Woman Naps with Book, by Gina Harlow

Untitled, by Frances Fink (USA) late 20th century

Woman Naps with Book
 
The woman looks nothing like the one who portrays her in brush strokes that reveal a skill not fully honed, this woman with a magenta flower tucked behind her ear. Looking at her sometimes I feel a sadness, but then I think, no, because the flower.

***

“Come to me,” she said, taking me in her arms after a long flight from Los Angeles to New York, a summer my father and I had come to visit. Me, a teenager, all straight dangling lines, she in middle age, round, plump and smelling of cured meat, but also a perfume of pastry. And although she looked like my father, it was his features in pale rather than his burnish. Her eyes were the same almond as his, as mine, but blue instead of the hazel he and I shared. Her skin was the white of a peeled pear against his warm olive. You could see, though, she was his sister. As she pulled me to her I felt her need to claim me, her only niece.
 
I’d met her once before, when my uncle was still alive. But that had been years before, when my father and I drove to a dude ranch outside Tucson to meet them. My cousin, her daughter, was there too. Maybe it was my fascination with her, a striking young woman, an accomplished writer I was told, confined to a wheelchair. Or it might have been my uncle’s presence, his strong drawn features, his gaze kind but solemn as a predator bird. The patriarch. I could see how both women were tied to him. In that setting, my aunt was drawn in the background. 

These trips my father and I took were our way of sustaining what felt like, many times, an arranged relationship after my parents’ divorce. Both of us injured, our love retracted, my aunt’s arms around me at the door felt like coming in from our tempest. 
 
That night, after unpacking, she ushered us into a room of flowered walls and china plates piled with sliced cheeses and the mortadella and salami my father loved, the doting older sister. For dessert she presented two large tarts she’d made of glistening plum and apricot slices arranged in careful concentric circles. It was simple, it was pie, but like nothing I’d ever seen or tasted before.
 
“This is delicious, Aunt Frances."

“Anything for my favourite niece!”
 
One day of our visit she and I walked the shaded sidewalks of her Long Island neighbourhood to a Jewish delicatessen. On our way, I noticed her glance at me with a quiet look of satisfaction, and I realized, as I basked in her unearned adoration, that I felt it too.
 
“Two knishes, Irvin. My niece has never eaten one.” 

“You’re in for a treat young lady,” he said as he bagged up our food. 
 
Back in her kitchen she cut one of the pastries in half and handed me my plate. The crusty dough, velvety potatoes with a hint of mustard was a revelation, and I began to know my aunt in a way I could have never at that dude ranch. I saw how she and I were tied together. 
 
It has always been, my thankfulness for the scent of a pot simmering, for the satin of cream, the savor of this element of our survival. Made with hands, the more hand-made the better. But it’s also remembering that melody filtering down the street, the ice cream truck’s arrival and that banana popsicle on a warm day. All the ways food transcends to more than necessity I see through a window of divinity that isn’t merely evidenced in the symmetry, colour, sound, and scent in the world, (where did it come from?) but that we see it, we hear it, we taste it, we want it.
 
And so for the rest of our stay in New York my aunt delivered a succession of her artistry, her meatballs and gravy, her pizza, her Shrimps Dejonge. Some days I would stand beside her and watch her able hands with the dough or the knife, and I saw how she considered it all an event, an opus from her kitchen. Later in the evenings, she poured cups of spicy Constant Comment tea we sipped from dainty cups served with biscotti while watching Johnny Carson.
 
On that visit, beneath her joy, I saw a grief,  I sensed it wasn’t just my uncle’s recent death, but how things were adding up. My cousin’s polio was one of the last reported in their county, the vaccine came soon after, although my aunt never uttered a word of pity. 

***

East 11th street, New York City, 1925, when and where my grandmother realized the name she’d given her daughter was too much for a young girl to take to school. Too much for the child of Sicilian immigrants who muddled together a life in tenement housing. I think of a puzzled young Alfonsina, having grown accustomed to the sound of her place in the world, attaching herself to those vowels and consonants when they rang out, being told she would now be Frances, the anglicized version of her mother’s Francesca. Maybe this and her fair skin would save her from the slurs of Dego, Wop. 
 
When my aunt met and married my uncle Sal, who became a successful building contractor, she pulled herself from ugly streets to soft green lawns and rooms set aside for dining. To a life as the cultivated person instead of the bleakness she was born into.

***

The woman in the painting reclines, sleeping on a coverlet of rich rust, a tender repose of pale skin, blushed cheeks, and garnet lips. She rests so as not to disturb the billowing flower in her dark hair. Before her, a book lies open, the pages coloured a rosy hue, as if the words are haloed in some essence from beyond. Gazing on her I feel her quietude, I know it. Deep in her story, far from her own, she has drifted off, blissfully away from the vicissitudes of her waking hours.

***

After New York my aunt and I became pen pals, and I began to look forward to the envelopes addressed to me in her tight cursive and distinct flourishes, “Dear Gina, I’m sending this recipe for my Blueberry Buckle. Everyone in the office loves it.”
 
She worked for years at Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan,  a position in management, although I never knew exactly what. It was important enough, though, that she met some interesting people. In one of her many shipments to me of books that began arriving in later years was the signed first edition of The Plaza Cookbook by historian Eve Brown,  Dear Frances, Bon Appetit, Affectionately, Eve. 
 
During her time there, when I was very young, before we’d ever met, she sent a doll from the store. Over a foot tall, she was outfitted in a royal blue dress with a double-breasted red coat. Dark curls trailed down her porcelain face, flowed to her shoulders, and was topped with a black felt hat, an uptown girl. This gift from a distant relative, a doll I would not snuggle as my pretend baby but place on a shelf and admire for her elegance, hinted of the woman who’d given it, a lover of beauty, a creature of aspirations.
 
A few years after the visit to New York my aunt announced she was moving to Tucson. Her doctors advised that her terrible allergies would do better away from the spoors that hung in the humid summers of Long Island. In this decision she left her son and daughter-in-law, her daughter, and the only state that had ever been home.  A while later, she sent a picture of herself. In it she’s wearing a flowing caftan dress, lounging on a sofa, her strawberry blond hair now styled high, she several pounds lighter, her big eyes popping from eyeliner. Not long after she married. 
 
Ben was a pharmacist, a widow, and like my uncle before him, handsome and reputable. My aunt moved into his flat-roofed stuccoed home and the two of them began to travel. A fat gold photo album given to me after she died is filled with pictures of Europe, along with my aunt's little notes accompanying them. Is there anywhere as glorious as Rome? 
 
In Arizona, she took up painting, and her growing portfolio was comprised mostly of landscapes and still life, but she also ventured into portraiture. One of them, a glamorous woman, a Spanish Doña, gifted to my father and my step-mother, hung in their living room for years. 
 
During this period, each summer, she and Ben took a cottage on the north shore of Lake Tahoe where I happened to be living at the time. While she was there, we’d visit often. Some days she would produce a miracle out of her small kitchen for our dinner and others we’d go to a restaurant in town. Ben was a nice man, friendly but a little fussy. Many days he was off golfing while my aunt painted by the water’s edge. We’d sit in Adirondacks where she spoke to me now as one woman to another. 
 
“He ignores me. I can’t bear it.” 

“What are you going to do?” 

She looked at me as if she was considering what that might be. 
 
The subject never came up again, and several years later Ben suddenly died. No matter her confessions to me, I saw how his passing jolted her. In her flat-roofed home in the desert her world was now smaller, and then more tragically so when a few years later her daughter also died. 
 
This loss, I knew, was the deepest. Not simply because it was her child, but was the unnatural end of a frayed yet enduring relationship. One that broke both their hearts. For all the unconditional love my aunt bestowed on me, she held her own children to standards, expectations. Many of which my cousin never met as she faced life with her disability. My aunt  could only see the world from where she stood, a place where ill-fate was a test, a measurement of fortitude, of imagination. I knew she loved her daughter with the passion of any parent, but she also dug into her positions. So, as is often the case, when you continue with your imperfect love, as love always is in degrees, thinking of the day it will be made right, you are stunned when there are no more.
 
About once a year I came to visit, and, by then, bring my own family. She would take my kids in her arms and hold them with the same cherish she had me when I was a girl, and even in encroaching age, she spared no effort to do has she’d always done, feed us in spectacular fashion. 
 
On one of my last visits I came alone. I remember walking through the back porch door into the kitchen and seeing the counters overflowing with cans and bags of food, as if she was expecting a crowd any day, although it was clear she was no longer cooking. She’d also stopped painting, yet her little studio was filled with paints and canvases. Her television room bulged with piles of CDs and DVDs of movies and the operas she loved so well, many of them unopened. I saw how she was slipping away, how that part of her that had clung to life’s lusciousness and small graces had been silenced in a dark melancholy. It wasn’t long after my last visit to her in a residential care home that she passed. Her estate had been liquidated but her custodian held back some of her paintings for me. 
 
The woman napping hangs over a dresser in my bedroom. Her presence a given in my back in forth, my in and out. She resides close to where I might find myself in a mirror image. And when I stop to gaze at her, so tender in this deliverance, I sense the artist close by. I detect her sweet scent and hear her say,  for you, my favourite niece.

***

The woman in the painting has years before her, full lips, eyes without a crease, angles sharp. I imagine she has reached the point in the pages where her heroine has come to a field of tall grasses, an escape of sorts, a place of respite. She has left some torment behind. She sits in the caress of that green and soft breeze. Under a sky of blue, she cups a flower. Before drifting off, the woman in the painting is suspended in that field in bloom, warmed by the sun, wrapped in  flush of colour and soft perfume.
 
Gina Harlow

Gina Harlow is a writer living in Southern California. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Narratively, HerStry, Austin Statesman, The Hunger, and elsewhere. She is a nonfiction reader for Third Street Review and her work in progress is a long story about a young horse. Links to most of her writings can be found at www.ginaharlowwrites.com