Life Drawing: A Novel by Robin Black

Author:Robin Black
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780812996036
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-07-15T07:00:00+00:00

11

Here we are, Jan and I, clearing our father’s belongings from the efficiency apartment he has occupied for nearly two years. Two women, sisters, similar coloring, black hair, dark eyes, tanned skin—mine from the country summer, hers from two weeks’ boating and swimming in Nova Scotia. I am informal, a bit messy in my comfortable clothes, jeans and a rose-colored T-shirt; she is elegant in gray linen pants, a white short-sleeve silk blouse—straight from a morning at work. In the first moments or possibly minutes—immeasurable—we are both, together, silently overwhelmed. Not by the extent of the task, modest and meager, but by its nature.

Eventually, I say, “I can’t imagine where to start,” meaning that I can’t imagine how this ends. I am counting on my sister’s orderly mind, on her ability to see systems and methodology where I cannot. She sighs, resigned, ready to engage that brain of hers. She has boxes in her car, she says. There are categories we can use. What she will take. What I will take. What neither of us wants. What he might be able to have in his new room. I nod. It all makes sense. It sounds so obvious—though I might have stood there an hour before detecting this structural simplicity to the job.

We move quietly, rarely speaking—each of us drawn first to the meaningless objects, the things he has mysteriously acquired since our childhoods. A Lucite paper towel holder. A beer stein from Atlantic City. An afghan that looks handmade, that neither of us can place but that we decide should go with him. A pair of galoshes he will never now need. (Of all the unfamiliar things, these alone stir me. An existence spending all rainy days indoors. A life sentence. A never again molded into this loosely human shape, green rubber, traces of old mud still wedged in the grooves of the soles.)

Once the unrecognized objects are gone, the familiar sparkle like shards of all the memories he has lost. I find the salt and pepper shakers that sat on our kitchen table for decades, aluminum cubes I used to knock together during long family meals, and I can see that Jan wants them, so I tell her to go ahead. Into her box they go. I take the single jade bookend, its partner long vanished, the back half of a dragon carved into it. We come close to alternating, one for her and one for me; and I wonder as we do if she too is feeling the absence of the third set of hands. Neither of us mentions Charlotte. Or our mother—but that is not so noticeable an omission. Neither of us reminisces at all. Sitting on the bed, I think that we might be somehow cheerier had he died. The weight of his double captivity, within the locked room, within his own body, is heavy on us.

We haven’t discussed whether or not we will visit him after the task is complete. But then I’m relieved to learn that Jan has made the decision.

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