Still Life With Hemingway

The phone rings at six-thirty in the morning. It’s Kat’s usual hour of artistic crisis. Especially since Daddy’s heart attack. Which is why I answer the way I do.

“WHAT’S WRONG?” I have the phone in my left hand, to my ear. My blow dryer in my right hand, blasting hot air, tangling my damp, mousy hair, making it even more unruly than usual. I get to see this disaster in a round mirror with a border of crowns sandblasted around the edge. Mom hung it up in my room when I was ten. To encourage me to groom like a princess. My sisters got a mirror just like it at the same time, in the room they shared. They have since graduated to other rooms and more grown-up mirrors. While I, at the tender age of 29, am sitting on my pink chenille-covered single bed in my childhood room. I’m trying to style my hair like Princess Diana. But in my white terry bathrobe I look more like a Princess Cruise liner than royalty.

This is Mom’s fantasy. To keep me tied to this childhood bedroom. Under her Medusa power. Except the spell has misfired. And now we are both turned to stone. Locked together. And the spell that holds me here came from my own lips when I was a toddler. She reminds me of this every time I try to talk to her about the future.

The phone is silent in my hand. I switch off the blow dryer. Tap the volume off on my clock-radio. Queen’s Radio Gaga goes silent.

“Hello?” I shout.

An unknown voice answers. At this hour.

“Nothing’s wrong.” I can hear her smile at the other end.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“I hope so. Is this Coleen Ivey?”

“Yes.”

“Your sister gave me your number. She said this was a good time to reach you.”

“Which sister?”

“Katharine Ivey.”

“Oh.” This hour – still night in wintry February – this hour is the magic junction between Kat’s habitual time for going to bed and mine for getting ready for work. This is when Kat clears her mind of any terrors or accidents or puzzles that happen to bombard her brain while the rest of us have been sleeping. More often than not, she speaks in disjointed phrases or single words. For just over a year now, since our father died, she has taken to calling me at this hour. Bypassing her husband. She simply empties her brain into my ear. It’s her way of sifting through ideas. So I tolerate her morning calls. It’s my duty.

Her hours are not so unusual here in Silicon Valley. Where overgrown hippies and ex-surfer boys stay up all night in their converted garages. They’re soldering circuit boards and inventing languages for the new PC industry. Some of these geniuses are my clients. Some of them went to school with me. Or would have if they hadn’t dropped out.

Somehow, I missed the part in school where they tell you how to figure out if your path in life. Yesterday’s slackers suddenly seem to know here they’re going. While I sit in front of the mirror with the crowns.

I tell the happy stranger: “This is Kat’s favourite time to call me. It’s not really my best time.” I keep my voice carefully calm. No clue who I’m talking to.

“Sorry.” She doesn’t sound sorry. “I’d like to talk to you about Low-Hanging Fruit. Katharine said you would be the best person.”

Katharine connects the dots in odd ways. She is opaque to the rest of us. When my family was amused by news stories about mysterious crop circles, 16-year-old Kat organized her school friends. They got the hide of a slaughtered cow from some farmer. They figured out how to cure it. Stretched it over a frame. Attached it to a small helium balloon. Got themselves on the evening news by flying it past the straw flower fields and pumpkin patches of Half Moon Bay, tethered to ropes they held. The dead cow never made it more than a few feet off the ground. When they reached the coast, the wind tried to drag the cow over the cliff into the ocean. The fiasco earned her a top grade in Civics class in the special high school she was attending. And that kept her on the scholarship list. So everyone was happy in the end. Although I never figured out how a hovering cow illustrated principles of civic law.

Mom took the floating cow as a personal insult.

I tell the strange voice on the phone: “I don’t know anything about fruit. Maybe a garden centre ...?”

She chuckles. “I meant the installation. Katharine’s new work? Low-Hanging Fruit? I had a preview yesterday. I’m hoping you can explain some of the elements. Especially about the, uh … noose around the child’s neck.”

I catch my breath. Careful not to show any reaction. “You want me to explain my sister’s work?”

“She said you would be a good person to talk to.” The voice falls silent. I have a moment to think. I’ve been trying to understand Kat since the day I put my hands on our mother’s abdomen and felt the alien inside trying to kick her way out.

“And may I ask who you are?” I say to the phone voice.

“Of course! I’m Lana Cooke. I write the art scene column for the San Francisco Chronicle? West Coast Sunrise invited me to preview the installation. Her first multimedia work, I understand.”

“Not her first. But it’s not ready yet. None of the family have seen it. The exhibition doesn’t open for a few weeks.” Kat promised we would get a preview. She took the unusual step of warning us this time: “You might think it’s kind of personal.” Ignoring the fact that everything she puts on public display is personal. Especially to the family. Now I have this stranger talking to me while my head is dishevelled. And not only on the outside.

“She gave me a preview of it yesterday. With the understanding that it’s a work in progress,” Ms. Cooke says. “It looks finished to me. It’s ... beautiful, of course. But upsetting. I want to give my readers some background, so they don’t jump to the wrong conclusion.”

“What kind of wrong conclusion?”

“Well, you know. The father images, especially. And there seem to be references, I assume, to your family history? Katharine is known for injecting personal references into her work.”

“All artists do that.” I am wondering what Kat sees about our family that the rest of us missed. Our parents were selective when they discussed the past. Daddy especially.

“To some extent, yes, all artists do that,” she agrees. “But in this case, her first installation after your father’s death? It appears to be a statement about your family life? So it makes sense to get comment from the family, don’t you agree?” I don’t answer. Her voice tries to fill in the void. “I’ve been following her work, of course. Even before her USF days. But I just met her yesterday. She seems like a USF kind of person. You know, the Jesuit influence.”

“She’s not into organized religion,” I say. Later I remember that the University of San Francisco was founded by monks.

The Lana voice is still talking. “What I mean is, her body of work seems to display a strong social conscience. But her vision of childhood ...”

I’m trying to play back this conversation in my head. Up to the point where I discover I am talking to a journalist. Dad was a journalist. The editor of Template magazine. Vee Ivey was a local celebrity. In Dad’s hands Template grew from a neighbourhood rag to a glossy monthly magazine. It had an avid readership across all of California.

Daddy warned us about his own kind. Coached us how to answer journalists without giving anything away. His training helps me in my public relations job. Our mother drilled us too. She edited our family life. Kept a long list of things we should never say to anybody outside the family. Kat never seemed to understand that making art about our family might be a way of talking about us to the outside world.

I break my silence. “I can’t help you, Ms. Cooke. Katharine’s work needs to stand on its own. Our father always said the same.”

“You haven’t seen the installation yet, you said?”

“I need to get dressed now.” I rev up the blow dryer in my other hand.

The voice starts talking faster. “I have a deadline to file for the Sunday arts section. I need to interview you as soon as possible. Can you see the installation today, can we talk about it later? I really think you’ll want to help people understand Katharine’s work. I think she wants that too. She said to call you. Can I give you my number?”

“Thank you for calling.” I hang up. I finish blow drying. Resigned to having something worse than a bad-hair day. I turn the radio back on. I listen to the end of Toto’s Rosanna. Then I dial Katharine’s number.

Once an interviewer on KABL Radio asked Kat if she had ever been in a battlefield during a war. That’s how her work is interpreted. Art critics want to know the stories behind her art. They expect gruesome tales. No, she says. “I just read the papers.” The interviewers are never satisfied. She is spare with her words. They always leave wanting more.

Doug answers the phone. He doesn’t wait to hear my voice. He doesn’t say Hello. “I know,” he says. He is used to these early morning calls. He speaks our special Ivey brand of telephonese. I met Dougie when he was three years old. Tagging along with Kat’s Brownie troop on hikes. As a brother-in-law he’s still sort of a tag-along. And he’s so polite and understanding about Kat’s eccentricities that it’s a little scary. But since Daddy died, I find myself depending on him more and more. It’s not a gender thing. It’s a Kat thing.

“I just hung up on an art critic,” I tell him. “She’s asking questions about Kat.”

“I know,” he says again. Doug is 21 years old. With a PhD. The boy wonder lectures Economics 101 at UC/Berkeley. My alma mater, by the way. His older brothers all had their different ways of expressing teenage rebellion: drugs, rock music, a petty crime that led to weekends spent in orange vests, picking up garbage along Highway 101. So far, Dougie’s only show of teenage assertiveness has been to get himself married to my artistic sister. We keep waiting for him to come to his senses.

His mother, Carmel Alvarez, the writer, helped organize all those table grape and lettuce boycotts in the 1960s. She still hangs out with farmworkers. My mother sneered at her when I was a little girl. Well…. Mom still sneers at her. Mom thinks of the working class as the muddy bottom of the evolutionary ladder. Anyone who is still sitting there lacks the ambition to move upwards. When she hears Bruce Springsteen on the car radio she changes the channel. She says the farmworkers don’t know the value of a day’s work.

Before her whole family died in a freak flood, she grew up on a farm. Dairy. Which is another reason why she didn’t like the flying cow.

Doug is used to being in the crux of controversy. He once told me the Reader’s Digest version of modern economics. “Long story short, it’s really just a tug of war between John Maynard Keynes and economic structuralists, guys like Celso Furtado in Brazil. The middle ground tends to get muddy. Partly because a lot of the research is historic. We really need to investigate what’s happening now among the poor nations. Especially with the ones that are kicking out their imperialist oppressors and getting financial backing by countries like the USSR and NATO members. But that’s good because that’s the kind of research I want to do.”

“What is Kat’s new installation about exactly?” I ask Doug now.

“You need to see it, Col. All of you do.” Sometimes Doug feels like my own life partner. Like we’re joined at the hip by years of love for Kat. None of my boyfriends has ever been as tolerant of our haughty, arthritic mother. He brings kindness into our broken family. His voice reminds me of his mother’s Hispanic croon. Once I watched Carmel put a Band-Aid on a girl’s bloodied knees after she fell at a Brownie meeting. Carmel whispered to her about the heroic scars to come. She was the troop leader. She said it was the way God showed her after she gave birth five times. All of them sons. All of them rowdy, except for Dougie, studying Keynes at university level as a free-time project when he was in sixth grade.

I ask him: “That writer. Lana Cooke. Did you meet her? She said she was at Kat’s workshop yesterday. She said Kat has done something about a child getting lynched. She said people will get the wrong idea.”

“Maybe.” He’s using his neutral voice. Not taking sides. “But maybe not about Kat,” he adds.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s about, it can seem to be about, your dad. Or your mom, too. But there are things I don’t understand. That’s why you need to see it, Col.”

I sigh. “I have a busy day. I have deadlines.”

“I know you do. But I think you should come soon. This morning if you can. You and your mom. How about nine-thirty? They should have the sound fixed. They were working on it late.”

“You want me to get Mom up and into the car at rush hour?”

“Or we can make it at ten. But I have a class at eleven. I can drive Lucy over.” Lucy is my other sister. The youngest. She’s supposed to taking a sanity break at home. But she’s been staying with Kat and Doug since last week. After our big fight.

I flip open my Filofax. I was looking forward to writing brochure copy at a leisurely pace this morning. Now I’ll have to write it fast. “Okay,” I ink lines through half of today’s page in the diary. I sigh. “Nine-thirty it is.”

“I’ll try to get Lucy into a good mood. I’ll find a gospel station to play in the car.” I can hear him grin.

“Thanks, Dougie. So tell me: what is Kat saying about us?”

He hesitates. “You know, maybe it’s not about you. I don’t know. This exhibition has that big sponsor. West Coast Sunrise. So she had to sell the initial concept as something bigger than just the Ivey family.”

“The exhibition has a theme, right?”

“We Are Family.”

“But that’s the name of a song.”

“They had to pay Sister Sledge for the right to that phrase.”

“West Coast is an investment company, right? Finance is more your thing.”

I hear his chuckle. “They think this will make them appear human.”

“Can I talk to her?” He knows I mean Kat.

“You think it’ll help?”

“Please see if she’ll talk to me.” Doug puts down the phone to go look for my sister.

Kat never told us the meaning of the flying cow. When she was in kindergarten, she drew an elaborate house with her family standing in front. Except Lucy had an alligator head. When I asked her about it, all she would say was, “It’s not an alligator, it’s a crocodile!” Something about the shape of the snout. That’s how Kat was at five. Imagine her today. Twenty years later.

Kat comes to the phone. “Good morning!” People think Kat is in a permanent state of just waking up. Or possibly stoned. But this morning, at this hour, she trills like a canary on weed.

I say, “I hear your work is getting attention. Again.”

“You mean Lana from the Chronicle? I asked her to talk to you.”

“Yeah, I mean her. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“She and I had drinks last night. We didn’t stop talking until a couple hours ago.”

“You were up all night with a journalist?”

“Off the record. We like the same music. We went to a couple of clubs. Then we had early breakfast at Denny’s. It went kind of long. Don’t worry, none of it is quotable.”

“Except the part where you gave her my phone number.”

“Well, she kept asking about you.”

“Why about me?”

“She saw your picture.”

“Where?”

“You know …”

“You used my picture in your installation?”

“But no one knows it’s you.”

“Lana knows it’s me. Because you told her. Kat, we talked about this.”

“Don’t take it so personal, Col. It’s my work.”

“But you used my photo.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s about you.”

“Your sponsor, your West Coast Sunrise, couldn’t cover the cost of new photos? Don’t you think people will jump to a conclusion?”

“They’re happy photos, Coleen. I don’t identify you.” I register the plural form: “photos”.

“Lana knows it’s me. That will go into her article.”

“No. It’s off the record.”

“That’s why she wants to talk to me, Kat. To get it on the record.” I feel sweat running down my back. I will have to change my blouse. I’m not even sure what the rules of “off the record” are. I open my Filofax and write “OTR” on the top of today’s page. I can ask Stephen. My boss.

“You don’t have to talk to her,” Kat is saying.

“Then why did you give her my number?”

I can picture the sleepy look coming back into Kat’s face. She yawns loudly. She says, “So you could say no.”