Diary, Page 7

  Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.

  Just so you know, Peter, your mother's still a bitch. She's working part-time for a service that finds people pieces of china after their pattern is discontinued. She overheard some rich summer woman, just a tanned skeleton in a knit-silk pastel tank dress, sitting at lunch and saying, “What's the point of being rich here if there's nothing to buy?”

  Since Grace heard this, she's been hounding your wife to paint. To give people something they can clamor to own. Like somehow Misty could pull a masterpiece out of her ass and earn the Wilmot family fortune back.

  Like she could save the whole island that way.

  Tabbi's birthday is coming up, the big thirteen, and there's no money for a gift. Misty's saving her tips until there's enough money for them to go live in Tecumseh Lake. They can't live in the Waytansea Hotel forever. Rich people are eating the island alive, and she doesn't want Tabbi to grow up poor, pressured by rich boys with drugs.

  By the end of summer, Misty figures they can bail. About Grace, Misty doesn't know. Your mother must have friends she can live with. There's always the church that can help her. The Ladies Altar Society.

  Here around them in church are the stained-glass saints, all of them pierced with arrows and hacked with knives and burning on bonfires, and now Misty pictures you. Your theory about suffering as a means to divine inspiration. Your stories about Maura Kincaid.

  If misery is inspiration, Misty should be reaching her prime.

  Here, with the whole island around her kneeling in prayer for her to paint. For her to be their savior.

  The saints all around them, smiling and performing miracles in their moments of pain, Misty reaches out to take a hymnal. This is one book among dozens of dusty old hymnals, some without covers, some of them trailing frayed satin ribbons. She takes one at random and opens it. And, nothing.

  She flips through the pages, but there's nothing. Just prayers and hymns. No special secret messages scribbled inside.

  Still, when she goes to put it back, carved there in the wood of the pew where the hymnal hid it, a message says: “Leave this island before you can't.”

  It's signed Constance Burton.

  July 8

  ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE, Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.

  You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”

  The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop's front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.

  Misty and you.

  Blocking if anybody might see her painting.

  Her signature was at the bottom, below the picket fence, Misty Marie Kleinman. The only thing missing was a smiling face. A heart dotting the i in Kleinman.

  “Maybe a museum of kitsch,” she said. This was just a better version of what she'd been painting since childhood. Her fantasy village. And seeing it felt worse than seeing the worst, most fat naked picture of yourself ever. Here it was, the trite little heart of Misty Marie Kleinman. The sugary dreams of the poor, lonely six-year-old kid she'd be for the rest of her life. Her pathetic, pretty rhinestone soul.

  The trite little secret of what made her feel happy.

  Misty kept peeking back over one shoulder to make sure no one was looking in. No one was seeing the most cliché, honest part of her, painted here in watercolors.

  Peter, God bless him, he just cut the mat and centered the painting inside it.

  You cut the mat.

  Peter set up the miter saw on the shop's workbench, and he cut the lengths for each side of the frame. The painting, when Peter looked at it, half his face smiled, the zygomatic major pulling up one side of his mouth. He only lifted the eyebrow on that side. He said, “You got the porch railing perfect.”

  Outside, a girl from art school walked by on the sidewalk. This girl, her latest “work” was stuffing a teddy bear with dog shit. She worked with her hands inside blue rubber gloves so thick she could almost not bend her fingers. According to her, beauty was a stale concept. Superficial. A cheat. She was working a new vein. A new twist on a classic Dada theme. In her studio, she had the little teddy bear already gutted out, its fake fur spread open autopsy-style, ready to turn into art. Her rubber gloves smeared with brown stink, she could hardly hold the needle and red suture thread. Her title for all this was: Illusions of Childhood.

  Other kids in art school, kids from rich families, the kids who traveled and saw real art in Europe and New York, all of them did this kind of work.

  Another boy in Misty's class, he was masturbating, trying to fill a piggy bank with sperm before the end of the year. He lived off dividends from a trust fund. Another girl drank different colors of egg temperas, then drank syrup of ipecac that made her vomit her masterpiece. She drove to class on a moped from Italy that cost more than the trailer where Misty grew up.

  In the frame shop that morning, Peter fitted the corners of the frame together. He dabbed glue with his bare fingers and drilled holes in each corner for the screws.

  Still standing between the window and the workbench, her shadow blocking the sunlight, Misty said, “You really think it's good?”

  And Peter said, “If you only knew . . .”

  You said that.

  Peter said, “You're in my light. I can't see.”

  “I don't want to move,” Misty told him. “People outside might see.”

  All the dog shit and jack-off and barf. Running the glass cutter across the glass, never taking his eyes off the little cutting wheel, a pencil tucked in the hair behind one ear, Peter said, “Just smelling super gross doesn't make their work art.”

  Snapping the glass into two pieces, Peter said, “Shit is an esthetic cliché.” He said how the Italian painter Piero Manzoni canned his own shit, labeled “100% Pure Artist's Shit,” and people bought it.

  Peter was watching his hands so hard that Misty had to watch. She wasn't watching the window, and behind them they heard a bell ring. Somebody'd walked into the shop. Another shadow fell over the workbench.

  Without looking up, Peter went, “Hey.”

  And this new guy said, “Hey.”

  The friend was maybe Peter's age, blond with a patch of chin hairs, but not what you'd call a beard. Another student from the art school. He was another rich kid from Waytansea Island, and he stood, his blue eyes looking down at the painting on the workbench. He smiled Peter's same half smile, the look of somebody laughing over the fact he had cancer. The look of someone facing a firing squad of clowns with real guns.

  Not looking up, Peter buffed the glass and fit it into the new frame. He said, “See what I mean about the picture?”

  The friend looked at the house wrapped in porches, the picket fence and blue birds. The name Misty Marie Kleinman. Half smiling, shaking his head, he said, “It's the Tupper house, all right.”

  It was a house Misty had just made up. Invented.

  In one ear, the friend had a single earring. An old piece of junk jewelry, in the Waytansea Island style of Peter's friends. Buried in his hair, it was fancy gold filigree around a big red enamel heart, flashes of red glass, cut-glass jewels twinkled in the gold. He was chewing gum. Spearmint, from the smell.

  Misty said, “Hi.” She said, “I'm Misty.”

  And the friend, he looked at her, giving her the same doomed smile. Chewing his gum, he said, “So is this her? Is she the mythical lady?”

  And slipping the picture into the frame, behind the glass, looking only at his work, Peter said, “I'm afraid so.”

  Still staring at Misty, his eyes jumping around every part of her, her hands and legs, her face and breasts, the friend cocked his head to on
e side, studying. Still chewing his gum, he said, “Are you sure she's the right one?”

  Some magpie part of Misty, some little princess part, couldn't take her eyes off the guy's glittery red earring. The sparkling enamel heart. The flash of red from the cut-glass rubies.

  Peter fitted a piece of backing cardboard behind the picture and sealed it around the edge with tape. Running his thumb over the tape, sealing it down, he said, “You saw the painting.” He stopped and sighed, his chest getting big, then collapsing, and he said, “I'm afraid she's the real deal.”

  Misty, Misty's eyes were pinned inside the blond tangle of the friend's hair. The red flash of the earring there, it was Christmas lights and birthday candles. In the sunlight from the shopwindow, the earring was Fourth of July fireworks and bouquets of Valentine's Day roses. Looking at the sparkle, she forgot she had hands, a face, a name.

  She forgot to breathe.

  Peter said, “What'd I tell you, man?” He was looking at Misty now, watching her spellbound by the red earring, and Peter said, “She can't resist the old jewelry.”

  The blond guy saw Misty staring back at him, and both his blue eyes swung sideways to see where Misty's eyes were pinned.

  In the earring's cut-glass sparkle, in there was the sparkle of champagne Misty had never seen. There were the sparks of beach bonfires, spiraling up to summer stars Misty could only imagine. In there was the flash of crystal chandeliers she had painted in each fantasy parlor.

  All the yearning and idiot need of a poor, lonely kid. Some stupid, unenlightened part, not the artist but the idiot in her, loved that earring, the bright rich shine of it. The glitter of sugary hard candy. Candy in a cut-glass dish. A dish in a house she'd never visited. Nothing deep or profound. Just everything we're programmed to adore. Sequins and rainbows. Those bangles she should've been educated enough to ignore.

  The blond, Peter's friend, he reached one hand up to touch his hair, then his ear. His mouth dropped open, so fast his gum fell out onto the floor.

  Your friend.

  And you said, “Careful, dude, it looks like you're stealing her away from me . . .”

  And the friend, his fingers fumbled, digging in his hair, and he yanked the earring. The pop made them all wince.

  When Misty opened her eyes, the blond guy was holding out his earring, his blue eyes filled with tears. His torn earlobe hung in two ragged pieces, forked, blood dripping from both points. “Here,” he said, “take it.” And he threw the earring toward the workbench. It landed, gold and fake rubies scattering red sparks and blood.

  The screw-on back was still on the post. It was so old, the gold back had turned green. He'd yanked it off so fast the earring was tangled in blond hairs. Each hair still had the soft white bulb where it pulled out at the root.

  One hand cupped over his ear, blood running from between his fingers, the guy smiled. His corrugator muscle pulling his pale eyebrows together, he said, “Sorry, Petey. It looks like you're the lucky guy.”

  And Peter lifted the painting, framed and finished. Misty's signature at the bottom.

  Your future wife's signature. Her bourgeois little soul.

  Your future wife already reaching for the bloody spot of red sparkle.

  “Yeah,” Peter said, “fucking lucky me.”

  And still bleeding, one hand clamped over his ear, the blood running down his arm to drip from his pointed elbow, Peter's friend backed up a couple steps. With his other hand, he reached for the door. He nodded at the earring and said, “Keep it. A wedding present.” And he was gone.

  July 9

  THIS EVENING, Misty is tucking your daughter into bed when Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot and I have a secret.”

  Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot knows everybody's secrets.

  Grace sits through church service and elbows Misty, telling her how the rose window the Burtons donated for their poor, sad daughter-in-law—well, the truth is Constance Burton gave up painting and drank herself to death.

  Here's two centuries of Waytansea shame and misery, and your mother can repeat every detail. The cast-iron benches on Merchant Street, the ones made in England, they're in memory of Maura Kincaid, who drowned trying to swim the six miles to the mainland. The Italian fountain on Parson Street—it's in honor of Maura's husband.

  The murdered husband, according to Peter.

  According to you.

  The whole village of Waytansea, this is their shared coma.

  Just for the record, Mother Wilmot sends her love.

  Not that she ever wants to visit you.

  Tucked in bed, Tabbi rolls her head to look out the window and says, “Can we go on a picnic?”

  We can't afford it, but the minute you die, Mother Wilmot's got a drinking fountain picked out, brass and bronze, sculpted like a naked Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle.

  Tabbi brought her pillow when Misty moved them into the Waytansea Hotel. They all brought something. Your wife brought your pillow, because it smells like you.

  In Tabbi's room, Misty sits on the edge of the bed, combing her kid's hair through her fingers. Tabbi has her father's long black hair and his green eyes.

  Your green eyes.

  She has a little room she shares with her grandmother, next to Misty's room in the attic hallway of the hotel.

  Almost every old family has rented out their house and moved into the hotel attic. The rooms papered with faded roses. The wallpaper peeling along every seam. There's a rusty sink and a little mirror bolted to the wall in each room. Two or three iron beds in every room, their paint chipped, their mattresses soft and sagging in the middle. These are the cramped rooms, under the sloping ceilings, behind their little windows, dormers like rows of little doghouses in the hotel's steep roof. The attic is a barracks, a refugee camp for nice white gentry. People to-the-manor-born now share a bathroom down the hall.

  These people who've never held a job, this summer, they're waiting tables. As if everyone's money ran out at the same time, this summer every blue-blood islander is carrying luggage at the hotel. Cleaning hotel rooms. Shining shoes. Washing dishes. A service industry of blue-eyed blonds with shining hair and long legs. Polite and cheerful and eager to run fetch a fresh ashtray or decline a tip.

  Your family—your wife and child and mother—they all sleep in sagging, chipped iron beds, under sloping walls with the hoarded silver and crystal relics of their former genteel life.

  Go figure, but all the island families, they're smiling and whistling. As if this were some adventure. A zany lark. As if they're just slumming in the service industry. As if this tedious kind of bowing and scraping isn't going to be the rest of their lives. Their lives and their children's lives. As if the novelty won't wear off after another month. They're not stupid. It's just that none of them have ever been poor. Not like your wife, she knows about having pancakes for dinner. Eating government-surplus cheese. Powdered milk. Wearing steel-toed shoes and punching a goddamn time clock.

  Sitting there with Tabbi, Misty says, “So, what's your secret?”

  And Tabbi says, “I can't tell.”

  Misty tucks the covers in around the girl's shoulders, old hotel sheets and blankets washed until they're nothing but gray lint and the smell of bleach. The lamp beside Tabbi's bed is her pink china lamp painted with flowers. They brought it from the house. Most of her books are here, the ones that would fit. They brought her clown paintings and hung them above her bed.

  Her grandmother's bed is close enough Tabbi could reach out and touch the quilt that covers it with velvet scraps from Easter dresses and Christmas clothes going a hundred years back. On the pillow, there's her diary bound in red leather with “Diary” across the cover in scrolling gold letters. All Grace Wilmot's secrets locked inside.

  Misty says, “Hold still, honey,” and she picks a stray eyelash off Tabbi's cheek. Misty rubs the lash between two fingers. It's long like her father's eyelashes.

  Your eyelashes.

  With Tabbi's bed and her grandm
other's, two twin beds, there's not much room left. Mother Wilmot brought her diary. That, and her sewing basket full of embroidery thread. Her knitting needles and crochet hooks and embroidery hoops. It's something she can do while she sits in the lobby with her old lady friends or outside on the boardwalk above the beach in good weather.

  Your mother's just like all the other fine old Mayflower families, getting their wagons into a circle at the Waytansea Hotel, waiting out the siege of awful strangers.

  Stupid as it sounds, Misty brought her drawing tools. Her pale wood box of paints and watercolors, her paper and brushes, it's all piled in a corner of her room.

  And Misty says, “Tabbi honey?” She says, “You want to maybe go live with your Grandma Kleinman over by Tecumseh Lake?”

  And Tabbi rolls her head back and forth, no, against her pillow until she stops and says, “Granmy Wilmot told me why Dad was so pissed off all the time.”

  Misty tells her, “Don't say ‘pissed off,' please.”

  Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot is downstairs playing bridge with her cronies in front of the big clock in the wood-paneled room off the lobby. The loudest sound in the room will be the big pendulum ticktocking back and forth. Either that or she's sitting in a big red leather wing chair next to the lobby fireplace, reading with her thick magnifying glass hovering over each page of a book in her lap.

  Tabbi tucks her chin down against the satin edge of the blanket, and she says, “Granmy told me why Dad doesn't love you.”

  And Misty says, “Of course your daddy loves me.”

  And of course she's lying.

  Outside the room's little dormer window, the breaking waves shimmer under the lights of the hotel. Far down the coast is the dark line of Waytansea Point, a peninsula of nothing but forest and rock jutting out into the shimmering ocean.

  Misty goes to the window and puts her fingertips on the sill, saying, “You want it open or shut?” The white paint on the windowsill is blistered and peeling, and she picks at it, wedging paint chips under her fingernail.