Eva does a series of paintings called Memories of My Father. One shows her father sleeping behind her mother. Another shows him sitting on a toilet seat folding a newspaper in half. Others: squeezing lemon juice for a pitcher of scotch sours, mailing a bunch of manila envelopes in a post office, pushing the two girls in a shopping cart at a supermarket, paying for takeout food in a Chinese restaurant, haranguing her mother across the dining room table, peeling an avocado seed for planting, fork-feeding the two girls simultaneously, kissing her mother while holding on to her bottom, digging his knuckles into his temples, looking at several photos of his father, helping his mother downstairs, putting a record back into its jacket, filling a pen, cleaning a typewriter key. Eating, exercising, cooking, slicing, typing, reading, driving, raging, sneezing, aimlessly peeing, winding his watch, brushing his teeth, grating a carrot, unpinning her diapers, filling her baby’s bottle with milk, in a hospital dying. Brown tweed suit, button-down blue shirt, light gray tie. The family stands above it staring inside, Eva on a box, Olivia on tiptoes, his mother crying. He looks healthier there than in any of the others. The paintings are exhibited and get lots of attention and reviews. The gallery sells the lot. Two are bought by European museums, one by a prominent Japanese art collector. Most of the drawings for the paintings sell too. Newspaper article, long critiques in art publications, two-page spread with reproductions of some of the works in a popular newsweekly, interviews. “I feel awful,” she writes Olivia. “First, that I didn’t keep even one for myself. That’s because I couldn’t make up my mind. ‘Daddy in the Tub’? ‘Daddy Showering’? ‘Daddy Shaving the Back of His Neck After Giving Himself a Haircut’? When I finally chose the tub one, it was just being bought for the most money, even if it was one of the smallest and no better framed than the others. The gallery owner said to me ‘My dear, we must pay expenses and keep peachy relations with this particular buyer, who’s already begun to sock away funds for the most expensive work in your next show. Choose another,” but by then admissible bids were being made for the other two, and the few remaining I didn’t feel merited keeping. Secondly, that I didn’t offer you whichever one you wanted for nothing. Especially the one of you and Daddy holding hands and he with your backpack over his shoulder as he walked you down the hill to school. I got you both from behind. You seem to be looking at a squirrel in a tree running. I think it’s a good one. Now I’ll probably never see it again, though I’ve some like slides of it. Also, that I should be on my way, or already made, as one idiot critic put it, and partly because of Daddy. What about all the paintings I did before? The Laughing Mom series. Bombed quietly. One-dimensional, that gallery owner kept being told. They didn’t get the joke—’Say “Cheese”’, even though I know you can’t float a whole show on one pun — or see, as we say, the new nuances in them, among other delusions. No reviews, one sale, and I think that one to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Iris, who still haven’t unpacked it because they want me to believe someone I didn’t know — possibly a hotshot influential art collector — bought it. It wasn’t you, I hope, since half the sale went to the gallery, another ten percent to the gallery for announcements, hangings and cheap opening-night crackers and wine in paper dentist cups, and the rest she’s still promising me. Besides, I’d have given you any two Moms you wanted. Best thing about that gallery is that it dropped me flat. That’s what I need most to get into and go on with the next series. As it is, I’ll probably have to start debasing my present success and maybe give away half my earnings to old age homes for artists to start anything new. But what’ll more likely happen is that the Moms will now sell. They had some good things in them, but everyone seems to think the Father ones were more lived than the Moms, though technically as virtuous. But all the scenes in the Mom paintings I experienced and all the ones in Father I made up. I had nothing to paint from because I had no memories of him. Just photos of different sorts and groupings, and I wasn’t going to reproduce blown-up versions of those. They’d be so cold, except perhaps my reaction to them, and it’s also been done to death before. You should have painted the Father series. You showed lots of talent once. It’s all I can remember of you for years. Drawing, painting, tracing, coloring, cutting out and pasting things together to play with and for collages and mobiles, designing and illustrating your own books. Or we could have done Father together. You giving me your head snaps and telling me if I’m getting them on the canvas right. And dabbing here and there and even splashing all over the place if you wanted, for I’m sure you’re a better artist dormant than I am active and that it’d all come back to you in a flash and with an intelligence and feeling my works lack. And then with paintings, if it’s really bad or there’s a serious mistake, there’s little you can’t cover over and change. Now it’s too late. They’re done, bought, hung, insured, guarded by guards and alarms and maybe even attack dogs in some places. And many probably can’t be located and, if I wanted to, destroyed, since some collectors think announcing they’ve a collection is like asking for a major break-in. And somehow I don’t see myself doing alone Olivia’s Memories of Our Father. Though who knows? Since after I do a series on you and a shorter one on Grandma and an even shorter one called Other Relatives, a Bad Marriage, a Number of Lovers and Some Friends, I won’t have any place to go. Maybe sculpture. That’d get me doing something new. Though suddenly I see myself sculpting bigger-than-life-size bas-reliefs of all of us, starting with Mom just giving birth to you, and Daddy, in this same scene, in hospital gown and mask and holding you in his arms and weeping voluminously, a moment, Mom’s said Daddy called, the happiest in his life.”