were up to the rehab”), but really inside my head I was attending to my unmentionable itch, I was reliving and reinterpreting conversations (“You won’t be here till six?”—she’d sounded disappointed. She tried to make it seem she didn’t care, but I could tell she’d been disappointed!), I was wondering what she was doing at that moment, I was wondering how long till I could call and find out, I was wondering when I could next get to the studio, and how long I’d be able to stay. I was wondering, as I often did, whether she or anyone else could tell the difference in me, whether my revelation, my awakening, had any outward mark.
Did I say anything? To anyone? And risk awakening from my amazing awakedness? What do you think?
All the exhilarating advantages of my condition, and also its inconvenient effects, led me to want to be at the studio as much as possible. In February, and in March, and in April too, every Saturday, and almost every Sunday, I’d sit or stand or lean or carry all morning, building Wonderland, Sirena’s Wonderland, laughing and being silly, sometimes just watching, able to ignore the unmentionable itch because it Was No More. And then we’d eat something. After the first couple of weeks, we took turns bringing lunch, and I lingered over my choices in the shops on a Friday evening: flavored breadsticks or big Swedish crackers like enormous communion hosts, wrapped in crinkly white paper; olives, cheeses, cured meats; dolmas; burek; sweet peppers stuffed with soft curd. Tubs of ratatouille, piperade, anchoïade. Endive leaves; strips of fennel. Purple broccoli stalks. Heirloom tomatoes, which cost a fortune in early spring. And sweets: I’d bring such sweets—the famous Highland Avenue cupcakes or sesame buns soaked in honey, or salted chocolate oatmeal cookies, or loukoum, or extravagant bars of Italian chocolate from the deli down the road from my house—always I brought enough for Reza, even for Skandar, substantial portions of sweets for the others, to assuage the guilt of my happiness.
There was, in these months, a new side of Sirena, obsessive and imperious, one I hadn’t seen in the fall, and it might, I suppose, have seemed to me selfish. But I was in thrall to her passionate single-mindedness, not least because, as her virtual assistant, I was included within it. Like a madness, her Wonderland was everything to her, and while she didn’t care to talk about it generally, she did talk about it with me. As in, “I think we need more rain sheets, more, yes? … I’m trying to decide whether the shards should be actually dangerously sharp—what do you think, Nora? We don’t want to draw blood, but shouldn’t it hurt to touch it?”
February vacation week, she signed Reza up for robotics camp at the Science Museum and we spent all day every day at the studio. She started to become an organic part of it, like the sink or the chemical smell in the hallway. By mid-March she hardly changed her clothes, or washed her hair, her fingertips were cracked and discolored from the paint and glue, her jeans, like her hair, more stiff and bespattered at the end of each day. She filched her husband’s cigarettes and smoked them with her coffee, one grubby hand palming a chipped cup, the other flicking ash onto the floor. The studio started to stink and was freezing—she threw two windows open wide to clear the fug, with only moderate success.
Sirena was turning, before my eyes, into my ideal of an artist—as if I’d imagined her and, by imagining her, had conjured her into being. And here’s the weird thing: her existence as an ideal woman artist didn’t feel as though it thwarted or controlled me, I didn’t look at her and think, “Why are you almost famous and I’m only your helper?” I don’t recall having the thought even once. Instead, I looked at her and saw myself, saw what suddenly seemed possible for me, too, because it was possible for her.
And the weirdest thing is that in that time, in addition to sewing together dresses, and sowing flowers on Astroturf, and stringing broken mirrors onto fine wire, in addition to making tapes of cricket sounds and animal-in-the-undergrowth noises, and in addition to fashioning Jabberwock tusks that would ultimately be discarded and forgotten, and rigging up the piercing little bulbs that would be Jabberwock eyes, in addition to working out for Sirena the camera settings for the kids’