the movies and on TV, people were always getting swept off their feet.
And really, none of that mattered. What did was how the picture called to her, making her forget what she had just found out about her ring, making her forget that she wanted to get away from the pawnshop, making her forget how glad her sore feet were going to be when she saw the Blue Line bus pulling up in front of the Hot Pot, making her forget everything. She only thought: Look at that! Isn’t that the most wonderful picture!
It was an oil painting in a wooden frame, about three feet long and two feet high, leaning against a stopped clock on the left end and a small naked cherub on the right end. There were pictures all around it (an old tinted photograph of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a watercolor of fruit in a bowl, gondolas at dawn on the Grand Canal, a hunting print which showed a pack of the unspeakable chasing a pair of the uneatable across a misty English moor), but she hardly gave them a glance. It was the picture of the woman on the hill she was interested in, and only that. In both subject and execution it was not much different from pictures moldering away in pawnshops, curio shops, and roadside bargain barns all over the country (all over the world, for that matter), but it filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us—the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another’s perspective, at least for awhile, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be.
Her emotional reaction was so sudden, so hot, and so completely without connection to her real, practical life that at first her mind simply floundered, with no idea at all of how to cope with this unexpected burst of fireworks. For that moment or two she was like a transmission that has suddenly popped out of gear and into neutral—although the engine was revving like crazy, nothing was happening. Then the clutch engaged and the transmission slipped smoothly back into place.
It’s what I want for my new place, that’s why I’m excited, she thought. It’s exactly what I want to make it mine.
She seized on this thought eagerly and gratefully. It would only be a single room, true enough, but she had been promised it would be a large room, with a little kitchen alcove and an attached bathroom. In any case it would be the first place in her whole life that was hers and hers alone. That made it important, and that made the things she chose for it important, too ... and the first would be the most important of all, because it would set the tone for everything that followed.
Yes. No matter how nice it might be, the room would be a place where dozens of single, low-income people had lived before her and more dozens would live after her. But it was going to be an important place, all the same. These last five weeks had been an interim period, a hiatus between the old life and the new. When she moved into the room she had been promised, her new life—her single life—would really begin ... and this picture, one Norman had never seen and passed judgement on, one that was just hers, could be the symbol of that new life.
This was how her mind—sane, reasonable, and quite unprepared to admit or even recognize anything which smacked of the supernatural or paranormal—simultaneously explained, rationalized, and justified her sudden spike reaction to the picture of the woman on the hill.
4
It was the only painting in the aisle that was covered with glass (Rosie had an idea that oil paintings usually weren’t glassed in, maybe because they had to breathe, or something), and there was a small yellow sticker in the lower lefthand corner. $75 OR ? it said.
She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and took hold of the frame’s sides. She lifted the picture carefully off the shelf and carried it back up the aisle. The old man with the battered briefcase was still there, and still watching her, but Rosie hardly saw him. She went directly to the counter and put the picture carefully down in