The Worst Thing I've Done (20 page)

“Proof enough.” Annie smiles.

“S
O WHAT
is
happening with your collages?” Aunt Stormy asks.

“I…keep postponing.” Annie feels uncomfortable thinking about her work. “I do want to go back to them.”

“Good.”

“Some days I think Mason has taken my work from me.”

“If you let him.”

“He killed himself where I work. All right? He was so jealous of my work—”

“—but also supportive,” Mason reminds her.

“—and it got worse once I had my studio.”

“You closed the door on me, Annie. It was different when you still had everything set up in the living room. We could talk then—”

“There are other places you can work,” Aunt Stormy says.

“But he's everywhere. It's not as simple as getting another studio.”

“Of course it's not simple.”

“Thanks for giving me that much.”

“I'm on your side, Annie. It's going to be damn difficult to start again.”

“You'll be in museums,” Mason says.

“I only want to do the work for myself.”

Aunt Stormy motions to a corner of the living room. “How about if we clear that? You'll be between two windows.”

“We're already crowding you.”

“One: You're not. And two: I wouldn't suggest this if I didn't mean it. I'm not into martyrdom.”

Annie has to smile. “Then you won't get sainthood.”

“Fuck sainthood.”

“O…kay.”

“Let's set up there right now. Unless you want to go kayaking.”

“Not particularly.”

Together they stack the crates with Annie's collages along the wall between the windows and cover them with quilts and pillows.

“Now you have an
Eckbank.
”

“
Eck——
what?”

“Corner bench. We had one when I was a girl.”

A
FTER
A
UNT
Stormy goes to sleep, Annie sits on the
Eckbank
, sits with what she needs to begin her collages, and doesn't do anything. Except sit and stare at what she has around her. When she was a girl, the space between Mason and her was narrow. Girl-boy. Boy-girl. Almost one. And what she has come to believe is that the space between two people needs to widen and narrow and widen again. But with Mason it only narrowed more when they grew up.

“What if you leave too much space?” Mason asks.

“You'll lose each other.”

“And if you cross the space between you, Annabelle?”

“You crush each other. Or one of us will retreat forever.”

“How then does it apply to three people?” Mason says.

Sitting and staring and not doing anything is what Annie does the next day.

And the day after.

But she sits with it. With the feeling of not being able to do anything. With the frustration and failure that come out of not doing anything.

She stays. Stares at what she has in front of her.

“What if you promised yourself one hour?” Aunt Stormy suggests.

Annie feels like throwing up.

“Maybe not even let yourself work for more than an hour.”

“Five minutes feels like too much. I probably should just get a real job.”

“You have a real job. You can also work with me.”

Annie enjoys the hard physical work with Aunt Stormy, lifting and carrying, picking up stacks of drapes and quilts from clients, houses, washing whatever can be washed and taking the rest to the dry cleaner. With Opal, she clears the path to keep it from growing together.

From her own work, she feels split off. From any desire. Still—she gives it that one hour. Day after day.

Nights when nothing will stop the pain, she makes herself kayak instead of driving. Not a shutting out of the pain but an opening to what is around her. The water holds the light longer than the earth. And the radio people don't mind, are right along with her, making her fret over what happens to them when they're off the air. Like the shrimp woman from Walla Walla, Washington. Linda.
Is Linda still hiding out in her house?
And the second-marriage couple from Hartford.
Are Elise and Ben still fighting and keeping lists so that one of his grown children won't get a more expensive present than one of her grown children?
How about Mel and Hubert?
Has Mel kicked out his bully roommate, or are they on a cruise to—

Annie stays close to shore. To be safe and to gather critter bits: bones and wings and those jingle shells she used to call mermaid's toenails as a child, slipper shells that she used to call devil's toenails. Stuck inside a devil's toenail is the skeleton of a tiny crab.

Aunt Stormy has set up two card tables for her. “Not as sturdy as what you used to have.”

“I don't want what I used to have.”

Side by side, the tables brace each other, not as flimsy as on their own. Annie covers them with butcher paper, goes with Aunt Stormy to the basement, and returns with empty jars, scissors, leftover fabrics, old photo negatives, tools.

Pete brings over sandpaper and store receipts, the linings of envelopes and worn chamois cloth. Best of all a shoe box filled with old dental tools and X-rays, hundreds of tiny X-rays.

Opal collects dried grasses for her, pinecones and leaves, crooked twigs and Popsicle sticks, beads and lavender, clothes she has outgrown.

And Annie sits with all she's gathered and all they've brought her though she doesn't know if she'll ever be able to make another collage. Sits with her hands still.

One hour. That's what she promises herself. More if she wants. But not less.

O
NE NIGHT
she returns from kayaking with egg casing that's shiny and ribbed and rattles like armor…like a soul. The canvas on her easel is bare, blank, and as she flings acrylic paints at it to stop it from daunting her, she's thinking of Pete, who goes down to the bay every day and does his sequence of stretching and an hour of water-walking, working every muscle, reclaiming his body. She can see why Aunt Stormy loves this man…the way he's finding foothold in the sand to keep himself upright, working at sustaining and advancing whatever strength his body gained in the last hours.

She slathers her paint, searching for a way in, and suddenly she can no longer stop because the canvas is opening itself to her imagination. She knows what that's like, knows what it's like to live for that—exciting and frightening and mysterious and familiar. It's as though the image has been shaping itself inside her, months of untapped back work breaking free, now, into another version of raft, dragging her into territory where she didn't expect to be.

Once again, she's using twine for the raft, though it makes her uneasy. But the image calls for that—even if twine suggests rope.

“Is that where you took the idea for hanging yourself?”

This twine is thinner than in earlier versions, and she lays it in an open weave on top of marbleized paper from Italy, all blues and whites, torn into thin shreds that overlap, rising and pushing like choppy waves, making the raft unstable. And on the raft, a momentary sculpture of limbs, dark silhouettes against the low afternoon sun. In motion.

That's what she works toward.

In motion.

Or just before motion.

Or after.

When the impact of motion still resonates.

It can happen within one image, but usually she needs several; and the transition from one to the next is like what happens offstage—essential for understanding what's happening onstage. It's almost like what she once saw at a photo exhibition of places
after
violent crimes had happened there—no bodies; no blood or guts—ordinary places where people walked or sat or passed; yet, the impact of that violence resonated. Nothing concrete. Nothing you could point to and say: This is what has changed. And yet, extreme change, forever, in the soul of those places, in every particle of air and of matter.

Annie's hands are reaching into the collage, building up. Lavender twigs. Dental X-rays. Leaves. An overlay of sheer fabric, a shade lighter than copper. On the raft, the feet of the yellow figure are fused to the planks. The brown figure is light-limbed, quicksilver. As Annie tears into the layers with the sharp point of a dental instrument, an excavator, Pete called it, the surfaces wrinkle and tear…those wonderful lines…beautiful dark streaks…all those marvelous surprises…and she feels herself moving into the image, feels something opening to her. Pain? Joy?

Already, the sculpture of limbs is dissolving while the copper sun continues to shimmer on water. And the red girl is there, more of her now. Still watching. Or being watched.
What did I see?
Annie brings her fingertips against the girl's red shape, closes her eyes. Too smooth. Too still. Everything else feels torn and puckered.

T
HAT SUMMER
Aunt Stormy becomes Annie's eyes, her reason, the wise voice that cuts through Annie's confusion as they work together. Sometimes all that holds Annie upright is the pattern of ordinary days. Making breakfast for Opal. Going to the post office every morning. Feeding the ducks.

Nights she works.

In the mail, a Simon and Garfunkel CD from Mason's parents.

“I promised I'd burn a CD of Mason's favorite music for them,” Annie tells Opal. “Next time we visit them, we'll—”

“We don't have any of his music,” Opal accuses her. “You threw out everything that belongs to Mason!”

“We can download his favorites together if you want.”

“You threw out everything that belongs to me! You threw out our house!”

“Because Mason spoiled the house for us. And everything in it.”

When Annie calls to thank Mason's parents, his mother tells her she's worried about one of her regulars.

“Old Mrs. Belding. She signed in for her safe-deposit box. I didn't like her son, Annie.”

“Why not?”

“He was so impatient with her. Held on to her elbow the entire time. When I unlocked Mrs. Belding's box, he shook the contents into his briefcase. With the three of us standing right there in the vault, though he could've had privacy in a cubicle. And Mrs. Belding not glancing up. I haven't seen her since. And when I went to the bank manager with my suspicion that Mrs. Belding's son was robbing her, he lectured me again that I was too attached to my customers.”

“A
LL HER
tenants inherit BigC's annual battle with the ducks,” Aunt Stormy tells Opal and Annie as they watch BigC scrub duck shit from the boardwalk.

But many of the white spots are embedded as if the boards had been splattered with bleach. Every year BigC has the same battle with the ducks. She buys gadgets to keep them away. Whirligigs and scarecrows. When she invites Opal along to Sag Harbor, Annie lets her go; they return with a cordless drill and various things made of plastic, all ugly: three huge owls, a set of porch dishes to match BigC's umbrellas, and a boy doll that's all in one piece with the clothes painted on.

Hollow like Aunt Stormy's rocks, the owls look fake with their evenly grooved feathers and glass eyes. Opal holds them while BigC bolts them to the railing of the boardwalk, and for almost a week, they scare the ducks away.

Rain then, so much rain that it seems Pete's trumpet vines double on sunny days. They creep up the bamboo canes by his garage, around the legs of his outdoor table, grazing your ankles when you sit down, startling you.

O
NE NIGHT
, the water is thick against Annie's paddle, and even before she sees the flicker, she knows the lumis are here. Quickly, she paddles back to the cottage, wakes Opal, and paddles with her into the bay. It feels as if all waters around them and way beyond them are saturated with that white-green flicker, heavy with that light—phosphorescent, fluorescent—and will cradle them if they were to leap in, just as it cradles their kayaks.