A Piece of the World

  “This doctor could make you well.”

  “I’m all right the way I am. I don’t mind it.”

  “Do you not want to run and play, like other children?”

  “I do run and play.”

  “It’s getting worse.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Stop it, Christina. Your mother and I know what’s best for you.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “How dare you speak to me with this disrespect?” he hisses, then quickly glances around to see if anyone noticed. I know how much he dreads making a scene.

  But I can’t help it; I’m crying now. “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m sorry. Don’t make me go. Please.”

  “We are trying to make you better!” he says in a violent whisper. “What are you so afraid of?”

  Like a slight tidal pull that presages the onset of a huge wave, my childish protests and rebellions have been only a hint of the feelings that well inside me now. What am I so afraid of? That I’ll be treated like a specimen, poked and prodded again, to no end. That the doctor will torture me with racks and braces and splints. That his medical experiments will leave me worse, not better. That Papa will leave and the doctor will keep me here forever, and I’ll never be allowed to go home.

  That if it doesn’t work, Papa will be even more disappointed in me.

  “I won’t go! You can’t make me!” I wail, wrenching away from him and running down the street.

  “You are a mulish, pigheaded girl!” he yells bitterly after me.

  I hide in an alley behind a barrel that smells of fish, crouching in the dirty slush. Before long my hands are red and numb, and my cheeks are stinging. Every now and then I see Papa stride by, looking for me. One time he stops on the sidewalk and cranes his neck, peering into the dimness, but then he grunts and moves on. After an hour or so, I can’t take the bitter cold any longer. Dragging my feet, I make my way back to the buggy. Papa is sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking his pipe, the blue wool blanket around his shoulders.

  He looks down at me, a grim expression on his face. “Are you ready to go to the doctor?”

  I stare back at him. “No.”

  My father is stern, but he has little tolerance for public displays. I know this about him, in the way you learn to identify the weak parts of the people you live with. He shakes his head, sucking on his pipe. After a few minutes, he turns abruptly, without a word, and jumps down from the buggy. He lifts me into the back, tightens Blackie’s harness, and climbs back into the driver’s seat. For the entire six-hour ride home he is silent. I gaze at the stark line of the horizon, as severe as a charcoal slash on white paper, the steely sky, a dark spray of crows rising into the air. Bare blue trees just beginning to bud. Everything is ghostly, scrubbed of color, even my hands, marbled like a statue.

  When we arrive home, after dark, Mother meets us in the foyer, baby Sam on her hip. “What did they say?” she asks eagerly. “Can they help?”

  Papa removes his hat and unwraps his scarf. Mother looks from him to me. I stare at the floor.

  “The girl refused.”

  “What?”

  “She refused. There was nothing I could do.”

  Mother’s back stiffens. “I don’t understand. You didn’t take her to the doctor?”

  “She wouldn’t go.”

  “She wouldn’t go?” Her voice rises. “She wouldn’t go? She is a child.”

  Papa pushes past her, removing his coat as he walks. Sam starts to whimper. “It’s her life, Katie.”

  “Her life,” my mother spits. “You are her parent!”

  “She threw a terrible scene. I could not make her.”

  Suddenly she turns to me. “You foolish girl. You have wasted your father’s day and risked your entire future. You are going to be a cripple for the rest of your life. Are you happy about that?”

  Sam is starting to cry. Miserably I shake my head.

  Mother hands the squalling baby to Papa, who bounces him awkwardly in his arms. Crouching down in front of me, she shakes her finger. “You are your own worst enemy, young lady. And you are a coward. It is senseless to mistake fear for bravery.” Her warm breath is yeasty on my face. “I feel sorry for you. But that’s it. We are done trying to help you. It’s your life, as your poor father said.”

  AFTER THIS, WHEN I wake in the morning, I spread my fingers, working out the stiffness that creeps in overnight. I point my toes, feeling the crimp in my ankles, my calves, the dull sore ache behind my knees. The pain in my joints is like a needy pet that won’t leave me alone. But I can’t complain. I’ve forfeited that right.

  MY LETTER TO THE WORLD

  1940

  It’s not long before Andy is at the door again. Awkwardly lugging a tripod, sketchbook under one arm, paintbrush like a bit between his teeth. “Would you mind if I set up my easel somewhere out of the way?” he asks, dumping his supplies in the doorway.

  “You mean . . . in the house?”

  He nods his chin toward the stairs. “I was thinking upstairs. If you’re okay with it.”

  I’m a little shocked at his nerve. Who shows up unannounced at a virtual stranger’s house and practically asks to move in? “Well, I . . .”

  “I promise to be quiet. You’ll hardly know I’m here.”

  Nobody’s been upstairs in years. There are a lot of empty bedrooms. And the truth is, I wouldn’t mind the company.

  I nod.

  “Well, good,” he says with a grin. He gathers his supplies. “I’ll try to stay out of the way of the witches.”

  His footsteps are loud as he thumps up the stairs to the second floor. He sets up his easel in the southeast bedroom, the one that once was mine. From the window he can watch the steamers pull away from Port Clyde, heading to Monhegan and the open sea.

  Through the floorboards I hear him muttering, tapping his foot. Humming.

  Hours later he comes downstairs with paint-stained fingers, the corner of his mouth purple from sticking a brush in it. “The witches and I are cohabiting just fine,” he says.

  BETSY COMES AND goes. Like us, she knows better than to interrupt Andy while he’s working. But unlike us, she has a hard time sitting still. She gets a towel and a bucket of water and washes the dusty windows; she helps me feed the wet laundry through the wringer and hang it on the line. Donning one of my old aprons, she crouches in the dirt and plants a row of lettuce seeds in the vegetable garden.

  On warm evenings, when Andy has finished for the day, Betsy shows up with a basket and we picnic down by the grove, where Papa built a fire pit long ago and wedged boards between tree trunks for seats. Al and I watch Betsy and Andy collect driftwood and twigs to make a fire in the circle of rocks. From the campfire, the fields that separate us from the house in the distance look like sand.

  One rainy morning Betsy shows up at the door, car keys in hand, and says, “Now, madam, it’s your day. Where to?”

  I’m not sure I want a day, especially if it means I have to gussy myself up. Looking down at my old housedress, the socks bunched around my ankles, I say, “How about a cup of tea?”

  “That would be lovely. When we get back. I want to take you on an adventure, Christina.” She strides over to the range and lifts the blue teakettle, inspecting the bottom. “Aha. I thought as much. This old thing is on the verge of rusting through. Let’s get you a new one.”

  “It doesn’t even leak, Bets. It works just fine.”

  She laughs. “This whole house could fall down around your ears and you’d still say it’s just fine.” She points at my shoe. “Just look at how worn that heel is. And have you seen the moth holes in Al’s cap? Come on, my dear. I’m taking you to the department store in Rockland. Senter Crane. They have everything. And don’t worry, I’m buying.”

  I suppose, in some abstract way, I’d noticed the rust on the teakettle. And the shaved heel of my old shoe, and the holes in Al’s cap. These things don’t bother me. They make me feel comfortable, like a bird in a nest feath
ered with scraps. But I know that Betsy means well. And truth be told, she seems to need a project. “All right,” I relent. “I’ll come.”

  Betsy and Al help me into the station wagon in the drizzle and get me comfortably situated, and then we set off down the long drive to Rockland, half an hour away. At the first stop sign she reaches over and pats my knee. “See? Isn’t this fun?”

  “It makes you happy, doesn’t it, Bets?”

  “I like to be busy,” she says. “And useful. I think those are pretty basic human desires—don’t you?”

  I have to ponder this for a minute. Do I? “Well, I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Idle hands . . .” she says.

  “The devil’s playground. Is that what you think?”

  She laughs. “My Puritan ancestors certainly did.”

  “Mine too. But maybe they had it wrong.” I gaze out the windshield at the fat raindrops that land on the glass only to be whisked away by the wipers.

  Betsy glances at me sideways and purses her lips, as if she wants to say something. But instead, with a slight tilt of her chin, she looks back at the road.

  OVER LUNCH ONE day—split pea soup with ham, on a blanket in the grass—Betsy tells Al and me that Andy’s father doesn’t approve of her. He objected to their engagement, warning Andy that marriage would be a distraction and babies even worse. But she doesn’t care, she says. She finds N. C. arrogant, bullying, presumptuous. She thinks his colors are gaudy and his characters cartoonish, calculated for the marketplace. “Billboards for Cream of Wheat and Coca-Cola,” she says disdainfully.

  While she’s talking I watch Andy’s face. He’s gazing at her with a bemused expression. He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t protest either.

  Betsy tells us that Andy needs to differentiate himself from his father. Take himself more seriously. Push himself harder. Take risks. She thinks he should limit his palette to starker colors, simplify the composition of his images, sharpen his tone. “You’re capable of it,” she tells him, putting her hand on his shoulder. “You don’t even know your own power yet.”

  “Oh, please, Betsy. I’m just dabbling. I’m going to be a doctor,” Andy says.

  She rolls her eyes at Al and me. “He just had a one-man show in Boston and won a prize. I don’t know why he thinks he’s going to be anything but a painter.”

  “I like the study of medicine.”

  “It’s not your passion, Andy.”

  “You’re my passion.” He wraps his arms around her waist, and she laughs, shrugging him off.

  “Go mix your tempera,” she says.

  MOST MORNINGS ANDY rows over by himself in a dory from Port Clyde, half a mile away. On the way to the house, swinging a tackle box full of paints and brushes, he ducks into the hen yard and emerges with half a dozen eggs, cradling them in one hand like juggling balls. He comes in the side door and chats with Al and me for a little while before heading upstairs.

  Andy’s eye is drawn to every cracked or faded implement and receptacle and tool, objects that once were used daily and now exist, like relics, to mark a way of life that has passed. Through his perspective I see familiar things anew. The pale pink wallpaper with tiny flowers. The red geraniums blooming in the window in their blue pots. The mahogany banister, the ship captain’s barometer in the foyer, an earthenware crock on a shelf in the pantry, the blue pantry door scratched by a long-ago dog.

  Some days Andy takes his sketch pad and tackle box to the shed, the barn, the fields. I watch from the kitchen window as he roams the property, loping unevenly down the grass to peer at the words on the headstones in the cemetery, sit on the pebbled shore, gaze at the sudsy waves. When he comes back to the house, I offer him sourdough bread from the oven, sliced ham, haddock chowder, apple skillet cake. He settles on the stoop in the open doorway, cradling a bowl in one hand, and I sit in my chair, and we talk about our lives.

  He’s the youngest of five, he tells me, with three doting sisters. A twisted right leg and a faulty hip kept him from walking properly as a child, from taking part in sports; you’ve probably noticed my limp? He was plagued with chest infections. His father was his only teacher. Kept him out of school, apprenticed in his studio. Taught him all about the history of art, how to mix paints and stretch canvases. “I was never like the other kids. Didn’t fit in. I was an oddball. A misfit.”

  No wonder we get along, I think.

  “Betsy’s told me a lot about you and Al,” Andy continues. “How Al chops firewood for everybody on the road. And you make dresses for ladies in town, and even quilts.” He points to the tiny flowers on my sleeve. “Did you embroider these?”

  “Yes. Forget-me-nots,” I add, because it’s a little hard to tell.

  “Interesting, isn’t it, what the mind is capable of,” he muses, stretching out his hand and flexing his fingers. “How the body can adapt if your mind refuses to be bowed. Those intricate stitches on the pillowcases you gave us, and here on this blouse . . . It’s hard to believe your fingers can do the work, but they can because you will them to.” He takes his empty bowl to the counter, swipes a slice of apple cake from the skillet. “You’re like me. You get on with it. I admire that.”

  IN SKETCH AFTER sketch Andy focuses on the house. Silhouetted against the sky, a blot of smoke rising from a chimney. Viewed from a drainpipe, the cove, the eye of a seagull overhead. Alone on the hill or surrounded by trees. As large as a castle, as small as a child’s playhouse. Outbuildings appear, disappear. But there are constants: field, house, horizon, sky.

  Field, house, horizon, sky.

  “Why do you draw the house so much?” I ask him one day when we’re sitting in the kitchen.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he says, shifting on the stoop. He stares into space for a moment, drumming his fingers on the floor. “I’m trying to capture . . . something. The feel of this place, not the place itself, exactly. D. H. Lawrence—he was a writer, but also a painter—wrote this line: ‘Close to the body of things, there can be heard the stir that makes us and destroys us.’ I want to do that—get close to the body of things. As close as I can. That means going back to the same material again and again, digging deeper every time.” He laughs, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I sound like a crazy person, don’t I?”

  “I just think it would get boring.”

  “I know, you’d think it would.” He shakes his head. “People say I’m a realist, but truthfully my paintings are never quite . . . real. I take away what I don’t like and put myself in its place.”

  “What do you mean, yourself?”

  “That’s my little secret, Christina,” he says. “I am always painting myself.”

  THERE’S A SINGLE bed with a rusty creaking frame—my old bed—in the room upstairs where Andy has set up his easel. When Al finishes his chores in the afternoon, he often goes up there and watches Andy paint for a while before drifting off for a nap.

  One day, offhandedly, chatting in the doorway with Al and me before heading upstairs, Andy mentions that he doesn’t like being observed. He wants to work in private.

  “I’ll stop coming up, then,” Al says.

  “Oh, no, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Andy says. “I like it when you’re there.”

  “But he’s watching,” I say. “We’re both watching.”

  Andy laughs, shaking his head. “It’s different with you two.”

  “He’s himself around you,” Betsy says when I relay this conversation to her. “Because you and Al don’t need anything from him. You let him do what he wants.”

  “It’s our entertainment,” I tell her. “Not much happens around here, you know.”

  And it’s true. For so long this house was filled to the dormers. I used to wake every morning to a cacophony of sounds coming through the walls and the floorboards: Papa’s booming voice, the boys pounding up and down the stairs, Mamey scolding them to slow down, the barking dog and crowing rooster. Then it got so quiet. But now I wake in the morning and t
hink: Andy is coming today. The day is transformed, and he hasn’t even gotten here yet.

  1900–1912

  On winter afternoons, when the sun goes down by 3:30 and wind howls through the cracks, we huddle near the woodstove wrapped in blankets, drinking warm milk and tea in the dim light of a whale-oil lamp. Papa shows Al and Sam and me how to make the knots he learned as a sailor: an overhand bow, a clove hitch, a sheet-bend double, a lark’s head, a lariat loop. He hands us wooden needles and tries to show us how to knit (though the boys scoff, refusing to learn). He teaches us to whittle whistles and small boats out of wood. We line them up on the mantelpiece, and when the weather warms, we take these boats down to the bay to see whose sails best. I watch my tall, large-limbed father, his blond shaggy head bowed over his miniature boat, muttering to himself in Swedish, coaxing the vessel along in the choppy water. Mamey told me that several months before I was born, Papa’s brother Berndt sailed over from Gothenburg to spend the winter here, and the two of them built a crib for me and painted it white. Berndt is the only Olauson who has ever visited us.

  On a low shelf in the Shell Room, behind a giant conch, I discover a wooden box filled with a motley collection of objects: a whalebone comb, a horsehair toothbrush, a painted tin soldier from a long-ago children’s set, a few rocks and minerals. “Whose is this?” I ask Mamey.

  “Your father’s.”

  “What are all these things?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  So later that afternoon, when Papa comes in from the milking, I bring him the box. “Mamey said this is yours.”

  Papa shrugs. “That’s nothing. I don’t know why I kept it. Just bits and pieces I brought with me from Sweden.”

  Weighing a black lump of coal in my hand, I ask, “Why did you save this?”

  He reaches for it. Rubs his fingers over its metallic ebony planes. “Anthracite,” he says. “It’s almost pure carbon. Made from decomposed plant and animal life from millions of years ago. I had a teacher once who taught me about rocks and minerals.”