by Leslie Haynsworth

That whole summer when Callie was sixteen and was so afraid to do anything more than she had to just to stay alive that she spent as much of each day as possible sitting by the lake eating apples and doing crossword puzzles, her grandfather Crenshaw devoted as much of his own time as possible to becoming an artist. A landscape painter, he said. That was his goal. He’d gone to Washington in April to visit his dying sister, and while there he’d spent an afternoon at the National Gallery and then come back saying he was going to be a landscape painter. For the rest of April and most of May, he drove 30 miles into Columbia almost every day to take private lessons from one of the art professors at the university, and then, from June on, every afternoon from 2:00 to 7:30, he’d set up his easel in his backyard, angling it in a slightly different direction each time, and paint whatever it was that he saw.
Since his backyard was right across the cove from Callie’s, and since she was spending so much of her own time sitting still by the lake, sometimes what he saw included Callie. There she was, in early June, eating a green apple in the bottom right corner of one picture; there she was again six weeks later, more in the center of things this time, stretched out on her side in the grass having a nap. Although the apple, she thought when he showed her the pictures, had almost certainly actually been yellow rather than green; she was not partial to green apples, and so her mother rarely bought them.
It could, she supposed, have been a trick of the light that made her yellow apple appear green to her grandfather. Light refracted off of bright summer grass might well cast a greenish reflection onto the pale shiny skin of a yellow apple. But then again, it could be that her grandfather, his vision not so good now that he was in his late 60s, and made worse by all that squinting into the bright summer light for so many hours each afternoon in order to become a landscape painter, had simply taken a guess at the color of the apple, had discerned from across the lake its fundamental, essential appleness but not its particulars, and so, knowing no more about the apple than that it was an apple, had made the rest of it up.
It made her nervous. The paintings were a record, a visible, tangible record, of who she was at each particular moment, and so of how, despite all her efforts to the contrary, she might be changing. And also of how you could never be sure that a yellow apple wouldn’t, for any one of a number of reasons, look to someone else as if it were green.
The reason Callie didn’t want to do anything that summer besides sit by the lake doing crossword puzzles was that she was afraid that otherwise she wouldn’t be able to help changing, and that then when Brad Lawhorne came back from the summer camp in North Carolina where he was working as a golf instructor, whatever it was he had loved (or at least was beginning to love) in her would be gone. Or, almost worse, if not gone, might still be hidden from his sight, obscured by what was new in her, still there but beyond his powers of perception to recognize. Just as it was beyond her grandfather’s power to recognize that no apple in her hand would ever be green.
She couldn’t read any books that summer, then, because reading might, as it had done before, cause her to see things in a different light. To become, in unexpected and uncontrollable ways, a different person. Likewise spending time with her friends: not feeling the same imperative that she did to stay the same, they’d be changing all the time, and their changedness would, she knew, be contagious. The night before he left for the camp in North Carolina, she and Brad Lawhorne had stood together, side by side, right here in her backyard, looking out at the lake together, and he had taken her hand in his own and touched her fingers softly and told her how happy it made him just to be with her, that everything about her was perfect, just right just the way it was. After which how could she not do all that was in her power to keep herself as much the same as she could for as long as she possibly could?

 

 

The landscape painting drove Callie’s grandmother and Uncle Henry crazy. “Forty-two years as a lawyer, six months he’s retired, and now this,” said her grandmother. “We were supposed to go to Paris with the Hopgoods in September, you know, but now he says we can’t, or at least he can’t, because of some nonsense about the uniqueness of the first autumn light over the lake.”
“It’s this business with Talia that started it,” said Uncle Henry. Talia was Callie’s grandfather’s dying sister in Washington, who had not in fact died yet but still might at any moment. “He’s trying to stave off thoughts about his own mortality, which is perfectly understandable, I suppose, but he’s making a damn fool of himself going about it like this.”
“He could stave off thoughts of his mortality just as well in Paris,” said Grandmother Crenshaw. “Don’t you think, Marianne?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Callie’s mother shrugged. “To each his own, said the old lady as she kissed the cow.”
They were all in Callie’s kitchen, watching Grandfather Crenshaw through the big bay window that looked out over the lake. “He’s going to get heatstroke if he keeps this up,” said Uncle Henry, “out there for so long on a day like this.” He picked up another brownie from the plate on the table in front of him and took a big bite. Crumbs rolled down his shirtfront onto the kitchen floor. “You should tell him, Marianne,” he said. “You’re the only one he really listens to. Tell him he’s going to kill himself if he doesn’t watch out.”
Callie, who’d just come into the kitchen to get another apple, noticed that her mom looked tired, like she wanted her mother and brother (and daughter too?) out of her kitchen. Her mom’s eyes were not on Uncle Henry himself but on the crumbs he’d scattered all about himself on her floor. If Callie had dropped the crumbs, her mother would have slapped a broom in her hand and expected the mess to be gone by the time she turned around. But you couldn’t imagine anyone asking Uncle Henry to clean up after himself. Uncle Henry was a psychiatrist. He had more important things to think about than what happened to the bits of food that didn’t make it into his mouth.
“Callie, good gracious, honey,” said her grandmother just as Callie’s hand closed around a Golden Delicious from the bowl by the sink, “I swear you look like you’ve grown two inches in the last month.”
It wasn’t true. She knew that. She hadn’t grown at all in almost two years. Her grandmother had it wrong. But still, she had to fight the urge to run, to race down the hall to her parents’ bathroom and climb up on the old doctor’s scale that measured height as well as weight. Just to check. Just to be sure.

 

 

Later that afternoon, when it was just Callie and her mom in the kitchen, making supper together like they did almost every afternoon, her mom looked up from the peaches she was peeling and frowned and said, “Sweetheart, I do hope you haven’t forgotten to write Mrs. Hopgood a little thank-you note.”
Callie ground her teeth. She hadn’t forgotten; she just didn’t want to do it. The Hopgoods had invited her to the beach next week, and only reason they’d done it was so she’d be on hand to babysit their grandchildren while they and their daughters played golf. But because they had pretended to be extending this wonderful offer of a beach vacation, she was supposed to pretend to be grateful. It was what most infuriated her about her mom, how she always did everything according to such a rigid code of rules, as if stepping one inch out of line would make the whole world turn against her. And then seemed to spend every moment that she wasn’t following her rules drilling them into Callie. Her mother didn’t even like Mrs. Hopgood very much. And she was the one who had said, when the invitation came, that it would be a shame for Callie to spend one of the last weeks of the summer cooped up in a condo at Litchfield with a bunch of preschoolers. But that didn’t matter. The rules said you had to write a thank-you note anyway. Just like the rules said someone else always had to clean up after Uncle Henry, since he was too important to do it himself. And there, look, under the kitchen table, no crumbs were in sight. Her mother had already swept them all up. Just as she was supposed to.
Thinking about it all, Callie poked too hard at the hamburger she was browning on the stove. A blob of meat flew out of the skillet, and before she could bend down to retrieve it, Florence, the dog, appeared out of nowhere and gobbled it up. Suddenly, unexpectedly, her mom started laughing. She laughed so hard she had to stop peeling the peaches and sit down at the table to catch her breath. “Oh, honey,” she said, when she’d calmed down enough to get the words out, “did you see what Florence looked like when your grandfather painted her?”
And Callie had to laugh too, because she had seen. In real life, Florence was a svelte little border collie. But in her grandfather’s painting, she seemed to have become a misshapen, multicolored Labrador retriever, with a massive, blocky body, stubby little legs and a square head. “Oh,” her mom gasped, “he’s a terrible painter, isn’t he?”
Then she stopped laughing. “But you know,” she said, “I’m so glad for him, really. After all that time, always doing what was expected of him, he’s finally getting to do what he wants to do. And so what if he’s rotten at it? And so what if it makes him look a little eccentric? It’s also making him happy.”

 

 

The next morning, Callie went around the cove to the barn where her grandfather was keeping his paintings and pulled out all the ones in which she appeared. Laying them side by side on the floor, she studied them carefully. The evidence, as she’d suspected it would be, was unmistakable: even in the dim, barn-filtered light, even with all her grandfather’s considerable faults as a painter, no one who looked at the paintings could avoid knowing that over the summer Callie had changed. Her hair was lighter in the later pictures, her freckles darker, her arms rounder. Probably no one could spend so much time sitting still in the grass eating apples without gaining a little weight. And certainly if she’d thought about it, she would have known that her hair would bleach under all that summer sun.
Somehow, she wasn’t as upset about it as she thought she’d be. She’d worked so hard for so many weeks to accomplish nothing, to keep herself in stasis, believing that in so doing she was accomplishing everything that mattered. And here was the visible proof that she’d failed.
But what she kept thinking about was her mother. Cleaning up after Uncle Henry. Baking her father all those homemade pies. (And then, when he changed as a result of eating them, just smiling and saying, well, the more of you there is, the more of you there is to love.) But did her mom really like it that her father had gotten kind of fat? Or that he always expected supper at 7:00 on the dot? Or that even now that she was 41 years old, she still lived right across the cove from her parents, both of whom felt free to drop by unannounced whenever they felt like it?
Brad Lawhorne had thick, curly red-gold hair, and warm gold-brown eyes, and when she’d watched him last winter on the basketball court, seen the easy confidence with which he handled the ball and the lean sleekness of the muscles in his arms, she’d thought he was almost too perfect to be real. All January and February, she’d sat in her geometry class daydreaming about what it would be like to have those strong arms wrap themselves around her as they sat by the lake in the moonlight. She’d almost failed geometry that term; her mother had had to send her to a private tutor. And then she and Brad had both been cast in the spring musical, and the night of the cast party he’d kissed her on Nancy Livingston’s sofa, and it had felt like everything she’d wanted most in life had happened just the way she’d dreamed it, which made it all so precarious, so too-good-to-be-true, that she had known it was going to take all her powers of will to keep the dream going.
But this time next year, after spending one last summer at the camp in North Carolina, Brad would go to Wofford College, where all the Lawhornes went. And when he finished, he’d come back home and go to work in his dad’s insurance agency. In a few years, he’d be too busy and too important to clean up after himself. Someone else would have to do it for him.
That afternoon after lunch, she went into her room and dug out the summer reading list the school had sent her back in May. Crime and Punishment. A Farewell to Arms. Jane Eyre. Moby-Dick. Pride and Prejudice. The logical thing to do would be to start at the top of the list. Or to start with Pride and Prejudice, since all her friends who had already read it said it was so good it was almost hard to believe you were reading it for school. But last summer when her cousin Walter was reading Moby-Dick, he’d said it was the craziest book he’d ever read. And she was kind of in the mood for crazy. All five books were there on her bookshelf, bought by her mother the day after they got the list, and now wedged in a tight row between her old Nancy Drews and Harlequin Romances. She wiggled Moby-Dick out carefully, then curled up on her bed with it and started to read.

 

 

Leslie Haynsworth is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of South Carolina. Her work has previously appeared, or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, The Common Review, CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual, The Battered Suitcase, Up the Staircase, Marie Claire, and elsewhere. She is fiction editor for Yemassee, and publications editor for the University of South Carolina College of Arts & Sciences.