We Only Know So Much (24 page)

Priscilla has no idea how this will all shake out, but she’s not worried; it’s obvious destiny really is on her side after all. She has a proudest accomplishment.

fifty-five

I
t’s an eventful day for Vivian.

It starts when she goes out front to look for the newspaper. Usually someone brings it in by this time; for a long time that someone was Theodore. Briefly Vivian wonders why her son hasn’t brought it in today, before she remembers, then pushes away any further thoughts about that. Bending down to pick up the paper, Vivian discovers, under the porch swing, the letter Theodore had intended to mail the day he died. At first she doesn’t recognize the handwriting, it looks like a child’s, maybe Otis’s. But the return address clearly reads “Theodore Copeland.” Vivian finds herself feeling a little light-headed, seeing this, sits down on the porch swing for a moment. She examines the envelope again. The handwriting is familiar now. It’s almost identical to what Theodore’s penmanship looked like when he first learned cursive: careful and overly rounded, the unsteady but slow hand of a child learning to write. Vivian looks up and away, clasps the letter in both hands like a prayer. A few tears come up into her eyes before she dabs at them with a handkerchief, takes a deep breath, puts the letter in her pocket, and goes back inside.

This afternoon, Vivian has a luncheon with her friends at their favorite restaurant, The Iris. They have a key lime pie that’s always worth commenting on.
Real key limes!
one of them always says, though no one really knows this for sure. She has a pleasant time as always, but feels a little more restless today than usual, undoubtedly made worse by finding the letter and by the fact that her friends have all expressed their condolences once again. This might have been all right had their sympathies been brief. Vivian had always felt she and her friends shared a sense of decorum on subjects like these, believed there was an unspoken amount of time that should be devoted to conversations about such things—which, in Vivian’s mind, ought to be limited to a single comment or two per person. Today, though, her friends share their own experiences with losses, of which they’ve all had many. This puts Vivian into something of a pickle; though there are known limits, you also don’t want to be the one to interrupt someone talking about how much they miss their spouse, although you can be sure Vivian is considering it and hoping to the heavens that someone else will. This conversation goes on for an interminable eight or nine minutes before Florence mentions something about her great-grandchild, which Vivian sticks to like a wad of gum in a second-grader’s hair. Never before has Vivian seemed so interested in a person, place, or thing other than herself.

Vivian walks home from lunch as usual. The Iris is just a few blocks away from home and it’s a gorgeous day. A block down from the restaurant, Vivian spies a convertible in the drugstore parking lot. Oh, it’s a shiny thing; she has no idea what model, that’s hardly anything she’s interested in. What catches her eye is the beautiful aqua color, the sunlight glinting off the silver trim, the white leather upholstery. Oh my! She’s never seen such a thing. For those of you who care, it’s a 1956 Thunderbird. There’s a vintage car show in town. Vintage models from all eras have been spotted on the streets this week. But Vivian can hardly tell it’s a vintage car. She’s never been one to pay attention to new cars when they come out, can hardly tell a wagon from a minivan, but she can sure recognize a convertible when she sees one, and to her this one looks brand spanking new.

Well, it certainly can’t do any harm to just touch those seats. Vivian runs a gloved hand across the leather, takes her glove off to touch it again. Oh my. Isn’t that something? Oh, that is quite nice. Well, it couldn’t do any harm just to sit behind the wheel for a moment. Who’s going to get upset with a ninety-eight-year-old lady in a smart suit? Vivian slides in, runs her hand along the seats again, looks at the dash, the silvery chrome of the dials, puts her hands on the bright white steering wheel, the keys in the ignition! Oh, who would notice if she just turned that little key . . .

Oh, the purr of that engine! How has she never felt such a thing before, never felt this marvelous rumble in her chest! Maybe just a spin around the block; who would know? Did she dare?

Vivian looks around. There’s no one in sight. She puts the car in reverse, like she’s seen her husband do a thousand times, pulls the bar down until it clicks the R into place, slowly backs the car out of the spot, shifts into drive, and
goes
. Down Main Street, over to the wealthy section of town. Oh, wouldn’t it be just marvelous if her friends could see her, if anyone she knows would see her right now? She knows she must look like she was just born to drive this car, up the hilly, winding road past mansions and into the woods. The wind is blowing back her curls—she’ll probably look a fright when she gets back, but she’ll deal with that later. Vivian keeps going, past the last estate, through the woods, past farms, cities, skylines, past mountains and oceans until the car lifts up off the ground, over the trees, and right into the stars.

fifty-six

T
he morning of the sermon, Jean comes back inside to get dressed, looks in her closet, and finds herself suddenly appalled at the swath of khaki pants and black cardigans in her eyesight. Did these seem different to her when she bought them? She knows this church isn’t a fancy place where women put on elaborate hats, wonders if anyone really gets dressed up for church anymore; still, she’s speaking today, and she wants to look nice. Maybe Priscilla has something. She creeps into her daughter’s room—she’s still sleeping—pokes around in the closet. Lots of things with tags; where is Priscilla getting the money for this stuff?

Nothing looks quite right. She pushes some things around, pulls out a pair of gray wool trousers, a long lavender cardigan, a pair of suede pumps still in the box. Jean takes the clothes back to her room to get dressed, goes downstairs to make breakfast. When Priscilla comes down and pours herself coffee, it takes a minute for it to register.

Are those my clothes?

Mmm, no. Mine
is all Jean says.

No they’re not, those are mine. Were you in my room?

Guess so.

Priscilla is hardly awake enough or she’d have a full-on invasion-of-privacy shit fit. Plus, her mom is so far on the weird side this morning, there’s no telling how that would go.

Where are you going, anyway?

I’m going to church.

Priscilla so does not want to know anything else about that. Things are bad enough with Dad sobbing all the time now. She thought maybe things would get a little more normal around here after her grandfather died—well, maybe that’s harsh, it’s not like she wanted him to die, but he was less and less his old self and more and more hard to care for and that just is what it is. But her dad is being weirder than ever, much as that would have once seemed impossible, and she’s not fully over her mom calling her a bitch, even though in the end that method seemed to have worked, though she’ll for sure never admit that. The last thing this family needs now is Jesus or some shit. But her mom is wearing her nicest clothes and she still looks like a hot mess.
Okay, well, at least . . . you’ve got the sweater on wrong
. Priscilla starts to adjust it a bit; it’s hard for her not to do her thing, but as she does, she sees something in her mom’s eye, sees the corners of her mom’s lips turn up just the slightest bit and recognizes this as a moment coming on between them, backs away.
Okay, that’s fine, I guess
. She shakes her head, takes her coffee mug back to her room.

Jean hasn’t even put the shoes on yet. She won’t put them on until she gets to the church—she knows she can’t drive in them—so she drives barefoot, puts the heels on when she arrives at the church, takes a few awkward steps, can’t remember the last time she had on heels, at her wedding maybe? But then quickly finds a stride, walks up the church steps and down to the front pew of church. She’s ready.

Jean walks up to the podium after the music ends. Her daughter’s clothes feel foreign; that may have been a rash choice, but the shoes make up the difference. In the shoes, her posture is different, straighter; her person feels like it’s matching up with her body. This is how tall I should have been, she thinks.
If I’d been this tall, things could have gone differently for me from the beginning.
Wait, did she say that out loud? She did, people are laughing. That’s good, right? She starts by talking a little about how she’d come to the church, has a hard time looking out at the congregation at first, but talks a bit about how welcomed she had felt when her father-in-law died; segues quickly into her certainty that heaven is a high school dance filled with movie stars, with astrophysicists and dinosaurs, with long-gone pets, literary greats and your loved ones, anyone you imagine; looks up long enough to see a few nods in the front row, enough for now, though there are as many more who aren’t sure where she’s going with this, more than a few are thinking high school dances were their idea of hell, but on the other hand, they’ve heard weirder things around here. Jean latches onto Bob’s serene face, doesn’t look down again.

And in heaven, when you dance with your dead lover, you will no longer have the need to ask him
Why the fuck
, you will no longer have that horrible, indelible image in your mind of his lifeless, sad body hanging in the place where you once made beautiful love, you will no longer ask yourself a million questions that can’t be answered, like what if you hadn’t had an extra cup of coffee that day, or how did you miss goddamned everything, what kind of blackout shades had you pulled down over your life to miss goddamned everything, how could you be so stupid to not see one single clue that your lover was so depressed that he would hang himself, what story were you telling yourself about what was going on between you, about who he was? You will no longer ask yourself if he had set you up from the beginning, knowing he was living his last days, not wanting to hurt his family, so instead putting it on you. You will stop asking if your entire relationship was made out of nothing but air, created solely for the purpose of having some random person find you hanging rather than having one of your family members find you hanging, because let me tell you I spent a good long time on that one. For a while it made as much sense as anything to me. It’s hard to come up with any good reason why someone would do that to a person he supposedly loved
—
unless what he felt wasn’t love at all, was something more like complete dispassion, or hate. But these are the questions. There’s an additional line of questions relating to Who the goddamn are you, lady, that you could do such a thing in the first place, tell this epic lie to your family and friends, sneak around and tell yourself the great love you think you have rights out any wrongs. That’s a movie-star lie.

I have heard it said that if you commit suicide, you go straight to hell. I know now that this is nothing but a myth. I’m just saying there is no hell. Whatever god is, if there even is one, he/she/it loves and forgives everyone. Everyone. That’s what I’m going with. Probably even a psychopath, that’s the kind of love I’m talking about
—
that god can love a psychopath, love him so much that forgiveness isn’t even part of it, it’s just pure love. Don’t misunderstand, I think it’s clear enough that god can’t stop a psychopath, can’t even stop you from doing whatever shit you have in mind to do. And he can’t give you parking spaces, not even if there’s a puppy stuck up a flaming tree that needs your help. And yet I see now, really, it’s all got to be about god. It’s all happening in god’s world, right? Psychopaths and parking spaces, rainbows and lollipops. There is a great loving and forgiving something out there even if it’s not pushing things around the way we might like. I believe it.

I’m not saying it’s okay to commit suicide. Don’t do it, please. Seriously, please don’t commit suicide. Please, if you have terrible thoughts like that, you should tell someone
—
anyone. No one thinks it’s better if you do that. I mean, if you’re a child molester or something, for a second, yes, I might be glad you killed yourself
—
I can’t lie about that, I am a mother
—
but still, someone loves you. Someone always loves you. Just turn yourself in and let your sister or your nephew visit you in jail. Don’t fucking kill yourself. We enter the world pure and clean. We are heavenly in body, mind, and spirit. I have witnessed a miracle in this dream, and to witness a miracle is to know yourself, vital, brilliant, heavenly in spirit.

We hesitate to disrupt Jean’s groove here, but it may need to be pointed out that she’s just quoted the label from the face cream she had only recently been so disturbed by.

Yesterday I looked into the eyes of a squirrel and I saw my dead lover, James, who said, Yes, it’s true about heaven.

I am sure, now, that my lover, James, must have known about this heaven, because I have tried and tried to understand what made him take his life away from me and have, until this dream, failed. Failed to understand. I know now that this dream was James contacting me from heaven, to tell me, Look, my beloved, I am here dancing with Rita Hayworth, everything is beautiful.

fifty-seven

G
ordon holds a “gallery opening” in the garage for his family. He has completed the family series. He’s covered a workbench with a paper tablecloth, put out some club soda, a cheese plate, and a box of wine (itself indicating to Jean and Priscilla that Gordon is not his usual self, considering how many lessons on fine wine they’ve gotten over the years). Gordon is positively beaming, still weepy but beaming, and for once in his life he says little. He wants the work to speak for itself. Whether or not it has actual artistic merit, we may not be the ones to say, nor do we know if it will ever be seen outside of this garage. Gordon hasn’t thought that far ahead.

The family looks at the paintings. For the most part, their initial responses are a bit blank. Everyone is silent. The portrait of Priscilla shows her inside of a TV set; the edge of the canvas is the edge of the TV (proportions here being entirely skewed, considering this is a vertical rectangle). Her arms are crossed against her chest, but there’s a new elegance to her, a slight difference in her stance, a hint of an intelligence in her eyes, a focus. The painting of Otis shows him with a pencil in his mouth, holding a hand that presumably belongs to Caterina, but she is not in the picture. His expression is at once beatific and furrowed. Vivian is standing in her rose garden. She’s wearing a crown. Gordon added that in at the last minute. He’d captured her regal posture so well he thought she needed a crown. But there’s an underlying note, if you look closely, an uncertainty in her eyes. Behind the roses in the background is a dirt road, at the end of which appears to be a tiny aqua blur that disappears up into the clouds. Given what we know of Gordon’s skills as a painter, we cannot interpret his meaning here, or know whether that aqua blur is merely a mistake he tried to cover up with some clouds. We will only say that Vivian is not present and we’ll say no more about it.

Theodore’s painting is based on one of his accidental photographs, the one of the top half of his head; in this garage, anyway, it seems near as big as a Chuck Close, Gordon’s father’s bright eyes the size of softballs, the top of his head taking up the rest of the canvas. He’s oriented the painting vertically, unlike the photo it was based on. The background is grass, and there’s a bright red cardinal perched on top of Theodore’s head.

The self-portrait Gordon had shown Priscilla earlier is also included, though the watch is now a slightly darker brown to better contrast against his skin. Also, the expression in his eyes has been altered slightly. Gordon’s intention was to create the illusion that he was looking out from the canvas, directly at the viewer. Whether he’s actually accomplished this is hard for us to say.

Even Mott has a painting. He’s curled up in his spot at the head of the bed, the backs of Jean and Gordon on either side of him, the rest of them off the sides of the painting, but his head is up, facing the viewer. Jean’s portrait is a nude. She has a penetrating stare, and she’s standing with her legs slightly apart, arms by her hips at the ready, like a nude gunslinger. This one is his favorite.

Everyone has thoughts about the paintings: thoughts about their individual paintings, and thoughts about the other paintings, and thoughts about the paintings together. Are they stunned? Maybe? Do they see themselves in these paintings, any little part of themselves, as Gordon has, finally, or do they think Gordon’s gotten it right about everyone but themselves, or is it a mixed bag? Is there a chance they’ll somehow connect now, where they see themselves as their father sees them, or do they not get it? For once, we have no idea. We only know so much. What do you think?