Very in Pieces Read online

  “As long as we can see it on these walls, Annaliese, that’s what matters.” They begin walking toward another canvas. “Be sure to send me the date so I can get it on the department calendar.”

  When they move on, I look at the small typed description.

  Oceanic.

  Acrylic on canvas.

  It’s possible that Ramona checked the title, but I doubt she ever looks at those gallery labels. She would consider that cheating.

  Yet she knew. She knew without hesitation, as if the knowledge had been deposited in her brain before birth. Nonnie always says that if everyone in the family were an artist, we’d never eat or have clean clothes. “Everyone has their role to play, Very.”

  I’m sick of mine.

  iii.

  The gallery is too much. Too bright, too square, too white, too many bubbly champagne-drinking sycophants.

  I slip out a side door of the main room and descend the stairs to the lower level of the gallery. The walls down here are gray and there’s no light jazz playing, just the sound of the air conditioner whirring.

  The New Hampshire High School Art Exposition is on display. This art, at least, makes sense to me. There are paintings of vases of flowers or landscapes—the White Mountains, mostly. Silver gelatin print photographs of buildings or blurry people. Crooked ceramic mugs.

  A wall at the back is reserved for the best of the best, and as I walk toward it, my eye is drawn to a large-format photograph of two girls. They are sitting with their bodies twisted into each other and their faces pressed together. They are both white girls, like me, and the photographer has made them even paler, as white as the dresses they are wearing. One is a brunette, the other a redhead, and the color of their hair seems to pop against all the white. Their lips and eyes, too, are unnaturally saturated.

  They are beautiful. Like angels or fairies or ghosts. They are not real girls.

  Only they are real, and I know them. Callie and Serena. They’re in my grade at school, going into our senior year. I look at the attribution, and I recognize the name of the photographer: Hunter Osprey. The three of them are inseparable, a triumvirate, and I never felt that I really knew anything about them. Callie, Serena, and Hunter. Now, though, I want to touch the picture and feel if their skin is as cool and smooth as it seems.

  I want someone to see me as Hunter sees these girls. Unnaturally beautiful. Tempting as the quince in Eden. Dangerous.

  I don’t have to go far for a reminder of how I’m really seen, for there, on the adjoining wall, nestled among the also-rans, is Christian’s portrait of me. Christian, my steady-in-every-sense-of-the-word boyfriend, and I had taken Intro to Art to fulfill our arts requirement. I was terrible, which delighted Mr. Solloway, but Christian was decent. We had to pair up and sketch portraits. Mine of him looked like some demented cross between Albert Einstein and Yo-Yo Ma. He sketched me leaning forward, pencil in hand, sucking on my lower lip as I worked through a math problem. Everyone said it captured me entirely: driven, studious, intense, blah, blah, blah. I used to love it, but now seeing the gray lines on small white paper compared to the glorious photograph of the girls, I want to tear it from the wall and smash the frame.

  Behind me a man clears his throat. I imagine that I’m not supposed to be down here, and I wonder if I should explain who I am—Annaliese Woodruff and Dallas Sayles’s daughter, Imogene Woodruff’s granddaughter—but when I turn, I don’t see a docent or a security guard or a man at all. It’s Dominic Meyers, the closest thing my high school has to a juvenile delinquent. The rumors are that he’s a small-time drug dealer, pot mostly. He’s standing there looking the part in dark jeans, white T-shirt, and black Doc Martens.

  He stares at me with deep green eyes and I wonder if he even knows who I am, that I go to his school, that we’re both seniors. Our school is small, only 130 people in our graduating class, and yet I can’t recall a single time we’ve interacted. Our lives slip by on lines that don’t intersect, and it’s possible he’s never even noticed me.

  “Quite the photograph.” He nods toward the picture of Callie and Serena.

  I glance back as if I hadn’t even noticed it, at the same time sidestepping to put myself between him and Christian’s sketch. “I guess so.”

  “People say that Serena’s slept with half the hockey team.”

  So at least he seems to know that we go to the same school. I heard the rumor, too, as it ricocheted around the halls. I thought it was disgusting, and not just because Christian was on the half of the team she hadn’t slept with. There is something in the way Dominic looks at me—the glint of his eyes, the twitch of his lips, even the curl of his dark brown hair—that seems like a challenge. Good girls don’t talk about sex. So I say, “It seems to me that it’s the hockey team that has the problem, not Serena.”

  “What’s their problem?” he asks.

  “A lack of imagination.”

  He laughs at this, which makes my body relax and shiver at the same time. He looks past my shoulder and I turn to block his view, hot in my cheeks at the thought of him seeing Christian’s portrait of me.

  “A general laziness,” he agrees, “like lions jumping on the gazelle once one of them has already brought her to the ground.”

  “It’s not like they’ve devoured her. She’s still there.”

  He raises an eyebrow. I’ve never really looked at him before. I mean, I know his general outlines, the way I know everyone in school, but I couldn’t have said before this moment, for example, that there seems to be a faint scar in that raised eyebrow, a thin line where no hair grows.

  “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, Very Woodruff.” Hearing him say my name is a small thrill, a question answered: he knows me. His voice is low and almost like a whisper. Instinctively, I lean in to hear him better.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why do they call you Very? What is it that you are very—very what?”

  My name is number two on my own personal list of frequently asked questions, right after “What’s it like to be Imogene Woodruff’s granddaughter?”

  “It’s short for Veronica,” I explain. “I’m named after the Elvis Costello song.”

  He looks at me blankly.

  “You know, ‘Veronica.’” Usually people either have no idea what I’m talking about when I explain my name, or they fawn all over Elvis Costello like he’s God’s gift to pop music. But Dominic just shakes his head. I sing my own name back to him, off-key and warbling.

  He grins crookedly, of course, and I can’t help but wonder if he practices the rakish expression. I can just see him standing in front of a bathroom mirror: Too cocky. Too sly. Too menacing. Ahh, just right!

  The air-conditioning is cranked up in the lower gallery, and I’m suddenly very, very cold, goose pimples and everything.

  “For what it’s worth, I like that one better.” He points to Christian’s sketch behind me.

  “That’s not me.”

  “It seems a pretty fair representation.”

  “No. I mean that’s not who I am.”

  “Well then, who are you?”

  “This gallery isn’t open.” The voice comes from behind Dominic: a security guard.

  “We’re here for the exhibit opening,” I say.

  “Upstairs,” he replies. “This floor is closed for the evening.” His eyes shift from Dominic to me, back and forth, as if we’re up to something illicit down here. Hardly.

  “Right,” Dominic says. “Our mistake. Sorry.”

  The security guard waits for us to move. Dominic holds the door open for me like he’s a proper gentleman. Just as I’m walking through, he leans in close enough for me to feel his breath on my neck, and asks again: “Who are you, Very? Very what?”

  I step around him. “See you around, Dominic.”

  He laughs so loud it dances through the empty gallery. “Sure you will.”

  iv.

  “Sylvia Plath had the right idea sticking her head in tha
t oven,” Nonnie declares.

  “Nonnie.” I’m perched on a wingback chair pulled up next to my grandmother’s bed, where she sits with pillows propped behind her like some sort of Middle Eastern royalty in a storybook.

  “It’s true. Sylvia, Anne, they’re both famous as much for their deaths as their poetry. Oh that beautiful, sad Sylvia. Oh that sexy, psychotic Anne. If I had known it was all going to end like this, I would have done it myself long ago. I should have just walked into the ocean with stones in my pockets like Virginia Woolf.”

  She coughs and I tilt toward her, ready to—what? Catch her falling body?

  “Yes, I should have let go back when I was lithe and beautiful like you. I thought about doing it. Before them. After them. It wasn’t like I was jumping on the bandwagon. Bandwagon. God-awful word. Things were different then for women. Women writers especially. You’re lucky to live now.”

  “I know.” Sitting here across from my fading grandmother, I don’t feel fortunate. Seven months ago, she was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lungs. She is dying.

  She wipes her thin wrist on her forehead. “At least couldn’t I be dying of something gorgeous like consumption?”

  “Consumption is tuberculosis,” I tell her. “You would die coughing up blood.”

  “I would die pale as ivory with rose-red cheeks and lips. Snow White in the flesh.”

  “Snow White in the ground.”

  Nonnie’s room is cast in shadows, the only light coming in through slim gaps in the curtains. The radiation treatments bring on migraines, and she’s never been one for bright light anyway. Still it seems I can see every angle in her face. Everyone knows the iconic pictures of her: dark brown hair in a pixie cut, white blouse, tailored black pants. Like Audrey Hepburn only sharper, and the cancer has made her edgier. In contrast, her hair is growing back soft as a baby’s and is starting to curl over her ears. “You need a haircut. Do you want to go to the salon or just have the woman come here?”

  “That woman is so dreary. I much prefer the gay man.”

  “Carl.”

  “Yes, Carl.”

  She doesn’t precisely answer my question and instead returns to her perennial topic: her impending death. “No one else will talk about my death with me, Very. Not your mother. Not your father, though that would hardly be worth trying. Ramona won’t talk to me at all.”

  Mom says Ramona is like a snake in its old, dusty skin, but when she sheds it and emerges full of brightly colored scales, watch out. I say she’s being a petulant little brat who’s breaking our grandmother’s heart every day. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

  “I’ll talk about whatever you want, Nonnie.”

  She raises her penciled-in eyebrows. The radiation treatment stole those along with the hair on her head and hasn’t returned them yet. She doesn’t take the bait, though. Instead she says, “It’s coming. Sooner and sooner.”

  I don’t tell her that doesn’t make sense, that time doesn’t bend like a function that curves up toward the axis of the graph but never quite reaches it.

  “Professor Winslow visits from time to time,” she says, picking up our old line of conversation. “He just sits and drums his fingers on his pants as if they were his piano.” Professor Winslow is in the music department with my father and had a brief, unsuccessful stint as my piano teacher. “And Anton came by a few days ago.” Professor Anton Dixon is the chair of the English department at Essex College, where my grandmother has been poet in residence for ages. He’s been her nemesis since the day she started at the school, at least from her perspective. She says his class is where poetry goes to die. And his breath smells of liver and onions. “He said, ‘We need to talk about your death. How you want it handled.’”

  “You should have told him you plan to go into his class and perish there just like all the poets he’s killed before you.”

  She laughs, which turns into a cough. “I said I wanted a museum in my honor. The Imogene Woodruff Museum. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” She lies back against the pillows and closes her eyes as if she is dreaming of that museum.

  “Are you tired?”

  “I’m always tired.” Her eyes are still closed but I can see them moving underneath her eyelids. “It’s strange, Very, to watch yourself decay. I hope it never happens to you. When I was young my girlfriends and I would ask each other if we’d rather be pretty or smart. I always said pretty because pretty girls might not realize they aren’t smart, but smart girls always know they aren’t pretty.”

  “Can’t you be both, Nonnie?”

  “A bit of both, perhaps, but not devastatingly both.”

  “You are,” I tell her. “You and Mom.”

  “Don’t be a sycophant, Very.”

  I yawn.

  “Boring you?” she asks.

  “I had that thing last night. Mom’s gallery opening.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use the word thing, Veronica. Banish it from your vocabulary.” Nonnie always uses my full name when admonishing me about language. “It’s my dying wish,” she adds.

  I roll my eyes at her. “I wish you had been there. I had no one to talk with, and nothing exciting happened.”

  “You know how I hate those parties.”

  I agree, but I know she’s lying. Nonnie loves any event with wine and admirers.

  “Mom and Dad quizzed me about the art. I got it wrong.”

  “There is no wrong and right with art,” Nonnie says. “It’s not like your mathematics.”

  “Mom and Dad don’t seem to think so. Or Ramona. But Nonnie, you should have seen it. It was just squares painted on canvas.”

  “Now I’m doubly glad I missed it.”

  “Ramona said it looked like the ocean.”

  “She did always love the ocean.”

  “So you see what you love in paintings like that?” I ask. And if so, what would I have said? The bay behind our house? The blue of Nonnie’s veins as they shine up through her skin, letting me know that she’s still alive?

  The seconds tick by on the clock.

  She moans and resettles herself on her pillows. I think she has fallen asleep: her breaths are coming ragged but even.

  “You know, there was only one art opening to which I ever looked forward. One of Andy Warhol’s. He used one of my poems in a painting. ‘Word Art,’ he called it. All the words were silk-screened onto the canvas in different colors and sizes. I thought it was a bit gaudy, but he adored it. It was going to be a fantastic party.” She opens her eyes and they are glinting. “Mick Jagger was going to be there. But then that crazy woman shot Andy and the opening was closed, and the paintings never saw the light of day.”

  “So sad for the paintings,” I say.

  “Sad for the crazy woman. Valerie something. Solanas. Ugly name.”

  “Valerie sounds like Very to me.”

  “You have a lovely last name. One of them anyway. She was a pretty woman in her way. Interesting-looking. She wanted to get rid of all men. Andy was as good as any to start with. He was a bit of a prick. That’s a good slang word. Sounds just like what it is.” Then she says, “This is the last day of summer vacation, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what are you doing spending it with me?”

  “You’re who I want to be with, Nonnie.”

  “What about that boyfriend of yours?”

  “He just got back from Lake Winnipesaukee yesterday.”

  “Ha! There is someplace else you would rather be. I’m your fallback.” She coughs. “And that was yesterday. Where is he today?”

  “He had to go to some leadership seminar this morning, and then I had my math class at the college, and then he had to take his sister to get her clarinet fixed.” We had joked about it on the phone: Well then I guess I’ll pencil you in for three months from next Tuesday.

  “Sounds like he leads a thrilling life.”

  “I would rather be with you anyway.” It’s true and I try not to think too much about what t
hat means for our relationship.

  “Can’t we call him Chris? Christian is just so . . . Christian. That’s not even his religion, is it? He ought to be called Buddhism or something.”

  “Just because he’s Korean doesn’t mean he’s Buddhist.” I wonder what she would think of a boy named Dominic. “I like the name Christian. It suits him.”

  Nonnie snorts. She has never thought much of Christian. It took me a while to come around, too. Christian pursued me in a sweet, almost quaint way—writing me notes, leaving a daisy taped to my locker, telling me that he had scored a goal in a hockey game just for me—but I kept putting him off. Nonnie had been diagnosed the month before. I was tired. And there was Christian, day after day, with his daisies and his sweet smile. So, I had given in to him, and we’d been together ever since. It was the first real relationship for either of us, and we prided ourselves on doing it so well.

  Nonnie waves her hand at me. “You find me dull.” Before I can reply, she says, “And you should. You should have something better to do than hang around your dying grandmother.”

  It’s not Christian I think of. Or Britta and Grace. Instead it’s Dominic’s annoying, sexy smile that fills my mind. “Oh I do. I’m just sucking up to you for the inheritance.”

  Nonnie waves her arms around at the shelves of books. “There it is. Take it now for all I care.”

  The books, I know, are all that really matters to her, not the money she’s amassed. They say poetry doesn’t pay, but my grandmother made it work. She and my mom had this boho existence in New York City. They shared a one-bedroom apartment and got themselves invited to fancy parties for their meals. I guess Nonnie was socking money away the whole time, right from when she first came up from West Virginia and got a job as a chambermaid at the Chelsea Hotel. By the time they moved up to New Hampshire, she had a huge stash. Nonnie took the job at Essex College and had this big house built, designed by some famous architect too esoteric for any common person to have ever heard of. It’s ridiculous and over-the-top, and if anyone but Nonnie had built it, I would probably hate it. But I love it.