by Ruthie Knox
Beatrice’s hair was dyed a rainbow of oranges, purples, and blues, and hung halfway down her back. Rosemary had seen it, of course, in her daughter’s Instagram feed, but the effect was better in person. It suited her.
“Can you move it up, Wash?” Beatrice shouted over Rosemary’s shoulder to a young man holding a microphone on a boom—one of several people assembled to help Beatrice film her documentary. “I want the longer shot, but it’s getting in my way.”
“It’s extended as far as it can go.” Then, upon registering Beatrice’s dissatisfied expression, he changed course. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Beatrice turned her attention back to Rosemary. “So you made it.”
There was a sour note to the proclamation, an implication that Rosemary had taken longer than she ought to have done. She ignored it. “Yes.”
“You drove?”
“Well, I didn’t myself. I have traveling companions.”
“Where are they?”
“They’ll be along in a bit.” Rosemary had left Kal and Yangchen in the car after Kal declared his interest in locating a cup of coffee and something to eat—a ploy, she assumed, to give her some polite space to reconnect with her daughter.
“Who are they?” Beatrice crossed her arms. The sole of her right foot came off the floor to rest against her left calf. The faint line between her eyebrows matched the one her father got when he was in a mood. “These mystery people.”
“They’re not mysterious, they’re simply not people you know. They’re…Kal.”
The furrow between Beatrice’s eyebrows deepened, and Rosemary felt a familiar mix of concern that her daughter’s feelings had been hurt combined with irritation that Beatrice refused to treat her as an independent and competent adult who was permitted a life of her own.
They’d been down this road before, had versions of this same prickly conversation over the phone, and afterward Rosemary always felt guilty—certain she’d failed her daughter—at the same time she felt trapped and resentful.
This time, though, she remembered Kal telling her that you hurt children by hurting them. Not by caring for them, loving them, and living your life.
It helped.
“Kal is a man I was climbing with who helped me in the avalanche.” Rosemary watched the faint lines bracketing her daughter’s mouth deepen. “And his mother, Yangchen Beckett, has come along. She’s very interesting—she’s summited Everest more than any other woman alive.”
“And, what, they wanted to see the sights of Wisconsin? Why didn’t you just fly instead of dragging along a support crew?”
“It’s a long story.”
Beatrice managed to look past Rosemary’s shoulder at the film crew and somehow, simultaneously, to roll her eyes. “I’ll bet. How long are you staying?”
“Only a few hours, I’m afraid. I have to get to Milwaukee—”
“No, it’s fine,” she interrupted. “I’m busy, you’re busy. I get it.” She spoke quickly, her bloodless cheeks and brusqueness clearly indicating that she’d passed from feeling hurt to feeling slighted. “I have to get this shot while the light’s good, but we can grab a bite to eat or something when I’m done here. If you’re not already gone.”
“I’d like that.”
Rosemary wanted time with her daughter. She wanted a chance to fix the distance between them. She felt compressed by forces beyond her control, though of course she was the one who’d made the plane ticket, she’d decided on this quick trip to Wisconsin, she’d planned the climbing excursion and wrestled the book deal out of her publisher.
Everything that was happening to her was something she’d made happen. Only the avalanche had been beyond her control. The avalanche, and Kal.
“Find somewhere to sit, or you can walk around town, give yourself a tour.” Beatrice was already walking toward her crew. “Hey, Wash?”
The young man with the boom said, “Yeah?”
“Are we about ready?”
Rosemary had been dismissed.
Her daughter had left her on the threshold of a vast attic room with a wood floor, high ceilings supported by massive beams, and twelve-foot-tall paned windows with a view of downtown Manitowoc.
The center of the room housed row upon row of shelves stacked with antiques and collectibles, racks of vintage clothing, lamps and lightbulbs and crockery and antique letterpress equipment, Victrolas and records and sheet music, metal signage—an impressive collection of junk.
Near the windows at Rosemary’s right, a scene had been staged in a clear space: an oriental carpet, a lamp, an occasional table, a lavender velvet divan. A middle-aged woman rose from the divan. She wore an asymmetrical black sweater. An Alice band held her dense naturally curly hair off her face. Rosemary recognized her as Nancy Fredericks.
This was the woman Beatrice had decided to make a film about: an ordinary homemaker with an extraordinary and secret history of coordination and production work for the artist Justice. This was also the woman Beatrice had been living with for the past several months, and the mother of Winston’s girlfriend, Allie.
Nancy crossed the room and extended her hand. “I’m going to get in trouble for not staying on that couch, but I wanted to say hi. You must be Rosemary.”
“And you must be Nancy.”
She had bright blue eyes that softened and brightened when she smiled. “It’s good you could make it up to see her.”
“I hope so.” Beatrice bustled around, busy and important, quite pointedly not looking at Rosemary, who found it hard to take her eyes off her daughter. “I needed to. After the avalanche.”
“I can imagine. We prayed for you, you know. Bill and I, and Bea. Winston and Allie called to tell her, and we kept a vigil until we heard you’d landed safe in New York.” She said this in a breezy tone, but her hand came up to touch Rosemary’s elbow.
“Was she…What was she…?” Rosemary couldn’t formulate a question. She hurt for her daughter, for herself, for all the people who had never landed safe and would never make it home. “Thank you.”
“Bea was beside herself.” Nancy’s voice was kind. “But she kept her spirits up. She told us you knew how to keep yourself alive. You would do what you needed to to get home.”
“I was only lucky.”
Nancy squeezed her elbow. “She’s proud of you.”
“I’m proud of her, too. Thank you for keeping her. At your home, I mean. Thank you for giving her a place to sleep and the opportunity to make a film about you.”
“It’s been an education. I had no idea what I was getting into when I said yes. I thought she’d ask me some questions, videotape me with a handheld camera, and we’d be done with it. The time I’ve put in on makeup alone, not to mention dinner table conversations about B-roll and post-production color adjustment. It’s like being in art school again.”
“This space is remarkable.”
“Isn’t it? It belongs to Allie. This is her building, and she rents out to the restaurant and shops downstairs, but up here is where she keeps her best junk and does most of her work when she’s in town. We’ve borrowed it for the main interviews, the ones Bea says make the story of the movie.” Rosemary heard Kal’s voice drifting up the stairwell just as Bea shouted for Nancy to get back into place. “I guess I’d better do what she says. We’ll talk more later—will you be here a few days?”
“Just this morning, actually.” She turned to acknowledge Kal and Yangchen as they passed through the entryway behind her. “These are my friends, Kal and Yangchen Beckett. We have to go to Milwaukee after lunch to meet with someone.”
Nancy took the time to shake hands with Kal and Yangchen, who told her, “I love your work.”
“You do?”
Yangchen nodded. “The Brooklyn Bridge sailboat, the Statue of Liberty with the fabric draped on it, the jetty in New England. I liked Justice’s art. I liked it more when I heard it was you doing it. I said to my friend, only a woman could plan something like the bridge and get ev
ery detail right.”
The bridge installation they referred to was one Nancy and Justice had completed last fall, when Nancy’s identity as Justice’s long-term artistic collaborator was first revealed to the public—and to her family. Beatrice had been on the scene and had interviewed Nancy in a film that went viral and led to this documentary project.
“You saw it?” Nancy asked.
“Yes, we went the first day,” Yangchen told her. “Crowds everywhere, and the sails in the morning sun. It was beautiful.”
“Since when are you a fan of modern art?” Kal asked.
“You don’t know everything about me. You only think you do.” Yangchen turned to Nancy. “I climbed Mount Everest seven times, more than any other woman alive, and he unwrapped my straw for me at breakfast.”
“Nancy?” Beatrice called. “We’re losing the light.”
“I’ll try to make this go fast. You’ve made me feel super important, which is good, because Bea is always saying I have to ‘inhabit my accomplishment’ on camera.” Nancy clapped Yangchen on the shoulder. “Come over with me, we can talk until Bea kicks you out of the shot. It’s not every day the woman who climbed Everest seven times comes to Manitowoc.”
They walked off, Nancy’s blue eyes sparkling, Yangchen glowing, leaving Rosemary with the feeling she’d just witnessed the first meeting of soul-twins.
Kal handed her a paper cup of coffee. “How’d it go with your kid?”
“Fair to middling.”
“Is that her with the rainbow hair?”
Rosemary looked at her daughter. She wore a ratty pair of track pants, a too-tight T-shirt that said MR. PIBB, and discount-store flip-flops. Her lower arms were bare, adorned with colorful flower tattoos that Rosemary had previously seen only on the screen of her phone. Beatrice leaned over her camera, squinting into the lens as she harangued a meek-looking girl wearing red lipstick who clutched a clipboard to her breast.
Rosemary didn’t think she’d ever seen her looking so raffishly beautiful.
“That’s her.”
“Talk about a spitting image.”
“People have always said so, but I’ve never thought we were alike.”
Kal lifted his hand to her neck, brushed her hair aside, and planted a kiss against her skin. He kissed her again, behind her ear. “I’m not sure you have a clear idea what you’re like.”
Flushed, pleased, she could only say, “Shall we sit?”
“Sure.”
They found a bench against the wall and sipped their coffee side by side, watching the film crew do their work. The morning light was filtered and soft. Nancy and Yangchen talked animatedly until Beatrice was ready to begin filming and she booted Yangchen out of her shot—politely, to Rosemary’s relief.
The interview unspooled slowly, in fits and starts. Beatrice asked and re-asked the same questions several times, then interrupted Nancy’s answers for reasons she rarely explained. Nancy took it in stride, good-natured about being ordered about by a nineteen-year-old English girl.
Kal put his arm around Rosemary’s shoulder. She liked its weight, his smell, and especially that he seemed not to have given a moment’s thought to whether it was something he ought to do.
They had so little time left.
Beatrice walked Nancy through the story of how she’d met Justice, how she’d come to work for him from Manitowoc, and how their artistic relationship had deepened in secret over years as he became famous and Nancy received no credit for her work, not even in her own family. “Did you ever just feel like shouting?” Beatrice asked. “When you saw the stories in the art journals or the magazines, did you ever want to yell, you know, ‘That’s mine. I did that.’?”
Nancy took a moment to respond. “Yes. Of course I did.”
“Why didn’t you ever do it?”
The green light on the camera blinked. She’d set up her tripod at chest height, so she had to bend over it to look through the viewfinder. The crew held perfect silence as the seconds ticked by.
Nancy brought a coffee mug to her mouth, but she didn’t drink. She lowered it to her lap. “I think it was mainly feeling…I didn’t want anyone to take it from me. What I’d done. I knew what I’d done. I knew how much time I put in, over how many years, trying to figure out how to order the right fabric in the right amount to drop down over Lady Liberty, or what kind of fasteners we’d need, sitting in the pickup line at my daughters’ elementary school.” Her features had sharpened, focused off-camera at some moment in her past. “I had this recurring fantasy of walking into the newspaper office one day when it was quiet and sitting down in front of whatever reporter I could get to talk to me. I was going to tell him everything, the way I’ve told you.”
“But you didn’t.” Bea’s tone was challenging.
“No, because I knew if I did that, what would happen was he would write a story, and other stories would follow, but it would be, right away, all this shock. The story would be how unlikely I was. Just this mom, this boring woman, claiming to be responsible for the success of someone important like Justice.”
Nancy’s voice had found a new register—confident—and a thrill coursed through Rosemary. The thrill of something important. “There would be stories about whether I’d done as much as I claimed, casting doubt on how important I was really, and those sorts of things. The woman behind the important man. Which just makes everyone look at the important man.” She paused to take a deep breath, then leaned toward the camera slightly, looking right at Beatrice. “I felt possessive of my work. I didn’t want it taken from me like that. It was mine. It was the most important thing I had.”
Beatrice stood up straight, and Rosemary realized the green light had gone orange. She’d stopped filming. Beatrice’s eyes were wide and excited when she looked at the young man holding the boom. “Right?” she asked.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s exactly it.”
Rosemary felt she must have managed to do something right as a mother, to teach her daughter something, if Beatrice could capture a moment like this on film—if she could understand that it mattered, and why it mattered, to put this ordinary-seeming American woman on camera and ask her all the right questions to make her dig into the meat of her own importance, her life’s work.
This unlikely woman who’d changed modern art forever. Beatrice had seen her and known how to tell the story. She’d been willing to labor hard for months because she wanted to get it right, to make it perfect for film festivals and audiences and the world’s attention.
Beatrice practically skipped over to the couch and enfolded Nancy in a spontaneous hug. “That was absolutely perfect.”
“Is it all you need?”
“Probably not, probably I’ll need something else tomorrow and we’ll be back here all over again, but for now, I’m utterly thrilled.”
Beatrice and the crew packed up their things, Nancy gathered her purse and resumed her conversation with Yangchen, and Rosemary sat beside Kal, unsure where to put her feelings or what they meant.
As the crew began to leave, Beatrice came over with the video camera in her right hand.
“I’m thrilled I had a chance to see that,” Rosemary said. “It will be such an interesting film.”
Beatrice nodded. The camera in her right hand rose as though of its own accord and pointed at Kal. “So you’re the ice doctor, huh?” The red light turned green. “Does that mean you’re one of the ones who almost got my mom killed?”
“Beatrice!”
“I’m just asking. Everest is an industry, and Kal works for the boss-man. How much pressure are you under to get climbers up the mountain as fast as possible?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Who’s the pressure supposed to be coming from?”
“Do you get less money when people die, or does that not make a difference?”
He pushed the palms of his hands down his thighs and stood. “I think I’ll take a walk.”
“It’s gonna rain,” Beatrice
said.
“I don’t care.” He glanced at Rosemary. “Text me when you’re ready to hit the road?”
“I will.”
She watched him walk off to exchange a few words with his mother before he let himself out, his dark head disappearing down the stairs. Beatrice dropped the camera hand to her hip. The light went red again, then blinked out.
“You’re too old for me to need to tell you that was abominable.”
Beatrice flopped down beside her with a sigh, resting her head against the wall, and closed her eyes. “Are we going to lunch?”
“Would you like to?” Nancy and Yangchen were approaching, deep in conversation, the rest of the crew gone now. “We have an hour.”
“That’s fine.”
“Bea?” Nancy called, approaching with Yangchen. “Why don’t you take your mom downstairs to the vegan place? Yangchen and I are going to see some of the sights.”
“Sure, whatever,” Bea replied. She lifted both her feet high, used their weight to propel her body forward off the bench and into a standing position, and turned off the last of the lights. “Come on, Mums.”
The stairwell was dim, Nancy and Yangchen descending in front of her, Beatrice clomping down behind her and broadcasting resentment with each footfall.
Rosemary didn’t wait to reach the bottom stair. She paused a dozen steps from the landing, waited for Nancy and Yangchen to move out of earshot, and then said, “I’m not doing this.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Beatrice’s crossed arms said she knew precisely what Rosemary meant and had already prepared defenses.
“I mean I’m not doing it. I nearly died. Dozens of people, people I knew, people who had children and husbands and wives, did die, and all I wanted to do once I knew I was alive was to see you. So wipe that look off your face. I’m your mother. You’re my daughter. I nearly died, and now I’m here. Act like it.”
Beatrice dropped her gaze to the stair rail. “Sorry.”
“Are you? Because I’ve taught you how to apologize, and you can do better than that.”
