“Do you know what a muse is, Helen?”
“I guess.”
“What?”
“Poets have them.”
He placed the stacked letters inside the cardboard box and put the lid on it. “Other artists do too.” He walked over to the shelves along the back wall and went immediately to a large white-spined book. He turned and brought it over to me, delivering the hefty volume into my hands.
“The Female Nude,” I read.
Mr. Forrest pulled out a round-backed wooden chair. “Here, sit. Many artists have muses. Painters, photographers, writers. There is something very muselike about your mother.”
I sat at the shiny wooden table and looked at page after page of nude women. Some lay on couches and some sat on chairs, some smiled demurely and others had no heads at all, just legs, breasts, and arms.
“My father works with sediment.”
“That doesn’t mean Clair can’t inspire him.”
“In what?”
“She keeps him going, Helen. If you can’t see that, you’re blind. They are interlocked-each sustains the other.”
On the pages in front of me were two paintings of the same woman. “The Clothed Maja,” I read aloud. “The Nude Maja.”
“Yes. Goya,” Mr. Forrest said. “Aren’t they wonderful?”
I looked at the two paintings side by side, then hurriedly closed the volume.
“Mr. Warner said everyone thinks we should move,” I said. I saw the holes in the wood of the table now, where iron must have been driven through to secure the bridge’s beams. They were filled with perfectly cut pegs made from a wood that was lighter in color.
“Do you want to move?”
“I don’t know.”
He was quiet for a moment, and then he offered me his hand.
“I think you should allow me to help you learn how to drive.”
“In the Jag?”
“Are there other cars? I wasn’t aware.”
I flushed with happiness.
On my way home, I carried two things: the picture of my mother in her ecru slip, which I would replace, and an open invitation to come play with Tosh. But what preoccupied me most were visions of myself at the wheel of Mr. Forrest’s car. I would wear a colorful scarf around my head and huge sunglasses, and, somehow, I would smoke.
It was dark out now, but there were no lights on downstairs at our house. Inside, I saw that the bathroom off the kitchen was empty and that the radio had been left, along with my mother’s knitting, at the base of the stairs. I went up to my bedroom and took a pair of pajamas from the bottom dresser drawer.
I changed and went down the hall to brush my teeth. I thought of the nudes hidden in Mr. Forrest’s house. He had forgotten to give me a book to take to my mother, and somehow this delighted me, as if I’d won a competition, as if his loyalty, however obliquely, had been transferred to me. In the bathroom I filled my pink plastic glass with water and brought it back to my room.
I could hear the snap of the metal blinds as I entered my bedroom.
“Where did you waltz off to?” my mother asked. She walked to the second window, directly over my bed, and snapped shut the blinds.
I did not respond. Instead I walked past her and sat down in an old chair I kept in the corner of my room. It was piled with half-dirty clothes, as it always was, but instead of moving them, I sat high on my mountain and looked over at her.
“Really, I was worried sick,” she said.
I said nothing.
My mother began pacing back and forth on the braided rug.
“Look, Helen, you know it’s hard for me,” she said.
Nothing.
“There was no way I could face those men. I haven’t even been out in the yard since, well, you know, since that boy fell in the road.”
He was hit by a car! I screamed it, but only inside my head.
“Where were you?”
She looked at me, half accusing and half pleading. Her hands were shaking and reaching out about her to soothe some beast I couldn’t see, some phantom self that haunted her day by day. Mr. Forrest’s words were the only ones I heard: “mentally ill.”
“I suppose you went to Natalie’s. Don’t think I can’t smell booze when it passes by me. What did you tell that woman? Did you tell her your crazy mother was cowering in the bathroom? You won’t get very far bad-mouthing me to the neighbors, getting drunk with Natalie and her bilious mother. I can’t keep this house in order without help. Do you know where Natalie’s mother comes from? Do you? The South, just like me, but she did one of those ‘I’m moving north and losing my accent’ maneuvers like the South is some sort of trash bin she’s fleeing from. Believe me, if you think your little friend Natalie’s mother is any better than me, you’re crazy.”
I saw myself as if outside my body. I rose from my chair as my mother continued speaking, though I could not hear her anymore. Her hands were waving about her ever more wildly, and all I wanted was for it all to stop. The pink plastic glass was in my hand, and then my hand was shooting forward, and only the water hitting my mother’s face woke me to what I had done.
I wanted to tell her that I’d been hit; I wanted her to comfort me. I wanted to scream at her and rake my nails down her face. I wanted her to be sane. But instead she cowered, and I screamed, “Mr. Warner informed me that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that we should move!”
And then, just as promptly as I had stood up, I sat back down again on the lump of discarded clothes.
My mother did not make a move to dry her face. She smiled weakly at me and spoke very softly. “Mr. Warner would use a word like ‘consensus.’ He’s a…”
I could fill in the words-an actual Mad Lib! “Pompous ass.”
I could see that my mother was grateful for this, that I had greeted her back on the road she walked down. Water dripped off her nose and lips. Her face appeared glossy in the lamplight.
“One of the men hit me, Mom,” I said.
The more words I spoke, the more I felt my resolve, my separation, my autonomy, leaking away from me. She would own me yet.
She half turned away from me and looked down.
“Helen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It’s just that…”
“Yes.”
“It’s just that I have… Well, you understand. You’re my daughter. I don’t fit in around here.”
I noticed my mother was toeing the edge of the carpet. The movement was obsessive and seemed to match the rhythm of her shaking hands. Somewhere she was trying to retrieve the language of apology but was struggling.
“Why don’t I brush your hair?” I said. “Like Dad does.”
I stood, and my mother brought her hands up in front of her face. She looked at me from behind them.
“I want to,” I said. “It will feel good, and then we’ll both go to sleep and things will be better in the morning.”
What I did not say was that I did not intend to speak to her again. That in the morning I would wake up and leave the house early so I wouldn’t have to see her. That I would begin to squirrel food away so I could claim I wasn’t hungry at dinnertime. That Mr. Forrest had given me a gift greater than any driving lessons or G &T. He had called my mother “mentally ill,” and I, even if my father never did, was determined to see this as our truth.
The next few weeks were exhilarating. When my father came home, I told him what happened in the yard and that Mr. Forrest had offered to teach me to drive. I didn’t need to mention that I wasn’t speaking to my mother because it was with this news that she greeted him at the door. All I knew was that in not speaking to her, it felt as if I were storing nuts or bullets. I grew stronger every day.
Mr. Forrest would pull up in his Jaguar and honk the horn, and I would grab my jacket and fly down the stairs. Sometimes I would be aware of a shadowy presence in the living room, but it took exactly three giant steps from the bottom of the stairs until I was out the front door, and so I chose to believe that her presence was diminishing with my every escape from it. Outside was sunlight and the willow-green car with the jaguar leaping boundlessly in the air.