“You’re doing fine. How is life in this painting?”
“You know the way you painted Grief Cottage? When you look at it, you think right away of the overall sadness of life. But your McMansion house’s sadness creeps up on you. The way you’ve painted it, you can feel it thinking. ‘I’m new and too big, and if I have a message it’s a shallow message. But I can’t change what I am.’ ”
My aunt’s hand gripped my shoulder, and then quickly let go. She wasn’t a toucher.
“Well,” she said, moving into my sight line, “I hope the Steckworths won’t see all that in my painting, but I’m obliged to you, Marcus. I especially like the sky in this painting. It came out just right. I agree with you, the McMansion does have its own quality of sadness. A hint of impermanence for those who wish to see it.”
“Could they turn it down and not pay you?”
“I’ve never had that happen, but I suppose it could. On the commissioned ones I always take a deposit. Nonrefundable. And this is a very big canvas. It costs money to buy enough pigment simply to cover a canvas this large. And I have another kind of protection, too. It’s called ‘hard to get’ or ‘what if she turns me down?’ or ‘waiting list.’ By now I’m known well enough for people to want a Charlotte Lee and be willing to wait for it. Oh, hang it, I have to clean the house before they come. People expect some occupational clutter in an artist’s studio, but I’ve let things go too far.”
“I can help. I know how to clean.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed you don’t leave the bathroom a mess. Your mother raised you well.”
“My mom cleaned houses. I mean, that’s one of the things she did to supplement our income. She taught me some tricks people like.”
“Well, I hope you will teach me those tricks.”
“She must have been a gutsy woman, your mom,” Aunt Charlotte said the next day while we were doing the kitchen together. “It’s not easy to be a single mother. I’m sure I would have got on with her. We might have had things in common. I liked her that time your grandmother brought her to visit when she was a teenager. Too bad we never got to know each other better. Though Brenda would probably have ruined it, warned your mom off the hippie aunt. Not that I ever thought of myself as a hippie. I have worked nonstop all my life and will go on working till I drop.”
“You had things in common,” I said. “You both ran away from home when you were young. Mom ran away before she finished high school.”
“Now that I didn’t know. Why did she run away from Brenda?”
“It was Brenda’s father. He was coming to live with them and Mom said she’d rather die than live under the same roof with him.”
“Her grandfather was my father. I ran off at sixteen to get out from under his roof. Isn’t it just bloody amazing how defilement can become a family tradition? Why on earth did Brenda ask that monster to come and live with her?”
“She needed him to help her run the lumber mill after my grandfather died. When Mom heard about it, she ran away with an older man who was a foreman at the mill. She talked him into marrying her. The two of them moved to North Carolina and got jobs in a furniture factory. Mom said he was kind and a good worker and she felt safe with him. It broke her heart not to get her high school diploma, but she had to escape a worse situation.”
“Damn right.” She dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor. “Always escape a worse situation, even if escaping it is going to rob you of an education and ruin your life. Hand me that scrub brush, Marcus.”
“But I’m not tired yet.”
“Just hand it over. I need to scrub something within an inch of its life. It’s either that or kill someone.”
She snatched the brush from me and began making angry circles of soap foam on the tiles. “Why don’t you go down to the beach?
“But—”
“Just go, Marcus! Don’t make me ask you again.”
VIII.
I would have liked to hang out in my room or the hammock until suppertime, but Aunt Charlotte had ordered me from her house, and it wasn’t raining anymore, so I went to the beach. What had I done to turn her off? We had been getting along so well; she had even gripped my shoulder when I said something good about her painting. Then I had told her what cleaning products she needed and we had driven to the island store and I found them for her on the shelves. We had been dusting and polishing and scrubbing as a team, saving the tiled kitchen floor for last so it would gleam for the Steckworths the next day.
Had I said something wrong? We had been talking about my mother and how Aunt Charlotte and she might have been friends. It was the first time I had heard my mom described as a gutsy woman and it made me proud to think of her like that. Everything had been going so well.
I stopped to check on the dune that held the protected loggerhead eggs. All was quiet and untrammeled. Caretta caretta was their Latin name: the world’s largest hard-shelled turtle. Fully grown they ranged from almost a yard to a hundred inches long and weighed anywhere from three hundred to a thousand pounds. They could live until the age of a hundred, but they didn’t reach sexual maturity until they were in their thirties. “Which, when you think of it, isn’t such a bad idea,” said the old guy who had compared the hatchlings’ dash for the sea to “Normandy in reverse.” His name was Ed Bolton and he said these turtles had been doing their thing for forty million years, whereas modern Homo sapiens had appeared on the scene a mere two hundred thousand years ago.
I walked down to the surf and studied the patterns the outgoing tide was sketching in the sand. But the shrieking children all around me only intensified my agitation. It was too late in the day to look for the sunburnt man. The little white truck was gone from the beach by noon. What did he do for the rest of the day? Did he have other trash routes on the island or did he go to a second job?
What would happen if Aunt Charlotte’s tolerance for human company were to run out? (“Listen, I’ve given it a try, but I’ve been a solitary too long. He’s a nice boy, but I’m too set in my ways.”) Would she send me somewhere else? (“He was a nice helpful boy and the stipend that came with him was nice, but I have worked nonstop all my life and will go on working till I drop. And I have my painting. I’m known well enough for people to want a Charlotte Lee and be willing to wait for it.”)
I would go as far as the fourth yellow barrel and then head back slowly and sit on the steps leading up to her boardwalk. I would keep company with the turtle eggs for a while. Funny, I usually thought of Aunt Charlotte as a self-sufficient older person, but when she had dropped to the floor like that and started that desperate scrubbing, I had glimpsed a scared and angry girl.
It was too late for the white truck, but I could create my own dialogue with the sunburnt man as I walked north.
He would be surprised to see me still on the island.
“You? Still here at the beach?”
“I live here. With my great-aunt.”