fiction

The Painter 

“That’s powerful stuff.” 

Emily was surprised. She wasn’t a technical painter. 

“Oh, thanks. It’s nothing”

But when she turned, he was staring in the opposite direction of the small canvas, smoking a joint. It had suddenly gotten very quiet on the beach. Somewhere down the shore a motor had been running under the water, but the family was packing up now. He took another inhale of the joint he was smoking. The sun was still warm as it set, and the last of the day's sweat rolling down her face made her wonder if time existed at night in East Haven. Maybe they stopped creeping slowly from the horizon then, and that was why they all liked it here. 

“My grandfather would like that painting,” he said. 

He had told her his grandfather was a wealthy art collector. The whole family, he would tell her excitedly , wanted to make the world better with money. She had to accept he was probably, definitely, right. 

“Samson, why am I here?”

He waited to respond. “Because I like having you around.” 

“That’s it?” 

He waited again. “Can’t it be?”

Laughter echoed down the beach but no one seemed to be saying anything funny. They did not look at each-other. She waited for him to ask how she was. 

“What did you do today?’ she asked. ‘Nothing much. Read Ulysses.”

 She waited again. “Have you thought about the summer?” she asked. 

“I want to go fishing. Or maybe backpacking. Want a hit?”

She accepted. The smoke blowing towards her reminded her of home, in fire season, when the sky turned orange and pink and lost its definition. Boredom, she thought, was the worst of all emotions. People were passing by their spot and she noticed she was always the first one to break eye contact. 

“I keep getting nosebleeds,” he said.

“That’s probably because you keep smoking.”

“That’s why we bought the summer house,'' he replied without thinking. 

She remembered she used to hate the taste of burnt things — cigarettes, coffee, steak. She couldn’t place what had changed. Meanwhile he looked down at his book. She shouted at him in her head to ask her anything. He yelled back to notice him. Both ended up silent. 

They were relieved when Nisa asked if they were hungry. Emily felt relieved to be alone with Nisa, despite not knowing her well, despite hating the house’s kitchen. Nisa’s hand brushed the back of hers through the small doorway. She squeezed her arm. 

“How are you?” she asked. 

“Just fine.” 

“You know to come inside when you need to come inside?”

“Mhm.”

When Emily returned to the shore, Samson and his father were sitting together. 

“My dad was just saying this will really sell well.” He squeezed her arm. 

“I don’t understand. Sell where?” she asked.

“The sale tomorrow. It’s why Samson brought you, no?” 

She sat down with the bag of grapes. She ate them by the fistful, almost gagging as their skin peeled off and clotted on to the sides of her throat. 

“These good?” asked Samson. 

“Bitter.” she replied. 

----

white shoes

It was an odd sight, she realized: the woman weighing a shoebox full of avocados in the UPS store. It was an odd question, based on his look, when she asked the blue-vested clerk to smell the box. And it was useless, she knew, because neither she nor the clerk could smell the California she hoped the cardboard had absorbed; that the scent would only be foreign to her daughter, opening the box in Connecticut, which she could only imagine smelled like musty old blazers and wet leaves. What are the kids there wearing? She had asked her not so little girl on the phone. Nothing fancy, really. Everyone has white sneakers. She’d bought white socks for baby feet, covered with dust, with salt water, with mud. She’d bought white nail polish for teenage toes, to be painted on long drives to nice schools. And now she would buy white sneakers. She knows these are for walking up brick streets called University Row, which run north, opposite history, which runs south. THis type of walking you have to be taught -- it involves keeping your head up, and your eyes straight ahead, and windows not looked in. These are shoes for that future, given by a mother’s love, which grows towards separation. She is wishing she could nail old taps onto them like she did for YMCA dance classes, so that if her girl had to run, the noise would proceed her, would herald help, because she knows all too well, that white sneakers can’t run fast. In secret she hoped she would remember those lessons, more than what they were teaching her, relayed to her with words that got more and more confusing every time she called. Her own daughter now met question with question, and responded that no answer is real. The issue of victimhood. That real culture exists in France and Italy, not the avocado fields, not the sneaker stores That her girl, who wore all pink and yelled at the boys! no longer wanted babies, that being a girl -- her girl -- was a prison. What little she knew of real prisons, how little she felt she could say anymore. How are childrens mirrors of parents, as you say, when I do not know myself? Here is your law of diminishing returns; We give what we can, and get what we earn. She sees the girl running in her dream that night, her white sneakers caked in mud and pneumonia-wet. She texted; “I saw you picking avocados in my dream! - Xoxo, Mama” And in a sweat, went to the dollar store to buy some. that used to sit open in the cedar bowl and stain the walls green where the girl had touched them. She packs the fruit into the soles of the shoes, like packing paper. She hopes that the Connecticut winter will not freeze California avocados. She asks the girl what the box smells like when it comes. And she cries, tears of joy, when the girl responds “I don’t smell anything”.