Lily of the Valley

Suzanne Strempek Shea

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439122259
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

Lily Wilk always knew she was destined to be an artist -- ever since she pulled a drawing kit from a grab bag on her tenth birthday. Now Lily's work is always in demand around her small Massachusetts town, where she makes her living painting fire hydrants, lettering diplomas, and applying "Gulls" and "Buoys" to restaurant bathroom doors. But when supermarket heiress Mary Ziemba commissions her to paint a family portrait, Lily senses her lifelong dream of creating a memorable masterpiece is finally within her grasp. What she discovers, however, is that dreams often take their own unexpected twists...and with each small and gentle brush stroke she applies to Mary Ziemba's painting, Lily learns more than she ever imagined about the meaning of friendship, family, and love.With a gift for creating fiction that is "rich with an unusual sweetness" (USA Today) and filled with wry humor, bestselling author Suzanne Strempek Shea delivers a poignant and unforgettable work of art in Lily of the Valley.

1

The night of the day I turned ten, we all got to go out to supper at a place that printed a quarter page of half-off coupons every other month in the weekly paper and invited kids to step on this big carnival scale before they ate, then again after they were done, and the only thing their parents would be charged was one dollar if any amount of weight gain over a pound was registered.

Once I finished what I could of the Southern fried chicken, the French fries, cole slaw and decorative sprig of parsley, and after I blew out the white twig of a candle jabbed into the thick-skinned Boston cream pie slice, the waitress held out a red velvet grab bag brought out only for special occasions like mine.

I stuck my right hand in and felt my way around the obvious: the butterfly net, the hairbrush, the alleys in their net sack, some kind of floppy stuffed animal staring through the dark with bulging glass eyes. I considered the plastic hammer, the rolled-up paper kite, the doll’s rough yarn braids, and what was either a magnifying glass or a hand mirror. I spent a whole lot more time rifling through that bag than I think anybody expected me to. But that was because nothing in there really caught my great interest.

Until I came to the box.

Slowly, I ran my fingers along its edges and determined that it was not very large. When I gave it a shake, I found it to be not that heavy. But it was a box, and boxes hold the promise of containing many pieces that might connect together to make one big fantastic surprise. Greedy, I pushed aside the coiled-up Chinese jump rope, got tangled in the strap of the tiny binoculars, scraped a knuckle on the lucky horseshoe, then pulled out the unknown.

On the way home I studied the parchment-colored carton in the quick few seconds of light spared by each streetlamp we passed under. I placed my right hand over the delicate one that was sketched to decorate the lid, and I mimicked those fingers that so gracefully held a pencil over a sheet of paper blank except for all your imaginings. I was the first one out of the car, the first one at the door, and the first one inside the house. I ran straight to the kitchen table, yanked on the light string, pulled the cover off the box, and examined the contents: a black fat-leaded pencil already sharpened to a perfect point, a cold and golden metal sharpener for when it wore down, a rectangle of pink rubber eraser, a slim pad of smooth newsprint, and a small white sheet of paper with the title “Instructions.”

“Take the pencil in hand,” the first sentence told me, “and draw a line.”

I took the pencil in hand. I drew a line.

“Draw a circle.”

I drew a circle.

“Draw a square.”

I drew a square.

“Have you completed all these commands correctly?” the page asked, and it offered a picture of each thing, just in case I needed a reminder of what they were supposed to look like.

I studied my line. I studied my circle. I studied my square. All appeared to me to be as good as what I saw printed next to the directions, though maybe not as sharp and bold and exact—but I hadn’t used a ruler or a compass or anything, so what would you expect?

“Are they just as they appear in the illustrations?”

I checked again. I had done what I was supposed to.

“Then we wish you sincere congratulations!” the words told me. “Now you are an artist.”

And from that day, that hour, that minute, that second, with the kitchen light swinging overhead and me still standing at the table in coat and dripping boots, big green mitten forgotten on my left hand, new pencil sharp and ready in my right one, I deep down truly have never thought of myself as anything but.

That is it, the longest and the most detailed version of the reply I give people when they ask me when and why and how I got started in all this. I am out in the world doing my work when the most curious ones stop to peek over my shoulder. They might stare at the placement of my hand, at the wrap of my fingers, at the movements of my brush or my pencil, at what any one of those might be leaving in its wake, while I give them the long or short of it, whatever I feel like relating that particular day. Sometimes our eyes never really meet, and those times, even if you offered me money I couldn’t tell you what these people looked like. I am busy and I have a job to do, and I answer as I continue to make a line or mix a color, my words the soundtrack to the things I am making out of nothing right before their eyes.

I hear them breathing. I feel them inches from me. At some point I realize they are gone—usually right after they say something like how they wish they had some talent. Right after they tell me they couldn’t do what I am doing. And just before there is a chance for me to ask them what is it that they are able to do. I’m not just saying I would—if time allowed, I truly would like to find out. Because everybody can do something. It’s just that most people don’t have that something come right out and tell them what it is, as was the case with me. They might have to fish around a bit. Sometimes it even takes years. Or a whole life.

As for me, life so far has consisted of thirty-nine years. And for twenty-nine of them, I have joined together line and circle and square and have made for you whatever you have wanted. Because I am an artist. That is what the instructions told me. That is the title under the lily of the valley flowers that so fittingly frame the name Lily Wilk on the pale green business cards I hand out from the zippered compartment of my pocketbook. It is what that same card, enlarged fifty percent, tells readers who spot the ad I run every other week in the Pennysaver, inviting all to contact me for their artistic needs. It is what my friends and relations tell everybody I am. It is what I tell myself, silently in my head, when somebody who sees the ad calls to say it doesn’t matter what I paint for them. Just make sure it includes a lighthouse, and that it fits this frame they got on sale, and that the color of whatever I end up with comes as close as possible to matching their wall-to-wall.

I must remind myself of my true occupation when somebody requests a caricature of every kid who’ll be at their own kid’s birthday party, and I spend an eternity of an afternoon fending off a pointy-hatted shrieking mob of sugar-fueled brats who knock into me and steal my pens and throw up on my drawing board. Or when I am asked to fit on one single glass door the neat capital letters that will spell out how this particular place of business is the best, the newest, the oldest, the biggest, the cheapest, the tastiest, the fastest, the one that can make and deliver your custom order within twenty-four hours. Sundays included.

No, my work is not in any museums. And as for galleries, I don’t know if you’d think this counts, but for years I’ve been bringing paintings down to Mrs. Sloat at the post office, and she so kindly displays them prominently A couple times a year, somebody falls in love and buys something like Lis’ Cafe and its glass-brick front all glowing and ready for twin lobster night. Then I bring down another piece to hang in its place, on the nail pounded into the wall above the stamp-licking table, next to the recyclable-paper bin and the clipboard displaying the Ten Most Wanted.

If I am asked, I tell people I’ve exhibited widely But I don’t get into the specifics of how that mostly has been at the occasional amateurish local festival, where I must cautiously stand guard as people slosh their beer and point with greasy fried dough at the small display of the paintings I really want to make, and sometimes manage to pull off in my rare spare time. Local subjects: The egg carton factory billowing steam at first light. The dark huddle of buildings that is Main Street. Men, old and young, hunched playing their cards down at the AmVets. A woman reaching to hang her wash while the wind whips the linens around her like a fancy gown. The smoking remains of the vacant mill the day after the sad juvenile delinquents lit a fire in it to keep warm, and then fell asleep until they heard the sirens. Real things I’ve seen and have felt honored or touched to spot and take in through my eyes, out to my hand, and onto paper the way maybe only I, out of everyone in the entire world, see them. Not all greeting-card pretty, but why do things have to be neat and perfect to earn a place on your wall? Once in a while somebody at one of these festivals agrees with that. And before walking away empty-handed, they’ll go on for a bit how that one over there’s the painting they’d get if they ever found themselves rich enough to blow good money on junk like art.

Unlike my fellow vendors, who do a brisk business in lace hair accessories or wooden garden ornaments painted to look like the rear view of a wide person bending over, I am rarely able to earn back the rent of my twenty-five or fifty-dollar space. My particular take on beauty has not turned out to be what people want from me and has never gone far in paying for my rent, utilities, health insurance, car, food and sundries. What does bring in the money is something with a function, a purpose, a tangible usefulness that justifies the cost. If I’m going to paint, people want me to do so on simple wooden rectangles that will read “Welcome,” “Come Back Soon,” “Keep Out” or “Police Take Notice.” On bone-shaped signs for doghouses that shelter Neptune or Itchy or Gus, or just plain old Dog. On boulders at town lines, where a community’s official seal looks so, well, official. They want “Detroit Debris” scrolled across tailgates. Circa-whatever on the fronts of homes so old that the vintage deserves to be announced to all. Once, and only once, I was asked to tell the story of a couple’s meeting, courtship, engagement and impending marriage, all illustrated on the ten fake nails of the ten lumpy fingers of the one anxious bride-to-be who shook so much the night before the big day that I had to wait until she passed out from her sixth rum and Coke so I could finish the flat left thumb that held the critical scene from the love story: her groom-to-be and his then-soon-to-be-ex signing their divorce papers.

I had a different life envisioned for myself back at age ten, when I grabbed every spare stretch of paper and practiced careful rows and rows of the lines, circles and squares that I saw as the bones of all the landscapes and still lifes and portraits and other masterpieces I surely would go on to create. Fields of them stretching toward the great horizon that was my mysterious destiny, one big rainbow arc of pictures adorned with fancy medals and ribbons, all being admired by people in berets and bow-tied smocks who couldn’t help but swoon and gasp in foreign accents as they walked past my easel, where I, the artist, stood with palette and brush and pencil and golden sharpener, and strung together line and circle and square to make the world as no one before had ever viewed it.

Someday, I for years have told myself silently in my head, I will make something that people everywhere will stand in line for hours just to look at and study and be struck by. Then, satisfied beyond belief, they will travel all the way home in stunned silence, reflecting how they have been changed in some vital way by the sight of a thing made by my own right hand.

I have yet to get around to creating that particular piece, and if I have to give you an excuse, the one I offer is that I, for years, have been busy from morning to night—even if it has been on jobs far from what I really want to do. Whatever you want—that has been my mission ever since I turned ten and Valentine’s Day was approaching and somebody in the Ladies’ Guild complained about the high cost of paper tablecloths with hearts printed on them, as opposed to plain white ones with no such seasonal embellishment. And my mother piped up, “Why don’t you go buy the white ones, and why don’t I have my daughter decorate them for you—she does things like that for me all the time. She’s an artist.” So that’s what I did, and that’s what I am. An artist. Somewhere along the way, though, quotation marks sprouted up on either side of the word.

I always used to say I’m glad not to be as bad off as the many people I know who hate what they do for a living. Like Billy Doyle, who, back when I was his girlfriend and he started his first real job right out of high school, loathed it so much that he asked me to paint on a big dartboard a picture of the frozen-food warehouse where he would be wearing long johns all seasons of the year, struggling to list inventory with a pencil held in a shaking insulated glove. Or like that woman, Helena, down my street, who drives very slowly to and really fast from her day at the mascara wand factory, her sky blue Plymouth Horizon zooming dangerously through the curvy underpass in Cheneyville each weekday afternoon just after three, that homemade voodoo doll of her lecherous shift supervisor swinging wildly from a small noose tied to her rearview mirror. I’m nowhere near as flattened by my work as they were and are, but I have arrived at understanding some of how it feels to be giving so much of your life and time to what you believe you maybe were not put here to do.

Like how I maybe was not put here to stand on an oversized potty chair and dodge the dangling row of fake legs being shown off in the sunny window of the surgical supply store on Main Street in Ludlow. But that was me all this morning, stepping around empty oxygen tanks so I could apply the finishing touches to the words “ANNUAL HALF OFF ALMOST EVERYTHING SALE” I’d painted big and backwards across the inside of the glass, each of the letters being snipped in two by a large, steely pair of scissors. Maybe I was not put here to carefully paint the words “Adam” and “Eve” onto the respective restroom doors down at the Parish Center. But that was me at lunchtime, underlining each name with a branch of fig leaves and, finally, adding accents of tiny and irresistible apples. Maybe I was not put here to apply one final coat of Industrial Red #6 to the fire hydrant down near the French school. But that was me just around supper, all because I once again said yes when Frannie from the highway department called and asked me if I, once again, was interested in taking that on.

“Hey, Picasso!”

Somebody yelled this from a car roaring past. I didn’t look up. Over the years hundreds of comments have been hurled at me from passersby, so I’m used to it. Usually they are alerting me that I missed a spot. Usually I ignore them, just like I did right then.

“Just tell ’em to shove it.”

An older woman in a pale pink windbreaker shouted this from behind me as she raked her front yard with choppy but efficient strokes that left the grass looking like a well-combed head of hair. “They’ll be selling postcards of that plug once you get your big break.”

“Right—sure—that’ll happen someday,” I told her.

I heard only more bits of raking; then the woman yelled back:

“Someday’s today”

I finished my favorite part of the project, the last link on the silver chain that minds the hydrant’s cap once it gets unscrewed in a hurry during a fire. Then I turned to wave away her joke. But when we met eyes, her expression was nothing but totally serious.

I knew maybe four things about this woman: That her first name was Lorraine, which had been written on the badge she used to wear on her blue-and-yellow smock when she worked in the Fotomat booth back when we had one in town. That Chunglo was her last name, the one spelled out in bronze reflective letters on her black plastic mailbox. That she owned all the know-how and equipment to decorate elaborate cakes for your most special occasions. That once a year she was invited to be guest speaker at one of the Brown Bag Lunch meetings out at the old academy in Brimfield, and the following Thursday the paper always ran a couple photos of her demonstrating how you can doll up even the cheapest box mix by squeezing out a gorgeous and edible bouquet of the most exotic frosting flowers.

But there apparently was more to learn about Lorraine Chunglo:

Like that she was a psychic.

She had to be. How else could she have had any idea that this actually was a big someday for me? How, because of a phone call I placed that morning, the next day I would have an appointment at New Directions, where for one full-hour session I would speak in person with the career counselor who, for many years, has run an ad two spaces to the left of mine, just past the one for the dry ice company and right up against the stump-grinding service.

“Together, we will find your true path,” reads the line beneath a drawing of a compass and the digits of the big black phone number I’d finally dialed.

“You’re good,” I said, turning again to compliment Lorraine Chunglo. But she must have gone inside her house.

Probably to laugh at me. Because the someday she had referred to was an entirely different one—this I realized only after I unlocked my back door that late afternoon and heard my answering machine capturing the words “Mary Ziemba calling.”

The voice was continuing: “I’ll spell that for you …”

It had to be a joke, somebody with nothing better to do putting me on. But just in case it wasn’t, I jumped at the phone. Whoever was providing them, I didn’t need the letters. Around my town, Mary Ziemba’s name was as well known as God’s.

She was one real bigshot—the owner of the Grand Z chain of grocery stores that almost exclusively fed our half of the state. You either bought your food there, or you grew your own, or you starved. And it was people’s natural need for food, combined with the lack of any real grocery competitors since the death of Food Basket, that long ago had made Grand Z a household word and Mary Ziemba the richest local woman anybody could think of. Her business story was legend, and shoppers entering each of the eleven Grand Zs were greeted by a wall-sized photo of her as a young, skinny immigrant in a long, dumpy dress, sleeves rolled up to reveal the surprising Popeye forearms with whi...