Stephanie skipped out the library door and down the carpeted hall of her grandparents’ home. Frankly, she was disappointed about the lost mountain lion eye, and she vowed that after dinner, when her grandparents sent her to bed, she would stay awake and sneak out in order to continue her search of the carpet. Until then, she would find something else to play.
Making her way down the wide hall, she smacked the people in the oil paintings which had been arranged in a highly artistic fashion on one wall by her grandfather. All of the paintings featured mountain men and smoky Native American camps, because Grandpa Drummond was crazy about the lives and legends of the early mountain men, especially those in Arizona. Stephanie halted in mid skip in front of a large painting with a big lake. There was no one there to smack. “Hey,” she said, “where are all the peoples? Peoples, where are you? Huh?” Stephanie frowned while searching the entire picture for the figure of a human. And then she got her wonderful idea.
She realized that it might be fun, and probably important, to add a little person of her own to the painting. Near that big flat gray rock, she could slip a funny naked boy. He would be halfway into the cold water. Hey, thought Stephanie, it was an amazing idea for a day which had been so thoroughly awful—Aunt Helen was going to be a big disappointment as a playmate. Well, what had she expected, she reminded herself; adults were unable to play anything for long. They had short attention spans when it came to playing and long attention spans when it came to correcting children and other boring stuff.
Stephanie walked into the kitchen and said ‘hi’ to Granny Hilda who was layering lasagna noodles at the bottom of a large glass pan. She told Stephanie the noodles kept splitting and falling apart. When Granny Hilda turned her back to deal with a slippery, ripping noodle, Stephanie quickly searched a cup in the corner of the counter for a black permanent marker she’d seen. It was there! And a pocketknife, too! She grabbed the pen and stuffed the knife in her pant pocket and ran back to the painting in the hall.
On tiptoe, she brought the marker quickly to the spot she had chosen and she placed the small boy beside the rock, bathing in the aqua mountain water. She didn’t think about how to draw him at all; she just scribbled him in. And he turned out to be cuter than she had imagined him to be!
Now that the boy she’d imagined could go swimming in the water, she stuck the cap on the marker and placed it in her pocket, then she spun around, and hastened away toward the front of the house. In a front room, near a low shelf with a lamp on it, Stephanie froze. She saw a very strange and horrible thing she had never noticed before. It floored her, actually. It was an animal skull—she didn’t know what kind of animal—but it was covered with little rectangular turquoise stones, bright ones that were stuck all over it so they almost touched each other. That poor thing all stuck up like that, thought Stephanie, what a horror! And there were gems for the taking. Stephanie stooped down and found she could crawl right onto the shelf beside the skull. She pulled herself in and had plenty of room. What a safe nook she had found. No one would notice her down there, if she stayed still. If they came looking for her, she wouldn’t talk. She wormed her pocketknife out and got busy picking at the stones with the little knife.
It took a lot of prying to make the first stone pop off. Then a second came more easily because there was a space where she could get the knife blade under. It was wonderful fun making them plink off into the air, though it took some prying on the different corners of the stones to find the edge that was most likely to lift. When they did shoot off, she reached out wherever they flew and pocketed them. It took her quite a while to get enough of them, but what a lot of turquoise gems she’d gotten.
Eventually, Stephanie tired of popping stones off the skull and she sat and looked at it. She took it into her lap. Poor sad animal, thought Stephanie (not remembering the stuffed heads she had only just finished abusing) someone really ought to bury it. She would make that a job for the weekend. That poor thing deserved a break after all, someone had glued stones all over its head.
Stephanie crawled out from the cramped spot on the shelf, cradling the skull. She lifted it in front of her. “I am so sorry about you dying. That is just the terribliest thing,” she said to it, “but I am going to make everything okay. I got most of those stones off you, but you really ought to be buried, you know. That would be the right thing for you.” She gave it a kiss on the head. “I don’t know what my grandpa was thinking keeping you unburied. Really.”
Stephanie carried the skull outside to the back garden. There was no sign of Aunt Helen or anyone else, so Stephanie hid the skull under a bush. Then she came back in and turned her attention to an interesting belt displayed on the wall—with another skull! It was a baby deer head wrapped in a purple scarf with the belt hanging off the skull. The belt was hung low enough for Stephanie to touch the strange white paper-like cocoons that it was made of, row after row of cocoons, each like a little white shell with something inside to make a rattle.
Stephanie took the knife out of her pocket again, opened it, and sliced off one of the cocoons. She put the cocoon to her ear and shook it. Very nice! She cut off a lot more and filled another pocket. The deer head was mounted too high otherwise she would have taken it outside also. “I’ll get a chair tomorrow,” promised Stephanie to the baby deer skull, “and get you buried. Don’t you worry about yourself. I’m gonna take care of you.”
Next, Stephanie went to look at all those old pots which her grandpa kept on one of the low shelves in the living room. They were white pots with big red swirls that looked like nothing Stephanie could comprehend. Just then, Granny Hilda looked in on her. She seemed happy to see Stephanie looking at those pots.
“Dinner in about forty minutes,” said Granny. “Where’s your aunt?”
“She’s painting,” said Stephanie.
“Oh, she is is she!” exclaimed a delighted Granny Hilda, “Well, that’s the best thing for her. She said she was going to paint?”
“Uh huh, that’s what she said. I think I’ll use one of my Egyptian pharaoh cards to defeat these pots,” Stephanie explained.
“That’s nice,” said Granny Hilda. “As soon as your grandfather gets back I’ll tell him you were admiring his favorite Cibola pots. He’ll be so happy. They are cherished old things of his.” Granny Hilda smiled at Stephanie who smiled back in a simpering fashion.
The instant Granny disappeared Stephanie stacked two of the pots together and carried them outside. Several of those grackle birds, which Stephanie had seen walking with her aunt, strode across the lawn authoritatively in the cool pink twilight. In the center of the lawn the fountain bubbled loudly onto the backs of Koi fish. Stephanie placed the pair of pots on the edge of the fountain and sat on the edge herself watching the orange, white and black splotched fish for a while. It would be great to catch one of those huge things in a pot, but they kept away when she tried. She decided to fill both pots with water.
Stephanie started to think that it was very sad that no one had used those pots for anything, probably for years and years, if they were actually so old. Had the old Indian lady potter meant for them never to be used again? Did the potter lady give them to Grandpa for his collection? It didn’t seem right that something so nice never got used. The lady who made them probably wouldn’t have liked it if they never had a reason for being. Maybe she’d have wanted Stephanie to use them in a camping game?
The well of a mesquite tree nearby had been raked, but under a bush the yardman had left mesquite beans in a pile. Stephanie scooped handfuls of them and tossed them in the pots. Then she found some black bean pods on a smaller tree and she threw them in, too. It was fun filling the old pots with beans. The lady who made those would probably be happy about what Stephanie was doing, she thought.
Stephanie lifted one pot of the wet beans and placed it on her head. She stumbled around the yard, crying, “I have lost my way on the trail.” She spoke in what she thought would be the sound of the raspy voice of a crabby tribal elder. “Oh!
Oh! Now I return to my camp and what do I see? Where is my fire?” she cried. “You let it go out, you stupid invisible peoples! You are no good. I need a fire. Go into the forest, peoples! Every one of you, I order you,” she said. “Go, I say, go! At once, away with you, little bad peoples.”
She plopped the pot on the grass and assumed the part of the nervous, worthless people, who were hotfooting it around the garden in search of kindling. “We’re going where you tell us to go. Don’t beat us you mean old lady! Ay, ouch!” She pretended to fend off the blows of the disapproving elder.
Grandpa’s gardener did a thorough job of clearing garden waste. There wasn’t any kindling for Stephanie, so she snapped off the branches of some shrubs and stripped them of leaves. While she was at it, she snapped off the tops of some flowers to flavor the soup. She tossed the flower tops in the pots, and piled the stripped branches on the grass. She set the pots on the imaginary fire and knelt before them. “I am happy, my peoples,” she said, in the voice of the demanding elder. “You have done goody-nesses.” But now Stephanie wanted to stir the mesquite beans, and she remembered that the old garage had an amazing collection of tools in it. At Christmas she might even have seen some rusty spoons on top of a coffee can full of bolts.
Stephanie scrambled to her feet and crossed the lawn. When she was almost at the big wooden door to the garage, Granny Hilda came out of the house and began looking everywhere behind shrubs and trees and garbage cans. She seemed to be picking up leaves. Granny looked shocked when she examined those headless flowers and the shrub with all the branches broken off it. Stephanie thought she ought to hide herself, and she found that the south side of the garage was covered with a dormant Queen’s Wreath vine; the stout, reddish tendrils made a dusty curtain that Stephanie could part and squeeze through. Granny came straight toward her, but luckily it turned out that her objective was to peek into the garage. The door was ajar, so Granny looked in for an instant, smiled, and backed away. Stephanie didn’t feel like being seen or heard by Granny right then so she hesitated to come out; even if Granny Hilda’s back were turned, the garage door always made a loud scraping sound on the concrete. Just when Stephanie was getting really tired of waiting for Granny to disappear, and Granny was getting closer to the pots with the beans and flowers in them, a dinger went off in the kitchen and Hilda left the yard. Stephanie parted the dried vine and emerged. She snuck around the garage door.
The garage smelled of turpentine and linseed oil. Several lights were on like bright suns and for an instant Stephanie couldn't see a thing. Finally, there, with her back to Stephanie, slouched her Aunt Helen on a three-legged stool. Stephanie had forgotten that the garage was where Aunt Helen kept her painting supplies. Aunt Helen’s apartment didn’t have any place big enough to set up the kind of large paintings she was planning.
Aunt Helen was drooping before an enormous blank canvas. At first Stephanie thought her aunt was sitting motionless, but then Stephanie noticed that she made a slight movement, a rubbing motion of a soft rag over the hairs of a paintbrush, and after she rubbed it she would reach out and dip it in a glass jar and bring it back to slowly daub it on the rag. Her posture showed defeat. Her back curled over toward the big blank canvas as though she were confronting an angry white animal. Even when a few dried leaves from the vine scuttled through the open door and danced around behind Stephanie, Aunt Helen didn’t turn around.
Then Aunt Helen groaned, long and low, a groan of utter despair. Finally, she spoke. “I had the idea. I knew what I was doing. I had a way in my mind to paint modern clouds above a modern city.”
“But you can’t paint clouds, Aunt Helen,” Stephanie chirped. Aunt Helen spun around.
“Oh, it’s you. Are you telling me I can’t paint?” said Aunt Helen despondently.
Stephanie stepped into the garage. “You can’t paint clouds, because they’re too high up. You could never get up to them with a ladder made by the best ladder maker in the world.” Stephanie looked at her aunt with a face that attested to her sincere effort to educate.
Aunt Helen smiled weakly and laid her paintbrush on the ledge of the easel. The canvas had been prepared meticulously; it had been stretched and coated thoroughly with rabbit glue, which she thought superior to gesso, and she had made sketches of what she wanted to paint, but what she had been actually doing day in and day out until now was puzzling over gross domestic product and exchange rates. Up until that day, she had been living one of those modern lives of quiet despair, which the man who camped at the pond criticized so astutely a hundred and forty years ago.
Why the sadness she felt for a year hadn’t prompted her to make the leap to painting earlier was complicated. She entertained doubts about her talent in art, and those doubts destroyed her enjoyment. You could even say she was harassed by demons, inner critics, and couldn’t face selling her art to anyone, or, more extremely, even doing her art, as long as those demons told her that her unmade art wasn’t going to be good enough. She often wondered how it could be that she would place a single daub of paint on a canvas and immediately have doubts about every possible thing about the daub, its location on the canvas, the intensity of the hue, the brush used, and even the amount of linseed oil and turpentine in the mix.
And these clouds Helen aspired to paint were rather nebulous things; they would appear in her first series of ideal paintings, which she hadn’t yet painted, above deteriorated cities, Haciendas, mysterious jungles, or high desert mountains. An oak tree on a grassy plain might have an interesting cloud above it in her ideal paintings, or a crowded city skyline might reveal a single, enigmatic blotch of white. That was what she had in mind. She wanted to depict all kinds of modernist clouds: cumulonimbus clouds with wispy trailing edges, banks of grimy fog, billowing storm clouds with iron colored edges, or extraordinary pink clouds at dawn, etc., and every day she itched to get started on this broad canvas in her parents’ garage, but still it awaited her first brushstroke.
“I ought to go inside,” she said in despair. She put the rag beside the brush. “I thought after I was in the library with you and we talked about what people wanted to do–about you wanting to get that piece of elk brain and then the glass eye–I thought I ought to try to paint. But I don’t think I’m quite ready yet. A part of me is holding me back. Maybe it’s the critic or something.” Aunt Helen stood up. “I wanted to paint the essence of clouds, actually, not their physical attributes, but their essential nature, the fogginess, the spirit of them in the sky. I wanted to capture their airy nebulousness, and the way they change and flow over the face of the earth. So, you see, it was more complicated than real clouds that you really see in the sky. I was thinking about the clouds you feel.”
“Oh, well,” Stephanie replied, “okay. I think you ought to just do that, what you just said, instead of sitting there the next time you decide to paint, okay? Anyway, are you going to stay overnight?” asked Stephanie when Aunt Helen turned off the garage lights, led Stephanie outside, and swung the big wooden door closed behind them.
“I suppose they’ll make me,” said Aunt Helen. “Uncle Will is working until late Sunday and Granny thinks I need company tonight.” Uncle Will was Aunt Helen’s husband and at times he stayed days at the missile plant.
“You might not be able to sleep. In a strange house like this,” Stephanie suggested. “Grandpa has a lot of horrible stuff all over the place.”
“I suppose I might have trouble sleeping,” Aunt Helen agreed.
“Then I know what will help you. I’m going to read you a bedtime story before you go to sleep! Grandpa Drummond has some really great books in his library. I found one last Christmas that was so interesting. We could act it out.”
“That sounds nice.”
“After dinner, when I get ready for bed, you meet me up there in the second storey where my bedroom is and I’ll get you all relaxed, okay!”
Aunt Helen promised to do just that.
Chapter Six