My Beautiful Failure by Young Janet Ruth

Author:Young, Janet Ruth [Young, Janet Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-12T23:00:00+00:00

53.

the g word

A bright November day. Through the screen door, I saw Mom and Dad taking a break in Mom’s rose garden. Mom had neglected the garden last year, so this year she made the most of it. Everything was raked and deadheaded and pruned. Each rosebush had its own square, cut into the grass and lavished with manure. A statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, presided in the middle, and two or three flowers had lasted into November. Although the neighbor’s leaf blower sounded like a burping machine gun, Mom and Dad, in their white plastic stackable chairs, drinking store-brand diet cola, apparently thought they were in paradise. When the blower stopped you could hear the Asianlike tone of a wind chime.

Dad removed his straw hat and leaned over Mom’s chair, hiding both their faces with the hat while he kissed her. When he had disappeared to the front of the house, I approached her.

“Mom,” I asked in a low voice, “how many of the paintings have you actually seen?”

“Two or three,” Mom said. She leaned back in her chair to get the sun on her face. Disturbingly, she was still smiling from Dad’s kiss.

I moved Dad’s chair so my mouth would be close to Mom’s ear. “Have you seen the one of the whale trying to swallow another whale headfirst, so they both get stuck and have to stay that way forever? Don’t tell me that’s not the product of a fevered imagination.”

Mom’s red lipstick stretched in a laugh. “I didn’t quite get that one either.”

“Does anyone get it, other than Dad? I think he has a secret system of meanings that’s all in his head.”

Mom squeezed my hand, and I felt some of the affection from Dad squickily transfer to me. “Maybe he’s an unrecognized genius. Not everyone will get or like what he’s doing. How do you think most middle-class Spaniards reacted when they first saw Dalí’s Persistence of Memory?”

“Which one is that?”

“With the melting watches.”

“I call that one Melting Watches.”

“Your dad might be ahead of his time,” Mom said. She flicked a beetle off one of the flowers. Mom wasn’t really a reliable judge of anything. She was just in love with Dad.

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