Zanna had taken a Polaroid, once, of Betty walking along the top of a picket fence—an incredible balancing act, actually, but she was so good at it that she was still going even after Zanna rushed into the house to get the camera. And then, just as Zanna was about to snap the picture, a neighbor boy taunted Betty from what he thought was a safe refuge in his yard, two doors down.
Incredibly, Betty reached into her pocket, pulled out a stone—and not a small one—and from the top of the fence, with the best pitching form, hurled that rock at a speed only slightly less than David’s must have had when it killed Goliath.
Oh, the wailing from that boy, hit square in the chest with a stone by a nine-year-old girl.
And Betty’s fury at herself—as she lay sprawled in the petunias—for having missed. “I was aiming at his big fat mouth!” she insisted as her mother dragged her inside amid a flurry of Come with me young lady I will not have you throwing rocks and trying to kill other children even if they deserve it.
Zanna didn’t bother following her inside. She was busy with the Polaroid, waiting all atremble to see the exact moment that the camera—which wasn’t all that good at action shots—might have captured.
It could not have been better. The photo had caught her at the exact moment when the stone released from her hand. And Zanna had been in exactly the right place to get Betty’s profile—the curl of her lip, the fire in her eyes. Of course, the fire, now, that wasn’t exactly in the picture. But it would be in the painting!
Zanna had worked on that painting, whenever she could, what with the morning sickness—much worse than with the first two—and then, after Colleen was born, the endless feedings and the perpetual exhaustion.
She had already captured Betty’s face on the canvas, along with the yard and the street and Betty’s mother and grandmother—Zanna always roughed in the background first, painting inward toward the heart of the piece—when she got the call from Mother, telling her that little Betty had polio, and could Bug bring the older children to her, since she lived closest of all the family right then?
Zanna put the painting away almost that moment, faced it to the wall, stacked other canvases in front of it. She had a vague idea that if Betty died, then she would finish the painting, so that Bug and Sylvia would have it to remember their marvelous daughter.
Then, when it was clear that Betty would live, but might never walk again, Zanna realized that this painting would be the cruelest thing she could give them. A constant reminder of what they had lost inside that iron lung. Better for them to love and rejoice in the child who eventually escaped that dire machine, and let the other be a distant memory.
What she hadn’t understood was Betty herself. The child whose face Zanna had put onto the canvas was still there. That rock was not flung by an arm, it was flung by a person. The painting was not a reminder of what was lost, it was the perfect image of something that was very much alive in that girl.
So she went home from that Christmas visit to her parents’ house and, despite the fact that Patty was at the “why” age, Lyle was proving that age three can be more terrible than two, and Colleen thought that it was great sport to clamp down on Mama’s nipple as hard as she could (this was one child that would not be allowed to continue nursing once the first tooth appeared), Zanna found time to finish that painting of Betty before the first of February.
And then did nothing with it.
What could she do with it? Whom could she show it to, besides Hal? She knew it was perfect—it was Betty. The Polaroid had captured the physical shape of the moment, but the soul of the girl in the painting and the love of the mother looking on came from Zanna’s love and admiration for the child and from her artist’s eye and from her own experience of new motherhood and, yes, from her memory of a lost brother and of a sister she had only seen in dreams.
But just because a painting is perfect does not necessarily mean that it is right to afflict others with the burden of so much emotional freight. If this were a ship, she thought, it would sink under the weight of all that I’ve stowed below.
So, finished now, the canvas was once again placed against the wall. Hal asked about it only once, sometime during the summer, as they contemplated going to the family picnic back at Mom’s and Dad’s. “You going to take that painting?”
And it honestly didn’t occur to Zanna for a long moment what painting he meant.
“I mean, Sylvia writes that she and Bug are coming and I just wondered.”
“No,” said Zanna. “They’ve got a little girl in leg braces. I don’t think they want a reminder of how she used to be.”
“Your call,” he said.
“You think I’m wrong?”
“I think it’s your call. Your brother, your painting.”
“What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s your second best painting so far, but I’m no judge of art, you know that.”
“Second best?”
His eyes suddenly sparkled from getting a little teary. “Your portrait of you and Ernie will always be my favorite,” he said. “Though your technique wasn’t yet as strong as it is now.” He smiled.
“You sentimental fool, you’ll never be an art critic.”
“And I know you always wanted to be married to one.”
“Is it really a good painting, Hal?”
“It’s her to the life. When a painting like that is possible, it just makes me sad for all the people paying so much attention to splashes of paint or geometric figures on canvas.”
“So you are an art critic.”
“I’m saying that even if I didn’t already know and love Betty, I would from your painting.”
“So maybe someday it’ll be seen. But not this year.”