day she’s first riotous inside. Flipping through the different artists’ movements, classicism and realism—why always this obsession with what can be touched and measured, all this silliness of breasts and beauty and brawn. How they delight in surfaces—the whisk of fabric, the gloss of bodies—but never the misty swirlings of the inner eye. Something here that implies feeling in Cassatt’s little whale-white belly of a daughter, mother spreading her chubbed toes to water in the white-bellied bowl. The silent workings between them, a something that can’t be seen. And here, what they called fauvism, vision the eyes alone can’t see, sight of deepest speaking, color for a true mood. She wasn’t even hang-head or blowing over how she’s been keeping all these paintings from me, never telling, never teaching me, she never told me—what her whole body can’t know, only I. Cubism, how the seams and turnings in a person, the many seen and hidden versions, overlap—yes, they know, they can see beyond the bodies, these painters. How long ago—fifty, a hundred—I am a hundred years behind.
Seven
Monday, July 8, 1974
30 days
“Don’t move.” The early sun tilts into my eyes so all I can see is someone standing close over me. There’s a click, click and the person drops a camera from the dark outline of his face and crouches down to root around in a canvas bag. I’m freezing, curled up on my side in the cold sand. Sun-spots swim across my vision and when I turn my head I see the person is a girl, skinny as a colt, crouched in khaki pants and a black tank-top. “Damn. Didn’t you hear me?”
“I haven’t moved,” I say, shivering, and although my eyes burn with salt and sand, I don’t lift a hand to rub them.
“Your hair. I wanted the swirl of it on the sand.”
“Oh.” I sit up and wrap my arms around my knees. “Sorry.”
She shrugs, and even though she’s almost as small as me, she’s older than I first thought—a grown woman, the corners of her eyes radiating faint lines.
She twists a dark filter off the end of her lens then slots it into a plastic box, all of her movements quick and efficient. “I was pretty much finished for the morning anyway. The kids seem to have picked this beach clean.”
“You mean shells? There are never any out here. You have to go up that way.” I point back down the beach towards the house. My teeth are chattering, and she turns her dark eyes to look at me, then pulls a windbreaker out of her bag and tosses it over. “Hey,” I say, her accent registering. “You’re an out-of-towner.”
“Hardly the only one.” She points with her chin towards the windbreaker and I slide my arms in, pull it over my knees, and the shivers stop. She digs in her bag, pulls out a little brush with a bulb on the end, and starts swiping at the lens.
“Yeah, but you’re a yankee.”
She lets out a loud, quick “ha!” and grins, sitting down next to me and peering at me from behind a shoulder-length curtain of shaggy brown hair. “What’s your name?”
“Ansel.”
“After the photographer?”
“After my grandfather.”
“I’m Lee. But just call me The Yankee.”
I get up, dust the sand from my legs, and my whole face blazes when I realize I’m only wearing a bra and underwear underneath the windbreaker. “I bet I’m not the first person to call you that,” I mumble as I scoop my clothes against my body, then scramble behind some big rocks back against the cliff. I strip off my still-damp undies and hastily pull my shirt and shorts on over my raw skin, then shove my damp bra in one back pocket and my panties in the other.
“Maybe not, but you’re the first to call me that to my face.” She’s standing beside the rock now and I see the dark eyelid of her camera blink back at me before I can say anything. I shove the windbreaker at her as I push past and the camera winks at me again.
“Well, I…” but nothing I can think of would sound mature, cool, so I turn and walk slowly away from her. She snorts and starts to laugh as I take off running, up the beach away from her, my feet light on the cold sand.
The clock at the diner says 7:15 and Pauline makes me a hot chocolate, on the house. We’re the only two there so she settles on a stool, pulls the ashtray over and smokes, watching me.
“Everything okay at home, Ansel?”
I don’t think of Izzy when I shrug and wrap my hands around the cup, the heat not seeping deep enough to warm my bones.
“You look like hell, is all.” I stare into my mug and blow and sip as Pauline shakes her head. She looks tired as always, her dyed-red hair faded to a carroty orange, her green eyeliner flakey and smudged into her wrinkles like it’s weeks old. “Goddamn small towns,” she mutters.
“What do you mean?”
She takes a deep drag and exhales slowly, saying, “I mean the way no one—” but the door jingles open as a trucker in a plaid shirt and suspenders slouches in. Pauline stubs out her cigarette and walks back behind the counter, grabs a mug and fills it with coffee before smacking down a menu in front of the trucker. He asks her what’s the forecast, she flicks on the radio, a young couple in bright polos and crisp matching khakis slides into a booth, and Pauline stays busy the rest of the morning. I hold myself in my seat against the dark pull of the house and Izzy anchored there, smoldering with fever, and make a mental list of all the countries and capital cities I can think of. At ten I leave my empty mug on the counter and cross the street.
The library has one coverless paperback on Matisse, a coffee table book on Picasso, and nothing on the rest of them. I spend a few hours sorting through cardboard boxes stacked against the back wall that are full of garage-sale National Geographics and cast-off Redbooks. Brown veins of crusted dirt branch across the covers where bugs have eaten. I keep digging until I find one Art Today with an address for a place that sells art posters and postcards. I tear it out and shove the slip of paper into my sand-filled pocket behind my damp panties.
“You look like crap.” Everett Lloyd is standing behind me, not smiling, his light eyes distant, like he’s looking out at me from behind dingy glass.
“I—yeah. So I hear. I slept on the beach,” I say. He nods quickly—he hasn’t even heard me—and shifts his eyes to the door leading back to the bathroom.
“Watch out for that.” His shoulders are cinched up, and as he turns towards the front door I realize these might be the last words he’ll say to me all summer.
“Am I covered in sand or what,” I call after him, then remember I took my wet bra and underwear off before pulling on my shorts and t-shirt. The air slips inside my clothes so easily my face starts to burn and when I rub my arms sand sprinkles the floor around me.
“Yeah,” he says, focusing on me, a tiny smile curling the corners of his lips. “You’re a real mess.”
“Ansel Mackenzie,” Mrs. Hammond calls from the circulation desk. “I hope you’re planning on sweeping that up.”
We both snort and Everett says, “I’ve got it, Mrs. Hammond.”
“Oh sure,” I say, “Make me look like some irresponsible—”
“Well,
