Where The HeArt Is
by
Pat Rosier
Smashwords Edition
Copyright, 2012, Pat Rosier
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Thanks to:
Libby Clements, Annabel Fagan, Robin Fleming, Jill Hannah, Terry Kennaway, Jill Livestre, Aorewa McLeod, Fran Marno, Barbara Simmons, Jicca Smith, Jan Thorburn, Kate Torrens, and, especially,
my partner, Prue Hyman.
A note to readers
For those who like to see a whole poem where a few lines are quoted, or an image of a work of art referred to, sources are listed at the end of the book. Click on the blue link to get to the information about the source and on “Return to text” to go back to the place in the book you started from.
Where the HeArt is
Chapter 1
She leaves, just like that; announces her intention after lunch and is gone before dinner. Not that Ann wants any.
“Yes, there is someone else,” she says. “Julie. Sutton.”
Shit. Julie was Ann’s friend. Emphasise was.
“How long?” Ann doesn’t want to know and can’t not ask.
“Six weeks.” She won’t look at Ann. “Look, there’s nothing to talk about,” she says, “it just happened and I didn’t know how to tell you. You’ll get over it.”
That’s when Ann gets mad and shouts and cries, until her ex-partner—get used to it, Ann—picks up her bag—a small bag for fourteen years—and walks out, saying over her shoulder, “You can stay here for now. We’ll work out the rest later.”
“CAN!” Ann is yelling again. “I thought we were happy! Happy! Silly me!” The only response is a quietly closing door.
Ex's laptop is gone, of course. Bella the dog, Ex’s dog, remains.
“She’s abandoned us Bella, for pastures new. Don’t take it personally, but you’re going too. Until then, I’ll do my best, but we both know I’m not a good dog mother.”
Ann experiences being left as banal. She thinks of a line from Edna St Vincent Millay.
Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike
She finds a mutual friend to deliver Bella to Ex.
Because Ann has taught a third-year paper on Romantic Literature for a decade she can use last year's lectures and tutorials without revising or rereading the texts. Upheavals in the university pass her by, as she struggles with re-discovering how to live on her own.
Ex wants to talk about selling the house. “You could buy me out,” she suggests cheerfully.
It’s a buyer's market, but Ann is not going to be obliging. Nor is she going to be talked to by Julie Sutton. Ever.
Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do.
On a dismal Sunday morning weeks later,
And life goes on for ever like the gnawing of a mouse.
Ann wanders through the rooms, feeling each one as a cloak enveloping her. A brutal southerly whips the karaka tree against the side of the house. Her hand slides over the red formica of the kitchen table, built into an awkward space, its bench seating giving it the look of a retro café. Ann never liked it much. Ex showed it off. The rest of the kitchen is slick and modern, including an expensive toaster for Ann, for whom multi-grain bread, toasted until crunchy at its edges, is a food group. She knows exactly which setting works best for her favourite loaves, the ones you buy uncut. She slices them herself, with an old, wide bread-knife, freezes the slit loaf and eases off two slices at a time for breakfast or lunch or dinner. Some of these days it's all three.
Whole grain bread and peanut butter make a perfect protein. She forgets where she heard this. A lettuce leaf or two, a tomato, a chunk of aging cucumber from the bottom of the fridge and she can convince herself she's having a balanced meal, never mind the two glasses of wine. Only once has she drunk a whole bottle on her own in an evening. Only once, truly.
They had cooked together a lot at first. Over time, it became usual to take turns; a senior lecturer and a public service manager have busy lives, work long hours.
The dining room centre-piece is a long rimu table with eight matching chairs. They fought over this table, one wanting it, the other not. Ann can't remember who was on which side. She likes it now, can see it with friends all around, eating, talking, drinking, laughing. The best of times. And meetings. Neighbour-hood watch, until too many people moved out of the street and their replacements didn't opt in. Ex had tried very hard to keep that going. Occasional end-of-year afternoon teas with Ann's third-year students. Their book group—no, that met in the living room. Other gatherings, she can't think what, but she thinks of this room, dominated by the table, as full of people.
Aah, the living room. Comfort. Big sofas, two. Big arm chairs, two. They got into habits—Ann on a sofa, feet up, Ex in one of the arm chairs, using a squab as a footstool, watching their favourite television shows. Ann followed 24, which Ex hated. Ex was fixated on Lost, which Ann couldn't be bothered with. They both liked ER, and Outrageous Fortune. Now, Ann sits on her sofa for an evening’s channel-surfing, and forgets everything she’s seen by the time she goes to bed.
The bedroom. Theirs once. Hers now. Ann can't think about that. The office. A spare room, really, they both worked anywhere on their laptops. Sometimes one of them would spread out papers all over the dining room table; they had a kind of two-day limit on that. Now Ann can leave anything anywhere for as long as she wants and she never uses the big table for work or meals. The cubbyhole in the kitchen suits her better, she doesn't feel as lonely there.
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There's this little street and this little house.
Except the house isn't little. There are two more rooms downstairs, a double garage—probably the only double garage in Wadestown, Ex used to say. But “little” describes Ann to herself today. Diminished. Bereft.
“Oh, fuck it! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” She says—shouts—to the house. “Fuck OFF.”
“I have,” says the voice of Ex from somewhere in the back of her mind.
“I mean FUCK OFF HOUSE!” Her mouth is still poised for words, loud words, while her thoughts race ahead.
“She can buy me out. Or they. Ouch. Yes, they. She/they can buy me out and I can …” That's an idea with nowhere to go, but she feels lighter. Ex can decide what to do with this object, that piece of furniture. She, Ann, will float free.
She spends the rest of Sunday making a list of what she wants to keep and is surprised at how short it is. Monday and Tuesday evenings she makes another list, of chattels, things they bought together.
On Thursday she goes to see lawyer Jennifer Ryan who explains the legal situation, which Ann, unusually, doesn't bother to follow. She's still got that floating feeling, as though she’s in a Chagall painting. Ann leaves the chattels list with Jennifer. She and Ex kept well organised accounts, so the list includes the date of purchase and the price they paid for every item.
*
“How are you?” asks Ex, from a seat opposite Ann in one of the new cafés in Chews Lane. Her voice is gentle, her eyes are soft.
“Not your business these days.” Ann likes her own reply. “You—and her if you like—can buy me out. Of the house. You always liked it more than me.” That's not true, but Ann doesn't care.
There's no reply for a long time. Ex looks at the table. When she raises her face Ann can't read her expression. Maybe this is what Ex wanted. That doesn’t matter to Ann, it's what she herself wants now and she's not going to go cheaply. She doesn’t want a “screw your partner for everything you can get” scenario she wants to be fair, but fair to herself as well.
“Well! That's caught me on the hop. I thought you’d want to stay put.”
“You buy me out or the house goes on the market. Soon. By the end of August.”
“Hey, I'd have to agree to it going on the market, you can’t just sell our house. We do own it together, after all."
“I know that. I'm thinking you'll do what I want because you're guilty about dumping me. And guilty about being a coward and not telling me about you and—her.” Ann is pleased with herself, again, for saying what she thinks.
Ex’s eyes drop back to the table. “I'm not sure that Julie and I have much of a future.”
Ann throws back her head and laughs. And laughs. People look. Ex wipes away tears.
“Too late,” says Ann, “I’ve taken your advice and gotten over you. “And,” she pseudo-sings, “I’m mo-oving on,” then reverts to being crisp. “Let me know about buying the house. Here's my lawyer's card.” She tucks it under the saucer of Ex's cup.
Ex looks at Ann and says, “I miss Shirley and Keith.” She's still teary and Ann is still refusing to take any notice and just looks back and waits, enjoying feeling cool and angry and detached. “I thought I might ring them,” Ex says eventually.
“They're my parents, not my children, you don’t need my permission to contact them. Ring, don't ring, it's your call.” Ann thinks she is enjoying this far too much.
“I thought they might be, you know, angry with me or something.” Ex’s voice is practically pleading.
“We haven't actually been talking about you,” says Ann as she stands up. Which is nearly true, if you don't count her mother's, “How could she?” or her father's, “I always wondered if she could be trusted.”
Ann doesn't look back as she walks off. She feels tall again, as though she is taking up the right amount of space.
Chapter 2
Uncle John, a large, loud man with gingery hair, had appeared now and then in Ann’s childhood. He’d pick her up and swing her around while she squealed in a mixture of fear and excitement. Her father never did that. Once she grew up Uncle John would leer harmlessly and make jokes about finding her a man like himself but younger. He was more sad than threatening.
“John smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, changes women as often as he changes his underwear, just as well he never had children,” her mother would say of him, her older brother. He has died, at seventy, of emphysema.
“That’s hardly surprising,” is his sister’s response, with a sniff of disapproval, possibly laced with sadness. The funeral will be in Wellington, because there is only Shirley to arrange it. She emails the news to her sister in New York, frowns at the flowers that arrive from Interflora and pays for a minibus to bring her brother’s few friends down from Carterton.
It’s a small funeral. Ann counts twenty people, including the woman from the funeral directors' standing at the door, and they didn't all know John; some are her parents' friends. In half an hour Uncle John is off to the crematorium, accompanied by Shirley and Ann, who goes with her mother because she is asked to. Neither of them says anything on the drive.
On the way back, her mother says, “We're not inclined to keep close, my family, nor your father's. Not like my friend Lynne, she's got eight siblings and goodness knows how many aunts and uncles and cousins and had four children herself. She's constantly on the phone to one or other of them and always has a grandchild or two in the holidays. It's family central at their place.”
Holy shit, Ann thinks, am I about to feel guilty for not giving her grand-children? But Shirley is saying that she hopes Keith encourages the men from Carterton out for a beer and shouts them a round before they’re driven home.
*
Ex will buy Ann out of the house. Just Ex. It will take a while to organise a mortgage.
“Fine,” says Ann. “It will take a while for me to find somewhere else to live.” She doesn't have a clue where or how she wants to be, but she doesn't say that to Ex, nor to anyone else, because she doesn't know which of their friends will pass it on. She lets people think she is still numb with the shock, which is kind of true, and be solicitous.
Uncle John has left Ann twenty thousand dollars. Oh well, Ann thinks, that will help when I have to buy a house or something. She's rewriting her Emily Dickinson lecture, cutting out “Wild Nights,” and not sure about keeping the famous hope with feathers poem either. She's more inclined to sweet hours that have perished and shadowed tombs.
Emily is not a Romantic, but Ann does a guest lecture on her every year for James, who really wants to write poetry full-time but has three children and teaches American Poets. It’s a very popular lecture.
Ann likes her work. She can lose herself in it. Lines of poetry pop into her head at odd times. Having been accused over the years of everything from showing off, to elitism, to an inability to be in the moment, she tends to keep them to herself. Choosing literature over art history for post-graduate study had a lot to do with books being more available to her than original art works. The Romantics attracted the young Ann with their passion and ideals and their contempt for “mechanical” classicism. Their revolutionary fervour was appealing too, even as she became aware of its limitations. She got to travel to conferences overseas and learnt to add on exotic places in South America and Asia. The sabbatical she has coming up in eighteen months was going be a major trip in the United States and Europe, an art gallery trip, with a few sorties into the Romantics on the side. Thinking about that is difficult now, she and Ex were planning it as a trip together. Well, bad luck for Ex, she can stay at home paying her mortgage.
A colleague, Mark the medievalist, convinces Ann to go to Friday drinks in the staff club. People are talking about restructurings and cut-backs as usual; arts isn't a priority area any more, it’s all technology and commerce. “And what's more an arts degree doesn't prepare the students for the job market,” says someone in a sarcastic voice.
“Our numbers are holding up,” Ann points out to no-one in particular.
“Oh, we all have to grow our share these days. Growth or stagnation, that's what they think.” Ann doesn’t know the man speaking.
“Come on, Gareth, the bean counters might be in ascendance, but employers still like a good arts degree. Look at Bob Jones.” That’s Jeanne-Marie, from French Studies. Ann switches out and soon leaves.
Within a month she is offered voluntary redundancy. Looking around at harried colleagues jockeying to keep their positions, she accepts. Her career has vanished, like smoke in a strong wind. She will be unemployed from the end of November and feels Wordsworth’s burden:
the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
without the lightening the poet found at Tintern Abbey.
*
“Unemployed, yes, but with a decent redundancy package.” Her friend Ruth is a union rep.
“And twenty-five working years ahead of me, with a career that's come to a dead end. A career I like.”
Ann is embarrassed to be crying in front of Ruth, who hands her a tissue, saying, “You’ll be okay.” They go to a night-club and dance to a wild, thumping band. Ann thinks of asking Ruth to come home with her, and then is so overwhelmingly tired she can barely stay awake in the taxi she takes by herself.
At the weekend, Ann cries herself around the garden. She cries while she trims back the wisteria, and when she looks at the vegetable garden, waiting expectantly for its spring makeover. Shrugging, she turns her back on it.
*
“I'm forty-two, my partner has walked out on me and my career has evaporated. How many Eng Lit lecturers are there out there looking for diddley-squat jobs?” She's gone to the reading group, not caring if Ex is there, not caring if she runs crying from the room at the sight of her, or screams abuse, not caring that she’s forgotten to read the book. There has to be something in her life that will still be there next month, next year.
They talk about the book, the new Elizabeth Knox. Then someone asks Ann how she is, in that concerned voice she’s getting used to.
“You should …,” the advice comes thick and fast. Write a novel, write up her lectures into a book, teach English as a second language, do more study; everyone is being kind and helpful. She thanks them, goes home and cries herself to sleep.
That Friday she has to tell her senior students she won’t be back the following year. They are touchingly outraged for her and anxious about what it means for them. Angry on their behalf, and because she herself has been unable to get any information, she rings the Faculty Dean and insists that he come down and speak to them. Once the Dean arrives, Ann excuses herself. She catches the bus home to Wadestown, gets her car and drives to her parents' place in Lower Hutt, city of roundabouts. Their house, the house she grew up in, is a flat walk from the mall; ten minutes and you can buy all manner of things you don’t need.
“We only use the car for groceries,” her father would say, which isn't true.
“Don't worry about me, I'm fine.” Her mother and father are both home, out in the garden with trays of vegetable seedlings.
“You can come and stay here, you know, any time,” says her mother, her father nodding like a novelty dog in the back window of a car. Ann is feeling mean and crabby, but she will not let that show with her parents.
“I know. Thanks. Let me help you plant those. And can I stay for dinner?” She has to gather herself together, get back a sense of her own substance, before she goes home.
They dibble with tools her father made, sliding each seedling in, firming the soil around the base, settling it to grow and produce.
All nature seems at work, Coleridge wrote.
“You'll be getting mud on your good work clothes,” says her mother.
“It's okay, these are the practically retired work clothes. Like me.” She didn't mean to say “like me,” not to her mother. There’s a huge empty space in front of her and she doesn’t want to think of the rest of Coleridge’s poem, doesn’t want to be
the sole unbusy thing,
for whom the banks of amaranths
bloom
not.
After dinner her mother gets out a folder of papers. “I want to show you something,” she says.
“Don't be bothering her with that, Shirley,” says her father.
“You just mind your business, Keith, and go off and watch your sport.” Ann knows he hopes she will watch the Ranfurly Cup match with him, so she says, “I'll just have a look at this, Dad, and come and see the second half.” She has a lifetime’s practice at sharing herself between her parents.
Her mother empties the folder onto the dining table.
“Since my brother John died,” she says, “I got to thinking about family, and doing some family research. You know, there's so much on the internet, genealogy sites by the hundred.” Ann is looking at the pages in front of her, many of them empty forms. She looks up at her mother, a question on her face.
“I was keen at first, but when a Wilson marries a Williams, and neither family goes in for reusing first names,” Shirley says, “it's pretty hopeless trying to track down your ancestors. Anyway, I don’t think it’s my kind of thing. People can be so earnest and obsessive about finding their forebears, it's rather put me off.” She gathers up the papers. “What I have done, though, is made contact with our few living relatives overseas.”
“You and Dad could go on a trip, visit them all.” Ann is immediately excited at the idea of it, her parents on a big overseas trip … she could stay in their house …
“No, dear, Keith and I never got the habit of overseas travel. And he likes his routines, it's all I can do to get him to have a summer holiday. But I've emailed my little sister in New York, your Dad’s cousin in Washington and,” she pauses for a moment, “Rob’s boy in London. All three of them. Just today.”
“You emailed Evelyn? I thought you two weren’t speaking.”
“Not so much not speaking, dear, it’s just that we haven’t been in touch, not for … well, far too long. And all she did when John died was send those fancy flowers, not even a proper card. But—we are the only siblings left and it’s silly not to know about each other.”
Ann remembers her mother dismissing her sister, twenty years younger, as “too good for us no doubt” when she sent extravagant flowers instead of coming back for either of their parents’ funerals. Shirley and Evelyn had hardly known each other as children, Shirley had left the family home for Auckland and nursing training before Evelyn was born. Rob, Shirley’s twin, was at university in Dunedin. Rob was killed in a car accident, in 1979. Twelve-year-old Ann and her father had worried about Shirley together until, gradually, she came back to herself.
*
Ann won’t have a farewell from the university. She leaves her office as it is, taking only her jar of nuts and raisins. All the books and papers she wants have gone home with her a few at a time over the weeks and IT put her computer files on a couple of memory sticks, then cleared out the hard drive. All the student results she’s responsible for are on the university’s mainframe.
As she leaves the building she feels the air closing behind her, silently filling the space in the department that she has occupied for more than ten years. It’s three o'clock in the afternoon, she isn’t waiting around for the embarrassed stayers to drop by and say their farewells. Gonesville, that’s her, and in a few days she will, literally, leave everything behind her, at least for a while. It had been her mother’s idea.
Chapter 3
Evelyn Wilson, 47, and her four friends, meet on Mondays at a tapas bar near Chelsea Market. Evelyn arrived from New Zealand a long time ago, and after a few false starts found work as a freelance science editor. These days she thinks of herself as a New Yorker.
Jerry, 43, gay, from Minnesota, is a hairdresser. “Every stereotype of your gay man,” he says of himself.
Monica, 52, has married twice and matched that with divorces. She’s an administrator at New York Public Libraries.
April, 39, high-school teacher, identifies as bisexual, though she has so far had sex only with men. She was named April-Mae by her parents but won’t answer to that.
Jonathan, 50, is married, sort of, to his childhood sweetheart, Jessica, who he describes as “too busy being a lawyer to have kids, or a husband really,” He works in a bank, insists he is not “a banker”.
On most Mondays there are four or five of them at the bar by seven. This night there are only Evelyn, Monica and Jonathon at their usual table, with a bottle of Australian wine and two tapas plates: a spinach dip and Croquettas De Jamon Cerrano.
Evelyn: I’ve had an email from big sister Shirley asking if I’ll be around to host—her word—her daughter, in November.
Monica: Who in heaven’s name would come to New York in November?
Evelyn: My niece Ann, apparently.
Monica: And “host.” What’s that?
Evelyn: Have her stay with me at my place.
Monica: You’re kidding!
Evelyn: No kidding. It’s a New Zealand thing; when family come to town they stay with you.
Monica: Not in New York, they don’t. Not unless you’re loaded and live in a penthouse.
Evelyn: I don’t think Shirley would know that. I expect she’ll suggest leaving a key under the doormat.
Jonathan: We don’t have a penthouse and Jessica’s parents come and stay.
Monica: (Talking over Johathan.) Sheesh! Shall we get another plate? How about the patatas bravas? No, too much carb with the croquettes. Asparagus with shrimp?
Jonathan: Get the patatas as well.
Monica: When my brother and sister-in-law came I booked them in to a place in the next block that did breakfasts, so I wouldn’t see them until lunch. It didn’t work, they were at mine by ten.
Evelyn: There’s only one of Ann and she can have the fold-out bed. I’m not going into how things are done—or not—in New York with my sister.
The two plates arrive and Monica arranges the steaming asparagus and curling shrimps into three equal portions on the plate and the patatas into two, pushing the latter towards Jonathan and Evelyn and away from herself.
Jonathan (to Evelyn): I didn’t know you had a sister.
Monica: Yes you do, or you would if you took notice. Evelyn and the older sibling and running away from, what was it Evelyn, your “bible-banging presbyterian family.”
Evelyn: That was my parents, the siblings escaped before I was born.
Jonathan to Monica; What was that about taking notice?
Evelyn: What am I going to do with this niece?
Monica: (Stretching across the table for a forkful of patatas.) Make her get up so you can start work and send her out for the day.
Jonathon: I’ll help, especially if she’s hot. How old is she, anyway?
Evelyn: Umm, about six years younger than me.
Jonathan: Sharp! Just the right age, is she hot then?
Monica: What’s with “sharp”?
Jonathan: “Cool” isn’t cool any more.
Evelyn: How would I know if she’s hot, I haven’t seen her since she was, I dunno, five or something. Anyway, reading between my sister’s lines, I think she might be gay.
Jonathan: Bummer! Offer of help withdrawn.
Monica: Jeez, Jonnie, you’re so selfless. How’s Jessica?
Jonathan: Out lawyering. I get to control the remote.
Jonathan’s marriage is one of their regular topics, along with the pounds Monica has lost or gained, New York’s transport system, April’s incompetent boss, and recently, President Obama.
Later, at home, Evelyn re-reads her sister’s email, trying to imagine Shirley at 67. She sees her mother in a print dress, with neat, permed hair and a cardigan she knitted herself; she should ask Shirley for a recent photo.
Lying in bed, she lets her mind drift, remembering herself as a lonely only child, her two brothers and sister distant grownups, off in their own lives. She remembers her mother writing letters to them on Sundays, one of the few things you were allowed to do on “God’s day”, other than go to church and pray and read the bible. People in the houses around them did other things on Sundays, like playing or mowing the lawn, which her father did on a Saturday. Even on Saturdays it was quiet and uneventful at their house. Evelyn loved school.
Being good all the time, when she wasn’t sure what was good and what wasn’t, because god could see everything, took a lot of effort. When she realised other kids at school didn’t worry about god watching them, the need to be careful when she was away from home gradually faded. Her parents were old, like other children’s grandparents. When her father became “a nelder” in the church her parents got even more serious and home even less interesting. She taught herself to not-listen while seeming to pay attention and learnt things by rote for Sunday School. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and the great commandment; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Mathew 22, verses 37 - 40. Jesus, she even remembers chapter and verse.
Another memory. She is six and she asks her mother if she can go to Moana’s two houses down the street, they’re having a party for her big brother’s twenty-first and did they have a party for John’s twenty-first because she can’t remember one and he’s her big brother and Moana said it would be fun with sausages and bread as well as a hangi and there’ll be singing later. Moana had said to Evelyn when they were walking home after school that she should ask her mother if she could come and her mother and father could come too if they wanted because Moana’s father had said they’d better invite the whole bloody street so there wouldn’t be complaints about the noise.
“You weren’t born when your older brother turned twenty-one,” says her mother and looks worried and Evelyn knows she won’t be allowed to go to the party no matter how much she wants to and then notices her father in the doorway.
“I want to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’,” she says to her father and he raises his hand, and she cringes, and hears an intake of breath from her mother, and the world stops for a moment.
“The devil is at his work” he says in his most awful voice, and turns away. “Depraved heathens.” He says “depraved” often and something stops her asking what it means, though she does know about heathens, who don’t believe in God and Jesus Christ. She wants to go to the party even more and knows it’s hopeless. As she walks away she hears her father shouting to her mother and practises not-listening.
Now that her father is so important in the church he uses that awful voice more often. When he’s not angry he tells her to say her prayers, and pats her on the head and calls her child if she asks questions, and answers them with verses from the bible. “Honour thy father and thy mother.”
The rest of that afternoon and night is a blur, with noise from Moana’s house of people talking and laughing and music and from her father getting angrier and angrier and her mother trying to soothe him and him ringing up people and the police coming to their house and saying things to her father that make him even angrier and eventually she goes to sleep feeling sad because it sounds as though there is a lot of fun going on at Moana’s house and she knows her parents will never let her play with Moana again.
The Abba wars confirm Evelyn’s suspicion that she’s a heathen. She’s in the resistance, operating underground. Girls at school sing the songs and practise the dance moves and she learns them, without at first knowing what Abba look like. When she sees the magazines with Abba pictures and stories that other girls have, she willingly takes up her father’s directive that she should learn some self-reliance by delivering papers after school. She is in love with Abba, the whole group, and their fantabulous clothes. All the money from the papers has to go into her bank account, the one they started for her at primary school, except for—she can’t remember how much—that her mother thought she spent on sweets and soft drinks.
Big Brother John, or maybe Robbie, sent her a transistor radio for her 13th birthday. It had headphones. For one dreadful moment she thinks her father might take it off her. All the best radio stations play Abba, and a whole lot of other music, but Abba is her true passion. Her mother finds one of the magazines under her mattress and makes her kneel down and pray about it. Evelyn pretends to be contrite and keeps the magazines in her school bag, giving each one away as she buys another. Really, she wants to keep them all, have a collection to look back on but there aren’t any hiding places in their house. The radio sits all innocent-looking on her chest-of-drawers during the day, carefully tuned to the classical music station her mother sometimes listens to.
The worst day is when she is walking home from school with some other girls and forgets to look out and her father sees them, singing and dancing Abba songs. When she gets in the house he’s waiting for her and before she realises he’s hit the side of her face with his open hand. She cries out, from shock, and at the ringing noise in her ear. Then her mother is there, hustling her into her room. Later she hears noises, groaning noises coming from her parents’ room and when she asks her mother if her father was hurt, her mother says he was very, very sorry he had hit her, he had promised, if she had another child, he would never raise his hand to it and up to now he hasn’t, not until today. Then her mother stops talking and puts a hand over her mouth as if to stuff the words back in and Evelyn feels awful. But unrepentant. She can still remember the word unrepentant coming into her head, and knowing that meant she wasn’t sorry about Abba, or dancing in the street with her friends.
Later, she doesn’t remember how much later, maybe a few days, she is in her room and the door is open, her mother makes her to leave it open while she does her homework, and she hears her parents talking and something in their voices makes her creep to the door and listen.
Her father is saying that he wouldn’t hit Evelyn again, he promises, he truly repents, he asks her forgiveness, as well as God’s for breaking his promise to never chastise her in the way he had the older ones. Her mother’s voice is too low, Evelyn can’t hear her words. Then her father again, “How have we sinned against you, O Lord, to have brought into your world four children. Four! And not a speck of grace among them.”
Chapter 4
Shirley opts to say goodbye at home. Ann and her father drive to the lawyer’s office where they sign the papers that authorise him to sell her share of the house, and then to the airport. The last thing Ann sees before she heads into aeroplane-world is her father, waving the brown folder from the lawyer’s.
When she finally lands in New York, Ann’s has been in transit for over thirty hours. The bus from J.F.Kennedy airport into Manhattan takes an age, more stop than go in an endless stream of traffic. Ann’s first views of the city register only dilapidated buildings and rusty cars in the fading light.
At the bus station she spots a card with ANN WILLIAMS on it waving over the heads of the crowd. Ann is so relieved and grateful that she doesn’t have to manage a taxi in her disoriented state, she almost cries as she burbles her thanks to Evelyn. Texting from the airport had been inspired. Thank you, mother dear, for such thorough information.
“You look terrible.” Evelyn is blunt. Ann is surprised at how worn she looks, she’s always thought of her aunt as young. “You think she’d have made one trip back over the years, the money she makes in New York,” her mother had said. She’d also said, “It was years before I could admit, even to myself, that I was embarrassed at my mother having a late baby. Not that anyone would take any notice of a new baby at forty-four these days.”
As a young child, Ann had wished her grandparents and Aunt Evelyn, who could have been more like a cousin, lived nearer; Whangarei was thought by Shirley and Keith to be too far to go for holidays. As an adult, Ann realised her mother, her easy-going, amenable mother, didn’t get on with her own parents, grimly ultra-conservative Calvinistic Presbyterians.
“I just don’t get people who prefer their God to their children,” her father had said once.
Evelyn is brisk too, clipped and business-like with the taxi driver, handling the fare with an aplomb Ann wants. Her hair must be dyed, no natural hair was ever that black on a woman of nearly fifty. With clothes in a dark, murky colour, not brown or blue or green, but some mixture of these, highish heels, a swishing skirt and an elegant shoulder bag, she looks just like Ann’s idea of a New Yorker.
"You must be shattered from all that traveling.” Evelyn says as she unlocks the street door. “I've finished work, so you can go to bed if you want.” That doesn't make sense, but Ann is beyond sense. “Shirley thinks I'm much flasher than I am,” she adds once they are in the flat. “I don't care what you say to her about my life. Ruin her idea of embarrassingly younger sister made good if you want.” Now is not the time to try and deal with any of that. Evelyn offers her a sleeping pill. With her mind set to say no thanks, Ann hears herself accept. Evelyn asks if she'd like to go with herself and her gay theatre-buddy to an off-Broadway play the following night.
“Yes! Anything!”
Giving in to jet lag is not an option, as Ann has to stay out all day while Evelyn works at home. The fold-out bed is in the living room that is also Evelyn's office and what there is of a dining room. The kitchen is a cubbyhole off one corner, Evelyn's own bedroom’s not much more than a double-bed-sized box, and the shower and toilet (“bathroom” Ann would have to get used to) are a plumbed cupboard. Both televisions are attached to the wall, one in the main room, another in Evelyn’s bedroom.
New York—Manhattan, that is—is intense. Tall, fast-moving, crowded, loud. Around Times Square huge, frenetic, brightly-lit advertising shouts at Ann’s eyes, covering the whole side of buildings, screaming for attention, largely ignored by the dwarfed people hurrying around below.
Walking on Sixth Ave in the rain with her umbrella bobbing in a sea of umbrellas is a challenge. It takes a jagged, pumping, perpetual vertical motion to avoid eye-gouging collisions. For once it might be an advantage to be short. After a hundred metres—yards—Ann puts up the hood on her parka and jams the umbrella into a rubbish—trash—bin—can.
*
Ann is in MOMA, The Museum of Modern Art—she likes the nerve of that, the New Yorkish nerve of being The museum of …—, standing in front of the huge Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. A monumental work in every way, one with which Picasso, it is said, revolutionised the art world.
She’s looking hard into the painting, thinking about its special significance, concentrating on the fractured body shapes, the African-mask look of two of the faces, the blade-like slice of melon among the fruit at bottom centre, the splintered planes of the curtain-folds. Absorbed in study, fascinated by the way the flat painted shapes jut out towards her instead of receding away, she all-at-once is there, in the painting. Her right elbow shoots up, hand falling behind her head. Her left leg moves across in front of the right. The other hand clutches at the bottom of her jacket. She is the one second in from stage left, off centre, looking directly out of the canvas, eyes wide and knowing.
The room, the building, the city fade away. She is the future of painting, she and her four companion demoiselles. They, Barcelona prostitutes, are determining what will come, taking art into realms never before known. The paint that is her skin makes angles, her eyes, unblinking, direct artists' eyes to what has previously been hidden. She is in a state of serious bliss. Wordsworth is there.
………by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things.
Later, how much later she can’t tell, Ann returns to herself in a slow fade. She feels her flesh melting away from hard angles to its usual rounded-ness. Her arm falls to her side, and she’s rubbing the stretched muscle. As the hand clutching the bottom of her jacket unclenches, she automatically feels for the shoulder bag sitting at her hip. She can feel the solid floor through the soles of her shoes. No-one seems to have noticed her, um, transformations. Slowly she leaves the building, not allowing questions to ask themselves, cradling the experience in her mind, holding any thoughts about what has happened at a distance.
Then she is walking along Fifth Avenue, window-shopping, people-spotting, feeling invisible—a different way of feeling from engaging with the demoiselles. No-one here knows her, or wants to. All anyone wants is for her to be out of their way. It’s a good feeling.
She had planned to leave the Met for another day, but it’s right there and only two in the afternoon. There’s a special Exhibition, “Vermeer's Masterpiece: The Milkmaid.” She thought it was a small painting, like the Mona Lisa. Oh, that image on the wall is a digital reproduction, made large to show off Vermeer’s technique. Never mind that, she wants the real thing, the actual painting. There aren't many people, that’s good. Ann tells her body to behave itself and walks into the room where The Milkmaid is hanging. She stands as close as the barrier will allow, and looks and looks.
A woman, an earthy, peasant woman, is pouring milk from a jug into a bowl. There are a few other things about: a table, a loaf of bread, a stool-like object on the floor, a window lighting up the woman and the pale wall behind her. The woman's skirt is blue. Ann knows that blue to be lapis lazuli and it is a beautiful, dense colour that you could fall into. A small group comes close to her and she stands aside so they can see, then goes back to her position directly in front of the painting. It is more than beautiful, it’s perfect. The woman’s hand is underneath the jug, steadying it as she pours, and the whole picture, the light, the figure, the colour, is perfectly balanced, in an ineffable calm; a living calm, light bouncing around within the canvas from small daubs of paint overlaid on each other, capturing the light within itself.
A sight so touching in its majesty
Not that Wordsworth was dwelling on anything as humble as a maid pouring milk. But still. Eventually, she tears herself away, goes around them all, the five Vermeers from the Met's collection and some accompanying contemporaries. Nothing captivates Ann in the way of The Milkmaid. As far as she can tell, only one work in the whole exhibition is by a woman. In that, a kitchen maid is cooking, turned away from the viewer, getting on with the job.
Ann’s attempts to get Evelyn to talk about family are unproductive. “Once I lost any faith I had absorbed from the parents, which I did around twelve, and said so, probably with no regard to their feelings, it was all downhill,” she says. “Sister Shirley and brothers John and Rob were elsewhere. End of story, no regrets. I knew as soon as I got to New York this was where I belonged. Still do.” She wants to hear what Ann has been up to in her city. Ann leaves out her encounter with the demoiselles. An enquiry about Evelyn’s working day gets the same short shrift as the family. “Same old, same old. Writers cling to every precious line—understandably, as they get paid by the word—publishers go for slash and burn.” Then she gossips about Jerry, the theatre-buddy who has just had his heart broken by yet another blond.
“Poor darling,” says Evelyn without a trace of sympathy, “he will go for young and beautiful and they never last. He won't let me say ‘blond boys,’ swears he hasn't had anyone under thirty for years.” While she speaks, Evelyn is clearing away the trays they'd perched on their knees with the delicious Asian food that was delivered to the door. Ann managed to pay, and then got embarrassed about a tip. “Keep the change,” Evelyn calls out. Four dollars.
Jerry is tall, with blond streaks disguising the grey in his hair, a black roll neck jumper, chinos and smart shoes.
The street is even more crowded than in the daytime, people now largely in pairs or groups. It looks as though the whole of Manhattan is going out.
“Jude Law in Hamlet doesn't seem like off-anything to me, why is it off-Broadway?” Ann asks Jerry as they walk, but his reply is lost in the noises around them. What the hell, expensive tickets, off- or not, and this is fun.
Ann has to agree that Jude Law is gorgeous, but she thinks he’s too certain about himself, too heroic to be a brilliant Hamlet, in spite of his fantastic acting. She gets up the courage to express an opinion and is gratified when Jerry and Evelyn nod agreement. The two of them launch into a discussion about the director, and Ann looks around, trying to imagine herself a New Yorker, at home in this milieu, at ease with all the ways of doing things, like finding their seats in the theatre and ordering drinks in this bar. On the short walk here every second person was walking a well-behaved dog on a lead. It looked as though they—the dogs—were trained to do their business in the gutter, and everyone carried a bag for the doings. She wonders where all the homeless people she remembers from past conference-driven visits have gone, but this doesn’t seem like the time to ask. Maybe the homeless have morphed into pedigree dogs. Stop it! she tells herself silently, you need sleep, that’s all.
*
Sunday brunch is happening in a full and chaotic deli off Sixth Ave and Ann can see why Evelyn wanted them to be there before ten. The food involves scrambled eggs and smoked salmon—“lox,” Evelyn insists—and is delicious. Ann is gazing around at the crowd, when Evelyn says,
“I had a relationship with a woman.”
“What?” She has Ann's full attention.
“Four years. It was good, until the end.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, well at least nothing different. That was the point, really. She wanted a baby and to live in the suburbs, I wanted this life and to stay living here. She called me selfish, I called her stupid, and that was it. She did it all with a man in the end, even invited me to the wedding, to which I didn’t go. I haven't had anyone since, though I think I could go either way.”
“Gosh. How long ago?”
“Six years. I'm well over it, but I don't want to do it again, really, not with anyone. I feel tired just thinking about swapping life stories, all that stuff, all over again.”
“Oh. I'm sorry. Did Mum—Shirley—tell you … ?”
“You mean you, woman, breakup? Yes. She said you might be sad, upset, something like that. You seem all right to me. Are you?”
“Pretty much.” Ann tells her about Ex leaving and losing her job and running away, leaving her father to deal with the house.
“Not that he minds, he loves that sort of thing. I left yellow post-it notes everywhere on the stuff I want, not that there's much.” Ann has barely thought about her house since she left New Zealand. She doesn’t want to bring it all back by talking about it. “I love being in New York, but what's it like living here, all the time, for years and years?”
“Fabulous. Hard. Too hot in summer, frigid in winter. It gets under your skin, though. I can't imagine living anywhere else, but I won't be able to afford to stay if—when—I stop working. Might have to come back to enzed. Ha! I might even prefer New Jersey. You know, I can't be thinking about that. Can you walk?”
“Walk? Yes.”
“I mean for a couple of hours. Central Park.”
“Yes. Definitely. For sure.”
“Come on then.”
The six blocks to the park are interesting in themselves, an odd mixture of gentrification, empty shop fronts, a bewildering variety of people and the dog-walkers.
“Relationships,” says Evelyn as they walk, “I never really got them. Did you watch Seinfeld?”
“Some, not much.”
“If you want to understand New York, well, at least the New York I live in, watch it. It's the friends thing, you know, the people you hang out with. Like being an adolescent in a way. Anyone who gets settled in a relationship, unless they are rich, and I mean really rich, moves to the suburbs, especially if they're into rugrats.”
“Rugrats?”
“Children.”
“Oh. Children?”
“Yeah, you can't have children and live on Manhattan unless you’re loaded. People go to New Jersey, so help me, to have kids. Or Connecticut. And say they like it. I suppose they have to.”
They’re passing Bryant Park. An elderly Chinese man sits on a stool by the entrance playing a single-stringed instrument with a bow. The high, haunting sound of it cuts through the other noises of the city: the cars, the sirens, the general hubbub. Ann hears the notes before she can see where they come from. She drops some coins into the cap on the footpath—sidewalk—by his foot, then has to run a few steps to catch up to Evelyn. She feels as though she’s in a movie. A foreign movie. New York is kind of familiar and also very, very strange. She can only think of the clichés: edgy, fast, people looking like they’re on speed, politely spoken, saying “excuse me” even if they only almost-bumped you, but quick, purposeful, on their way. Exotic, exciting, exhausting and thrilling.
Evelyn walks at a fair pace, which keeps them warm. Ann enjoys walking, watching, ducking and diving around people. And those dogs.
Then they are in Central Park. Evelyn strides right on past the pond, heading somewhere in particular.
“I want to show you something.” Clearly. Some trees are bare, others hold on to a few dying leaves. It’s a still day, but Ann is surprised at the uncluttered paths. Plenty of ground staff to clear away fallen leaves, no doubt. Beautiful lawns. People sitting reading, a paper or a book or a screen, hampered by gloves, festooned with scarves. Some have white or black cords coming out of their ears, some are apparently talking to themselves, but probably not; if Ann looks carefully there’s a tiny phone mic on the earphone cord.
“Here we are. Look.” There’s a round pond, an angel on a fountain, a terrace, people sitting and standing around, some in boats on a lake beyond. “This is my favourite place in the park. I often come here at the weekend with the paper when it’s warm. Oh, Look! Quick!” Someone is leaving a bench and Evelyn darts over, making her claim seconds before two men who veer away, looking like cats when they make out they never wanted the morsel you didn't offer them. Of course I wasn't after that silly seat.
People are so polite. Kind of indifferently polite, but it makes for a sense of safety. Ann is certain she'll not get much of a response if she tries to start a conversation, but the sense is of pleasantness. Where are the homeless she wonders again. You’d expect, with the financial meltdown, mortgage foreclosures and job losses, that there would be more homeless people.
“Moved on,” says Evelyn, “moved out.” That’s it, she doesn’t know any more. Doesn’t want to know any more, Ann thinks, and doesn’t press the matter. It’s too cold to sit for long. Too cold for snow, according to Evelyn. “Wisconsin,” she says. “I’ve never been there, but it got snow today apparently. Come on, we’ll head back.”
*
Wassily Kandinsky has not been one of Ann's art history favourites, but the big retrospective at the Guggenheim is being made much of and she doesn't want to regret missing it, so she goes on her last full day in New York. Starting at the bottom, she makes her way slowly up the spiral that is the gallery, following the artist’s move to abstraction, revelling in the patches of saturated brightness, the relationships of colour and lines. In a side gallery of works on paper Klee and Miro jostle in her mind with the works on the wall and she smiles her way around the room, enchanted.
From the top she works her way back down, stopping in front of some paintings, wandering right past others, enjoying the art-work that is the building as she goes.
Ann stands for a long time at Composition 8, July 1923. Looking into the painting feels like being in New York, out in the street, or the park, in it, not completely of it. Then she is wholly there. Not immersed in the painting exactly, but in it, feeling herself as a speck, traversing the lines, floating in the colours, being, in an inexplicable sense, pure being. She is also aware of her actual body, standing in front of the painting, not taking up any particular shape, just standing there while this tiny other self moves within the frame, a slight shimmer on the surface of the paint as she negotiates the colours and angles, lines and shapes, in pure experience. Uplifting. The movement is taking its own time, going at its own pace, she has a sense of panic that she will not be finished—whatever finished is—before someone comes along and interrupts. Figures move in and out of her side vision but none intrude fully until she has in fact completed the painting—all the lines walked, (but walking’s not the right word) all the colours taken into herself. Then, suddenly, like a switch turning off, the surface of the painting is still and she is aware of other people and herself standing slightly to one side, looking at the painting from an angle, as in the Emily Dickinson poem about the truth, and telling it slant. Wasn’t she standing directly in front of the painting earlier? She continues on her way down, quiet in her mind, and out into Fifth Avenue, walking until she finds a way into Central Park. Back at the Bethesda Fountain, she sits and eats a sandwich. Pastrami on rye, because that's such a New York kind of sandwich.
Entering into paintings is exhilarating while it’s happening and she feels peaceful and satisfied afterwards. But should she be worried? Is she having a breakdown, as they say, fragmenting into madness? A definite no. Strange, but all right, she decides, a trick of my mind. Not an academic interpretation, more a visceral experience. She likes “visceral” and says it out loud to the hopeful pigeon pecking at the ground by her feet. “Best not to talk about it,” she tells the pigeon. “The last thing I want is other people's explanations. It can be mine, all mine.” She likes that, a total immersion experience, belonging only and wonderfully to her.
Evelyn is finishing work early today, to take her across the river to Brooklyn on the subway, so they can walk back to Manhattan across Brooklyn bridge in the twilight, and watch the lights of the city come on.
“Don’t go to the Twin Towers site,” Evelyn had advised, “It’s gross, what they’re doing there. I’ll show you the gap in the skyline from the bridge.” She refuses to talk about That Day, says far too much has already been said, and was still being said, most of it rubbish, “Which is what the towers were reduced to.”
It’s a longer walk across the bridge than Ann has expected, and spectacular. The views of Manhattan are magical in the half-light, gradually illuminating themselves from the inside. She and Evelyn face the mass of people walking and cycling home in an orderly stream above the road traffic.
As they walk, Evelyn says she is glad to be back in touch with her sister. “I effectively don’t have any family, at least not here,” she says. “And it’s thin over there. Like many in this town, I’ve gotten used to getting by without.” She hopes she'd sent flowers to her parents’ funerals—family by interflora—and no, she isn't lonely. She has buddies, not just Jerry, girl-buddies. “Like on Friends, though not as well scripted.” Ann realises too late she was meant to laugh.
The email from her father begins, “Hi Honeybunch, well your dear old dad has been and gone and done it. You don't own any of that house any more.” There’s a lot of detail about price, a good one in spite of the state of the housing market, and Ex agreeing to everything on cost of chattels (guilt, Ann thinks). She skims through it all. “And Mum and I have organised for all your things from the house to come here, we've cleared out the spare room for them, you left such good lists, it's all very simple. And Mum had the bright idea of getting some boys from student job search to help on the day, so don't worry about us lifting and carrying all those boxes of books.” Ann remembers walking around the house making those lists, feeling abject, not really caring what she put on them. Now, she stares at the sentence, “You don't own any of that house any more,” feeling it etch into her brain. Homeless. Jobless. Her stuff at her parents’ house. Like a teenager, she says to Evelyn over their last meal together, late, at a nearby café.