Page 67 of Meet Me in the Garden

“I would have to be dead inside to not love the Renoir.”

“Want to hear something embarrassing?”

“Always.”

“I went to a figure drawing class on the night we first met, and when the model dropped his robe I was shocked. The teacher actually had to tell me to draw the model’sentirebody.”

She laughs and laughs and we turn our pages to look at the next painting,Naked Figures in the Open Air. “You never paint people,” Elise says.

“That’s true. I love drawing them.”

“What holds you back?”

“I don’t know.”

I ponder it as time passes, as department store windows fill with green and red and gold and Christmas tree lots pop up on street corners. Who would I paint, and how would I paint them? I fill my sketchbook with drawings of the children and Felix and my sisters and Al and Bernard. At Lionel’s house one day, I sketch him by the coop with his birds, and I can tell that he likes it. He stands still for me, raises his chin, holds a bird tenderly in his hands. But at night, alone, it’s Delphine’s face that I see. I close my eyes and she’s in the garden. Pink dress, bare feet, berry mouth, fawn eyes. I go to draw it but the image comes out all wrong. Proportions off, eyes too far apart. It leaves me tired and sad and I almost give up until I look in the bathroom mirror one morning and decide to paint myself.

I draw my first self-portrait in mid-December. Keep drawing them. Learn for the first time exactly what I look like. I go to sleep and wake up contemplating color and light and mood. My sisters and I take the children shopping and stand in a long line to meet Santa. We get all of the cousins together in a picture, Baby Sebastian eyeing Old Nick with trepidation, Rudy smirking at the pageantry, Titter and Bobby and Nathalie and Clément grinning ear to ear. Afterward, they unwrap candy canes. Clément nibbles his like a bunny. Nathalie licks hers sharp.

Felix heads back on the train after Christmas and the children are out of school until the New Year but I finally have a vision for my painting and I don’t want to lose it. They read children’s novels by the fire, play Go Fish and War and pick-up sticks. I paint outside but it gets dark early so I move my easel into the living room, throw a drop cloth over the rug and sheets over the sofa. I’m painting myself as a mother, on my knees in the center of a circular rug with a toy train beside me. In the background, the light from a window cast on the wall, a hint of the world outside. Love and isolation. Devotion and restlessness. Charcoal and cream and pink and yellow. There’s a tightness in my chest as I work—so much to hold in my mind’s eye.

“We’re hungry,” Clément says, appearing in the doorway.

“Open a can of soup,” I say. “I’ll come and heat it.”

A minute later: “Ready.”

I set my brush down, empty the can into a pot, start the flame. Dish it into two bowls. Nathalie and Clément get their spoons and napkins and take their places at the kitchen table. I return to my painting but the color on the brush doesn’t make sense anymore, the images on the canvas vague, too hazy to grasp. I knew where I was going but it’s lost now. It takes so much time to find my way back. The next afternoon, it starts to rain. I go through the house shutting windows.

The kids play in puddles outside but soon return, restless, hovering in the living room. “Want to paint with me?”

They do.

The shadows on my canvas need to be flatter, the daylight on the wall warmer. More folds in the dress. But first: Finding a surface for them to work on. Cutting open a record jacket for cardboard. Choosing a brush for each of them. “We need a still life,” Nathalie says.

“Why don’t you two arrange one while I get you set up?”

I sift through my tin of paints, feeling ungenerous, knowing they’ll use too much, fearing that if I give a color away I won’t have it when I need it. I can’t make myself choose. I set aside what I’m using right now and bring them the rest. “You can pick five. Put your heads together and decide.”

On the table is a bowl of oranges and a chocolate bar in a gold wrapper. Clément adds a mug and they ask for my opinion. “Maybe something for height,” I say. Nathalie takes a taper candle from the living room. They choose colors. I add dollops of white and black to their glass palette for mixing. Give them their own small jars of turpentine and linseed oil. Their own rags. I make sure they have everything they need, and they are darling and serious, considering their still life from different angles. I put on a record for us. I approach my painting again. It stares back at me, blankly. What was I going to do next? It’s as though someone else made it and now I’m supposed to step in. Supposed to know how to do it. And meanwhile I’ve lost the courage to touch my paintbrush to the canvas. I close my eyes. Keep them closed. The kids are silent. Occupied. They should stay that way for a while. I open my eyes again. The shadows are blotchy. I need to make their color flatter—that was it.

I get lost in time. In smooth brushstrokes. In charcoal first, and then yellow. The kids whisper and giggle. It’s going so well, better than I could have imagined. They’re behind me, sneaking a look, trying not to interrupt me, their tones admiring. There’s a chair scrape across the kitchen floor, and the opening of a cabinet. The rustle of saltine sleeves. Darkness outside.

And then, sometime later: “Mommy,” Clément says. “We don’t feel well. Our heads hurt.”

I set my brush down. I go to step toward them but I’m suddenly woozy, a sharpness shooting through my skull, and I stagger forward, find the wall with my hand to steady myself. “Mommy!” Nathalie cries. I strain to bring her into focus but everything’s blurry.The turpentine, I realize.

I fling open the front door and the kitchen door, open the windows to cold and dark and the sound of rain. “Let’s stand outside,” I say. “We need fresh air.” I guide them out under the awning, their backs angular and delicate against my palms. “Damn it,” I say, shaking. “Take deep breaths. I’m so, so sorry.” Through the lit window the house is a mess, dishes undone, empty soup cans scattered on the counter. Castaway saltine sleeves and hardening orange peels.

I can’t take them back in there. Not yet. I have them wait outside while I seal up the turpentine and linseed oil. I leave the windows cracked so air will come in but not rain. I take them to a drive-in for dinner and then to the Crest in Long Beach for a showing of cartoons. Sneak looks at their faces in the projector’s beam of light. Even as they laugh along, they look exhausted, pale. So foolish of me, to paint for hours without a thought to the air we were breathing. Careless. Irresponsible. Back home, once they’re sleeping, I wash the dishes and scrub the counters and sweep the floors. I set the children’s paintings on the kitchen counter to dry. I stand in the doorway to the living room, looking at my painting on its easel. A lurch of anger, hot and violent. I douse a cloth in turpentine, and I scour the paint off the canvas. Scour myselfoff. I rub until the canvas is smooth again and only a ghost of the image remains. Maybe the painting was headed somewhere but I’ll never know now. I clean my brushes andput them away. I pack up my paints and drag a chair to the high kitchen cabinet, push the materials far back, out of my own reach.

The next day, the last of my vacation from work, I take the kids to Adele and Al’s house, sit in the yard with the men, smoke cigarette after cigarette.

“Where have you been?” Adele asks me, carrying a platter of cheese and crackers and cornichons.

“Holed up painting,” I say. “Stupid.”

“Why stupid?” Al asks.