expressive, joyful gathering of family, friends & fans.
Donations can be made to…
Directions to gallery…
Tillie had even helped him with the wording, checked his spelling.I can’t believe all these people still…she started. He smiled because of course they do. Still. He has known them forever and yet he doesn’t know them at all. He couldn’t tell you their faces or even their real names, but he knows that LATfan4ever has three children who are all married and do not visit her, that burger_mama has been in love with a man for years who has never acknowledged her, that daytimemuse lives alone and makes show memorabilia (place mats, small sculptures) and sells it on Etsy. Probably none of them will come, but even if one of them does…
Somehow, this feels like the closest he can come to a real goodbye. And he knows he needs to say it. It occurred to him the other day, when he was working, that everything in her life, everything she loved, all of it was transient. Television shows like tissue paper. Stage performances that end when the curtain falls. And here he was trying to make monuments to her. If he considers—really considers—the lasting marks that people make upon the world, the buildings with men’s names on them and the giant phallic statues and the landfills and land mines and highways and space stations from up above, most of them look like scars.
He is almost jittering as he finishes setting up the room. The centerpiece is interactive. Four boxes of scraps, painstakingly selected and cut, various shades and themes, magazines and family memories and everything discarded from every previous project, he brought all of it, let them choose. On the wall, a canvas with a rough outline in Sharpie, and here are the glue sticks, maybe a thirty pack would do. Let them have at it.
“Good curation,” his father says, looking at a photo of the four of them. They could never get one where all of them were smiling. But this one is close, his mother looking at something off camera, Sebastian midsentence. “Wonder where you get that from.”
His father looks older.I guess that’s what happens when you see someone only once in a while.They’re exactly the same height, have been for a while, but it will always surprise Sebastian.
“I’m sorry, you know,” Al says. He’s still looking at the photograph. “I should have given you more credit. For your art, I mean.”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“You could have gone to art school. You still could if you want.”
Sebastian smiles. “I think I’m good, Dad.”
He’s been invited, recently, to a group show in Los Angeles. “A New Whole,” it’s called, which as a dyslexic person, he thinks is asking for many unwanted puns. But the group invited is cool, collage artists from around the country. He’s buzzed, if he’s honest. It’s a bizarre feeling to be taken seriously. He’s spent so long thinking of himself as the underdog.More helpful than art school, in some ways, he thinks.
His father puts a hand on his upper arm, squeezes it. Where is this new sincerity coming from? The room? Or maybe just Tillie, her soft influence. Either way, better not say too much. Don’t spoil the moment.
There’s a picture on the wall of his mom in the hospital, surrounded by cards. She’s sitting up, waving. He had debated including it, but in the end, it would have felt wrong to leave it out. His father is looking at it now, the pain of it written on his face. Sebastian has never really thought about that year, what it must have done to his dad, having to care for her like that.
“I held it against you,” Al says. “That you got to be with her.”
Sebastian doesn’t feel the need to forgive him for this. But he listens.
“I never asked. Did she say anything at the end?”
“No,” Sebastian says. “Not really.” And then, because he can see this answer is disappointing, he adds: “She asked what we were going to do tomorrow.”
Al smiles. “And? What are you going to do tomorrow?”
“Remains to be seen.”
What’s next, if he isn’t bumping up against this man? Or chasing a past that isn’t his own? They smile at each other. The bell on the back of the door jingles and a small, frowning middle-aged woman, immaculately made up, is looking cautiously at them. “Is this…”
Al moves to her, shakes her hand, says, “Welcome, please…”taking her coat and asking if he can get her some wine. Anxiously, she introduces herself as Marion. “I used to work on the show. With. I did makeup.” She takes in the room, the boxes of scraps, dawn breaking on her face. “This is fun.”
Then they all start arriving: a casting director, someone from props. Someone picked it up off the forum, forwarded it to the old crew. And then Sadie shows up with an old friend from Chicago named Bernie. The room gets loud and Sebastian turns up the music and is washed with the relief of having done something right for what feels like the first time in his life. Everything is in place except for Lola.
1996
It’s getting hard. The medicine is making her feel out of control. At least she thinks it’s the medicine. It could be any number of things, the situation, all the time alone. Who knows, really, what nightmare fear and pharmaceuticals might produce.
As it turns out, dying in real life is nothing like dying on-screen. It could not fit into a sixty-minute episode. It is not a brief, dramatic moment, not a centrifuge for family catharsis. She does not look beautiful propped up on pillows, her hair tufty and unready, the scant remainder of her eyebrows hardly enough to convey the despair of it all. She wraps her head in scarves. When the children come into the room, she becomes a new character created just for them, a fortune teller, like the women in Salem who used to read people’s palms. She tells them their futures:
You will have a wonderful day at school.
You will make a new friend today.
You are going to be very generous with your brother.
