Excerpt of Reveries,a Novel

There’s a Monet that hangs above the table in the hallway. It’s a still life of wine and bread, oil on canvas. My mother’s mother, Cécile, gave it to my parents on their wedding day. Before Cécile had it, it belonged to her mother, Inès, and before Inès had it, it was in a different private collection. I don’t think of Inès as my great grand-mère but as Inès, and I don’t know much about her except that she founded Aubépin in 1898 with her husband, Olivier, who was a doctor and chemist. Together they had two children, lived with a greyhound named Percival, and brought synthetics into perfumery.

When I was young, I would often see my mother with the painting. She spent a lot of time with it, especially after her mother died. Sometimes she would bring a chair in from the kitchen so that she could stare at it for hours on end, and even as the sun crawled up and across the sky, her head wouldn’t move. I didn’t understand what compelled her to look at the painting because we had bread and wine in the kitchen, and so when she finally went off to prepare dinner or help Lizzy with a project, I decided to look at the painting to see what she could see. But I didn’t see anything. It was the same old carafe, the same old butter, and the same old bread.

I look at it now and the way the brushstrokes make clumps of paint. If I were to describe the way it looked, I would say dismal, like someone drank the wine with two or three pills and then went to lie down. And down the hallway, past the living room to the kitchen counter, I hear my mother’s voice. I have not taken my shoes off yet. I stare at the bread without moving because she’s on the line from Paris. My father laughs as if, together, they held a baby girl in their arms in my mother’s apartment with the French doors open to the Parisian balconies. As if my father looked at the baby with Edith Piaf’s voice circling around the room from a record player. I slip out of my shoes and take quiet steps down the hallway.