Emma Rathbone: Losing It

The plates were lined up in sets of four or five, and on each one was a meticulously painted scene. There was a jellyfish, painted in purples and pinks, gliding through the water toward the surface. It was part of a series that had to do with the ocean. Another one showed a craggy turquoise mountain under the sea. Another an underwater city, with clusters of towers and twinkling lights. A school of fish swam through, giving a sense of scale.

A different group showed a bright, teeming garden outside some kind of ominous estate with dark windows. There were twisting rosebushes, sculpted shrubs, and orange paths; flowers spewed out of small pots and the tops of statues. The perspective was all off, as if a child had done it. It was like the ground leading up to the estate was tipped up, slanted wrong. One plate showed the property from a different side, where a gray wall cast a shadow across a birdbath, and it looked like someone had just left a picnic, a golden fork and knife strewn on the ground. They were meticulously detailed. You could see the designs, some flicks of a thin brush, on the pots, and the small wells of shadows on the statues.

Other plates showed scenes of horses and cowboys, migrating bison and teepees on great plains, a Wild West theme. In another series was a line of camels following a colorful sultan across the desert, their bodies making long shadows across the sand.

It wasn’t so hard to see why people would buy these. On each of them were Viv’s tiny initials, “V.G.” My favorites, or the ones I stared at the longest, depicted two mice constructing a multi-tiered card house on a red carpet in a dark living room. In the last plate, a mouse was standing on its tiptoes, balancing the final one on top. You could see tiny dots on each card — spades, hearts; it must have taken forever. Next to each mouse was a gold goblet. I stared at them for a really long time.

I then wandered with my laptop into the sunroom, a frayed, faded area with a row of windows you could crank open. There was a pouchy purple velvet couch and a glass coffee table with some craft books stacked on it.

Here was the list I made:

— Take some kind of community class

— Hang around the university or audit a course

— Internet dating

— Go to a bar

— Join a gym

— Go to a sales conference or a convention at a local hotel

— Join a singles-outing group

— Take a language class

— Get a job

— Don’t think too much

— Just be relaxed about it

—

I studied the profile picture of a man with the screen name “TheMeeksShallInherit.” He was outside, at what appeared to be an electronics fair, standing next to a table with a neon-orange tablecloth on it. There was another picture of him against the Golden Gate Bridge. Then a picture of him holding a huge kite and giving the thumbs-up.

“He sounds like an alien. Those are the kinds of pictures an alien would put up,” said Grace, my old roommate whom I’d lived with in Tempe and who was now my closest friend.

“Really?” I said.

“To convince you he was human and knows how to do things.”

“Sure,” I said.

I clicked through a few more pictures.

“Well, at least he’s not holding a huge pencil at an imaginarium,” I said. “Like, ‘Look at me!’”

“Totally.”

After I’d left, she’d stayed in Arizona and gotten a job at the historic public library in Tucson. I’d been there once. As we talked, I could hear her heels click on the marble floor as she walked around in the giant, day-lit atrium.

“He’s sent me a bunch of messages. Lots of exclamation points. He seems really jazzed about everything.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s not a bad quality, necessarily.”

I could feel her choosing her words. I’d let her think, over the years, by alluding to it or not correcting her when she made assumptions, that I’d had sex. That I’d been having sex. But there was something about the wide berth she gave the subject that made me think she knew the truth. Once, when she’d visited me, I told her about a flirtation I had at Quartz to keep apace with a story she was telling, and a troubled, questioning look had come over her face.

“So what’s she like?” she said. “Your aunt?”

“She’s nice,” I said. “She’s polite. She’s got a kind of inner poise. She’s very poised.”

“Okay.”

“She’s artistic. She has been to Orlando.”

“Okay.”

“Recently.”

“Got it.”

I heard the shrieks of children over the phone. A school group, bustling by.

“You’re really painting a nuanced picture,” she said.

“There’s a sort of hard quality to her. Like, if you said, ‘What do I do with this hen that’s bullying all the other chickens?’ and you were having all these qualms, she would take it from you and snap its neck, just like that.”

“So she has leadership qualities?”

“I’m not not saying that.”

“I get it.”

“I do think she’d be a good person to have in some survival situation. Like some kind of space mission that crash-landed on another planet and lost touch with Earth.”

“I’d be like, ‘Might as well rampage through the dessert rations!’” said Grace.

“Me too,” I said. “Except if it was only little boxes of golden raisins. In which case I’d be like, ‘Has anyone gone ahead and tried these cyanide tablets?’ Oh, hey, Aunt Viv.”

She stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come in.

“Grace,” I said, “I have to go.” I put down the phone.

She was wearing a sheer white cotton overshirt-type thing that seemed to float around her body.

“Hi.” She looked around the room. “I didn’t know you’d be in here.”

“Yeah, I–It’s nice and calm.”

“I agree.” She tried on a bright smile. “Did you have a nice day? I was afraid you’d be bored.”

“No, I got a lot of writing done,” I lied. “It was great. No, this is just what I was hoping it would be like.”

“Good, good.”

We both looked at my bare feet, which were up on the coffee table. I lowered them. She pinched her ear. “It’s my friend Alice’s birthday tomorrow. She’s having a small get-together. I was wondering if you’d like to come?”

There was a slight quaver beneath her veneer that made me realize that perhaps she, too, had thought our conversation at dinner the other night had been lacking and that she was trying to make up for it, reaching out.

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “What time?”

“Three o’clock. In the afternoon.”

I nodded with a little too much exaggeration. “Great.”

“Great,” she said.

And then, because the moment seemed to require something more, I said, “I really like your plates. The hanging-up ones? In that room? They’re really good.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Those are from earlier. When I was first starting.”

“Oh, okay.”

She hesitated in the doorway. Then we started talking at the same time. “So, did you just get home?” I said. She said, “I’ve actually submitted a few of my latest ones to an art show.”

“What?” I said.

“I’ve submitted a few. To an art show. I’m doing a series about Arthurian legend. The Knights of the Round Table.”

“Cool,” I said. “Great. Like a local, community type of deal?”

“Well,” she said. I had insulted her. Something shifted between us and I immediately felt terrible. I also realized why Viv’s first impulse was to pull back and be aloof, because otherwise her face would unlock and every raw emotion would visibly travel across it. In this case, she flashed with hurt.

“It’s actually much bigger than that,” she said. “It’s sponsored by the folk art museum of Durham. It’s widely known. Have you heard of Southern Living magazine?”