by Brenda Grate
Jilly dropped to the floor to sit cross-legged, her gaze still riveted on the painting. Gregg found her there, hours later, still looking at it, as though she waited for it to come to life and consume her.
“Jilly? Baby?” Gregg’s voice came from a faraway place. Jilly couldn’t find it in herself to respond. He stepped closer and brushed a hand over her hair.
“Wow,” he said when he saw the painting. “You’re painting again.”
Jilly turned to look at him. He stared at the canvas as she had done, his gaze also pulled into that gaping black hole of a mouth. She tucked her knees under her chin, trying to cover up the nakedness of her soul. She knew it was useless. Anyone who saw what she’d created would only turn from her in horror. Dropping her face to her knees, she waited for her husband to leave. He didn’t.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re painting again.”
Jilly looked up, searching his face for truth. She only saw love and acceptance. She didn’t understand it.
“I picked Matty up from my mom’s. He’s ready for dinner. Want me to order Chinese?”
“Sure.” Jilly’s voice cracked like she hadn’t used it in a decade.
“Come on.” Gregg took her hands and lifted her up, turning her from the evidence of her shattered life as though it didn’t actually matter, as if she were still the same wife he’d always known. He acted like he wasn’t worried that he’d taken a stranger into his home all those years ago.
Jilly let him comfort her, let herself believe the lie for a little bit longer. She’d think about the painting later, and how it would change her life.
Chapter 15
It was closing time at the gallery, and Mel cleaned up while Anna browsed. It was quiet and clean with no trace of the gala, other than the painting still sitting on its easel in the center of the room. Anna’s breath caught in her throat, but she forced herself to examine it. She doubted Mamma had ever painted anything more beautiful. Her mother’s style had definitely evolved over the years. Even though she wasn’t an artist herself, Anna had become a fine critic after years of skulking around galleries waiting for her mother to finish with her business.
Now that she’d made the decision to go home, she wanted to see the painting again. What was Mamma trying to say to us?
The painting was of herself and Jilly, which had probably caused Jilly’s reaction. Mamma had never painted them before, even when they were small. So many people had asked her why she didn’t do a portrait of her beautiful girls. Mamma had said, “Why? I have them right in front of me.” People had always shaken their heads, slightly mystified. They accepted her answer as that of an eccentric artist. Anna had never understood why she wouldn’t paint them. People loved paintings of children. And why had she painted them now?
She and Jilly held hands as they walked down a path toward what looked like an Italian villa. It was made of stone and surrounded by Cypress trees. The small Anna pointed at something in the distance, and when Anna moved closer and followed the finger’s direction, she gasped. There was the tiny face, hidden in a tree this time.
“Mel?” Anna called, her voice anxious.
Mel popped out from the back room, “Yeah?”
“Do you have a magnifying glass?”
A minute later, Mel handed it to her. “Did you find it?” she asked. “I couldn’t find it in this painting.”
“Yes, here, in the tree,” Anna pointed.
Mel sucked in a quick breath.
“And, look, I’m pointing at it.”
“You? Those girls, then, they’re you and Jilly?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.” Mel stepped back from the painting and studied it. “Now I realize you look like her, especially in the red dress.” Mel turned and examined Anna. “That’s why you didn’t want it, isn’t it? You never wear those colors—”
“I don’t really want to talk about my resemblance to her, okay?”
Mel got quiet.
“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to shut you out, but it’s hard to talk about her.”
“I’m trying to understand,” Mel said. “She’s been my idol for so long that it’s hard to digest.”
“Most idols have a harsher side than you see in their public persona.”
“Yes,” Mel said, “but you love them all the same.”
Mel had been best friends with her idol’s daughter for years. “I’m sorry. I know how hard this must be for you.”
Mel waved a hand. “Don’t you dare worry about me. I want to know you’re going to be okay.”
“I’m fine.” Anna turned to face her friend, putting her back to the painting. “I’m fine,” she stated. “It’s Jilly I’m worried about.”
Mel’s brows came together. “Me too, me too.”
They both turned back to the painting. Anna tried to see it through her sister’s point of view, which was hard because she and Jilly were so different. Jilly like fire and Anna, while not exactly ice, like water. Whenever there’s that much fire around, it’s always a good idea to have some water on hand. Jilly had often burned out of control, and Anna had the job of dousing some of the flames before too many people were consumed. Jilly had calmed down a lot in the years after Matthew, but could still be unpredictable. She hoped, oh yes, she hoped, but she knew her sister was a ticking bomb about to go off. That kind of passion couldn’t be tamped down. It lay underneath the surface waiting for a fissure that would allow it to erupt. The evening of the gala was like the small wisps of steam that signaled a volcano becoming active again. Smart natives ran for their lives before the giant fully awoke.
Mamma had tempered passion. She only revealed it in her art. Jilly lived and breathed it. Jilly’s art, on the other hand, showed a different side, like she strove to be something else. She painted like she had an idealist’s dream of what an artist should be, but it just ended up looking like someone else had painted in her place.
Mamma had always felt that way too. She pushed and prodded Jilly until she exploded in anger, but it somehow never made it to her canvases. Jilly would rant and scream and leave the house. But when she came back and painted, she continued with her benign themes. Jilly had locked the monster away and wouldn’t allow it to roam.
Mamma called Jilly a coward. She said a coward didn’t deserve the talent she possessed. She called Jilly’s art common. It hurt Jilly deeply, she saw that. Anna often wondered if that was why Jilly stopped painting. She got tired of never measuring up to Mamma’s standards. In those volatile moments, Anna was happy she wasn’t a painter. Mamma never knew what to make of her scribblings, Anna’s little stories, as Mamma called them. She would smile and pat Anna on the head like a good little puppy and go back to her painting. Anna always felt like a lower class citizen at home because she didn’t possess the di Rossi artistic talent.
Anna had tried to fit in with the artsy retinue that surrounded Mamma, even wearing a beret for an entire year, just like the Parisian painter who’d come to worship at Mamma’s feet for a while. He’d been flamboyant and emotional, two things Anna wasn’t. She stole his beret from his suitcase just before he left and told Mamma he’d given it to her. She didn’t know if Mamma believed her, but after a year of wearing it, she made Anna throw the ratty thing away. Anna knew, as she dropped the black piece of cloth into the trash, that no matter how she dressed, acted or spoke, she would never fit in with Mamma’s people. She was just like a cuckoo. She’d think herself adopted if not for people always telling her she was the exact image of her gorgeous mother. Anna just felt like a carbon copy, a little faded and never quite as vibrant as the real thing.
After years of living in the shadow of the huge tree, the little sapling needed to get away, find some sunlight of its own. Anna didn’t hate Mamma. In fact, she loved her too deeply to be around her. It constantly hurt when she would be ignored for the sake of a painting or another person who shouldn’t be as important as a daughter.
“You know, Mel,” Anna spoke her tho
ughts out loud, “I stopped writing after I left Mamma. Just like Jilly stopped painting when she had Matty. Why did we do that?”
It was a rhetorical question as Anna didn’t expect Mel to have the answer.
“You’re afraid you’ll never measure up.”
Anna turned to stare at Mel, startled by her insight.
“Your mother is Catarina di Rossi. You’re used to the world idolizing her and her amazing talent. What could you or your sister ever do to compete?”
“We don’t need to compete with Mamma,” Anna said. “Why would we feel the need to?”
“Don’t you know that every girl grows up and feels the need to compete with her mother? It’s the natural way of things.”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
Mel smiled. “Well, I guess along with the study of art, there’s the necessary study of psychology. You have to understand people to understand why and how they paint. I took psychology in school as well. One thing I learned is that women are competitive, but none more than a girl on the threshold of womanhood. She competes with her mother for her father’s affection, to be the most beautiful, the most talented. The twisted relationship is when the mother competes with her daughter. In a healthy relationship, the mother understands the competition and allows her daughter the freedom to express who she is. The daughter will gradually grow out of it and develop a peer relationship with her mother.”
Anna thought about that in relation to her and Jilly’s relationship with their mother. “I don’t think Mamma ever competed with us. She always seemed comfortable being herself. I wonder if you’re right. Maybe we never grew into who we were supposed to be.”
“It would have been much harder to discover who you are when you have a mother of such stature. It’s the same thing all celebrity children go through. Some of them never get past it.”
Anna and Jilly had seen their mother’s celebrity status everywhere from the time they were very small. She had been on television interviews and even on magazine covers. The art world was a very exclusive club, and she and her sister were honorary members. Mamma had always included her children in her special events. Anna hadn’t understood why when she so often ignored their existence. Mamma was a contradiction.
They weren’t raised by a nanny as so many artists’ children. Mamma raised them herself, or more accurately, Anna raised herself and Jilly. When Anna was born, Mamma hadn’t been so busy. She hadn’t been “discovered” yet. That happened soon after Jilly’s birth. So the tiny girl ended up being left in her older sister’s care while Mamma spent hours in her studio painting.
Often Anna would slip the door open and silently watch Mamma work. The look of fierce concentration would frighten her a little. She’d never seen her Mamma look like that except in her studio. But she got used to it. She began to love the look. She’d even tried to mimic it in the mirror in her room. She got good at it and felt it coming over her face when she would write one of her stories.
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Anna said. “Mamma never seemed to belong to us.”
“That’s very hard on children.”
“I took care of Jilly while Mamma was busy. I even started writing stories for her.”
“I bet she loved them.”
“I got so tired of reading the same bedtime stories over and over that I decided to make up new ones with Jilly as the main character. One night I started, ‘Once upon a time there was a little girl named Jilly—’” Anna laughed remembering her little sister’s surprise and delight. “‘That’s me, I’m the girl in the story’,” Anna said, mimicking a tiny girl’s voice. “After making up a dozen or more stories, I decided to put them together into a book for Jilly’s birthday. I went to Mamma for help.”
Anna remembered the day clearly.
“Mamma, I want to make my stories into a book for Jilly. Do you know how I can do it?”
Mamma was in the kitchen making a cup of coffee. It was rare in those days for Anna to find her outside her studio and she wondered why Mamma didn’t just put the coffee maker in there, then she’d never have to come out as the studio even had a bathroom. Mamma didn’t eat much when she was working, but she couldn’t do without her coffee. Anna looked forward to Mamma’s breaks.
Mamma looked at Anna with a confused face. “A book? Why would you want to make a book?” Mamma couldn’t seem to comprehend time spent on anything other than painting.
“I write stories for Jilly. Stories about her, for her bedtime. They help her calm down and sleep at night.”
Mamma studied Anna. “You made the stories up yourself?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very good, Annabella. I’m impressed with you.”
Anna beamed at her mother. It had been so long since Mamma had used Anna’s nickname. “Would you like to read one?”
“Later, okay. I’ve got a lot of work to do right now.” Mamma put her tiny espresso cup in the sink and left the kitchen. Anna watched her back recede down the hallway, tears blurring the image. She still didn’t know how to make the book.
“She said she was proud of me for writing the stories, but as usual I had her attention for all of five minutes and then she was gone.”
Mel squeezed Anna’s arm.
“In the end, I wrote and illustrated the stories myself. I’m not a great artist like my mother, but I could draw well enough. I took all the stories and pictures and stapled them together into a book.” Anna laughed. “I made a cover out of thick construction paper and glued the pages in. It wasn’t the prettiest book ever created, but Jilly loved it. She saved it in her special box and wouldn’t let anyone touch it. She wouldn’t even let me read from it. She said she liked it better when I made up the stories ‘out of my mind’.”
“That’s a special thing you did for your little sister. You were a mother at such a young age, weren’t you?”
Anna shrugged. “The point is, I never wanted Jilly to feel she didn’t matter, like I always did. My writing was never going to be as important as Mamma’s painting. No one but Jilly appreciated them. So I wrote for Jilly. By the time I graduated I’d written hundreds of Jilly stories.”
“Do you still have the stories?”
“No. Maybe Jilly does, but we haven’t talked about them in years. I gave them all to her and I think with the last book, I gave up on my writing ever being important like Mamma’s painting.”
“You still write. You’re a journalist.”
“I know, but it doesn’t feel the same as the Jilly stories did. I felt so alive when I wrote them.”
“Why did you give up then?”
“Maybe it’s something to do with competing, like you said. If I didn’t write, I didn’t have to feel second-best. So I gave up.”
Mel made a humming sound in her throat. “You gave up. I don’t think Jilly did.”
“What do you mean?” Anna shifted her weight.
Mel waved at the comfortable chairs by the window in the gallery. “Come, sit with me.”
Mel crossed her long legs and clasped her knee between her long-fingered hands. “You felt your writing wasn’t as important as painting. Jilly, on the other hand, was also an artist and very talented.”
Anna nodded in agreement. “Yes, Jilly has crazy talent, but she stopped painting. How is that competition?”
“It’s a passive-aggressive form of competition.”
Anna shook her head. “What does that mean?”
“First Jilly tried to mimic her mother, right? Isn’t that what her earlier work was? Jilly showed me some of her paintings when she first came here. They looked like weak copies of Ms. di Rossi’s work. She didn’t tell me Ms. di Rossi was her mother, just that she’d studied her work.” Mel rolled her eyes, like she couldn’t believe she’d been so naïve. “I could see strokes of genius, but the work lacked life and depth. It felt emotionless.”
“That’s what her teachers always told her. There was no life to her art. I know it hurt Jilly so much.”
&nbs
p; “I believe it’s because she wasn’t painting what’s in her heart. Passion denied can destroy a person.” Mel sat back and studied Anna’s face like she was afraid she’d gone too far.
Anna leaned forward. “You’re right. Actually, Jilly has been denying her true passion for far too long. I think it’s eating her up inside.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but it’s been years since I’ve written anything other than a piece for the newspaper.”
“It can’t hurt to try, right? I’ll bet you’ve got ideas rolling around in your mind for a novel.”
