The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  There was nothing likeable about going red. Petra had no words.

  “My name is Petra,” Geraldine prompted. “And I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

  “On my ears,” muttered Petra. Then, because it felt wrong to be surly to Geraldine, she repeated, “My name is Petra, and I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Geraldine smiled gently. She had a smile directly from old paintings. “Now let’s rest your voice, and you can have some tea while I work on this landscape.”

  Petra was being rescued. She was relieved.

  Here’s another oft-shouted writing rule: don’t use passive voice. I’ve heard many writers tell me it was grammatically wrong; it was poor writing; it was any sentence that had the word was in it. None of these are true. It’s a tool, like any other bit of grammar, and fine when you understand why you’re using such a tool. Compare the impact of these two sentences:

  The streetlight blasted him with light. He was blasted by light.

  In the first, the reader understands immediately where the light is coming from; the sentence is straightforward and fairly invisible in the context of an entire action paragraph. In the second sentence, it’s not immediately understood where the light is coming from—which can be useful for suspense or drama. Is it a streetlight? OR AN ALIEN CRAFT?

  I use the passive voice for “Petra was being rescued.” The active version of this sentence would be “Geraldine rescued Petra.” I didn’t want the sentence to focus on Geraldine, though, despite her being the person driving the action. Petra was literally passive in this situation, and putting her rescue in passive voice keeps the focus on her and her helpless uncertainty.

  She slumped on one of Geraldine’s chairs with yet more rose tea, while Geraldine perched on a chair, perfectly upright, and dabbed tiny, perfect leaves onto a painting in progress.

  “It’s—so—neat,” Petra said, haltingly. She thought of what Geraldine had said earlier and wished that she had thought the entire sentence through before she’d said it out loud. Choose words, Petra, she thought, words that you like. Thinking that and doing it were miles apart, though. “It seems so particular, I mean. So delicate.”

  “Thank you.” Geraldine dabbed another perfectly formed leaf onto the canvas. It was magical: one moment there was nothing, the next the bristles touched down and dribbled out a precise leaf. “I am not great, but I do enjoy it immensely. Do you think I might paint you? We could do short sessions, just a bit each time you came. We could begin during your next visit! Don’t feel you have to say yes just to please an old creature like myself.”

  Petra went red. “Oh, that’d be fine.”

  Don’t paint me red, is all, she thought.

  • • •

  By the sixth day, Petra was feeling guilty about accepting money, as she was clearly performing no job at all.

  She called Marla, one of Geraldine’s daughters, who met her outside the apartment building. Actually, Petra wasn’t entirely certain that Marla was Geraldine’s daughter after all. Nothing about their facial features looked the same. Geraldine had a stately nose and a tiny jaw, and Marla had a square jaw and a tiny nose. Where Geraldine was elegantly understated, Marla was fancy, every inch of her wardrobe brocaded and designed. Her earrings looked like antique chandeliers. She ducked her head against the wind scampering down the treeless road, looking secretive, as if they were spies exchanging information.

  Marla asked if there was a problem. She really hoped, she said, that there wasn’t, as Petra was doing such an excellent job and Geraldine was so pleased.

  “Job. Right. Sure. That’s the thing. I guess, uh, I guess I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do,” Petra said. “What’s my work day? Some days she doesn’t want me to read or do anything other than just sit there. What is my job?”

  “Your job is to make her happy,” Marla said.

  In that case, Geraldine might be performing that job on Petra.

  “You aren’t uncomfortable with it, are you?” Marla asked anxiously. The ear chandeliers swung. “There haven’t been any … problems?”

  The way she said problems immediately caught Petra. It was not so much problems as Problems. Geraldine? Problematic? Trying to imagine her even raising her voice was impossible.

  “It’s nice,” Petra admitted, and this made her flush. Damn her skin. She could imagine a life avoiding humiliation, but must she avoid sincerity too? “I like her a lot.”

  Marla’s face relaxed. “Oh, good. Are you headed up now?”

  “Yeah. Yes. Are you?”

  “Oh, no. No, no. I mean, I have an appointment. Tell her I said hello and to give me a call!” Marla rummaged demonstratively in her purse and presented car keys for Petra’s approval.

  Then Marla headed down the street, toward her car, and Petra ascended the eternal staircase, thinking about Problems. Capital P.

  • • •

  When Petra got home, the babies were there, sitting at the table, screaming with laughter. They grinned at her as she slid her shoes off by the door.

  “Is that lipstick around your eyes?” Petra asked Nikki.

  Both of them shrilled with laughter again, and then Nikki turned around the magazine they were looking at so that Petra could share their humor. It was a glossy thing off a grocery store cashier rack. The page in question featured a collection of photos of starlets caught in situ on the street. There were a lot of tall boots and tank tops. Petra couldn’t see the joke.

  “Oh, Petra,” Mae said. “Look at him.”

  Petra pretended to suddenly see the joke and laughed as convincingly as she could manage. She wondered if the eggs Mae and Nikki had hatched out of had been more colorful than Petra’s. Did their mother know right away, she wondered, that Petra was a different species than the rest of the family?

  • • •

  Geraldine liked beautiful, impossible things. At first Petra couldn’t find words to express what tied them all together, even though it was obvious when something was a Geraldine-thing. She liked fussy, deliberate creations: nature seen through the lens of man, glass worked by skilled hands, paper manipulated into specific and particular shapes. Even her living things were delicate and strange: curled ferns, combed palms, tender-throated lilies, fine-edged orchids. Heavy flowers somehow held aloft on spindly stems.

  Geraldine’s paintings were beautiful and impossible too, and it seemed unlikely that a painting of Petra would belong among them. That first session, when Geraldine had showed Petra her initial sketches, Petra had gone red. Not because they were poorly done, but the opposite. Geraldine had captured the essence of Petra perfectly in just a few spidery charcoal lines. That lump was her, seen truly. Shoulders curled in. Chin ducked to make a lump of a second chin. Hands balled in lap, eyes heavy-lidded, legs shapeless as if carelessly affixed to the chunk of Petra’s body.

  “Oh, no,” Petra said before she could help herself. She went redder. “Never mind the painting!”

  “Whatever is the matter?” Geraldine asked. In the background, the Emperor Waltz played. Geraldine had told her a few minutes earlier that it had originally been called “Hand in Hand” and had been written to commemorate the meetings of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Franz Josef. The name had been changed by Strauss’s publisher in an effort to not offend the delicate egos of the powerful men involved, Geraldine had added, concluding with, “which is a shame, as ‘Hand in Hand’ is a far more emotive title, don’t you think?”

  “I just, uh, think—” Petra stopped. Think before you speak. Speech is an act for other people! Geraldine waited as Petra got herself together—she never rushed to fill in a silence. Finally, Petra said, very distinctly and formally, declaiming, “You’re very good. But it’s disappointing to think that’s how I look on the outside. I don’t think I’d like to have a painting to commemorate that.”

  I like to have an idea of what the character is like before I begin, and where I’d like the character to end when I stop, but not a
tremendously precise map of how to get from one to the other. As long as I have that big-picture arc in the back of my head as I’m drafting scenes, I can be open to opportunities to show lurching steps forward. This moment is one of those that I didn’t have planned but fell into the manuscript quite naturally as I was writing. Petra has not embraced herself, but she’s found a way, at least, to trick herself into speaking her own words with some confidence for once.

  Commemorate was a word that had been on Petra’s mind since Geraldine had explained the Emperor Waltz. A wonderful word, too grand for everyday conversation. Petra had always been annoyed by how so much of the beautiful language she recited didn’t seem to be … right … in normal life. Sometimes one of those words would sneak out in school, and the back of the classroom would laugh, and Petra would go red. Of course, with Geraldine, nothing seemed quite like normal life. It seemed correct to ask to not have Petra’s hideous teen years commemorated.

  One of the themes I wanted to highlight in this story was the idea of teens feeling miserably born into a wrong era. I was one of those teens, and I have since met many, many more—possibly it’s a common thing. Certainly feeling like an outsider is common enough. Anyway, growing up, for me, meant learning that there was a bigger world than the one I currently occupied, and that if I wanted to live in a world that I liked, it was perfectly possible that it already existed somewhere if I went looking. It was important to me that Petra find other people who also loved language like she did. I reckon it’s possible to write a story that doesn’t have a seed of personal importance to it, but I don’t suppose I want to find out.

  “Very succinctly put,” Geraldine allowed. “But this is not how you look all the time. It’s merely how you looked when you were sitting in that moment. How about you pose again, and this time you sit as you’d like to look in the painting? If you still don’t like it, we can always call it off then.”

  Petra hesitated.

  “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  “It’s just that I don’t think it will make a difference. I’m—I’m a lump,” Petra confessed.

  “You are sitting lumpily,” Geraldine insisted. “No one is a lump.”

  They held eyes for a moment. Finally, Petra let out a breath. “All right, I’ll try.”

  So she sat on the couch again, and this time she looked at Geraldine’s posture. Shoulders back and chin up, of course. But there was more, too. Knees together? A slight tilt to the head? It all felt ridiculous and undefinable. Her ears wouldn’t stop burning.

  “I feel stupid,” she confessed, even though stupid wasn’t a Geraldine word. “Foolish. I feel like I’m playing a part.”

  Geraldine inclined her head gently. She was still sitting perfectly straight, and that tilt of her chin was entirely natural and beautiful and ageless. Petra, still a ramrod, felt she couldn’t move any of her body or she’d immediately turn back into the lump she’d just seen drawn on Geraldine’s paper.

  “Just recite,” Geraldine said. “Fetch one of your books and read me something. You have beautiful posture when you perform.”

  Which was how Petra ended up reading the entirety of Ezra Pound’s “First Canto” (he was also a singularly unpleasant man) while Geraldine sketched her with charcoal.

  Geraldine turned the paper for inspection. Both of them smiled at it.

  “I look like someone out of the nineteenth century,” Petra said.

  “You look,” Geraldine said, “ladylike.”

  • • •

  There were only three shallow steps into Petra’s family’s home. It took no effort at all to climb them. She could, in fact, stretch and take all three stairs at once without falling. They were nothing like the stairs into Geraldine’s apartment. They were a real-life sort of word—“consider”—versus a Geraldine sort of word—“prevaricate.”

  • • •

  “I believe the underpainting is finally done,” Geraldine said. She had spent several sessions painting a blocky version of Petra in improbable colors. “I don’t like underpainting. It’s so very messy. Do you have any Dickinson? She’s pleasant.”

  Petra was getting good at sitting for her portrait; ever since the day of the sketches, they’d spent half an hour of their time together with Petra frozen like a statue and Geraldine squinting at her to do something she called “establishing values.” Now, in response to Geraldine’s question, Petra moved only her mouth, not her body. “Do you think she’s pleasant? She seems so dire to me.”

  “I like her,” Geraldine said. “She was a shut-in and never left her house. Do you have ‘A great Hope fell’? I like that one quite a bit.”

  She plunged her brush into turpentine; Petra took this as a cue that she could move.

  “I don’t think so,” Petra replied, admitting, “I don’t know if I’d even know, because my index isn’t great on this book. Is that the first line of the poem? She didn’t use titles, did she?”

  “No, sometimes, if you can’t find a prettier way to say something, it’s better to just not name it at all.” Geraldine had been gesturing to herself, but now she pointed to a ferny area. “If you take a look in that room, there’s a small green shelf with a small green book on it, and the book is a volume of Dickinson. If you’re of the mind, you could fetch it back while I clean these brushes.”

  I often get asked if I intentionally place morals into my stories. Not really. I don’t think anyone wants to be preached at. But still, I know that I’m saying things with my stories: broad concepts, broad themes, broad assumptions. For instance, I know that with this story I’m saying that I think that being painfully shy is something to be overcome, not something to embrace. I’m saying that on purpose, but sometimes I find that my rough drafts are saying something by accident: scenes or character moments are arranged in such a way that I seem to imply that ambition is evil, or that being brave means being a bad friend, etc. At the end of the day, I always try to make sure my stories are only saying things I mean. I mention it here because I had to revamp a line of Geraldine’s conversation in this section. She originally said “Some things are better not named,” which is in direct conflict with what she said earlier to Petra, about just acknowledging Petra’s blushing with pretty words. Is that what I want to say—that Geraldine is living her life by not acknowledging what she is? No. What I want to say is that Geraldine is repurposing her identity—she knows what she is, but she embroiders and beautifies it into something more elegant than the raw truth.

  Part of Petra thrilled; she was intensely curious about what the rest of the apartment contained. So much of it remained hidden to her still, coyly peeking from behind screens or shrinking back behind man-sized palm trees. To be granted permission to pry seemed like a gift, and who didn’t like presents?

  Following Geraldine’s directions, she found herself in an area so convincingly walled by great leafy plants that it was hard to believe there really weren’t walls behind them. The furniture struck Petra as … colonial. Not in the American sense, but in the British sense. Fancy old British tents set up in the jungles of a far-flung empire. It contained an old trunk with a beautiful latch that begged her to open it (she did not) and a faded teal chair that looked like it might be easily folded (she did not) and a bookshelf that only came up to her knees. Everything was either Lilliputian or collapsible, the better to be conveniently taken to the next small country to be colonized. Petra had to kneel on the Persian rug and turn her head sideways in order to find the Dickinson on the bottom shelf.

  Possibly Geraldine’s accent, Petra thought, was also colonial. It wasn’t English, that was for certain. But she was hard pressed to further identify it. Perhaps it was English by way of a non-English-speaking colony.

  As Petra stood, her eye was caught by a cage. It was in the next “room” over, behind the ferns, barely visible in the dying afternoon light and the shadows of plants. It was as tall as Petra and only a meter or so wide, with wrought iron bars spaced as wide as her hand. It mus
t have been decorative, she thought, because an animal large enough to not be able to slip through those bars would have been too long to fit inside it. Petra stepped closer, craning her neck. If she didn’t leave the ferned room she was in now, it wasn’t trespassing; it wasn’t rude. The bars were dinged and worn. This close she could see the door—thin and nearly as tall as the door to the apartment—and see that it had a newish padlock hanging open on the latch. There was something dark stained across the bars of the door.

  Blood, thought Petra dramatically, since furniture polish seemed unlikely. Possibly it was paint, or rust. But dramatic Petra preferred the idea of blood.

  “Did you find it?” Geraldine called.

  Petra snatched the Dickinson book closer to herself. “Yes!”

  She returned to the painting area, guilty about her prying eyes, and allowed Geraldine to page to the Dickinson poem she wanted Petra to read.

  It was dire, as all of Emily Dickinson’s poems were.

  A great Hope fell

  You heard no noise

  The Ruin was within

  Oh cunning wreck that told no tale

  And let no Witness in

  The mind was built for mighty Freight

  For dread occasion planned

  How often foundering at Sea

  Ostensibly, on Land

  A not admitting of the wound

  Until it grew so wide

  That all my Life had entered it

  And there were troughs beside

  A closing of the simple lid

  That opened to the sun

  Until the tender Carpenter

  Perpetual nail it down—

  But Geraldine sat with her eyes half-closed and her mouth turned up, like a cat in the sun, listening to the words with evident enjoyment.

  “Dire,” Petra concluded at the end.