Now, sitting here in church services, it’s hard for her to remember what she first imagined and what she saw for real after she’d arrived. The purple altar cloth. The thick wood beams black with varnish.
It’s all what she imagined as a kid. But that’s impossible.
Grace beside her in the pew, praying. Tabbi on the far side of Grace, both of them kneeling. Their hands folded.
Grace’s voice, her eyes closed and her lips muttering into her hands, she says, “Please let my daughter-in-law return to the artwork she loves. Please don’t let her squander the glorious talent God has given her ...”
Every old island family around them, muttering in prayer.
Behind them, a voice is whispering, “... please, Lord, give Peter’s wife what she needs to start her work ...”
Another voice, Old Lady Petersen, is praying, “... may Misty save us before the outsiders get any worse ...”
Even Tabbi, your own daughter, is whispering, “God, make my mom get her act together and get started on her art ...”
All the Waytansea Island waxworks are kneeling around Misty. The Tuppers and Burtons and Niemans, they’re all eyes-closed, knotting their fingers together and asking God to make her paint. All of them thinking she has some secret talent to save them.
And Misty, your poor wife, the only sane person here, she just wants to—well, all she wants is a drink.
A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. And repeat.
She wants to yell for everybody to just shut up with their goddamn prayers.
If you’ve reached middle age and you see how you’re never going to be the big famous artist you dreamed of becoming and paint something that will touch and inspire people, really touch and move them and change their lives. You just don’t have the talent. You don’t have the brains or inspiration. You don’t have any of what it takes to create a masterpiece. If you see how your whole portfolio of work is just grand stony houses and big pillowy flower gardens—the naked dreams of a little girl in Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—if you see how anything you could paint would just be adding more mediocre shit to a world already crammed with mediocre shit. If you realize you’re forty-one years old and you’ve reached the end of your God-given potential, well, cheers.
Here’s mud in your eye. Bottoms up.
Here’s as smart as you’re ever going to get.
If you realize there’s no way you can give your child a better standard of living—hell, you can’t even give your child the quality of life that your trailer park mom gave you— and this means no college for her, no art school, no dreams, nothing except for waiting tables like her mom ...
Well, it’s down the hatch.
This is every day in the life of Misty Marie Wilmot, queen of the slaves.
Maura Kincaid?
Constance Burton?
The Waytansea school of painters. They were different, born different. Those artists who made it look so easy. The point is some people have talent, but most people don’t. Most people, we’re going to top out with no glory, no perks. Folks like poor Misty Marie, they’re limited, borderline dummies, but nothing enough to get a handicapped parking space. Or get any kind of Special Olympic Games. They just pay the bulk of taxes but get no special menu at the steak house. No oversized bathroom stall. No special seat at the front of the bus. No political lobby.
No, your wife’s job will be to applaud other people.
In art school, one girl Misty knew, she ran a kitchen blender full of wet concrete until the motor burned out in a cloud of bitter smoke. This was her statement about life as a housewife. Right now, that girl is probably living in a loft eating organic yogurt. She’s rich and can cross her legs at the knee.
Another girl Misty knew in art school, she performed a three-act play with puppets in her own mouth. These were little costumes you could slip over your tongue. You’d hold the extra costumes inside your cheek, the same as the wings to a stage. Between scene changes, you’d just close your lips as a curtain. Your teeth, the footlights and proscenium arch. You’d slip your tongue into the next costume. After doing a three-act play, she’d have stretch marks all around her mouth. Her orbicularis oris stretched all out of shape.
One night in a gallery, doing a tiny version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, this girl almost died when a tiny camel slipped down her throat. These days, she was probably rolling in grant money.
Peter with his praise for all of Misty’s pretty houses, he was so wrong. Peter who said she should hide away on the island, paint only what she loved, his advice was so fucked.
Your advice, your praise was so very, very fucked.
According to you, Maura Kincaid washed fish in a cannery for twenty years. She potty- trained her kids, weeded her garden, then one day she sits down and paints a masterpiece. The bitch. No graduate degree, no studio time, but now she’s famous forever. Loved by millions of people who will never meet her.
Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.
Just so you know, Peter, your mother’s still a bitch. She’s working part-time for a service that finds people pieces of china after their pattern is discontinued. She overheard some rich summer woman, just a tanned skeleton in a knit-silk pastel tank dress, sitting at lunch and saying, “What’s the point of being rich here if there’s nothing to buy?”
Since Grace heard this, she’s been hounding your wife to paint. To give people something they can clamor to own. Like somehow Misty could pull a masterpiece out of her ass and earn the Wilmot family fortune back.
Like she could save the whole island that way.
Tabbi’s birthday is coming up, the big thirteen, and there’s no money for a gift. Misty’s saving her tips until there’s enough money for them to go live in Tecumseh Lake. They can’t live in the Waytansea Hotel forever. Rich people are eating the island alive, and she doesn’t want Tabbi to grow up poor, pressured by rich boys with drugs.
By the end of summer, Misty figures they can bail. About Grace, Misty doesn’t know. Your mother must have friends she can live with. There’s always the church that can help her. The Ladies Altar Society.
Here around them in church are the stained-glass saints, all of them pierced with arrows and hacked with knives and burning on bonfires, and now Misty pictures you. Your theory about suffering as a means to divine inspiration. Your stories about Maura Kincaid.
If misery is inspiration, Misty should be reaching her prime.
Here, with the whole island around her kneeling in prayer for her to paint. For her to be their savior.
The saints all around them, smiling and performing miracles in their moments of pain, Misty reaches out to take a hymnal. This is one book among dozens of dusty old hymnals, some without covers, some of them trailing frayed satin ribbons. She takes one at random and opens it. And, nothing.
She flips through the pages, but there’s nothing. Just prayers and hymns. No special secret messages scribbled inside.
Still, when she goes to put it back, carved there in the wood of the pew where the hymnal hid it, a message says: “Leave this island before you can’t.”
It’s signed Constance Burton .
July 8
ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE, Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.
You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”
The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop’s front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.