Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(43)

I knew John believed in me the way I’d once believed in myself, but it felt too late somehow; I just couldn’t rally any more optimism around the prints, or, in fact, much of anything. “Those prints cost eight hundred pounds apiece to make,” I said dismissively. There was no way I could afford three more.

Instead, I was working on another video installation, panning my camera across still images of landscapes I’d found in books. Edited together, the effect was that of the view from a train window, a dizzying assemblage of nameless places passing by—only I was finding that gaining perspective on false constructs was a far simpler feat in art than in life itself. In life, the false constructs themselves tended to take over.

“Anyway, I’m going home for Christmas,” I told John. A kind of masochistic curiosity had seized me, and I’d booked an airline ticket. “Maybe I’ll make those prints after I get back,” I added, though I knew I wouldn’t. I could feel something closing off inside of me, the drive to make pieces waning, and well before I’d gotten the recognition I’d so badly wanted. Being in favor had always been my mode of survival and, later, the brittle foundation on which I’d built my creative life, my independence. Now, though, all that had changed. I’d need to find something else to lean on.





Dispossessed





LONDON, 1996

(by Tanja Merz)





Grosse Pointe, 1996


My first night back in Michigan the sky dumped a magical foot of snow, and the morning cast a pale-blue light across my room. Hearing my grandmother’s voice downstairs in the kitchen, and catching the scent of coffee, I sank back into the pillow supremely comforted.

I’d been woken by the shrill voice of a neighbor dropping off a present at my mother’s door. “It’s supposed to snow three feet before Christmas,” the voice had caterwauled. “Three feet!”

And then, “Gailie, close the door,” my grandmother had shouted from the kitchen, silencing the voice. “I’m cold!”

It was my grandmother I had missed most of all during my year and a half abroad. Where my parents had fallen short when we were young, my grandmother had always been ready to step in, nurturing us, sometimes even spoiling us.

Smiling at her high-pitched laughter down in the kitchen, I quickly dressed, brushed my hair, and went down to greet her, taking in the French perfume, even from the top of the stairs, that always marked her—Joy by Jean Patou.

Passing through the dining room, I could see her sitting at the kitchen table in the next room, regal in her puffed mink hat and mink coat, which she had draped over herself like a blanket. She always complained of the cold in my mother’s house. Her wispy white hair had been styled, perhaps just the day before, at the hairdresser she liked here. At eighty-nine years old, her still-beautiful face was free of wrinkles, thanks to her daily masks of drugstore cold cream.

“There’s Frances,” said my mother with a big smile, as if introducing me on one of those festive afternoon talk shows.

“Hi, Granny,” I said excitedly, bending down to kiss her.

My grandmother looked up, her soft brown eyes bright and expectant, but her smile quickly faded. “What have you done with your hair?” she cried. She turned back to my mother for an explanation.

My mother said nothing.

“It’s short, Granny. That’s all.” I knew she was prone to outbursts of scathing criticism, but thus far I had avoided being a target myself. I turned on the kettle for tea, trying to ignore her condemning gaze.

“But it’s just . . . awful,” my grandmother said. “Look at you! You used to be so beautiful, Franny, and now . . . now you’re just a plain Jane!”

The last time she’d seen me I’d been a long-haired golden blonde, it was true, but in London I had wanted to shed my past, to create myself anew, my hair getting shorter and blonder with each salon visit. I poured the hot water into the mug and dropped in a tea bag. “Granny, come on, it’s just that you haven’t seen me in a while. I’ve changed.”

My grandmother brightened. “Well, have you met anyone nice over there?”

I knew what “nice” meant. Marriageable. At thirty, I’d been over the hill in her book for a good five years now. “I’ve met a lot of nice people,” I said with a smile, dodging the question. I certainly wasn’t going to launch into a discourse on the British sensibility of unrequited love.

“And what about the Fulbright crowd?”

“I’m not going out with any of them, if that’s what you mean.”

She turned to my mother. “I just don’t understand this at all,” my grandmother said. “She had the world by the tail!”

“Take it easy, Mother,” said my mother. “Frances is doing all right.”

“All right?” I protested.

“What kind of art does she do, anyway?” asked my grandmother.

“I don’t know, Mother. Something with video.”

My own mother didn’t know how to describe my art, but I couldn’t blame her—I had trouble putting it into layman’s terms myself. I left the room, carrying my steaming mug of tea with me. “Granny, look, I don’t expect you to understand my choices,” I said from the doorway. “But I hope you’ll at least try to respect them. Okay?”