by Hilary Sloin
Francesca nodded. “It isn’t a specific kind of hut, just something I made out of branches and mud.”
“Can I see it?” asked Lisa, trying to seem equally intrepid: A girl so tall, with such dirty feet, who lives alone in an attic, surely is afraid of nothing.
When Isabella returned, holding two glasses of lemonade, two yodels stuffed in her pockets, and a magnetized chess set under her arm (she hoped this one would bring her better luck), the white room was empty.
Immediately, upon stepping off the reliable pavement and onto the bumpy ground, Lisa regretted her feigned insouciance, her cavalier “Can I see it?” when Francesca mentioned a hut. She imagined savages, bears, gorillas. Her father had said of the woods, in that spooky tone he used to shake her: “You go in, you never come out.”
She positioned her feet sideways and moved down the embankment in baby steps, searching for grooves and ledges. Francesca moved nimbly ahead, the distance between them increasing. The incline stiffened and Lisa felt her body hurtling forward even as she tried to slow down. She grabbed for a branch or a vine, something to steady her, but her fingers clutched a switch of prickers instead. She screamed and tumbled the rest of the way down the embankment, landing in a crusty mattress of leaves at the bottom. Tall trees blocked the lightness of the sky. Sharp rocks popped out like broken bones. The screaming of black birds cut through trees. She tried not to think of how much trouble she’d be in—defying her father, soiling her new sneakers. She turned and searched for the DeSilva house but could see only the treetops swaying like giant, wagging fingers.
There had been days of rain and what was normally just dirt had become a bit of a swamp to wade through. Francesca, who was used to navigating the woods in all sorts of conditions, had already made it through the murky puddles.
“Are you alright?” She squatted down and lifted Lisa’s wounded hand.
“Look,” she whispered and pointed to a nervous chipmunk at Lisa’s left, a bright yellow stripe down its back.
Even Lisa could see the beauty in that. Nothing threatening in that. “Cute,” she tried to smile. She followed Francesca, who now maintained a mindful distance as they stepped into the swampy terrain. Cold, pasty water crawled inside Lisa’s sneakers. She resisted screaming as things stringlike and slippery tickled her ankles and focused instead on the back of Francesca’s head, the thick helmet of hair, the dipping, rising shoulders, hands flapping at her sides for balance, like a penguin.
Finally, they made it to the other side. Lisa wiped damp hair off her forehead.
“Tada . . .” Francesca imitated a game show girl, pointing to a drunken structure camouflaged into the woods, its walls covered in evergreen switches, its base built from stones fitted together and shored up with dry mud. An occasional burlap scrap plugged up a stubborn hole. PRIVATE was painted in black on a plywood post stuck into the sandy ground, the “E” squashed to fit.
“You built this?” Lisa circled the hut.
“Actually, this is just a rough version of what the final thing will look like.” Francesca put her hands in her pockets and sloped her shoulders, masking her pride. “You can go in.” She bent down and pulled back the chamois door. Lisa peered in cautiously, then crawled through the threshold. Her navy cardigan sweater hiked up her back, exposing knobs of white spine.
“Wow!” she called from inside, inhaling the damp smell of the woods. She moved to the back wall to make room for Francesca and patted the floor, fingering the many bottle caps fastidiously pounded into the dirt. “Tiles,” she said.
The air was moist and syrupy, like being under covers: the heaviness, the closeness of breath. The girls filled every inch of the interior. Lisa grinned, so pleased to have escaped Isabella and to find herself here, with this girl instead. She felt safe. Her breaths spread into wide aisles of air. She giggled, which she never did, and found the widest part of the hut. There she sprawled on her back, pressed her feet to one end, her head to the other.
“Lie down,” she said, folding her hands behind her head and exposing her pearly stomach.
“I’m too tall.”
“So bend your knees.” With black eyes, Lisa stared far into Francesca’s face, pulling her down without moving: a magician extracting a rabbit from his hat.
Everything in Francesca’s life seemed to have changed. She landed so close to Lisa, she could feel the steady rhythm of breathing, see the pulse in Lisa’s neck. Her feet extended under the chamois door, out into the cool air. Water beat the river rocks; a car passed on Riverview Street; the wind whispered and tugged on the frail autumn leaves.
“Don’t you want to ask about my mother?” Lisa turned onto her side and faced Francesca. “Everybody wants to know something: how she did it or who found her. Why she did it or how high the building was.”
Francesca stared at the ceiling and felt that, like always, she was failing some essential test. But these were not the sort of things she wanted to know from Lisa. There were other things she wanted to ask. Under her bed, for instance, were finger paintings she’d made on huge pieces of shiny paper. She wanted Lisa to look at them and guess what they were.
“Do you think my sister’s smart?” she asked.
“My father says she’s crazy.”
“He does?” This was not a bad answer. “What about me?”
“He’s never met you,” said Lisa. “But he hates Americans.”
“I’m not American. I’m half-Italian, half-Jewish.”
“He hates Jews. He hates everyone but Chinese. That’s why we live in the ghetto. With other Chinese.” Lisa swallowed hard. “My guidance counselor says I’m wrong, but I know my mother did it because I lost the big chess game. It was my first defeat. You might have heard about it; it was in the papers and magazines. There were even pictures.”
Francesca nodded, though she hadn’t.
“She lived for my chess matches. If it hadn’t been for her, I would never have learned to play.”
“Do you like chess?” Francesca asked.
“I love it,” Lisa said. “I love all the pieces.”
Again, Francesca nodded. She, too, had always admired the intricate, distinctive figures.
“My feeling is that each one has (1) motivation, (2) moral character, and (3) a purpose in relation to the queen,” Lisa said, bending back one small finger on each of the three attributes, for emphasis. When she saw that Francesca would not interrupt, that she seemed to listen ardently, Lisa continued, espousing her philosophy of the game, how it functioned as a replica of the world, a miniature society, complete with cruelty, loyalty, and class struggles. “The pawns are poor Chinese people,” she spoke with great authority, “the under class. The Queen is Chinese, beautiful and mean, with huge boobs, always wearing velvet against her white skin. I call her Jacqueline, because I love and hate the name. And the King is American. He’s stupid, with a red face and blue eyes and gray hair. No one takes him seriously, especially Jacqueline. She makes all the rules. She invented the game; that’s why she gets to do whatever she wants. She hired the horsemen, twins named Billy and Willy. The rooks were just pieces of the castle until she brought them to life. And then there are the pawns: sycophants.” Lisa made a disgusted face. “But you can only trust the Bishops. They’re noble and good. And they can cross the board in one long stroke. So they’re very effective.” Lisa flipped onto her back, her legs spread flat like a corpse. She lay like that for a moment.
“You can kiss me,” she said.
Reflexively, Francesca leaned back. She’d wanted to kiss Lisa since they’d sat in her room, but she felt sure it was a perverse thing to want. She’d wanted to touch Lisa’s hands, even though Lisa was a girl. She’d wanted something she could not define since that first meeting in the hallway.
“Don’t you want to?” asked Lisa.
No, no, no, thought Francesca. She nodded.
“So?” Lisa puckered up and waited.
Francesca leaned over slow as a bending branch, inching her fac
e closer and closer until she could feel Lisa’s breath across her lips. She pressed her mouth down onto Lisa’s and held it there, perfectly still. How complicated it was, the dry moist soft cool sending her body orbiting into space, then thrusting into deep, wet earth. Her head was dizzy. She leaned her weight on her hand so as not to collapse like a building onto the girl’s small frame. Her mouth slackened, lips parted, making room for Lisa’s tongue. And then it came, the tongue, feeling in her mouth nothing like her own tongue, making the world open like a door into hot sunlight. She felt herself bleed inside. Lisa hooked her feet around Francesca’s legs and pressed hard at every possible intersection, until they were moving and rolling, bearing no resemblance to the two awkward, introverted girls they’d been all their lives.
“They’re back, Mom!” Isabella bellowed, her arms folded across her chest. She pulled the door open and let Lisa and Francesca into the foyer, trying not to stare at Lisa’s underwear showing through her wet, pink pants.
The smell of butter, chocolate, and grease followed Vivian out of the kitchen, where she’d been making tollhouse cookies. She wiped her hands on a dish towel.
“She’d never seen the river,” Francesca said.
“Is that right?” Vivian’s voice was sweet and sharp. “Isabella, why don’t you run upstairs and get Lisa another pair of pants and we’ll put these sopping wet ones in the dryer?”
Lisa dripped on the floor. Her thumbs moved in circles at her sides. Vivian knew it had been only months since the mother’s suicide, that the girl must be fragile as a soufflé. “Go on honey,” she said gently. “Take those off.” She squatted down and skinned the heavy fabric from Lisa’s body.
Isabella returned, carrying a pair of white pants.
“How ‘bout a towel, Bella?” asked Vivian.
Still winded from her last trip upstairs, Isabella ran up again, pulled a white towel from the rack in the bathroom, panting exaggeratedly, her shoulders rising and sinking on each breath. Vivian dried off the bright red legs, cold and skinny as hoses. Lisa stood in her clinging undershirt, looking at Francesca’s darkened, muddy sneakers. Cautiously, she placed one hand on each of Vivian’s shoulders and stepped into the pants, several sizes too large, that Vivian held open before her. The thick, soft material bunched at the belly; the hems hung well below her ankles. Vivian rolled bulky cuffs, patted Lisa’s hips. “There. No one died, right?” Isabella shot her a horrified look. Vivian immediately regretted her choice of platitude, but, oh well, nothing to do about it now. She smiled. “Run upstairs and I’ll bring your pants when they’re dry.”
Francesca began to follow Lisa upstairs.
“You,” Vivian reached out and grabbed Francesca’s belt loop, stopping her at the third step from the bottom. “Where do you think you’re going?” she whispered. “You’ll help me in the kitchen and leave your sister’s friends alone. What’s the matter with you? Trying to steal your sister’s best friend.”
“Hah!” Francesca said, then crashed her mouth closed.
Vivian let go of Francesca. She bent down and mopped up the water with Lisa’s pants. “Your sister is special, Francesca. She may not be the easiest person to get along with, but we have to make concessions for her. We have to nurture her so she can develop some social skills.”
“What are social skills?”
“A successful way of interacting with people in the world. I can’t explain this now.” She opened the front door and wrung out Lisa’s pants on the front stoop, standing back to stay dry.
“Can I have a cookie?” Francesca asked.
“You can lick the bowl. The cookies are in the oven. And then I want you to stay in your room until dinner.”
“Fine with me,” Francesca muttered, thinking how she’d been kissed. Nothing else mattered.
Rake, 1986
Rake is a haunting portrait of an ordinary household tool stuck, upside down, into the soft soil of a suburban yard, the green tines fanning prophetically toward the nighttime sky. The sky is an eerie backdrop, lit from behind, a sheer shroud of cheesecloth or gauze over the not-quite-right neighborhood. Behind the rake is a house in which a teenage girl, probably a babysitter, sits in an armchair. She stares ahead into a puff of gray light—the unseen television, its picture bloating out into the room. We watch her through a large picture window with no curtain, privy to only her profile, dark hair, and reclined posture. She lounges lazily, perhaps loafing on the job.10 The door to the house is halfway open; only a screen door separates the young girl from the predatory world.
In a 1994 article in Caleidoscope, Lucinda Dialo unveiled her theory that Rake is a metaphor for Rape. The demonic within the mundane, the threat lurking in the “whitest, most placid neighborhoods, the neighborhoods where we’re assured we are safe.”11 Others have elaborated on this interpretation, pointing to the open door as evidence that in this painting, the real story is about to happen.
Phillip Hamil, columnist for Illustrated Gent, dismisses Dialo’s interpretation as “. . . feminist paranoia. deSilva would have been offended by this distortion of her meanings, the idea that nothing in her work—not even a gardening tool—is exempt from the onerous duty of representing misogyny or sexual perversion . . . There is no evidence of deSilva’s hatred of men. She was, in many ways, one of the boys, and was revered by the men who had the good fortune to know her.”12
Of the use of light in Rake, Hamil writes, “deSilva’s knack for setting and mood is unrivaled. The light in this painting—the gray/purple/blue/white/yellow hue which, to my knowledge, has never before been achieved, not even in the most spectacular L.A. sunset, not even in Van Gogh’s sunflowers—looms over the painting like the impending apocalypse. Rake, as deSilva herself told me in one of our many discussions about her work, is about Godlessness, all that is cold and soulless. The garden tool is man—not the gender, but the species—evil, defiant, its broad shoulders clawing avidly in every direction. deSilva emphasizes her loss of faith in humanity by reducing the female subject to a set piece and featuring the rake front and center, as the protagonist.”13
Other interpretations abound. Cynthia Bell, in Lesbians in Oil, theorizes that Rake is less a metaphor for Rape, than Race, and that beyond race, it is a meditation on homosexuality, specifically lesbianism. The painting is concerned with “otherness,” according to Bell, the rake representing the alienated other, forced to remain out on the lawn like a second class citizen, well into the nighttime hours. The rake, she says, “is deSilva keeping her polite distance from the object of her desire, in this case the babysitter, who it may be postulated, represents Lisa Sinsong.”14
Michael Wright, in his examination of the link between art and mental wellness, Art That Heals, asserts that the rake represents Alfonse DeSilva, whom he claims Francesca hated and feared. “The rake, a tool Alfonse wielded throughout the day, is presumably an innocuous object, set against a garage wall and there expected to remain all through the night, beside fertilizer and shears and shovels. But deSilva shows us the rake as she’d have us see her father: prowling the neighborhood, stalking his prey, when he ought to have been in bed with his wife.”15
Chapter Four
Francesca fell asleep while it was still light outside, then awoke to a dark and silent world. She could smell Lisa’s baby powder and sugar breath. She licked her lips, remembering the long white stretch of Lisa’s neck. Hot tears loitered behind her eyes. A crooked bolt of sensation traveled down her spine and sent a shock to her groin. She pressed her fists against the zipper of her jeans and rolled left and right. The thin murmur of Isabella talking in her sleep drifted up through the floorboards as the previous day returned to her like fragments of a dream: Mr. Sinsong clenching Lisa’s thin arm, dragging her down the porch steps and over the slate path, Lisa’s feet barely touching the ground.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Vivian had said.
“It’s your fault,” Isabella had whispered to Francesca, giving her the evil eye.
And Lis
a had become tinier and tinier, like a strand of hair, a blade of grass, finally a blurry profile trapped inside the prison door of the Buick.
She pulled her knapsack down from its hook on the back of the door and packed her Captain Kangaroo sweatshirt, then doubleknotted her shoelaces and tiptoed downstairs into the dark kitchen. She cracked the refrigerator door for light, then removed the telephone book from the potholder drawer and quietly flipped pages. There were so many S’s. Her finger glided up one column, down the next, landing upon two Sinsongs, but only one in New Haven. 496 Temple. She memorized the address and put the thick book back in the potholder drawer, positioned the remaining half of an Entenmanns chocolate cake at the top of her pack, then adjusted the pack so it sat comfortably on her shoulders. This, too, she’d learned from Sam Gribley: Never be hampered by awkward apparatus.
The night air smelled sweet and earthy. Francesca edged along the driveway to avoid the clamor of gravel, and crossed the street. The sky was spotted with marble stars, a nearly full moon. She rolled down the embankment, only half on the path, recognizing enough of the girthy pines and spindly birches to know she was in the vicinity. Still, the milky darkness infused everything with danger. She plowed into prickers, splashed across the thick black swamp—a mystery of underlife and cling—repeatedly reminding herself that these were her favorite woods, and that although she never wanted to see her parents again, they were, dependably, just across the street.
The hut appeared at the center of a round blue clearing, lit up by the night sky and surrounded by darkness. She pulled back the door and scrambled inside, slid her body all the way to the back wall, and extended her legs straight out in front of her. A car passed on the street above—nearing, nearing, then fading like something that changed its mind. She removed her flashlight from the shelf overhead and aimed its beam all around the small room to remind herself where she was, how many afternoons she’d spent by this river, never attacked, never eaten by animals. What was the worst thing that could happen: Bobcat? Rabid dog? Pack of hungry wolves? Grizzly bear? Sadistic teenage boy? Hadn’t they caught the legendary Hillbilly Hermit after he strangled a young girl with strings from his banjo? Even so, there were always more murderers, ones who sought girls like Francesca: ugly girls, girls overgrown and devoid of form, who kiss other girls and build huts at the riverside.
