ELISA FAISON

A Survey of Modern Art

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The younger boys were playing with the dog in the garden, and I was on the porch swing, when that word he had been saying found me through the buzzing white noise. “Barbaric,” he said. “We’re sorry, ma’am, it was a barbaric thing someone did.” I was conscious of the hairs on my arm and tried to smooth them down. Barbaric, I thought. Wordlessness is a kind of barbarism. 

“Ma’am?” the man said, and I looked up. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I wondered if he thought I was stupid. Then I wondered if I was stupid. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, and smiled. I almost stood, but then I remembered that I hadn’t been able to dress properly for the day—stupid dog, always rifling through my drawers. I didn’t want this man to see how the front of my blouse sagged on one side where my breast should be. So instead of standing, I jerked in place and pulled my textbook into my belly. “You’re right. I don’t understand.” I shook my head and smiled silly me. 

“Your brother-in-law,” he glanced down at his little pad of paper, “Mr. Cary Michaels—he called us round this morning. She was in the bathtub. I can spare you the details, ma’am.” He hesitated and looked over at the boys, who were busy digging. 

“It was barbaric,” I repeated. A barbarism is a poorly formed word. Hadn’t I just learned that? “So, it was an error?” Now I felt like I was looking at him too intently. His eyes were a dopey brown. One drooped slightly like he hadn’t had enough sleep. They reminded me of the dog’s. The dog, who had been so bad this morning I had swatted him on the behind. Where had he hidden that damn thing anyway? 

I only realized that my eyes had started darting around the yard when I saw that the man was trying to catch them. A flush came to my cheeks as he continued, “Well, no, ma’am, not an error. We have every reason to believe it was intentional.” I noticed he had slowed down and narrowed his brow for my benefit. “Laurie Michaels—that is, your sister—she seems to have been stabbed. Several times. Mr. Michaels, he found her in the bathtub.” 

“Naked?” I asked. My hand shot back up to the hole in my chest and pulled compulsively at my top.

“I– like I said, I—we covered her. The boys—we didn’t like to see. Someone did a… well, a truly barbaric thing.”

The picture tried to flower in my head. I couldn’t remember what color her bathroom was. Peach? Was the tub full? Had she used bubble bath? Had she had her hair done? Where had she been stabbed? I tried not to notice her breasts, but there they were anyway. Both of them and fuller than mine. Then my mind ripped them to shreds. I swallowed. “Who did it?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am. But don’t go fretting. We have our ideas. We found some… well, I shouldn’t… well, we think we have some idea.” He gave me a probing look, like he expected me to understand something from his expression. 

“Cary didn’t do it,” I said. He was a good husband to Laurie, despite everything. Always there. Dependable. 

“No, ma’am. That’s nothing for you to worry about. We’ve got a good handle on this thing already and we don’t suspect your brother-in-law. But…well, if you have anything you want to tell me, you could. Now.” I stayed quiet. I didn’t want to tell him that I suspected Laurie might have been seeing a man outside of her marriage unless I had to. What would he think of her? 

After a long moment, he shut his little notebook and nodded at me so slowly I found myself mirroring him. “Okay? You okay now?” He tilted his head kindly. He felt sorry for me, I realized. Not just because of Laurie, but for some other reason, like I was sick. I hunched over to hide my chest, trying to block out Mother’s voice in my head. When I didn’t answer, he continued, a little too carefully, “And what’s that you’re reading?”

I sat up straight like a lady, as Mother would have said. But when I flipped the book over, I made sure to keep it pressed to my front. A Survey of Modern Art. On the cover was a black-and-white woman who looked like she got flattened by something. Her face was the shape of a wrench. She was screaming at a bull and dropping the baby she was supposed to breastfeed. She was surrounded by a pile of arms. Guernica. “I’m taking some classes, just part time. I drive to Vanderbilt on Tuesdays and Thursdays when my sister can sit for the boys.” As I heard myself say it, I knew that sentence didn’t mean anything anymore. A barbarism is the destruction of a world. 

He winced. “Your sister was here this Thursday?” I didn’t answer. His eyes darted to the sitting room window and tried to pry it open. To my horror, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the tiny notebook again and jotted down what I had said. I fidgeted. Sit still, silly girl, a voice like Mother’s said to me. “Listen,” he said, looking up with something like dread in his eyes, “You are home alone, right?” 

“Me and the two youngest. Sam’s with a friend.”

He looked over at the garden again. I used the moment to readjust my top.  

“Your husband, Mr. Autry? He’s not here?” This time his eyes x-rayed the front door. He was standing rigid and tall.  

“No. John had to go into work today.”

“Saturday work, too, huh? Just our luck.” He patted his badge and then melted a little, looking more at ease. He turned toward the dog. “That’s a good pooch, though. No need to be afraid. Listen, it’s important. We’d really like to talk to Mr. Autry. If he comes back by, let us know by ringing the station. That okay?”

“Yes, okay. I—when should I start planning the funeral?” That felt stupid as soon as I said it, and it got a little laugh in return. 

“Reckon that’s up to your family.” He gave me that look again, and I hunched. “You take care now. And let us know if Mr. Autry gets off early today.” He turned and walked down the driveway. As soon as he pulled out, I threw my book across the porch—the boys barely looked up. I began to pace. 

My sister was dead. It seemed important to start thinking of her that way. Dead sister. But my head was full of Laurie as a baby in her carriage, crying my ears off, my own hand loosening to let her roll down the rocky hill by our house. I shuddered. Then little Laurie, when she had her first fit in church, Mother holding her arms down on the pew. “You did this,” she had hissed. I had looked down. I could still see my patent leather shoes under their crown of lacey sock, a size too small. Had I done that? Had her carriage crash as a baby given her the shakes she would have all through childhood? Her eyes open, her mouth gaping, her head jerked back. I shut my eyes. Had I been so violent? Well, children all are, aren’t they. Anyhow, if it was my fault, I had been punished, surely. Poisoned and cut apart, not so long ago, and all for my own good. My own health.  I stood and looked out into the street. The line of houses and the men pruning the bushes or reading the paper. All of them trying not to look at me. Some men stayed home on Saturdays. The women were walking back and forth, decorating their lines with laundry. 

A woman across the way caught my eye, so I bent down quickly and picked up my book. I waved behind my back and returned to the swing. As I looked down at the cover I wanted to cry. It was such a beautiful book—even with the piles of arms and legs. I had thought the way they were layered was lovely, but the boy who sat next to me in class had asked, “Have you ever seen something so ugly? I bet your kid could do a better drawing than this!” How had he known I had children? 

“After World War II,” our professor had said on Thursday, “there was a movement of philosophers who believed that making art had become unethical. The aesthetic object, they said, could not represent a violence so total.” He flipped to a slide showing a pile of uniformed bodies next to a trench. Then to a slide showing a pile of naked bodies next to nothing. Had Father seen things like that? Had John? I thought of the images we had seen on television a few years ago when Lieutenant Calley was on trial for murder. The accumulation of those poor villagers and their children in the road. John had said it was uncivilized. I didn’t know if he meant the war or the photograph or Vietnam. They had looked like the collage on the front of my textbook. The television had flattened them into cartoons. 

“‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ as you know.” Our professor paused. “That’s Adorno.” The boy next to me nodded vigorously and copied down the quote. I leaned over to see how he had spelled “Adorno.” The professor and the boy and what seemed like the rest of the class happily moved on, but I wanted to pause. That hadn’t seemed right to me. My own private devastations had made art feel more immediate and necessary to me. I had wondered if maybe I didn’t know what “barbaric” meant, and had looked it up in the library after. Strange how you hear words back-to-back like that. 

Would I have to see Laurie’s body? 

She was the first person to see mine, after I got better. I reached my hand up to where my prosthetic breast usually was, and remembered it was lost, stupid dog. “You’ve got a hole where your heart should be,” Laurie had said to me in the hospital. She was joking but I had cried. I might have still been tired from the surgery. My punishment. She had patted my hair then, shh shh. 

“What will John think?” I had croaked out through sobs. I had read in a women’s magazine that I could try a biopsy first, before having the radical mastectomy. Shirley Temple had had it done, and she hadn’t had to have surgery after that. But when I asked about it, the doctor had scoffed. I wished I hadn’t mentioned Shirley Temple. It felt too stupid to say that I didn’t want to lose my breast, so I said I thought my husband and I might try for a fourth, and wouldn’t I need to breastfeed? “You silly, stubborn woman,” the doctor had said. “You could be dead in weeks.” 

Laurie was dead. 

“Don’t worry about John,” Laurie had said to me in the hospital room, speeding through her words. She always changed the subject away from him. “Didn’t President Nixon say we’re in a war on cancer? You’re nothing but another veteran who lost a limb. Don’t think another thing about it.” 

But Laurie didn’t understand marriage. She didn’t know that to have a good one, you had to know that your body belonged to that other person, just as much as it belonged to you. Even after she got married, she hadn’t learned. I sometimes thought maybe I shouldn’t have listened to her when she encouraged me to start taking classes again. Maybe she had wanted me to do something bad because she was doing something bad. 

I didn’t like to think it, but I wondered, sometimes, if the man she was seeing was also married. It was a feeling I had in my neck and chest, more than a real idea. She never spoke to me about him. I had only asked for his name once, and her whole face had gone white. It was her guilt, I thought. She didn’t mind that she was cheating, I knew her well enough to know that. But that she might be the other woman, harming someone’s wife without their knowledge. Maybe even a woman she knew. Someone she liked. I thought that must be the real source of her unease. But when I told my suspicions to John, he got big and red and told me I was just being a gossip and to mind my own business. It was just a silly feeling. 

How might I feel, if I were that woman, putting her children to bed alone, eating dinner alone, never knowing my husband was seeing Laurie? I supposed I might not feel much different than how I did already. John was gone all the time. I had even wondered, a time or two and in my silliest moments, whether he might be seeing another woman. But no. I didn’t think he really even knew any other women. None but me and Laurie, anyway.

I wondered if the police had discovered her infidelity. Maybe they had found proof. That worried me. I was afraid that the knowledge might make them feel like it was okay to take a good long look at her naked body in the morgue, or wherever she was right now. I stopped looking at her body in my mind. I wasn’t sure how many stab wounds it had. 

Would we be able to have an open casket? We had for Mother. That’s what was done. Would we stand in church in our nice clothes and sing, while Laurie’s body sat like it had been hole-punched in the corner? Would we squeeze past the box she was in as we walked up to the alter? What if I bumped it and knocked her out onto the ground in front of everyone? The carriage, her little body shaking. Any act of civilization is also an act of barbarism. 

There was a shriek, and I jolted upward, my book flying once again. I ran to the sound. Had the murderer come for me too? Had he come for the boys? In my mind there was a bloody man in the garden waiting for me. Little Walt ran up to me, and grabbed my legs. “Mommy!” he said, “We found something!” 

I looked over to the pile of dirt and saw a squashy skin-colored mound. Thacker was poking at it. My stomach seized. It was human. A breast. I put my hand over my mouth as my mind told me, wildly, that it was Laurie’s. That the faceless, murdering man had cut it off and left it here for me, a warning or a joke. I felt a thunderous urge to run. Bouquets of questions bloomed in the corners of my mind. How had he known where I lived? Where the children lived? Where was John? Why was he never here? John, who had promised to love and protect me and who, instead, went to work and went to the club and played golf. Who couldn’t even be bothered to stay home and watch the children while I took my class, who insisted that I ask Laurie to do it, since the whole ridiculous idea had been hers in the first place. But who I sometimes found at home, on those evenings after I returned home tired and made aware of my own intellectual inadequacies, sitting in our den, sharing a drink with Laurie, his face flushed and leering. Where was he now, when we needed him? Why hadn’t I seen him all day, and today a Saturday? The day my sister was found dead in her home, a piece of her found buried in our garden? 

Why did the police want to see him? 

A horrible thought gushed down from my mind into my chest, ran along my veins and into my tingling fingertips, and settled in my boiling stomach. I turned my head away from the boys, from the thing in the dirt, and was sick right into my new rose bushes. Hot waves of vomit that made my forehead go cold and sweaty. Please let the neighbors have gone inside, I thought. Please. 

“Mommy threw up!” Thacker shrieked, waving his shovel in the air. Walt started to giggle. “Shh,” I whispered. “Shh, boys. It’s going to be okay.” I moved toward them, pulled them both into me with one practiced sweep of my arm. I looked down at the horrible thing, braced to run, to take the boys with me. Something rose in my throat again, and I was surprised to hear that it was a choked laugh. The sound got louder and more insistent. My body started to convulse with it. The boys were laughing too. We were all laughing at silly mommy. Oh.

I put my hand on my flattened chest to slow my heart. I had walked over it a dozen times this morning and not even realized. It was just me, after all. Not Laurie, just me, that new, plastic part of me. The dog had buried it. It had been partially shredded by his teeth and claws. I pulled Walt closer into my legs, wanting to sigh with relief, wanting to tell Laurie what had happened. What a funny story it would be! But instead, I felt a tear roll down my left cheek and I lifted my hand to it and wiped it away, feeling my face, still cold. My mind, not yet resettled, still snagging on something. I said, “Get away, boys. Come inside. Mommy wants to go inside.” 

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