8. The Elixir Gallery

“Tell me again, where are all the Black and brown people in this town?” Pedee asked Raven when we caught up with him, heading toward the Gallery.

From all sides the white people in T-shirts, shorts and sandals walked down both sides of Main Street. Now they bunched up at the door of the Elixir Gallery.

Raven wore a clean white shirt, his black hair pulled into a pony tail, clean faded blue jeans, dusty beige sandals, all of which made him look quite handsome.

“If diversity is what you want, we have one trans man,” he said.

“Where does he live?” she asked.

“He teaches the Elk Talk class.”

“Doro…” Pedee looked up at me. We had stopped talking about the class for a few hours. Pedee promised not to post her Meredith Out West video if we went to the class. So far, I hadn’t figured out how to get out of it.

“I want to meet the trans man,” Pedee said.

“Pedee, you don’t know anything about that.”

“Yes, I do. We had a boy in our class who felt like he was in the wrong body and needed to become a girl. I’ve told you, Doro, we had a class on the Gender Unicorn last year.’

“Sounds like a progressive school,” he said. He was carrying The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. One I meant to read.

“Doro, didn’t you ever want to be a boy?” Pedee asked.

“I was a tomboy growing up,” I said. “But we’re going to miss Lucca’s talk if we don’t get inside.”

The gallery was on the corner of Main Street across from the Lander Bakery. As we entered, I admired the stamped metal ceiling. I was not surprised that given the juried show’s theme “The Interconnectedness of Life,” it was jammed with artwork.

Each artist including Lucca displayed their artwork on a U-shaped partition. Since it was also a gift shop, the walls were lined with shelves of mugs and bowls, smaller drawings, dreamlike interpretations, totemic figures, one portrait of Chief Joseph. The larger paintings featured rivers, sunsets, bluish mountain peaks. I stepped closer to a small painting of a mountain bluebird standing on a shelf inside a cabinet.

“Oh look--trompe l’oeil!”

“What’s that?” Pedee asked.

“Trick of the eye. See how it’s three dimensional?’

“What’s that?”

“Looks like you could reach in and touch the bird in the cabinet.”

“Look, a cat! Is it a real cat?” She pointed to a corner of the room.

“She’s not moving. Maybe since she’s on the floor, she’s a real cat.” I thought of a trompe l’oeil example at Arrowhead, the gallery I helped Constance manage back in Boston. We kept that painting of an archway that looked real enough to walk through with a cat in the sun in one corner on our Yellow Cadmium wall. Our gallery at the subterranean level is in the area known as SOWA for South of Washington Street. I poured money into preserving hunks of granite supporting wood beams. I replaced exposed industrial air shafts, occasional glass walls, rebuilt brick archways. The inner stone wall needed work every year. Today, it’s still standing.

I looked around, saw what looked like children’s handmade mugs like ones Constance and I made with her son Robbie. When she got pregnant and became a single parent, I’d shoved down my feelings of being jealous that she could keep her child. I tried to help at every turn with Robbie who was now grown and living in Seattle. A year after she had Robbie, his artist dad left for Pourville-Sur-Mer with his muse, a black female dancer. Constance announced she would take a small inheritance from her uncle to start a gallery south of Washington Street in the South End. I’d shown her my Wyoming find.

“We’ll name the gallery Arrowhead,” she said.

For all these years, it has been my second calling. Yes, a bit awkward to be cheering for a gallery to succeed while my own painting languished. I rationalized that if I kept one foot planted in the art world, something would spark my own creativity. Well, that never happened.

As I walked into the gallery, it brought back attending a recent Arrowhead Open Studio. I’d found Constance sitting at the desk up front.

“New glasses! Love the unibrow.” I admired their top rim with bits of color like stained glass. Her electric blue short-sleeved top under a three-quarter length black faux leather vest with leggings, was a good choice for her full-figured self. I was in my jeans with the striped blue and white cotton shirt that makes me feel natty.

“The place still feels upbeat.” She smiled. “We got through the pandemic. Go look at the ‘History of Arrowhead’ corner—it’s new.”

On the Cadmium Yellow wall, she’d placed a picture of us in school, and one of Robbie, and his dad in Pourville, and a small gouache painting he’d made there. He never used an easel, always liked spreading out at a table. She’d framed some of his pocket notebooks, two pages splayed open to drawings that used “the golden mean” ratio. As they taught us, he composed a street fight, topped by a fisherman pulling in his catch that used the diagonally backward curving shell shape. He had the gift of going for it.

Remembering this difference between us led me straight to my critical self. Who was I kidding? I had not become an artist or a mother. Nothing to show for the last sixty-three years but ushering my parents, twenty years apart, through dying at home. And now here was Lucca to try and help however I could. Gia had told us we would not see the Lucca who stared at a view in silence, her brush poised to make one dab. Instead, we would see Lucca, the Performer.

I had seen that version of Lucca thirty years ago, but not since we had arrived. When we made it inside the door, I steered Pedee toward the drink table. The first bartender wore a white shirt with a golden braid like mine down her back. Next to her, the gallery owner’s daughter wore her brown hair cut short with turquoise highlights. Would my daughter color her hair?

Both looked like they were the age my daughter would be. Were they too sociable to be mine? My daughter might be witty like Clive. He was not interested in starting a family when we were 18. I heard he’s growing oysters on the Cape now.

“Did you do that to yourself, hiking?” asked the first bartender.

“Not hiking. Well, wearing flip flops hiking.”

“Not a good idea,” she said.

“I broke my toe,” I said. “Promised to wear this boot for three weeks.”

“And the neck brace?”

“Bad landing on a waterslide.”

“And the sling?”

“Waterslide.”

“I hope it was fun. Red or white?” I wanted to rip off the neck brace and sling. Where was the gin and vermouth?

I said, “Nothing stronger?”

“You can get that down at Buffalo Bill’s.”

“And for you, young lady?” she asked Pedee.

I wanted to say “something without caffeine.” But I was on shaky ground critiquing her drink choices. I’d dropped by at Buffalo Bills earlier while Pedee hung art with Ric and Gia. I decided to let Pedee have her Coke.

“I’ll take red,” I said, wanting to ask her, “any chance you were adopted?”

No one had answered when I last tried the adoption tracking service two years ago. No one said they were looking for their mother.

Now Ric signaled to me, pointing at the Ladies Room. Lucca must need help. Where was Gia? Pulling the door open, I found Lucca clutching the sink.

Gia jockeyed the wheelchair back and forth behind her. “I can’t persuade her to sit down.”

“I’m practicing,” Lucca clutched a wrinkled scrap of paper with writing scratched sideways on it.

She began, “Sky. Clouds. Creek beds, violet in the fall.”

“You’re a poet,” said Gia.

Lucca’s blue gray eyes brightened as she reached for more strength. I felt her desire to forge ahead, not finding enough words to work with. She brought me back to my own effort when I labored into the night to push my baby out, only to give her up. Tears came to my eyes. I put my arm around Lucca as she stared at the mirror. She straightened her gnarly fingers. Letting go, she sank into the chair. Gia nodded to me to open the door. She pushed Lucca back into the gallery as the festivities were about to begin.

First, the show’s judge spoke. He kept it light and casual in his Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. He said that the name Elixir for the Gallery meant capable of prolonging life indefinitely. Later, as he commented on each artist’s work, I was impressed by his humility. He did not pretend to understand every aspect of it. That especially applied to one abstract painting named Infinity, and So On.

When it was time for the artists to comment briefly, it had been decided that Lucca would go first. I felt we were about to watch a tightrope walker inch her way out on a wire. She stood up shakily from her wheelchair. I breathed in the silence as if fresh air had been blown into the room. I felt ready to take her elbow if needed, but she straightened up on her own.

“I have learned from Matisse that his best work happened late in life. He cut out shapes and felt no need to draw, no need for words. The invisible becomes visible. Art, you know is truer than the literal truth.”

Everyone clapped politely. I felt myself letting go of whether I would ever find my birth daughter. Maybe now I’d go back to Boston and focus on changing my family’s legacy at the museum. Should we put on an exhibit, pulling objects from the so-called Vault? Like that painting “Crane, Pine and Sun” I always loved?

A weird flapping lurched through the back door and someone yelled, “A bat!” It swooped and dove around Lucca, but she remained calm.

The only time I ever dealt with a bat, I got a tennis racquet out of the closet and knocked it into an empty laundry basket, took it out on the porch, and threw the bat into the sky. I shook all evening after that, it made me feel so vulnerable when that wild energy got into the house.

This bat settled on a corner of one of Lucca’s creek bed cut-ups. We watched Lucca turn slowly and knock the bat with her art show program into a plastic wastebasket in her partition area. She threw her indigo scarf over the top and handed the basket to the judge. The audience clapped and cheered. As Gia predicted, Lucca the Performer had delivered.

In all the excitement I wondered, how could one glass of wine affect me this way? Not counting the two martinis I had before, but as I stared across the room at a photograph of Chief Joseph’s determined face, I stepped back and knocked a bowl off its pedestal.

It crashed, breaking into three pieces. And there was Raven at my side, stooping to gather the pieces.

“You should expect a major loss,” he said. “This is the Six Grandfathers’ Bowl made by my friend Oren. Earth, Sky, North, South, West, East. Oren felt the bowl had spiritual powers, but maybe not anymore.”

I paid the Gallery $600 and received the pieces wrapped in newspaper to carry home. I would glue them together back in Boston.

Pedee, I thought, looked chagrined for me. She took my hand and said, “Doro, I need you to take me to the Elk Talk class. Ric says I need an adult to go with me. It’s tomorrow.” I actually felt grateful for her laser focus in the moment. But I disagreed, of course.

“We have to take the show down.” If I’d been a parent, would I know what’s in the playbook for dealing with this?

Pedee stamped her foot and rushed across the room to speak to Ric again.

I handled it, I’m afraid immaturely, by walking out of the gallery. I headed for Buffalo Bill’s. Maybe we needed space from each other. I would come back to pick up Pedee later.

***

I was on my second martini when I received a text from Ric. He said, “We’re taking Pedee with us. You can pick her up in the morning.”

I could try and catch them. But I didn’t. Definitely felt woozy by then. Free and clear for one night sounded good to me. Irresponsible, am I? A stone-cold narcissist? Well, I knew Pedee would be happy to explore Lucca’s house. She would be like our lab Phineas who always wanted to walk in the door of a new house. What would he find inside that door?

I put the phone on vibrate and began chatting with Raven who arrived soon after I did.

“Where’s Pedee by the way?”

“She’s with Ric… He’s taking her out to their house.”

“So, you can drink ‘til you drop?”

But now my friend alcohol did not seem to be doing its job, either. It usually helped. When I started to wheeze, alcohol warmed me, made it feel easier to breathe. Now I must have been feeling panicky about having let everyone down.

When Raven said, “Let’s get out of here,” I said, “And go where?”

“You’re not on kid duty. Come on.” He slid off his stool and as I finished my drink, I thought, why not?

He led me to his silver Dodge Ram. “Would you like to see the canyon under the stars?”

“I haven’t had an invitation like that since we arrived.” And who could say no to that?

When we set off, the truck felt like an armored car, something I felt when I dated Greg the lobsterman from Isle au Haut. So long ago. In the decade of my 30’s, I sometimes enjoyed having a body guard. It made me happy, never having to drive. His boat reminded me of Raven’s truck. Safe and sound, just get in, don’t worry about a thing.

***

When you get to the switchbacks in the canyon, you’ve passed the place where the Popo Agie River rises. A bit further on, the river sinks. Then the road starts curving up and around. He floored it as we circled on up.

“I can almost see patches of yellow all around us” I said.

“Aspen—yes.”

He pulled off at a spot where three medium-sized boulders sat in a semi-circle off to the right.

“This is Lucca’s favorite place,” he said.

“You know her that well?” He got out and walked over to the boulders, gesturing for me to sit on one next to him. I could feel the cold stone through my white jeans. Then I started to shake. Well, it was down to 42 degrees that night.

“I’ve got a leather jacket and a blanket in the truck. I’ll get them,” he said.

When he came back, he sat close enough so that we could share the jacket over our shoulders. He spread the blanket across our laps.

“That’s better,” I said, touching the corner of the flannel blanket. I felt the raised logo for Lander Medical Center.

“You’ve got a hospital blanket.”

“My mother’s.”

“Was she at the Medical Center? My second home for a while, here.”

“She had a stroke and died there during the pandemic.”

“I’m sorry. How long ago?”

“Two years.” I wanted to ask more, but didn’t. So that’s why he was always drinking at the Lounge.

We sat gazing at a rock ridge across the valley from our cliff that dropped so steeply I didn’t want to stand or step closer to the edge. A coyote howled on the hill behind us.

“I never see this many stars in the city,” I said. “In Maine, it’s more like this. The sky looks like it’s overflowing with minnows the way they sparkle on the surface sometimes. Were you close to your mother?”

“In a funny way, yes. She was good with numbers like I turned out to be.”

I was still shaking and he sat closer and started rubbing my back and shoulders under the leather coat, over my linen shirt. That felt so good.

“Does this help?” he asked. I may have felt scared as to what it might lead to. So, I called a halt.

“It feels great, but maybe we should get back.”

“I wanted you to see it at least once,” he said. “And I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”

What would that be?

“I hope your purpose comes along soon.”

I pushed off my stone seat and my knees almost buckled but he held me by my shoulder propping me up.

It was time to tell him this. “I gave birth to a baby girl and gave her up for adoption here in Wyoming when I was 18.”

“Why did you give her up here?”

“My uncle owned a ranch in Jackson. It’s gone now. My folks thought it was far enough away to keep it all secret.”

“Are you here to find your baby?”

“It has crossed my mind, but it’s not possible. It was a closed adoption.” I looked at his face and he seemed thoughtful but stayed silent.

“So, finding my purpose now means facing all those feelings. I’ve felt fairly empty and confused since I was 18. My classmates at the Museum School thought I was so privileged since my great-grandfather created a wing of the museum. Honestly, I identified more with the homeless people I passed on the Boston Common. I tried to paint feeling homeless in an abstract way. Once I did a portrait with two sides of a face. One used a Boston brownstone’s exterior painted three-dimensionally so you might think you could reach inside. Do you know the term trompe l’oeil? I was explaining it to Pedee tonight. Trick of the eye. The other side of the face held a field in Wyoming. I named it “Homeless,” but no one believed I was painting from experience.

Some in class thought I had no right to draw homeless people. Alexander Calder may have walked around Paris with a ball of wire creating caricatures of the people he met. But when I tried that in the late 70’s, these naysayers felt I was using the homeless for my own purposes. I gave up trying. If you’re white and privileged, they expect you to care about the tree canopy on Commonwealth Ave, so I painted that. Then the river. For years.”

I noticed I was monologuing, but didn’t stop myself. We had an amazing view from up here. Maybe I sounded like background music, so I kept going.

“I’ve felt blocked since I was 23. Painting portraits of children from school photographs. That might have been an odd choice. I felt curious what the mothers wanted to preserve in their child’s identity. Some opted for formality, others wanted it to feel like a summer’s day. Since I studied art in the late 70’s, I practiced after Helen Frankenthaler changed things when she applied paint to an unprimed canvas with her famous soak and stain technique. Back then, I painted large canvases along the lines of her Mountains and Sea, and later, it felt like my collages lit a few sparks, but once again, more like matches that flare up, burn out. Time to go?” I asked.

We both stood up and walked arm in arm to the truck.

As he started driving down the hill, I wondered, am I fifteen years older than he is? Do I remind him of his mother? Soon I moved into a more generous mood, feeling grateful for seeing the vastness of the view.

“I hope we can do this again.”

He smiled. Nodded. Feeling impulsive as I opened the door, I gave him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. He waited as I disembarked to head up the stairs at the Lodgepole. Maybe he wanted to make sure I did not go back in the Lounge for another drink.

***

When I opened our room door, I stepped on Meredith whose grimy turquoise coat felt like it had been dunked in water and left to dry in the sun. I smoothed her out and placed her on Pedee’s freshly made bed.

I lay on my bed and rather than searching for something in the mini-bar I thought about what had just happened. The nearly life-sized cutouts on the wall, Dart said, were the new owner’s idea of how to make the rooms Western-friendly.

I saw the sequence of my friends and love interests lined up like gentleman callers. The bear was of course, Greg. Fuzzy and warm. A good hugger. None of it could have led to anything permanent. How would that have worked? I would have to have moved to Maine.

The moose was Christopher, my Museum School teacher who was my main flame after the debacle in Wyoming. He always seemed larger than life the way a moose seems in the wild.

Then there was the bison, Jasper, my longtime friend until he broke things off abruptly. He did offer his sperm when I was in my mid-40’s to impregnate myself with a turkey baster. It amazes me we were close enough to consider it. But I’d ruled out children after giving Madeline away.

Now I saw the fourth cut-out was an eagle in one corner. Raven? I felt touched by his kindness. I felt sure he hadn’t told me the whole story of why he showed up at the Lounge every night.

Well, the next morning, I woke up, not entirely hating myself. I began with where I was the night before, and why Pedee was not here. I knew I’d behaved badly. Was it unforgiveable?

My cell rang at 8:11 AM with that ringtone I must change. It was Ric, and he handed the phone to Pedee.

“Hi. I slept in Ric’s old room upstairs. He sleeps downstairs now.”

“Did you like it up there?”

“Yes, but there’s no TV. This morning, I painted the view with Lucca.”

I felt a little jealous. “I hope I’ll get to do that,” I said. If I was going to help Lucca, I’d better get moving on it.

“Ric says the Elk Talk Class is at 2. He signed us up.”

“Doesn’t he need help taking down Lucca’s artwork?”

“He’s going to do that while we’re in class. He’ll drop me off.”

“All right,” I said, picturing myself sitting in the back with the Louise Penny mystery I had barely cracked.

Elk Talk. All I could imagine was it’s using your power to lure a helpless beast into a trap. I mean, obviously we would not kill it. But why would the elk come that close?

This made me think of my daughter. Why would my daughter be willing to come closer now if I ever did manage to find her?

Hopefully that was the end of Meredith Out West, the video, outing my drinking. I had to admit, I had never chased alcohol like this before. Was this all about having to stuff my feelings about finding Madeline?

I picked up the newspaper they placed under the door each morning,

The Lander Journal. An article started on the front page, “Remembering Senator John McCain.” It began, “His code to redeem himself was courage and self-sacrifice.”

I did not feel drawn to redeem myself.

Ric and Gia had seen me abandon Pedee. I was afraid they might say, “Why don’t you come to the AA meeting?” It was happening at noon. I could go today. What was my defense? I don’t like the never-drink-alcohol-again model.

It was time for me to get closer to Lucca. We had a history. I needed to build on that. My old friend was buried somewhere inside, but now any words or sounds could come out of her mouth. I wondered how Raven interpreted the vastness around the stars. Did he believe his mother’s soul was up there amidst the stardust? What had happened to him with other women in his life? That passing thought would get buried in the avalanche to come.