The Chalk Artist

by Allegra Goodman

  One shoe in each hand, she tapped the wall. She loved the new-shoe smell, clean leather and fresh rubber.

  “Stop,” Aidan said, after a few seconds.

  She kept drumming her new shoes at the spot she hoped was just above his computer monitor.

  “Stop or I’ll kill you.”

  “He speaks,” Diana said. “Hey, Aidan. I got new shoes.”

  No answer.

  When she laced the shoes and walked around her room, she bounced. The floor felt like those giant inflatable birthday party castles. She jumped, and jumped again. Her dresser rattled when she landed. She could hear Aidan shuffling around, her fellow cell mate, self-incarcerated in his room. “I’m going to do something,” she told him. “Do you dare me?”

  No answer.

  “You dare me,” she answered for him, but that sounded pathetic. “Okay, I dare myself.” That sounded even worse, like she was trying to be inspirational. Even when she was little she had hated anything inspirational, like books where kids saved the day or movies involving wildlife and parents getting back together and slow-motion horse races at the end. She sat on her bed and looked down at her feet in the new shoes. Who are you kidding? she thought. She embarrassed herself, even when she was alone.

  Long ago, when she was six and seven, she had swung bar by bar across the climbing structure. As a small girl, she’d gone to GAB, Gymnastics Academy of Boston, which was the only day camp open in the very last weeks of August. At the gym near Fresh Pond, she had practiced pikes and flips on the giant trampoline, hurled herself with all her force up and over the vault. She had been a little gymnast and Aidan had been a swimmer, and they had been a matched pair, wiry and strong. Then at about twelve, he grew tall, and she grew round. The weight came on in cookies and gumdrops, and late-night snacks. Aidan ate too, but it didn’t show on him. He was over six feet and growing; she was done at five feet four. He paced the house, while Diana hunkered down. He refueled standing at the kitchen counter, while she curled up with goldfish crackers on the couch. He started killing monsters, and she built up her defenses, practiced her self-doubt.

  She was not a small girl anymore, nor was she fast, nor was she flexible. She could barely remember hurtling over anything. For a while now, her tiny pediatrician had been talking about exercise and healthy nutrition. Diana was thirty pounds overweight.

  Sometimes she felt doomed. Other times she felt as though she were carrying somebody’s lost luggage. When would the real owner come to claim it? She felt disgust, resignation, surprise, but no sense of recognition. She avoided herself. Stayed away from scales, mirrors, bright lights, shorts, and bathing suits.

  Kerry could talk all she wanted about standing up straight and being beautiful; she could say it a thousand times. Words could not change anything. “You’re a beautiful girl” was like saying God is good. You didn’t say these things because they were true, you said them because you hoped the universe would take pity on you.

  Diana pounded once more on the wall.

  “What?” Aidan shouted.

  This time she didn’t answer.

  “What?” he called again.

  When she spoke, she wasn’t even talking to him anymore. Thumping down the stairs, she berated herself. “Go. Go. Go. I’m tired of waiting for you.”

  Near the front door at the bottom of the stairs, she found her broken Nikes, and picked them up by the laces. Outside she flung them in the garbage can and shut the lid.

  “Where are you going?” her mother called out from the couch.

  “Nowhere,” Diana said.

  The night was mild, the snowbanks melting, no longer white, but newsprint gray, the sidewalks cracked, but clear of ice. Diana walked down Antrim Street to Broadway, and she took deep breaths, swinging her arms, speed-walking like the old ladies in the mall. They were probably in better shape than she was. Diana was already hungry after five minutes in the fresh air. At the corner of Prospect Street, she nearly stepped into Tedeschi’s market for a bag of chips. The only thing stopping her was Aidan’s friend Jack, walking out with two gallons of milk.

  He wore glasses, but he had a way of squinting to look at you. He had been the small one. Tiny! Now he was all legs and bony shoulders, incredibly long arms. “Diana.” He couldn’t wave, because he had a gallon weighing down each arm. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing.” She hated how he examined her.

  Since they had known each other since preschool, he thought he had a right to trail after her. He followed her to the traffic light. “We ran out of milk.”

  “Yeah. I see that.” He was heading home to Norfolk Street, where he lived in the Chocolate Factory apartments, so called because yes, the building had been a chocolate factory. She said, “Okay, I cross here.”

  He knew she lived in the opposite direction. “Why are you…?”

  She didn’t wait for the light. She dodged cars, crossing Broadway to Sennott Park. Then she checked that he was gone. She didn’t want anyone to see her, so she hid behind a tree to touch her toes.

  She didn’t know the real stretches, the kind they did on teams at school. She didn’t know the right way or the fast way, so she just started walking the perimeter of the field. There was no moon; she saw no stars. She wasn’t quick enough to pass anything moving, only houses and little stores, and the great silent trees. Her legs were heavy under her, and her sides ached. Breathing hard, she began to run.

  Now Nina came to Grendel’s just to see him. She stacked her students’ Discovery Journals on the table and looked up at Collin as he brushed past. He was always hovering near her, or scribbling little notes. His friends thought the situation was hilarious. Not just that Nina was a teacher, but that she’d turned him into such a courtier.

  At closing time, Collin and Kayte cleaned up, while Nina waited at the bar.

  “You’re anomalous,” Samantha told her.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Collin said as he wiped tables.

  “You aren’t a teetotaler, are you?” Sam asked Nina.

  “No.”

  “Because you never even order beer.”

  “I drink other things.”

  “Like what?”

  Nina hesitated.

  “Collin!” Sam cried out as if to say, I can’t believe her.

  He threw his wet rag and Sam ducked behind the bar.

  “Drink me! Drink me!” Sam poured Nina a drop of crème de menthe. Nina shivered, tasting Sam’s strange medicine. She really did look like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Curiouser and curiouser. Collin had to kiss her.

  —

  She went with Collin to Charlie’s Kitchen, the almost-all-night diner in the Square. They sat together in a red vinyl booth, and he told her of his days performing plays about nutrition at the Children’s Museum, where Darius had worn a full tomato suit.

  “Full tomato? Is that like full metal jacket? What were you?”

  “A loaf of bread.”

  She laughed.

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to picture that,” Nina said.

  They discovered that they were both turning twenty-four in January. Their birthdays were just a week apart, and they had been born in the same hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess. Strange that they had never met.

  She had attended Cambridge-Ellis as a toddler, while he’d spent his days at Aisha’s Family Daycare. No chance of meeting there. Ice cream? She had walked to Lizzy’s. He’d worked at Christina’s. Pizza? She went to The Village Kitchen. He went to Angelo’s. Summers she’d interned at CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at Tufts. He had taught swimming at the Y. They had grown up two miles apart, but it was as if they came from different cities. He said it was funny. She said, “I’m not so sure.”

  He caught the guilty note. “That’s a West Cambridge thing to say.”

  He told her about the triple-deckers of Antrim Street. The back porches where you could hang in summers. He told her his old
girlfriend had worked as a nanny for a baby named Moses. Noelle would lull Mo to sleep inside and then she and Collin would sit out on the porch and smoke weed until all the trees and green leaves shimmered. He told Nina this, but he downplayed the smoking part. He focused on the trees.

  “They’re huge,” he said. “And people worship them. There was an elm that died and my mom’s friend Lois had a funeral before the city took it down.”

  “What’s that like?” Nina asked. “A funeral for a tree?”

  “Pretty straightforward. Everybody gathered and Lois said a eulogy.”

  He described his mother’s garden, tiny but so well planted that you couldn’t set foot in it without stepping on a flower. There were pale-green hydrangeas, and purple irises, soft lamb’s ears, creeping strawberry vines. “You’ll see,” he told her. “If this winter ever ends.”

  Nina’s stepmother had a garden too. Helen had terraced lawns, and a swimming pool edged with bluestone, and a clay tennis court, but Nina didn’t say all that at once. She started with the roses, and the moss on the stone walls.

  Each night they stayed out later. They walked to Broadway Bicycle after the shop had closed. Bike seats hung like hunting trophies, the size and shape of deer skulls on the wall. Behind the register, Nina saw hundreds of plastic drawers labeled like body parts: SPIKES, NUTS, SHINS, FANGS.

  He took her to Christina’s, where he had chocolate-orange and she had gingersnap ice cream. There were no open seats, so they walked up Cambridge Street with their cones past Boutique Fabulous. When they came upon Rosie’s Bakery, Collin said, “My father used to take me here before he joined the navy.”

  “That must have been hard,” Nina said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Missing each other?”

  “They can’t get you for child support if you enlist.”

  They walked down Fayette to the new coffee shop called Dwelltime. “I liked the boyfriends better,” Collin said, and he described Maia’s main ex-boyfriends: the poet, Greg, who wrote obituaries until he got laid off from The Boston Globe. Tony, the chiropractor, who taught Collin how to drive. Best of all was Chris, the guy who’d lived with them until Collin was twelve. “He gave me this,” Collin said, showing off an old-fashioned watch with a worn leather band. Chris didn’t really work, but he would take Maia and Collin to his parents’ farm in Western Mass. They’d drive out in the fall to pick apples and press their own cider. All the ground was covered with peaches, plums, and pears, the fruit ripening, splitting open in the sun, fermenting, so the whole orchard smelled like wine.

  They sipped their coffee and she told him about her stepmother. “She’s taller than my father,” Nina said. “She’s tall and jealous.”

  “Without reason?”

  “No, she has reason.”

  She told Collin how Viktor traveled, and how she had waited up for him. She described his parties and his renovations, his fights with Peter, his younger brother and business partner.

  “What do they fight about?” Collin asked.

  “Design, schedule, money,” Nina said. “But my father always wins.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s the commercial one.”

  She told Collin of Viktor’s dazzling inventions and the lawsuits afterward. His platforms MORPH and OVID (ocular-virtual integration device). Ideas like comets with long tails. Viktor had invented new ways to use aeroflakes, tiny sensor-receptors that filtered light to construct interactive, immersive fantasies. Aeroflakes drew power wirelessly through walls.

  “I want to see that!”

  “You will,” she told him. “Everybody will.”

  At work, Viktor was charismatic and aggressive, at home, affectionate and preoccupied, by turns jovial, baffling, furious. Once she had seen her father fly into a rage and smash a table lamp. Another time she’d found him, early in the morning, kissing her au pair. Then Nina ran away to hide. She was the guilty one, terrified he’d punish her.

  When Nina told Collin this, he saw her all alone and small, and he wondered what else she’d seen with her gray eyes.

  They saw each other almost every night, but she never let him walk her home. Did she think it was too soon? It didn’t seem too soon to him. She was so soft, her mouth so sweet. They talked for hours, but she held back. He knew she wasn’t teasing; she was a serious person. She didn’t take relationships lightly, and that was fine—except he wasn’t used to it. He loved the rush, the free fall into intimacy. You had your whole life for conversation afterward.

  One night he pulled her close and closer, swept her hair back from her face, and kissed her neck. Serious as you want, he promised silently. Anything you want. “Let me take you home.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Don’t walk by yourself.”

  She stood there in her white down jacket. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “You’re afraid of me.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What’s wrong? Are you ashamed of where you live?”

  “A little bit,” she confessed.

  “Do you live in some big mansion too expensive for a teacher?”

  “No, just an apartment.”

  “Where?”

  “Mem Drive.”

  She lived in one of those buildings on the river. He had always wondered who lived there. “Show me.”

  “It’s not mine,” she told him as they began walking. “My father owns it.”

  “Okay.” He was not surprised.

  She looked at Collin earnestly. “Do you know Arkadia’s symbol?”

  “An ouroboros.”

  “Right. The dragon eating its own tail.”

  “And that’s your father?”

  “That’s my family.”

  “Lots of families eat their own tails,” Collin reassured her, but even as he spoke, he realized that she was warning him. Hers was cruel.

  She told Collin about how her father married Helen at the Cape. Nina was six and wore green silk, and she cried during pictures on the pier. She’d trailed her hand on the weathered railing and a splinter had pierced her palm.

  The weather had been perfect, water glassy in the cove called Pleasant Bay. Barely a breeze ruffled the long sea grass, but Nina’s tears ruined the photos and annoyed Helen. Nina’s uncle Peter took tweezers and worked the splinter out. “You hate her, don’t you?” Nina’s uncle said. He was like a magician, drawing the idea out of her. As soon as he said the words, Nina knew that they were true.

  She was walking slowly now. Collin waited, but for a long moment she didn’t speak.

  They were standing in front of Nina’s redbrick building, with its bay windows, its faux balconies of fanciful wrought iron.

  She said of her family, “I love them. Unfortunately.”

  He slipped his hands into her coat pockets and felt the rounded corners of her phone, her jingling pocket change. He ran his thumb over the rough edges of her keys. “Why unfortunately?”

  “I don’t believe in them.”

  “What does that mean? You don’t trust them?”

  “I don’t trust them—but I can’t get away from them.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  “I’m trying now.”

  “How? Standing in the cold with me?”

  He was impudent and funny, more straightforward than other guys she had known. He spoke without embarrassment about his talents and his difficulties. He loved performing, but he hated computer programming. He drew well but he had dyslexia and didn’t like to read. He said that, but he read Nina. He listened intently, and he watched her face. Stories of her family didn’t scare him. He kept his eyes on her. It was a simple thing, but it was rare. He really looked at her. “Are you freezing?” she asked.

  “My hands are warm.”

  She felt his hands through the lining of her coat. She felt his warmth and she wanted to kiss him, but he must have known before she did, because he was already kissing her, his mouth
softly on her mouth. He hadn’t shaved, and his rough cheek scratched her face.

  When she tried to make sense of what was happening, she got scared. She’d known him for only two weeks. He had no career. He wasn’t even a student. Once or twice she wondered what he might want from her, and then she felt dishonorable thinking that way. She had never known anyone so uncalculating.

  Please, his body begged.

  “Wait.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Should I go?”

  “No.”

  He murmured in her ear, “It doesn’t matter who your father is or where you live.”

  She pulled back, just enough to breathe. “That’s not been my experience.”

  “Try me.” His hands closed inside her pockets.

  “You have my keys,” she said.

  —

  From outside, the apartments looked like jewel boxes with their gilt-framed mirrors and carved furniture, their book-lined rooms. Inside, the lobby was dusty and old-fashioned. Chipped plasterwork and scuffed white marble stairs, a squeaky elevator trimmed with brass. The halls were hushed as libraries. Collin pictured old professors tucked away in bed. He smelled wood polish, noticed the umbrella stand inside Nina’s door. Who had an umbrella stand?

  Her upholstered furniture, her kitchen big enough for chairs, her view, the shining river at her feet. All in an instant, she saw him take it in. Silently she dared him to speak.

  He said nothing. He turned toward her instead, his expression rapt, his dark eyes bright. Even so, he waited. Though they stood just a few feet apart, the distance and the silence seemed dangerous to cross. “I’ll hang up your…” she began, but the coat closet was too far away. When he pulled her in, she let his jacket fall.

  As they unwound scarves, unlaced boots, she didn’t offer him a drink or something to eat. Undressing, they tasted nothing but each other. They lay down on the couch and then on the carpet. And then they were so warm that they forgot the time, the view, the world outside. They forgot that it was winter.

  Nina still assigned too much homework and popped too many quizzes. She was just as serious in January as she’d been in September—and yet she had changed. She was more relaxed, sitting on her desk or leaning back against the board. Less fearful, less self-conscious, she smiled as she brushed chalk dust from her clothes.