy page.

Francesca knew much of the encyclopedia by heart. Every paragraph of information had been reviewed, until she'd carpeted her head with facts, just to have them there, to fill the space. She loved knowing things, even things of no consequence. She'd committed to memory, for example, all the lyrics to “I am the Walrus,” even the goo goos, and how many there were before the joo joos came in. She knew that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD and that LSD stood for lysergic acid diethylamide and that it could alter the entire world and make it seem, suddenly, interesting. And she knew entire paragraphs from
My Side of the Mountain, Squanto: Friend to the Pilgrims
, and
Miracle Worker
. Anything that moved her, she attempted to memorize.

“I've read almost all of these books,” Lisa smiled at her, revealing a dimple in the center of her chin. Francesca noticed immediately that Lisa's smile was the opposite of her sad, tense face, everything pointed up instead of down, emphasizing her finely etched eyes, the arc of her eyebrows, her long pale lips. “Which is your favorite?” Lisa asked.

“My Side of the Mountain,”
Francesca said at once.

“Mine is
The Phantom Tollbooth
,” Lisa offered. “After I read it, I tried to drive through the bedroom wall in my wagon!”

“You what?” shouted Isabella, appalled.

Lisa sat beside Francesca on the bed. She measured the length of her own dangling legs against Francesca's longer, thicker ones. “How come
your
room isn't one color?” she asked Francesca, looking hard into her eyes.

“Why, is yours?”

“
Mine
? I don't even have a room. I sleep in the living room.” She pointed to Isabella. “But
she
has a white room. Don't you want a white room?”

“Are you nuts?” whined Isabella, “She has no aesthetic sense. Let's go.” Isabella hopped down the steps on one foot and out into the hallway. “Lee-sa,” she demanded.

“I'd want a purple room,” Francesca said suddenly, imagining the whole oddly shaped room coated an inky purple; thick, porous paint on the rough walls and beams.

“Me too!” Lisa bounced up and down on the bed. “How come Francesca doesn't get a purple room?”

“Because I'm a genius,” Isabella shouted.

“Oh.” Lisa nodded, as if that explained it. She spanned the breadth of stars and orbs on the ceiling. “Is that the solar system?” she asked.

Francesca nodded.

“Do they glow?”

“You have to hold a flashlight on them for a while before you go to sleep.”

“Lee-sa. Mother made magic tuna fish,” whined Isabella.

“I hate tuna fish,” Lisa whispered. She looked down at her feet in white, narrow tennis shoes and compared them to Francesca's bare ones, ashen dirt darkening the creases. “Do you know how to play chess?” she asked.

Francesca shook her head.

“Too bad. I'm the national champion. Which means I've never been defeated. By a girl,” she added with obvious bitterness.

Isabella climbed the steps and leaned into the room. “My mother
slaved all morning over this tuna fish. This is not like a can of Bumblebee in a bowl with mayonnaise. It's a secret family recipe.”

“She'll be right there,” Francesca said firmly.

Lisa stood up and took a final whiff of the dusty room. She walked to the edge, where the floor dropped off into three steep steps. “Maybe I could teach you how to play chess,” she said.

“Okay,” Francesca shrugged, as if it made no difference one way or the other.

After the girls had eaten, Vivian scrubbed the insides of the kitchen drawers with Fantastik and a sponge. The silverware and utensils were laid out on the surface. Francesca entered, silent as a panther, took a sandwich from a plate on the counter, and sat down.

“Mom,” she said. “Can I paint my room?”

“Jesus!” Vivian dropped the plastic bottle, put her hand over her heart. “Francesca! You scared the hell out of me!” Her fingers were sweating inside flannel-lined rubber gloves. She turned and leaned her back against the counter, tossed her head to throw a strip of hair off her left eye. “Now what is it?”

“I want to paint my room purple,” said Francesca, pressing the thin rubber flap of a spatula against her palm.

“You do, do you? And I'd like to paint mine . . .” Vivian looked in the air and rolled her eyes extravagantly, “Oh, I don't know . . . polka dots.”

“Okay.” Francesca smiled.

“Stop it, please. I'm busy. Why don't you girls ever play outside?” She returned to her task, shaking her head.

“I have an aesthetic sense too,” said Francesca, rather forcefully.

“You have a
what
?”

“At least, I'd like a purple bedspread. Isabella has a white bedspread.”

“Listen, Sarah Heartburn, I let you put up that poster. And those little stars—”

“The solar system,” said Francesca. “It's a re-creation of the solar system. Done precisely to scale.”

“And that's very impressive. You did a good job with that. But I don't want you to paint the room purple. It would ruin the wood. The thing—” Vivian scrubbed harder, the friction making a tiny, high-pitched sound, “—about painting raw wood, is that you can never go back.”

“But I wouldn't want to go back,” said Francesca.

“Francesca, I appreciate your creativity. I really do. But some girls have nothing, you know. Look at that poor little Chinese girl,” she whispered, shooting her eyes toward the ceiling. “You could be her.”

“Well, what about blue? Could I paint it blue?”

“What sort of blue?”

“Light blue. Cloud blue.”

Vivian stopped cleaning for a moment. She recognized the opportunity for a compromise. She stared ahead, as if picturing it. “Oh,” she said. “I really need to think about it. I don't like the idea of painting that room. What if we need to sell the house? What if all your father's work dries up and we need to move into a tiny apartment in downtown New Haven? A mother worries about these things. It's not your job to worry about them, but someone has to. I don't think so, honey. Sorry.” She tipped her head and shrugged, then tore a fresh sheet of towel paper from the roll and spritzed some Fantastik into the potholder drawer.

Francesca put the spatula down. She let her hands fall hard onto the table. “Forget it,” she said. She stood up and walked through the side door, slamming it behind her, out into the gray afternoon. Under the rhododendron bush she found a green tennis ball. She tossed it in the air, each time higher and higher, gazing up at Isabella's window. When she tired of this, she began throwing it against the house, but no one noticed. Finally she threw the ball at her sister's window and ran away, across the street and down the hill to her hut.

After Vivian deposited the Chinese girl at her decrepit apartment building, she drove to Loehmann's, where a sale on linens was in progress. She'd decided that purchasing a lavender bedspread for
Francesca would satisfy both of them: Vivian could not stand unadulterated purple. But lavender—a more feminine, subtler hue—was still in the purple family, and so ought to mollify Francesca. After all, Vivian decided, this was less about color than it was about sibling rivalry. By procuring the bedspread, Vivian would acknowledge Francesca's rightful place in the family and encourage her importance as a separate, autonomous being. Anyhow, this nonconformity was something she admired in each of her daughters—even if Francesca seemed to possess more oddness than talent.

The bedspread would be a present, a gesture of affection, and it would honor what was, after all, a fair request. Isabella asked for and received multifarious white items as well as writing utensils and rare manuscripts about Anne Frank and other dead heroines. And Francesca asked for pretty much nothing. Plus, Vivian wanted to be a kind mother, to love both her daughters with the same force, even if that didn't always come easy. She loved them, of course, and she told herself that she loved them equally. For example, she often imagined running into a burning building for Isabella (easy!) and for Francesca (of course!), knowing that, as their mother, her instinct to rescue them would prevail over any consideration of her self-preservation. But she knew whom she would rescue first. She could not escape the feeling that Isabella's life was just the tiniest bit more valuable than Francesca's, what with the certain contribution Isabella would make to scholarship, her quick wit, her worldly grace at such a tender age. She loved her daughters differently, rather the way a man loves his wife versus how he loves his mistress. Francesca received the wifely love—dutiful, steadfast, a bit stolid; but Isabella occupied Vivian's thoughts with the force of a paramour, like Léon obsessed Emma in
Madame Bovary
.

She parked the Valiant in a space designated for the handicapped, crossed the lot, and stepped onto the rubber mats, forcing open the automatic glass doors. She'd worked in this store as a dressing-room clerk during high school, just after it became Loehmann's and not whatever it had been before, something sprawling that sold lawn furniture and cheap housewares. Working at Loehmann's had been her least favorite job. Worse than working without pay in her father's auto parts
store. Each time she'd enter the brightly lit, low-ceilinged dressing room, trying not to look at the women cramming their bodies into designer clothes, their skin reddened by triple-hook bras, highwaisted underwear and girdles, she'd feel sick with dread, as if she were witnessing her future. The cruel fluorescent lights accentuated every scar and wrinkle and birthmark, every roll of flesh and riverbed of stretchmarks. And the lack of privacy created an atmosphere of frenzy, the women hurrying to get the clothes off and on before anyone could take note of their imperfections.