WordPress.com



Two Sisters Times TwoSerial #31byJeffrey AndersonCopyright 2015 by Jeffrey AndersonReading and Recipes EditionALL RIGHTS RESERVEDNo part of this manuscript may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the author.This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.Two Sisters Times TwoSerial #31Spring ThawPart XIIThe next morning they rose late and ordered room-service continental breakfasts that Leah signed for at the door then carried the wide silver tray into the bedroom and set it in the middle of Jodie’s bed. She then climbed in beside her niece and they spent the next half hour nibbling on the various pastries and fruit salad as they watched a local variety show that included a field trip to a tulip farm and tips on how and where to hang a summer hammock. Neither of them were quite sure if they were sisters sharing an upscale version of Saturday morning cereal while watching an adult version of Saturday morning cartoons (neither had ever watched cartoons, for divergent reasons—the animated chaos too silent for Leah, too loud for Jodie) or mother and daughter engaging in some “quality time.” Or aunt and niece on an idle frolic with a not so idle purpose.At the end of the meal, Leah suggested they use the balance of the morning as “personal time.”“Like apart?” Jodie asked, propped up on a wall of cushy pillows mounded against the headboard.“Is that O.K.? I really need to check in with Whitfield and Jasper and a few others.”“Mom?”“I thought I’d give her a call, yes.”“Tell her I said hi.”“I’ll call her now. You can tell her yourself.”“I thought I’d go running, work off some of these carbs.” To enforce the statement, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed then headed for the bathroom.“Run off a few calories for me,” Leah said as she sipped the last of her cool coffee beneath the drone of a TV ad for age-defeating facial cream. After Leah had dressed and completed her calls to Whitfield (“When will I again wake to you beside me?” “A few more days, please?”) and Jasper (leaving a message, again—was he always in class?) and Momma (safely back with Father at their home in a retirement community along the coast) and Brooke (“You’d love Dave in his little French maid outfit. “I guess that means you’re feeling better.” “Better every day, now that I’m home.”) and Billy Erwin, her Green Ways project coordinator deep in the fray of their busy spring season of plantings and upgrades (“Sorry to be away so long at a bad time, Billy.” “Take as much time as you need, Mrs. Monroe. I’ll hold down the fort.” “Leah.” “What?” “I’m Leah, Billy.” “I know.”) and made a to-do list for whenever she did get home, and Jodie had returned from her run on a trail along the river and taken a shower and dressed in her jeans and U of W sweatshirt, Leah called down to the concierge for a hotel courtesy car to take them to The Fan section of Richmond. The car dropped them off in front of a neighborhood eatery called simply Joe’s at just past noon. Last night over a light dinner in the hotel’s café, they’d decided to make an outing to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which was not far away in The Fan. When they asked the concierge if there was a restaurant in the museum, she said yes but then suggested this “quaint little pub” just a few blocks away. They were seated at a tall booth in narrow and dim “old side” by a perky receptionist. A smattering of locals sat at the nearby bar eating French fries and sandwiches and drinking dark beer from frothy mugs. Jodie looked toward the bar and said, “That looks yummy” under her breath.Leah looked in that direction to see a tall dark-haired man in his forties with a ball cap and a sawdust-flecked denim shirt lifting a dripping monster burger to his lips. “The guy or his food?” she whispered.Jodie laughed. “You guess.”“I thought you were a vegetarian?”“Only till I get a hankering for a juicy burger.”Leah shrugged. “You surprise me every day.”“Why didn’t you think it was the guy that I thought was yummy?”“Do you?”“He is kind of cute” then added with a wink, “For an old guy.”Leah looked again at their subject, who’d polished off his burger with startling speed and was downing the last of his beer. He reminded her of Billy in his rugged masculinity. “I’ll take that as a no.”Jodie said in a tauntingly loud voice, “Bring me the burger all the way, hold the guy” to both her aunt and the young waitress approaching their booth.The waitress said, “Guys are only on the dinner menu,” which freed them all to laugh. Then they ordered lunch.After lunch they walked the few blocks to the museum past beautifully restored and brightly painted row houses, passing parents pushing infants in strollers under the warm spring sun, including two sets of clearly homosexual couples—one male, one female—as well as young mothers pushing their carriages alone and maybe one nanny, based on the age and ethnicity and reticence of the attendant adult. On the museum grounds they wandered the outdoor sculpture garden for a short time to extend their enjoyment of the sun before finally surrendering and entering the cavernous and sparkling glass and limestone building. They meandered through the diverse collections at a leisurely pace, sometimes together, sometimes separated, rarely speaking and then only in whispers in the hushed halls. As yesterday at the capital, there were few others touring and the guards far outnumbered their visitors.Near the end of the tour, Leah caught up with Jodie who was lingering in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock.“What do you think?” Jodie asked.“Abstract doesn’t do much for me.”“That’s because you don’t let it in.”“In where? To my nightmares?”Jodie laughed. “Into your soul.” She proceeded to give a brief summary of Pollock’s action painting approach and the abstract expressionists’ view that their paintings are eternally imbued with the energy of its creation and its creator. “It’s meant as a living thing,” she concluded.“I guess I still prefer seeing living things over feeling them, at least in my art.”“That’s funny,” Jodie said. “I thought you named your son after the artist.”Leah laughed. “No, from the verse ‘walls of Jasper’.”“What verse?”“In Revelation.”Jodie was still perplexed.“The last book of the Bible, Silly. The writer has a vision of Heaven with streets paved in gold and walls of jasper. Didn’t they teach you anything in Sunday School?”“I quit going at age seven.”“Brooke let you?”“She had no choice. The teacher threw me out.”“Why?”“I kicked him in the shin.”“Jodie!” “He deserved it. He called me a little heathen.”“Maybe you were.”“I didn’t know what a heathen was, but I didn’t like the way he said it.”“So you never went back to Sunday School?”“Not to church either.”“That couldn’t have sat well with Brooke.”“What did she care? She had all her chubby little angels to keep her company.”“Cherubim.”“What’s that?”“Chubby little angels.”“Oh. What’s jasper?”“A green gemstone much prized in the ancient world.”“And I always thought my cousin was named after a gay contemporary painter.”“Another expressionist?”“No, quite the opposite. Jasper Johns strives to hide his ego beneath optical tricks and cultural symbols.” She grabbed Leah’s coat sleeve and gently led her the few yards to the exhibit’s lone painting by Jasper Johns, a monochromatic display of dark cubes and angular lines. “Rather than trying to project his will and life force, he plants his painting like a seed inside you, to grow into whatever you and it deem appropriate. He said ‘to view a painting is one thing, to interpret it quite another’.”Leah smiled at her niece, startled by her learning but even more impressed by her passion for her design vocation. Then she looked at the painting. “I prefer walls of jasper.”Jodie shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I’ll still think of my cousin as named after a gay neo-dadaist.”“What’s that?”“Don’t even get me started,” Jodie said over her shoulder as she headed for the museum’s atrium and the exit beyond.Leah lingered in front of the dark painting for just an instant before following two strides behind. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download