be taken from me—these are the fragments I have shored against my ruin. And I didn’t explain, then, about how I stopped trying to show my work, let alone to sell it, and let go of the idea of it finding a home in the world—because somehow, in that long, slow extinguishing of life, it felt as though the one way I could try to keep my mother alive was to close in, and hold on, hold on to what I made as she had made me. I worried that this would make no sense, and this is why I didn’t speak of it then. But I explained about my illuminated boxes, about making scenes and worlds in miniature, and how always, hidden somewhere, where you could barely see her or could not see her at all, there was a small gold figure that was Joy.
“It’s hard for me to believe in,” I said, “but it’s also the most important thing to make myself believe. So I put her in there no matter what. Even in the death scenes, I put her in.”
“I really understand,” she said, and I could tell that she really did, and suddenly the afternoon was worth it, the sign had meant something, and we could get up and leave our awkward little table at Burdick’s, separate into the now-dark afternoon.
As she gathered her parcels, fumbling again, her clumsiness charming to me, she said without glancing up, “I’m thinking of renting a space, but the one I like is too big, too much for me. It’s better to share. Would you have any interest?”
“Yes,” I said, before I really understood what she was offering. It was a very fast “yes.”
Outside on the sidewalk, she put her hand on my arm, in the same way her son put his small hand on my arm. Now I would know where the gesture came from. “I’ll call you,” she said. “At the weekend, you can come with me to see the studio. Maybe Saturday afternoon? Skandar and Reza can do something together then.”
“Yes,” I said, without considering that I’d promised to visit my father that day, that I’d have to call and disappoint him, a spare, gray old man alone in an apartment in Brookline, counting the hours until I came. And when I realized this mistake, I didn’t waver, either; and I didn’t wait for Sirena to confirm, I called him up, picturing him there in his overheated lemon-yellow sitting room with its strange, plush, old rose broadloom that my mother had chosen when they moved in from Manchester, when the cards were already on the table but she was still up to such choices—the weirdness, to me, that my mother had deliberately made it an old person’s apartment, the colors and the furnishings saved from their house the ones most conducive to a powdery, grannyish atmosphere, as if, by doing so, she might will herself into old age (she wasn’t then old; she wasn’t old when she died), might keep herself going by simply setting the stage for keeping going—and always, when I spoke to him, I pictured him forlorn in this sea of pink and yellow, oblivious to it as he seemed to be. I told him something had come up; I intimated that it had to do with school. He tried to sound excited for me, thinking perhaps this might imply some professional advancement, while I tried to sound irritated about the obligation, as if I wanted nothing less than to go. We were both engaged in bonhomous deceit of such long standing that it was barely conscious; but surely he knew I wasn’t sorry enough, and I knew that he was disappointed, and I’m ashamed to admit I was so excited that I didn’t properly care.
There comes that time, that Lucy Jordan time, when your life looks small and all and always the same around you, and you don’t think anything will change, you think that hope is not for you—and if you’re me, then in that early period of awakening to your condition, you don’t even feel angry. Dismayed, maybe; shocked; but that’s just, it seems, what life is, a world in which the day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog that you will peruse in the bathroom, and where a triumph is when you take a long walk through the glorious snowbound cemetery after the first storm and somehow don’t get lost among the dead, you find your