But I look again, more closely: this woman is not Grace. She doesn’t even look like Grace. Grace is my age, she would not be this old. There’s a generic resemblance, that’s all. This woman is a stranger.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” says the woman who is not Grace. Her eyes narrow behind her glasses. She raises her fist, and I drop my glass of wine. Red splashes the wall and floor. What she has in her clenched hand is a bottle of ink. With a shaky twist she unscrews the top, and I hold my breath, with fright but also curiosity: is it me she’ll throw it at? For throwing is clearly her intention. There are gasps around us, this is happening fast, Carolyn and Jody are pushing forward. The woman who is not Grace hurls the ink, bottle and all, straight at White Gift. The bottle careens and thuds to the carpet, ink pours down over the skyscape, veiling Mrs. Smeath in Parker’s Washable Blue. The woman gives me a triumphant smile and turns, not stalking now but scurrying, heading for the door. I have my hands over my mouth, as if to scream. Carolyn envelops me, hugging. She smells like a mother. “I’ll call the police,” she says.
“No,” I say. “It will come off.” And it probably will, because White Gift is varnished, and painted on wood. Maybe there won’t even be a dent.
There are women gathering around me, the rustle of their feathers, a cooing. I am soothed and consoled, patted, cherished as if in shock. Maybe they mean it, maybe they like me after all. It’s so hard for me to tell, with women.
“Who was that?” they ask.
“Some religious nut case,” says Jody. “Some reactionary.”
I will be looked at, now, with respect: paintings that can get bottles of ink thrown at them, that can inspire such outraged violence, such uproar and display, must have an odd revolutionary power. I will seem audacious, and brave. Some dimension of heroism has been added to me. FEATHERS FLY AT FEMINIST FRACAS, says the paper. The picture is of me cringing, hands over my mouth, Mrs. Smeath bare-naked and dripping with ink in the background. This is how I learn that women fighting is news. There’s something titillating about it, upended and comic, like men in evening gowns and high heels. Hen fighting, it’s called.
The show itself attracts bad adjectives: “abrasive,” “aggressive” and “shrill.” It’s mostly Jody’s statues and Carolyn’s quilts that are called these things. Zillah’s lintscapes are termed “subjective,” “introverted”
and “flimsy.” Compared with the rest of them, I get off easy: “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon.”
Carolyn makes a bright yellow banner with the words “abrasive,” “aggressive” and “shrill” on it in red, arid hangs it outside the door. A great many people come.
Chapter 63
I’m waiting, in a waiting room. The waiting room has several nondescript blondwood chairs in it, with seats upholstered in olive green, and three end tables. This furniture is a clunky imitation of the early Scandinavian furniture of ten or fifteen years ago, now drastically out of style. On one of the tables there are some thumbed Reader’s Digest and Maclean’s magazines, and on another an ashtray, white with a rosebud trim. The carpet is an orangey-green, the walls an off-yellow. There is one picture, a lithoprint of two coy, grisly children in pseudo-peasant costume, vaguely Austrian, using a mushroom for an umbrella. The room smells of old cigarette smoke, old rubber, the worn intimacy of cloth too long against flesh. On top of that, an overlay of floor wash antiseptic, seeping in from the corridors beyond. There are no windows. This room sets me on edge, like fingernails on a blackboard. Or like a dentist’s waiting room, or the room where you’d wait before a job interview, for a job you didn’t want to get. This is a discreet private loony bin. A rest home, it’s called: The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home. The sort of place well-off people use for stowing away those members of their families who are not considered fit to run around in public, in order to keep them from being carted off to 999 Queen, which is neither discreet nor private.
999 Queen is both a real place and high school shorthand for all funny farms, booby hatches, and nuthouses that could possibly be imagined. We had to imagine them, then, never having seen one. “999
Queen,” we would say, sticking our tongues out the sides of our mouths, crossing our eyes, making circles near our ears with our forefingers. Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.
I am waiting for Cordelia. Or I think it will be Cordelia: her voice on the phone did not sound like her, but slower and somehow damaged. “I saw you,” is what she said, as if we had been talking together only five minutes before. But in fact it had been seven years, or eight, or nine: the summer she worked at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the summer of Josef. “In the paper,” she added. And then a pause, as if this was a question.
“Right,” I said. Then, because I knew I should, “Why don’t we get together?”
“I can’t go out,” Cordelia said, in the same slowed-down voice. “You’ll have to come here.”
And so I am here.
Cordelia comes through a door at the far end of the room, walking carefully, as if balancing, or lame. But she is not lame. Behind her is another woman, with the optimistic, false, toothy smile of a paid attendant. It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn’t look at all the same. Or rather she doesn’t look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she?
Flesh has been added, but it has slid down, toward the middle of her body, like mud sliding down a hill. The long bones have risen to the surface of her face, the skin tugged downward on them as if by irresistible gravitational pull. I can see how she’ll be when she’s old. Someone has done her hair. Not her. She would never make it in tight little waves like that. Cordelia stands uncertainly, squinting a little, head poking forward and swinging imperceptibly from side to side, the way an elephant’s does, or some slow, bewildered animal. “Cordelia,” I say, standing up.
“There’s your friend,” says the woman, smiling relent lessly. She takes Cordelia by the arm and gives a small tug, to start her in the right direction. “There you are,” I say, falling already into the trap of addressing her like a child. I come forward, give her an awkward kiss. I find to my surprise that I’m glad to see her.
“Better late than never,” Cordelia says, with the same hesitation, the thickness in her voice I’ve heard over the phone. The woman steers her to the chair across from mine, settles her down into it with a little push, as if she’s elderly, and stubborn.
Suddenly I’m outraged. No one has a right to treat Cordelia this way. I scowl at the woman, who says,
“How nice of you to come! Cordelia enjoys a visit, don’t you, Cordelia?”
“You can take me out,” Cordelia says. She looks up at the woman, for approval.
“Yes, that’s right,” says the woman. “For tea or something. If you promise to bring her back, that is!”