The Best of Pickering

Still Life

Still Life a still life has always hung over the sideboard in my parents’ dining room. When I was small the painting frightened me, and I wouldn’t look at it. The varnish over the oils had aged and turning dark hid the fruits in a pall of shadows. Like creatures from a troubling, halfremembered dream, forms hovered circular and indistinct on the edge of vision. In the painting fruits were piled on a table, covered with a white cloth. On the lower left side of the painting were pineapples, one cut open, its color pale and tubercular, like some entrail sliced in half, ‹rst wet and glistening then browning as it dried. Next to the pineapples were three pomegranates, one torn apart, seeds spilling across the tablecloth like drops of old blood, cracking and ›aking. Behind and above the fruit was a greenish ›agon, its spout hooked like the beak of a vulture and light preening from its sides like feathers iridescent in a broken shade. Along the lower right side of the painting were more pomegranates , translucent grapes, their leaves waxy in decay, and then a peach, broken open, the pit still in place and bulging like a tumor. In the shadows behind was a ›uted bowl, rolling with what seemed to be apples, grapes, and peaches. Until this year I wasn’t sure what lurked in the background because I had never examined the painting closely. Then during a visit to Nashville in March, I took the painting from the wall and placing it in the sunlight looked at it carefully. Under the varnish brightness ›owed like spring. Instead of white the pineapple was yellow, and the texture of the fruit was delicately, lovingly drawn. For their part the pomegranate seeds resembled red violets, not splintering, but glowing with promise and fertility. Instead of a vulture, craw swollen with carrion, the ›agon smacked of newly turned earth and vines heavy with blossoms. Colors ran across the painting like a rainbow, down through the apples and across the grapes to the peach pit, pink and breathing, then over the pomegranates up through the pineapple to a stalk of ‹rm, green leaves, tapering to sharp golden quills.
275 For a moment I was elated. If the painting were cleaned and hung over the mantel in our living room in Connecticut, it would glow throughout the year, I thought, like a warm welcoming ‹re, lifting expectations and pushing sadness out of sight into corners. That moment, though, passed quickly; something there was in me that preferred dark to light. Youth and the time of extravagant expectation were over, and instead of attracting, bright color, more often than not, repulses me. Rather than promising a future shining with lively possibility , colors remind me of joy left behind, all those things I once did and can never do again, all the things I imagined doing and now know I will never do. No longer did the painting frighten me, and as I hung it back above the sideboard, I realized I would not have it cleaned. Although part of me wanted light promise and bright hope to whistle through life, I could not help being drawn toward melancholy. There in the gloom about the ›uted bowl and ›agon lay my future, bleak reality, not now the easy intangible ›uff of a child’s dream. Of course in contemplating the shadows of my still life, I occasionally see fruits clearly, apples red and orange, and peaches pink and fuzzy. Not only that, I am not always melancholy; in fact I frequently behave in ways more fruity than funereal. I have a bad back and three mornings a week I swim a half or two-thirds of a mile in the university pool. Swimming is boring; all one does is splash back and forth from one end of the pool to the other. Talking is impossible. The person who tries to talk is sure to swallow a mouthful of water, if not drown. After the swim the silence of the pool continues into the shower. Nakedness inhibits conversation and bathers turn their backs on words and each other, single -mindedly gripping soap and scrubbing. Like a grape unnoticed in the background of the still life, most mornings I pass unobtrusively through the shower, washing quickly and silently. Occasionally, however , words like fruit will ferment and last Wednesday when I walked into the shower and saw eight silent strangers, words burst out. “Well, girls,” I...