Congratulations to Emilie Allen, BFA ’05, ArtSci ’06
Excerpts from A Moveable Tableau
Chiara had come to Constableville, Florida with nothing but the family name. Plus a dirty plaid suitcase Mama had snatched from somebody’s Sunday garbage. She rode the bus two hundred miles south with Amelia’s address pinned to the inside of her blouse. Amelia was her grandmother, a woman she’d never met. Chiara had been seven and small for her age, barely tall enough to reach the ticket counter, but she could still remember Mama’s messy face out the bus window, mascara running everywhere, her hollow cheeks all flushed.
One day on a hazy dusk closer to dark than daylight, a childhood friend of Mama’s had shown up down the street from the house. Chiara stood alone on the steps looking at the far-off figure glittering in the shadowy light, a cigarette lit. She wasn’t surprised when the woman stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked squarely up at her. She had bright yellow hair and eyelids painted molten-gold, a cigarette between her teeth. Her mouth looked larger than it might have actually been, her lips drawn in with vivid pink color and smeared at the corners. When the woman bent close to give her a kiss, Chiara skipped backwards up the steps and into the house, the screen door slamming behind her. Mama acted vaguely surprised to see her old friend, although she was wearing a sheer silver-colored dress Chiara had never seen before, countless skinny silver bracelets dangling at her wrists. Her eyes were outlined like a cat’s in wet liquid blue and when she moved she made a sound like someone whispering, or something like tall grass in a sudden breeze.
Chiara was reminded of that sound, listening to the rain, as she crept shivering through the window into her grandmother’s TV room, warily dropping one leg over and in and then the other until she stood dripping on the carpet, reeking of smoke and something raw, wet, warm and sweet, ginger or lavender, and whisky. There was a light on in the front of the house. It came from the kitchen. Chiara stood in the TV room and studied it, this unexpected thing, just a slender arrow of light in the doorway at the other end of the hall.
Every night, once at six o’clock and again at eight, her grandmother drank a cup of hot milk with two spoons of honey. By nine o’clock she was in her room whistling loudly through her nose, a funny shrill sound that almost always stopped abruptly after an hour or two, and then Chiara was out the window and into the night. Surprisingly, Amelia never noticed, as far Chiara knew, but there it was—she was caught.
Chiara pulled off her boots, then socks. Unbuttoned and peeled her jeans down to a mound on the carpet, took her blouse off. Naked now, she stood shivering and cursing looking down the hall, just waiting, waiting for Amelia to flood the hallway with light, to open the kitchen door only to look away at the sudden sight of Chiara shivering wildly, plain in her own skin.
She dropped her wet clothes to the ground, nudging them with her foot into a bunch on the closet floor. The closet in the TV room was small, intended for stacks of board games or musty coverlets. Two church dresses were clothespinned to a thin wire suspended between nails on the back of the door, navy blue for funerals and ordinary Sundays, pink and white stripes for Christmas and Easter. Starched blouses lined the shelves and plain teeshirts and slacks and underwear and socks that Amelia had folded into fantastically neat piles.
She dressed quickly for bed, listening for something. The rain picked up. It came down hard, beating the house in long steady strokes that made Chiara shiver though her blood was getting warm now and her feet were dry. Not a sound from the kitchen. She couldn’t see but just knew; the light was still on, gleaming softly at the end of the hall at the edge of the kitchen door. She was a bit drunk again, after getting warm, mostly she felt tired. She shut the closet but didn’t move, her eyes fixed a little fuzzy, her focus lost in the muddy blue of the carpet, its colour seeping into the sagging couch. All of it fading into a listless blur.
In the morning the rain stopped. Chiara woke cramped and hung over, out of sorts. It felt unusually late. The light was strange. From the window she could see the sun obscured yellow-white by a colorless veil of clouds. The house was quiet. She lay still, listening for the sizzle of bacon fat being spit from the stovetop onto the white linoleum floor, Amelia shuffling through the morning paper, fingertips black, the newspaper dotted with grease. It was the only time she let her hands get dirty.
Chiara’s stomach had the kind of hunger that hurt.
It was dark inside the kitchen. Slowly Chiara’s gaze settled on her grandmother. Her eyes focused on Amelia’s shoes; she couldn’t remember a time when Amelia had not worn them, brown leather slip-ons worn raw at the heel, discolored from splashes of bleach and badly scratched from crusty spots of food that Amelia scraped off with a razorblade everyday after cooking. She had tiny feet; how small they were, how impossibly small, like a child’s.
Amelia was slumped onto her side. Her face pressed close to the ground, almost invisible. Chiara moved her hand along Amelia’s neck, pulling her head up away from the floor. She felt almost surprised to see her grandmother’s face. It seemed unfamiliar. There were purplish half-moons under Amelia’s eyes, her lids partially open, her features accentuated by a flurry of lines, the skin weathered, wrinkled and saggy around her mouth but her face soft somehow, still glowing with a deep olive color that looked as if it had come from a cosmetics bottle and taken great care to apply.
It was hard to know how long she stayed there, crouching, numbed all the way to the bone with her feet heavy as anchors though after awhile she felt the sharpness of her knees on the ground, her legs trembling so wildly that she was forced to stand. She noticed Amelia’s teacup by the sink and went over to it instinctively touching the rim, a trace of saliva and honey and crusted milk. She wondered if the people in the ambulance would switch on the sirens for a person who was already dead, or would they just let the emergency lights flash absently, no deafening sound, no life to save.
In the back of one of the shelves in the closet in the TV room was a flask of whiskey. Chiara had been saving the stuff, hid it in a red wool sock. She unscrewed the cap and took a mouthful, her throat like a flame. Amelia was at a distance now, clearer somehow but further off. With eyes closed Chiara fell onto her belly on the couch, pushing her face into a mess of blankets stained red-brown in spots from bloody noses that had come in the night. There was no place for her breath to go. All she could smell was her own smell and it reminded her of Mama. Chiara could hear her talking. It’s no good getting bent out of shape. It’s all gonna get better as soon as I have time to figure it out. Then I’ll be down there in a flash with a suitcase full of Jolly Ranchers. In New Mexico I’ll buy you a Navajo ring with a turquoise stone and mail it express. She could see Mama’s mouth, smiling, her lips painted especially bright. Chiara could almost feel it all now, shooting like a fantastic bolt, a wrenching spasm that moved like a wave through her blood. When she woke for the second time that day it was dark outside and it had been raining. She felt scared as hell for the first time in a long while. Her head was hurting bad. The thought of staying put was making her nervous. She found some old slacks in her closet, a pullover, a pair of sneakers unfortunately without laces. She opened the door to Amelia’s room and lay down in the dark on her small white bed. Her dresser was topped with lace, and covered by a collection of blue porcelain angels with gold lacquer eyes. Behind the dresser was an antique mirror. Tucked into the corner of the mirror’s frame was a portrait of Jesus, delicately painted on small prayer card. On the far wall was a painting that Chiara rarely got the chance to look at; Amelia’s door was usually locked. It was an old painting, Jesus again, but in the hills of Jerusalem alone on the blackest of nights sitting beneath a silhouette of trees, specks of light just barely visible in the valley below. In the darkness of Amelia’s bedroom, Chiara could only see his face in the painting, a small pallid face in the dark despite being the sharpest spot of light in the composition. But there was something almost pitiable about it. He looked like such a worthlessly ordinary man. As a child the painting had seemed much bigger somehow, but now it was so small she could easily take it off the wall. It meant nothing to her really, just one small piece of something that she might like to keep.
Outside the night was moonless, spitefully dark. Chiara stumbled behind the house toward the shed, just a short distance away, off a small path that lead nowhere but to swampier ground. She hid the painting inside behind some old lumber. Amelia’s face stayed with her, fixed on the kitchen floor.
Chiara didn’t plan on getting her bearings. Just headed on in the one direction she knew. The ground was wet, gummy with mud, but she moved with a kind of grace that came straight from the gut, until she could no longer feel her legs, her feet falling almost weightlessly. When she finally reached the highway she just kept on running alongside the screaming lights, until the roaring hum of wind and cars was sucked away like water down the drain, leaving only the sound of her own heart in her ears, the rolling beat of single drum.
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