Peonies

Every Sunday for as long as she could remember, there had been women in her grandfather’s yard, sitting on the pink plastic lawn chairs, entirely naked except for some strong, spare ornamentation—a tuft of feathers behind one ear, a string of eyeteeth around their necks. They were bronzed from shoulder to shoulder—no interruptions, no strap-size white mark—in a way that made Dari more embarrassed than their nakedness did. She was mature; art was a thing she understood; it required women to stand half-slumped against garden walls, entirely nude, so that they could be reproduced in gouache and white marble. But if these women didn’t have tan lines, they had to be naked nearly all the time. All the time wasn’t art.

Her grandfather painted them for hours, his brush hardly shaking, his sweat-whitened Dodgers hat pulled low around his ears. Hats must fit better, Dari thought, if you had no hair.

But even her grandfather took small breaks. The women, even when they weren’t modeling, were always models. Until they got to a certain age. Then Dari wouldn’t see them anymore.

The women smoked when her grandfather took his breaks. When the women finished their cigarettes, they flicked them into the kiddie pool, where they flickered lightly and failed. Smells of a sad campfire.

They were always surrounded by peonies. Peonies, people said, were her grandfather’s signature. Why make a flower, Dari thought, when you could just sign your name?

When she had paper, she would sometimes draw, but mainly she would practice writing her signature frankly, on everything. Someday she would sign checks with her grandfather’s flamboyance and authority. And when she had passed over some undetectable line and become famous, her signatures would stop being signatures and would become autographs.

She liked the models because they regarded their bodies as work, as entertainment. They spent hours training their long, glossy hair into curls. They wore dark lipstick. They taught her how to blot her face with toilet paper, never tissues. A set of older sisters, initiating her into the cult.

And it was a cult. A devotion to beauty.

Dari wanted to grow up to be devastating. She practiced devastating looks in the mirror. They were not entirely effective.

Lila, walking by: “If you’re not careful, your face will keep that way.”

They loved her, even if they never really liked her. First of all because she was a child. This was all play to her, until one day it would be deadly serious, it would be a matter of her youth.

Model: “Look at that. I mean really, look at that.”

They all turned to look at Dari. Hushed faces, hushed eyes. Dark honey.

“You remember having arms that little? God. I would kill for arms that little.”

“They say having a child makes you, I don’t know, appreciate life. Like you’re supposed to be smashing through the rosebushes or something. Now, me—me who never, I never hated anyone—I see children, I hate children.”

“Yeah, OK. Never hated anyone.”

“A saint. Real saint, ladies.”

“Children teach you how to hate people.”

“What a saint this woman is. A real role model.”

“Look at it reasonably,” someone said.

The second reason they could not like her was because they understood their own status here. They were simply passing through. Perhaps one or two of them would appear in a painting that became valuable. Memorialized as a swipe of lavender, a navy-colored breast. But Dari was the granddaughter. She would always be remembered alongside the painter. She would not age out of this, whatever this was. For her, makeup was play. It was not immortality.

She was flattered by their attention. But still, she could not help noticing the difference between talking with them and talking with someone her own age. They seemed to have a kind of halfway imagination; they talked about how much they wanted silk-screened scarves, to meet Cary Grant, to visit Paris, but they never took the necessary step. What would they do with the scarves? What would...