I turn to leave, figuring Mom must be at yoga, or perhaps painting in a hidden corner of the garden, when a canvas by the window catches my eye. I walk toward the easel, bracing myself for my inevitable exasperation when I survey it, and audibly groan when I make out the details of the scene depicted. Fuck. It’s yet another happy family portrait. And I want to smash it against the fucking wall.
To an outside observer, this painting, like all the others, would likely seem like nothing but a pleasant idyll. A lovely tribute to family. And if it were a one-off, or a two-off, or even a hundred-off, I’d probably agree. In reality, though, as I know too well, this painting is actually anything but a pleasant idyll. No, it’s a physical manifestation of my mother’s unwell, hyper-fixated mind. Evidence of what doctors call my mother’s “perseveration.”
In short, my mother’s got an obsessive compulsion that prompts her to pick up a paintbrush, every week of her life, and paint yet another iteration of this exact scene, with only a few small variations and variables, over and over and over again.
Indeed, no matter how many times her doctors, therapists, “best friend,” or I encourage my mother to, please, please, paint something else—anything else, for the love of fuck—Eleanor Rivers always paints the same thing. An idyllic depiction of her family at rest or play, enjoying some pleasant sunshine without a care in the world.
This time, Mom’s portrait depicts a late-afternoon family picnic in a park surrounded by gorgeous cherry blossoms. As usual, Mom’s painted herself as a young mother. This time, Mom’s avatar is seated on a red blanket with her two small sons: my older brother, Oliver, who’s holding an ice cream cone and looks to be about seven or eight, and me, holding a lollipop, looking to be around five or six.
Mom always paints Oliver the same way—looking like he’s around eight years old—even though, in reality, he drowned in our backyard swimming pool at age four, when I was two. Mom also gives Oliver some sort of treat in every painting. An ice cream cone, as with this one. A piece of candy. A shiny new toy. A puppy. A kite. A kitten. A butterfly net. Apparently, one of Mom’s greatest pleasures is showering her ill-fated older son, in paintings, with all the little gifts she never got to give him in real life.
Scattered around Mom and her two happy sons are Mom’s three younger sisters and mother, all of them clad in merry, pastel dresses, and all of them gaily spinning cartwheels and jumping rope... even though, in real life, tragically, all four of them died in a horrific house fire when Mom was barely sixteen.
Mom had been babysitting a neighbor’s three children at the time of the fire, mere blocks away. When word of the blaze got to Mom, she frantically sprinted home, hell-bent on hurtling herself inside the burning structure and saving everyone she loved so much from catastrophe. But, alas, by the time she got to the house, it was already abundantly clear it was too late. Four of the only five people my mother loved in this world were already gone.
As for the fifth person in this world my mother loved, her father, he was a traveling salesman on a trip at the time, marooned that fateful night with a flat tire about two hours away. Or, at least, that’s what Charles Charpentier swore to investigators, when no witnesses could confirm his whereabouts, one way or another.
To this day, I think my mother mostly believes her father’s version of events, which is why she always includes him in her happy family paintings. Including her father in her paintings is my mother’s way of declaring to the world: Charles Charpentier’s sole surviving child rejects the wicked rumors about him—the whispers that swirled around Scarsdale immediately after the fire, and then continued swirling endlessly, long after the man killed himself on the one-year anniversary of the tragedy.
According to my grandfather’s doubters, Charles Charpentier was a compulsive gambler who’d arranged to burn down what he’d thought would be his empty house that fateful night, in order to collect insurance money and pay off his mountain of debts. To my mother, on the other hand, her father was a tragic figure who lost almost everything that horrible night, all at once... and, tragically for her, the only thing that remained, the man’s eldest daughter, simply wasn’t enough to keep him from putting that gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
Interestingly, Mom always places her father off to the side in every painting—as if he’s watching his family’s revelry from a distance, but not participating in it. I think Mom keeps her father at arm’s length in this way, each and every time, because, in the deepest recesses of her unwell mind, she’s not sure what to think about him. Consciously, she’s decided to believe in his innocence. But, subconsciously, I’m guessing she’s got her doubts. Perhaps she includes her father’s figure in her paintings, in the first place, as a declaration of love and support for him... but she then feels compelled to set him apart, away from her beloved mother and sisters, as a show of loyalty to them... just in case, on the off-chance, the incessant whispers and gossip about her father were actually true.