but he did gut them on our drive, the same drive where we rode our bicycles and played hopscotch after drawing the outline of the board with chalk. And even though he washed the pavement when he was finished, I was sure little pieces of bone or skin had caught in the rutted surfaces or settled in a shallow corner. I avoided all the corners, sure there was something remaining, a tuft of fur, a tooth. He scrubbed the car windows clean, the metal door handles, too.
Mother froze the deer meat in plastic but never made us eat it. She didn’t touch it either, except to fry it in the pan. Father was the only one.
Father wants to capture us as children and hang us on the wall above the love seat in the living room. To do this Mother takes us to the artist’s house to the part out back he calls his studio. We have to sit an hour a week and each of us goes on a different day because we can’t patiently wait our turn and then be poised and obedient.
Monday is my day. Monday mornings Mother worries about the creases in my jumper. I come to breakfast dressed but still she makes me remove the jumper and has me stand in my socks, shoes, and underwear at the ironing board while the maid runs the iron up and down the front of my dress. There are three pleats that begin at the collar and come to an end at the hemline, which is stitched in a zigzag of red. Father sips his coffee and watches me, not even pretending to read the morning paper. When Mother says the pleats are perfect, I put the dress on without waiting for it to cool. I would rather burn my skin than stand in front of Father for even one more second half-dressed.
Mother reminds me to hurry outside to the car as soon as the last bell rings. But I make her wait, having told my teacher Monday is a good day for me to wash the blackboards, which is why I am never the first one out and why, when I do appear, I am covered in chalk dust.
Mother doesn’t like the drive, especially in winter when it gets dark early. The unpaved road cuts through the woods where men come to shoot deer. I open the car window and listen for the sound of shots even though I have never heard any. Mother gets cold easily and insists I close the window. With my forehead pressed against the glass, I look for bloodstained patches of ground but I have never seen any.
The artist tells me to fold my hands and when he isn’t satisfied he comes over and bends down on one knee. Using both of his hands he moves mine, touching my fingers, placing them like tiny sculptures across my pink lap. It is each finger he wants to see. I don’t like him watching me so closely. Even so, I ask Mother if she has a ring I can wear. I imagine a pink stone in the shape of a diamond, but she doesn’t have a ring or any other jewelry, not for me.
Now when I think of my brother and sister as children, the faces I see are the ones the artist painted. Helen’s hair is parted slightly off-center. He captured the dazed look she already had in her eyes at the age of thirteen. Seated below her is my brother holding the double-decker bus Father bought him in London. His lips are in a half-smile that looks more like a grimace.
When we are not with the artist, he works off black-and-white photographs taped to the wooden frame of his easel. He told Mother he needs to see me even when I am not there in order to draw me more perfectly. Sometimes he changes the placement of the photographs, but never eliminates any. He asks Mother about my habit of biting my nails. Of Helen he wants to know about the bruises, and as to my brother, why all the politeness?
In one photograph Father’s arm is around my waist. I remember trying to inch away and him pulling me back. The artist says I look like Father, more so than Helen or Jake. He insists my legs be crossed with each shoe facing forward, my socks folded in a straight line even though no little girl would sit this way. If the scene isn’t how he wants it, he leaves the brush on the easel’s wooden ledge and comes in so close I can hear his heart beating. His hands stink of turpentine. When he touches my chin or tucks a loose hair behind my ear the odor makes me drowsy. I must stay awake watching him, making sure he doesn’t come in closer and touch me again. Later, at home in front of my mirror, I practice staying focused. There are nights I am in bed and feel my skin burning. It is the artist looking at me.
He does not paint our marks, our bruises or scrapes, not even a rumpled skirt. There is a framed photograph on the wall across from where he works. I can’t say what it is because the head is missing; it is some sort of water animal, maybe a hippopotamus or rhinoceros. In houses of my friends and in a club my Father takes us to, I have seen halls lined in hanging heads. In his photograph, perfectly perched on top of the rotting animal is a very white bird. It is different from the wooded scenes hanging in my parents’ paneled den—deer at streams or roosters outside a barn where everything is drawn to scale. It seems beautiful because of the light, but there is a trick to looking at it, to seeing what it is exactly.
I never know how much time is left until I hear Mother’s car pull into his gravel driveway. And I never ask. Here in the South, we have been told children should not speak unless spoken to. When Mother picks me up, I am so tired from being still and from worrying about the artist and what he is doing that I sleep the entire drive home, waking with the print of the seatbelt patterned into my cheek. Saliva is crusted on the outside corner of my mouth and my left arm is pins and needles. It is an awful thing this sleep, and every Monday night, no matter how late I go to bed, I lie wide-awake watching the hands on the clock.
The three of us are standing in my parents’ house, not the one where we grew up but the one they moved to at the end of their lives. It’s a ranch because Father can no longer walk up stairs. The box-like home sits on a flat piece of property overlooking the woods. Father spends his afternoons on the back deck bundled beneath a blanket. Seated on a plastic-latticed lawn chair, he stares into the trees hoping to see a family of deer grazing on the lawn or leaping over the wire fence that divides his property from the neighbor’s.
The oil painting of us as children now leans against the wall with all their other paintings, the old man with the captain’s wheel in hand, the peeled orange on a dark mahogany credenza, a batik from Thailand of two dancers and a trio of flowers at different intervals of budding. My brother turns the picture of us around so the image faces the wall. Helen doesn’t want it either. None of us, she says, ever looked that way.
Remember having to sit for him? I ask. How impatient he was and how long it took, that way he stared at you, as if he knew everything about you.
I don’t remember, Helen says.
Even in photographs, Mother’s hairpiece doesn’t look real. She keeps it bobby-pinned to a Styrofoam head that sits on her vanity. In the late afternoon, anticipating a dinner party, she brushes each shaft the way the sales lady instructed, then, positions it on her head using the combs sewn inside the wig to attach it to her scalp. Unlike Mother, the fall has straight long hair in many shades of brown. She wears a velvet headband to disguise the stitching of the wig.
Father likes the guests to hear how well Helen plays the piano. Before the performance the maid helps Helen with her hair, sweeping it from her face and piling it on top of her head. She plays Mother’s childhood piano that Mother never plays. Before beginning, Helen stares at Mother hoping to get her attention. Mother casually leans against the wall and smokes her extra long cigarettes. She doesn’t look at Helen but stares into the distance. For most of the night Mother is quiet. It is unusual to hear her speak except when she is telling the maid to do something.
Father’s expression during the performance is of pleasure, and when Helen is done, she takes a bow and makes a curtsy. Some guests ask her questions. Others compliment her. It is true she is pretty when she smiles.
That night there is a commotion in Helen’s room. I think Father must have disturbed her when he left a gift on her nightstand, which he does after she performs.
In the morning I ask Mother if Helen is okay.
