Isabella and the Pot of Basil, by William Holman Hunt (public domain)
May Day
Gregory Wolos
“She’s flatter than she looked on my laptop,” Tandi says. My ten-year-old daughter and I are standing in front of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, a painting that before this moment we’d only seen on the last of the dozens of virtual museum tours we took during our two years of in-house sheltering. This is the first day that social distancing restrictions have been lifted, and even though a chill rain is falling, and the air over our driveway carries the odor of worms, it’s May Day, and the city streets are full of cars and pedestrians. I’m reading the placard next to the painting when Tandi says something else I only half hear.
“Did you say fatter?” I ask. God forbid that Tandi thinks the starved, pale figure in the painting is overweight.
My daughter makes a face. “I said flatter, not fatter.” She sticks out her arms and spins like a top, and her yellow rain jacket and red hair fan out. I catch the museum guard standing at the doorway smiling. One or two of the half dozen patrons circulating around the gallery glance her way, assessing whether or not she’s keeping a safe distance before realizing that it no longer matters. They reach for their exposed chins. The epidemic is officially over. Done with. We are free.
Tandi stops swirling and catches her breath. “Time for class, right?” She gazes, glassy-eyed, around the gallery. “There’s so much space,” she murmurs. “Everywhere you look.” Then she’s back to staring at the painting. “Isabella’s so sad,” she says. “I keep forgetting that her boyfriend’s head is in that pot she’s caressing. Is that the right word, caressing?”
“Yes,” I say. “Lorenzo’s head. Her brothers murdered and buried him because they had a better match picked for her. She dug him up, cut off his head, and hid it in the pot.”
“And she waters it with her tears.” Tandi steps up closer. “On the laptop it looked like a photograph. Here you can see it’s a painting. That’s what I meant by flatter.” She meets my eye. “But I feel her sadness filling my stomach. It’s not flat at all.” She peeks over her shoulder at the guard. “I want to touch her,” she whispers. “To comfort her.”
“Hands off,” I warn. “I think she’s past the point of comforting. Take a last look and we’ll go.” The assignment for Tandi’s special May Day session is to find a work of art in the museum and study it.
“She looks a little like Mommy,” Tandi says, “but without the mask.”
“And Mommy is without the grief, I hope.” Wendy didn’t join us for this museum trip. Asthma and allergies compromise her breathing—afflictions which make her particularly vulnerable to the virus the nation’s medical experts have assured the public is no longer a threat. In fact, they were sure the pandemic was over a month ago, but waited until today, May Day, just to be extra safe. It has been promoted as a national holiday. Activities and events, small and large, like Tandi’s museum sponsored art class, have been scheduled across the country. But Wendy’s “not ready” to leave the house or to shed the mask she’s worn for two years, even to bed. She hasn’t left our property since the stay at home order was first given. My wife and I have been sleeping in separate bedrooms since the third month of the pandemic. I am waiting for an invitation to return.
Tandi and I make our way through the long halls lined with paintings and statues. Her head bobs and swivels as we walk, but her restless eyes don’t pause on anything specific. Overwhelmed at simply being out, she rubs her palms together, gobbles, and listens gleefully to the sound echoing from the high ceiling and marble floor. I’m feeling frisky myself—I can feel my hibernating senses beginning to stir after months of numbing routine.
This morning Wendy sat across from me at the breakfast table, her hair tousled, her eyes dark and moist. Next to her was her dog-eared copy of Dark Before Dawn, the Chinese novel she’s been working on translating for months, and one of the yellow legal pads she’s been filling with notes. She joins Tandi and me for every meal, but refuses to eat until we’ve left the table. I haven’t seen the lower half of her face in quite a while. While I sipped my coffee and waited for Tandi, Wendy reminded me of an internship she began the summer before our wedding.
“Remember when I went to Cambridge for the internship? I was supposed to move into a basement apartment at my mentor’s house. A taxi dropped me off, I rang the doorbell, and when she answered, she stared at me for at least a minute then burst into tears. It turned out that an hour before I arrived, she’d learned that her sister and her sister’s family—the husband and their two young children—had been killed in an avalanche in the French Alps.”
I’d heard the story a hundred times, and I nodded along, but I was too giddy about the museum trip to absorb the tragedy. I visualized the scene as a cartoon: animated figures chased, caught, and buried by a monstrous snow-tsunami. I pictured heads popping up like whack-a-moles—the final head belonging to a Scooby Doo-ish Saint Bernard that shook its head and flung snow into the smiling faces of its family. And, God forgive me, I chuckled.
“Don’t be a shit.” Wendy’s mask absorbed little of her tone’s heat. “The poor woman was going to be my only contact for the entire summer.”
“Sorry.” I forced a frown. “Awful, right? Tragic. Everything about it sucks.” Why had that story popped into her thoughts on the morning of our liberty? Her gaze fell back to her book. For Wendy, there’s no such thing as clichés, no dead metaphors. If she called me a shit, that’s what she saw when she looked at me. And smelled? Her mask shifted a bit, and I knew she’d wrinkled her nose. “Sorry,” I repeated.
Tandi entered the kitchen, stood at the counter, and poured herself a bowl of Cheerios from the last cereal box we’d ever need delivered from Amazon. “Guess what I did last night,” she said as she added milk. “I got to nine-hundred thousand. Isn’t that great?”
I cocked my head. “Nine-hundred thousand what?”
“You know, Dad. I told you. You and Mom both.”
“Refresh my memory,” I said.
“My counting!” Tandi rolled her eyes. “You know—I’ve been doing it every night since first grade. For almost five years. I started at one. Every night I add five hundred. And last night I reached nine-hundred thousand.”
“Really?” I asked, wondering how this fact had escaped me in a house where the three of us had been sheltering so closely for endless months. “Every night?” I visualized Tandi in prison stripes scratching lines on a concrete wall. “You knew about this?” I asked Wendy, who shrugged noncommittally.
“Every single night, Daddy. When I was little I used to start right after you said, ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ I’m going to get to one million in two hundred days—that’s November 16.” She bounced a look between her mother and me. “Maybe we could have a party to celebrate.”
“Sure,” I said. “Or we could wait a week for Thanksgiving and have a Pi pie for a ‘numbers celebration.’” I peeked at Wendy, half-expecting the polka-dots on her mask to resolve into a recognizable expression, but her focus had dipped back to her Chinese novel. Maybe, by the time Tandi reached a million, my wife and I would be back to sleeping in the same bed. “How do you keep track, anyway?”
“A million deserves its own day. And I told you how I keep track,” Tandi muttered, exasperated.
“Well, I forgot. What, do you write it down someplace?”
“That’s cheating. I chant the number to myself. During dull times.”
“Really?” What counted as “dull”? Had I ever noticed her zoning out?
“Isn’t it time you left?” Wendy interrupted. “Probably a lot of people on the road won’t be used to driving. Be extra cautious.”
The instructor of “Kids Make Art” meets us at the classroom door, and I can’t help staring at her mouth: white teeth framed by bright red lips stretched in a broad smile. Her dark hair is wrapped in the kind of scarf I’m used to seeing covering faces, and I’m both confused and titillated, as if she’s showing too much cleavage, though her smock, with its museum logo, is buttoned up to her throat. I twitch in and out of my own grin, testing the feel and effect of it. It feels like I’m flirting. The instructor steps back, breaking eye contact.
“And who are you?” she asks Tandi, who’s staring past her into the classroom at the dozen or so children seated at tables covered with stacks of paper, paint jars, and brushes in jars of water. Standing against the back wall are half a dozen young adults also wearing museum smocks. All mouths grin, all pairs of eyes glitter.
“‘Tandi,” my daughter answers distractedly. This wouldn’t be a time to chant nine-hundred thousandwould it?
“Very good.” The instructor bats shadowed eyelids. “We’re about to get started. Tandi, you found a painting to inspire you?”
My silent daughter has the look of someone caught staring directly at a solar eclipse despite a stern warning. “Yes,” she finally says to the instructor. “Should I just sit anywhere?” When the woman nods, Tandi taps her cell phone pocket. “I’ll call you when we’re done,” she says then heads for a table.
“The session is ninety minutes,” the instructor tells me, adding confidentially, “It’s funny not to be social distancing, isn’t it?” She jabs a paintbrush toward the young adults. “These interns I’ve got from all the stalled college programs—they’re practically paralyzed. Nobody’s used to seeing so much of strangers’ faces. It’s almost too much. ‘Too close’ means much more than it used to.”
Is she commenting on the way I’ve been staring at her lips? She’s waiting for me to leave, but I feel stuck, and I think of the avalanche Wendy brought up this morning. My wife called me a shit. How I’m seen isn’t necessarily up to me.
“Ninety minutes,” I confirm.
It won’t be difficult to kill time in the museum. Hadn’t we all become experts at whiling away months during our confinement? At first, there were the hours each of us spent on Zoom—Tandi with school and Wendy and I with our jobs. Then the decision came to suspend school for the extra twelve months it was going to take to develop a vaccine. All students, regardless of grade, would be “left back” for a year. Around the same time, a universal job furlough with monthly stipends for every worker in the country was declared. Taxes were suspended for a year. The stock market was frozen in place. A “reorientation” period for workers will begin this Monday. For the time being, maybe forever, analysts and statisticians will continue working from home. Will it feel any less like we’re under house arrest? Without work to fill my day, I watched old movies and reread books I hadn’t thought about since high school, surprised by how much I’d missed first time around. School-less Tandi found ways to amuse herself. She read the books and watched the films I recommended and kept up with her friends on social media for a while. But Skyping and Facetime lost their attraction eventually—everybody’s experience was so similar, sharing with friends was too much like looking in the mirror. Simultaneously, we all began to prefer the ennui of isolation to socializing. Withdrawal became a habit. It was a surprise when secrets rose to the surface, like Tandi’s counting. And then there was Wendy’s Chinese.
The only foreign language my wife and I knew was our school French. We’d been to France the year before the pandemic, taking Tandi, who we assumed would begin the language once she started middle school. “We could have ‘French Day’ once a week.” We were just at the turning point in the pandemic where ambition still seemed possible. “Give Tandi a leg up for the future. Or what if we headed in a completely different direction and studied Spanish?” Wendy shook her head so hard at the suggestion her mask came loose.
“Not Spanish for me—” She covered up quickly after these last unmuffled words, and I was too surprised to take a good look at the mouth I’d been missing. “I decided to teach myself Chinese,” she said.
“Chinese? Really? Have you found a course of study? Something online?”
Wendy adjusted her mask. “No. I think it would be a fun challenge to try to figure it out on my own. I ordered a book in Chinese from Amazon. A novel. In Mandarin. The title is translated as ‘Dark Before Dawn.’ I’m going to use the title as a key to untangling the Chinese letters—characters. I’ll look for patterns. Don’t you think every language is really just a big cryptogram?”
Wendy’s plan sounded impossible to me. Distill a whole language from three words? My wife is extremely intelligent, but she’d been educated as a mathematician, not a linguist. I didn’t object, though it seemed she’d be more likely to invent a pattern than discover one. Did she want anything more than a private language that belonged just to her?
“That’ll keep you busy,” is all I said, and a few days later Dark Before Dawn was delivered to our stoop, along with a stack of yellow legal pads. Wendy sat down at the kitchen table to work, and I looked over her shoulder at the text she flipped through—page after page of incomprehensible characters. I’d forgotten that Chinese was written vertically. Tandi sidled over to have a look.
“Maybe we’ll go to China someday, after the pandemic,” she said. “Mommy can be our translator. Go, Mommy!” She rubbed her mother’s shoulder, just as Wendy drew a bold slash across her pad. I kept my doubts to myself about the likelihood of future vacations.
I’m on my own now, in the galleries, headed for a restroom. An hour and a half to wander. The museum’s not as crowded as I thought it might be. I pass a few couples and loners like me; we make nervous eye contact and exchange smiles. Several times I check myself from side-stepping to create more space—how long before we lose that habit? And we’re all a little frightened by each other’s in-the-flesh Joker grins.
I find the restrooms. A copy of the male half of Durer’s Adam and Eve woodcut distinguishes the men’s. As I unzip, I think about fig leaves. Above the urinals, sinks, and hand dryers, bold-faced signs admonish patrons to “WASH HANDS FOR 20 SECONDS!”
Back out in the museum, I meander for a while, half-intending to get lost. Standing at the entrance to the gallery where Tandi and I had found Isabella and the Pot of Basil, the guard coughs as I pass, ducking his head into the crook of his arm, and my heart flutters like a sparrow trapped in a chimney. He looks at me apologetically, keeping his arm over his mouth like a caped vampire. I hurry past and shove through several sets of glass doors before turning into a dark gallery full of mid-nineteenth century American portraits. I aim for the bench in the middle of the room, take a seat, and gaze around me at the bloodless faces of mutton-chopped men, bonneted women, and pale, unsmiling children. Am I their first visitor in two years? Their eyes meet mine, but without light or challenge. But when I stand to leave, I have the odd feeling that I’m being touched—pawed at—by dozens of invisible hands. “No!” I say sharply, swatting at my shoulders and hips. Invisible fingers caress my neck as I rush out the gallery door back into the corridor. Do I hear papery whispers gossiping behind me? I hurry toward another set of glass doors below a sign that reads “Art of the Ancient World.” Ignoring a sign that says “Early Chinese Dynasties,” I push through despite—or because of—my wife’s new hobby.
Instead, I find myself wandering through a maze formed by Egyptian sarcophagi and glass cases full of decrepit mummies. I pause to check the time, but before I can fish my phone out of my pocket, a young voice stops me cold:
“Hello.”
“Hello,” I answer hesitantly, peering around a statue of a dog-headed god to find a boy, a tween not much older than Tandi. He’s leaning forward in his wheelchair, staring into a display case.
“Not you,” the young man says without facing me. “I’m talking to Ta-Iset. From the Akmimh region, west of the Nile, 350 BC-ish. He was just a toddler when he died and got gift-wrapped.”
I examine the ragged baby-bundle in the case, then sniff sharply at what lies next to it: a bundled head the size of a cabbage. Lorenzo, I think, as if the head of Isabella’s lover had somehow escaped its pot and rolled all the way back through history to ancient Egypt. I realize I’m stooping over the kid and step back. He laughs and throws me a look over his shoulder.
“Hey, it’s okay—social distancing is dead, remember? This is May Day!” The lower half of his face is covered with a mask the same blue as his sweater. Both are marked with a St. Anselm Prep emblem, which on the mask looks like the tooth-filled mouth of a barracuda. “Like my mask?” he asks. “Me and my friends think they’re cool, so we’re waiting for our teacher to make us take them off. Not a word, so far, though. He’s calling our bluff. He let us go off on our own during lunch.” He turns back to the case, looking at the head. “Tomb robbers got the rest of this guy. It says he’s ‘unidentified.’” The boy cranes his neck, peering past me. “You didn’t see any kids with masks like mine did you? We’re playing hide and seek. I’m great at hiding in this museum. My father used to bring me here every weekend after my parents got divorced. I’d hide on him for hours sometimes. That was all back when I was a kid.” He jerks a hand in the air and cocks his head. “Shh—you hear something?”
I hold my breath. My pulse drums a dull rhythm in my ears. I pry my attention loose from the mummified head. “Nope,” I say. “Don’t hear a thing. I dropped my daughter off for an art class. Do you know Isabella and the Pot of Basil? In the American wing? She’s using it for inspiration.”
The boy studies me as if I’m tucked in the case between little Ta-Iset and the head. The lighting is weak, and I can’t tell if his eyes are black or dark blue. “That’s a creepy painting,” he mutters. “There are heads all over this place. Hey, take your hand off the glass. No touching!”
I yank my palm from the case as if I’d been burned.
“You smudged it,” the kid snorts. “Just a day ago we would have wiped the glass off with disinfectant. Now nobody will bother with it for years. Our mummy friends will be talking about your lifeline like it’s a work of art.”
“Hey,” he says to the inhabitants of the case, “you’re looking at the handprint of a guy with a daughter who likes creepy paintings.”
I try to picture Isabella, but it’s Wendy in her polka-dotted mask I see gazing at the ceramic pot. I feel a tug on my sleeve.
“You want to see something really cool?” He urges, pointing down a narrow corridor lined with cases full of urns. “Roll me this way.” I grab the handles of his chair, and he gives a wave to the case we’re leaving. “Later, guys.”
I surrender to the kid’s directions, turning “Right!” then “Left!” on command. I wonder, what keeps him confined to the chair? A permanent affliction? He looks sturdy enough, a little pale, but aren’t we all after two years in isolation? He’s not wearing a cast or leg brace of any kind. When a hallway intersects, he looks to the right and left, then twists to look up at me. “Anybody behind us?”
I check. “Not a soul.”
“How old is your daughter?” he asks.
“Ten.”
“What’s her favorite subject? Art?”
The question stumps me. That’s something a dad should know. But after a year without school the idea of “subjects” has faded away. I wonder what the deal is with prep schools like Saint Anselm’s. “She likes everything,” I say. Then I remember Tandi’s counting. “Math probably the most. Tandi’s been counting to a million. She got to nine-hundred thousand last night. She adds five hundred each night, so she’ll get to one million in two hundred days.”
My companion mulls this over, then settles back in his chair. “Whoa.”
“It’s taken almost five years for her to get so far. And my wife’s teaching herself Chinese.”
“Un-hunh,” the kid says. “Turn left. We’re almost there.”
I hesitate. “The sign says ‘STAFF ONLY.’”
“I’m pretty sure nobody comes down here. At least they didn’t use to. You’ll see. It’s just storage. Come on.”
I wheel him up to a set of massive wooden doors. The kid reaches forward and twists the knob. The door gives.
“Unlocked. Back us through.”
I do as he directs, pull him into the room, and pivot the chair. We’ve entered a huge space, stuffed with dozens of statues. Along one wall, faded purple drapes cover tall windows. A bulb-less chandelier hangs from a high-arched ceiling between rows of fluorescent lights that blinked to life when we entered.
“The lights are motion sensitive,” the kid says. “Welcome to the world’s biggest closet. It used to be a ballroom back before they built the addition. Now they use it to store statues they don’t need anymore. Broken ones, I guess. Stuff they can’t identify.”
“Redundancies,” I suggest. “If there’s too much of something.”
“Whatever. Push me down there, to the back corner.” The wheelchair tires squeak over the old wooden floor. The air is stale. Probably no one’s breathed it since the last time this kid was here. “Stop!” The boy’s voice cracks with excitement. I let go of his chair and wipe my palms on my thighs. Unless they’re playing coy, the statues surrounding me seem indifferent to our presence. What am I doing in this remote spot with a kid I don’t even know? What do I say if someone discovers us—a museum official or his teacher? I fumble for excuses: I found him here, lost or Isn’t this the way to the education center?
Suddenly, I find myself staring at the statue directly to my left, the limbless, headless body of a reclining woman. Breasts, belly, hips, and thighs were chiseled from white stone.
“Not that one. I’m talking about this guy.” The boy is gesturing at the sculpture to our right, the tall figure of a man. The deeply cut eyes are vacant, the mouth somber. A stone beard descends to the middle of his chest. He’s lost his arms, but the cornucopia of fruit and vegetables they would have carried hangs at his waist. Below the cornucopia and above the figure’s slim legs is an enormous erect prick.
The kid giggles through his mask. “Isn’t that something?”
Aghast at the shocking presence of the huge erection, I look over my shoulder through the scattered statues, certain someone is recording the scene. Our total isolation doesn’t ease my discomfort.
“We’d better go,” I say.
“He’s Priapus, the Roman god of fertility. He keeps on keeping it up. Get it?”
My mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. I back away and bump into the female torso. Reaching out for balance, I cup a stone-cold breast and jerk my hand away.
“Oops!” the kid calls. “Maybe you—”
But whatever he means to say next is cut off by a booming cry that clubs me from behind.
“Tag!”
I spin and discover a swirling chaos of flying bodies. Statues come to life? An army of museum guards? No. Sweaters and masks with barracuda mouths identify the intruders. It’s the St. Anselm’s crew, in full feeding frenzy. The boys ricochet among the statues, circling closer and closer, until a chubby blond lumbers near enough to swat my companion on the shoulder.
“Tag, Simon. You’re it!” the boy puffs, then rejoins his classmates, who pause, panting, and ogle the wheelchair boy and me like we’re lab specimens. I raise empty hands and struggle to keep from glancing at Priapus or the torso.
A chorus of adolescent voices fractures the silence: “It!” “Simon’s it!” “Run!” The masked boys dash out the doorway. I flush with relief.
“I’m It!” my young guide cries. Which means what? What are the game’s rules? Who is he to chase? Am I expected to wheel him off in hot pursuit of his buddies? If he asks, I’ll refuse; if he protests, I’ll roll him to his to his teacher. Look what I found, I’ll say, and we adults will share an uneasy laugh. I take a deep breath and pat the phone in my pocket. Ninety minutes has surely passed. Time to pick up Tandi. Nine-hundred thousand, I remind myself.
I hear rattling and turn to the wheelchair, where the boy is wriggling violently. Seizure disorder? I grasp the handles, and then, astoundingly, the kid is up and on his feet—standing and facing me. He’s shorter than I am, but tall for a middle schooler, and a bit gangly. His hair is sweat-pasted to his forehead and temples, and his cheeks are flaming. A chortle escapes from behind his mask.
This couldn’t be a miracle. The kid steps around the chair, shrugs, and sticks out the elbow the pandemic has taught him to extend instead of his hand. I reflexively bend my arm and we touch through the fabric of our sweaters.
“Thanks,” he says. “Just a game, you know.” He looks past me toward the corridor, eager to follow his classmates.
“Go ahead,” I say. “You’re It.” And he’s off, leaving at a brisk walk that accelerates to a trot and then to a full sprint. At the doorway he skids to a stop and turns on his heel.
“Good luck to your daughter,” he calls. “With getting to a million, I mean.”
I wave to his back.
I’m left in the room of broken sculptures. A former ballroom, the kid said. Alone, my presence is easy to explain: Lost. Dead-ended. Priapus and the torso? Just two more rejected statues. The wheelchair? Don’t know anything about it.
Then I think of Wendy, my masked wife, bent over the kitchen table, absorbed by her private puzzle. On a whim, I pull out my phone and call her cell. “Wendy is unavailable,” her recorded voice tells me, “please leave a message.” I try our landline, which rings ten times before I hear myself: “We can’t come to the phone right now. Listen for the tone, then, well, you know what to do.” It’s the same message we’ve had since before the pandemic, even after friends and relatives told us it confused them. I hang up for the second time.
Suddenly, the phone frets in my grip like a tiny creature plucked from a nest. Wendy? No, it’s Tandi. As I answer, I sink into the chair, overcome with weariness, but Priapus is aiming his prick straight at my face, and I shut my eyes and spring to my feet a moment before I hear my daughter’s voice.
“Dad? What’s up? We’re done here. I did a drawing.”
“Sorry,” I say, maneuvering around the wheelchair, my safety in doubt until I put the god behind me. “Got side-tracked.”
“Well, hurry. The teacher is acting like it’s my fault you’re not here yet. I’m the last one.”
“On my way,” I say, and following the path of the St. Anselm boys through the statuary and across the warping boards of the old ballroom, I don’t look back.
“You know what I drew?” Tandi asks. “I did my own Isabella and the Pot of Basil. In my drawing you can see Lorenzo’s head in the pot. I made it like a fishbowl, you know? Lorenzo is looking at Isabella and smiling. She’s crying. I think she can see him. I think. That’s funny, right? It’s my own picture, and I don’t know if Isabella can see Lorenzo. Or if she’s crying for him or just for herself. Do you think we can get a postcard of the painting at the gift shop? So Mommy and I can compare my drawing to the real thing?”
I’m moving fast now, gaining momentum, already back among the Egyptian sarcophagi. Earlier the exhibit had seemed such a labyrinth, but now I hardly break stride as I weave through on my way to my daughter. “Good idea,” I say, controlling my breath to disguise my haste. “Tell the instructor I’m almost there.”
Gregory Wolos
“She’s flatter than she looked on my laptop,” Tandi says. My ten-year-old daughter and I are standing in front of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, a painting that before this moment we’d only seen on the last of the dozens of virtual museum tours we took during our two years of in-house sheltering. This is the first day that social distancing restrictions have been lifted, and even though a chill rain is falling, and the air over our driveway carries the odor of worms, it’s May Day, and the city streets are full of cars and pedestrians. I’m reading the placard next to the painting when Tandi says something else I only half hear.
“Did you say fatter?” I ask. God forbid that Tandi thinks the starved, pale figure in the painting is overweight.
My daughter makes a face. “I said flatter, not fatter.” She sticks out her arms and spins like a top, and her yellow rain jacket and red hair fan out. I catch the museum guard standing at the doorway smiling. One or two of the half dozen patrons circulating around the gallery glance her way, assessing whether or not she’s keeping a safe distance before realizing that it no longer matters. They reach for their exposed chins. The epidemic is officially over. Done with. We are free.
Tandi stops swirling and catches her breath. “Time for class, right?” She gazes, glassy-eyed, around the gallery. “There’s so much space,” she murmurs. “Everywhere you look.” Then she’s back to staring at the painting. “Isabella’s so sad,” she says. “I keep forgetting that her boyfriend’s head is in that pot she’s caressing. Is that the right word, caressing?”
“Yes,” I say. “Lorenzo’s head. Her brothers murdered and buried him because they had a better match picked for her. She dug him up, cut off his head, and hid it in the pot.”
“And she waters it with her tears.” Tandi steps up closer. “On the laptop it looked like a photograph. Here you can see it’s a painting. That’s what I meant by flatter.” She meets my eye. “But I feel her sadness filling my stomach. It’s not flat at all.” She peeks over her shoulder at the guard. “I want to touch her,” she whispers. “To comfort her.”
“Hands off,” I warn. “I think she’s past the point of comforting. Take a last look and we’ll go.” The assignment for Tandi’s special May Day session is to find a work of art in the museum and study it.
“She looks a little like Mommy,” Tandi says, “but without the mask.”
“And Mommy is without the grief, I hope.” Wendy didn’t join us for this museum trip. Asthma and allergies compromise her breathing—afflictions which make her particularly vulnerable to the virus the nation’s medical experts have assured the public is no longer a threat. In fact, they were sure the pandemic was over a month ago, but waited until today, May Day, just to be extra safe. It has been promoted as a national holiday. Activities and events, small and large, like Tandi’s museum sponsored art class, have been scheduled across the country. But Wendy’s “not ready” to leave the house or to shed the mask she’s worn for two years, even to bed. She hasn’t left our property since the stay at home order was first given. My wife and I have been sleeping in separate bedrooms since the third month of the pandemic. I am waiting for an invitation to return.
Tandi and I make our way through the long halls lined with paintings and statues. Her head bobs and swivels as we walk, but her restless eyes don’t pause on anything specific. Overwhelmed at simply being out, she rubs her palms together, gobbles, and listens gleefully to the sound echoing from the high ceiling and marble floor. I’m feeling frisky myself—I can feel my hibernating senses beginning to stir after months of numbing routine.
This morning Wendy sat across from me at the breakfast table, her hair tousled, her eyes dark and moist. Next to her was her dog-eared copy of Dark Before Dawn, the Chinese novel she’s been working on translating for months, and one of the yellow legal pads she’s been filling with notes. She joins Tandi and me for every meal, but refuses to eat until we’ve left the table. I haven’t seen the lower half of her face in quite a while. While I sipped my coffee and waited for Tandi, Wendy reminded me of an internship she began the summer before our wedding.
“Remember when I went to Cambridge for the internship? I was supposed to move into a basement apartment at my mentor’s house. A taxi dropped me off, I rang the doorbell, and when she answered, she stared at me for at least a minute then burst into tears. It turned out that an hour before I arrived, she’d learned that her sister and her sister’s family—the husband and their two young children—had been killed in an avalanche in the French Alps.”
I’d heard the story a hundred times, and I nodded along, but I was too giddy about the museum trip to absorb the tragedy. I visualized the scene as a cartoon: animated figures chased, caught, and buried by a monstrous snow-tsunami. I pictured heads popping up like whack-a-moles—the final head belonging to a Scooby Doo-ish Saint Bernard that shook its head and flung snow into the smiling faces of its family. And, God forgive me, I chuckled.
“Don’t be a shit.” Wendy’s mask absorbed little of her tone’s heat. “The poor woman was going to be my only contact for the entire summer.”
“Sorry.” I forced a frown. “Awful, right? Tragic. Everything about it sucks.” Why had that story popped into her thoughts on the morning of our liberty? Her gaze fell back to her book. For Wendy, there’s no such thing as clichés, no dead metaphors. If she called me a shit, that’s what she saw when she looked at me. And smelled? Her mask shifted a bit, and I knew she’d wrinkled her nose. “Sorry,” I repeated.
Tandi entered the kitchen, stood at the counter, and poured herself a bowl of Cheerios from the last cereal box we’d ever need delivered from Amazon. “Guess what I did last night,” she said as she added milk. “I got to nine-hundred thousand. Isn’t that great?”
I cocked my head. “Nine-hundred thousand what?”
“You know, Dad. I told you. You and Mom both.”
“Refresh my memory,” I said.
“My counting!” Tandi rolled her eyes. “You know—I’ve been doing it every night since first grade. For almost five years. I started at one. Every night I add five hundred. And last night I reached nine-hundred thousand.”
“Really?” I asked, wondering how this fact had escaped me in a house where the three of us had been sheltering so closely for endless months. “Every night?” I visualized Tandi in prison stripes scratching lines on a concrete wall. “You knew about this?” I asked Wendy, who shrugged noncommittally.
“Every single night, Daddy. When I was little I used to start right after you said, ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ I’m going to get to one million in two hundred days—that’s November 16.” She bounced a look between her mother and me. “Maybe we could have a party to celebrate.”
“Sure,” I said. “Or we could wait a week for Thanksgiving and have a Pi pie for a ‘numbers celebration.’” I peeked at Wendy, half-expecting the polka-dots on her mask to resolve into a recognizable expression, but her focus had dipped back to her Chinese novel. Maybe, by the time Tandi reached a million, my wife and I would be back to sleeping in the same bed. “How do you keep track, anyway?”
“A million deserves its own day. And I told you how I keep track,” Tandi muttered, exasperated.
“Well, I forgot. What, do you write it down someplace?”
“That’s cheating. I chant the number to myself. During dull times.”
“Really?” What counted as “dull”? Had I ever noticed her zoning out?
“Isn’t it time you left?” Wendy interrupted. “Probably a lot of people on the road won’t be used to driving. Be extra cautious.”
The instructor of “Kids Make Art” meets us at the classroom door, and I can’t help staring at her mouth: white teeth framed by bright red lips stretched in a broad smile. Her dark hair is wrapped in the kind of scarf I’m used to seeing covering faces, and I’m both confused and titillated, as if she’s showing too much cleavage, though her smock, with its museum logo, is buttoned up to her throat. I twitch in and out of my own grin, testing the feel and effect of it. It feels like I’m flirting. The instructor steps back, breaking eye contact.
“And who are you?” she asks Tandi, who’s staring past her into the classroom at the dozen or so children seated at tables covered with stacks of paper, paint jars, and brushes in jars of water. Standing against the back wall are half a dozen young adults also wearing museum smocks. All mouths grin, all pairs of eyes glitter.
“‘Tandi,” my daughter answers distractedly. This wouldn’t be a time to chant nine-hundred thousandwould it?
“Very good.” The instructor bats shadowed eyelids. “We’re about to get started. Tandi, you found a painting to inspire you?”
My silent daughter has the look of someone caught staring directly at a solar eclipse despite a stern warning. “Yes,” she finally says to the instructor. “Should I just sit anywhere?” When the woman nods, Tandi taps her cell phone pocket. “I’ll call you when we’re done,” she says then heads for a table.
“The session is ninety minutes,” the instructor tells me, adding confidentially, “It’s funny not to be social distancing, isn’t it?” She jabs a paintbrush toward the young adults. “These interns I’ve got from all the stalled college programs—they’re practically paralyzed. Nobody’s used to seeing so much of strangers’ faces. It’s almost too much. ‘Too close’ means much more than it used to.”
Is she commenting on the way I’ve been staring at her lips? She’s waiting for me to leave, but I feel stuck, and I think of the avalanche Wendy brought up this morning. My wife called me a shit. How I’m seen isn’t necessarily up to me.
“Ninety minutes,” I confirm.
It won’t be difficult to kill time in the museum. Hadn’t we all become experts at whiling away months during our confinement? At first, there were the hours each of us spent on Zoom—Tandi with school and Wendy and I with our jobs. Then the decision came to suspend school for the extra twelve months it was going to take to develop a vaccine. All students, regardless of grade, would be “left back” for a year. Around the same time, a universal job furlough with monthly stipends for every worker in the country was declared. Taxes were suspended for a year. The stock market was frozen in place. A “reorientation” period for workers will begin this Monday. For the time being, maybe forever, analysts and statisticians will continue working from home. Will it feel any less like we’re under house arrest? Without work to fill my day, I watched old movies and reread books I hadn’t thought about since high school, surprised by how much I’d missed first time around. School-less Tandi found ways to amuse herself. She read the books and watched the films I recommended and kept up with her friends on social media for a while. But Skyping and Facetime lost their attraction eventually—everybody’s experience was so similar, sharing with friends was too much like looking in the mirror. Simultaneously, we all began to prefer the ennui of isolation to socializing. Withdrawal became a habit. It was a surprise when secrets rose to the surface, like Tandi’s counting. And then there was Wendy’s Chinese.
The only foreign language my wife and I knew was our school French. We’d been to France the year before the pandemic, taking Tandi, who we assumed would begin the language once she started middle school. “We could have ‘French Day’ once a week.” We were just at the turning point in the pandemic where ambition still seemed possible. “Give Tandi a leg up for the future. Or what if we headed in a completely different direction and studied Spanish?” Wendy shook her head so hard at the suggestion her mask came loose.
“Not Spanish for me—” She covered up quickly after these last unmuffled words, and I was too surprised to take a good look at the mouth I’d been missing. “I decided to teach myself Chinese,” she said.
“Chinese? Really? Have you found a course of study? Something online?”
Wendy adjusted her mask. “No. I think it would be a fun challenge to try to figure it out on my own. I ordered a book in Chinese from Amazon. A novel. In Mandarin. The title is translated as ‘Dark Before Dawn.’ I’m going to use the title as a key to untangling the Chinese letters—characters. I’ll look for patterns. Don’t you think every language is really just a big cryptogram?”
Wendy’s plan sounded impossible to me. Distill a whole language from three words? My wife is extremely intelligent, but she’d been educated as a mathematician, not a linguist. I didn’t object, though it seemed she’d be more likely to invent a pattern than discover one. Did she want anything more than a private language that belonged just to her?
“That’ll keep you busy,” is all I said, and a few days later Dark Before Dawn was delivered to our stoop, along with a stack of yellow legal pads. Wendy sat down at the kitchen table to work, and I looked over her shoulder at the text she flipped through—page after page of incomprehensible characters. I’d forgotten that Chinese was written vertically. Tandi sidled over to have a look.
“Maybe we’ll go to China someday, after the pandemic,” she said. “Mommy can be our translator. Go, Mommy!” She rubbed her mother’s shoulder, just as Wendy drew a bold slash across her pad. I kept my doubts to myself about the likelihood of future vacations.
I’m on my own now, in the galleries, headed for a restroom. An hour and a half to wander. The museum’s not as crowded as I thought it might be. I pass a few couples and loners like me; we make nervous eye contact and exchange smiles. Several times I check myself from side-stepping to create more space—how long before we lose that habit? And we’re all a little frightened by each other’s in-the-flesh Joker grins.
I find the restrooms. A copy of the male half of Durer’s Adam and Eve woodcut distinguishes the men’s. As I unzip, I think about fig leaves. Above the urinals, sinks, and hand dryers, bold-faced signs admonish patrons to “WASH HANDS FOR 20 SECONDS!”
Back out in the museum, I meander for a while, half-intending to get lost. Standing at the entrance to the gallery where Tandi and I had found Isabella and the Pot of Basil, the guard coughs as I pass, ducking his head into the crook of his arm, and my heart flutters like a sparrow trapped in a chimney. He looks at me apologetically, keeping his arm over his mouth like a caped vampire. I hurry past and shove through several sets of glass doors before turning into a dark gallery full of mid-nineteenth century American portraits. I aim for the bench in the middle of the room, take a seat, and gaze around me at the bloodless faces of mutton-chopped men, bonneted women, and pale, unsmiling children. Am I their first visitor in two years? Their eyes meet mine, but without light or challenge. But when I stand to leave, I have the odd feeling that I’m being touched—pawed at—by dozens of invisible hands. “No!” I say sharply, swatting at my shoulders and hips. Invisible fingers caress my neck as I rush out the gallery door back into the corridor. Do I hear papery whispers gossiping behind me? I hurry toward another set of glass doors below a sign that reads “Art of the Ancient World.” Ignoring a sign that says “Early Chinese Dynasties,” I push through despite—or because of—my wife’s new hobby.
Instead, I find myself wandering through a maze formed by Egyptian sarcophagi and glass cases full of decrepit mummies. I pause to check the time, but before I can fish my phone out of my pocket, a young voice stops me cold:
“Hello.”
“Hello,” I answer hesitantly, peering around a statue of a dog-headed god to find a boy, a tween not much older than Tandi. He’s leaning forward in his wheelchair, staring into a display case.
“Not you,” the young man says without facing me. “I’m talking to Ta-Iset. From the Akmimh region, west of the Nile, 350 BC-ish. He was just a toddler when he died and got gift-wrapped.”
I examine the ragged baby-bundle in the case, then sniff sharply at what lies next to it: a bundled head the size of a cabbage. Lorenzo, I think, as if the head of Isabella’s lover had somehow escaped its pot and rolled all the way back through history to ancient Egypt. I realize I’m stooping over the kid and step back. He laughs and throws me a look over his shoulder.
“Hey, it’s okay—social distancing is dead, remember? This is May Day!” The lower half of his face is covered with a mask the same blue as his sweater. Both are marked with a St. Anselm Prep emblem, which on the mask looks like the tooth-filled mouth of a barracuda. “Like my mask?” he asks. “Me and my friends think they’re cool, so we’re waiting for our teacher to make us take them off. Not a word, so far, though. He’s calling our bluff. He let us go off on our own during lunch.” He turns back to the case, looking at the head. “Tomb robbers got the rest of this guy. It says he’s ‘unidentified.’” The boy cranes his neck, peering past me. “You didn’t see any kids with masks like mine did you? We’re playing hide and seek. I’m great at hiding in this museum. My father used to bring me here every weekend after my parents got divorced. I’d hide on him for hours sometimes. That was all back when I was a kid.” He jerks a hand in the air and cocks his head. “Shh—you hear something?”
I hold my breath. My pulse drums a dull rhythm in my ears. I pry my attention loose from the mummified head. “Nope,” I say. “Don’t hear a thing. I dropped my daughter off for an art class. Do you know Isabella and the Pot of Basil? In the American wing? She’s using it for inspiration.”
The boy studies me as if I’m tucked in the case between little Ta-Iset and the head. The lighting is weak, and I can’t tell if his eyes are black or dark blue. “That’s a creepy painting,” he mutters. “There are heads all over this place. Hey, take your hand off the glass. No touching!”
I yank my palm from the case as if I’d been burned.
“You smudged it,” the kid snorts. “Just a day ago we would have wiped the glass off with disinfectant. Now nobody will bother with it for years. Our mummy friends will be talking about your lifeline like it’s a work of art.”
“Hey,” he says to the inhabitants of the case, “you’re looking at the handprint of a guy with a daughter who likes creepy paintings.”
I try to picture Isabella, but it’s Wendy in her polka-dotted mask I see gazing at the ceramic pot. I feel a tug on my sleeve.
“You want to see something really cool?” He urges, pointing down a narrow corridor lined with cases full of urns. “Roll me this way.” I grab the handles of his chair, and he gives a wave to the case we’re leaving. “Later, guys.”
I surrender to the kid’s directions, turning “Right!” then “Left!” on command. I wonder, what keeps him confined to the chair? A permanent affliction? He looks sturdy enough, a little pale, but aren’t we all after two years in isolation? He’s not wearing a cast or leg brace of any kind. When a hallway intersects, he looks to the right and left, then twists to look up at me. “Anybody behind us?”
I check. “Not a soul.”
“How old is your daughter?” he asks.
“Ten.”
“What’s her favorite subject? Art?”
The question stumps me. That’s something a dad should know. But after a year without school the idea of “subjects” has faded away. I wonder what the deal is with prep schools like Saint Anselm’s. “She likes everything,” I say. Then I remember Tandi’s counting. “Math probably the most. Tandi’s been counting to a million. She got to nine-hundred thousand last night. She adds five hundred each night, so she’ll get to one million in two hundred days.”
My companion mulls this over, then settles back in his chair. “Whoa.”
“It’s taken almost five years for her to get so far. And my wife’s teaching herself Chinese.”
“Un-hunh,” the kid says. “Turn left. We’re almost there.”
I hesitate. “The sign says ‘STAFF ONLY.’”
“I’m pretty sure nobody comes down here. At least they didn’t use to. You’ll see. It’s just storage. Come on.”
I wheel him up to a set of massive wooden doors. The kid reaches forward and twists the knob. The door gives.
“Unlocked. Back us through.”
I do as he directs, pull him into the room, and pivot the chair. We’ve entered a huge space, stuffed with dozens of statues. Along one wall, faded purple drapes cover tall windows. A bulb-less chandelier hangs from a high-arched ceiling between rows of fluorescent lights that blinked to life when we entered.
“The lights are motion sensitive,” the kid says. “Welcome to the world’s biggest closet. It used to be a ballroom back before they built the addition. Now they use it to store statues they don’t need anymore. Broken ones, I guess. Stuff they can’t identify.”
“Redundancies,” I suggest. “If there’s too much of something.”
“Whatever. Push me down there, to the back corner.” The wheelchair tires squeak over the old wooden floor. The air is stale. Probably no one’s breathed it since the last time this kid was here. “Stop!” The boy’s voice cracks with excitement. I let go of his chair and wipe my palms on my thighs. Unless they’re playing coy, the statues surrounding me seem indifferent to our presence. What am I doing in this remote spot with a kid I don’t even know? What do I say if someone discovers us—a museum official or his teacher? I fumble for excuses: I found him here, lost or Isn’t this the way to the education center?
Suddenly, I find myself staring at the statue directly to my left, the limbless, headless body of a reclining woman. Breasts, belly, hips, and thighs were chiseled from white stone.
“Not that one. I’m talking about this guy.” The boy is gesturing at the sculpture to our right, the tall figure of a man. The deeply cut eyes are vacant, the mouth somber. A stone beard descends to the middle of his chest. He’s lost his arms, but the cornucopia of fruit and vegetables they would have carried hangs at his waist. Below the cornucopia and above the figure’s slim legs is an enormous erect prick.
The kid giggles through his mask. “Isn’t that something?”
Aghast at the shocking presence of the huge erection, I look over my shoulder through the scattered statues, certain someone is recording the scene. Our total isolation doesn’t ease my discomfort.
“We’d better go,” I say.
“He’s Priapus, the Roman god of fertility. He keeps on keeping it up. Get it?”
My mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. I back away and bump into the female torso. Reaching out for balance, I cup a stone-cold breast and jerk my hand away.
“Oops!” the kid calls. “Maybe you—”
But whatever he means to say next is cut off by a booming cry that clubs me from behind.
“Tag!”
I spin and discover a swirling chaos of flying bodies. Statues come to life? An army of museum guards? No. Sweaters and masks with barracuda mouths identify the intruders. It’s the St. Anselm’s crew, in full feeding frenzy. The boys ricochet among the statues, circling closer and closer, until a chubby blond lumbers near enough to swat my companion on the shoulder.
“Tag, Simon. You’re it!” the boy puffs, then rejoins his classmates, who pause, panting, and ogle the wheelchair boy and me like we’re lab specimens. I raise empty hands and struggle to keep from glancing at Priapus or the torso.
A chorus of adolescent voices fractures the silence: “It!” “Simon’s it!” “Run!” The masked boys dash out the doorway. I flush with relief.
“I’m It!” my young guide cries. Which means what? What are the game’s rules? Who is he to chase? Am I expected to wheel him off in hot pursuit of his buddies? If he asks, I’ll refuse; if he protests, I’ll roll him to his to his teacher. Look what I found, I’ll say, and we adults will share an uneasy laugh. I take a deep breath and pat the phone in my pocket. Ninety minutes has surely passed. Time to pick up Tandi. Nine-hundred thousand, I remind myself.
I hear rattling and turn to the wheelchair, where the boy is wriggling violently. Seizure disorder? I grasp the handles, and then, astoundingly, the kid is up and on his feet—standing and facing me. He’s shorter than I am, but tall for a middle schooler, and a bit gangly. His hair is sweat-pasted to his forehead and temples, and his cheeks are flaming. A chortle escapes from behind his mask.
This couldn’t be a miracle. The kid steps around the chair, shrugs, and sticks out the elbow the pandemic has taught him to extend instead of his hand. I reflexively bend my arm and we touch through the fabric of our sweaters.
“Thanks,” he says. “Just a game, you know.” He looks past me toward the corridor, eager to follow his classmates.
“Go ahead,” I say. “You’re It.” And he’s off, leaving at a brisk walk that accelerates to a trot and then to a full sprint. At the doorway he skids to a stop and turns on his heel.
“Good luck to your daughter,” he calls. “With getting to a million, I mean.”
I wave to his back.
I’m left in the room of broken sculptures. A former ballroom, the kid said. Alone, my presence is easy to explain: Lost. Dead-ended. Priapus and the torso? Just two more rejected statues. The wheelchair? Don’t know anything about it.
Then I think of Wendy, my masked wife, bent over the kitchen table, absorbed by her private puzzle. On a whim, I pull out my phone and call her cell. “Wendy is unavailable,” her recorded voice tells me, “please leave a message.” I try our landline, which rings ten times before I hear myself: “We can’t come to the phone right now. Listen for the tone, then, well, you know what to do.” It’s the same message we’ve had since before the pandemic, even after friends and relatives told us it confused them. I hang up for the second time.
Suddenly, the phone frets in my grip like a tiny creature plucked from a nest. Wendy? No, it’s Tandi. As I answer, I sink into the chair, overcome with weariness, but Priapus is aiming his prick straight at my face, and I shut my eyes and spring to my feet a moment before I hear my daughter’s voice.
“Dad? What’s up? We’re done here. I did a drawing.”
“Sorry,” I say, maneuvering around the wheelchair, my safety in doubt until I put the god behind me. “Got side-tracked.”
“Well, hurry. The teacher is acting like it’s my fault you’re not here yet. I’m the last one.”
“On my way,” I say, and following the path of the St. Anselm boys through the statuary and across the warping boards of the old ballroom, I don’t look back.
“You know what I drew?” Tandi asks. “I did my own Isabella and the Pot of Basil. In my drawing you can see Lorenzo’s head in the pot. I made it like a fishbowl, you know? Lorenzo is looking at Isabella and smiling. She’s crying. I think she can see him. I think. That’s funny, right? It’s my own picture, and I don’t know if Isabella can see Lorenzo. Or if she’s crying for him or just for herself. Do you think we can get a postcard of the painting at the gift shop? So Mommy and I can compare my drawing to the real thing?”
I’m moving fast now, gaining momentum, already back among the Egyptian sarcophagi. Earlier the exhibit had seemed such a labyrinth, but now I hardly break stride as I weave through on my way to my daughter. “Good idea,” I say, controlling my breath to disguise my haste. “Tell the instructor I’m almost there.”