Landscapes on Cardboard
There’s a painting over the couch. Then, there isn’t. It disappears. Returns, changed. A sailboat floats in a sea of yellow blue. A sunrise on the water. Two weeks later, a landscape, with round trees and people so small I have to squint to see them.
Mom stands on the couch in socks, her feet disappearing into the cushions. She tilts the painting. Stands back to check, is it straight? Did she ask me, as I sat there watching?
Some paintings appear more than once. The sailboat, with its thin lines and angles. Like something my four-year old hand might have drawn with a pencil. There are times with no painting. Just one thin nail midway across the blank wall. Where a picture could appear.
They come and go silently. I can’t count on the paintings. So I don’t get attached.
* * *
Berries stain the ground underneath the purple mulberry, a blotchy circle spreading like a bruise. I help, stomping each fallen berry as I circumnavigate the tree. Stomping, skipping, running until my feet turn purple and the ground looks like cheesecloth Mom has strained raspberries through for jelly. No one picks the mulberries.
Its summer and I’m not required to wear shoes. I bear down on the fruit with my whole foot, pulping it between my toes. Then skip over the driveway to the sprinkler-damp grass where I wipe my feet on the cool softness.
I trust the ground.
And the grass, topped in dandelions and bees. I bring the dandelions inside. Pull their stems apart and put them in water, watch the ends curl up.
I step on the bees.
I meet different bees throughout the summer. When I feel the stab, I drop to the grass and lift my foot to my face. The stinger pulses in time with the spreading ache. The bee is someplace else, dying. Dad told me. I remember that, as I watch one small bee part vanish into the pad of my foot.
* * *
The paintings disappeared every few weeks. When they were due.
At the downtown library Mom led me past a room filled with newspapers and old men in hats like Grandpa’s.
She stopped at a tall rack. She flipped slowly. Considered a reproduction on cardboard. A landscape, probably. Maybe a ballerina. I watched her decide that this one, or another, was right, or not right. For now.
Back at home Mom stood on the couch in her socks. Leaning back to check, is it straight?
Was she looking for a painting that would bring something new to this room? Or carry a feeling she wanted into our house? I wonder if I made all of this up.
* * *
Sometimes, when I have a stinger, I tell Mom. She mixes baking soda and water. She spreads it on with a spoon and tells me to keep my foot off the furniture. The paste feels cool and heavy. When my foot starts itching, it’s done. I hop to the porch, leaving paste crumbles on the carpet. Outside, I stretch my toes and the crust cracks off in chunks. I run to the grass.
I trust the ground, with its dandelions and bees. They are foreseeable, feelable.
Mom checks my feet before I get into bed, to make sure they are clean.
* * *
I can no longer ask Mom about the paintings, she’s been dead for a long time. I could ask Dad. Fearing a trap, he’ll want to know why I care. He’ll forget what he might have known. As if remembering something means taking sides.
“I don’t remember,” he’ll say.
Dad grew up in this house of rotating paintings. There may have been leftover ghosts from his own childhood. Telling him to start the coal heater or help his sister get dinner. Whispering to him under the big table where he’s still hiding, playing with fabric scraps. Watching his mother’s legs as she sews dress after dress for other ladies.
The ghosts are moving scraps around. Confusing Dad with different sets of things to remember.
I could call the downtown library and ask if anyone has been there long enough to remember a department, in the old building, off the Madison Street entrance, filled with sailboats and ballerinas on cardboard. And old men reading newspapers. Or not.
A painting disappearing, a new one arriving. That’s what makes sense to me. Just when I was feeling good about the sailboats, they left. That feels true.
Recovering details is irrelevant. Dad is off the hook.
Kirsten Voris is a writer and translator with words in Sonora Review, Superstition Review, Hippocampus, Knicknackery and other fine places. She is the co-creator of the Trauma Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids and is hard at work on a magic and mentalism-filled memoir.