asking if Hen was going to be part of the upcoming Open Studios, Matthew stood and said, “Can I get anyone a drink?”
“What are the choices?” Lloyd asked, a little too eagerly.
“Wine, beer.”
“I’ll have a beer,” Lloyd said, while Hen and Mira each asked for a glass of white wine.
Matthew left the room, and Mira asked again about Open Studios.
“I don’t know,” Hen said. “I just got my space set up, like yesterday. It seems strange to suddenly have people parade through.”
“You should do it,” Lloyd said.
“Yeah, you should,” Mira said.
“Have you been to Open Studios before?” Hen asked Mira.
“Yeah. Every year we’ve been here. I go, anyway. Sometimes Matthew does. It’s fun, you should definitely do it. You might even sell something. That’s where I bought these prints.”
Mira indicated the framed prints on the wall, and Hen felt bad for thinking they’d come from a furniture store. Matthew returned with the drinks, Hen noticing that he’d brought a can of ginger ale for himself.
“Tell us about your art,” Mira said.
It was not Hen’s favorite thing, explaining her profession, but she did her best, and Lloyd, always her champion, jumped in and took over. Since college, Hen had been a printmaker, first in woodblocks and later using copper or zinc plates. For years, she created works of pure imagination: grotesque, surreal tableaus, usually with a caption. These illustrations were made to look like they came from books, often terrifying children’s books that didn’t exist except in her mind. She’d been fairly successful all through her twenties, selected for several group shows and even profiled in a New England arts magazine, but she’d always had to supplement her income by working in art supply stores and sometimes as a framer for a prominent Boston painter in the South End. All that changed when she’d been approached by a children’s book author to create actual illustrations for the first chapter book in a proposed fantasy series. She’d taken the job, the book had done well, and that had led her to an agent, and now she was a full-time children’s illustrator who only occasionally created an original piece of art. She didn’t mind. Secretly, she felt happy these days to be told what her compositions should be. Her current cocktail of meds, which included a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, and something that apparently boosted the antidepressant’s effects, had kept Hen’s bipolar disorder from rearing its ugly head going on two years, but she did feel that it had also removed all of her creative impulses. She could still do the pieces—still loved the work, really—but rarely had an idea these days for something original. Not that she told any of this to Mira and Matthew. Mira was mostly interested in the fantasy books, since she’d heard of them, and was promising to buy the first in the series. Matthew asked her several questions about her artistic process, leaning in and listening intently to her answers.
They eventually moved to the dining room, where the food had been set up on warming plates on a sideboard: mashed potatoes, drumsticks in a bright yellow sauce, a green salad.
“This was how my grandparents used to serve food,” Hen said. “On a sideboard.”
“Where are they from?” Mira asked.
Hen explained that her father was British and her mother American and how they’d moved back and forth between Bath in England and Albany in New York during her childhood.
“I thought you had an accent,” Mira said.
“Really? I thought I didn’t.”
“It’s mild.”
“Are you from . . . ?”
“I’m from California, but my parents were both from the north of England, by way of Pakistan, and they acted very British. All our meals, including breakfast, were served from a sideboard in the dining room.”
“I like it,” Hen said.
Conversation at dinner was fine but never really kicked into anything lively. It was a lot of talk about their respective jobs, the neighborhood, the ridiculously overpriced housing market. Whenever Matthew spoke it was to ask more questions, usually of Hen. She realized, after he’d asked her if she’d survived the block party, that he was fairly perceptive. Lloyd, hoping to turn the conversation to sports, asked Matthew if he did any coaching at Sussex Hall. Matthew said he didn’t (“the only sport I was ever good at was badminton”). Hen, who, right out of college, had spent a disastrous three months trying to teach a preschool art class, asked him if he found teaching to be emotionally draining, and he said that the