"Certain Kinds of Lighting" by Sarah Mollie Silberman
A week after Jonathan and Rachel became engaged, they drove to his mother's house for the weekend. She lived forty-five minutes outside of Philadelphia, in a neighborhood of wraparound porches and slate walkways that ran along neat, green lawns; her porch had a wooden swing and an antique watering can, or at least a watering can designed to look antique, and a pot of flowers the precise yellow of the front door. Paper lanterns hung like tiny, uniform planets above the railing.Rachel shaded her eyes and tried to picture the interior of the house: a place where faded pencil marks inched up the doorframe in the master bedroom, where the kitchen pantry was lined with jars of homemade fruit preserves and loaves of twelve-grain bread and where, as an adolescent, Jonathan had been permitted to watch movies on a boxy television--a small television, in spite of what they could afford--that contained nudity but not gratuitous violence. “It makes complete sense,” she said, “that you grew up here.”Jonathan did not seem to hear her. He had turned to look at the old VW parked in the driveway. “My mother always leaves the windows in her car rolled down,” he said. “She could drive home in a thunderstorm and she would leave them rolled down.” He pulled at the strap of his duffel bag, climbed the porch steps, and turned the knob on the front door. Rachel followed.Inside, a staircase rose to the right of the entryway, its banister fashioned from a long, sculptural piece of metal. To the left sat a room with two windows dressed in sheer white fabric, a round coffee table built from a red and white Texaco sign, and a wine-colored fainting couch. A mobile constructed from fishing wire and the wheels of a disassembled clock drifted over the couch, and across from it stood a line of small canvases propped on the mantel.Rachel stepped closer and lifted her sunglasses. “Your mother's?” she said.The paintings, each barely larger than a postcard, showed a series of tired-looking buildings--a barn, a single-story home, a warehouse--that stood against a watery sky. In spite of the scale, each image possessed a startling precision; it was possible to discern the blades of yellowing grass that scratched against the warehouse door. “Last year she did a series on the town where she grew up, outside of Pittsburgh.” Jonathan said. “Which means she spent a whole year painting rundown buildings.”“I generally prefer buildings to people,” Meredith said. She leaned in the doorway to the kitchen, her arms crossed loosely at her waist. “Buildings have a kind of dignity, whereas people always seem slightly ridiculous.” Barefoot, in a man's oxford shirt rolled to her elbows and a pair of fitted charcoal pants, she resembled a model in the type of women's catalog that referred to shirts as “tunics” and attempted to equate late middle age with vitality, except she had allowed her hair to turn grey.Meredith crossed the room and placed her hand on Rachel's elbow, squeezing it lightly. “You're prettier every time I see you,” she said. “But thin enough to snap in half.”Rachel, who had met Jonathan's mother on two previous occasions, laughed nervously.Jonathan dropped the duffel bag and walked over to kiss Meredith on the cheek. “I remember that shirt,” he said.“Your father used to wear it to board meetings,” Meredith said. She set a hand just below Jonathan's left ear, on his jawbone, and studied his face closely, as though looking for someone in particular. “I believe it cost more than the house.”Jonathan smiled dryly. “Try not to get any paint on it,” he said.Meredith laughed and wiped her hands down the front, along the blue and white stripes. “It's been two years, she said. “By now he's probably found several other shirts.” At the kitchen table, they sat over jam jars of iced tea and listened to the ice cubes clink against the glass.“I thought I'd cook dinner for the three of us tonight,” Jonathan said. “Would that be okay?”“Of course,” Meredith said. She turned to Rachel. “I used to think it was important for a man to be able to build things. A nice, sturdy bookshelf, maybe. I suppose that seems odd.”“Not at all,” Rachel said.“But there's something about a man who can cook, isn't there?” Meredith said. “I liked that about Jonathan's father, very much.” She set her glass on the table and slid it forward, like a chess piece. “He left a strange message on the answering machine a few days ago,” she continued. “Which leads me to assume he knows about your engagement.”“I talked to him over the weekend, after I spoke with you,” Jonathan said.“And?”“And now he knows.”“And have you set a date?”“We thought in early October,” Rachel said. “Before it gets too cold.”“You're not wearing a ring,” Meredith said, smiling. She squeezed a slice of lemon and dropped it into her glass. “Was Jonathan too sensible to buy you a diamond?”“Too sensible?”“Fiscally.”Rachel laughed and glanced briefly at Jonathan. “I guess I figured I had the rest of my life to wear one,” she said.Meredith considered her own hand, which was folded in her lap, and nodded. “Smart girl,” she said.“Actually,” Jonathan said. He lifted his glass from the table and wiped a ring of condensation with the palm of his hand. “I thought I could give Rachel Nana's ring.”Meredith was quiet for a moment. “You want to give her Evelyn's ring,” she said.“Dad suggested it. He said you would want Rachel to have it.”Jonathan's mother placed her hand on the table and looked at the finger, now bare, that had once held her mother-in-law's wedding band. “I almost lost Evelyn's ring once, on one of your father's trips to Florida,” she said. “I knew perfectly well that he would be in meetings the entire time but I wanted to go anyway, just so I could resent him for it. That was how badly I wanted a fight.” She tapped on her ring finger on the table. “In any event,” she said, “I nearly lost it in the fountain of the hotel.”“Does it qualify as losing,” Jonathan said, “if you do it on purpose?”“Rachel would be more than welcome to have Evelyn's ring,” Meredith said. “But your father is the one who has it.”“He said you had it.”“No,” Meredith said, firmly. “When he decided to move out, I left it on the bookshelf in the bedroom. And after he left, Evelyn's ring was gone.”“It was gone,” Jonathan said, slowly, looking directly at his mother.“Yes,” she said. “He took it with him.” Rachel took a sip from her second glass of iced tea--she had added rum, upon Meredith's suggestion--as Jonathan sliced a shallot into paper-thin strips. He worked quickly, with relaxed and capable hands that Rachel admired at strange times: as he pried a piece of bread from the mouth of the toaster oven, or removed his eyeglasses, folding and unfolding the plastic arms absently. At a party two years earlier, Jonathan had dipped a finger into a plastic cup of red wine, removing a piece of cork, and though they had never spoken, Rachel felt compelled to take hold of his necktie (green and white stripes, silk, the only necktie in the room) in order to pull him toward her. It remained one of the few times she had ever seen him flustered.“I know you know this,” Rachel said. She glanced at the stairway that led to the second floor, to the bedroom and studio where Meredith had gone to work. “But I have no particular need for your grandmother's engagement ring. For any engagement ring, really.”“I know that,” Jonathan said. “I want you to have it, anyway.”“Why?”Jonathan paused at the cutting board and looked up. “Why does my mother need it?”“She was married for half of her life, and now she's not,” Rachel said. “That would be difficult.”“You're right,” he said. “But my mother, she extracts the most possible difficulty from every situation. It's what she does.”“You're not being fair.”“She threw her engagement ring into a fountain,” he said. “I mean, what is that?”“She only thought about throwing it.”“No,” Jonathan said. “She claims it slipped off, but she threw it.” He scraped the shallots into a metal bowl and replaced the cutting board on the counter. “My dad fished it out.”Rachel considered this, tracing her hand around the rim of her glass. “What did your mother say,” she said, “when you told her we had gotten engaged?”Jonathan cut a lemon into quarters before he answered. “She thinks you're good for me,” he said. “And that we're right for each other.”“That's what she said?”“No,” he said.Rachel sipped from her glass and allowed a sliver of ice to drift to the back of her mouth, settling against a molar.“Well, so,” Jonathan continued, removing a whole fish from butcher paper. “I think what matters is that my ideas are different from her ideas. And from my father's, for that matter.”“Then he has reservations, too.”“Fewer than my mother, apparently.” Jonathan poised a curved knife over the fish and made an incision below the head. He slid the blade lengthwise, from gills to tail, in a single motion. “My father is getting remarried.”“What?” Rachel said.Jonathan set down the knife. He removed the glass from Rachel's hand, drained what was left, and set it on the counter. “I know,” he said. “I mean, I don't know. I wish he hadn't told me.” He unscrewed the cap from the bottle of rum, filled the glass, and took a drink. “It doesn't taste as bad as you would think,” he said, sliding it to Rachel.“When did he tell you?” she said.“Last weekend,” he said. “When I called to tell him about you and me.”“Are you going to tell your mother?”“I hadn't planned on it.”“Maybe you should.” Rachel took a sip of rum. It was warm and coated the inside of her mouth like cough syrup.“If I told her, that would make things worse.”“But would you rather find out from your son,” she said, “or your ex-husband?”“Jesus,” Jonathan said. He leaned forward, elbows on the counter, and pressed his hands to his eyes. “Neither.” Jonathan claimed that he had overcooked the fish, but in truth the dinner was lovely: striped bass with toasted shallot vinaigrette, a salad of avocado and grapefruit, and scoops of vanilla ice cream with fresh blueberries. To Rachel, the meal confirmed that she was engaged to a particular kind of man: one with the technical skill to de-bone a fish and with another, more abstract quality that enabled it to taste good.Jonathan's mother opened two bottles of wine at dinner, and Rachel had two or three glasses before it occurred to her that Meredith was the kind of hostess who always refilled a cup before it was empty. The wine made it easier for Rachel to talk a little more than usual--about their apartment in Philadelphia, where Meredith had once stayed overnight, and the gallery where she held a job as an assistant to the curator. It was located on a street with lots of pedestrian traffic, though few people ever seemed to walk into the gallery, and she would sit on her modern, backless stool and watch people walk by the front window. “There's one girl, I see her almost every day, who wears the most amazing clothes,” Rachel said. She set her wine on the table and the dark liquid swooshed from side to side in the glass. “On Friday, it was a metallic red dress and a huge white hat, like she had just stepped out of an Italian movie from the 1970s. I wonder what it's like, to be someone who wears clothes like that.” It occurred to Rachel that she had started talking because Meredith asked her a question; she wondered if she had answered it or not.“She probably looked ridiculous,” Jonathan said. He had consumed several glasses of wine and had been mostly quiet through dinner; but then, he was often quiet.“No,” Rachel said. “Not at all, actually.”The sky had started to darken, and Meredith rose to find candles as Rachel stretched her arms over her head, arched her back, and placed her hand in Jonathan's. She squeezed and he squeezed back.“You're so talkative,” she said. “Please be quiet.”“It feels like we've been at my mother's house for about a year,” he said.Meredith returned with a pair of votive candles, placed in two delicate white teacups that rattled as she set them on the table.“We could just turn on the lights,” Jonathan said. He let go of Rachel's hand and leaned back in the chair, its two front legs lifting from the hardwood floor.“A young person cannot be expected to know this,” Meredith said, blowing out a match. “But a woman my age should avoid certain kinds of lighting.”“No, of course you should,” Jonathan said. He lifted his wineglass in the gesture of a toast and red liquid splashed onto the table. “I apologize.”“Jonathan, dear,” Meredith said. “Every once in a while, you could stand to be a bit more flappable.” She tried to toss the match into the saucer under the teacup, but it landed in her water glass. “You're drunk and you're still profoundly unflappable.”“Mom,” Jonathan said.“It reminds me of your father,” Meredith continued. “And it makes you seem less interesting than you actually are.”“I see,” Jonathan said. “I suppose that you and Dad divorced because he was unflappable.”“Truly, I suspect Rachel finds it dull,” Meredith said. “It will grate on her after a while. It is truly very sad, the inevitability of it.”Jonathan allowed the front legs of his chair to hit the floor with a thwack and stood up. He flexed his hand, as if to throw a punch, and then walked briskly out of the dining room. Rachel and Meredith rose to follow him--through the kitchen and hallway, past several more of Meredith's tiny and dignified buildings. He walked up the staircase, its metallic banister a long, polished blade, and into the room at the top of the steps.Rachel entered the bedroom in time to watch Jonathan walk over to a dresser and lift an old Folgers can from its surface. “I'm curious,” he said, turning the can upside down.The sound was like a pane of glass shattering on concrete. A necklace of knotted, cloud-colored beads, a dozen large and small coins, a silver bracelet as thin as floss, a checkerboard cufflink, a Timex with an electric blue wristband and a larger, more expensive watch with a band of interlocking metal squares--these objects tumbled from the can, spilling across the dresser and onto the floor. A ticket stub twirled to the carpet, cutting slowly through the air.For a moment after, it was quiet. Then Jonathan crouched to the floor and started to sift through the contents. “Where is it?” he said. He spoke in the voice of someone rapidly losing conviction.“We've discussed this,” Meredith said, her voice tight and controlled. Her eyes darted from the carpet to her son. “Elliot took it.”Jonathan sighed almost inaudibly and picked up the larger wristwatch, a man's watch, sliding it over his hand. “It just seems strange,” he said, quietly. “That he would want to have it.”Meredith gave a sharp laugh. “Maybe he wants to propose,” she said.“Maybe he does,” Jonathan said.Immediately, the pressure in the room seemed to change. The air was dense now, pressed tightly against their bodies.“Oh,” Meredith said, the sound catching in her throat. She bent her head and lifted a hand to the corner of her eye in a way that compelled Rachel to look away, at the jewelry scattered on the floor. An earring made from a curving white feather rested near the dresser. It was the sort of item that she would have admired in a store display or on a woman she passed on the street--the woman would strike her as artistic and independent, and Rachel would feel a small wave of envy as she walked by--but she would never think to purchase a pair for herself. The feather tapered to a graceful point that led her eye to a small, glinting object nestled next to the foot of the dresser, so close that it was almost undetectable.She looked up at Meredith, who returned her gaze with an expression that Rachel could not quite discern; it may have been alarm, or curiosity. Rachel turned to Jonathan, who had not seen the ring. He was crouched with one hand spread flat on the carpet, as if to test the stability of the floor beneath it. When Meredith opened the door to her studio the next day, she did not seem surprised to find Rachel, not Jonathan, on the other side. “I suppose he wants to get an early start,” she said.“He wants to do some work at home,” Rachel said. “Sometimes they want him to work on weekends.”Meredith nodded. “You're kind to make excuses for him,” she said. “I hope it's not something you're accustomed to.”Rachel ran her fingers over an imperfection in the doorframe. “After last night, I wonder if it's possible,” she said. “To find someone you never have to make excuses for.”Meredith opened the door wider and gestured for Rachel to enter. “Elliot apologized on my behalf for twenty-five years,” she said. “It was a mistake to believe that he would do it indefinitely.”The studio had bare white walls, the baseboard lined with canvases that circled the room like a fence. One painting showed a weather-beaten door--it looked as though Meredith had sliced into the canvas to create its texture. The blue paint on the door peeled and rippled like tree bark, exposing patches of discolored wood underneath.“I had no idea you were so prolific,” Rachel said.Meredith set her paintbrush on the easel's ledge and opened the red toolbox on the table beside it. She set a few tubes of paint on the table and then removed the diamond ring, placing it on her finger. The band was too big, and the stone slid around to the palm of her hand. “Since my divorce, I've never been lonelier,” she said. “I've never been lonelier and I've never painted more.” She removed the ring and extended it to Rachel. “You and Jonathan will want to have it resized, of course,” she said. “Otherwise it might slip off.”The diamond was larger than Rachel would have expected, an emerald cut, and she wondered how many times Meredith had reached for it on her hand, after the divorce, only to find it missing. It had a nice weight, too, and somehow it was easy to picture arcing through the air. It would have hung there, suspended, a perfect, glinting object, before falling towards the fountain.