BLUE HOUSES by Nancy Reisman
Afterward, she moved down the street from the blue house with the mansard roof. Two stories of soft gray blue and a half-third of black, white-trimmed windows all around, brick stairs leading to French doors, wrought iron lace along the front windows, the roof a squared-off hat curving slightly on the sides. Each morning peach light slipped across the blue face and those white-trimmed windows, the red bricks and glass door, as she imagined it had since the mid-19th century. Opposite, a fat stripe of sunrise lit cumulus clouds – also briefly peach – as they roved east, out to sea. As if, it seemed, embarking across centuries into an unframed Van Ruisdael. She’d rented the apartment down the street unaware, unthinking. Or, thinking of absence, if one could call what passed through her then thought. It was closer to sensing the shape of things by listening, or marking the borders between silence and sound. But here for a few minutes each morning the blue house transformed.
By then she was accustomed to temporary places: hotel rooms, short-term apartments, storage units. Two states away, in Kenmore, she and her siblings had rented space from a company called Uncle Bob’s. No one had mentioned aloud the echo of their late father’s name. The units had yellow roll down doors, a concrete floor, motion-activated lights. Though the building held dozens of units, often the place seemed empty, a few echoing sounds emphasizing the quiet. Intermittently, the siblings sorted their parents’ possessions. The last time, her cousin S. had joined her. Through bubble wrap, they’d gazed at her mother’s rich Klimt-like collages and sorted the color-thick landscapes, all with deep horizons. Here were the orphaned boxes of family china, pale turquoise, fluted white, cream and berry plates rimmed with forget-me-nots; here the unclaimed jewelry. Tucked among her mother’s beaded necklaces and painted palm-sized boxes she found a ticking analog watch. A wide cherry band, a blue face. She’d seen it on her mother’s wrist. And now, here, independently pursuing its small life – a feat, it seemed, harder than it appeared.
“Look.” She held up the watch for S. They’d been sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, in a temporary fort of boxes and racked paintings and sheet-covered furniture, casually and intimately discussing death, as they often did, now. S. displayed a string of beads, pink glass. These she recognized from a late photo of her mother: in it, her mother wore a matching ribbed pink turtleneck, a jaunty black and red cap. She’d taken the photo at her mother’s request, before they left for the counselor’s. That morning seemed to exist apart from the surrounding time, as if a small island once linked to the continental before; and as if for those hours, she and her mother had traveled suburban streets shielded by a rogue, vestigial assumption of her father’s existence; as if, still-vibrant, he’d join them for dinner; as if clear CT scans – her mother’s – were still clear. By dinner the facts would reassert themselves. But the morning was just a mother-daughter morning, an appointment, errands, the matter of lunch. Late winter air hinting at thaw. “Gram wore them,” S. said, of the pink beads. Meaning previously. Meaning first. Which also seemed right: tiny mirthful Jewish lady, pink jacket, pink skirt, pink beads.
Bits of white floated through the pink glass. S. had arranged earrings and strung beads on the concrete, the beads ringing private hieroglyphics. “You should take them, ” S. said.
And then? Or otherwise? “I guess,” she said. “I guess I should.” There were things and things and things.
“It’s so quiet here,” S. said. “Too bad we don’t have vodka.”
True. The quiet was luxurious. No one could trouble them as they sorted odd treasures and spoke bluntly about morphine, the upsides of denial versus the price of naiveté. Or the years before, heydays of other lives, unreachable from here. If one could define heyday. Apparent heyday. And as if those exact human voices, those living parental bodies, had unified time, all time as she had known it, bridged all now with all then. Yet the continuous past had shut down, replaced, it seemed, by random moments, each one falling away as you stepped into the next; and as if, once free of your weight, the earth at your heels dissolved.
Before they left for the parking lot, she tagged a painting for S, who’d also chosen earrings, a silver and stone bracelet. She slipped the pink beads and the red watch into her own bag, and wrapped a portrait of her mother, a pumpkin-toned watercolor of a young woman with a tousled pixie, wearing a chic knee-length dress: a figure captured through a wavy-glassed window, a woman glimpsed at a party, the walls a wash of color, the light infused with orange.
That wavy glass, those blurred features – the woman familiar but also unknown. The painter had been her mother’s teacher. For years the portrait had seemed a minor, expendable accessory, a time-stamped riff on her actual mother, but now that she had the painting and no mother, it seemed to denote current access. One glimpse through an altering medium – yes, it was like this, true to all versions of her mother. Though her mother’s own art still relayed interior states: a brief out-of‑body communion, a momentary recognition, the surprise of flight.
Fleeting, of course. True, she thinks, of any art. Or of flying in dreams. Except, maybe, Chagall’s flying lovers, he and his beloved Bella soaring – rooftops below – on the canvas now and always. And soaring even when not-soaring: in Bella With White Collar, Bella almost fills the canvas, her black dress pressed against a whirling backdrop of blue and white: in this one, she’s standing but she also fills the sky. Dark hair in a bob; her white collar and cuffs setting off her beautiful clavicle and hands, her arresting face. A woman of elegant angles. She gazes over a miniature green forest. In the center foreground, a tiny man holds the hands of a very tiny girl, their arms raised together, as if the girl is learning to walk; as if they are waving at Bella; as if they are euphoric. The scale tells it all: giant love.
Imagine the green forest, the tiny figures, without her.
Or imagine The Blue House, painted that same year, as the place everyone is waiting. Riotously off-kilter, a cabin built of logs the shade of smeared blueberries. The tilting front door opens wide; on the right side, one can see the suggestion of a seated woman, a white foot, draped fabric. In the distance beyond a river, a red and white walled town rises on a hill, and close up the yard is drenched in bright yellow.
Blueberry? Or delphinium? Not at all the blue of the mansard-roofed house, with its own story of transcendence. That summer she moved down the street, she had little to say. There were no ghosts: the absence included the absence of ghosts. Apparently, decades had pancaked and vaporized. Apparently, each moment was square one. But she had not expected the blue house and the clouds, and she had not expected the blue hydrangea, which appeared on street after street in July like Victorian ecstatics. On the boulevard, a hummingbird garden bloomed red.
And again, each day, the blue house down the street briefly transformed. At that hour, no one left or arrived. She did not know who lived there. Or if, from the inside, you’d know what had happened.
Nancy Reisman is the author of the novels Trompe L’Oeil (Tin House Books) and The First Desire (Pantheon and Anchor Books), and the story collection House Fires (University of Iowa Press). Her stories have appeared in Tin House, Five Points, Subtropics, The Yale Review, New England Review, and in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories.