by Robbi McCoy
Wilona nodded and quietly began filming. Harper started to create the story in her mind— an old woman who wove beautiful textiles of excellent quality, a woman who did nothing but weave, whose passion for decades had been weaving. Even if there had been no video series to perpetuate, Harper decided, she would have come to see this woman and listen to her life story.
Wilona filmed the scene before them, sweeping across the room to where the mesmerized children sat, then back to the loom and the methodical rhythm of the weaver. Harper sat on a stool near Mrs. Silva, studying her face. Gently, so as not to disrupt the mood, she said, “Mrs. Silva, we’re ready.”
The old woman stopped weaving and turned her attention to the camera.
“Why don’t you just tell us about yourself, about how you got interested in weaving and how you live.”
Like most people, Mrs. Silva seemed pleased enough to be the subject of interest.
“Well,” she began, her voice deep and slightly raspy, “it started long ago, thirty years ago. When my grandmother died, she left that behind.”Mrs. Silva gestured toward one of her smaller looms. Wilona panned over to the loom Mrs. Silva pointed to. “She used to make the most beautiful cloth on that thing, but I never paid that much attention. I was young. I was stupid. She showed me how to use it a couple of times, but I didn’t like it much.”
Mrs. Silva’s small eyes looked almost black. She picked up a photo from the table by her side and showed it to the camera.
“This is her.” The woman in the photo could have been Carmen Silva herself. Their ages were similar.
“After she passed, I didn’t know what to do with that damned thing. I gave it another try and, what d’ya know! I just sort of took to it. Then I got better at it. People started buying the stuff I made. Some people say that my stuff is just as good as hers was.” She shrugged. “I’ve got four looms now, as you can see. I’m still weaving. It’s just what I do. All the time. I never tire of it.”
Harper knelt nearby, enthralled. “Tell us what your life is like,” she said, “day to day.”
“I mostly stay here,” Mrs. Silva explained. “Usually, if it’s not too cold, I leave the front door open. People pass by, coming and going. Sometimes someone comes and buys something. Or brings me things, like food, or just comes to talk.”
Laying offerings at her feet, Harper thought.
“The children come and watch. Sometimes they help with the yarn. Sometimes I send them out on errands. I can’t get around much anymore. Bad knees. I used to go to church on Sundays, but not anymore. Sometimes Father stops by.” Her fingers went subconsciously to the silver cross around her neck.
Harper listened, captivated. Mrs. Silva became a kind of mystic to her. She was a woman doing what she must do, as if she were designed by nature or ordained by God to do this. She reminded Harper of Sister Josephina. Their minimalist lifestyles, of course, were similar, but more than that, there was such a sense of rightness about them. They both suited their lives so completely. No complaints, no unmet needs. At peace and in harmony with the universe. Harper was envious.
They spent two hours with Mrs. Silva, listening to her talk about her life and her weaving. She proudly displayed her work for the camera. Before they left, Harper purchased a shawl with white and green designs over a black background. The pattern was intricate like so many of Carmen Silva’s creations, not simple geometric shapes of lines and zigzags, but complicated, imaginative motifs that testified to a truly artistic mind at work. Harper caressed the fine wool as though it possessed some magical power, as if it had absorbed some of the passion of its creator. She felt that it might be able to instruct her. On the drive back, Wilona said, “That went well. We can look at the film tonight, do some editing.”
“That would be great. I was hoping you’d want to help with that part. What an inspiring woman!”
“What does she inspire you to do?” Wilona asked.
Harper glanced at her friend. Wilona waited expectantly.
“Uh,” Harper said, turning her gaze back to the road, “I don’t know. Something like what she’s doing, I guess. Something that I could feel a real passion for.”
“But you don’t know what it is?”
Harper sighed. “No, I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, from what I’ve seen, you seem to have a passion for admiring other people’s passions.” Wilona laughed.
Harper didn’t really think that was funny. “I’m just trying to understand them. I want to know how a person knows what to do.”
“In your case, don’t you suppose it would have something to do with music?”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe, instead of trying to emulate other people, you should look more carefully at what you already have in yourself. You can’t absorb somebody else’s passion, no matter how much you admire it. It’s a hackneyed bit of advice, I know, but, dammit, girl, seek within.”
“‘Seek not the truth in another’s heart,’” Harper quoted. “Yes, I’m aware of the hackneyed advice. Doesn’t mean I can follow it.”
“Okay, enough with quotable quotes, then. How about stopping right up here? We can have our picnic.”
Harper pulled into the park Wilona had spotted, and they carried their lunch to a shaded redwood table. As Wilona unpacked baked chicken, pasta salad and strawberries, two squirrels appeared nearby, standing on their hind legs, looking expectantly at the possibilities unfolding before them.
“Do you remember when she was telling us about her grandmother,” Harper said as she ate, “about how she had tried to get Carmen interested in weaving, but the spark didn’t catch?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But after her grandmother died, she suddenly discovered she had a passion for weaving after all.”
Wilona waited, her dark eyes placid.
“This is going to sound nuts to you.”
“Go ahead.” Wilona’s eyes twinkled in anticipation.
“While she was talking...at the time, I mean, I had the idea that when her grandmother died, her spirit moved into her granddaughter, and that’s why she became the weaver. She didn’t inherit the talent and the passion genetically. She inherited it spiritually.”
Harper caught a small smile playing across Wilona’s lips.
“You don’t really believe that, do you, Harper?”
“I don’t know.”
“Couldn’t it just be that she was older, so it was more interesting to her then? Hard for a child to devote the kind of time and concentration necessary to learn a skill like that.”
Harper considered this. “Yes, I suppose. And maybe losing her grandmother stirred something in her, to keep it alive, you know?”
“Maybe. She loved her grandmother, obviously. I think that makes more sense than the heebie-jeebie ghost idea.”
Harper laughed. “But don’t you think it’s interesting anyway, that the granddaughter would have the same talent and drive as her grandmother?”
Wilona raised her eyebrows, her mouth full of chicken, and said nothing.
“This reminds me of something,” Harper said. “Mary Tillotson used to teach a class called ‘My Mother, My Muse.’ It was about channeling the artistic impulse of your female ancestors into your own art.”
“Sounds like a fun idea for a class. A little New Agey.”
“Probably. But interesting to think about. What is the source of the artist’s vision? When we talk about that abstract concept, the Muse, what do we really mean? Is it all just genetics, the way our brains happen to be wired? Or is there something more mysterious at work?” “You know I don’t have much of a mystical bent, Harper. I think it’s all just the luck of the draw. A chance arrangement of genes and a particular selection of personal experiences.”
“Don’t you think there’s anything predetermined?”
“You mean by God? You know I don’t believe in—”
“No, I don’t mean by God. I mean, don’t you think some things would be true for eac
h of us regardless of our personal experiences?”
“Well, some things, but they’re genetic and they aren’t determined before you were conceived. I’m thinking of things like your being gay or my mother getting cancer or Andrew being blind. I don’t think Carmen Silva was destined to be a weaver, if that’s where you’re going with this.”
Wilona pushed a container to Harper’s side of the table. “Have some strawberries,” she said. “I picked them this morning while you were asleep.”
Harper took a strawberry and watched a scrub jay above them while she ate it. “These are wonderful.” She took another.
Wilona was silent for a moment and then said, “Harper, I think there’s something wrong with the way you look at other people’s work.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I saw it here today with Carmen, and I’ve seen it before in your comments about my photography, for instance. It even shows up in your documentaries. It lends a tone of reverence to your films and that’s great. I mean, I certainly appreciated it in the one you made of me, but I thought it was just a technique you were using for the films. I didn’t realize at first that it’s how you really see things.”
“I don’t understand. What technique?”
“The assumption that the passion for the art preceded the practice of the art, as if it’s manifest destiny that Carmen Silva is a weaver and I’m a photographer.” Harper glanced over for a second to see Wilona nodding to herself.
“When I was twelve,” Wilona said, “my uncle gave me a camera for my birthday. I hadn’t asked for it. Had never thought about taking pictures one way or another. He just thought I might enjoy it and cameras were becoming inexpensive and commonplace at that time. So, of course, I took some pictures. Later, when my mother was ill, I took a lot of pictures of her. It was sort of an obsession. I knew she was going to die. I think I thought that I could stop the cancer by taking its picture, freezing it in its tracks, you know. I mean, I didn’t really think that, but I fantasized it. The camera and the photographs became really important to me during those years. That’s how it started. By chance. It wasn’t something I was driven to do before I did it. That’s my point. The passion grows out of the practice, not the other way round.”
Harper said nothing. She had always assumed that people who were driven to do something like paint or write had always been driven to do it, that the drive was innate to them from birth, like Mozart. But most people weren’t like Mozart.
“I can see I’m going to have to start over completely,” Harper said at last, “and redo that documentary about you because I’ve gotten absolutely everything wrong.”
“Oh, no!” Wilona said emphatically. “You didn’t get it wrong. It’s a beautiful testimonial to the photographs. I love it. What I said before is still true. It’s about my work, not about my life, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that film. It’s a true work of art.”
“So I’m an idiot savant?”
Wilona laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far. But, you know, you seem to be in total awe of other people’s work without understanding that it’s work. The films that you’re making are art. They’re beautiful. But they’re work too, aren’t they? You spend long hours editing content and dubbing in words and music. It’s the same for me and the photos. It’s not like the hand of God is on my shutter button.” “But not everybody with a camera can do what you do.”
“No, you’re right. There’s got to be a predisposition to it, but whether I end up being a photographer or you end up being a cellist is largely a matter of chance. It’s what you do with the talent after you realize that you have it that makes you an artist. How did you end up playing the cello, by the way?”
“Oh, well, I hadn’t planned that. I wanted to learn the violin. I had this high school music class, and the first day we were going to actually play instruments I was late because I missed the bus and had to get my brother to take me to school. By the time I got there, everyone had picked out their instruments, and all of the violin positions were taken. So the teacher said, ‘Why don’t you grab that cello, Harper, and give it a try?’”
Wilona smiled in a self-satisfied way and said nothing more.
Chapter 16
SUMMER, TWO YEARS AGO (JUNE)
The summer of Harper’s thirty-sixth year was turning out to be more interesting than most. Much more. A huge transformation was taking place, a transformation that had been approaching for a long time. She was ready for it. She embraced it.
For the last sixteen years, summers had, at least in part, meant Eliot. But, this, this would be the summer of Chelsea. Eliot was now relegated to her past. By ten thirty this morning, he was out of her life. By eleven, she was on the phone with Chelsea, ready for a new beginning.
“He’s gone,” she reported.
“Eliot?” Chelsea asked. “Gone for good, you mean? Or gone for the season?”
“Gone for good. He just left. I told him it was over.”
“Wow! I didn’t think you’d really do that after all these years.”
“It was time I did. It was just clinging to the past, for both of us.”
“Are you okay?” Chelsea asked.
“Yes, fine. I feel such a sense of...relief, I guess I have to say. And hope for the future.”
“Good. I was worried that you might have second thoughts. Since I’m sort of responsible—”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” Harper said. “Not at all. Don’t think that. I needed to do this, regardless. You were just the catalyst. Whatever happens now, I’ll always be grateful to you for that, for giving me the push in the right direction.”
“No regrets.”
“No regrets. Absolutely not.”
“Can I come over?” Chelsea asked, sounding suddenly shy.
“Yes, of course! Why do you think I called?” Harper laughed lightly. Her voice was calm, but her body was in a state of frantic euphoria. Today would be the culmination of weeks of gentle wooing between them.
“See you in a few minutes,” Chelsea said.
“Can’t wait.”
Harper switched off the phone and took a deep breath, relishing the delirious tension in her body. At last! she thought, closing her eyes so that she could conjure up an image of Chelsea’s hesitant smile, an expression she had grown to adore. That shyness, it wasn’t lack of confidence. It was lack of presumption. Chelsea took almost nothing for granted, it seemed. Harper found that refreshing and endearing.
She had known Chelsea for six years but still did not know her well. Until recently, she had known her only as Mary Tillotson’s student lover, an interesting young devotee of the woman of arts and letters. For most of this time, Harper had thought of her as simply an extension of Mary. But lately Chelsea had emerged as an individual. She was no longer the impressionable young coed that Mary had taken under her wing. She was a twenty-seven year-old woman who had come into her own.
After being a rare visitor to the university library since her graduation a few years earlier, Chelsea had begun to appear again in recent months. She was back in school, she told Harper, working on her master’s in education. They had started talking, first about books and writers, poets and painters. They had long, sometimes antagonistic, discussions that left Harper feeling stimulated and drained at the same time. During one of these talks, Chelsea mentioned, in passing, that she was no longer with Mary, that Mary had “kicked her out” and that she was living alone in an apartment. After that, their conversations turned more toward the personal.
One day in early spring they went out for a drink, a date that ended up lasting several hours. By the second hour, Harper had felt comfortable and familiar enough to ask a question that had been on her mind for a while—after six years with Mary, what had gone wrong.
“Mary doesn’t comprehend the principle of exclusivity,” Chelsea told her.
“You mean she cheated on you?”
“It’s probably not fair to say it that way. ‘Cheated,’
I mean. Because that isn’t how she would see it.” Chelsea smiled sadly. “Mary actually has a very loving heart. She loves everyone. Almost literally. She thinks of sex as just another aspect of human relations, not something to be denied or suppressed. It’s something to be given as a gift to out-of-town visitors, like a fruit basket.”
Chelsea’s voice had a tinge of bitterness. She had obviously been hurt. “In a way, I admire that. It’s honest and free, but it isn’t something I want for myself.”
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me,” Harper said. “Most people expect fidelity in a relationship. I guess things were different in the beginning, then.”
“Not for very long, actually,” Chelsea said, “but I was so smitten, I took what I got, you know? I let her make the rules. It was a classic case of hero worship. I put her on a pedestal. But as I got older, there was no way she could live up to that image, of course. I hate to admit it, but I’m a cliché.”
“So you don’t love her anymore?” Harper asked.
“The relationship is over. I can’t give her what she wants, the unquestioning adoration. She thrives on that. She isn’t able to adapt to something on a more equal footing. She’ll always see me as a student. No, it just doesn’t work anymore, even if I could overlook the occasional dalliance.” Chelsea took a sip of her merlot, looking thoughtful. “Which I can’t.”
Harper was aware that Chelsea hadn’t answered her question about love. She had to conclude that Chelsea still loved Mary. She also accepted the idea that the relationship was unsalvageable. What Chelsea was saying fell in line with what Harper herself had observed over the last several years.
“The others—” Harper asked tentatively, recalling campus rumors that went back to the beginning of her own career, “—are they students?”
“Oh, no!” Chelsea laughed. “No. Mary has a thoroughly maternal relationship with her students, and she doesn’t cross the line.”
