Pilgrimage
Even with Meg’s steady income from Mark Frank, money was still tight. Reluctantly, she had cut back on her habit of giving a daily dollar to the Shakespeare Lady, a tragic and brilliant homeless woman who inhabited various doorways on Broadway. She had all of Shakespeare in her head, and insisted on reciting a sonnet in exchange for handouts from Yale students. When Meg lived on campus, she would often smuggle food from the dining hall for the Shakespeare Lady, and the previous winter, on a dreadfully bitter day, she had given her the really nice leather gloves her parents had sent the week before.
Meg and Joanna were in agreement that under no circumstances should Amy be allowed any sort of job—they wanted her to devote herself entirely to her schoolwork. Let no one ever be able to say that they hadn’t managed well enough on their own or that their education had suffered.
Despite all of their budgeting and the fruit of their hard work, after the first cold weather utility bill coincided with the bookstore bill for Meg’s course books, they realized they just weren’t going to make it unless each of them dipped into savings. They simply had to do it, though it was a violation of their long-term plans, made in a family meeting three years ago. But wasn’t this
whole situation a huge violation of their long-term plans? They hoped they wouldn’t need to take very much, just enough to get by. This was money that had been put aside over the years with the intention that it would pay for something really major someday after they had each completed college (which their parents had always told them would be completely funded, but now each of the three sisters was unsure in her own way if she could accept tuition money from them, though Meg was grateful that her Yale tuition had already been paid for both semesters, postponing that issue for many months). The really major something might be an amazing trip for the three of them together, perhaps, or cars, maybe even down payments on houses. This money had always been seen as something reserved for the start of their grownup lives. The Green sisters had always looked forward to their independence, but had never imagined it would come so precipitously.
The bank accounts had been opened when the girls were in elementary school. Lou and Janet had always emphasized that these accounts were the girls’ own, to do with as they saw fit, though of course there was a great deal of moralizing talk about the virtue of saving the money for the future rather than squandering it on ephemeral amusements. At first there had been regular augmentations by generous birthday checks from their two grandparents. Then there had been small grandparental bequests.
Though they would have been shocked had anyone called them rich, the Green sisters had always lived very comfortably. They knew that Great-aunt Hodgson had left their father her estate, which was presumably a lot of money. Although finances had always been a serious subject, in their family it had been neither taboo nor a source of any particular worry. This had been fine while they were one big happy family. Each of them had assumed that the day would come when they would be on their own, but true financial independence had always been a vague concept for some future moment. Now Meg especially began to realize how naive and ignorant they had been.
The three Green sisters had also always been pretty conscientious about saving any money they earned baby-sitting or on summer jobs. Added to those funds were the odd occasional windfalls or surprises (as for instance when Meg won five hundred dollars as part of an award for a philosophy essay on Prize Day just before her graduation from Warren, when she hadn’t even known her essay was under consideration). Consequently, that autumn, each of them had a bank balance of something close to twenty thousand dollars.
They took the train to New York on the last Saturday before Christmas. It was a sharply beautiful day. The passing scenery, even ugly industrial yards, seemed possessed of some special clarity, as if rinsed of all summer haze and vagueness.
“You are absolutely positive that our bank is open on Saturday?” Amy asked for the tenth time since they had boarded the train. She closed her sketch pad and chewed absentmindedly on the eraser of her pencil, as was her habit.
“No, I’m sure it’s closed. That’s why we’re here, idiot, going into the city for no reason whatsoever, so we can stand at the locked door and beat on it until mounted policemen come galloping up to chase us away,” Joanna said crossly from behind her newspaper. (It was her newspaper now, though it had originally belonged to a businessman who left it on his seat when he got off the train in Stamford.)
“They’re open until one on Saturdays. I told you already, sweetie. I called to make sure, too,” Meg said more temperately from behind her history text, which she had been completely unable to read since boarding the train, though she had held the book open to the first page of her Crusades reading assignment for over an hour now, as if somehow the meaning of the words would flow directly to her brain through osmosis if she just stared at the pages long enough.
The train stopped at 125th Street and a few people got out.
The door closed and a conductor came through their car announcing the final stop in a matter of minutes.
“What time is it?” Amy asked for only the sixth occasion since they had left the apartment to walk to Union Station and the third time since they had sat down on the train.
“It’s eleven-ten.” Meg glanced at her watch and answered without looking up.
“Hey, Ames, we need to talk,” Joanna said, bundling and thrusting the newspaper under her seat. It was The Wall Street Journal. Other than a pretty good movie review, it had turned out to be incredibly boring reading and, to top it off, very conservative. No wonder it had never been a Green family staple. And what was up with those drawings of people on the front page, as if The Wall Street Journal did not want to admit that photography had been invented?
“What, my dear sister,” Joanna asked, “is your problem with the time thing? You are wearing a watch, aren’t you? What time does your watch say?”
“Eleven-ten. I just don’t trust it, I mean, what if it’s not running right?”
“I think you can trust it,” Joanna said. “Your watch is fine—look, same as mine. Same as Meg’s. It’s got to be more than coincidence, don’t you think? Now it’s eleven-eleven. That must be a lucky time. When you were little, you would make a wish.”
“What did zero say to eight?” Amy asked abruptly.
“What?”
“Your belt’s too tight!” Amy chirped with a triumphant grin. Joanna and Meg groaned appropriately. “So where does seaweed look for a job?” Amy asked, unwilling to relinquish her hold on them.
“Where?” Meg said wearily.
“In the kelp-wanted ads!”
One moment Amy seemed as mature and composed as anyone in her classes, but then at the next moment she was a little kid, Meg reminded herself, for whom this all had to be harder than
it was for her and Joanna. The train seemed to accelerate as it whisked them out of the sunlight just then, entering the blackness of the Park Avenue Tunnel.
“Did you know bone china is made with real bones? Isn’t that gross?” Amy asked no one in particular and neither of her sisters replied.
“What if the bank won’t give us our money?” Amy asked as she and Joanna stood up to put on their jackets. They rocked with the motion of the train as it hurtled the final miles to Grand Central Station. People around them were stirring, gathering their things, and could probably hear the conversation, though nobody looked very interested. It was a Christmas-shopping crowd for the most part.
“It’s our money. They have to,” said Joanna.
“What if they tell Janet and Lou?”
“What if they do?” Joanna nudged Meg, who was still reading in her seat across from them; she was the only member of the family who could tolerate riding backward on a train. “Hey, we’re almost there, Meg.” She wanted Meg to join in reassuring Amy, and she wanted reassurance for herself as well. This was the first time they had left New Haven. It felt weird to be going into New York as visitors, just for the day.
Amy plucked at Meg’s sleeve, trying to get her attention.
“Don’t pizzicato me,” Meg said, swatting her hand away, still reading. The door at the end of their car banged open and the conductor walked through again, a draft of dank New York underground air wafting after him. Joanna had a sudden intense stab of something like homesickness that she hadn’t felt until this moment. She let her leg jostle against Meg again.
“What?” Meg begrudgingly looked up from her book.
“Amy has a question.”
“Like that’s an amazing event?”
“What if they won’t give us our money, and what if they tell Janet and Lou?” Amy repeated.
Meg shrugged. “Why would they bother? Anyway, it’s not really their business, is it?”
“How do you want it?” the teller asked Meg, stamping the withdrawal slip. They hadn’t thought about this. They had worried about all sorts of other details and yet in the end everything went perfectly smoothly. They had anticipated all sorts of eventualities during the ride on the Broadway bus that took them uptown to their bank. What if someone saw them and reported back to Janet and Lou? What if they actually ran into their mother or father, or any number of other people in the neighborhood who knew them? Or friends from school?
Joanna and Amy had kept up with a few friends through e-mail and a little bit on the telephone, but neither of them was ready to see anyone from their old life, especially not on this Saturday, on this singular money mission. But those friendships were fading away rapidly. It was just all so embarrassing and complicated, almost beyond explanation. Being cut off from everybody from their old life seemed an inevitable and almost natural part of the cataclysmic shift their lives had undergone. The few friends with whom Joanna and Amy had promised to stay in touch had not really understood what they were doing, leaving home and moving in with Meg. And now that they were actually doing it, not just making angry noises about why they should leave, their new life would be all the more inexplicable.
Amy was well liked at school, but like Joanna, she had always felt so close to her sisters that she hadn’t needed to make very many of those intense connections that most girls seek. The only close friend she had ever had, Emma Corrigan, had moved to Los Angeles with her mother at the end of the school year the previous spring, and Amy had felt the loss acutely all summer. No matter what anybody promised, she knew that they would never again have the same closeness, living so many miles apart. She and
Emma had gone to camp together for five summers, and Amy once spent a month with the Corrigans at their house in Sag Harbor. But that was before Emma’s parents divorced.
Joanna had always been more of a loner, content to be well liked during school hours. The people she missed most acutely were certain Warren teachers. Mrs. Possick, the English teacher who told her she had the makings of a writer. Mr. Ryden, the British history teacher for whom she had written a huge extracredit paper on Benedict Arnold. And she had been supposed to be managing editor of the Warren Widgeon this year. The adviser to the school’s creative writing magazine, Mrs. Altschul, must have felt very let down. She had lobbied hard to get Joanna appointed to the position although it went against tradition to give it to a junior. And she had hugged Joanna so warmly on the last day of classes in June, telling her she was looking forward to working with her on the Widgeon in the fall.
It must have seemed to everyone at Warren as if Joanna and Amy had gone on an unexpected long trip, or taken a semester abroad. One of the last things Janet had said to Joanna was something to the effect that their places were being held at Warren, a school used to families who took semesters or entire years out of the country here and there. There had been a few sporadic communications with classmates, e-mails from the kind of girls who write to everybody they know, but after the beginning of the Warren school year, with everyone caught up with classes and sports and all the other preoccupations of school life, Amy and Joanna had simply slipped out of contact with every one of their New York acquaintances.
“We’ll be those girls in the class pictures where nobody can remember their names,” Amy said bitterly. “Look, that kid, I remember her, she was the girl who played the flute that time at the Thanksgiving assembly. What was her story? She and her older
sister ran away from their parents and disappeared? I wonder whatever happened to them?”
“Oh, stop it,” Joanna said. “More likely they’ll look at their old class pictures someday and say, ‘Why, look at that, Amy Green was in my class. I wish I had gotten to know her better before she left. And now she’s so famous and successful, she would probably never remember me.’”
“Damn straight.” Amy grinned gratefully at Joanna.
Reader’s note: This chapter is amazing. It’s completely accurate. I love it. Why can’t the whole novel be like this chapter? It would be totally successful. AG
Reader’s note: What you’re calling accuracy is not necessarily a desirable feature. Some people might call it laziness. Is it really a novel when she isn’t making up fiction at all, but is instead just reporting? I agree, this chapter is pleasant, so far, but I don’t believe the accuracy is the element that makes it so. MG
Author’s note: Amy—I’m glad you like it. Meg—Feel free to mention any parts of the manuscript you do like.
Although it was located so close to the apartment, they had elected to go to their own familiar bank branch where they maintained their accounts, out of a theory that they were known there, so large withdrawals were much less likely to be questioned. It felt unreal, like a dream, when they actually pushed their way through the heavy revolving door to the imposing bank lobby.
The bank in New Haven where Meg had her student account was dingy and plain, with a low ceiling and chipped fake walnutgrained Formica counters. It was situated just beside a communitycenter soup kitchen, and some of the people on the long lines at the bank looked as poor as the unfortunates who lined up waiting for the door to the soup kitchen to open at noon.
Joanna was struck for the first time by the beauty and elegance of this New York institution, with its soaring vaulted ceiling and ornate granite columns. Suddenly she understood for the first time why Lou would often launch into a horribly tuneless “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls” when she was little and she would tag along when he did neighborhood errands. There had been an old-fashioned mechanical coin-counting machine at one time. Joanna recalled the sound it made counting the pennies from their big penny jar which they would bring in with great ceremony when it got full. She looked for it, but it wasn’t there anymore, and in its place was a cluster of ATMs.
Cash? Large bills? The teller was growing impatient. How else would she get her money? Surely not traveler’s checks. But cash? Meg looked at Joanna, and Joanna shrugged. They hadn’t thought this through. Would so much cash be safe? A check? Yes, yes, a check, Meg agreed. Perfect. A bank check, then, was made out to Margaret Charlotte Green for the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars. In turn, Joanna and Amy each withdrew the same amount from their accounts. Prudently, Joanna also asked for her money in the form of a bank check. But Amy wanted hers in cash, in fifties and twenties. Meg and Joanna couldn’t persuade her otherwise. With an important air, she took the thick sheaf of bills from the teller and stopped at a counter to organize it and tuck it away in her wallet. (She had a beautiful blue wallet of soft leather, one of last year’s birthday gifts from Janet and Lou.)
“Do you think so much cash is safe?” Meg asked in a confidential tone a while later, when they were eating lunch at their favorite neighborhood sushi bar on Amsterdam Avenue, a place they had missed terribly, though sushi was a costly luxury these days. “We never have this much cash.”
“This much cash. Dismiss crash. Isthmus bash. Christmas rash—” Amy started up.
“Oh, please,” Joanna muttered, snatching the last toro morsel away from Meg’s roving chopsticks. “Hieronymus Bosch.”
“That’s not close enough,” Amy said crossly at Joanna’s careless intrusion, which had spoiled the pattern. “Could we order one more dragon roll? I really miss dragon rolls. The ones in New Haven aren’t the same.”
“I’m just concerned about it, Ames,” Meg said carefully, guessing that her youngest sister was both proud to be able to make a monetary contribution to their little household and also a little drunk on the excitement of having so much of her own cash in her hands. She nibbled on some little bits of pickled ginger from her otherwise empty plate. “So let me know if you want me to hold on to it for you, or anything. And no, we’ve already spent a fortune and you couldn’t still be hungry.”
“You’re right, I am such a pig sometimes,” Amy admitted. “I guess I’m not really hungry anymore. Anyway, here’s a thousand dollars for the household,” she added with grandeur, extracting her wallet from her bag and proceeding to count out that amount on the tabletop. The waiter had been approaching them with a pot of steaming tea for refills, but at the sight of the money on the table he skittered away. Perhaps, Joanna thought, he was used to cash deals on his premises and knew to keep a discreet distance.
“That’s for our expenses for now, and I’ll keep the rest.” Amy pushed the money across the table and Meg took it and folded it compactly into an inner pocket of her knapsack. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. I know you think I’ll waste it but I won’t, I promise,” vowed Amy. “This way, I can buy little things I need without having to come to you every time.”
“Poverty enriches those who live above it,” Meg said in a mock-Janet voice, and Amy and Joanna pelted her with the balled-up drinking straw papers that littered the table.
“Seriously, you guys, aren’t you glad we did the work at the soup kitchen for Thanksgiving?” Amy asked. “Don’t you feel really good about it?”
“I do,” Joanna agreed, “though it made me so sad, especially those little kids. It also made me feel guilty for all the times we
don’t even think about people like that. You know, I see some of those people on Chapel Street almost every day. The guy who talked about chicken ghosts is always sitting out in front of Willoughby’s. And the Shakespeare Lady broke my heart. We should work at the soup kitchen every week.”
“You’re right, I know,” Meg sighed, “but I just don’t have the hours in the day. I am so tired after classes and then the work for Mark, especially when I’m with Alice and Wills. But maybe you and Amy could go some nights. We should find out their schedule.”
“How’s that going?” Joanna asked. “You never say much about it. What’s the work these days?”
“Oh, just a lot of different things getting his book ready for publication,” Meg replied vaguely. “And we’re working on a new project. Mark really liked my ‘Babbitt to Rabbit’ idea for a seminar he’s thinking of proposing.”
“When would he teach that? Isn’t he only here for the year?” Joanna asked.
“He’s thinking of extending his time at Yale,” Meg replied distractedly, busying herself with their check.
“What do you think they tell their friends?” Amy wondered as they waited for the waiter to come back with their change. Lunch had been expensive, Meg noted, trying not to flinch when she read their total, even though they had not ordered with their customary abandon. She felt bad about turning Amy down on the additional dragon rolls. How many times had they eaten here in the past, blithely paying with easy pocket money handed out by Janet and Lou? She was, she had to admit, so fond of luxury.
“Who?” Meg said blankly.
“I mean,” Amy continued, “do they lie about where we are and why? Do they just act like we’re not home for the moment? Or do they tell everyone what wonderful selfless and sensitive parents they are being, indulging us in our fanciful little adventure?”
“Oh. Does it matter?” Meg asked with some weariness.
“Not really, of course not,” Amy said. “But I mean, don’t you wonder? I think about it a lot. Like when I practice my flute—”
“Which you should do more often,” Meg interrupted.
“Anyway, I wonder if they care about whether or not I’m practicing, you know? Don’t you think about it?”
“No, I don’t think about it that way, actually,” Meg replied carefully. “But then I left home to go to college two years ago. I’m not especially out of position the way you two are.”
“Out of position,” Joanna mused. “That’s exactly right. That’s what it feels like. I mean, I love living with you and I think the apartment is fine, but I do sort of feel out of position, like in a field hockey game when you’re suddenly separated on the field from everyone else on your team and you have to figure out how to deal with it, you know?”
“Do you miss sports, Jo-Jo?” Meg asked suddenly. “God, I hadn’t even thought about that! Not just the Widgeon thing, but weren’t you supposed to be on the varsity team this season? You’re right wing, aren’t you? Oh, sweetie.”
“Isn’t that creepy old Kromesky from our building?” Amy said suddenly. “You know, Mr. no-neck science fiction writer guy?” It was. They sat in subdued silence until their erstwhile neighbor paid for his takeout order. He was never especially friendly to them when they weren’t with their parents, and would have no reason to say anything to Janet and Lou, even if he ran into them while leaving one of those literary deposits on their doormat. That reminded Meg, she told her sisters, about a conversation she had the previous week with a guy in her history section who was obsessed with science fiction. He had been totally impressed that she lived in the same building as Kromesky, who, he had told her, had a huge success with a horror novel that had been turned into a cult classic of a horror film twenty years before, the residuals for which were probably supporting him now. They watched Kromesky with sidelong interest as he left.
“Close call, you guys,” Amy said. “Let’s eighty-six this joint.”
“You’ve got that wrong,” Joanna told Amy when they were back in the weak afternoon sunshine of Amsterdam Avenue, headed for the subway. Although they had spoken of going to the Museum of Modern Art, the way they had so often on a Saturday afternoon, it seemed like a drag now, and would probably be crowded. They were all three of them suddenly anxious to get out of the city and head back to New Haven.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think that’s right. I mean, as an active verb. I think ‘eighty-six’ is when you’re thrown out of a place—you know, like you were drunk, so they’ve kicked you out—you’ve been ‘eightysixed, ’ and then if you’re banned you’ve been permanently ‘eightysixed’ from the place, and it’s also when they’ve run out of something, like ‘Eighty-six the tuna special.’” Joanna explained, with expertise only recently gleaned from Pearl, the waitress behind the counter at the Yankee Doodle, where she secretly repaired after school from time to time for a pig-in-a-blanket and a Coke before her Starbucks shift.
“It’s also what you say when you’re deleting some part of the order or some ingredient, like ‘eighty-six the mayo on the BLT,’” Meg chimed in. She, too, had spent time in the Yankee Doodle. She was particularly impressed when, in order to accommodate two people together, the waitress would command “Doodle Shift!” and everybody wolfing down lunch at the tiny counter would slide over one place to make room without missing a bite.
“Jeez,” Amy complained, “whatever, you guys. Go give a seminar on coffee shop lingo, why don’t you.”
“That’s a good thought. I like it. ‘Adam and Eve on a Raft: The Hermeneutics of the Coffee Shop in a Post-Chomsky World,’” mused Meg. “There’s a semester’s credit for an independent project right there. I bet I could find someone to supervise it, too.”
“When I was little I thought Janet knew someone named Herman Ootic,” Amy confessed.
“We know. You’ve mentioned him before. The question is, did
he drive to work in a semiotic? Oh my God, there’s Kromesky again,” Joanna exclaimed. “Isn’t he only supposed to come out at night? Why didn’t he just go home and eat his sushi? Is he just carrying it around? What is wrong with him? Quick, guys, let’s go in here, what is it, a gallery? Is the door unlocked, okay, go! Go! Move! Let him pass.”
They ducked into a dazzling white space in which framed photographs were leaning against bare walls.
“Sorry—the gallery’s closed until tonight at six,” said a woman kneeling on the glossy oak floor surrounded by coils of picture wire and assorted bits of hardware. She said this cheerfully and without the usual sort of intruded-upon hostility one can encounter in such stray inadvertent circumstances, and the three Green sisters explained to her in a chorus of mutual interruption that they weren’t there to look at the art but were hiding from someone and would only need to linger for just a moment more, if she didn’t mind.
The woman laughed at this candid explanation, and, having finished wiring the frame over which she had been laboring, she got up to introduce herself as the photographer whose show was being exhibited. Everyone else had gone out to lunch, she explained, and she was here on her own until the gallery staff returned. A little embarrassed at their rudeness, they each felt obligated then to look at her work, and the photographer, who said her name was Harriet, told them to go ahead.
“They’re lovely,” Meg said perhaps just a little too quickly to have really taken in every one of the twenty or so images that surrounded them.
“It’s all reflections, isn’t it?” Amy asked, after another moment. Joanna had been studying the photographs one by one, and yet somehow had not noticed this, but it was true. Amy always saw the overall composition and connected structure of things so clearly and instantly, while sometimes Joanna felt as if there must be something wrong with her brain, she was so easily attracted to
details that she often missed the more obvious patterns and larger meanings.
The photographs leaning against the walls of the gallery were a series of self-portraits taken in reflecting surfaces. Joanna was particularly struck by one showing the photographer, this Harriet, in what seemed to be a butcher shop window. There were all sorts of carcasses and pigs’ heads and other dead animal parts visible around her and even through her face. It was savage and beautiful at the same time, as if it were a declaration that behind Harriet’s almost sweet expression there were dark and unpretty—perhaps even murderous—thoughts.
“Is this how you see yourself?” Joanna asked, without turning around. “I know that feeling, but I’ve never actually seen it before.”
“It was one of the ways I saw myself that summer,” Harriet said. Joanna turned to look at her. She had gotten back onto the floor again and was intently screwing little eye-hooks into the sides of another frame. Joanna thought she seemed marvelously comfortable, this thirtyish woman in old jeans and a baggy sweater who had somehow come to possess certain knowledge about the world. Joanna yearned for some further connection with this fascinating person, but couldn’t imagine how it would ever come about. She often discovered people and was excited by them in this fleeting way, harboring brief but intense curiosities, but she had not yet learned that other people had been known to respond to the discovery of her existence with a similar intensity.
“I’ve seen that picture somewhere,” Meg said, coming up behind Joanna. “I know I’ve seen it very recently.”
“There’s another print of that image in the big survey show at the Modern that just opened last week,” Harriet said. “‘Black and White and Shades of Gray’—Have you seen the show? Or maybe a review? It’s been all over the place.”
“Oh, you mean MoMA? No, but actually we were talking about going today,” Joanna replied. “But—”
“That’s it! The same photograph was on the announcement for the show. I saw it in Janet’s mail pile at the end of the summer,” Amy contributed. “You’re Harriet Rose.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Harriet agreed. “And you’re—?”
“Amy Green.” The chatter had stopped abruptly with the mention of Janet’s mail pile. Harriet looked at them expectantly.
“Oh, sorry, and this is Meg, and that’s Joanna. Green also. I mean, our names are the same. We’re sisters,” Amy added unnecessarily, with her usual zest for blurting information haphazardly.
“Well, thanks, really, sorry to bother you, and good luck with the show,” Meg said then. “Come on, guys.”
“You’re sure the coast is clear?” Harriet asked with an amused look on her face. Clearly, the three girls entertained her immensely. She was kneeling on the floor, coiling up some wire.
“He’s gone,” Amy confirmed, having made a second circuit of the group of photographs. She peeped out the door to be sure and then turned back inside and walked over to Harriet, who was now threading wire through the eye-hooks on another frame. “Um, excuse me again, but I just wanted to tell you that I really love the ones in the bucket of water, with the flowers,” she said, a little self-conscious to be making a declaration of what was probably boring and obvious to the top of the head of the actual creator of the photographs.
“The way the stems of the flowers were going into the water break the line right there, you know? The way they come right through from one side of the reflection to the other, dividing the image? It’s wonderful. And with your face just sort of there but not there? It’s like a perception of a perception.”
“You should be an art critic,” Harriet said to Amy, putting down her pliers and getting to her feet. She stretched, and rolled her head around, unkinking her neck. “You’re incredibly observant. No, that’s not fair. I take it back. I know lots of unobservant art critics and some of them will be here in a few hours. I just wish art critics were as observant as you are. That’s what I meant to say.
And by the way, the title of the show is ‘Objects in Mirror,’ which I have really mixed feelings about because it’s kind of obvious, but the guy who promised to do the lettering on the door hasn’t shown up yet, so now I really want it, but I’m trying not to panic one way or the other.” Harriet got back down on the floor and reached for the next frame. Over her shoulder she added, “So, Miss Amy Green, are you a painter?”
“We’ve got to go,” Meg said impatiently, holding the door open. Street noises underscored her determination to leave the peaceful little gallery space. “Sorry. Really. But, you guys, it’s getting late—it’ll be dark soon, and we have a train to catch.”
“She plays the flute like a charm, but she is a great painter,” Joanna pronounced, ignoring Meg for another moment. They had no specific train to catch, after all. Meg was just being bossy.
“Well, I’m really glad you ducked in here, you three, but don’t let me keep you,” Harriet said, scrambling to her feet and putting out her hand to shake each of theirs as they departed. “Meg, Joanna, Amy, goodbye, Green sisters! I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
They were subdued on the train ride home, oddly exhausted, but they had the satisfied feeling one does after a mission has been accomplished. Amy leaned heavily on Joanna’s shoulder and slept most of the way home, while Joanna daydreamed out the window. The afternoon had grown gray and chilly. Meg, sitting across the aisle from them in the near-empty train car, attempted with a little more success to penetrate some of her history reading. As they pulled into the Milford station, Amy stirred and sat up.
“Look, you’ve drooled all over my jacket,” Joanna complained good-naturedly. “Don’t worry,” she added, as Amy scrabbled for her bag, which was, after all, stuffed with an uncommon quantity of money. “I’ve got your bag over here with mine.”
“She noticed about our names, but she didn’t say anything,” Amy said.
“Who did?” Joanna asked.
“The woman in the gallery. The photographer, Harriet. I could tell. She made a little smile when we told her our names, but she didn’t make any of the usual stupid remarks. Do you really think I’m a great painter, Jo-Jo?” Amy asked, and snuggled down against her again. “That was such a nice thing for you to say to her.”
“I really do,” Joanna assured her. The train started rolling again; they would soon be in New Haven. “You have a wonderful talent. You were great teaching painting to those little kids at the Y in the summer, but I mean you have something that’s really there, not just technical skill. You’re incredibly skilled with a pencil but you also have an eye. Like the way you could really see those photographs today. I hope you keep up with your drawing even though everything else, like your painting class, is messed up right now.”
“Maybe someday I can travel and be a great artist and have a show in a gallery,” Amy said contentedly, and she closed her eyes again.
Joanna looked out the window at the rushing scenery. Mud flats, strange, mysterious, municipal structures of the sort visible only from trains and airplanes making final approaches to airports, and large dilapidated factory buildings all streamed past. The particular factory window from which, over time, it appeared that many different colors of paint had been spilled flashed by.
Joanna had first noticed this window the year before, when she had taken the train alone up to New Haven to visit Meg for the weekend, and now she reflexively looked for it whenever she rode the train. It was a private pleasure, a secret she shared with whoever it was who had been discarding paint out the back window of whatever sort of establishment it was, without, in all probability, having any awareness that the multicolored spills had made a splendid splashed pattern down the grimy concrete block wall. It was wonderful, Joanna felt, even though the window overlooked a hideous barbed-wire fence and a thicket of rusting metal drums
and discarded fence sections and a solitary abandoned supermarket trolley canted at a useless angle. (How did it get there? It would have to have been hoisted over the high fence, and for what purpose? Another of life’s mysteries.) The train rocked and another desolate factory building blurred by and Joanna continued gazing out at the darkening landscape, and saw, now, instead of the outside motion of the world passing, the stillness of her own pensive reflection in the window, with Amy’s sweet head tucked under her chin.