Issue 18 Nonfiction
Posted in Issue 18, Non-Fiction
The Painting
My boys are four and two the summer my mother throws out one of her paintings. It is a scene of a lake and trees, surrounded by a handmade frame she’d crafted from some old pieces of ceiling molding. She’s on one of her crazed clean-out-all-the-crap kicks, and she has decided that this particular painting isn’t worth saving. So there it sits, on top of a pile of rickety furniture and dust-caked knickknacks, out by the side of the road in the afternoon sun.
As I pull my red station wagon alongside the curb, Mom looks over and smiles her big smile, wiping her dirty hands across her jeaned thighs. From the back seat Billy and Steven yell “Hi, Grandma!”
Mom helps me unbuckle the boys and haul them out of the car.
“What you doing, Grandma?” Billy asks.
“Cleaning. I have a lot of old stuff I need to throw away.”
“Mom, that painting has been hanging over the living room sofa for years. Why’d you decide to get rid of it now?” I ask.
“I never liked it,” she says.
I think about taking it, but honestly, I’d never liked it either. There didn’t seem to be anything special about it. It was like one of those generic landscapes you see in the furniture department of Macy’s.
The boys and I head around to the back of the house to spend the rest of the day playing in the pool. My parents had bought an above-ground pool, four feet deep, twenty-four feet round, a few years earlier. “For our grandchildren,” my father said.
“I’ll join you guys soon as I finish with this mess,” Mom says.
Mom is like a big kid. She loves the water and spends so much time in the pool that she gets those crinkly-wrinkled fingertips and toes all the time. Usually when we arrive at her house on summer days I find her out back, half asleep on a blow-up float, one hand dangling off the side playing with the water. The sun shines on her multicolored bathing suit, emphasizing its fluorescence, and her fair skin looks tan from the crowding of all her freckles.
Once her grandsons arrive, though, that is the end of her relaxation. They climb the ladder in a hurry, pulling at each other, trying to be the first one to jump in and splash Grandma.
We aren’t in the pool long that day before Mom joins us. “My back is killing me,” she says as she slides off the side of the deck and into the water.
“You finished throwing out all your junk?” I say.
“I’ll finish later. I thought I’d give you a break, play with the kids.”
My boys are already good swimmers, but as soon as Mom is in the pool, they cling to her, taking turns riding on her back, and then climbing up on the deck and jumping into her arms. Her energy seems endless, and I take full advantage of her generosity. Now I am the one lounging on the float, paddling my hands to steer clear of the commotion my boys make.
As I lie there, eyes closed, mind drifting, I am pulled back by the laughter of my boys. I let her delight them; I need her to attend to them. On my own, alone at home with them, the episodes of joy, of innocent mayhem, are meager. Often bored with motherhood, missing my days working at the museum, my time with coworkers discussing exhibits and lectures, I know I am cheating them. When we are at home, I have schedules, rules, activities planned for them, and I can see my obsession for purposeful enterprise crowd out their playfulness.
My mother observes me. When she comes to my house, she comments on the orderliness, the quiet. “When you kids were little, our house looked like a tornado hit it,” she’d say, and I take those words as an insult, the slight I believe she means them to be.
Now I float and am happy that my boys are having fun.
A week later, I run into an acquaintance, Brenda, at the grocery store. She tells me she took the painting off the pile of trash outside my parents’ house, and it’s now hanging in her dining room.
“You’re kidding? My mother painted that!”
“Really? I love it.”
“Well, now you know who the artist is,” I say.
Mom is proud and thrilled when I tell her about Brenda and the painting.
“Wow, so someone liked it. That’s nice. That’s funny,” she says.
We are sitting by the pool again, the boys in the water with my sister, Deb, and her kids.
“Hey, Deb, did you hear that? Someone has my painting hanging in their house.”
“Yeah. Vicki told me. I wish you’d told me you were getting rid of it.”
“How come you didn’t want it?” Mom asks me.
I am annoyed by the question.
“I don’t know. I have nowhere to put it.”
“You just didn’t like it,” she says, turning her face away, blowing cigarette smoke up to the sky.
“Well, neither did you. You didn’t ask me if I wanted it anyway.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, adding, “I know it’s not your style.”
Mom thought I was a snob when it came to her painting and her crafting. Because I had gone to college, and majored in art history, she assumed I thought myself too sophisticated to appreciate her dabbling.
My going to college was still a touchy subject between us.
Back in my senior year of high school, as our family sat around the dining room table eating dinner, I told my mother and father about the parents’ meeting for college that was coming up. My father spoke first.
“You’re not going to college. We can’t afford college. Besides, you’re a girl; you’re just gonna get married and have kids anyway.”
Mom added, “Just get a good job, like your cousin, with health insurance.”
Following her advice, I went ahead and got a job as a bank teller. But two years later, I quit. I wanted to go to college. Mom thought I was nuts.
“You have a good job, with benefits. Why would you quit?”
I applied for financial aid and loans, moved on campus, and after graduation I was hired at the university art museum. When again I had a good job, Mom apologized for not having been more supportive.
Once in a while, though, she still let it be known how she felt: my college degree made me act superior to her. And sometimes, that was true.
Two years later, September. My mother has been dead for three months.
This morning, I have an hour to walk before it’s time to pick up my boys from school. It is cool out, cloudy; the night before we had rainstorms, thunder, lightning. But now blue is beginning to peek out between the clouds, and I walk briskly along my usual route through town.
I climb the hill of Stewart Place, where Brenda lives. In front of her house, I see a pile of soggy cardboard boxes leaking old books and magazines, a rocking chair with a broken leg, and my mother’s painting. It sits on the ground facing the street, my mother’s name brushed in white paint in the lower right-hand corner. The frame has warped with the rain, and the image ripples across the canvas, splashed with mud.
I’d heard Brenda was moving. Obviously, my mother’s painting is not going with her. I know I have to take it home, rescue it.
I stop and pick it up. It is heavy, and I have a long walk. I’ll have to come back with my car, so I move it away from the road, onto the front lawn and hope I get back before it is taken away.
I drive back with Billy and Steven. The painting is still lying on the grass. I lift it into my car by the passenger side door and slide it between the front seats, through to the back, between my boys.
“Guys, do me a favor, hold on to Grandma’s painting, okay?”
“Okay,” they say, each putting a little boy hand on the warped wood frame.
“You know what we’re gonna do?” I say. “We’re gonna get Grandma’s painting cleaned up and put it in a new frame, and we can hang it in the living room. We can look at it everyday.”
Billy cocks his head to one side, examining the picture. “I like it,” he says. “It’s pretty.”
- Vicki Addesso has kept a journal for 30 years, the wellspring for her stories. After a career in museum education, Vicki concentrates on writing. She’s completed a collaborative memoir, Still Here Thinking of You, with three other writers, excerpts of which were recently published in the online journal The Living Room.
