“What do they expect? I’m going through chemo,” Claire said when the call was over.
“Why aren’t you talking to them?”
“Whenever they hear I’m ill, we start with the selling of the farm again.”
Mrs. Girbaldi shook her head. “But it’s just land. Not kin.”
“No! Those acres are as born from me as the children are. Maybe more so. The girls turned away from it all.”
Mrs. Girbaldi shook her head as if something valuable had been dropped and broken. “They escaped, child.”
“They betrayed.”
* * *
For dinner Claire lit candles at the kitchen table, pulled out the cloth napkins, creating a minicelebration. When Minna came downstairs, she wore tight jeans, high heels, a glittery, low-cut camisole that used to belong to Lucy when she was in college.
“Night,” she said, letting herself out the door, not bothering to look at the table with its three settings.
Mrs. Girbaldi spied on her out the kitchen window. “Where’s she going?”
“A date,” Claire said. “Just spoons? Or forks, too?”
“She goes out regularly?”
Claire shrugged. “Quite a few nights.”
“That’s not her job. Her job is to keep you company.”
“This is a job, not a prison sentence. I can’t expect her to take vows of celibacy, can I?”
“She spends the night? With who?”
A sly smile. “Don.”
“That was quick work.”
“I like having her here. It gets me through. And I have you, don’t I?”
“Of course. And you have your daughters. Have you forgotten about them?”
“No.”
“I think you have. This girl has bewitched you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Claire said, but wondered if it was true.
“Something I wanted to talk to you about. I was at the club, having lunch with Margaret Parker. You know Margaret?”
Happy to change the subject, Claire nodded, wagging in a noncommittal motion as one did with Mrs. Girbaldi’s sprawling narratives, like genuflecting toward the points of the cross, indicating a familiarity, rather than intimacy, with said person.
Mrs. Girbaldi continued, undeterred, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. “Well, her cousin came down with the cancer.”
Claire smiled at the idea that one could come down with the cancer, as if it were the flu.
“They took her to a clinic down in Baja,” Mrs. Girbaldi continued. “They fed her all this strange stuff — I’m not saying what, but let’s just say it was a struggle getting it down, and it would be illegal in this country. A month later, she went back to her doctors, and they examined her: the tumor was gone! They accused her of having it operated on. ‘How could I do that,’ Margaret asked, ‘when you all said yourselves it was inoperable?’”
The story hung, unremarked upon, Claire’s attention directed away as if Mrs. Girbaldi had burped.
Chapter 8
A week later, Minna invited Claire to her now transformed room.
The climate in California is ephemeral; the air brittle and self-effacing. Upon entering the room, Claire felt she had left her old world as she knew it. She understood for the first time the indolent pleasure of the wet and liquid air in those exotic novels that took place in the tropical corners of the world. Impossible to explain how a coat of paint could affect barometric pressure, but there it was. She was in a strange but longed-for land.
Two walls were painted dark greenish turquoise, a color that breathed the nearness of the ocean, its salty stick, the choking, crowding vegetation, and the torrential, silvered downpours of rain. Claire was positive if she touched these walls, her hand would come away slick, not with paint, but the breathing condensation of the equatorial climate. The walls modulated from light to shadow, as if one were looking down into the depths of a lagoon while sitting in a small, unseaworthy boat. A vertiginous experience that suggested to her the overwhelming feel of crossing a sea whose entrapping strands of kelp wrapped around rudders, propellers, anchors, hulls.
“You’re an artist, Minna.”
Claire had taken in only half of the room, and by far the half of lesser importance. The remaining two walls were painted a bold yellow, the color of blazing sun, bleached coral beaches, the stuccoed walls of mean villages. All manner of figures and symbols and words filled these two walls with a sense of menace proportionate to their unintelligibility. Claire reassured herself that it was only a matter of familiarity and comfort would surely follow. In a spirit of exploration, she excavated the nearest, largest of these words: OGOU BALANJO. Underneath it, smaller letters read SPIRIT OF HEALING. Then, like a bend in the road, a view that was formerly invisible presented itself: the drawing of a white woman, round-faced, with empty blue eyes and long strands of stylized, yellow hair. But one noticed this only much later because what riveted the attention was what she was holding — a salver at waist level, on which rested her two breasts. The chest area above the tray was blank as an unmarked map, scored only with two small X’s where the breasts should be, like the cartooned X-ed eyes of a dead fish. Above her head, written out in strips of Christmas tinsel, were the words SAINT AGATHA. Below her large, round, clawed lion’s paws were the painted words PATRON OF BREASTS.
“Is it magic?” Claire asked.
“It’s the beginning.”
“She’s me?” The figure was so monstrous — a mockery or a kindness, she couldn’t decide — that she felt unmoored as if punched. She stood there, stranded, as Minna waited to catch her swoon, helping her onto the floor. Claire kept looking up, hypnotized by the figure, who only grew in power when observed from that vantage.
“I’ve upset you?” Minna sat on the floor next to her and held her hand. “These are powerful majik, sanp. To heal you.”
Claire nodded, sickened and awed, mesmerized by the eyes of the woman, flat and placid. She felt that if she sat there long enough, looked hard enough, she would find the answer to many things that had eluded her. Meanings so covered by time and evasions and half-truths that they were all but forgotten. The more time she spent looking at Saint Agatha, the less fantastic, the more normal, she appeared, until it was Claire’s own bare walls, her timid Germanic landscapes and faded English botanical prints in the rest of the house that lacked reality.
“She’s beautiful?” Claire whispered, feeling unqualified to judge even that because the figure was so far beyond the dull concepts of beauty or ugliness.
“You like her!” Minna jumped up, excited as a schoolgirl, and waved her hands back and forth across the walls as she described her future plans for more drawings, as if the surface of the walls weren’t already buckling under their duty. Her happiness took away all Claire’s opposition, the menaced feelings of alarm. Of course, they were just drawings, primitive renderings no more powerful than pictures in a magazine, book, or cave. Harmless.
But after that first visit, Minna’s door again remained resolutely shut. Somehow Claire understood that the powerful contents needed to be bottled tightly, sealed like a drug or alcohol. The room was so foreign now that for all practical purposes it had ceased to exist as part of the rest of the house and became like the exotic grafting of the lion paws on Saint Agatha, or the grafting of more delicate fruit on rugged rootstock. As time went on, such permutations on the everyday began to seem more and more possible. Another of Minna’s pictures that Claire had barely had time to glance at on her way out of the room: a fish tail attached to a woman’s lower body. The house, too, had become mermaidized.