Diary

We can’t afford it, but the minute you die, Mother Wilmot’s got a drinking fountain picked out, brass and bronze, sculpted like a naked Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle.

Tabbi brought her pillow when Misty moved them into the Waytansea Hotel. They all brought something. Your wife brought your pillow, because it smells like you.

In Tabbi’s room, Misty sits on the edge of the bed, combing her kid’s hair through her fingers. Tabbi has her father’s long black hair and his green eyes.

Your green eyes.

She has a little room she shares with her grandmother, next to Misty’s room in the attic hallway of the hotel.

Almost every old family has rented out their house and moved into the hotel attic. The rooms papered with faded roses. The wallpaper peeling along every seam. There’s a rusty sink and a little mirror bolted to the wall in each room. Two or three iron beds in every room, their paint chipped, their mattresses soft and sagging in the middle. These are the cramped rooms, under the sloping ceilings, behind their little windows, dormers like rows of little doghouses in the hotel’s steep roof. The attic is a barracks, a refugee camp for nice white gentry. People to-the-manor-born now share a bathroom down the hall.

These people who’ve never held a job, this summer, they’re waiting tables. As if everyone’s money ran out at the same time, this summer every blue-blood islander is carrying luggage at the hotel. Cleaning hotel rooms. Shining shoes. Washing dishes. A service industry of blue-eyed blonds with shining hair and long legs. Polite and cheerful and eager to run fetch a fresh ashtray or decline a tip.

Your family—your wife and child and mother—they all sleep in sagging, chipped iron beds, under sloping walls with the hoarded silver and crystal relics of their former genteel life.

Go figure, but all the island families, they’re smiling and whistling. As if this were some adventure. A zany lark. As if they’re just slumming in the service industry. As if this tedious kind of bowing and scraping isn’t going to be the rest of their lives. Their lives and their children’s lives. As if the novelty won’t wear off after another month. They’re not stupid. It’s just that none of them have ever been poor. Not like your wife, she knows about having pancakes for di

Sitting there with Tabbi, Misty says, “So, what’s your secret?”

And Tabbi says, “I can’t tell.”

Misty tucks the covers in around the girl’s shoulders, old hotel sheets and blankets washed until they’re nothing but gray lint and the smell of bleach. The lamp beside Tabbi’s bed is her pink china lamp painted with flowers. They brought it from the house. Most of her books are here, the ones that would fit. They brought her clown paintings and hung them above her bed.

Her grandmother’s bed is close enough Tabbi could reach out and touch the quilt that covers it with velvet scraps from Easter dresses and Christmas clothes going a hundred years back. On the pillow, there’s her diary bound in red leather with “Diary” across the cover in scrolling gold letters. All Grace Wilmot’s secrets locked inside.

Misty says, “Hold still, honey,” and she picks a stray eyelash off Tabbi’s cheek. Misty rubs the lash between two fingers. It’s long like her father’s eyelashes.

Your eyelashes.

With Tabbi’s bed and her grandmother’s, two twin beds, there’s not much room left. Mother Wilmot brought her diary. That, and her sewing basket full of embroidery thread. Her knitting needles and crochet hooks and embroidery hoops. It’s something she can do while she sits in the lobby with her old lady friends or outside on the boardwalk above the beach in good weather.

Your mother’s just like all the other fine old Mayflower families, getting their wagons into a circle at the Waytansea Hotel, waiting out the siege of awful strangers.

Stupid as it sounds, Misty brought her drawing tools. Her pale wood box of paints and watercolors, her paper and brushes, it’s all piled in a corner of her room.

And Misty says, “Tabbi honey?” She says, “You want to maybe go live with your Grandma Kleinman over by Tecumseh Lake?”

And Tabbi rolls her head back and forth, no, against her pillow until she stops and says, “Granmy Wilmot told me why Dad was so pissed off all the time.”

Misty tells her, “Don’t say ‘pissed off,’ please.”

Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot is downstairs playing bridge with her cronies in front of the big clock in the wood-paneled room off the lobby. The loudest sound in the room will be the big pendulum ticktocking back and forth. Either that or she’s sitting in a big red leather wing chair next to the lobby fireplace, reading with her thick magnifying glass hovering over each page of a book in her lap.

Tabbi tucks her chin down against the satin edge of the blanket, and she says, “Granmy told me why Dad doesn’t love you.”

And Misty says, “Of course your daddy loves me.”

And of course she’s lying.

Outside the room’s little dormer window, the breaking waves shimmer under the lights of the hotel. Far down the coast is the dark line of Waytansea Point, a peninsula of nothing but forest and rock jutting out into the shimmering ocean.

Misty goes to the window and puts her fingertips on the sill, saying, “You want it open or shut?” The white paint on the windowsill is blistered and peeling, and she picks at it, wedging paint chips under her fingernail.

Rolling her head back and forth on her pillow, Tabbi says, “No, Mom.” She says, “Granmy Wilmot says Dad never loved you for real. He only pretended love to bring you here and make you stay.”

“To bring me here?” Misty says. “To Waytansea Island?” With two fingers, she scratches off the loose flecks of white paint. The sill underneath is brown varnished wood. Misty says, “What else did your grandmother tell you?”

And Tabbi says, “Granmy says you’re going to be a famous artist.”

What you don’t learn in art theory is how too big a compliment can hurt more than a slap in the face. Misty, a famous artist. Big fat Misty Wilmot, queen of the fucking slaves.

The white paint is flaking off in a pattern, in words. A wax candle or a finger of grease, maybe gum arabic, it makes a negative message underneath. Somebody a long time ago wrote something invisible here that new paint can’t stick to.

Tabbi lifts some strands of her hair and looks at the ends, so close-up her eyes go crossed. She looks at her fingernails and says, “Granmy says we should go on a picnic out on the point.”

The ocean shimmers, bright as the bad costume jewelry Peter wore in art school. Waytansea Point is nothing but black. A void. A hole in everything.

The jewelry you wore in art school.

Misty makes sure the window’s locked, and she brushes the loose paint chips into the palm of one hand. In art school, you learn the symptoms of adult lead poisoning include tiredness, sadness, weakness, stupidity—symptoms Misty has had most of her adult life.

And Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot says everyone will want your pictures. She says you’ll do pictures the summer people will fight over.”

Misty says, “Good night, honey.”

And Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot says you’ll make us a rich family again.” Nodding her head, she says, “Dad brought you here to make the whole island rich again.”

The paint chips cupped in one hand, Misty turns out the light.

The message on the windowsill, where the paint flaked off, underneath it said, “You’ll die when they’re done with you.” It’s signed Constance Burton .

Flaking off more paint, the message says, “We all do.”

As she bends to turn off the pink china lamp, Misty says, “What do you want for your birthday next week?”

And a little voice in the dark, Tabbi says, “I want a picnic on the point, and I want you to start painting again.”

And Misty tells the voice, “Sleep tight,” and kisses it good night.

July 10

ON THEIR TENTH DATE, Misty asked Peter if he’d messed with her birth control pills.

They were in Misty’s apartment. She was working on another painting. The television was on, tuned to a Spanish soap opera. Her new painting was a tall church fitted together out of cut stone. The steeple was roofed with copper tarnished dark green. The stained- glass windows were complicated as spiderwebs.

Painting the shiny blue of the church doors, Misty said, “I’m not stupid.” She said, “A lot of women would notice the difference between a real birth control pill and the little pink ci

Peter had her last painting, the house with the white picket fence, the picture he’d framed, and he’d stuffed it up under his baggy old sweater. Like he was pregnant with a very square baby, he waddled around Misty’s apartment. His arms straight down at his sides, he was holding the picture in place with his elbows.

Then fast, he moved his arms a little and the painting dropped out. A heartbeat from the floor, from the glass breaking into a mess, Peter caught it between his hands.

You caught it. Misty’s painting.

She said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

And Peter said, “I have a plan.”

And Misty said, “I’m not having kids. I’m going to be an artist.”

On television, a man slapped a woman to the ground and she lay there, licking her lips, her breasts heaving inside a tight sweater. She was supposed to be a police officer. Peter couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. What he loved about Spanish soap operas is you could make what people say mean anything.

And stuffing the painting up under his sweater, Peter said, “When?”

And Misty said, “When what?”

The painting dropped out, and he caught it.

“When are you going to be an artist?” he said.

Another reason to love Spanish soap operas was how fast they could resolve a crisis. One day, a man and woman were hacking at each other with butcher knives. The next day, they were kneeling in church with their new baby. Their hands folded in prayer. People accepted the worst from each other, screaming and slapping. Divorce and abortion were just never a plot option.

If this was love or just inertia, Misty couldn’t tell.

After she graduated, she said, then she’d be an artist. When she’d put together a body of work and found a gallery to show her. When she’d sold a few pieces. Misty wanted to be realistic. Maybe she’d teach art at the high school level. Or she’d be a technical draftsman or an illustrator. Something practical. Not everybody could be a famous painter.