Roses, at their most elemental, are made of pain and beauty. Grace saw things clearly nowadays. You couldn’t help it, after so many nights of driving alone, wretched and headstrong behind the wheel, listening to late-night preachers and love songs. Last night she came home from her studio to find it on her pillow, that one long-stemmed rose. Damn that kid. She had felt the lid fly off her heart, letting air in and hope out, from where she had kept it safely hidden for the past few years.
Grace poured the beeswax pellets into her small slow cooker and turned it on low. It would be about a half an hour until they melted sufficiently to brush onto the canvas. The gallery was expecting a few more pieces from her by the end of the month for her collage exhibit. In the meantime, she trimmed a pile of pictures with her cuticle scissors, careful to leave the little locks of hair jutting out from the sides of the heads. She was too distracted to do anything else. The old pictures were brown and cracked, and had probably been sitting in a box in someone’s attic before making it to the flea market where she’d found them.
The leaves outside were turning, too, everything browning and falling to earth. The trail of a solitary airplane divided the sky into two cold, blue halves. It had been a while since she had talked to anyone beside her daughter, who called every few days or so from college. Mollie was studying art at a design school about an hour away. She didn’t come home often, though--ever since the divorce she had been coming home less and less. Grace seldom stocked up on her favorite snacks and crackers now. It was funny how one person could walk out of your life and leave more space than they took up. When two people left, you may as well be on the moon.
Last week Mollie had brought a boy home for the weekend—not a boyfriend, but her roommate’s brother, who had come to look for a place and a job and needed somewhere to stay. “It’s okay, right?” she had asked. “I told him what a good cook you are.” Grace didn’t give it much thought until he showed up later with his small suitcase and heavy carryon full of books. He looked like a student—old jeans, shredded sneakers, and a T-shirt with some Midwestern bar band’s name on it. But he had long eyelashes and a smile that made you feel like the world was blessing you. She left; he stayed.
The beeswax finally melted into a warm, yellowish glaze, and the room smelled of the industriousness of bees. She did not like her canvases white. The emptiness was too daunting, in the same way that planting her garden every summer seemed an impossibility until she placed the first timid seedling into the rich, brown rectangle of humus and soil and manure. She dipped her brush, a cheap trim brush from the hardware store, into the wax and then stroked the canvas, first the front and then the sides, until it was coated in warm, rough wax. Then she ripped a piece off an old sewing pattern and placed the brown tissue on the canvas so that the printed lines, curves and arrows made a pleasing background pattern. Another coat of wax sealed it down.
She hadn’t been feeling lonely, certainly not. Twenty years of marriage was enough for her; the marriage had succumbed peaceably to a slow calcification that could only lead to numbness or finality. She had lived long enough knowing that things could turn with a breath; that conversation and love could end as suddenly as a dandelion dissipated by the wind. Nature tended towards decay—but she did not tend toward nature. She had always wanted to make something new, to put things together, to roll the dice and move ahead. Love was supposed to be the closest you came to magic, a place where you could look at yourself and see more than your skeleton and connecting fibers. You just couldn’t live without a glimpse of heaven.
The young man, his name was James, spoke softly and appreciatively. Looked you in the eye half the time he was talking with you and the other half down at his shoes, blushing like a child at a recital. He wanted to be a programmer, just like everyone else. He was so young, everything he cared about fit in that duffle bag. She imagined that a few thousand miles west he had a mother her age, dusting a roomful of old baseball trophies and photos. She had shaken his soft, firm hand and wished him luck. Her hands had started to become lined and leathery, like her mother’s, and she did not like it one bit.
Once the wax cooled, she smoothed it out with the small, shovel-like tip of her quilting iron, then picked up one of the photos with tweezers. It was a woman in mid-jump, face alight, her plaid skirt flared around her knees. She placed it down and sealed it in with another coat of wax. Below it she placed small cutouts from faces from Mollie’s art magazines; six pairs of eyes looked out. Did they know the joy above them? Small pieces of beach glass near the top completed the composition, all encased in layers of wax drawn over them like a summer blanket.
Grace had spent most of the week in her studio, driving there early in the morning and coming back late at night. Sometimes when she came back James was sitting on the couch watching old movies, and she would make him tea and tell him about the odd jobs she had trying to make a living when she was younger. He told her that the plane ride over was the longest he’d ever been on and that he’d never seen the ocean before. At night the bridge across the sound looked like a bright caterpillar, or that dragon from the Chinese New Year celebration in Chinatown. She thought he might be slightly homesick.
She layered the canvas with more wax and then carefully pressed a large rubber stamp of a chambered nautilus over the photographed figure. Eyes closed, she waited a minute as the wax cooled and the rhythmic chug of the radiator filled her world. She removed the stamp and carefully rubbed some black ink into the impression, then wiped off the excess. The spiral of the shell radiated outward. Straight lines and precise measurements mathematically described the shell’s ripple. She pulled out the small tube of quinacridone crimson, and dripped some around the edges of the canvas. It looked like fresh blood. She bit her lip. This was when everything was supposed to come together, when you slipped out of the process and looked with your hands open, to see if you had been given more than you started with. But it was not, and her hands were shaking.
He had left suddenly, yesterday, was gone when she came home. She thought maybe he just had not come back yet, but his bag was gone and there was a sweet, scrawled thank-you note on the kitchen table. And the rose. Foolish! How could she feel like a schoolgirl at this age? But she felt like she’d been kick-started, opened up, taken out without a coat. She didn’t want to feel like this, but it was too late. Love was something that you yearned to, an unaccountable warmth that beckoned like the sun on the face of a swinging child.
Grace wiped her hands on her old jeans and decided she needed to go home. She’d have to go to the mini-mart and get gas first, since she’d been too distracted this morning to realize the tank was empty. Maybe she could work some more at home. She unplugged the slow-cooker and grabbed her keys. Hopefully the old Chevy could make it down the street. At the station she got out of her car and slid her card through the machine, then hefted the stiff hose with both hands. As the gas pumped into the car, she stood alone on the island while her breath collected, briefly, in rings in front of her and looked at the people around her. A few kids were standing to the side near a beat-up car, pooling their money for gas and cigarettes. They looked at her and she averted her eyes to the numbers clicking round and round. “Nice ass for an old broad,” one of them yelled, as the rest giggled and cuffed him on the shoulder. She looked down at her car and topped it off, and the gasoline started pouring back out of the tank, up over the side of the car and down onto her shoes, as she began to laugh and cry at the same time.
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