Days have passed since their aborted attempt at marital intercourse. The air is growing chilly. The radiator hisses with heat. She is dressed in one of Aaron’s old knit sweaters pulled over her pink chenille bathrobe and with wool socks on her feet, because she is always cold. One of her husband’s Lucky Strikes smolders in the green glass ashtray on the kitchen table as she sketches her reflection on a pad with a charcoal stick. Her mother shares the table, smoking a rice-paper Gitanes Brune inserted into an elegant amber resin holder. A strong and pungent aroma in the past, but all that Rachel smells is the stink of ash that always lingers over her mother’s arrival. Eema’s face is a perfect heart shape and her complexion alabaster. She is dressed in her finery of velvet and sable. Her black bob is silvered by the arrow point of a widow’s peak. Her face is coldly beautiful. Not exactly the nurturing parent, perhaps. Always happy to judge.
So we are here, you and I, she hears her mother observe. Azoy, mir zenen do. Always, between them, it’s Yiddish.
“Yes, Eema. We are here.”
Peering at her daughter with her usual mix of curiosity and disapproval, she wonders, What is this you are doing?
“I’m drawing,” Rachel tells her.
Really? Eema is skeptical. Is that what you think? This qualifies as drawing?
“Es iz a shmittshik,” Rachel says and then picks out a few words from English. “A doodad, you know? A doodle.”
So you may call it. But is it a waste of your God-given talent?
“And now it’s about what God gives us, Eema? I thought my talent came from you. Besides, you said you had abandoned God.”
Eema replies in a leaden tone, Of course! This is how a daughter speaks to her mother. Let’s be correct, Rashka. I did not abandon God. God abandoned me. She expels smoke with a certain dramatic aplomb, but Rachel does not react, prompting Eema to frown at the silence. So this shmittshik? You think it serves art?
“Degas said that art is not what you see but what you make others see.”
Degas, Eema scoffs. Degas was an anti-Semite and a misogynist, tsigele.
“Don’t call me that. I’m not your little goat anymore.”
But still stubborn as one. When will you stop sleepwalking? You’ve been scarred, yes. We live, we die. But in between, for those chosen, we have a duty to create.
“Very simple for you to say, Eema.” Rachel’s charcoal stick scratches against the paper. “You’re dead.”
But her eema is deaf to this fact. She clutches at the sable collar of her coat. When I was your age, Rashka, I was already a recognized artist. My work was highly valued. Hanging in the most important galleries in Berlin.
“And yet not a single painting survives. They all went up in smoke. Just like you.”
As usual, you’re missing my point. You have your share of talent, Rokhl. A blessing or a curse? I can’t say. But why do you waste yourself?
“I’m not wasting myself, Eema. I’m protecting myself.”
Forget these silly drawings. Go! Pick up your brushes. Lay color onto your palette.
“No,” Rachel answers.
Open your easel and face an empty canvas!
“No,” Rachel answers more forcefully. “No, I cannot. I’m sorry, I cannot do it. It will hurt me.”
It will heal you!
“No! I’m afraid, Eema,” she confesses, her eyes heating with tears. “I’m afraid of what will come out of me.” She’s startled by her tiger cat leaping up onto the table, and with that, her mother’s chair empties. The smell of smoke returns to the cigarette in the ashtray. Wiping her eyes, Rachel seizes the cat. Kibbitz she calls him, because he’s always sticking his nose in, always getting into the middle of things.
Escaping to America, surviving the ruins of Europe, she felt she must—must—continue as her mother’s daughter. So for a period of years, she had dabbed a brush into globs of oily colors and smeared them onto canvases. “Ghosts” she called them. At first, they were only plumes of color. Whiffs of smoke. Nothing human. But gradually they began to take shape into more human forms. Of human memories. Over and over, she tried to capture the essence of what she had lost. The life of her mother? Yes. A life lost to a colorless killer, cyanide gas. The millions of lives lost. But she didn’t dare confess this, even when she found a gallery. Even after the gallery was selling those small works on small canvases or Masonite board. A newspaper printed her name and called her work both challenging and promising. She was married by then, yet Aaron didn’t seem to mind. He wasn’t exactly an art expert, he’d confess, obviously. Still, he was impressed that a painting could actually sell for money. He’d joke about retiring to easy street now that his wife could turn a profit!
But really, underneath it all, it was a lie. She was still pretending to be an artist. The human plumes of color she was producing were nothing. They were personal without being profound. Their impact was as meaningless as candle flames. A cough could blow them out. And they certainly weren’t Art. Not real Art like the Art of her mother. Secretly, she was ashamed of how inconsequential they were. Ashamed but also relieved. Maybe she didn’t need to be an artist. Maybe she could escape. Leave Eema’s legacy behind with the ashes. Maybe she could simply be what her husband expected her to be. A wife and a mother. Those were both acceptable professions in his mind. Maybe she could sign on as a regular American woman. And if she painted a canvas or two on the side? Well, there was a word in English that took the curse off that. Hobby. A pastime, a way to pass time. And in the process, if she collected a few dollars doing it? Even better. It didn’t mean she had to be—that she was doomed to be—her mother’s daughter. Rachel could avoid a career with the same zealousness that Eema had cultivated hers.
But after Bellevue? After the Episode, there was no question. She had to face the truth. There was a monster inside her. Locked away so that no one could see it? Yes. But painting was dangerous. Painting baited the monster out into the open. It made her vulnerable to herself. Who was she trying to fool? God? History? Herself? She had forfeited her rights as an artist one day while seated in a Berlin café. So returning from Bellevue to their apartment on West Twenty-Second Street, she’d locked away her easel and closeted her Winsor & Newton painter’s box. She no longer pretended that any of her soulless plumes of color had purpose. They were meaningless. Nishtik! They were trash, and she simply discarded them like New York litter, one at a time, leaving them behind on the subway or leaned against a fire hydrant in the street for dogs to piss on them.
Now? She confines herself to these scribbles. The Episode was a line of demarcation. After it, she could no sooner pick up a brush and apply paint to canvas than she could sprout wings and fly into the treetops. All that remains to her is the shmittshik. The doodle of her face mocking her warped reflection in a toaster. Her avowal of the truth of her inner distortion. The monster crouched so deeply within her.
When she hears the toilet flush, she removes the cat to the floor, then flips her sketch pad closed. “Good morning, Husband,” she calls, tamping out her cigarette, rubbing the charcoal dust from her fingers.
Aaron is trim, with a handsomely ordinary face. His curls are uncombed, and he’s dragging his tuchus, as he likes to say, shambling in from the bedroom in his pajamas. He’s wearing the plaid flannel bathrobe with matching slippers that she’d given him last May on his thirty-fourth birthday. The robe hangs open, and its belt drags on the floor on one side. Rachel is up, padding toward the kitchen galley in her socked feet to pour him coffee.