mother’s stone and kiss it, kiss her: that is a triumph. The stone leaves an icy taste upon your lips and your nose; and the sky, with its ridged clouds, is tinged with mauve. It’s a far cry from the tony gatherings in the galleries of New York’s Meatpacking District for which you once believed yourself destined; and while it is beautiful—grief, too, can be beautiful—this small triumph doesn’t have about it any aspect of beginning. Let’s just say that the open doors in graveyards aren’t necessarily doors you want to enter.
But it looks—it is—as though that’s what there is, Death or the Garnet Hill catalog, that cheery, flimsy distraction from Death; or in a pinch Law & Order, because on some station or other, at any time of day or night, you can find it—Detective Benson! Detective Stabler! My long lost!—and no longer be alone.
And then, suddenly, there’s something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there’s an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn’t have imagined, and—elation!—it feels as though you’ve found the pot of gold, when you’d thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It’s enough, for a time—maybe even for a long time—to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.
7
When I went to college—to Middlebury, a small liberal arts institution known for its language studies, up in Vermont—I didn’t major in Studio Art. There didn’t seem much point in having gone to Middlebury for that. It was a battle, or rather, a discussion, I’d had with my parents before I chose the school. I’d applied to RISD, the art school in Providence, and to Pratt, in New York, as well as to traditional liberal arts colleges, and my parents had sat me down and told me they thought it would be a wasted opportunity if I went to study art. I wasn’t surprised that this was my father’s opinion; but I trusted my mother, so I listened to her.
“You’ll do your art either way,” she said. “Your art doesn’t depend on a degree. To be honest, your art lives in a realm where degrees are meaningless.”
“Then why go to university at all? Why not just go and make art?”
“Look, Mouse”—my mother called me Mouse; nobody else did, not even my father, and when she lost her ability to talk I felt that she looked the word at me with her eyes—“you’re only sixteen years old. You’re not old enough to vote, or to drink, or to sign a lease on an apartment. You’re barely old enough to drive. You can go away to college or you can stay at home with us and make your art in the garage and scoop ice cream all day down the road. Your choice, but I know what I’d choose: get out of this stodgy little dump! See the world.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Get out and see the world.”
“Oh, Mouse”—she stroked my hair, which was long then, so that stroking it meant caressing, too, the greater stretch of my back. Like a cat, rather than a mouse. I loved it. I loved being her child. I remember looking at her and thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the world. “I’ve had my moment, sweetie. Maybe another will come. But for now, I’m needed right here.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.”
“But I’ll go and then—”
“I love your daddy. He needs a home, too.”
And then we were back to the college question, and it seemed that art school wasn’t really a choice, because there wasn’t any money—barely enough, even with loans, to get me to university at all—and it mattered to my mother that I be employable at the end.
“You’re such a baby, you can go to art school afterward and still come out even. Get a master’s in Painting on top of your B.A., and you’ll be ready for all of it. I want you to have it all. It’s not like when I was a girl, the MRS degree and all that. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair. And so I went to Middlebury.