French Braid(58)

And then she crossed the room to the daybed, where she settled herself with a flounce of her shirttails and reached over to turn on the radio. WLIF, it sounded like; an old-people station. From behind one of the couch cushions—the big one, which was really a bed pillow—she pulled a library book covered in clear plastic and opened it and started reading, meanwhile wagging her feet back and forth in time to something waltzy on the radio. She was small enough that her feet stuck straight out in front of her on the daybed, like a child’s.

At first Candle felt lost. Shouldn’t she be getting some sort of instruction, here? But eventually she drew a few tentative lines to indicate the three objects, and then she picked up a tube of yellow paint and squirted a blob onto the palette. It was just as well, she realized, that she’d been left to her own devices, with no one to wince and suck in a sharp breath if she happened to do something wrong.

She tried a round-tipped brush and then a slant-edged one, dipping each first in the jar of water next to Mercy’s vase of brushes. She tried mixing a little white with the yellow to make it paler; she was working on the apple juice. Mercy was humming along with the radio now, but only off and on—a measure or two under her breath as she turned a page. Candle’s mother claimed Mercy read junk. English whodunnits, mostly, she said. “I personally,” she often added, “have never been able to care who done it, myself.”

Candle started in on the dish mop. She liked painting the gray strands of string. She learned to use less water for adding fine black lines on top of the gray, and much more water for painting the swash of gray Formica tabletop.

By the time Alice knocked on the studio door, Candle was stippling in the pores of the cantaloupe and Mercy had tucked her book away and was fixing iced tea at the kitchen counter. Not once had she so much as glanced at Candle’s painting. She went to open the door for Alice, who instantly asked, “How’d it go?” as if she’d spent this whole time in suspense.

“Hmm? Oh, fine,” Mercy said, and she crossed to turn off the radio. “Want a glass of iced tea?”

“No, we really should be—what do you think of acrylics, sweetie?” Alice asked Candle.

“I like them,” Candle said.

“Really? Should we get some?”

“Yes!”

“Mom? What do you think?”

“Why not?” Mercy said airily.

“Okay, well…and what do you think about her work? Do you think it’s worth her while to pursue this?”

“I like her work very much,” Mercy said, “but only she can tell you whether it’s worth her while.”

Alice turned toward Candle expectantly, but Candle chose not to say a word, for some reason. She just sent her mother a blank smile and then got very busy gathering her brushes together to wash them.



* * *



—

She did get her own set of acrylics, along with a selection of brushes and a pad of the woven paper. But at home, it turned out, she couldn’t paint in private. She had to work in the kitchen because that was the only room without a carpet, and it was ridiculous how often her mother kept passing through and peering over Candle’s shoulder but ostentatiously making no comment, which seemed a comment in itself. “Things went better at Grandmom’s,” Candle told her. What she meant was, it was better not to have anyone breathing down her neck; but Alice, misunderstanding, said, “Shall I phone your Grandmom and ask if you could come back, then, and she can give you some helpful tips?” And Candle didn’t correct her.

So she started painting in Mercy’s studio once a week or so. It wasn’t at a certain set time, although Alice would have preferred that. “I said to her,” Alice told Candle, “I said, ‘If we could make it, like, every Monday afternoon…’ but your grandmom said, ‘I can’t always be sure if my Mondays will be free or not.’ I said, ‘Well, is there a day you can be sure about?’ and she said, ‘Not really.’ What does the woman do with herself? I’d like to know. What could possibly keep her so busy? It’s not as if she has scads of customers beating down her door.”

So Candle went to the studio on a Monday one week but a Thursday the next, and so on. And then the new school year began and weekdays were no longer an option; Saturdays and Sundays were her only free times. Alice said, “Well, you know what your grandmom will say to that. ‘Oh, I just can’t commit,’ she’ll say.” And here Alice used an old-lady voice, even though Mercy’s voice wasn’t old-lady at all.

But this time Candle herself called Mercy, and things went more smoothly. “Poor you,” was all Mercy said. “Back to the grindstone! Yes, fine; either day, provided it’s afternoon.”

This was because Mercy liked to sleep late, Candle discovered. It wasn’t that customers were beating down her door in the mornings, or even that she necessarily painted then. It was just that she lived this lackadaisical, unplanned life, this suit-herself life that Candle would have loved to live. “Grandmom,” she said on one of their afternoons, “when I grow up I’m going to follow your schedule exactly.”

“What schedule would that be?” Mercy asked, looking amused.

“Well, your nonschedule, I mean. I’m going to do what I want when I want to, and nobody’s going to order me around.”