When we are not with the artist, he works off black-and-white photographs taped to the wooden frame of his easel. He told Mother he needs to see me even when I am not there in order to draw me more perfectly. Sometimes he changes the placement of the photographs, but never eliminates any. He asks Mother about my habit of biting my nails. Of Helen he wants to know about the bruises, and as to my brother, why all the politeness?
In one photograph Father’s arm is around my waist. I remember trying to inch away and him pulling me back. The artist says I look like Father, more so than Helen or Jake. He insists my legs be crossed with each shoe facing forward, my socks folded in a straight line even though no little girl would sit this way. If the scene isn’t how he wants it, he leaves the brush on the easel’s wooden ledge and comes in so close I can hear his heart beating. His hands stink of turpentine. When he touches my chin or tucks a loose hair behind my ear the odor makes me drowsy. I must stay awake watching him, making sure he doesn’t come in closer and touch me again. Later, at home in front of my mirror, I practice staying focused. There are nights I am in bed and feel my skin burning. It is the artist looking at me.
He does not paint our marks, our bruises or scrapes, not even a rumpled skirt. There is a framed photograph on the wall across from where he works. I can’t say what it is because the head is missing; it is some sort of water animal, maybe a hippopotamus or rhinoceros. In houses of my friends and in a club my Father takes us to, I have seen halls lined in hanging heads. In his photograph, perfectly perched on top of the rotting animal is a very white bird. It is different from the wooded scenes hanging in my parents’ paneled den—deer at streams or roosters outside a barn where everything is drawn to scale. It seems beautiful because of the light, but there is a trick to looking at it, to seeing what it is exactly.
I never know how much time is left until I hear Mother’s car pull into his gravel driveway. And I never ask. Here in the South, we have been told children should not speak unless spoken to. When Mother picks me up, I am so tired from being still and from worrying about the artist and what he is doing that I sleep the entire drive home, waking with the print of the seatbelt patterned into my cheek. Saliva is crusted on the outside corner of my mouth and my left arm is pins and needles. It is an awful thing this sleep, and every Monday night, no matter how late I go to bed, I lie wide-awake watching the hands on the clock.
The three of us are standing in my parents’ house, not the one where we grew up but the one they moved to at the end of their lives. It’s a ranch because Father can no longer walk up stairs. The box-like home sits on a flat piece of property overlooking the woods. Father spends his afternoons on the back deck bundled beneath a blanket. Seated on a plastic-latticed lawn chair, he stares into the trees hoping to see a family of deer grazing on the lawn or leaping over the wire fence that divides his property from the neighbor’s.
The oil painting of us as children now leans against the wall with all their other paintings, the old man with the captain’s wheel in hand, the peeled orange on a dark mahogany credenza, a batik from Thailand of two dancers and a trio of flowers at different intervals of budding. My brother turns the picture of us around so the image faces the wall. Helen doesn’t want it either. None of us, she says, ever looked that way.
Remember having to sit for him? I ask. How impatient he was and how long it took, that way he stared at you, as if he knew everything about you.
I don’t remember, Helen says.
Even in photographs, Mother’s hairpiece doesn’t look real. She keeps it bobby-pinned to a Styrofoam head that sits on her vanity. In the late afternoon, anticipating a dinner party, she brushes each shaft the way the sales lady instructed, then, positions it on her head using the combs sewn inside the wig to attach it to her scalp. Unlike Mother, the fall has straight long hair in many shades of brown. She wears a velvet headband to disguise the stitching of the wig.
Father likes the guests to hear how well Helen plays the piano. Before the performance the maid helps Helen with her hair, sweeping it from her face and piling it on top of her head. She plays Mother’s childhood piano that Mother never plays. Before beginning, Helen stares at Mother hoping to get her attention. Mother casually leans against the wall and smokes her extra long cigarettes. She doesn’t look at Helen but stares into the distance. For most of the night Mother is quiet. It is unusual to hear her speak except when she is telling the maid to do something.
Father’s expression during the performance is of pleasure, and when Helen is done, she takes a bow and makes a curtsy. Some guests ask her questions. Others compliment her. It is true she is pretty when she smiles.
That night there is a commotion in Helen’s room. I think Father must have disturbed her when he left a gift on her nightstand, which he does after she performs.
In the morning I ask Mother if Helen is okay.
A mouse scampered across her dresser and frightened her. Still, she insists on keeping food in her room.
But, I argue, Helen likes the mouse. She keeps the lifesavers in the dish next to her brush and comb so he will come. She even tries to wait up for him.
The gift Father gave Helen is a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Barbie. When I come home from school I find it on the floor alongside Helen’s dirty clothing, undressed. Barbie’s hair is in tangles. A pin from Helen’s Girl Scout sash, the one she received for International Friendship, is in Barbie’s eye. The gash is larger than the circle of blue.
There are other disturbances, and I wonder if our house is haunted like my friend Thea’s, who lives on the plantation her family has owned for over a century, where slaves once grew tobacco. Their main house is lit by gas, which throws an eerie and unreliable light. Beneath the foundation are underground tunnels connected to storehouses. Her brother takes us through using a flashlight. Without warning he turns it off and rushes ahead. Thea pleads with him to come back, and when he doesn’t, she starts to sob.
Get on your knees, I tell her, and use your hands to feel the wall on the left and the ground in front of you. Just crawl.
I can’t without seeing. Do you know what’s in this ground? All sorts of dead things. It is awful to even think about it.
Yuck. But you don’t want to stay here. And besides we don’t know if he is coming back.
When she doesn’t move, I squeeze in front of her. The damp soil scrapes my knuckles. It still hurts, especially now as soil collects under the nail and then a shard of glass, or something sharp, cuts into my palm. I was in the tub when Father came in. I grabbed the shower curtain to wrap around me to hide myself, but he was pulling from the other end and my fingernail got caught in the crease. He kept pulling until the nail tore from its bed.
It’s a joke. Her brother says and then turns on the flashlight.
Thea is huddled against the wall, her cheeks streaked with tears and soot. Above her head, iron hooks jut from the wall and the ground beneath is stained.
Animal blood, he says pointing, cows and chickens, what they ate back then, duck too, just like now.
The ground slopes as if the blood carved a shallow stream and its banks are tinted red. I see cow heads hung upside down so the blood can drain, then I see people, whole bodies, naked black men, the skin of their throats wrapped over the hand-hewn hooks, the way a jacket’s hood loops over a metal store-bought hook.
Thea’s mother and father sit at opposite ends of a very long table. We answer only when we are spoken to and we always begin with Sir or Ma’am and end with Thank You. The servants hover at the swinging door that leads into the kitchen. Our backs are to them, but when they approach to clear the table, the light of the chandelier outlines their dark faces, accentuating their white crisp shirts and ironed skirts, but even still I cannot see their expressions. The most they do is nod.
It is implied that not a bite of food is to be left. I wouldn’t know for sure, but I think we are eating goose or maybe duck. Something I have never eaten, more the texture of chicken than steak, although the meat is