Alexander Jablokov - Fragments Of A Painted Eggshell

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FRAGMENTS OF A PAINTED EGGSHELL

Alexander Jablokov

"I'm not sure what you mean," Paula said, leafing through the immense stack of letters that had somehow

come to be covering her kitchen counter. "Which old postcard are you talking about?" She tapped and

aligned the envelopes, making them seem orderly.

"Well, any of them...but there is one specific one I'm thinking of." Mark's voice sounded hollow. He did

insist on using that ancient heavy-handset phone, bought at some long-ago yard sale. He'd gotten it after

the divorce, good riddance, and Paula had replastered the spot on the kitchen where it had hung. She

wore a headset, and could move around as she cooked dinner. Mark had never been able to recognize

the simplest solutions to things.

She started to open the letters with the cleaver, but quit when she saw how much red bell pepper she

was getting all over everything. Besides, she should really finish chopping the pepper before she got to

anything else.

"A postcard from France." She wandered from the kitchen into her office to look for a letter opener.

"Yes, that's right." Only something really important would make him call outside their usual schedule for

sharing out Rue's time. So what was it about the postcards Mark had sent her while they were still dating

that made her ex-husband desperate enough to talk to her?

"I just threw all that old stuff in boxes," she said, distracted by the Billable Accounts file displayed on her

computer screen. She plopped down in her work chair, throwing the stack of letters into the overflowing

"To Do" box on the floor, and started looking through the active accounts. "I wasn't in much of a mood

to be too orderly. I don't even know if I still have any of it."

"You have it. Could you please take a look?"

"Sure, sure...." There were some extra hours to be billed on the Hammersly house -- Paula Pursang

Construction had completely redesigned their moldings three times now. Easy money, but a pain in the

ass....

"Paula, are you paying attention to what I'm saying?" Mark's voice wasn't angry, just tired.

"Of course I am. It's somewhere in the basement. I'll just have to put a bucket over my head to protect

myself against the Tergiversator, and go down there."

He laughed. He didn't want to, but he did. "Just take a position when you go down there, and hold it."

The Tergiversator was a creature who hid under the basement stairs and lived on equivocation. Paula

couldn't remember how it had first been born -- it might have been from a crossword puzzle clue -- but it

had a firm place in Pursang family mythology.

"That never works. Eventually you get an itch and have to scratch something, and...."

"Just find it, Paula. Please."

She knew exactly where that damn postcard was. It was in a cardboard box under a stack of heating

ducting and vent grates, in a corner of the basement behind the furnace. If the basement flooded, as it

used to every spring, the box would be soaked, leaving its contents to rot and get covered with mildew.

But she had installed a sump pump and a dehumidifier last fall and the damn improvements worked too

well. The basement was now dry enough to create mummies.

And she did remember that postcard in particular. It had been an antique one he bought from some street

kiosk, showing the Palace of the Popes in Avignon in the 1920s. He wrote a note indicating that he had

fallen through some sort of time warp, but was hoping the magical time-delay stamp he bought from the

gypsy would ensure that the card was delivered to her eighty years later...and that he still thought about

her with every new thing he saw.

It was all very sweet, but she had spent that summer sleeping with someone else, a fellow carpenter on a

job, so didn't take any of it too seriously. Still, she had put the card up on her refrigerator, where it had

stayed many months amid the torn-out cartoons and orange-crate-label refrigerator magnets until Mark

came back from Europe and she found herself engaged to be married to him.

"So why do you want it?" she asked. "Just tell me."

"It's Miriam."

"Oh. Miriam." Mark's new wife was named Miriam-Selina. Irritated by the compound name, Paula

privately called her Miracle of Science. She had breasts like a female impersonator's. They couldn't be

real.

"Now, Paula. If you're going to be like that, I don't have to tell you anything." Mark wouldn't have been

human if his ex- wife's jealousy over his new wife hadn't, secretly, pleased him.

"All right, all right. So, Miriam."

"Miriam...well, we haven't been together very long. She wants our relationship to be of longer standing."

"Wait a while," Paula said. "It will be."

"No, no. She wants it to be longer now."

She froze for a moment, shocked at the depths of his betrayal. "And you want to steal my past, weld it

on to hers? Make it seem like you and she have had a real life together? Buy a memory transfer so that

you remember sending that postcard to her, and she remembers getting it. It'll cost you, you know. That

sort of thing's not cheap." The emotion was too sudden, too strong, for her to even identify it as anger or

grief. "So you just call me up, ask me casual-like to give up my past --"

"Paula --"

"Sure we screwed it up, lost it. It still means something. Do you think it doesn't?"

"I'm not doing this to hurt you, Paula."

"Then why?" Anger was easier.

His voice, when he finally spoke, was so quiet she could barely hear it. "Why don't you ask Rue?" And

then he hung up, dropping the heavy receiver from the primitive phone hook once before finally managing

to cut the connection.

Paula pulled her headset off and threw it across the room. Then, with exaggerated care, she hit a couple

of keys and printed out an invoice on the Hammersly job. At least she'd gotten something done.

She sensed rather than heard the back door closing. Rue always came home silently, trying to seep in, as

if her mother, dim as some senescent household pet, would conclude that she had really been there all

along.

Paula had learned not to say hello to her when she first came in. It took Rue a while to adjust after

coming into her mother's carefully built house, even though she had grown up in it. A little prowling

around, a few minutes' ceremonial examination of the contents of the refrigerator -- anything she took out

she immediately put back in -- and she would be calm enough to deal with.

"Hi, Mom," Rue said when Paula came out of her office. She sat hunched at the ceramic-tile counter, still

wearing her ankle- length black coat, its shoulders wet with spring rain. Her hair, for a wonder, was

combed and fresh, falling past her shoulders in soft dark curls. Until a few days before, it had been

deliberately ratty and feral-smelling, like that of some distraught mad poetess. It drove Paula crazy. For

years she had regarded that hair as a sort of joint possession. Rue had finally dissuaded her.

"Hello." Paula started getting the raw materials for dinner out of the refrigerator. The coat, worn tightly

buttoned in the bright warm light of the kitchen she had worked so hard on, disturbed her. It was of

textured leather, and sucked in close above Rue's hips, then flared out, ending up pleated at the tips of

her boots. How much must such a thing have cost? It was dizzying. Rue was only fourteen.

"You know, Arnie, our sosh prof, is such a whack job." Rue rapped her gloved knuckles on the counter.

Somehow, as Paula cracked eggs, they actually managed to have a discussion of sorts about Arnold

Renborn, Rue's Sociological Sciences teacher. It helped that Paula honestly agreed with her daughter's

assessment that the man was a fool.

Then, a long silence. "Mom, there's something I have to talk about with you."

Paula held tightly onto the egg bowl and set it clumsily on the counter. Without looking at Rue, she took

all the eggshell halves and nested them before throwing them down the disposal.

"What is it, honey?"

"I --" Rue swallowed. This was bad. Usually she just dropped her news on the table, take it or leave it,

and was gone before Paula could react.

"I got a notification from Miriam-Selina Kaman's lawyer yesterday. I checked it with my legal program --

seems okay. I won't actually sign up to anything without consulting our lawyer directly, of course." Rue's

voice was desperately practical. "Miriam-Selina Kaman, her husband Mark Pursang, her cousin Ella

Trumbull, and Trumbull's husband Winston Ortega are forming a family co-op, name as yet

undetermined. There are four other kids and I've been invited to join."

"Oh." Paula felt like the guy in the joke who's had his head cut off but doesn't know it until he tries to

nod. She wasn't going to nod. That was a nice bit of legalistic precision, sticking her father into the list

simply as Mark Pursang, Miriam- Selina Kaman's husband. Fourteen. Rue was fourteen. Had Paula

forgotten that? Had she forgotten that the joint-custody agreement let Rue make a decision when she

reached that age?

"Oh, Mom, I know it's stupid and doesn't make any sense but...I don't know what it is. I look back and

feel like I didn't have a childhood. Isn't that silly? You did the best for me and all but somehow it all sifted

away...." Looking at her mother with those clear blue eyes she'd gotten from Mark, Rue started to cry.

"Oh no, oh no, never mind, I'll...oh, damn." She ran from the kitchen, still wearing her long coat buttoned

as if she had never actually come into the house.

Paula continued to make dinner, even though it was clear Rue would not be eating it. She only

half-watched the kitchen computer demonstrate the proper wrist technique for mixing her hollandaise and

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