'Shadow Boxes' by Vanessa Blakeslee
“Shadow Boxes” was first published in the Fall 2011 issue of Bosque as the winner of the Bosque Fiction Award.
The summer I was fifteen, Ward knocked at my door every day on his way to the museum, and I greeted him in my satin bikini briefs and matching bra. For twenty minutes, we did everything from the waist up. Then we tugged on our clothes and scrambled down the road to Phoebe’s Waxworks Museum, where until four o’clock we ushered busloads of summer day camp kids through the rooms of shadow boxes and hounded them about not pressing their noses and fingers onto the glass. My mother worked as a secretary for the school district; at noon she rushed home to choke down a tuna sandwich and catch her soap opera. Lately, after school and on weekends, she embarked on baking frenzies: cakes in bunt pans, brownies, cookies. I was determined to be nothing like her; my life would take off when I fell in love.
One late afternoon, Ward and I were alone, buffing the museum free of greasy little handprints and cleaning up gum wrappers. I swept the floor while he wiped the glass fronts of shadow boxes. He squatted and stared at his favorites as he dusted the frames: adventure scenes like Robin Hood and Little John fighting on the log. I preferred the country girl spinning straw into gold with the wiry Rumpelstiltskin looking on.
Bored, I trailed my broom across the laces of Ward’s shoes.
“Cut that out,” he said, flinching. “And hurry up. I’ve got to talk to Phoebe.”
Phoebe was the willowy spinster artist who had created the waxworks and then built the small museum on her property, across from the Methodist church my family had attended since I was born. She was hardly the struggling artist; on summer afternoons, her barn swarmed with art students from morning until evening.
I exaggerated my broom strokes slow and wide until Ward glared and swatted at the handle, and I dodged, laughing.
“It’s too early to go home,” I said. “Let’s go down to the old mill and swim.”
I had been avoiding the swimming creek all summer, but I’d go if Ward came along.
“Nah,” he said, peering closer into the last shadow box in the row. “You’re getting to be one crazy girl, you know that?”
He eyed me, reached over and squeezed my breast through my shirt.
I sidled up so that my blouse sleeve rubbed against his shoulder underneath his t-shirt. We stared into the shadow box. Inside, a waxen figure of Snow White lay dead-asleep, waiting for her prince to awaken her. The dwarves were frozen in bedside vigil like seven tiny fathers. I held my breath, but Ward kept studying the wax figures.
He asked, “How do you suppose she gave the dwarves such tiny tears?”
“Who cares how?” I said. “Knowing would ruin everything.”
He elbowed me on the side.
“You’re so damn sure all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
He hopped to his feet.
What did he mean by that? I kept my mouth shut and hurried after him to the barn.
Late afternoon sunlight poured into the building. Half a dozen smocked adult students stood painting, their easels arranged in a circle like spokes on a wheel. At the center of the circle a woman about my mother’s age perched on a stool, immobile except for her eyes which roved around the giant room. I wondered why the class was in a circle until I figured out that was the point: each student was to capture the woman at a different angle.
Phoebe rattled off instructions and swept her hand over a student’s canvas. Even as she spotted us and made her way to the door, she kept teaching. She was a slip of a woman, barely my height; once she told us that she had been a champion ice skater until a bad sprain prompted her to discover painting. But she never crossed a room without a skater’s grace and a spring in her step.
Ward handed her the cash box but he didn’t let go.
He asked, “How much for art lessons?”
The faint crow’s feet that marked the corners of Phoebe’s eyes were like little starbursts, but her mouth remained a straight line.
“The youngest I take students is eighteen,” she answered. “Boys, especially.”
“I’ll be eighteen in October,” he said.
She studied him for a moment, and then turned to me.
“What about you?” she asked.
Ward looked at me, too, his eyes unblinking behind the wiry frames that made him look like John Lennon, only with shaggy blonde hair instead of brown. His thick lips parted in anticipation.
“That’d be great,” I said quickly, my voice sounding hollow.
I had no interest in art lessons, only time with Ward.
“You can buy the supplies at Altemose’s store. Ask for Mr. Altemose, Jr.—he keeps a list for my students,” she told us. “Just tell him you’re starting lessons and he’ll give you my discount. And you can come to next Saturday’s class, bright and early at eight a.m.”
She planted the money box on her hip like a baby and sauntered up to the barn.
Ward called out a thank you, but Phoebe leaned in to examine a woman’s canvas and didn’t look back. She just raised one hand in a short princess-wave.
Early the next morning, Ward phoned to say he’d borrowed his dad’s truck so we could get the art supplies. I dressed in my favorite jeans and shirt, and added some eye shadow for the occasion. Maybe afterward we would stop by a diner for breakfast before going to open the museum, or return to my empty house for the hours between the errand and the museum. And then what? My mouth was so dry from nerves that all I was able to force down was a banana and some yogurt.
It was Saturday. My mother was still wearing her hair curlers, scribbling in her journal by the kitchen window like she did every morning since my father’s death. The oven glowed; seeping from its door came the syrupy scent of pineapple upside-down cake. She asked if I was going somewhere. I told her about the art lessons.
“Art lessons?” she asked, as if she had never heard of such a thing. “Working with wax?”
“I doubt it, Mom,” I said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “Probably drawing or painting. Ward and I are taking classes.”
The words sounded nice so I repeated them in my head but with variation: Ward and I are taking classes. Ward and I are studying art. Ward and I.
“Ha, that’s something,” she said, clucking her tongue. “Phoebe never did like children.”
“We’re not children,” I said, but softly, because I knew she didn’t hear me.
In Ward’s father’s truck with the Beatles crooning, “All You Need is Love,” we sped through town. A patchwork of cornfields, car dealerships and graveyards skirted the main route with two-story farmhouses stuck in between; this foreground continued on past the lone traffic light. Were the words of the song true, that love was all you really did need? Why would someone like Phoebe choose to live here, a speck of a village below the Pocono Mountains, where nothing exciting ever happened, when other artists were living in New York City, throwing bizarre art shows and being famous? The Beatles’ chorus looped around and around in my head, until we bounced into the parking lot of Altemose’s Feed and Hardware Store.
“Do you think Phoebe’s strange?” I asked.
“Yeah, she’s strange. I love it,” Ward said. “Do you realize what a huge deal this is, to take lessons from her? She’s no phony pretending to be good. She was written up in the paper.”
“The Pocono Record?” I asked.
He shot me the you-should-know-better look.
“The Express out of Easton,” he said.
“Well, that’s not such a big deal,” I said. “Anyway, she’s too pretty to be a real hermit.”
He turned off the truck.
“All my parents can talk about is her affair with Altemose, Jr.,” he said.
“Phoebe’s having an affair?” I asked, slapping him on the knee. “Why haven’t you ever told me?”
“Your mother’s never talked about that?” he asked. “People like my parents will never figure out someone like her.”
He cradled the keys in his hand.
“Know what I mean?”
I reached over and plucked the keys from his hand.
“Sounds mysterious,” I said.
He stared ahead at the store, the door opening and closing with the flow of customers, mostly men in plaid work shirts and heavy boots.
“Artists are different. They understand passion. Unlike most people.”
I dangled the keys in front of his face.
Laughing, I said, “So now you want to be an artist, huh? Not go into the Coast Guard and fly helicopters to rescue people?”
“You don’t know shit, Janie,” he said.
He grabbed the keys out of my hand so hard that he scraped his nails across my palm. He jumped out of the truck and I followed.
I didn’t say much while we roamed the store. I had never pictured Phoebe as anything but alone, painting her canvases and carving the faces of her wax storybook figures. As we trailed the younger Mr. Altemose with his wild crop of dark hair and mangy beard making him look like a younger brother of Jerry Garcia or John the Baptist, I wondered, how does it happen? Mr. Altemose had been married for as long as my parents, at least. Did the affair occur right here in the store, perhaps in the back room? But the older Mr. Altemose was usually puttering around back there, dragging feed sacks and pricing dry goods with his sticker gun. Did his son sneak into Phoebe’s barn at night, and tell the wife that he was attending a Rotary meeting? I had always pictured Ward and me kissing in a secluded, romantic place like the woods along the creek behind my house. But could it happen out in the open—while locking up the museum one afternoon? Ward was right; I didn’t even know what passion meant. And what about love? I’d thought I knew what love was at least, because of the fluttery way I felt around Ward. But now I wasn’t so sure.
“Your dad and I were in art class together, in high school,” Altemose, Jr. said as he piled a sketchbook, eraser and an assortment of pencils in my arms.
He added, “I was sorry to hear about him.”
At this Ward shoved his thumbs into his belt loops and looked at me.
I said nothing, just watched as Altemose, Jr. plucked the identical supplies off the shelf for Ward. Altemose’s tanned arms reminded me of how my father’s always looked in summer after the many hours spent tending to his cantaloupe patch in the field behind our house. That was where I found him the year before, face down on the edge of the field, plain t-shirt pitching out of his back pocket. Even from a distance I had known right away that he was dead. Until then I had thought that hearts only wore out on people my grandparents’ age, with hunched backs.
“He would be happy about the art lessons,” I said.
Altemose said, “Lots of people around here know who Phoebe is, but only a few know her real well.”
Then he looked at us and added, “You’re lucky. She’s a good lady.”
Ward and I climbed into the truck and drove along with the radio cranked up.
We exchanged few words, and when he pulled up in front of my house, he just said, “See you at work.” I hopped down from the truck and watched him roll around the bend and out of sight.
I let the screen door bang behind me, and my mother yelled for me from her bedroom at the top of the stairs. The downstairs smelled of flour and sugar cooling, but something richer than pineapple cake—was it chocolate? I took my time climbing up and then leaned in her doorway with my arms crossed. Plaster crumbled down from the walls; the room was like a cardboard box slowly disintegrating. My mother was rearranging her dolls on her bed, or her “babies” as she liked to call them—some with china faces, others made of porcelain. On the TV, a muted black-and-white Western played, the cowboy kneeling by the bed of a heaving-bosomed Ava Gardner.
“Your art lessons are a gift,” my mother said.
She clapped her hands together as if she was now sharing a secret she’d been keeping for a long time.
“I just got off the phone with Phoebe. And listen, she wants me to sit for her. For a painting.”
“Is that all?” I said, rolling my eyes. “She uses people all the time for that.”
“She’s got to have some special reason for wanting me,” she replied. “You think you’re so smart all the time. Well, it hurts. What do you think Daddy would say?”
I didn’t say anything. My father had banged his fist on enough tables in dealing with my mother; often he would spend hours out of sight, in his garden behind the wooded creek or his workroom above the stairs. My mother didn’t make much of anything then, but frozen dinners.
Downstairs, my mother made an appointment with her hairdresser for the following Saturday morning, “to be fresh,” she said over the phone. She’d made German chocolate cake in addition to the pineapple, and slathered icing atop the cake as she talked. She always used the store-bought kind, and her hands got streaked with icing from hastily dipping the knife. Since Easter she’d been baking without cease, and what she couldn’t stuff in her mouth she donated to neighbors or the church. Was it purely grief that was driving her to bake and binge and give away? Or some deeper need to create? As she licked icing from the side of her hand, then the knife, I couldn’t tell. Or maybe some warped kind of penance.
And yet, Saturday morning. My excitement at having more time with Ward during the art lesson now mixed with dread at my mother’s news. Surely I wasn’t going to have to draw my mother? Was Phoebe playing some kind of odd joke? No way to tell. I stared at the only piece of art in our house, which hung above my mother’s bed. My mother liked it because of the religious subject matter—the stone church where she and my father had been married, across the road from Phoebe’s waxworks exhibit. Although Phoebe claimed that she never set foot in church, she had liked the one across from her property enough to paint it. She had given the painting to my mother right after my father died.
My mother snapped the lid over the icing, hung up the phone.
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” I said quickly. “Phoebe’s nice but she’s a weirdo. She’s always spinning off in another direction from where you think she’s going.”
“She’s different, that’s all,” my mother said, rinsing her hands. “Last week Pastor Sam talked about each of us being like a lake. When you only see the surface of a lake, you miss everything that lies beneath.”
She brushed her hands on a towel and started for the steps.
“Oh, yeah?” I said. I felt myself growing hot and dangerous. “Then why haven’t you ever told me about Phoebe having affairs? You’ve always called her an old maid, but she’s not.”
Her footsteps creaked and paused, but I received no reply.
That afternoon, Phoebe closed up the museum an hour early and made Ward and me haul her unfinished canvases and students’ easels to the back corner of the barn. From underneath paint-spattered sheets, she tugged out completed portraits and landscapes to the main room. She and I heaved them up to Ward, who teetered on a stepstool and adjusted each canvas to hang on wires that Phoebe had strung between nails on the barn’s interior walls. Ward asked if she was going to have an auction of her work.
“I’m throwing a party tonight,” she said. “Passionate whimsy for art lessons is typically squashed by August unless I stir up some excitement.”
“Can I come?” Ward asked. “I won’t bother anyone, I promise.”
Phoebe said, “I doubt you’d enjoy this type of thing much. Lots of standing around and talking about painting technique.”
“But there’s nothing else for us to do,” I said quickly. “Other than the boring Avon party my mom’s going to tonight.”
Phoebe crinkled her nose and chin.
“That sounds just lovely,” she said to me. “Come around eight o’clock then. I have a few younger students who might show, and if you’re together you can at least amuse yourselves.”
As soon as Ward and I stepped onto the road, he asked me if I had made up the excuse about the Avon party.
“Sure, there’s an Avon party,” I said. “Why?”
“I just thought that was pretty clever,” he said. “If you’d made that up back there.”
He skimmed his hand over the tops of the Fourth-of-July lilies blooming in orange bunches on the side of the road.
“We should start walking over there by seven-thirty,” I said. “Before the sun goes down.”
“Right,” he said.
He ripped off the fiery head of a lily, pinched the V of my shirt away from my chest and propped the flower in the space.
Once I helped my mother to the car with her cakes that night, I itched to get out of the house. I combed through my dad’s bookshelf, untouched since his death; my mother read only Christian romances from the library. His shelves contained mostly issues of National Geographic, some gardening books and some dusty model airplanes with miniature fighter pilots inside. I held one up in the lamplight and marveled at how the teeniest detail, from the goggles to the silver buckles, had been brought to life with no more than brush and paint. I recalled my father bent over his models in the spare room underneath the attic where he worked for hours into the night, how the room smelled of airplane glue and stale ashtrays. Now the door to that room remained shut; after his death, my mother had emptied the closets and dressers of his clothes and dumped them in there.
At quarter to eight I flicked off all the lamps in the house except for the one next to the couch, but no sign of Ward. I dialed his phone number with trembling fingers.
His father picked up.
“He found out about some party at that Phoebe-lady’s and went over,” he said. “Some artsy shin-dig, I don’t know. Is this the girl who called earlier? Amy?”
“No, this is Janie,” I said weakly.
I told him thanks and hung up.
I grabbed one of my dad’s old jackets from the coat closet. The sleeves hung down past my fingers but I felt protected wearing it, as if to show up uninvited to an adult friend’s party required magical armor.
Halfway there, I realized that I hadn’t even changed clothes or bothered to brush my hair. How much did that matter, really? Was I in love with Ward or not? I had walked too far in the dark to turn around. I had to go on.
I could hear the party even before I crested the hill to Phoebe’s property. The barn doors were propped wide open. I hung back in the darkness just outside, searching the faces for Ward before I barged in and appeared foolish.
About two dozen people gathered in tight clusters of chatter and cigarette smoke. I recognized some as Phoebe’s students. Phoebe’s paintings hung on the walls, mostly landscapes of local farms and creeks. Phoebe glided from circle to circle; her long, straight hair was piled up in a bun with what looked like chopsticks poking out from the center in an X. She was wearing a silky pink shirt printed with pastel butterflies and flowers. She reached up to pat her hair and the wide sleeve slipped down to her elbow. Someone said something funny because she burst into laughter, the gap between her front teeth making her even more beautiful somehow.
She was laughing with Altemose, Sr., and not the son who looked like a Bible prophet and ran the front of the hardware store. The old man appeared to be about sixty, and wore a dark but neatly trimmed beard.
Where was Ward? I stepped into the light. But I all I saw was a field of adult faces.
I was about to slip away unnoticed when Phoebe caught my eye and waved me over.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re looking for Ward, aren’t you? He’s not far. Just stay away from the punch, please.”
And then I saw him standing in front of one of Phoebe’s latest paintings, the old grist-mill. But his stare was too transfixed for such a simple painting. Every couple of seconds he took a long sip from a large Dixie cup. I sneaked up behind him and slid both of my hands around his sides.
Ward yelled and dropped the cup, and watermelon-tinted liquid sloshed onto the toes of his Keds.
“Jesus, Janie,” he said.
His arms flew up; one brushed hard against the flap of my jacket. His nostrils flared and his mouth was rimmed red as if he’d been sucking on a fireball candy.
“Jesus, Janie, I like that,” I said.
“Smart ass,” he said, giving me a once-over. He asked, “Why are you wearing that funny wrinkled jacket?”
I didn’t answer, just sat back and crossed my arms.
He stooped and retrieved his Dixie cup and downed the last of his drink in one gulp.
“I showed up pretty early,” he said.
“You could’ve shown up early at my house,” I said. “I guess you don’t really want to hang out.”
But I pressed up close to him and placed my hands on either side of his chest.
“I want to hang out,” he said. He glanced around and added, “Just not right here.”
He aimed his empty cup at a trash can a few feet away but the shot missed, and he found my hand and led me behind him.
We disappeared out the back door of the barn, into the shadowy yard. Rhododendron bushes surrounded us on either side. We walked a few feet further, and Ward spun around and kissed me, tasting of strong sweetness and with too much tongue. But I held my breath and kissed him back.
In the museum, Ward fumbled underneath the ticket counter and a moment later, a flashlight illuminated shadow boxes draped by black curtains and the tiny white wax faces inside. We tiptoed further; the museum was cool and musty. I felt like I was walking into a house while someone was sleeping, or trespassing on something hidden.
At the far end of the room, I sank to my knees and shrugged off the oversized jacket. I spread it underneath me. Ward stood the flashlight on end, and then we were kissing again.
I heard his zipper yank down and he said into my ear, “You’re a virgin, right?”
“Are you?” I asked, pulling off my clothes. “How many times have you done it?”
He tore something that sounded like ripping open a candy wrapper, and I lay back on the jacket that still smelled like my father—Doublemint gum and Hai Karate cologne. I turned my head to the side and in the shadows I could just make out the wax figures of the Shoemaker and his elves.
Then, even though it was so dark that we couldn’t even see each other’s faces, I closed my eyes.
As soon as we started, I wished for it to be over. And strangely enough, the wish came true. Someone pounded at the door and asked who was in there, a male voice. I panicked and shoved Ward away.
“Did you lock the door?” I hissed.
He had locked it, but whoever was out there kept jiggling the handle, and a group of voices whined and protested drunkenly.
“Why is it locked? I want to see the dioramas,” a woman with a city accent said.
“I’ll go get Phoebe,” a man said.
The voices trailed off.
I staggered to my feet and started to pull on my jeans, but something trickled down my leg. I touched it with my finger—blood. So I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I hobbled, half-dressed, over to the counter, grabbed the roll of paper towel and mopped up the stream running down my leg. Ward was swearing and getting dressed, snapping in a whisper for me to hurry up.
We burst out of the museum. The steps were vacant except for an abandoned martini glass. I left Ward to lock the door. Heart thudding, I ran back to the barn and plunged into the haze and noise and paintings of the party.
The crowd seemed to have grown bigger and noisier. I dashed for the door, and ran smack into Phoebe. She asked if I had found Ward and I mumbled something about him being somewhere, and that he was sort of drunk so I was going home.
“The punch,” she replied with a snort.
Her eyebrows furrowed.
“Are you okay? I’ve never seen you so keyed up.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I thought he spilled his drink on my jacket, but I don’t see anything.”
She cradled her drink toward her chest with one hand, glancing at me.
“It’s your father’s army jacket, isn’t it?”
With the other hand she reached out and ran her fingers over the exterior buttons, all the way up to the squadron number embroidered near the label.
I started to speak but stopped. So Phoebe and my father had known each other.
Then she led me out the barn door and back into the blackness of the yard, her small but firm hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll have Mr. Altemose drive you and Ward home,” she said.
As soon as I sprang out of Mr. Altemose’s car and ran up to my room, tears blurred my vision. I went right to the bathroom and blasted the tub full of hot water. In the bath, I cried even harder. What had I done? Why didn’t I see things and accept them as they really were with Ward? Was I going to turn out like my mother after all, who believed in soap operas but refused to see what was happening with my father before he died? The jacket draped over the top of the hamper, and from the tub I sifted through the pockets. My wet hands left dark prints, and I dried my fingers and searched the lining for clues of a love affair between Phoebe and my father but found nothing—no secret inscriptions, no notes sewn underneath the seams, no stray nubs of charcoal pencil in the depths of a pocket. I kept repeating Phoebe’s flashing caress of the jacket, the assured cadence of her inquiries and advice. “Notice what’s around you,” she would say while weaving among students’ easels. “Nature supplies all the answers to life’s questions.” I scrubbed the make up and tears from my face. After I wrung out the washcloth and pulled the plug, a grayish film swirled above the drain, a living, moving artwork of dots and streaks. But it was like the Jackson Pollack Phoebe had shown us, abstract and chaotic.
A warm, spicy smell filled the hallway, like a holiday candle, and the lights were on downstairs. I pulled on a t-shirt and shorts and tiptoed down, even though I didn’t especially want to face my mother right now. She was still dressed in her party outfit, costume earrings dangling, except for the pantyhose disappearing into her slippers. She shoved a baking tray in the oven with a flourish.
“You’re baking? It’s late,” I said, and sank into a chair.
“No reason,” she said, upbeat, “just felt like it. Gingerbread was Daddy’s favorite, remember?”
With the spatula she scooped the cookies shaped as little men, one by one, onto paper towels. Their grayish-tan limbs puffed and deflated as they cooled, some more unwieldy than others. A few had elephantine limbs and heads.
I pushed against the edges of one swollen head, to fix the proportions.
“But it’s the wrong time of year. Gingerbread is for holidays, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know what’s got into me.”
Her face drooped all of a sudden, and she stared, transfixed, at the thin bodies of dough in the oven.
“Well, I think it’s silly,” I said quickly, finally giving up on a stubborn limb, breaking it off and popping the hot sweetness into my mouth. “Who says you can’t make gingerbread anytime you feel like it? The Avon ladies?”
She let out a soft chuckle.
“No, not them. I guess I don’t feel like doing much of anything lately. I’m just so tired.”
I broke off another of the poor man’s limbs; he was doomed anyway. I was tired, too, but didn’t want to admit it. I couldn’t afford to, because someone had to keep us from falling apart.
“You’ve started baking, though,” I said between munches. “You’re a real Betty Crocker now. Who knew?”
“Everybody loves my baking,” she said, then patted her middle. “Though I suppose I ought to go on Weight Watchers soon.”
She picking up the mixing bowl, frowned at its contents.
“All this batter, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I finished eating the rest of my misshapen man.
“We could make a house,” I said slowly. “That’s what Dad and I used to do with the leftover batter.”
She set down the bowl, squinted in the stove light.
“That was all you two,” she said.
“I remember how,” I said. “Besides, we can’t have a bunch of homeless gingerbread men running around.”
And I helped her shape the square on the next cookie sheet. While they cooled we gathered the odd bits of candy we had left over from Easter and trips to the movies: jelly beans and M&Ms, Twizzlers and butterscotch candies. It was late, well after midnight by the time the sheet cooled enough to be cut. She was too nervous to put it together, so I did. A mish-mash of icing sat leftover in the fridge—French vanilla, strawberry, dark chocolate. No matter, it would be a Neapolitan summer house, an exotic candy villa. My mother pressed the jelly beans and M&Ms along the roof trim; I made a red Twizzler trellis. By the time we finished, we were both stifling yawns.
“Well, didn’t that turn out nice,” she said. “Only there’s nobody around to eat it.”
I set it in the middle of the table, arranged the cookies so they resembled drowned men in a moat, or fallen soldiers storming a castle.
“You don’t eat gingerbread houses, silly. They’re for looking at.”
I poured some milk, and thought about what we make and tear down. Why build a gingerbread house at Christmas, and not in July, when building a gingerbread house didn’t make much sense anyhow? Do what you want, a simple choice really—wasn’t that what my mother was doing, with her baking, and Phoebe with her artwork? So why didn’t we?
That night I dreamed that Phoebe was presenting a new shadow box in her museum. A great crowd waited behind a red velvet rope; photographers from the local paper snapped pictures. Phoebe was dressed in the Mother Goose costume that she wore on such occasions, her hair in two long braids underneath a blue bonnet, reading glasses on the end of her nose. People from the party comprised the crowd, along with other faces I knew from town: the Altemoses, Jr. and Sr., Ward, my mother. But where was I?
Then Phoebe tugged on a cord, the black curtains swept open and the new shadow box revealed, and there I was: molded into wax yet still alive, naked and straddling a stuffed goose inside the box. I pounded the glass and shouted, but the crowd was clapping and congratulating her too loudly and couldn’t hear me.
From the back of the crowd, my father appeared. I shouted for him. He knelt down and pressed his face up to the glass.
He said, “Love belongs to the world of the unseen.”
Several weeks passed, and Ward and I had taken two art classes with my mother modeling for the group. On the third Saturday, my mother showed up in a suit that made her look svelte. But she also wore a hat with a stuffed bird on the side and insisted on eating peanut butter crackers to stave off her self-diagnosed hypoglycemia, now that she had ceased baking and started Weight Watchers. She had already lost eight pounds. Once my mother was seated, Phoebe removed the hat but permitted the crackers.
Since we were new students, Phoebe set Ward and me apart from the rest of the class to sketch still-life arrangements. When Phoebe swooped in to assess our progress, she fussed with pencil and eraser over his work.
But when she came over to mine, she said, “Next class, I want you to go down to the grist-mill and sketch there.”
I didn’t answer, because how could I explain to her that every time I pictured the grist mill I saw my father wading in the still, freezing pool where he’d first taught me how to swim, just the two of us, the water rushing below in the swollen creek bed of early summer?
“It’s up to you, of course,” she said. “Lots of rocks make for good practice.”
She returned to her wagon-wheel of students. Ward scowled at the empty frame and apples of our still-life. Each time I looked, I copied the curves and lines exactly as I saw them onto the paper—what I saw, not what I thought I saw. I enjoyed the pencil in-between my fingers, the scent of the lead and erasers.
“This is harder than it looks,” Ward said.
“Not really,” I answered, keeping my focus on the arrangements in front of me.
A moment passed, and I could sense his heavy gaze first on my sketch, then my back. Even so, I jumped at the poke he landed between my shoulder blades. I spun around.
“I got the keys to the museum,” he whispered with a grin. “She won’t even know we’re gone. Or we can go swimming after this.”
“That’s the last place I’d want to go with you,” I said. “Now leave me alone.”
I turned around and looked up again at the still life arrangement, but this time my mother and Phoebe were squared off from the rest of the class, caught in the space of the empty frame. Phoebe circled my mother, who was perched on the high stool like an exotic creature. Then Phoebe stepped in quickly and lifted my mother’s chin.
My mother was trying her best to look cheerily dignified yet humble. She was like a hen who clucks around the yard its whole life without cease. And the student portraits of her reflected just that. She sat with both hands on her knees, one on top of the other, restless fingers spread wide.
But on Phoebe’s canvas my mother’s true self peered back: her face weary from waiting on the bank for the next better moment, the creases and lines all down-turned but her skin flushed from the easiness she demanded of the world. And Phoebe had changed my mother’s hands; one of them hovered above the knee and reached out toward something unknown. The hand was open but the fingers were curled together and almost touched the thumb in a claw-like fashion so that her grasp contained nothing, same as my own, this mother of mine who remained to the rest of the world, unseen.
Vanessa Blakeslee’s latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories won the Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for the Short Story (2018). Blakeslee is also the author of Train Shots: stories and Juventud, a novel, both of which received prizes and accolades. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review Online, Joyland, The Smart Set, and many other places. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, The Banff Centre, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and many more. Blakeslee has taught for the MFA in Writing programs at Goddard College and the City University of Hong Kong, and currently teaches at the University of Central Florida.