Notes from the Missing

I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since I put up a new post on my blog other than fiction pieces. When I sat back and reviewed the month of June, I understood why.

So here, not necessarily in order, are the things that were occupying me this past month.

• Ran a 5K race (with my husband) as part of Rhode Island’s Gaspee Days celebration. Considering how out of shape I am and that I’ve never been a fast runner, I was satisfied with my time of 37:34. At least I didn’t stop and walk.

• Tried to start regular running again.

• Met a friend for lunch.

• Lectored for the first time since returning to our old church.

• Went on the Providence Preservation Society tour of houses on the East Side and of the historical cemetery in our neighborhood.

• Visited my father-in-law in Georgia for Father’s Day weekend. Stayed with my sister-in-law and her family. Saw our four nieces. Went to a AAA Gwinnett Braves baseball game. Took Dad out to breakfast and dinner for Father’s Day.

At baseball game

• Got caught in a thunderstorm while jogging.

• With a friend, visited another friend before she had knee surgery.

• Crocheted a prayer shawl for the friend before her surgery.

• Bought a new dishwasher and had it installed.

• Met with a kitchen remodeler about having a new floor and countertop installed and looked at floor tiles.

(red tile)

(gray tile)

• Had new front doors installed.

• Made up and sent out invitations for my mother’s 100^th birthday party in August.

• Finished the huge biography of van Gogh I’ve been reading.

• Celebrated the first day of summer by taking our dog to a neighborhood pizza place and sitting at an outdoor table.

• Made it through three very hot days (mid-90s) and still managed to get some work done.

• Finally started the garden and planted our window boxes.

• Went to a lecture on history of public houses (taverns) in Rhode Island at the Providence library.

 • Saw a concert by Manhattan Transfer.

• Attended a church prayer shawl ministry meeting.

• Visited my mother twice a week.

• Worked (why is this at the bottom of the list?)

 

Those are the tea leaves that went into my June teapot. When July and August are over, and I’m depressed about the end of the summer, I hope to look back over these things, smile at the memories, and enjoy a satisfying pot of summer tea.

How has your summer been so far?

A Certain Shade of Blue

Written for Sandra's Writing Workshop Hop

This is the beginning of chapter 1 of my novel-in-progress. I don't know if I have the formal first person quite right, but please let me know what you think!


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On a warm early-June evening I walked slowly along the river, against the mild current that ripples it into the city, my hand dragging lazily along the rough surface of the balustrade.


Another gallery opening, another newly “discovered” local artist in his first exhibition here. Kyle usually gave me these shows to review; I was his most “mature” stringer, he said. “These college students don’t know a Picasso from a soup can yet. You’ve got a degree. You’re it, sweetheart.” I never told him I didn’t feel even up to the level of those students.

           

Here the river splits the street down its center. Traffic loops around it, flowing with and against the tide, on its way into and out of downtown. The river is below street level; to see it you need to look over the balustrade. I stopped and leaned on the edge of the concrete rail. The daytime warmth was leaking out of the stone now that the sun was setting. Gnats and mosquitos scattered in the air. A black ant zigzagged toward me, and I pulled my hand away till it disappeared over the opposite edge. Rush hour was over, and only the occasional car hummed past to ruffle the quietness.

My eyes followed the flow of the water toward downtown, where it spilled into an  urban pool within the circle of buildings. The lights were beginning to come on, and the reflections of the streetlamps glimmered in the water, floating and bobbing like white chrysanthemum petals in a Japanese watercolor.

Dusk—the time of day that reaches into your soul and pulls it so close to the surface that everything that touches it hurts.

My thirty-fifth birthday, a month ago. I’d let it pass by unmarked. Not because I dreaded getting older—I actually welcomed it—but because for the first time in my life I was completely alone.

The past three years were a tunnel into which it seemed the whole of my life had been funneled. Three intense, eliminating years in which all my external supports had fallen away. But my regret wasn’t for that. It was for a part of me that hadn’t been born yet and might never be.

I stood with my eyes half closed, the melancholy of evening settling over me like a soft scarf. A warm breeze teased at my hair and rippled my skirt around my knees. In my squinting vision the dancing lights on the water stretched out and joined together, a white-gold undulating chain. The footprints of angels. Something my mother would have said. An instant of aching, and then a sudden lightness. The evening seemed to change character; on a gentle night like this it was possible to imagine that lives and fates could transform within a moment.

 I lifted my hands from the barrier and brushed off the tiny glasslike bits of gravel that had indented my skin. I turned away from the river, toward the building across the street, a nineteenth-century brick textile mill that had just been renovated as a center for the arts. It interested me more than the show being held there.

Tonight was the unveiling of the renovation and the opening of the new gallery, and much of Providence society was here. I snaked through the crowd toward the wine bar. I brushed against dresses with sequins and silk-fringed shawls, black evening jackets. Jewelry flashed from wrists and necks and earlobes. These were the people who could afford to buy the overpriced works of a narrowly known artist and hang them on the brightly painted walls of their twelve-room East Side mansions, telling all their friends that this painter was the Next Big Thing.

And here was I, in my simple unaccented rust-colored dress. The outsider, the one always trailing her fingertips in the stream of art, never fully immersed.

My glass of wine and I drifted along among the crowd, listening to the scatterings of laughter and conversation, enraptured by the light and color that flourished in this atrium like something organic. Dark red bricks along the floorline melted up the wall into dark green, lighter green, and finally a jewellike blue that ended at the ceiling. A stand of green and brown ficus trees. Cherrywood beams. A glass dome, a lancet window over a curving staircase that could have been a choir loft, the recessed lighting tumbling shafts of brightness down through the room—a cathedral designed for the worship of art. It was a building with a soul, I thought, and whoever had designed it was a true artist.

“…in her third year at Lincoln. Wants to go to Harvard Med. We were hoping for Brown, since we both went there.”

“At least she wants to go. Our Josh says he wants to spend two years—two--” the woman held up two fingers—“bumming around Europe. While he’s still young enough to enjoy it, he says. Didn’t that used to be our generation’s thing? I thought these kids cared more about their futures.”

“No,” one of the men said. “That was the ‘me generation.’ They’re up to what, Y now? Or have they gotten to Z already…?”

A tall, thin woman in a long brown muslin skirt and overblouse, wearing sandals and a costume-jewelry string of beads, her long black-and-gray hair in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back. “Well, with my investments and savings, I should be able to retire from law in about eight years and start my herb farm.”

Everyone had dreams. I was beginning to feel sad again.

A rustling in the room ran toward the far end, toward the dais and the grand piano being played by a tuxedoed man. Hustling through the crowd was the top of a head I recognized as the mayor’s. He would dedicate the building in the name of the philanthropist who’d donated most of the money for the renovation. Newspaper cameras were flashing; I moved back as other people began moving forward. Someone was speaking on the dais, but I couldn’t make out the words. I could see the mayor shaking hands with a large white-haired man, the philanthropist; then a third, younger man joined them, and the three shook hands while photographers snapped. The guests began to applaud, and the gaps in the crowd in front of me closed. I edged toward the entrance to the gallery.   

Written for Sandra's Writing Workshop Hop. This is the prologue to my novel-in-progress, originally written in third person, but I reworked it for this prompt and to see how it comes out. Any comments are very welcome.

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Oh, Toby, stop, I think hazily. He’s waked me again with his crying. Seems like he’s been crying since he was born, six months already. I’m so tired. I cover my ears with my pillow.

Then something shocks through my body; my eyes shoot open and I’m half sitting up. The scream shivers in my bones.

It wasn’t Toby. It wasn’t a dream. I know it was my mother.

I sit trembling as the screams subside to shrieking sobs. I creep out of bed, my legs trembling, my bare feet slipping on the cold wood. I get to the door between my room and my parents’ and try to stay quiet as I open it. White light slashes across the floor from the room beyond, Toby’s room. The door is wide open.

I see my mother next to Toby’s crib. She’s bent over against my father, who’s holding her up, his hands pressed into her back. A shocked, frightened hiccuping noise comes from my throat. My father looks back. Claire, go back to bed. His voice cracks. What’s the matter, Daddy? Just go back to your room, he says. I run back and curl up under the covers, shaking.

******

 

I’m still in my pajamas, sitting in Mrs. Lamontagne’s kitchen on the other side of the wall from our house. She gave me some warm milk and chocolate chip cookies, but I’m not hungry, and the chips look like they’re moving. Mrs. Lamontagne is chattering, as she always does, but tonight she sounds chittery, like a bird, nervous. Sounds are coming through the wall; I do and don’t want to hear them. Red lights are flashing in the street outside.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s Aunt Lucie. Why is she here in the middle of the night?

She and Mrs. Lamontagne whisper to each other, then she kneels and puts her arms around me. You’re coming to my house tonight, sweetheart. You can sleep with Delphine, OK? I don’t answer but let her take my hand, lead me out the back door, across the small yard and the one behind, through the chain-link gate, down a gravelly driveway to the next street and another block to Aunt Lucie’s house.

I’m lying in bed next to my cousin Delphine, who’s wide awake. What happened? Delphine asks. She is eight, two years older than me. I don’t know, I whisper, and I know my voice is shaky. I heard my mother saying your brother died, Delphine says. I lie sleepless, tears pooling in my eyes, trickling down my face into my mouth and my ears.