“She wanted me to pick those up,” David said reluctantly. “But she wanted you to have the others.”
“Oh, great.” I had moved to one side wall to examine a trio of hanging skulls, these far more unique and interesting than those made for David’s shop. One, horns and all, had been painted sky blue with fleecy clouds seeming to drift across it. Another was fire-engine red, and looked like something a Satanic cult might have ordered. Beside that, more disturbing, was a skull painted carefully to look like it still had skin on it—and a hide. The texture of hair was meticulous, and reminded me what a fine painter Mother had been, though she had apparently given that up as a means of expression in itself long before. Glass balls—Christmas bulbs?—had been glued into the eye sockets and painted with glossy paint to look like real eyes. They did, except that at some point one of them had shattered and the jagged shards of the glistening eyeball were grotesque. A fanged mouth for an eye.
“Your father always accused Annie of emulating Georgia O’Keefe too much. She did love her work, but Annie was her own artist with her own vision. Your father should have tried to understand her.”
I turned from the skulls to give him a look. “My mother cheated on my dad, you know. A lot. With his best friend. With his boss. Everyone where he worked knew it. Mother had a lot of problems, David.”
“I’m sorry, Jack…I know that. But she wasn’t evil. She never meant to harm you or your father. She only meant to harm herself.”
I didn’t pursue any more of David’s insights into my mother’s secret heart just then. I guess I wasn’t ready to dive into her life so fully yet; I wanted to test the waters carefully. Through her art seemed a good beginning. I found a scrapbook in a bureau in a corner of the studio and David came over when he saw what I’d discovered. Photographs, black and white enlargements, each filling one page. Mother had experimented in many mediums, as if in a desperate search for the right voice with which to express her soul. Had they all failed to release the demons inside her?
“Yew!” I said, in disgust. “She was certainly into cows, huh? Even rotting ones.”
“I know, but they’re almost beautiful, the way she shot them, aren’t they? The time of day, the light, the textures? I think she wanted to show that anything can be made to look beautiful.”
“As long as you can’t smell it, I guess.”
“And do you know what they are? These are some of those cows that are found killed mysteriously…the ones people think UFOs are experimenting on. Or Satanic cults are sacrificing.”
“Or Elvis is eating.”
David giggled and elbowed me. “I think the spooky stories were what compelled your mother most. She showed these once in a little gallery on Newbury Street, in Boston. They were received fairly well; the reviews are in another scrapbook. This was the last stuff she did out West, she said. She came back here right after.”
“Maybe she got too scared, huh? Maybe she was…
“Maybe Annie was doing it. Maybe she was a cow vampire, and fled back East when the Animal Rights people got on her trail.”
“I think that’s it. Mystery solved.”
* * *
David went home, taking all of his inheritance that he could carry in one load with him, leaving me to explore more minutely by myself. I remained in the studio to do this, my mother’s personality so ingrained here—if abstracted and in need of interpretation. I was almost jealous, resentful, that David knew her better than I. Though he could have been enlightening to me as I continued to explore, I was glad for the privacy. It had become so late in the day and so much darker that I finally put on one lamp and set it on the floor with me as I went through the packed lower drawers of the large bureau I had found the scrapbook in. After several hours of this the bones of my ass seemed ready to stab through my buttocks so I got up to stretch. It was night.
As I contemplated coffee my eyes fell on a closet I had dismissed earlier. Now I idly strolled to it, and slid it open.
Musty gloom. Paint-spattered smocks on hangers, some old coats. Boxes of books and newspapers stacked up. One box with its flaps closed. I reached to drag it out, expecting heaviness. It wasn’t filled with books; it slid out much too easily. I unfolded the flaps.
There was another steer skull in the box.
There was nothing painted on the forehead, but rather something glued to it. Interesting. A kind of mixed- media sculpture? I carried the thing to the lamp and hunched down close to its intimate ruddy glow.
It wasn’t glued to the forehead, either, but embedded in it. Almost in the center, like a black glassy third eye. Spherical, with subtle grooves, curves and figures inscribed in it, apparently as designs. Lightly I brushed my fingers over the surface. I turned the skull over in my hands and peered inside it through the sharp-edged holes underneath. With the eye holes, nasal channel, and huge molars on the underside it looked like another face in itself, hidden inside a cow’s outer face. Through one eye socket I could see splintered breakage where the sphere had been driven straight through. Had Mother hammered the object into this skull?
I’d have to ask David about it; right now I needed that coffee. Much too early to retire just yet. I set the skull with the third eye down on the work bench, shut off the lamp, and closed the studio door behind me.
* * *
What was that commercial for, skin cream? Moisturizing lotion? And how often was it that the commercial said we shed half a million dead skin cells…every thirty seconds? Every second? A lot, fast, in any case. Good thing they regenerate or we’d just crumble away to dust, I thought. I remembered hearing, also, that much of the dust in homes—most of it?—consisted of these shed scales. And we inhaled this scurf, it settled in our food.
The dust was thick in my mother’s bedroom. She was no great housekeeper…but then, to be fair, she’d been very sick toward the end. Here she had lain wasting away, crumbling. She was, in effect, all around me as if her cremated ashes had been scattered like powder across the bureau, the book shelves, the mirror and window sills. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Back to senseless matter. I ran my finger through the dust on the bureau top, rubbed it between my fingers. A shudder went through me, and I wiped my hand on my jeans.
There was a nice smell in the bedroom, despite the dust. A light perfume, not cloying. Delicate, feminine, appealing. But the dust. It was almost as if I were afraid that by ingesting it I would be infecting myself with my mother’s cancer, latent in those flakes of cell matter. Or that, by inhaling the dust, I would be cannibalizing her.
I would have to dust in here, vacuum, but not tonight. And I would not sleep in here tonight, either. I went to the smaller guest room instead.
* * *
I was awakened by the smell of cigarette smoke.
For a moment I lay totally disoriented in the alien bed; it was almost a kind of startled, momentary panic. I had not yet moved in, really, had brought virtually none of my things from my apartment, and I figured I had freaked myself out by jumping into this.
The house’s burnt-in layer of cigarette stink was so much stronger this morning, sharp and immediate. I almost expected to find David in the house, but then I realized I had never seen him smoke. Leaving the guest room, I followed the smell to where it was strongest: my mother’s bedroom. Very concentrated there, much more so than I remembered it from the previous night, but I assumed that I must have become used to the smell after being in the house for so many hours, and waking up fresh to the odor had made it seem distinct again.
I stretched; my neck hurt from sleeping tense in that strange bed. Idly, I slid open the top drawer of my mother’s bureau. Underwear, in soft colors, both cotton and silky. The silky surprised me a little and I shut the drawer, embarrassed, opened another more toward the bottom.
I found several photo albums, and sat on the edge of the bed to open one of them in my lap.
Cracked photos of my mother as a little girl; those unsettling cat-direct eyes were unmistakable, and even more weird in a child. There were pictures of Mother with her parents. Her mother looked nothing like her but my grandfather was, as Dad had told me, tall and slender. In fact, I could see myself in him. I am tall and slim like he was…like my mother was.
Grandfather had been an alcoholic…and Dad had told me, a nasty one. He had beat his daughter, my small empty-faced grandmother obviously not stepping in for fear of similar treatment. I resented the woman for it,
