Short Story: Still Life

Short Story: Still Life

Tom took the corner too quickly and collided with a stack of Bounty. From his seat high in the shopping cart, Ryan laughed as he watched his father clumsily restack the paper towels.

“Tom, how you holding up with the twins, man? About three months old now, right?” asked a neighbor, who bent down to help, efficiently building a tower from the packages of towels.

“Tired, Charlie,” answered Tom. “Really tired.”

“Say hi to Eileen for me,” said the man, crowning the display with the eight-pack and pushing his cart towards the meat case. Tom turned to his son.

“We need fruit. Then we pay and go home to Mommy and the babies, okay, buddy?”

Ryan nodded behind a sticky lollipop and a pack of Scooby-Doo stickers.

More slowly now, Tom steered his shopping cart along the produce aisle. As he parked it in front of the Red Delicious apples, the automatic mister turned on, drenching the apples and Tom’s shirt. Ryan laughed again as he watched his father dart his hand in and out of the water spray, reaching for one slippery apple after another.

Giving up, Tom tossed a five-pound bag of apples in the cart, where it jostled a gallon of milk and landed on a pack of diapers. He steered the cart towards the checkout, glancing at the table of reduced-price fruit, where yesterday’s bananas leaned on bruised pears and the kumquats that no one in Billerica, Massachusetts knew how to eat. In that moment, Tom saw the pile of tired fruit as a pyramid reflected in a shaft of light. The sticky redness of the oozing grapes contrasted sharply with the dull brown of a banana’s bruise. The dirt-colored kumquats seemed to mimic the shape of the pears beside them. The apples’ wrinkles led to the deep grooves of the table holding them. Each piece of fruit was silhouetted against another; together, they made a single composition.

Tom looked away at his cart and back again. The fruit seemed brighter now, the colors almost shimmering against one another, while the rest of Star Market faded into darkness behind it. Puzzled, he reached for a pear, stopped himself, and wished for a pencil. He looked around at other shoppers, wondering if they saw what appeared to him. For an instant, he wanted to call Charlie back, to ask him what he saw on the fruit table.

“Go home now, Daddy?” said Ryan, tired of the produce aisle.

“What do you see over there, Ry?” asked Tom, directing his son’s gaze to the fruit.

“Scooby-Doo,” replied Ryan. “I need to go to the potty.”

Tom loaded the groceries and his son into the truck, and headed east on Route 2, taking the long way home to check road conditions for the next day’s surveying job. As he drove and Ryan dozed, Tom tuned the radio to hear the next day’s weather.

“Another cold one for New England,” said the announcer. “Siberian winds blowing across the Arctic Circle will drive down the daytime highs to seventeen degrees.”

Tom switched off the radio and looked out the side window of his truck. The dark, wet telephone poles that lined the highway emerged from the forest of pin-oak and pine trees to frame his vision. Tom saw the heavy wires connecting the poles as arcs against a grey sky, reflecting the rise and fall of the uneven highway. Glancing back to make sure Ryan was still sleeping, Tom pulled over to the shoulder. Scrabbling for a pencil in the glove compartment, Tom stepped out of the truck and stood in the wind drawing on the back of an estimate form. The paper flapped against the windshield and the pencil point crumbled as he pressed harder.

“Damn,” he muttered softly, when his hands refused to obey his eyes. His drawing looked no more like what he saw than Ryan’s three-year-old scribbles resembled Scooby-Doo. He crumpled the page in frustration as his ringing cell phone woke Ryan and called them both home.

Later that Sunday, after dinner, a bath, and with the children in bed, Tom planted himself in front of his wife. Half dozing, half reading the business section of the newspaper, Eileen looked up at him inquiringly.

“Do you ever see art?” he asked her. “Do you see art in your regular daily life?”

Eileen thought for a moment before she spoke. “My old office had a great view of the Charles. Every time I looked at it the water was a different color,” said Eileen. “Is that what you mean?”

“Not exactly,” said Tom looking out the dining room window. “When you look out there, what do you see?”

She joined him at the window. Together they stared at the ice-covered patio, the big plastic toys mounded under the last of the season’s snow.

“Sorry, Tom,” Eileen said finally. “I just see the yard.”

When the 2:00am moonlight streamed into the bedroom window, Tom woke. He rose from bed, not feeling tired for the first time since the twins were born, and stumbled down the stairs. Burrowing though the toy bin, he found a set of watercolors Ryan had received for Christmas. He took the paints downstairs to his office in the basement. There, he tried to recreate the vision of the fruit he had seen in Star Market. He ground his damp brush into the dry watercolors again and again, painting unsatisfying streaks across pages of paper yanked from his printer. He pulled off his t-shirt to use as a blotter and then, when the t-shirt was soaked, his pyjama pants.

When a shadow fell across the page, Tom looked up to see his wife holding one of the babies, outlined by sunlight streaming in from the window behind her. Seeing Tom wearing only his underpants, covered in paint splotches, and surrounded by puddles of paint water, Eileen looked confused.

“I’m not crazy,” Tom told her. “It’s not a midlife crisis.”

“Just don’t cut off your ear,” Eileen said wearily. “We’re not covered for elective surgery.”

Later that day, Tom drove again along Route 2, parking next to his chief surveyor’s truck. In his orange safety vest, Vince was a bright spot among shades of highway grey. Tom nodded a greeting at Vince who was busy calibrating the contour gauge, and stared across the highway at the telephone poles. They looked again as they had last night, angular and upright, connecting the snowy mounds beneath them with their swooping wires, defining the limits of his vision. Looking beyond the poles, Tom saw a landscape of swirling color in shades of brown and patches of white. A single tree stood off-center, casting a weak shadow on a melting patch of dirty snow.

“Vince, look over there, will you?” asked Tom.

Vince looked to where his boss pointed:

“Yeah?”

“Your job is seeing stuff, right?” began Tom. “So when you look over there, what do you see?”

“I see a fairly level grade asphalt and macadam surface, a four-lane divided highway. Is that what you want?” asked Vince curiously.

Tom sighed. “Thanks. Yeah, that’s what I want.”

That evening, Tom pulled into his driveway and looked up at the garage roof. A thin squirrel perched on the gutter, paws at its mouth. Tom saw it as a laughing stone gargoyle, worn by weather and the sculptor’s craft. Quickly, he backed the truck of out the driveway and drove to Peabody Art Supplies.

“I need to get home by dinner,” he told the teenager behind the register breathlessly. “Can you get me some paint, fast? What do you do, mix it?”

“This isn’t house paint,” said the clerk. “We sell oils, watercolors, acrylics, that kind of stuff.”

“Give me some of each,” said Tom, brandishing a credit card, “and a brush – no - a bunch of brushes. And give me some paper, too.”

With a deep sigh, the clerk led Tom to Aisle 4.

“You choose the colors that you need based on what you’re trying to represent,” explained the clerk. “So what are you painting?”

“Bananas,” said Tom slowly, “telephone poles, Route 2, a tree in the snow, and a squirrel. And kumquats.”

“Hell of a painting,” mumbled the teenager, pulling tubes of paint from the rack. “You’ll need a lot of brown.”

After dinner, Tom created a space on the dining room table by pushing aside old surveys and a box of Christmas ornaments headed for the basement. He turned on the overhead light, a chandelier that he and Eileen had chosen at Home Depot on the same day they had bought the house. A bulb hissed and burnt out above his head. Eileen entered, handing him one of the twins, as she covered the table with forms and spreadsheets.

“Business isn’t bad,” she began formally. “But expenses are up, as you know.”

Tom nodded. He thought almost wistfully of a commercial he had seen once. “Babies change everything,” said the voiceover, as images of smiling infants played on the screen. Now, peering over his daughter’s tiny head, he studied columns of red and black figures in Eileen’s neat handwriting. He remembered when Eileen worked as an accountant, dressing stylishly for work, and lunching with clients. It’s true that babies change everything, he thought, but Family Finance Night is no happy hour.

“Fortunately,” she continued. “We get a nice home office deduction, and it’s generally a good thing that you went out on your own last year, to work for yourself. Tax wise, it helps. A little anyway.” Eileen paused, shifting the sleeping baby to her other hip. She looked at Tom expectantly.

“But in other ways it doesn’t help,” said Tom, completing her thought.

“I miss the security of your old job,” said Eileen sadly. “And the regular hours. Still,” she added quickly. “It’s every accountant’s dream to watch a business grow from nothing.

Tom thought fleetingly of the paints hidden in the basement. Through the pocket of his jeans, he crumpled the receipt. The movement startled the dozing baby he held, and she began to wail.

“I can’t hear Scooby-Doo,” Ryan whimpered from the living room.

Eileen looked at Tom quickly as if she suspected him of creating this diversion.

“Look them over and sign the tax forms when you get a chance,” she told him. “I need to get them out in the mail by the 15th.”

Late that night, Tom went again to the basement and found a square of unused drywall. From the tubes of paint, he squeezed lines of color on it that looked like capillaries and veins seen under a microscope. He nudged the lines of color into one another with a screwdriver. In a burst of inspiration, he traded the flathead for a Phillips head screwdriver. As he pulled its metal teeth through the paint, he saw a pattern emerge against the drywall. When he heard the roar of the trash truck rumbling down the street, Tom rushed upstairs. This time he made it; Eileen was in the shower and the babies still dozing while he dressed quickly. He dashed down to the kitchen, and back up the stairs to find Eileen standing on the landing wearing her bathrobe.

“I made you coffee,” he said, handing Eileen a full mug, and sloshing the coffee on her bare feet.

She looked at him suspiciously and said simply, “Thank you.” Eileen moved into a patch of sunlight. Tom studied her, this tired woman with wet, tousled hair, fraying bathrobe covered with food stains, chipped fingernails and toenails with tiny spots of color leftover from a Christmas pedicure. To Tom, she looked a Madonna in a Renaissance painting, silhouetted by watery sunlight from behind.

“What?” she said impatiently, as Tom gazed at her.

“You are my muse,” Tom imagined telling her, but he knew that would scare her. Instead, he patted her heartily on the shoulder, splashing more coffee from her mug.

For the next two days, Tom willed his eyes to behave. He realized, though, that it was his brain that turned the landscape of Billerica into an Ansel Adams photograph, cropping out the Burger King and Jiffy Lube that framed a tableau of pine trees bent double with the weight of dirty snow. On the third day, Tom woke again at night, losing himself in the gray-brown shade of squirrel fur he painted on a roll of unused wallpaper. He clambered up the basement stairs as the sun rose, bringing a paintbrush in his haste.

As he reached the kitchen, he saw that it was too late. Eileen entered the kitchen from the dining room, brandishing a sheaf of - he realized with a sudden sinking feeling – tax forms.

She took a deep breath. “You didn’t sign the forms. Yesterday was the fifteenth. Do you know what’s at stake here? These are our tax forms!” She paused to breathe and waited for him to reply.

Tom lifted a paintbrush in feeble apology. “Shit, I forgot. I was doing this.”

“Tom,” she said a hardness he’d never heard before. “You are not an artist. We’re not that kind of people. You survey, and I take care of the kids. We’re luckier than others, I know that, but my God this is hard. And you’re making it harder by being,” She paused, searching for a word. “Weird, okay, you’re weird. You’re having visions, delusions.” She rolled the tax forms into a tube as if to steady herself.

Tom reacted to her final words first. “Eileen, it’s not exactly a vision. It’s like I’m seeing art all over the place. I never saw it before. It’s like things I’ve seen in books, sculpture and paintings.”

She gazed at him sadly, some of her anger spent.

“Tom, we’re not looking at a beautiful life here; it is what it is. And it’s not art.” And she bent over the kitchen counter as the first gasp of tears overtook her.

Eileen cried as Tom had never seen her cry, not when her father died, not when the babies came early, not when the twins were on respirators and their future was uncertain. Those times, Tom tried to distract her, to say the magic words that would cease the flow. This time, he waited for the waves to dissipate, just as he waited for the waters that flooded the basement each spring to recede.

Tom began speaking softly as Eileen’s sobs slowed. “The thing is, Eileen, I kind of like the visions. I thought it would mess up seeing the lines and angles of surveying, but it doesn’t. It just makes the rest of the world look like it has an extra dimension.”

Tom stood and paced the twenty yards that spanned their kitchen from refrigerator to linoleum-tiled hallway. He had plastered, sanded, and painted every inch of this house, and he had surveyed the yard a dozen times.

“I’ve been doing surveying since I started working summers for my uncle when I was fifteen. That’s all I know, angles and blueprints. It’s like I see the world flat,” he said, struggling for words that would make a picture in his wife’s mind.

She didn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Like ledger columns, that’s how I see the world. Excel spreadsheets that can go on for pages,” she said finally. “It’s okay, though; it’s reality.”

“I think you might be missing something, Eileen,” Tom replied.

He looked at her bleary, red tear-stained eyes. He walked her to the living room window, where weak winter sunlight glinted off icicles dangling from the roof.

“Don’t look at the gutters,” he said. “I know the icicles mean there’s an ice dam under the shingles. But, Ei, just for a second, tell me what you see.”

“My eyes are all cried out,” she protested. “Nothing is clear, you know? I can’t really see that far.”

“That’s the perfect time to start looking.” Tom put his arms around Eileen, her shuddering sobs less frequent. The sun grew stronger, highlighting dents in his truck and pockmarks from the rock salt thrown by a snowplow. A trash truck passed and its reflection in the sun blinded them for a second.

“Now I really can’t see at all,” said Eileen turning away.

Tom followed her gaze to where the sun lit a pile of brightly-colored toys on the living room floor. Behind them waited a sheaf of bills to be mailed, tidy rectangles leaning on a sippy cup of forgotten orange juice. A clutch of diapers, more abstract rectangles, was scattered in front of the toys. A shaft of red, Elmo’s arm, bisected the rectangles.

Eileen started to sob again, from exhaustion, futility, and frustration. She stepped towards the pile as if to straighten the mess.

“’S’okay,” whispered Tom, as he heard the first stirrings from upstairs. He held her arm gently, preventing her from tidying the mess.

“It’s okay,” he repeated softly. “I’ll tell you what I see until you see it yourself. It all looks like art from here.”

As the sounds from upstairs grew louder, and Ryan’s voice reached a high C of frustration, they stood together and gazed at what they had produced. “I see,” Tom thought he heard Eileen whisper against Ryan’s wails, before she pulled away from his embrace to ready the children for the new day.