French Braid(59)

“It does have its pleasures,” Mercy said. “And will you have children?”

“Well…”

She had kind of assumed she’d have children, actually. But she could see this might complicate things.

“Sometimes people live first one life and then another life,” her grandmother said. “First a family life and then later a whole other kind of life. That’s what I’m doing.”

And she flashed Candle a tucked smile, an almost mischievous smile, and went back to humming along with the radio. “Moon River,” she was humming, while she worked a crossword puzzle in The Baltimore Sun.

Candle painted pictures of a couple dancing together, and a boy running down a hill, and a little girl walking alone in the woods—all completely made up. Once she tried painting her grandmother, but real things were less fun, she decided. With real things you were confined to the facts—the finicky details of hair straggling out of a bun and wrinkles in the bend of a neck. An impossibly tall tree looming above a tiny lone child in the woods had more pizzazz, somehow.

When she was satisfied with a painting, she would offer to show it to Mercy. “Want to see how it turned out?” she would ask, and Mercy would say, “Why, of course,” and hop off the daybed and come look. She grew very serious when she was examining a painting. She studied it first from close up and then from several steps away; she cocked her head; she narrowed her eyes. Then she would say, “I like it.” Period. Would she have said if she didn’t like it? Candle thought she probably would have, even though that never happened.

One time Mercy greeted her at the door with “I’ve just been given a commission, so today we’ll both be working,” and then she returned to her own painting. Not at the kitchen table, though; she had moved her materials to the counter. So Candle sensed she shouldn’t peek, and she unpacked her supplies quietly and resumed work on a picture she had started the week before. The only sounds in the studio were the whiskery strokes of their two brushes. She’d grown used to hearing old-people music, but evidently Mercy preferred to work in silence, and Candle saw her point. Silence made what she was doing seem more important, somehow—more purposeful, almost like praying. There wasn’t a single word spoken till her mother arrived to pick her up an hour and a half later.



* * *



—

For her sister’s wedding, Candle and her cousin Serena were bridesmaids while the maid-of-honor position went to Mary Ann Locke, Robby’s old college roommate. This was fine with Candle; she was so much younger than Robby that they’d never been that close. Nor did she feel close to Serena, for that matter, since these days they hardly saw each other. All they’d ever had in common, anyhow, was that they were their family’s “littlies,” as opposed to the “biggies.”

“What happened there?” Candle had once asked her mother. “Aunt Lily heard I’d been born and decided to have another one too, just to keep you company?”

“Ha!” her mother had said. “You think that sister of mine ever decided about a pregnancy?”

Because not only were there littlies and biggies in this family; there were the sensible ones and the wacko ones. Or—as Aunt Lily put it—the difficult ones and the easy ones. According to Aunt Lily, Alice was a difficult one while Lily herself was easy, meaning carefree and relaxed.

The good ones versus the bad ones, was what they were secretly talking about. By which each of them meant something different.

Candle’s grandmother was a bad one, in Candle’s mother’s opinion. “Oh, not that I don’t love her dearly,” she said. “But face it: the woman should not have had children.” Then she went into the whole long spiel about how their dining-room table had always been covered with paint tubes and brushes; how they’d never once in their lives been fed a balanced meal; how at one point, hearing that ordinary citizens might someday be invited to set up a colony on Mars, Mercy had said, “I would go! I would go in a flash!”

“And this was back in the sixties!” Alice said. “This was when she still had one of her children at home!”

“She meant after all her children were gone,” Candle explained patiently. “When she was leading her next life.”

“But even to think of it! Even to have it cross her mind!”

“Well, it’s not as if she was actually invited, for gosh sakes, so why make such a fuss about it?”

“No need to take that tone with me, missy,” Alice said.

Hard to believe that Candle’s mother considered herself to be one of the sensible ones.

It was at Robby’s wedding reception that Mercy asked Candle if she’d like to go to New York with her. “To where?” Candle said. This was coming out of the blue.

“My old friend Magda Schwartz is having an art show,” Mercy said. “I’m thinking of going to see it.” She and Pop-Pop were on the point of leaving the reception; they’d already said their goodbyes, but now she told Candle, “If you’re interested, I’ll phone your mother tomorrow and see if she’ll let you come along.”

“Yes! I’m interested!” Candle said.

She had never been to New York. It was a straight-shot three-hour train ride but she’d never once set foot there.