Ask Eleanor (Special Edition With Alternate Ending)

by Briggs, Laura

  Dear Clueless: Whatever you did to hurt your brother’s feelings, it’s no good trying to guess. Sometimes the most hurtful things are the last things we realize we’ve actually done. Failing to appreciate a sacrifice or gesture, the true depth of which we don’t realize at the moment – or saying something half-jokingly that touches the deepest, rawest nerve of another ...

  The only sound in the room was the steady tick of the wall clock in the kitchen. The hum of her apartment’s air filter switching on automatically.

  When she was finished editing these lines, she went into the kitchen and put a kettle of water to boil on the stove for a cup of chamomile tea. A white ceramic cup, smooth and unadorned, a single teabag tucked inside.

  Beige, fawn, eggshell, and brown. These were the shades of Eleanor’s world at home, from the short grain carpet and chenille sofa cushions to the tiled surface of the kitchen and the stucco walls. Easy to match or replace: a soothing haven needing only a touch of color to satisfy.

  Bland, in the opinion of Marianne, who saw nuances in every shade and color except those which appealed to Eleanor. It was a reflection of Eleanor’s personality, the closed shell of her existence, Marianne claimed, that colored everything in neutral shades and placid tones.

  Dear, impractical, impulsive Marianne. The one person in the world whom Eleanor wished would take her advice on at least something, even if it was just once in their lives.

  *****

  They were opposites in everything, it seemed. Marianne was neither sensible nor rational, neither calm nor dignified. Heated passion to cold reason’s world, sweet and sour to the grains of salt and bitterness in life. The unpredictable line of signal interrupting the static of black and white dots, breaking apart an orderly pattern of flowing pixels.

  They were separated by almost ten years of life, which explained something of the difference to Eleanor’s mind, the hierarchy of child development and psychology – the waning years of Ellen Darbish’s attention and common sense had been the dominant years of Marianne’s childhood.

  And there was always Eleanor. Big sister El, authority figure Eleanor who was tall and serious in her braids and school uniform and saddle shoes, who had the power to expose three year-old, chocolate-covered Marianne to shame in the midst of a pantry mess and enforce bedtime with hands planted on slender, undeveloped hips. Frowning Eleanor of college-era sweaters and slim jeans who disapproved of music blaring from cassette tape and vinyl record and had the power to enforce curfews and dismiss lean-framed, love-struck juveniles lingering hopefully on the sidewalk outside their home.

  Not Eleanor to Marianne – no, not anything so dignified. Elly, Ellie-bear, Ell, Nelly, or, the worst offender, Elly-Nelly. Any number of derivatives and endearments, sugar-coated or reproachful, spoken in love or defiance, depending upon the mood of Marianne.

  Eleanor had no nicknames for her. No Mary, no Annie, no Mae, no Mayday, in the fashion of her mother’s choice. Marianne had always been Marianne: a complete form, a whole sentence in itself in an illogical and grammatically-incorrect sense. A grace and dignity in that word which both belonged to her sister’s nature and defied its restlessness all at once.

  Their mother had applied different techniques of discipline for two different natures; had cultivated relationships and drawn confidences with unique angles for both of her children. There was little enough alike between them, Eleanor had reflected, except a general lightness of hair and complexion and a tendency towards figures more lines than curves. Dress, thought, voice, life direction – there was nothing there to link them at all.

  Yet, they ended up in the same city in the end. Eleanor’s advice might be pointless, but her presence was not when it came to the task of carrying furniture up flights of stairs or producing a credit card for an emergency plane ticket cross-country or across oceans. A messy and unpredictable life requires emotional and financial rescue on occasion – and there was no life more vivid in its shaping than her sisters. Like a lava lamp sliding and remolding in its glass sphere, an ornament which graced Marianne’s first cramped college dorm room in art school and took a hazy, effervescent form in one of her earliest canvases.

  The obligation of helping pick up the pieces of Marianne’s life whenever it splintered apart or reshaped itself was still Eleanor’s. A bond like blood and a history of ten years’ transformation under the same roof could not be severed by personality differences or lifestyle disagreements. For Eleanor would never spend a weekend of her life painting the ceiling of a condemned garage with a group of individuals who rolled joints or possessed hookahs; she saw no allure in offbeat poetry circles whose artists resembled chain gangs, refugees, and cross-dressers; she felt no desire to live on the cusp of constant change, in which friends, apartments, roommates, relationships, and place of employment changed on a monthly or weekly basis.

  Eleanor’s evenings were spent with boiled eggs and salads of Asian greens and light dressing and herbal tea. Opera CDs with historically-informative liner notes and glossy-paged, dustcover-clad volumes of Matisse or Cassat, the Impressionists or an occasional Warhol retrospect. She went to the opera and the symphony with friends or alone; or to cocktail or dinner parties thrown by friends or associates. They were all the same events and people and places which had become comfortable to her since she first came to this city.

  From her mother for graduation, Eleanor had received an engraved fountain pen set. Marianne had received a secondhand edition of French poems which bore meaningless and obvious traces of a stranger’s life.

  Compared to Eleanor’s existence, this life was chaos, upon which Marianne thrived despite Eleanor’s worst fears. The nightmare scenarios which Eleanor’s worldly experience predicted were somehow avoided in Marianne’s daily existence as it traveled the edges of utter collapse. Pain and pleasure were her equals; being fixed in place was akin to being trapped and dragged to the horrors of Hades.

  Marianne had four steady boyfriends in the last year and countless in-between, trivial romantic encounters which went nowhere after a spark of conversation or evening’s company. Eleanor had not had a date in almost a year.

  In this category, against all reason, chaos trumped practicality soundly in Eleanor’s reluctant and private admission.

  Chapter Four

  What Marianne wanted moved on Friday was a series of cardboard boxes: all equally heavy and indiscriminately packed with all manner of art supplies. Tubes of oil paint, palettes caked heavily beyond practical usage, fine-tipped brushes, and canvases already covered in avant-garde and modern techniques of lines and spherical shapes, intermixed with traditional oils of subjects and scenes immediately recognizable to Eleanor’s eye.

  In with these things were other, less recognizable objects. Glass jars of powdered paper and flour-like compounds, sculpted figures made from wire and fabric, papier-mâché and bits of refuse or rusty metal: tormented figures like skeletons or grotesque puppets in a Day of the Dead parade. A straw hat from Mexico, piles of pencils and crayons ground or sharpened to stubs, a glass sphere with a turreted building of foreign architecture embedded in miniature in its heart.

  “How much stuff are you moving?” In Eleanor’s voice, suspicion: for she could see other things in the box in her arms which were not artistic, in addition to this hat. Such as a waving Lucky Cat from a cheap emporium somewhere and a series of colorful blouses and t-shirts stuffed below.

  “All of my art supplies,” Marianne answered, over her shoulder. A movement of short, messy, wavy blond curls falling forwards, held at bay by a jeweled headband “Tannis wants them all out, anyway. And I hate painting in the apartment.” She was almost a flight of stairs above Eleanor, carrying a box which held still more canvases and part of a disassembled easel.

  Tannis was Marianne’s roommate. Of whom Eleanor knew little other than the sullen voice which sometimes answered the phone and the frigid nature of their relationship to which Marianne alluded in bitter tales.

  There were three more fl
ights to go. Eleanor could feel the cords in her legs beginning to draw tight at the thought of them; a fine layer of perspiration adhered her skirt to the back of her thighs and her white pullover to her shoulders. She had left her wool business jacket in the car, but that was not much comfort to her at the moment.

  At the end of the corridor, Marianne unlocked a door with an ancient-looking key permanently rusted to a ring bearing a four-leaf clover. It opened to a small room – a “loft” apartment which was more storage closet than actual room – overlooking a dilapidated part of the city resembling an ironworks converted into a garbage dump.

  “Set it anywhere,” she said to Eleanor, who appeared a moment later. Several more boxes were already present, part of the room’s gradual transformation. Its shelves already piled with woodblocks and rubber stamps, some jars of metal squares that looked like typesetter’s keys.

  Stacks of CDs and a miniature speaker for a music player, jumbled with its own cord. A series of posters dangling from its walls, French advertisements from the 1800’s, a Broadway music poster that looked as if it had been ripped from a theater frame, a scowling foreign pop band in black and white with Czech letters emblazoned across them. Above the cramped space and tables, a series of steel crossbars with lights which looked like a cross between stage lights and halogen bulbs, a complicated series which might be operated by a lever akin to the electric chair’s lever instead of the ivory-colored switch emerging in a tangle of wires from the wall plate.

  Marianne did not turn it on. She merely flicked aside the battered, wide canvas shade which partly covered the window. Eleanor set her box on the table.

  “There’s only five or six more boxes to go,” said Marianne. “I won’t move all the stuff I’m using for fabric sculpting right away. There’s a couple of pieces I need to take to Henri at his gallery first...” As she spoke, she knelt on an antiquated and overstuffed sofa shoved against the far wall, her hand pulling the chord to a nearby lamp fixture.

  “This is a sofa bed, in case you ever need a place to crash,” said Marianne, with an impish smile directed at Eleanor. Who directed her eyes to the ceiling as if her patience was suspended there somewhere above.

  “Perhaps if you hadn’t sent Miles packing, he could have moved all of your things for you more quickly than I,” suggested Eleanor. “He probably would have taken the day off for you –”

  “Yes, and then he would have bored me for the rest of the evening with some tickets to a drab, conventional musical or some story about his work over dinner,” Marianne answered. “Besides, he was against the idea of an art loft, remember? Too dangerous, the wrong part of town, too expensive for me to afford –” She ticked off the reasons one by one as she slid downwards into a half-reclined, half-sprawled position across the sofa.

  “All of which is correct,” answered Eleanor. Her advice would have been the same – had been, in a roundabout manner of suggestion – but that wasn’t entirely the reason why she defended the hapless Miles from the dripping sarcasm in her sister’s voice.

  Miles was Marianne’s last boyfriend and latest ex – a flame to which Marianne had always been somewhat cool despite his attentiveness to her. Shambling, gentle, and apologetic, he had stood little chance of charming her in the first place, a happy accident in his estimation that Marianne ever accepted his invitation out. Brokerage firm associates were not high on Marianne’s list of romantic partners.

  Eleanor’s approval of him, of course, was the death knell which tolled upon their future.

  “He was dull and pedantic and you know it,” Marianne answered.

  “He was chivalrous and polite and cared about you,” Eleanor countered. “Which is something more than you could say about the others you’ve dated.”

  “And this advice comes from what? Your personal tastes?” said Marianne. Now she was digging through a box at her feet, filled with newspaper clippings and art postcards. “Of course you would like him. He’s your type: stodgy, unimaginative, thinking the end-all of poetry is Wordsworth –” She emerged with a handful of cards of some ancient European cathedral.

  “Stodgy is harsh,” Eleanor said. She, too, removed a handful of items from the box on the table, although she had no idea what to do with them – a miniature Japanese doll on a stand, a strange little brass box punched full of diamond-shaped holes.

  “Your opinions on men are entirely shaped by the fact that you never see any of them,” said Marianne.

  Eleanor froze in shock. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know what I mean,” Marianne continued, brushing her hair out of her face. “I don’t mean you never see men; you just don’t see any variety. It’s all teenage boys in the mailroom and editors, or old, stiff types like the Colonel.”

  The “Colonel” was how Marianne typically referred to Brandon, a nickname coined for his military background and gruff manners, much to Eleanor’s protest over the years. She felt it was unjust to him, this flippant tone her sister used whenever speaking of her friend – whom, she suspected, was equally hapless with regards to girls of Marianne’s nature as poor Miles.

  “Brandon isn’t that old,” Eleanor answered. “And I don’t see an abundance of teenage interns, either. None of this has anything to do with your own taste in men, by the way. I’m just suggesting that maybe Freddy didn’t have your best interests in mind when he disappeared for three days–”

  “I didn’t know he drank that heavily,” said Marianne, defensively. “Besides, I broke up with him afterwards.”

  “And what of Seth? Was he a great potential relationship?”

  “He was a guitarist. They’re all a bit sensitive and moody.”

  Always, Marianne found an excuse for a boyfriend whom she particularly liked, regardless of whatever indifferent state of being or argument trailed their relationship into nonexistence. She looked back on these disasters amicably, with fondness for their brighter characteristics, something Eleanor found slightly maddening.

  “Then by comparison, Miles is a better man, isn’t he?” Eleanor’s voice struggled mightily to refrain from sarcasm. “Compared to drunks and ill-tempered louts and the one who stole your credit cards, I mean.”

  Marianne’s face was sullen. “Did Miles call you?” she asked. Suspicious of Eleanor’s motives in this conversation, apparently.

  “No.” Eleanor was taken aback, a spark of indignation entering her voice. “No, he didn’t call me, Marianne.” She couldn’t imagine Miles, even in all his apologetic mild-mannerdness, stooping to the level of calling her for advice.

  “Good.” Marianne rose from the sofa and made her way towards the stairs again.

  There were five boxes still in the trunk of Marianne’s battered little Bug and in its backseat. Eleanor lifted two of them against her better judgment, but they were light enough, containing mostly strips of newspaper and large housepainter’s brushes.

  How all of these things ever fit in Marianne’s small, shared, three-room apartment, she couldn’t fathom. Perhaps Marianne had a locker somewhere in the city where she had stored additional supplies. The decision to branch into her own studio was a new one, made in anticipation of a future art show and the successful sale of a few pieces in a friend’s gallery and not one inspired by an established career. Eleanor could see the point Marianne’s ex was making with regards to financial investment, even if the room’s rent was a paltry amount.

  On the other hand, she could see why Tannis had banished everything artistic across town. No doubt Marianne’s roommate had grown tired of stepping over and around creations on Marianne’s side of the apartment, avoiding wet paper sculptures and pulpy paper and plaster messes in the bathroom, and finding Marianne consuming all the apartment’s walking space as a zone for her canvas work on a rainy day.

  The remaining box when Eleanor returned to the car was one packed with heavy art molds and bricks of sculpting clay which threatened to break through the bottom. She hoisted it high with one hand protectively underneath, followin
g Marianne inside again – whom, she couldn’t help but notice, was carrying a single stretched canvas, one depicting a bizarre robot-like figure painted in bold shades.

  The canvas was large, and, apparently, heavier than it looked, for Marianne’s steps had begun to lag. Behind her, Eleanor boosted the box higher in vain, sending the bricks of unused clay sliding sharply towards the gaping bottom.

  She paused to adjust the cardboard flaps and prevent disaster. “Did you tell him it was over?” she asked. There was no need to say to whom she referred, since Marianne would know.

  “Not in so many words.” Marianne paused, resting the canvas on the steps. “He hasn’t called me, if that’s what you’re asking. Or come crawling around the apartment while I’m out.”

  “No one said anything about crawling,” answered Eleanor. She set the box on the stairs and tried in vain to adjust the strip of unsticky tape inside to cover the hole.

  “Then why do you care whether I see him again? Just forget it; I’m moving on and I feel fine about it,” said Marianne. She sat down several steps above, her arm supporting the canvas leaning against her. “I’m not feeling guilty. I don’t think ...I don’t think it was even serious enough for me to feel anything about it.”

  The hemlines of her denim capris were embroidered with little red geometric designs which clashed with the orange of her tunic, Eleanor noticed. Below them, a pair of shoes which resembled a cross between leather sandals and clogs.

  “He’ll find a perfectly nice girl who never goes to dangerous places and doesn’t have friends rough around the edges or leave plaster splattered all over the floors –” Marianne continued.

  “Now you’re being cruel, Marianne,” said Eleanor. “He didn’t exactly treat you as a child; he wasn’t some –” she searched for the right word, which failed to come, “– some curmudgeon –”