Threads of Life

Chapter 4-3

When my mother looked at it, her previously expressed feeling of being touched by Georgia’s generosity turned into something entirely different. She took a sudden deep breath. “It’s very, um, different. Lovely different.”

She handed it to my father. “Look how lovely it is, Sid.”

My father stared at it for a few seconds and handed it to me.

“How big is it?” my father asked.

Georgia told us the dimensions.

“Pink is an interesting choice of colour,” he said.

“It represents three grieving children, n***d and vulnerable.”

“I should have realized that,” my father said. “Can you see the grieving children in the picture, Auden?”

“Not really,” I replied. “That huge pink thing is in the way.”

My father looked like he was about to start laughing.

“Never mind them,” my mother said. She put her arm on Georgia’s shoulder. “I have the perfect spot for it”.

“Me too,” said my father, but before he could offer a suggestion, my mother said, “That’s enough, Sid.”

* * *

My mother led Georgia through the kitchen and into the backyard. My father and I followed them to the sliding glass door at the back of the house and remained inside, watching them. My mother was pointing to a section of lawn between the maple tree and triangular garden in the far corner of the yard. Georgia was walking slowly over the grass with her head bent down, probably measuring in her mind the space my mother suggested.

We watched Georgia and my mother hug each other and then walk around the side of the house holding hands.

“What a shame,” my father said.

I thought he meant that it was a shame my mother’s parents had died so young. But then he said, “If only Henry Moore’s grandfather had owned that pharmacy.”

* * *

Georgia, the sculpture, and her art school friends arrived at our house early the following Saturday morning. My parents, Simon and I were at Long Acre. I was supposed to have taken part in something called a “junior clinic”, which I abandoned after twenty minutes for one of the couches in the clubhouse, where I fell asleep.

After surveying the spot in the backyard intended for the sculpture, one of Georgia’s friends pointed out that there was a slight slope in the lawn toward the fence and that the three-hundred-pound concrete structure would probably tip over if they tried to install it in that area.

The students set out to find a better location but couldn’t find a suitable flat expanse in the backyard and decided that, because the sculpture was bolted onto a large rectangular platform which had to be lowered into a level section of cut-out grass, the only place it could be safely installed was in the middle of the front lawn—which is where they put it.

When we arrived home, not only was the sculpture standing in front of the house, where everyone in the neighbourhood would be able to see it, but so were our neighbours, Aldo and Annata Lorenzetti, who were watching their two youngest children, Nancy and Aldo Jr., climbing the three enormous pink ovals.

“Holy s**t,” my father muttered.

“Holy s**t,” my mother repeated.

We got out of the car and walked over to the Lorenzettis.

“We love it,” Annata said. “It’s so avant-garde.”

“It’s so out there,” Aldo nodded.

out thereMr. Lorenzetti seemed to like things that were “out there”. He had a gold-coloured Maserati that would overheat and stall every time he tried to drive it. Once, when smoke started to pour out of the front of the car on his driveway, he opened the hood and peed on the engine while waving to Simon, who was walking home from tennis practice.

My parents didn’t know what to say.

“Who’s the artist?” Annata asked.

“Farber,” my mother answered.

“I’ve never heard of him,” Annata said.

“There’s a note on it,” Aldo said, pointing to a small piece of paper, folded in half, and taped to the inside of the biggest oval.

My mother took it down, read it, and handed it to my father. “I guess that solves that mystery,” my mother said.

The note was from Georgia, explaining why the sculpture hadn’t been installed in the backyard.

“What do you mean?” Aldo asked.

“It was supposed to have been set up behind the house,” my father explained, handing him the note. “Apparently, the ground wasn’t flat enough.”

By now Simon had joined the other kids and was climbing on the sculpture, first onto the scooped-out middle section of the smallest of the three ovals, then to the top of it, and then onto the tops of the second and third ovals before jumping onto the grass, laughing and screaming.

I was sitting on the lawn, eating a bag of potato chips my father had bought for me at a gas station.

“I think it looks great where it is,” Annata said.

“The kids really seem to like it,” my mother added.

“Do you want one?” my father suddenly asked Annata.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want a sculpture like ours? I’m sure the artist can make you one too.”

There was a brief silence. The Lorenzettis looked at each other and Annata asked, “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely,” my father said. “You seem to like ours so much.”

Neither of the Lorenzettis knew what to say.

My father started laughing and said, “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t dream of ruining your front yard too.”

“Thank God,” Aldo said. “We were just trying to be nice. We don’t really like it.”

“We don’t either,” my mother confessed.

Now, all the adults were laughing.

When they finally stopped, Annata said, “I don’t understand why you bought it in the first place.”

My mother told the Lorenzettis how she had come to acquire the sculpture. As she was talking, a neighbour from down the street, Carole Hoffman, drove past Hampshire Court in a brown station wagon, stopped, backed up, turned toward our house and proceeded onto our driveway. She got out of her car and approached the other four adults.

“What is that?”

“It’s a Farber,” the Lorenzettis said.

My parents and the Lorenzettis started laughing again.

“It’s an abomination,” Carole said.

“It certainly is,” my father agreed.

For Carole’s benefit, my mother retold the story, beginning with the call she had received from Georgia Farber.

“What are you going to do?” Carole asked.

“Leave it,” my mother said.

“Leave it?” My father sounded surprised. “You have to call her and tell her to take it away. People will think we did this on purpose.”

“We have to leave it. Look how much fun we’re having,” my mother said. Then, when my father didn’t say anything, she added, “Look how much fun the kids are having.”

Simon, Nancy, and Aldo Jr. were still climbing the sculpture, laughing and screaming each time one of them jumped from the highest oval onto the grass,

“Do you think our friends would have dropped by if we didn’t have the sculpture on our lawn?”

“Actually, yes.”

Carole and the Lorenzetti’s were laughing because my father was right. They often dropped by with their kids for a swim.

“Well, do you think we would have had such a great laugh?”

“Laughing isn’t everything.”

“I married you because you made me laugh,” my mother told him. Then she turned to the other adults and asked, “How about joining us for lunch? Our friends from the tennis club will be here soon.”

* * *

The sculpture’s arrival was a harbinger of things to come for my parents, as it seemed to whet my mother’s appetite for things that were unconventional and avant-garde—counterculture and hippie things, I guess—and it wasn’t long before she was filling the walls of our house with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans and dragging my father to Big Sur on a yoga retreat and to a “Spiritual Hideaway” in Colorado for a course on Transcendental Meditation. There were even a couple times when her new posture of open-mindedness was misinterpreted by others as more open-minded than she really intended, and both her and my father found themselves momentarily living life on the edge, at least by their standards—once while staring in disbelief at a hash pipe they’d just been handed at a Cat Stevens’ concert and once while swimming in our pool with the Elkins and politely refusing their friends’ overtures to start an orgy.

And Simon and I were also recipients of my mother’s zeal to share and show off her latest infatuations. One Sunday morning during the winter, we found her lying on her side on the carpet in the den. The stereo was on and “Yesterday” by the Beatles was playing.

Simon noticed her first. “Mom, what are you doing?”

She turned onto her back, said, “Hi boys”, stretched her arms over her head, and then propped herself up on an elbow. “Have you ever heard anything more beautiful?”

I thought every song on Bob Dylan’s album Planet Waves was more beautiful but didn’t say anything.

Planet WavesThe song ended and my mother said, “Put it on again.”

Simon walked over to the turntable and restarted the song.

“Come lie on your backs on the carpet.”

Simon lay down beside her.

“Auden, you too.”

“Do I have to?”

“Come on.”

I lay down on her other side but further away from her than Simon was.

“Now, close your eyes,” she whispered. “And take deep breaths. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.”

Simon had his eyes closed and was breathing deeply. My eyes were open and I was staring at the unlit pot-lights in the ceiling.

“You too, Auden.”

“What are we doing?”

“Just concentrate on your breathing. You won’t believe how relaxed you’ll feel.”

My father appeared in the doorway in his pyjamas.

“Sid, come join us,” my mother ordered. “Start the song again and lie down beside Auden.”

My father did as he was told and the familiar chords, F, Em7, A7, Dm, which Simon had once tried to teach me, began to play, followed by Paul McCartney’s voice: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away …”

Simon was singing along with the music.

“Don’t sing. Just concentrate on your breathing.”

“What are we doing?” I asked again.

“We’re meditating,” Simon and my father replied in unison.

“For how long?”

“God knows,” my father said.

“Just until the song’s over,” my mother said. “Now, shhhh.”

“There’s a shadow hanging over me …”

Simon thought he was singing quietly enough that my mother couldn’t hear him.

“You’re not supposed to sing. Shhhh.”

We listened in silence to the rest of the song, lying side by side on our backs. The needle made a scratching sound when it hit the paper label in the middle of the record and then automatically lifted and returned to its holder.

“What did you think? Did you feel waves of relaxation wash over you?”

“Not really,” Simon replied.

“I felt ridiculous,” my father said. “Waves of ridiculousness.”

“Well, I know Auden felt something.”

“I felt the carpet.”

Three of us were laughing.

My mother started to laugh but stopped herself. “Very funny mister.” She pushed my shoulder lovingly with her hand.

Simon and I were sitting up.

“You boys can go now.”

My father was about to get up as well when my mother said, “Not you, Sid. Come closer.”

He slid sideways until he was close to my mother and put his arm behind her neck, and she instinctively curled up against his side.

“Simon, put the record on again.”

He went over to the turntable and restarted the song. I was standing in the doorway.

“Come on, Aud. Let’s have breakfast.” Simon walked past me into the hallway.

“In a second.” I was watching my parents, who didn’t know I was there. My father had turned toward my mother and their foreheads were pressed together and their noses were touching and their eyes were wide open. They were both smiling and their breathing looked like it was synchronized because their chests rose and fell together, and I felt something—something pretty good, maybe waves of relaxation—wash over me.