Some Things That Stay Read online

  He runs ads in newspapers all over the country, using a fake name. But now most of his customers come to him by word of mouth. Many of these people not only want him to match the color to something that they already own, they are also specific about what kind of picture they want. A Monet, but not a Monet, one woman wrote. Blend the spots together a bit more. Another wanted a picture of seven trees in a meadow. The trees represented her family and were to be age specific. She sent a long list of the personalities of her children, hoping he could capture those qualities in the trees themselves. She also listed the types of trees she felt were appropriate. A regal maple for her husband, a pin oak for herself (with the acorns showing, her seed, which produced the children). Her children were to be all different kinds of trees. Obviously, the acorns went through some form of metamorphosis, or they were adopted tree-children. My father sent a note back saying he didn’t think he would be able to accomplish all she asked, and maybe she should try someone else. It was the only time I know of that he refused.

  He paints these pictures inside, from noon to three, five days a week. He frowns and mutters under his breath. If you get near him, he will snap at you. The rest of the time he is okay. Not chummy or very warm, but if you sneeze, he says gesundheit.

  My father paints one picture a year that isn’t a couch picture or one that he sends to New York City. He paints a simple head-on view of the house we’re staying in at that time, and leaves it as a thank-you for the people who are coming back from France or wherever else they have gone for the year. When we see him start on that picture, we know we have less than a few weeks.

  My father finds these rented houses through a man he pays to look through newspapers and magazines. The man sends my father clippings, with notes scratched in the margins. I have the urge, when I see those manila envelopes come in the mail, to grab them and throw them away. But I don’t.

  Because I throw fits when I find we are moving again, they never tell us until the last possible moment. From the time my father starts his farewell painting until we actually move is always the very worst.

  When the Burns come on Sunday after church, my father is inside painting a couch picture, my mother is planting petunias in a spot of freshly dug earth by the barn, Robert is trying to scratch his name on one of the flat slate stones, Megan is climbing a small apple tree in the field, and I am bored silly, wearing cutoffs and lying in the sun to get tan. As soon as I see their car I want to shout. Get out of the tree! Turn the stone over! Hide the petunias! Get out of their house! I am the only one not messing with their things, but then I realize I’m lying on their towel. I want to apologize for us, for taking their place, for not having a house of our own.

  There is an awkward moment while my mother introduces herself. She turns to the house, expecting my father to come out and say hello, but he doesn’t. I have jumped up off the towel and am standing up, thinking it rude to lie down while they are here. I imagine us all standing up for the rest of the afternoon. How can we sit down if they won’t? Mr. Burns excuses himself to go tend to the cattle. Mrs. Burns asks my mother how everything is going.

  “Wonderful,” my mother says. “It’s a lovely house. We couldn’t be happier.”

  I turn red, not because of the sun, but because this house was such an unhappy place for the Burns that they left it, and can’t even walk back inside. Mrs. Burns looks at me and I blush more, thinking she can read my mind and knows I am thinking about her dead son. She says hello, but then her eyes get kind of glassy and she holds perfectly still, staring at me, but not at me. It’s like she is seeing something else—or someone else. I think maybe she sees me as someone who might have been here visiting her son, a girlfriend maybe. For a moment, I feel that way too, that I am not part of my family, but part of something that might have been.

  Mrs. Burns blinks, and turns back to my mother. “Are you planting annuals?” she asks, with an edge to her voice. “I never would have thought of planting flowers over there, but it makes perfect sense. You’ll be able to see them from the kitchen window. Would you like some help?”

  “Please,” my mother says. “I’d love some.” Together they walk over to the barn.

  Mrs. Burns looks back at me one last time. Her eyes do that hazy thing, and I think she frowns. It’s hard to tell, because she turns away so quickly. I think I am a reminder that most children grow up healthy. I think she’s not sure if that’s a good thing to know.

  Taking a left at the end of our driveway and walking about a half mile along Moore, we come to an intersection with another road, Potter. It leads up and up and up a steep hill, part of the ridge behind our house. The top of this hill is called Valley View Hill by the locals. From here you can see dozens of miles into the distance, hills following hills like folds of heavy cloth. Houses dot the hillsides; they are small boxes of secrets. I want to pluck off the roofs, see what’s inside. From up on top of the hill I feel very big, and everything else seems very small and silent.

  Every evening, a half hour before sunset, my mother and father lead us up this hill, making us walk on the stony berm of the road, in case a car comes over the top, which it never does, but my mother is cautious. Sitting on flattened hay we watch the sky over the rolling hills turn pink, then magenta, then deep violet. Straight above our heads the sky stays blue, the blue of that particular day: light blue, cerulean blue, French ultramarine, even blues my father can’t name. Just after the sun sets there are bolts and streaks of brilliant color reflected on clouds like oils fresh from a tube. Looking at the sunset, I swear I smell oil paint mixed in with the hay and the smell of warm blacktop.

  There are times, though, when the sky just goes dark, without the grand showcase of colors, as if it is in a lousy mood and doesn’t feel like pleasing anyone. I like those skies too, the drama of night falling without the rose-colored pretensions.

  After the sunsets, Megan, Robert, and I run down the hill, on the berm, always on the berm, because my mother shouts that out as we run. Stay on the berm, she yells as we move down and away, as if we can’t think for ourselves. But it is true: if she weren’t here, I’d run down the middle of the road, arms outstretched, eyes closed. I’d run as fast as possible to someplace I would never leave.

  As Robert, Megan, and I run, our feet pick up speed, going beyond our means, and we tumble into the tall grass and away from the road. It is one of the few times we do anything together.

  My father says a beautiful sunset is the day taking a bow. From the bottom of the hill, we hear him clapping.

  Brenda is not afraid of my father, like most other kids are. She comes up right behind him and asks him questions about painting. “Why do you put the white on last? Why do you go out of your lines? Why did you move that tree? Can you do that? How come you been standing there for so long and not painting? Did you know you have red paint on your ear?” He will answer her for a few minutes and then say, “I guess I better stop telling you my secrets now, Brenda, or you are going to be my competition soon.” She doesn’t know what he means, but she always laughs and goes away. Yesterday she told me she thinks my father is cool, which no one has ever said, ever. Then she said, “But your mom scares me.” When I asked her why, she just shrugged. I told her I wouldn’t be her friend if she didn’t say why and when I turned to walk away she grabbed my arm. “She acts spooky sometimes, you know. All talky or really quiet, like she went to sleep with her eyes open. She’s okay though. Really.” I jerked my arm out of her hand and walked away. She shouted that it wasn’t fair, ’cause she told me what I asked, but I kept going. She should talk. Her father limps like Frankenstein and hardly speaks, and her mother doesn’t ever smile. I was never going to speak to her again, but today she begged me to play marbles with her in the middle of the road and gave me a bag of her marbles to keep. She won most of them back, but it was fun playing in the road. My mother was out by the pond, or somewhere, otherwise she would have thrown a fit.

  When Robert and I were young, Megan too young, our
parents sat us down and taught us the meaning of the word atheist.

  My father dragged over his easel and clipped on a large pad of cheap white paper. He drew, with a gray pastel, six blobby circles. My mother narrated. “Amoebas,” she said. “In the oceans. Billions of single-celled creatures just floating about. Then, over millions of years, they began to change, to grow, to adapt.” My father drew tentacles hanging from an amoeba.

  “They became many-celled. They evolved into fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and dinosaurs.” My father drew quickly. Now the blobby shapes grew legs and tails and long necks. One looked like a rat, one like an alligator.

  “Then there was some kind of disaster and most of the creatures died,” she said gaily, and with a flourish of motion, my father tore off the top piece of paper, wadded it up, and tossed it across the room.

  “Some animals survived. No dinosaurs, but reptiles and mammals. And the mammals came to be the dominant life-form, through the survival of the fittest.”

  My father drew furiously. Monkeys. Apes. Ape men. People with all their private parts showing.

  “No Adam,” my mother said. “No Eve. No creating people out of dirt. No God. It was evolution. Say that. Ev o lu tion. Four syllables. Please say it.”

  “Ev o lu tion,” Robert and I repeated. Megan, maybe three, sucked her thumb harder

  “There’s a big dispute,” my father said, pausing for a moment by his easel. “We just want you to know what side of the fence we’re on.”

  “We don’t believe in God,” my mother said, as if we hadn’t caught on to that yet. I’d heard of God in school. He was like a principal.

  My mother sat down on the low flat table in front of the couch, facing us. “We’re atheists. There are not a lot of people who are atheists, not right now, although someday everyone will be one. Right now there are just a few. But that’s okay. We can be atheists, even if it’s not popular.”

  “Are any of the kids in my school atheists?” I asked. I must have been about eight.

  My mother bunched up her face and thought about it. “Probably not,” she decided. “But maybe. They may be in hiding. They may be scared to admit it.”

  “Scared of who?” Robert asked. “God?”

  “Well, son,” my father said. “They wouldn’t be scared of God if they didn’t believe in Him.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  “Oh,” Robert said. “Then where did the amoebas come from?”

  I winced. He hadn’t learned that a question like that would take up the next hour of his life.

  “Good question,” my mother said, and stood up. She waved my father away from the easel and took the pastel out of his hand. Then she tore off the sheet with the naked people and thick-eyebrowed apes and handed it to my father, shook her shoulders, stretched out her arms, and drew a big black ball in the middle of the white paper.

  “There’s a new theory, the big bang theory. There was all this matter in the middle of the universe surrounded by … Oh. Do you know what the universe is, Robert?”

  “No.”

  “How about the solar system? Do you know what that is?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Well, let’s start with some basics then.” She tore off the paper with the center of the universe and dropped it on the floor. “Let’s start with the sun and the planets, and their moons.” She drew the sun in the center and started on some planets, but before she got done with all of them she stopped, stepped back, and looked at her picture. “I’d like to do this in color.” She looked around the room and found my father’s box of pastels. With cerulean blue she colored in the third planet from the sun—Earth, I knew—then put back the blue and took out an emerald green. As she started coloring in continents, my father spoke up.

  “You know, Liz, if you’re planning on getting to the big bang, you might want to skimp on the details.”

  She thought about this. “Okay.” She finished drawing the rest of the planets with the green pastel. “It doesn’t look right, but … Now, Robert, do you know what an orbit is?”

  “Yes,” I said, before he could reply. She didn’t seem to notice that I answered, she was so busy drawing in moons. “Okay. So everything is moving, nothing holds still …”

  We are, I thought.

  We stayed on that couch for what seemed like all night long as my mother explained the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, and, finally, the big bang. The floor was littered with large sheets of paper that she stepped on without the slightest notice. The crinkle of paper still reminds me of the big bang theory.

  Nothing ever pleased my mother more than last year’s August issue of Life. A dinosaur on the front cover. Fifteen pages on Evolution. She bought each of us a copy. We discussed it at dinner for a month. It’s on our coffee table right now. You’d think she wrote the article herself.

  Sex is also a subject approached with the easel and white paper. The pictures were drawn prior to the talk. They were very detailed, although I think my father must have gotten carried away with the pubic hair. Certainly there can’t be that much. The balls on the man hung down like a dog’s. Not like my brother’s at all. Not like my father’s either, from what I’ve seen. I think he drew them hanging down so far so we could see them better from behind all that pubic hair.

  After the explanation of how babies are made I was numb. I think it was the year after the big bang, so I was about nine. To have sex explained by my mother, as my brother sat next to me on the couch and my father pointed with a painting knife to the erect penis he’d drawn, was a little too much, even for someone used to this kind of stuff.

  They both explained, at the end of this session, the importance of love. They said sex without love was only lust. I didn’t ask what lust was, I was much too embarrassed and I didn’t want any more pictures drawn or explanations given. I never looked the word up, but I think I’ve got it figured out now.

  They imagine themselves great teachers. They swell with pride at their openness, their boldness, their ability to get out the facts. But they started with us much too early, and now, when a frank talk about sex might actually interest me, they have collapsed into themselves, like those distant galaxies, the hot air and gas all burned up.

  The tar truck comes. We can hear it from way down the road, so we gather on our lawn for the show, crossing our legs under us, getting comfortable on the warm grass. Rusty and Brenda come out and sit on their lawn. Brenda is wearing the same plaid shirt she wore yesterday, and probably the same jean shorts. It’s hard to tell, since all her shorts are cutoffs with fraying threads hanging down like spit out of a dog’s mouth. Rusty’s curly red hair picks up the morning light and glows like a fuzzy sun. His hair needs to be cut, but I like the way some curls fall across his forehead. Brenda shouts hi to us. Rusty just nods. We stay on our own side of the road. The truck moves slowly, spewing out black tar like spreading night over dusk. The truck driver waves to us, a thick fleshy hand, and grins pleasantly, like a man in a parade.

  My mother comes out and stands behind us, hands on hips. “They are paving the road,” she says, as if she is telling us something we don’t know. But we are not little anymore, and her knowledge has its limits. She must realize how stupid it sounds; she doesn’t say anything else.

  Following the tar truck comes a truck that drops tiny pebbles into the hot tar, pebbles that tumble and bounce, then find their place, stuck forever like the dinosaurs. This driver also waves to us. Robert makes the motion of pulling down an invisible rope, and the driver answers with a blast of his horn. Robert claps and hollers as we watch the back of the pebble truck move down the road. Our road now glimmers in the afternoon sun, the curves of pebbles reflecting the light in dozens of directions, becoming something grand.

  Finally the big, wide roller comes, pressing the pebbles down into the tar, taking away their shape and their dimensions, until they all lie flat and lightless, until the road is once again just a road. I close my eyes. The smell
of hot tar makes me think of cities, with tall buildings, busy people, buses, taxis, car horns, sidewalks. I open my eyes. Brenda is scratching her armpit.

  Until the road cools, no one will cross to the other side. But even when we do, we are divided just the same. We are smarter, they are poorer. I will never understand how they can stand to live like they do.

  Forever we have lived among people who don’t shape up to our standards.

  Behind me, my mother sighs, unsatisfied by something she hasn’t said. I know that sigh. She turns away and goes to the barn, and I know she will milk the cow, her hands needing the motion her words have lost. Tomorrow she will go to the library to find something she can teach us about paving roads.

  I feel sorry for her, and for me, watching the road get paved as if it were a great play.

  While I’m writing an essay, “My Personal Hero”—I have chosen Amelia Earhart because teachers love her—the school siren goes off, jarring the silence of our supposedly deep thought and causing at least three girls to scream, one directly behind me. I know what this siren means; all my schools have had this same siren with the same deafening blare.

  “A tornado!” someone whispers harshly.

  “No, a bomb, stupid!” someone says.

  “The Communists,” someone else agrees.

  “The Communists are dropping the H-bomb on us!”

  I almost expect everyone to turn toward me and point, but then I remember my mother hasn’t been to school to protest anything yet, and just for a minute I’m thankful she hasn’t been feeling well. The teacher yells, “Hush up!” and motions for us to get into line. The girl behind me has the hiccups now. “This could be the real one,” she whispers. I roll my eyes, thinking that even the Communists wouldn’t be stupid enough to waste a bomb on Mayville, New York.