were braided to one side her face. Margaret was not in the habit of wearing undergarments. I had glimpsed her breasts once where they hung away from her skin as she bent over to adjust her stool and pour herself another trifle from her flask. The immodesty of my gaze seemed to impress her.
That morning, the two women were hanging a painting in the kitchen above Old Eagle Back. Margaret sat on the stool observing Mother work.
“What about here,” Mother said, holding the painting at shoulder level against the far wall of the kitchen. “How’s that for height?”
“That’s fine,” Margaret said. “That’s just fine. Mark it off. I’ve got a level in back of the car. I’ll make a dash for it after we finish our tea.”
Mother took the pencil from behind her ear and drew a faint line on the wall over the center of the frame.
The wall had been a focal point of Mother’s recent discomfort. It sat at the far end of the house onto which both the living room and the portico overlooked. The previous owners of the house had been an elderly couple with a fondness for stenciling pastoral scenes onto any stretch of wall that enjoyed some open expanse. To Mother’s mind, the kitchen offered a particularly unforgivable example. The laymen’s handiwork, she felt, was evidence of the house’s age and limited possibility.
“Like Didion said,” Margaret said. “Style is character.”
“Truly,” Mother said. She leaned the print against the wall and stood back to regard it as she smoked.
In truth, I could tell Mother wasn’t entirely sure about the choice of the work. The print had been a gift from Margaret, an old replica from her wall, which Margaret said she’d stared at too long.
“It needs fresh eyes,” Margaret had said, putting the frame into the back of her Volvo one night after the two women had gotten into the sherry.
Mother looked disappointed now with her choice. She’d hoped for something more modern. In the wake of their enthusiasm, she’d ended up with Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Red Hills.”
“There’s a hardness about it,” Margaret said. “It radiates a certain intelligence.”
Mother searched the soft red expanse of the print for the intelligence of which Margaret spoke. In her worst imaginings, I thought, the earthen mass looked not unlike one of the watercolors Birdie would bring home from school. At best, it radiated a kind of optimism.
“It’s a horizon,” Mother said.
“Not only that,” Margaret said. “It’s Texas.”
“Really,” Mother said.
“Truly,” Margaret said. “O’Keeffe attended art school in Chicago. The boys there were always encouraging her to abandon her practice and become an art teacher or a live model. One even went so far as to paint over her work to show her how the Impressionists made trees. At twenty-four, O’Keeffe said she moved to Texas because there were no trees to paint.”
“In that case I understand her prerogative,” Mother laughed dragging long and hard on her cigarette before pushing the smoke out her nose.
“When they got too bored of looking at the horizon,” Margaret said. “O’Keeffe and her sister, Claudia, used to go out and trace the evening stars. They’d take long walks and Claudia would play skeet with the bottles in the road, throwing the bottles up into the air and picking off as many of them as she could before they hit the ground.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Mother laughed.
“You’re a funny woman, Ania,” Margaret said to Mother. “In fact, you’re not so unlike Didion yourself.”
“Come off it,” Mother said by way of encouragement.
“Scout’s honor,” Margaret said. “When the men asked her why she painted ‘Red Hills’ instead of her traditional flowers, O’Keeffe replied, ‘A red hill doesn’t touch anyone’s heart.’”
Mother wasn’t much versed in the ways of Didion. She associated writers of that ilk with the allure she had felt towards the women’s movement that had erupted during her college years. The product of Russian immigrants who had raised their family in a small boarding house in one of New York’s smaller industrial cities, she had avoided her attraction to the movement for practicality’s sake. Her mindset was the product of the immigrant constitution. She’d been taught to keep her brow tipped slightly toward the heavens at all times such that her very posture might raise her up. While her grade school friends were tattooing their books with pictures of Kennedy, she’d attended Republican meetings with her father at the General Electric. The first vote she’d cast had been for Nixon. From a young age she’d wanted to be a part of the American politic, a forecast she associated with the Republican brain. Republicans belonged to a set of wealthy risk-takers with strong characters who made good on their children and their investments. “The future is portended in the rise of one’s cheekbones,” Mother often said. “That slender slope.” Mother had spent one summer of her college career working desk duty at the addictions division of the Red Cross, conducting intake interviews with the Veterans. She’d felt she’d seen enough that summer to know big government didn’t accomplish anything more than organizing people’s worst years.
Mother now spent what evenings she could out of the house. She took night classes that met at the feed store in the center of town. The nights she wasn’t studying, she attended meetings held by The League of Women Voters in Margaret’s studio. Beyond voting, the league was dedicated to promoting speaking opportunities. Mother had begun exercising these around the house with Birdie and I. Despite her conservative politic, Mother was fiercely imaginative and outspoken, attributes ignited by those Sunday sit-ins. Margaret appreciated Mother’s thrift and her libel. She recognized in the young woman a similar passion for bargaining with the world. Despite the gap in their age and their experience, life had lent both women the perspective that the only interesting lives were those lived by people whose subsistence required very little upkeep, yet whose true thriving was provided for by acts of excess. Margaret smoked and threw dinner parties. Socially Mother cavorted with the town’s few peaked progressives. She danced in the kitchen to Elvis. Margaret brought some color back into her cheeks.
“I’m just not sure this print’s particularly modern,” Mother said that morning, regarding the O’Keeffe where it rested against our kitchen wall.
“Look around you,” Margaret chided, “Next to that window, the painting almost looks like a mirror image of your little view.”
“So now you’re saying I’ve bought a house with a dismal view,” Mother laughed.
“Precisely,” Margaret laughed.
“It’s depressing,” Mother said. “Staring at all that red in the distance. It’s like someone rained blood on the mountain.”
“Color overthrows form,” Margaret said. “Really, it’s a very modern idea.”
As if to lend credit to her heritage, Margaret was a gifted photographer. Her husband had worked for the Audubon Society and was rumored to have been a distinguished botanist and nature writer. In an act of affection for him, Margaret had taken up photography and had often accompanied him on his trips. Mr. Nydam had died some years before Margaret came to own her apartment above the Agway—really more of an attic studio than home—which now housed her plethora of nature books, hardcover photography
