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The Oil Painting
by Cesca Janece Waterfield In her navy blue hatchback, smoking Merit Ultra Lights, my mother traveled the country roads with a speed that alarmed me. The partially-finished canvas was in the back, leaning against the window. The sky was heavy with low-slung clouds and the blacktop gleamed with falling rain. With each curve in the road, the frame of the canvas thunked the glass, creating an irregular rhythm against the shimmering harmonies of “California Dreaming” playing faintly from the radio. I stole looks at her as she smoked. She was not angry, or extremely grieved in any way I could discern. I find it hard even now to translate what her face divulged. I know what it didn’t express: any wavering in what she believed and had stated with disgusted conviction the night before; that the canvas in the back looked nothing like Rudy; more precisely, it looked “like hell,” and she couldn’t in good conscience pass it off to its buyer. As we raced along, I pinched the vinyl seat when it seemed that we were about to soar into a glade of pine trees. I saw mortal danger anywhere beyond our own house and woods. Occasionally even the sanctuary of those places shut briefly, and I moved slowly, taking shallow breaths in rooms and spaces I believed were fraught with peril. I was a sentry when my mother napped, watching her shoulders to verify that they rose and fell with her breath. More than once I awoke from sleep with a start, straining in the dark to hear what I had taken as one of my family falling down the stairs. This early awareness of death was inexplicable. My only genuine experience of death came later, when members of our stunningly ancient Episcopal parish began to die. My parents staunchly forbade me to attend these funerals, running contrary to the Southern tradition of funeral-as-social-event. That day, as we arrowed through the rain, I watched for calamity to betray the most commonplace routine. But was this commonplace? Racing as early as socially acceptable to the home of my math teacher to decline a commission, canvas in hand in order to sweep away any doubt as to its disappointing effect? Though the move to Virginia had awakened in me a formerly unexamined need to be “normal,” I didn’t know what that standard was. My comparisons were limited to my father’s family, most of whom lived here. I could not envision my Aunt Bonnie flying from the house to complete a similar social call. That I could not envision her doing much beyond antiques shopping or selecting a Civil War lithograph seemed beside the point. She was much like the mothers of my friends, while I knew no other mother who painted portraits of weary porches sagging with generations of cotton field workers, who let thick strands of hair fall into the clay while bent over a potter’s wheel, or who had burned her hand so severely with a soldering gun fusing stained glass that she spent an entire church pageant with her right hand submerged in ice water. I loved my mother and suspected she was remarkable, but if I stopped to observe her effect on others, I took on a defensive posture. I could see that my father’s conservative and reserved family and certainly some of the town, while admitting her clear ability as an art teacher, viewed her as outspoken and eccentric. While the word “outspoken” denotes no value judgment per se, when attributed to a woman in small town Virginia, it’s meaning was pejorative. It had taken only a matter of months of my living there to adopt an “us versus them” perspective. As we traveled, I mused about what Mrs. Prillaman’s house would be like. As my math teacher, I knew her to be outdoorsy; petite, yet rugged. I imagined her home to be a vision of L.L. Bean: pragmatic and slightly preppy. My family only occasionally paid visits to anyone, save for a few shut-ins to whom my father was devoted to providing company as often as he could. I hoped for the kind of visit I had experienced with a school friend while spending the weekend at her house in town. Returning from dinner out, her parents stopped to visit a colleague of her father’s. I began to plunk out “Heart & Soul” on their piano, but my friend, who was in her second year of piano lessons with the town’s musical doyenne, quickly began playing something far more mature and demanding. Quietly I watched the adults chatting in the adjoining room. Sitting in elegant wingback chairs, they seemed to smile from behind their teeth. I believed I could perceive each with an eye toward the clock. Yet it was normal. For all its apparent insincerity, I couldn’t imagine the grips of violence that occasionally seized my home daring to enter these starched, swept, and altogether orderly rooms which were squarely and enviably guarded by a gate of belonging. As we turned onto the highway leading to Mrs. Prillaman’s house, I remembered the afternoon she’d first visited us, while my mother recovered in bed from back surgery. Eyeing a stack of canvasses, our guest began poring over them. My mother, who would have made every effort to do so if she hadn’t been bed-ridden, was unable to stop her. That day, Mrs. Prillaman looked at every piece and later, after my mother had recovered, asked mom to paint her dogs Rudy and Roxie. The rumor was that the woman was unable to have children so she and her husband grew unusually close to their Labrador retrievers. The dogs graced the Prillaman Christmas cards; their whiskered faces were cross-stitched onto pillows, knit into wool sweaters, and carved into coat racks. In the house we sped toward, Mrs. Prillaman hoped to adorn a wall with their likenesses. She had a scene in mind and provided several of her photographs of the dogs emerging from the river, and magazine pictures of dogs in duck hunts. She asked that my mother combine elements of the photos to show the pair heroic and dutiful, one of them hauling a shot mallard to shore. Reluctantly, my mother consented. But as I sat in her basement studio scribbling on newsprint when she was a week into the project, I could see that she was dissatisfied. Not surprisingly, my assurances did nothing to quell her mounting frustration. I couldn’t bear watching her feeling inadequate. Since we had moved, I had grown accustomed to witnessing and trying in some way to soothe or divert her self-doubt and isolation in this tiny hamlet. We had left Alabama when my father retired from the Army, in which he’d been a pilot and flight instructor. Warsaw, Virginia was his boyhood home, and his father’s, reaching back for a sufficient number of generations to earn the “privileged” status as a “native.” The home he built in anticipation of returning was miles from the tightly-yoked town limits and faced the Rappahannock River, a veritable playground during the summer. My parents found that building their dream home was more arduous than joyful and the process almost brought them to divorce. My father’s upbringing as the son of a man who balanced legitimate entrepreneurship with bootlegging and a casino had allowed people to tuck away my father’s boyish profile into an unthreatening pocket on the town’s social periphery. Now, the prominence of the contractor and the relative size of the house provoked resentment among people from my father’s past. In our family, as in most, the past is something that never entirely stays put, but is regularly brought out and polished, lit and recast through storytelling. It is occasionally a weapon, too, and proved effective in the growing number of quarrels between my parents. But I loved our reminiscences and my father frequently painted colorful tableaus of his childhood. Nevertheless, painful memories also seeded his youth, and like his experiences in Vietnam, he rarely discussed these. Even his most entertaining tales reflected his childhood poverty, and set me adrift in imagination alone in my playroom and as I wandered the neighborhood lanes in thought. The neighborhood was so small as to make calling it such an overstatement. It was essentially an oyster-shelled lane of vacation homes owned by Richmond professionals. The seasonal presence of urbanites lent it an exoticism I relished. A vocalist with the Virginia Opera owned the red modernistic place a few houses down. When she visited, she spent early evenings on her pier singing toward the setting sun. Often my mom and I poured goblets of tea and galloped down the hill to sit on our own deck as her soprano filled the ginger-colored air. After one such evening my mother turned and asked, “Are you happy?” She might have posed the question in sign language, or Farsi. Happy was the ballet barre from which I believed I would soubresaut into my dancer dreams. Happy was losing my shoes to the creek grown mucky with coming spring, or the promise of my friends converging for a Halloween sleepover. At her question, I clearly remember plumbing my emotions, reviewing the past week’s activities as my head filled with images of the shore at low tide, the tiny, unused stable in which I played house, and sunlight through a crown of corn tassels as I sat hiding in a bare patch in the middle of a field. I wanted to answer her correctly, yet searching the question itself for some clue, I found only evidence of my mother’s own despondency.
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