In Sight of Stars

by Gae Polisner

  I roll my gaze to the window. It looks clear and blue outside, making me think of those stories people tell about 9/11. That it was perfectly sunny that day, with a deceptively clear blue sky. Not a single sign of the threat to come. Just like now. No sign of impending disaster. But I know better.

  “Or if you’re not up for that, you could always head down to the family room,” Nurse Carole adds. “At any rate,” she says, nodding at the tray with my pill cup, “there’s some toast and yogurt with granola in there in case you don’t have time to make it to the dining hall. You really shouldn’t take all that medication on an empty stomach. I’m here until noon if you need anything.”

  “Okay, thank you.” I swallow the pills down. As she’s about to leave, I call, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  She stops and turns. “Sure.”

  “Do you know the nun … the … the one that…” I stammer, not sure how to describe her. Is she a nurse? A social worker? A volunteer? “The one that works here?”

  Nurse Carole tilts her head curiously, then says, “You mean Sister Agnes Teresa? Yes, of course, why?”

  “No reason,” I say, feeling relieved. When she leaves, I take a bite of toast and stare out the window. My view is unobstructed. The excavator has moved elsewhere.

  I close my eyes and picture my mother, the way she was a long time ago. The way I remembered her last night, with Dad and me, playing board games. I had forgotten her that way. Before. Because there was a before, not just before Dad died, but when she was younger, less serious, less perfect. More East Village walk-up than marble-floored apartment on Madison Avenue. Less material. Less Ice Queen. Somewhere in the back of my brain she exists like that still, in some fuzzy recess, scratchy and faded, like she’s been put through some filter on Instagram.

  But she did. She was. We were. I can see us there. All three of us. Our family. We’re in pajamas, sitting together on the pilled green couch in Dad’s first apartment on St. Marks Place. The one she moved into after they got married. The apartment we still lived in while Dad finished law school at night. Before he got the suit job at the big white-shoe law firm, and we moved uptown, and the money rolled in … and he stopped painting altogether.

  I can see us there. My mother, smiling and laughing, and me, too. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to hate her.

  I open my eyes, desperate to see the excavator, its solid, massive self, head nodded down, teeth ready to chomp into soil, raze the earth. Erase and obliterate everything that’s come before.

  And here’s something else I want to erase, something that eats at me because I hadn’t seen it until just now: On that shabby green couch in that small apartment (or in the kitchen later that night, or the park six months later, or even in that Madison Avenue apartment when we first moved in), it’s not my mother who is unhappy. My mother is warm, and cheerful, and smiling.

  I’m smiling, too.

  The only one not smiling is my father.

  * * *

  I knock and knock until Dad finally opens the studio door. “I’m ready,” I say, slipping in. “Can we go?”

  Dad is still in his pajama pants, no shirt. Even when he’s sleepy and half dressed, he’s fresh and clean and meticulous. The green and white stripes of the pants frame a perfect flat stomach, his ab muscles tightening as he leans to close the door behind us. My father is skinny and in shape. Handsome and strong. He goes to the gym religiously, and, even when he can’t, he does at least one hundred crunches every morning. Plus pull-ups on the bar that hangs over their bedroom door. And most mornings he runs by the Reservoir, hours before I even wake up for school.

  My mother gets annoyed. “Must you be such a prima donna, Mark?” I once heard her ask, but she’s one to talk. She’s more obsessed with looking good than he is.

  My friends have mothers who wear sweats and jeans. Not mine, though. Not anymore. Lately, she’s always fixed up. Like she needs to be perfect. As if she’s going on a date. Or a photographer might arrive at our door.

  My dad dresses nice for work, but on the weekends, or the rare occasion he doesn’t have to work, he’s dressed in joggers and a T-shirt, holed up in his studio to paint. It makes me happy when he is, because he seems most happy there. Painting. Just being himself. Plus, sometimes, I get to paint with him.

  The studio is small, modest, with white walls, a clutter of paintings and canvases, and a big window with northern exposure. Dad told me that northern exposure is the best kind of light a painter can have.

  Paint, brushes, rags, and color-splattered palettes fill every space on the folding tables that line one wall. The room smells like his aftershave mixed with turpentine.

  The painting on the easel now, the one he’s been working on for months, is dark and gloomy, ugly. I don’t like it. I prefer when he does big sunny paintings with sunflowers and fruit trees and wheat blowing in fields. This one shows a wooden table in low light, stretching across a dark, old-fashioned room. There’s a big bowl of fruit on the table. Apples, pears, oranges, plums. But the fruit is bruised and half eaten, seeds and meaty cores scattered about. Several pieces have fallen to the floor, as if someone took a bite and rejected them. Flowers are scattered, too, some fresh and bright, but others dead and molting, shedding their brown leaves.

  I glance at the table where he has the actual still life set up that he’s working from, but the bowl there holds only a few normal-looking red apples and tangerines.

  Next to the table on the floor is a tall ceramic vase that reaches the tabletop. It holds giant yellow silk sunflowers, the kind Dad often likes to paint. He loves to paint sunflowers because Van Gogh painted them, and Dad did his thesis on Van Gogh. At the School of Fine Arts Boston, where I want to go one day.

  When Dad paints, he tells me stories about Van Gogh and his work, like how, when Van Gogh painted sunflowers, he didn’t just paint them yellow, but also used orange, and green, and even some blue, if you look closely enough. And, that the reason he used so much yellow in his paintings to begin with was because he drank a lot of absinthe. The liquor went to his brain and made his vision go yellow, so things looked yellow to him, even when they weren’t.

  Eventually, the lead in the yellow paint went to his brain, and made him go crazy. After that, he had a nervous breakdown and shot himself in the head.

  My mother gets mad when Dad tells me this stuff, but he explained that paints are different now. And besides, Dad doesn’t drink, so I don’t need to worry about him.

  Dad is home this morning instead of work. He’s taking a personal day and he told Mom I should take one, too. “We both know he’ll get more from the museums than he’ll get from a day at that school, Marielle.” She doesn’t want to, but she lets me. “Maybe we’ll hit the galleries,” he tells me. “We’ll head down to SoHo first.” I prefer museums, but Dad loves his galleries, especially the ones where his friends work.

  “The galleries are where the new work is, Klee,” he says all the time. “You already know all the masters. Who you don’t know are the masters in the making! Isn’t that exciting? To discover new art?”

  It’s perfect outside, sunny and cool, so I don’t really care where we go. I’m just happy that we have the day together.

  One of the galleries he takes me to has an entire exhibit drawn on Etch A Sketches. At the counter, they’re selling mini ones, so he buys one for me, and tells me if I get bored I should try to recreate the sketches I see. In all of the galleries, Dad talks too long, in a voice I’m not accustomed to. It’s more formal than his usual one, which makes me uncomfortable when he introduces me. “Georges, have you met my son?” “Pekka, this, here, is Klee. He’s sure to be a great artist one day, as well.”

  A lot of the men he introduces me to have foreign accents and odd, girlish names, like Danielle, and Jacques, and whatever Pekka is. It makes me hate my name, all artsy and different like theirs. I wish Dad had named me Mark after him.

  In the last gallery, Dad buys a painting from a man he int
roduces as Armond. I remember because at first I think he says Almond. I don’t really care for him. He’s one of the flowery ones, tall and thin with white-blond hair and blond eyebrows, and an accent that’s hard to understand. Dad talks to him in hushed tones, for a long time.

  When we’re finally ready to leave, Dad says he’s buying a painting from Armond. Even Armond argues—it’s an ugly painting called Icarus’s Flight Plan, in which a naked man with wings falls from the sky over a heavily trafficked city. Dad tells me it’s an homage to a famous painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that was done by an artist named Bruegel. “Well, attributed to Bruegel anyway, yes, Armond?” but I’m not listening anymore. Nothing he tells me would make me like the painting any better. It’s gray and grim and makes me feel sad and cold.

  While Armond wraps the painting, Dad sits on a bench by the door and tells me the story of Icarus, which comes from Greek mythology.

  “Icarus and his father, Daedalus,” he begins, “were imprisoned by King Minos of Crete, inside a labyrinth of the father’s own making.”

  “What’s a labyrinth?”

  “Ah, good question. Like a maze.”

  I listen, rapt as he talks, back to being content. I love when my father tells me these stories. “Daedelus was a craftsman, you see, and so as not to be held captive, he built wings made of beeswax and feathers. Giving one pair to his son, he warned Icarus: ‘Be careful, my child, whatever you do, make sure you don’t fly too close to the sun.’ But Icarus became drunk with his power to fly, and so he got cocky, and rose higher and higher into the sky. So high that his wings melted, and the feathers slipped off, and Icarus plunged fatefully down into the sea.”

  When Armond is ready to ring up the painting, Dad tells me to wait on the bench where I can’t make out most of what they’re saying. Except when Armond raises his voice. They’re arguing about money, I think. I hear the number four thousand. He tells my father it’s too much.

  “You’re a saint, Mark,” he says, handing the painting to Dad when we’re finally ready to leave. But Dad hands it back, asks Armond to hold it at the gallery. Dad leans in, whispers something I can’t hear, then promises, “I’ll be back for it!” as we leave to head up West Broadway toward the subway.

  “Why don’t you paint and sell your paintings there?” I ask my father. We’ve been walking for a while in silence. “Yours are way, way better than that Icarus one.”

  Dad rumples my hair and puts his arm around me. “Because I couldn’t afford to buy more paintings if I did.”

  “But four thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  He looks surprised, and stops and crouches down to talk to me, eye to eye. “Do me a favor, kid. Don’t tell your mother about that. It’s a gift for her. And it was a lot. But, just so you understand, that artist, if he is lucky, will sell ten, maybe fifteen, paintings all year. Let’s say twenty in a good year. And the gallery takes a cut, and you can’t survive in Manhattan very well on that.”

  “You can’t?” I try to do the math, because four thousand times twenty is eighty thousand, and that sounds like a lot of money. But Dad adds, “And if the artist is represented, his agent or manager might take a cut. And I may have paid a bit of a premium on that one.”

  He winks, like he’s joking, but his voice sounds sad. And I know that all of this means he keeps being a lawyer and doesn’t keep on painting like he wants. I try to think of something smart to say, something that would convince him we could live on that kind of money, so he can quit being a lawyer. He can go back to painting, like he went to school for. Like I bet he still wants to do.

  “We don’t have to live in Manhattan,” I say suddenly, “Or, we could stay, but we don’t need such a big, fancy apartment. We could go back to the old one … Mom and me, I bet we’d both agree on that.” Dad laughs, even though I’m not trying to be funny.

  “I’m not so sure about that. Besides, your mother … at a minimum … she deserves to live nicely.” He turns to me, serious now. “You need to know this, Klee, I went to law school because I wanted to. I chose my work, my life, because I wanted to. Not because anyone told me I had to.” He pauses, as if he’s carefully picking his words, like they’re harder than they should be. “I chose this life, and I’m not unhappy in it. Life is … well, sometimes life is different than you plan.”

  But I shake my head. I don’t believe him. I’ve heard them fighting. I hear Mom complaining about money, about needing to fix things, about the money she says he must spend. About how late he works, and how much he travels, and how, lately, it never seems like he wants to be home.

  So, he can say what he wants, but at least I know this: When I grow up, I’m going to be an artist, painting and showing in galleries, and not working in some office doing dumb things I don’t care about or understand.

  “Sometimes, when you’re a grown-up, Klee, your passions need to be a hobby, and you find work—a career—that can bring you stability, and other things…”

  His voice trails off and he puts his arm around my shoulder and squeezes, guiding me to keep walking toward the subway. When we reach the corner, he stops and looks at me hard, again. “When you’re a grown-up,” he says, “you see things differently. You count your blessings for all the good, amazing things you do have, not what you can’t have. And, you, son, for sure, are a good thing. The best thing. So you plow forward, and you don’t look back, regretting all the choices that you made.”

  And, I want to believe that he means it, but when the light changes and we start to cross, he turns toward the gallery, like his whole body wants to go back there.

  * * *

  I wash my face, splashing water up fast and hard, trying to somehow prepare myself for my mother, and to rinse away the fury that has spread over me, not at my mom for a change, but at my dad. For acting like he was happy when he wasn’t. For pretending that everything was okay when it wasn’t.

  For pretending he was okay.

  Maybe if he hadn’t, maybe if he had trusted me—But I can’t finish the thought, can’t go there anymore, to the place where I imagine he’s still here, still alive, and everything is normal.

  I turn off the faucet and stare in the mirror, and see not his face but my mother’s. Her light brown hair, and tepid brown eyes, her rounder face with softer cheekbones. His face was narrow and chiseled, his eyes, a deep, dark brown. He looked like a movie star.

  “You look like your father…” my mother always says, but she’s wrong. I don’t. I can never see him in me at all.

  A new wave of nausea rolls over me. I shouldn’t have called her. I shouldn’t have told her she could come. It’s already turned overcast, the clouds a foreboding gray. Soon it will rain, a downpour, and I’ll be stuck in the “family” room with her.

  * * *

  I doze off until the unmistakable jangling of my mother’s gold bangles and tennis bracelets wake me.

  I hear her out at the nurses’ desk, announcing herself. “Yes, that’s right. Marielle Alden. Did you need me to sign in?”

  “No, you’re good. Go ahead in, Mrs. Alden.”

  There’s a quick rap on my door. I sit up. My heart pounds to the steady beat of rain pelting the window.

  I feel like I’m going to puke.

  “Yeah, come in. It’s not even closed,” I say, when she knocks again.

  I glance at the small Dixie cup on my breakfast tray, but it’s empty. I’ve already taken my day’s full allotment of pills.

  * * *

  It’s a Saturday morning, the weekend after Sarah and I go to the Upper Bank Basin. The front doorbell rings, and by the time I register it, and my mother calls me to the living room, Sarah is standing in our foyer.

  Fuck.

  I was avoiding this for so many reasons. And now I’m not even sure what’s gone down.

  “Oh, hey! Mom,” I say, breathless, wiping sleep crust from my eyes, “this is Sarah. Sarah, this is my mom.”

  “We’ve met.”

  It’s
not even 10 A.M., yet my mother is dressed to the nines like she has an important business meeting to go to, except she doesn’t. Slacks, pumpkin-colored sweater set, inevitable heels.

  Sarah, on the other hand, wears her now ubiquitous cutoff shorts, her Vans, and a skimpy T-shirt that shows both her lack of a bra and her bare stomach, an outfit that shows no sign of a chill in the air as would be indicated by my mother’s selection. She looks beautiful, of course, but it’s not exactly the outfit I’d pick for her very first meeting with the Ice Queen.

  I should have told her my mother can be kind of judgmental.

  “Don’t give me that look, Klee. Your father likes it when I pull myself together…” My mother’s frustrated voice echoes from the depths of some distant memory chamber. She holds a scarf to her chest, shakes her head, tosses it back into her drawer, and chooses another. She wraps that one around her shoulders and neck, and turns to me. I must have some look on my face because she says, “So sue me for wanting to please him.”

  My mother, the victim. My mother just trying to make everyone else happy.

  “Klee, you have company,” my mother says, bringing me back to our living room. “Might you go put a shirt on?”

  I stare down at my unwashed, unbrushed self, in just ratty gym shorts, nothing else, which would be worse only if I were also sporting a pee boner, and wonder if I missed some text from Sarah warning me she was coming over.

  I didn’t even know she knew our house number.

  “Um, yeah.”

  It’s not that I’m not happy to see her, because I am. More than anything. I just could have used some warning. I’m embarrassed about myself, about my mother, about our too-perfect home, the premium model off the pages of some glossy architectural magazine.

  “Good! I’ll entertain your lovely friend here while you wash up and put clothes on.” The disapproval in my mother’s voice stings, but there’s no way I want to leave Sarah alone with her. God knows what she’ll say. Do. Maybe offer her some tea to go with a polite-yet-frank chat about my father’s suicide, about me being fragile because of it, and how she, Sarah, needs to be careful with me. I wouldn’t put it past her. And I need to be the one to tell Sarah about my father.