As always, this simple thought filled her with joy, amazement, and gratitude. She had been told — mostly in the Therapy Circle at D & S — that these euphoric feelings would pass, but she found that hard to believe. She was on her own. She had escaped the monster. She was free.
Rosie closed the refrigerator door, turned around, and looked across her room. The furnishings were minimal and the decorations — except for her picture — were nonexistent, but she still saw nothing which did not make her want to crow with delight. There were pretty cream-colored walls that Norman Daniels had never seen, there was a chair from which Norman Daniels had never pushed her for ‘being smart,’ there was a TV Norman Daniels had never watched, sneering at the news or laughing along with reruns of All in the Family and Cheers. Best of all, there was not a single corner where she’d sat crying and reminding herself to vomit into her apron if she got sick to her stomach. Because he wasn’t here. He wasn’t going to be here.
‘I’m on my own,’ Rosie murmured . . . and then actually hugged herself with joy.
She walked across the room to the picture. The blonde woman’s chiton seemed almost to glow in the late-spring light. And she was a woman, Rosie thought. Not a lady, and most certainly not a gal. She stood up there on her hill, looking fearlessly down at the ruined temple and the tumbled gods . . .
Gods? But there’s only one . . . isn’t there?
No, she saw, there were actually two — the one peering serenely up at the thunderheads from its place near the fallen pillar, and another one, way over to the right. This one was gazing sideways through the tall grass. You could just see the white curve of stone brow, the orbit of one eye, and the lobe of an ear; the rest was hidden. She hadn’t noticed this one until now, but what of that? There were probably lots of things in the picture she hadn’t noticed yet, lots of little details — it was like one of those Where’s Waldo pictures, full of things you didn’t see at first, and . . .
. . . and that was bullshit. The picture was very simple, actually.
‘Well,’ Rosie whispered, ‘it was.’
She found herself thinking of Cynthia’s story about the picture in the parsonage where she had grown up . . . De Soto Looks West. How she’d sat in front of it for hours, watching it like television, watching the river move.
‘Pretending to watch it move,’ Rosie said, and ran up the window, hoping to catch a breeze and fill the room with it. The thin voices of little kids in the park playground and bigger kids playing baseball drifted in. ‘Pretending, that’s all. That’s what kids do. I did it myself.’
She put a stick in the window to prop it open — it would stay where it was for a little bit, then come down with a crash if you didn’t — and turned to look at the picture again. A
sudden dismaying thought, an idea so strong it was almost a certainty, had come to her. The folds and creases in the rose madder gown were not the same. They had changed position.
They had changed position because the woman wearing the toga, or chiton, or whatever it was, had changed position.
‘You’re crazy if you think that,’ Rosie whispered. Her heart was thumping. ‘I mean totally bonkers. You know that, don’t you?’
She did. Nevertheless, she leaned close to the picture, peering into it. She stayed in that position, with her eyes less than two inches from the painted woman on top of the hill, for almost thirty seconds, holding her breath so as not to fog the glass which overlaid the image.
At last she pulled back and let the air out of her lungs in a sigh that was mostly relief. The creases and folds in the chiton hadn’t changed a bit. She was sure of it. (Well, almost sure.) It was just her imagination, playing tricks on her after her long day — a day which had been both wonderful and terribly stressful.
‘Yeah, but I got through it,’ she told the woman in the chiton. Talking out loud to the woman in the painting already seemed perfectly okay to her. A little eccentric, maybe, but so what? Who did it hurt? Who even knew? And the fact that the blonde’s back was turned somehow made it easier to believe she was really listening.
Rosie went to the window, propped the heels of her hands on the sill, and looked out.
Across the street, laughing children ran the bases and pumped on the swings. Directly below her, a car was pulling in at the curb. There had been a time when the sight of a car pulling in like that would have terrified her, filled her with visions of Norman’s fist and Norman’s ring riding on it, riding toward her, the words Service, Loyalty, and Community getting bigger and bigger until they seemed to fill the whole world . . . but that time had passed. Thank God.
‘Actually, I think I did a little more than just get through it,’ she told the picture. ‘I think I did a really good job. Robbie thought so, I know, but the one I really had to convince was Rhoda. I think she was prepared not to like me when I came in, because I was Robbie’s find, you know?’ She turned toward the picture once more, turned as a woman will turn to a friend, wanting to judge from her face how some idea or statement strikes her, but of course the woman in the picture just went on looking down the hill toward the ruined temple, giving Rosie nothing but her back to judge from.
‘You know how bitchy us gals can be,’ Rosie said, and laughed. ‘Except I really think I won her over. We only got through fifty pages, but I was a lot better toward the end, and besides, all those old paperbacks are short. I’ll bet I can finish by Wednesday afternoon, and do you know the best thing? I’m making almost a hundred and twenty dollars a day — not a week, a day — and there are three more Christina Bell novels. If Robbie and Rhoda give me those, I
— ‘
She broke off, staring at the picture with wide eyes, not hearing the thin cries from the playground anymore, not even hearing the footsteps which were now climbing the stairs from the first floor. She was looking at the shape on the far right side of the picture again — curve of brow, curve of bland, pupilless eye, curve of ear. A sudden insight came to her. She had been both right and wrong — right about that second crashed statue’s not being visible before, wrong in her impression that the stone head had somehow just materialized in the picture while she’d been off recording The Manta Ray. Her idea that the folds in the woman’s dress had changed position might have been her subconscious mind’s effort to bolster that first erroneous impression by creating a kind of hallucination. It did, after all, make slighdy more sense than what she was seeing now.
‘The picture is bigger,’ Rosie said.
No. That wasn’t quite it.
She lifted her hands, sizing the air in front of the hung picture and confirming the fact that it was still covering the same three-feet-by-two-feet area of wall. She was also seeing the
same amount of white matting inside the frame, so what was the big deal?
That second stone head wasn’t there before, and that’s the big deal, she thought. Maybe . . .
Rosie suddenly felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She closed her eyes tightly and began rubbing at ,her temples, where a headache was trying to be born. When she opened her eyes and looked at the picture again, it burst upon her as it had the first time, not as separate elements — the temple, the fallen statues, the rose madder chiton, the raised left hand — but as an integrated whole, something which called to her in its own voice.
There was more to look at now. She was nearly positive that this impression wasn’t hallucination but simple fact. The picture wasn’t really bigger, but she could see more on both sides . . . and on the top and bottom, as well. It was as if a movie projectionist had just realized he was using the wrong lens and switched, turning boxy thirty-five millimeter into wide-screen Cinerama 70. Now you could see not just Glint, but the cowboys on both sides of him, as well.
You’re nuts, Rosie. Pictures don’t get bigger.