The Painted Table, page 8
Wouldn’t having another baby, a final baby, prove her stability, change her fate? Unlike what happened to her mother, this baby would not be taken away. And then the words hysteria and acute mania or words like them would never condemn Joann, would never blaze across her death certificate.
Lodging for newcomers is scarce in Miller’s Ford, so the Kvaales’ upstairs apartments bring in a steady income. The main floor share-the-refrigerator apartment is harder to rent until, just before the first snowfall, a shy, dithering gentleman named Henry Clement comes and stays for six months.
Mr. Clement is rarely seen, except at suppertime, when the family is seated at their new kitchen’s “breakfast” bar. Most evenings, after the “God is good, God is great, we thank Him for our food. Amen,” their tenant enters the kitchen with apologetic noises. His slight frame squats before the open refrigerator. He contemplates the items on his designated lower shelf while annoyingly clucking his tongue. It’s not clear whether he speaks to himself or to the Kvaales when he inevitably says, “I just can’t decide what to have for supper.”
From where Saffee sits, she can see there is usually little for Mr. Clement to choose from—perhaps a package of bologna, a carton of eggs, butter, and maybe a head of aging lettuce. As a rule, on his first exploratory visit, Mr. Clement chooses nothing and returns to his apartment, only to reappear once or twice before making a selection.
Saffee and April find Mr. Clement’s mid-meal visits amusing, but Joann is put out. One evening, as the Kvaales enjoy pork chops, scalloped potatoes, green beans, and homemade applesauce, the hapless tenant lethargically stares at his near-empty shelf. Saffee wonders if he has fallen asleep in his hunkered-down position. Suddenly Joann blurts, as if to a naughty child, “Henry! You’re letting all the cold out! Our electric bill will be sky-high if you keep that door open much longer!”
Mr. Clement’s shoulders slump. He stands slowly and turns toward her, his face beet-red. “Oh, I-I’m sorry,” he stammers, “I’m so sorry,” and makes an empty-handed retreat. “I . . . I just couldn’t decide . . .” The door closes softly behind him.
From then on, it seems Mr. Clement makes an effort to shorten his refrigerator gazes, but the number of his mealtime appearances remains about the same.
“Mom, what’s this pile of books?” Saffee asks one day as she passes through the dining room. She puts down her opened copy of Heidi and riffles through pages of an imposing textbook. “Did you go to the library without me?”
Joann looks up from her study and tells her that the books are Mr. Clement’s college books about psychology. She has borrowed them. She glances toward the door that leads to Mr. Clement’s apartment and whispers, “I want to find out if our tenant suffers from neurosis or psychosis.” She speaks in an airy way that signals delight in a new word or two.
Joann’s married years have been filled with self-education. She no longer resents her father for preventing her from going to high school until she was considerably older than her classmates. By the time she enrolled, she had matured to the point that learning fascinated her.
“What’s ’chology mean, and that other word?”
“Psy-chology, Saffee. And you’re too young to understand.”
But Joann is very intent on understanding. Perhaps it will help her avert her own mother’s fate. She pores over Mr. Clement’s books for days. But to Joann’s disappointment, her study comes to a halt when Henry Clement and his books move away.
“Maybe he moved because he wanted his books back and was too neurotic to ask,” says Joann.
“Maybe he wanted his own refrigerator,” says Saffee.
They were both wrong, of course. What Mr. Clement wanted was something the Kvaales were not skilled in giving—friendship.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
UP AND DOWN
1950
All spring and into the summer, Joann sews draperies, tries her hand at upholstery, and adds touches that give the main floor of the old house a certain distinction, albeit homemade. As she bends over each task, she often repeats scraps of high-minded poetry and melancholy song.
Sweet sounds, oh, music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again . . .
After this brief hiatus, Joann’s nightmares resume, and something within her urges that she employ her brush again. Although disappointed, she almost dutifully removes her portable sewing machine from the table and spreads the canvas drop cloth beneath. After all, the experiment had brought relief for a while. As does the next application. For a while. And the next.
Baffled by what now seems to have become his wife’s obsession, Nels tries to dissuade her, but makes no headway. The sober intensity with which she works restrains the girls from asking questions. Her colors of choice are first yellow, and then red. Now, in late summer, Joann dips her brush into chartreuse.
Nels watches his wife’s fervent splattering.
“How do you like it?” she asks with a smirk. “It’s vomit green.”
“Joann! What’s got into you?”
She glares at him. Paint drips from the brush. “This is my business, Nels. You stick to yours.”
He retreats, shaking his head.
Curious about the exchange, Saffee appears in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. She leans against the wall and watches her mother’s deliberate stroking. She recalls how that morning Joann had poured the last of the milk from its waxed carton onto April’s cornflakes. When the carton was empty, Joann continued to hold it tipped in midair over the bowl. One more drop finally appeared, then none. Still her mother held the carton, motionless. Was that her frugality or, like it seems now, had she been rendered immobile, abducted into some invisible lair?
Saffee is tired of her mother’s complexities. She has always hated the trance-like staring. And now, after months of her mother’s painting obsession, which Saffee can’t possibly understand, she has grown to hate the Norway table. She heads out the front door and crosses the screened porch. April and her neighborhood friend, Marilyn, are busily drawing stick figures with chalk on the cement walkway.
Saffee says, with disgust in her voice, “Did you see Mom, April? She’s painting the Norway table again.”
“Yeah, I saw her. It’s gonna be green.”
“No, not green, April.” Saffee mimics Joann’s I-know-a-new-word voice. “It’s vomit green.”
“The king is having a ball!” April chortles as she dashes through the kitchen one afternoon. “The king is having a ball!”
She turns around and demands of Saffee, “Wash the floor, Cinderella! The king is having a ball!” and scampers away. April has recently seen a Disney matinee and ever since, her play-acting has been insufferable, at least to her big sister. Saffee looks up from her Etch-a-Sketch and appeals to Joann.
“Mother, can’t you make her stop? She’s bothering me.” But Joann’s expression says, “Isn’t she cute?” Saffee can’t help but notice that her mother’s cares curiously fade somewhat in the presence of her younger daughter’s merriment.
Later, when Nels comes home, April is still at it. “Dance with me, Prince!” she calls, stretching her arms toward him. Nels looks quizzical and scratches his head.
Joann comes from the kitchen, laughing. “April, haven’t I told you before your father has two left feet? Here”—she grabs April’s waving arms—“I’ll dance with you.” Giggling and singing, the two twirl together across the living room and out onto the screen porch.
The Miller’s Ford residents who venture to make Joann’s acquaintance are, for a while, fascinated by her posturing ways and unexpected pronouncements. But it doesn’t take long for her singular manner to create a space between them. A young grocery store employee one day asks Joann, with Saffee by her side, if she would like him to carry her two bags of groceries to her car. Joann doesn’t drive. With an upward twitch of her head she delivers an outlandish retort.
“Alas, my chariot awaiteth not at the door, young man, and my strength comes from sources you are obviously unfamiliar with.” She sweeps a bag from the counter and, with a self-satisfied snicker, floats with majesty to the door. She is oblivious of his puzzled look, as well as gasps from two middle-aged women in the checkout line.
Saffee’s face burns. She snatches the other bag from the checkout counter and hurries out. What fantasy world does her mother live in? Why didn’t she just say, “No, thank you”?
People of the town, unsure how to cross the divide between stable and unstable, learn to avoid this strange woman. Neither they, nor her family, nor Joann herself, can fathom the nuances of a darkening mind.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SEWING CLUB
1950
Saffee tightens toe clamps around her saddle shoes and buckles brown leather straps. The cement bridge spanning Blue River is ideal for roller skating. Swinging her arms back and forth, Saffee scrapes and slides along the sidewalk, bumping over every crack. The skate key sways on its string and lightly thumps against her chest.
On the sidewalk ahead, Saffee recognizes Mrs. O’Reilly, the mother of a fourth-grade classmate. Saffee drags a front wheel. The narrow concrete walkway, and Mrs. O’Reilly’s deluxe size, oblige them both to stop to avoid collision. Saffee would have preferred to zip quickly by. Mrs. O’Reilly greets her pleasantly and admires her polka-dotted shirt and matching shorts.
“So cute. Does your mother sew your clothes?”
Saffee nods.
“What’s your mother’s name? I wonder if she’d like to join the sewing club. I’ll call her.”
At supper, Saffee mentions that Mrs. O’Reilly might call.
“A sewing club? Hmm,” Joann says. “More likely a gossip club, I suppose.”
“Why don’t you go?” Nels urges. “It’d be good fer ya ta get out, meet some other women.”
To Saffee’s surprise, Joann does attend the sewing club. Once.
The following morning at breakfast the girls are eager to know about her uncharacteristic foray into small-town society.
Joann, holding her coffee cup with a raised pinky, tells them that it was at a Mrs. Birdwell’s house where everything was “hoity-toity.” Mrs. Birdwell, she says, collects ceramic parrots of various sizes and colors. Joann laughs with amusement and butters her toast. “Really bad taste.”
When asked about the food, she grins and reports that there was pink punch, way too sweet, and little square cakes called petits fours. It seemed no one knew the French pronunciation that Joann later found in the dictionary.
The women worked on “silly stuff,” like crocheted doilies and pot holders with ruffles. Joann doubts that they know how to make useful things, like clothes and curtains. She had let down a hem on one of Saffee’s skirts.
Saffee glances at April’s red-checked pinafore, proud that her mother sews so ably.
“I bet ya met some nice ladies, Joann,” Nels says, obviously hoping she had.
“Nice? Well, maybe, but short on looks, shorter on brains,” she scoffs. Joann scoops the last of the scrambled eggs onto her plate and declares, “I won’t be going back.”
Nels knows it is useless to argue.
That afternoon, flushed from the July heat, Saffee hurries into the house with an armload of books and heads to the kitchen for a glass of water. Which should she read first? Kon-Tiki or Pygmalion? Her mother, at the breakfast bar, does not acknowledge her. She is scribbling in a spiral notebook, imagination meeting memory, a wry smile on her face. More and more she dashes off lines of doggerel, revising for a number of days until a piece gives her pleasure.
“The library was so nice and cool,” Saffee says. “Wish our house was air-conditioned. Most of all, I really wish I could have a bike, Mom. I’m tired of walking all the time. I could have a basket on the front for books and stuff.”
Whenever Saffee asks for a bicycle, her parents remind her they live on a “very steep hill,” and she’d probably “break her neck.”
Gulping water, she watches her mother. “Whatcha writing, Mom?”
Engrossed in her own drama, Joann does not respond. Saffee asks again.
“Talk, talk, talk,” says Joann, still not looking up.
Saffee stamps her right foot on the floor and sets the glass on the counter a little too firmly. “I have not been talking!” she blurts. “I haven’t even been in the house! And all I did was ask for a bike.”
“Clean up the water you spilled, Saffee. No, I’m writing about talking. All that yak-yak-yak last night at the sewing club got me started on a poem.” She surveys the page, nodding slightly, clicking her tongue. “Actually, it’s turning out kind of good. Maybe I’ll read it to you when I’m finished.” She bends to resume. “Now, let me be so I can follow where my mind is going.”
Over the next two days, Joann labors on what she calls an “essay poem.” When relatively satisfied, she summons Saffee and April to a dramatic reading in the living room. Joann sits with one leg elevated on a hassock; her varicose veins are “killing her.” The girls sit at her feet.
“The title is ‘Ensnared,’” Joann says. “There are three parts. Here’s the first one.” She reads,
Advance. Retreat.
Offend. Defend.
Bumper cars converse, reverse.
Teasing push here, sudden jab there.
Touché! Good hit!
For a while, April is swept into Joann’s theatricality, which is much like her own. She bobs and sways to the rhythm of the words. Her sister sits very still.
Smiling masks belie sweaty palms, stiff necks.
Stupid! I knew I should not have come.
Stomachs knot.
Voices blabber.
Batteries rush toward their own extinction.
Blam! Quiplash! Cornered!
. . . At last, they slither away.
Smoke and mirrors.
Forgettable . . .
But not forgotten.
The confrontational words startle Saffee. She eyes her mother doubtfully. “What’s that got to do with sewing club, Mom?”
“That part just sets the stage for the next two parts, so listen.” Joann resumes reading.
We bring to the table the raw material of unspoken thoughts . . .
The fabric of our words becomes weightier. Riskier . . .
The essay poem drags on and on. By the time Joann reads the last part, she is giggling, thoroughly enjoying her own melodramatic absurdity.
Beware! Beware the delicate dance! The delicate verbal dance! . . .
April has become disinterested and has left the room. Saffee listens, hoping to understand even a little about her mother’s stinging reflections on the “verbal dance” and the “raucous undercurrent and pieties” at the sewing club.
. . . Naïveté trampled, again . . .
Rude cacophony retains its rule . . .
The Lord is in His holy temple.
Let all the earth keep silent before Him.
When the work finally concludes, Joann continues to edit, energetically inserting a new word here, hazarding a new line there.
Saffee sits silently. She’s too young to fully comprehend that what her mother has read from the notebook reflects a growing paranoia that writes on the tablet of her mind. Yet, on a simple level, Saffee relates.
“Like you said, that was about talking, right, Mom?”
“Right,” Joann answers, intent on her editing.
“I don’t like to talk to people much either, Mom,” Saffee says quietly.
Joann stops writing, looks down at her, and says, “Well, of course, the other night wasn’t really quite that bad. I made up some of it.”
“Oh.” Saffee pauses. “But still, I don’t think I’ll ever go to a sewing club.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TREE OF LIFE,
TREE OF EVIL
1951
Miss Eilert, a cherubic-faced pillar of the First Methodist Church, sits facing the row of three girls and two boys in the basement Sunday school room. The chilly stone walls suggest a cave unsuccessfully disguised with yellow paint. A labyrinth of ancient, patched pipes and heating ducts crisscross overhead. The children, all eight or nine years old, wear coats dusted by snow during their short walk from school.
To Saffee’s relief, a navy blue cape with silver buttons at each shoulder disguises Miss Eilert’s prodigiousness. Barrel-bosomed women always embarrass her. But worse, Joann’s insistence that Saffee attend this class meant she had to give up her usual after-school ice-skating on the Blue River. Saffee had put up a fuss to no avail, and now she sits hunched in a straight wooden chair, scowling.
“I’m sorry it’s chilly,” Miss Eilert says. “They don’t turn on the furnace during the week.”
Hearing her pleasant voice, Saffee’s impression of Miss Eilert softens. The woman seems intent, yet kind. The children fidget but show respect.
Miss Eilert begins by holding up a paper cutout from a pile on her lap. “When God created the world,” she says, “He placed the first man and the first woman in a beautiful garden called Eden.” She presses the cutout of Adam and Eve, discreetly standing behind a bush, onto a flannel-covered easel. Saffee’s face flushes pink. She’s glad no one in the room knows that her full name is Sapphire Eve, not after this obviously naked Eve, but after an evening sky.
