Anna could understand, too, Goldie’s disappointment when their relationship soured. Eventually Anna and Sadie reached adolescence and began to shop at Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul. They turned up their noses at the flowery Laura Ashley dresses that Goldie brought them from London and the beaded leather evening bags she special ordered for them in Rome. They tried to educate her about vintage fashion, but she rejected the term completely, declaring, “I suppose you’re wearing some stranger’s dirty underpants as well.” The situation reached a crisis one spring when Goldie and Saul visited Memphis, and Anna paired a six-hundred-dollar Christian Dior scarf, which Goldie had given her, with pink rubber ankle boots and a 1920s flapper dress missing a strip of fringe at the hem. Anna could still remember the reaction of each member of her family when she walked into Chez Philippe. Marvie’s face expressed the dread that accompanies the arrival of long-anticipated bad weather. Carol, whose own taste (much maligned by Goldie) centered on blue jean skirts and the occasional splurge at Ann Taylor, looked sick. Sadie laughed into her napkin. Saul rolled his eyes. And Goldie? She could not have responded with greater fury if Anna had literally slapped her in the face. As Anna’s mother later remarked, “You should have just walked in with a megaphone and declared: ‘All that stuff you tried to teach me, Nana? I don’t value any of it.’ ”

  Goldie didn’t give Anna another item of clothing until she left for college, by which point Anna had given up Goodwill in favor of the Gap—not exactly high style, but Christina Herrera was wearing jeans from the Gap by then, so even Goldie kept a couple of pairs in her closet. When Anna graduated from Brown, Goldie gave her a cashmere wrap from Yves St. Laurent and a card on which she’d written, “I love you very much. Don’t disappoint me this time.” For a while, Anna didn’t. And then she met Ford.

  Goldie, tiny and hunched over in her wire chair, wiped her mouth on a paper napkin and then folded it neatly and held it in her hand, smoothing down the creases in her trousers. “Let’s go,” she said. It was hard to imagine that Goldie was unaffected by the words that had passed between them, but she was excellent at pretending that she didn’t care. When they walked back to the car, Goldie went first, her head held high. Anna stayed a few paces behind her.

  Somehow they made it through the rest of the afternoon and evening in this same atmosphere of strained silence. They ate dinner in the restaurant that Rhoda the travel agent had recommended, and though the bread was stale, the chicken was dry, and the wine was barely passable, neither of them mentioned it.

  At 3:17 in the morning, Goldie decided to express herself right there in their well-appointed room at the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. Actually, she must have decided some time earlier. It was 3:17 when Anna, pulled from her dreams, finally looked at the clock on the table while her grandmother harangued her from the opposite bed: “ . . . such a bright future in front of you . . . get yourself out of this mess . . . I know a few things about life. . . .” How many long minutes had passed before Anna began to absorb these words?

  “What are you talking about?” she finally asked. “Why are you saying this now?” Her voice sounded scared and plaintive, like a child’s.

  “What do you mean, ‘saying this now’?” Goldie’s words were spirited and emphatic. “When else would I say it?”

  “Can’t we talk in the morning?”

  “No. I’m going to tell you right now: You have no sense. My mother had no sense. She married a drunk and ended up raising ten children without a man to back her up. I learned from her stupidity. I tried to make good decisions my whole life, and then you went and married a man with no prospects—”

  “Nana!”

  “I’m not saying I’m glad he died. Cancer’s a sad death and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody—but it happened. The question I’m trying to get you to think about is What next? Do you plan to sit around and mope for the next fifty years? I’ve got more sense in my little finger than you’ve got in your whole college-educated brain, you know that?”

  Anna felt as if she were drowning. She concentrated all her attention on the graceful lines of the chandelier above their heads, imagining that its solid frame was a hand reaching down to pull her out of here. “Can’t we just go to sleep?” she cried. “Can’t we talk in the morning?”

  But these entreaties just made things worse. “You never listen,” Goldie said.

  “Please, Nana.”

  “Are you an idiot?”

  “Please!”

  They both heard it. Anna’s voice had reached a level of despair that even Goldie could not ignore. For a long moment, neither of them said a word. When Goldie did speak again, her tone was softer. “You’re so lucky, and you don’t even know it,” she said. She still sounded aggrieved, but the words lacked their earlier edge.

  Anna said nothing. She stared at the chandelier, counting seconds, holding her breath.

  “The whole world’s been handed to you on a silver platter,” Goldie said. And then, a couple of minutes later, “You don’t even know it,” and, “You don’t even know it,” again, some minutes after that. Then silence. Then the soft snores of sleep.

  The next morning, they drove out of Cleveland under a bank of grim clouds, the sky the same dull concrete as the road beneath them. Neither Anna nor Goldie mentioned what had happened the night before. Anna wasn’t sure if Goldie even remembered, but the air between them seemed even heavier. Nothing felt resolved.

  They were extremely polite. “Are you hungry?” Anna asked, somewhere beyond Toledo.

  “You’re the one doing all the work,” Goldie responded. “I want to do whatever makes you happiest and most comfortable. I’m just a passenger here.”

  The day seemed interminable, one county sliding into the next. Eventually it began to rain, a desultory splatter that turned the spindly trees into dull green shadows outside the windows. Everything else was brown and gray except for the billboards imploring them from the side of the highway. Anna tried to find satisfaction in the fact that, mile by mile, they were moving closer to California, but she had no confidence that they would ever actually get there.

  Despite the troubles between them, six days had passed since they left New York, and they were comfortable now with life on the road. Anna had grown adept at maneuvering the suitcases in and out of the car (though they both appreciated the bellman, Hiep, who had handled their luggage at the Ritz-Carlton). In odd homage to urban living, the communities of chain hotels along the interstate often included chain restaurants that you could reach simply by crossing a couple of parking lots on foot. As they pulled up that night to the Hampton Inn in Angola, Indiana, they saw an Applebee’s just on the other side of a Sizzler and Best Western.

  “If we go to Applebee’s for dinner,” Anna said, “I could have a glass of wine and not have to worry about driving us back to the hotel.” At this point she considered her evening glass of wine to be indispensable to her sanity.

  Goldie held her hand to her eyes to make out the restaurant beneath the sharp rays of the setting sun. “What luck,” she said, as if the probability of having an Applebee’s near their hotel had not been something like 75 percent. “I could eat there every night.”

  It struck Anna as ironic that she had to travel with her grandmother, a habitué of La Grenouille and JoJo in New York, in order to familiarize herself with American chain establishments. Goldie loved restaurants and loathed staying in, even for a single evening. “That’s just eating,” she always said. “I dine, and you have to go out for that.”

  Oddly, Ford—the objectionable Ford—had been much more picky than Goldie, who could see the value in an occasional Big Mac. When he traveled, he carried along guidebooks that pointed the way to “authentic regional fare.” He would skip lunch rather than eat fast food. When they went to New Orleans, he plotted their itinerary based on where they would stop for meals. Anna could remember buttery pillows of biscuits, and mashed potatoes as rich as whipped cream, but she could also remember a Thousand Island dressing that tasted like chunky mayonnaise with sugar mixed into it. In comparison, Anna found Applebee’s palatable at least. “Well, we know what we’re getting,” she said. They had, after all, eaten at an Applebee’s for lunch.

  Later, after dinner, as Goldie started to get ready for bed, Anna said, “I’m too edgy to sleep.” She felt she had suffered a wound the previous night, and a day spent with Goldie—even one that had been excessively polite—had not allowed it to heal. “I think I’ll take the portfolio down to the lobby with my drawing stuff and fiddle around for a while. Do you mind?”

  “I couldn’t care less,” Goldie replied, sitting on the edge of her bed, pulling off her knee-highs. “I’m not even going to wash my teeth.” Without her stylish clothes on, she looked much older, but Anna refused to see her grandmother as vulnerable in any way. She considered Goldie’s physical frailty as just a trick to put you off your guard.

  And indeed, after Anna had pulled off her jeans, put on a loose cotton skirt, a T-shirt, and her espadrilles, Goldie let an expression of complete distaste cross her features. “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said.

  Anna had hoped Goldie’s politeness was a means of making nice after the attacks of the previous day. Now, though, it seemed that she wasn’t finished yet.

  Anna looked down at her clothes. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “What I mean is you’re a pretty girl and you don’t even make an effort.”

  “I need to make an effort to go sit in the lobby?”

  “I wouldn’t walk into a gas station without making an effort. All the beautiful clothes I’ve given you, and the way you dress you might as well wrap yourself in a roll of toilet paper. If I had looked like that, Marvin Feld never would have noticed me. I’d be a pauper lying at the bottom of a pig sty.”

  On another night, when she was feeling stronger, perhaps Anna could have ignored such talk. Tonight, though, she felt raw and vulnerable, worn down from all these days alone with Goldie. Worse, she heard a contempt in her grandmother’s voice that reminded her of how, all those years ago, Goldie had spoken to Ford. And then, without any other thought, she cried, “I loved him!” and for that moment she felt it as deeply as she ever had in her life.

  Goldie looked confused. “Loved who?”

  “You know who I’m talking about. I loved Ford. Can’t you understand that?”

  Something shifted in Goldie’s face then, some flash of understanding, perhaps, and her resolution seemed to falter. Then the moment passed. Her expression grew hard again and she said, “That’s not even worth whatever change you keep in that ugly backpack.”

  For one brief moment, Anna had felt a flicker of hope that finally the two of them might begin to understand each other. Now she pictured the great expanse of North America looming in front of her, an infinite line of tractor-trailers, each of which had to be passed, like her own labor of Sisyphus, from coast to coast. Whatever shaky support had held up the last of her civility suddenly collapsed. “Why are you always such a fucking bitch?” she asked.

  Goldie froze on the bed, her stocking halfway down her calf. These were not words that Anna could remember ever being uttered in her grandmother’s presence. Goldie clearly understood them, though. Anna saw the tiniest flinch in her eyes, but when she spoke, her tone was as forceful as ever. “I am a lady,” she replied.

  Anna knew that she had to get out of the room as quickly as possible. She didn’t want to give her grandmother the satisfaction of seeing her in tears. She put her hand on the outside door and swung it open. “A lady,” she said, “would never act like this.” Then she stepped out into the hall, letting the door slam shut behind her.

  Downstairs in the lobby, Anna sat down in the breakfast area, set the portfolio and her drawing materials on the table, and walked over to the hot drinks bar. Her hands were shaking as she poured herself a cup of tea. Wouldn’t this have happened eventually anyway? Putting Anna and Goldie into a car together for all those long miles was bound to cause combustion. It would have been more convenient, of course, if the flare-up had occurred in Cleveland, where the large metropolitan airport could have offered Anna an exit from life on the road (she imagined her father flying in and taking over as chauffeur). But surely there were planes out of Indiana, too. In any case, Anna and Goldie would not be getting back into that car again. Anna felt no regret for what she had said upstairs—she actually felt a sense of exhilaration for having spoken the truth—but she didn’t like that she had lost her temper, and worse, she cringed at the prospect of what lay ahead for her: return to her house on Waynoka.

  Better not to think about such things. Better to sit in the lobby and draw until she could assume that Goldie had fallen asleep, then sneak upstairs and deal with it all in the morning. Anna carried the tea back to the table, sat for a moment until she began to calm down, then opened the portfolio and pulled out her pencils and sketchbook. Every few seconds she glanced toward the elevators, half expecting to see Goldie hurling herself across the lobby in her bathrobe, ready for battle. The lobby remained empty.

  Feeling more at ease, Anna began to page through the Japanese prints, as she had taken to doing every night now. They calmed her after the days on the road, and she found them inspiring, too. A keen knowledge of her own limitations kept her from comparing this artwork to the illustrations she made for Shaina Bright, but she found that she could learn from what these long-ago artists had created. Each image, each individual subject, each alteration of perspective, taught her something new about design, or light, or color. During the crisis of Ford’s illness and death, drawing had helped to distract her from her personal troubles. She knew, however, that the comics she drew these days did not approach the quality of those she had made before Ford got sick. In her earlier years of creating Shaina Bright, Anna had developed a style that was both minimalist and highly expressive. The slightest alteration in the profile of Shaina’s neck, for example—a hard line, say, instead of a delicate curve—could indicate a drastic shift in the character’s mood: under pressure from Superintendent Markley, calm and practical Shaina Bright had turned irritable and huffy. Once Anna returned from her “hiatus,” though, she struggled more and yet failed to achieve the same effect. She would stare for hours at the page, or discard drawing after drawing that seemed heavy with effort but uncommunicative nonetheless. Oddly, the popularity of the comic didn’t suffer. Shaina had developed an avid fan base. As long as new stories continued to appear, readers didn’t seem to notice what had become horribly obvious to Anna, that Shaina Bright was little more than a collection of lines on a page. The fact that no one cared about the quality of the work bothered Anna even more.

  Looking through the Japanese prints, then, reminded her of how much she loved to draw. Within a few minutes of gazing at the portfolio, she had picked up her pencils and begun to copy, taking comfort from the steady accumulation of lines and the familiar friction of pencil on paper. At first she glanced up now and then, still anxious about the possibility that Goldie would appear in the lobby to berate her. But Goldie did not appear, and little by little Anna forgot everything but Hiroshige’s images in front of her.

  The pictures were, in general, extremely solitary—village streets at night, isolated mountain roads, a small group of travelers paused along a rural path—and that emptiness gave them a terrible lonely quality that in Anna’s present state seemed to speak directly to her. She focused most intently on an image of farmers in a field that sliced through a deep ravine. In the near distance, a few people walked along a quiet road. Still farther, two mountains emerged from a fog-covered valley. Here was the simplicity and eloquence that Anna had lost in her own work. The farmers were represented by little more than scratches of black on the page, but the shape of those scratches articulated the hunched back of arduous labor as precisely as anything Anna had ever seen. That these shapes could be pared down to their elements meant that the artist deeply understood the human form and the ways in which toil made itself known in the body. There was no need for extraneous detail. A line, a scratch even, could say it all.

  And then, without much thought, Anna tore the copy out of her sketchbook, set it beside her on the table, and began to conceive of something new. The jumble of emotions in her mind—her fury at Goldie, her recollection of Ford, her need to draw, her fascination with these lonely Japanese pictures—suddenly coalesced into a single desire. She wanted to draw a new comic. Instead of the adventures and tribulations of a pert teenage forest ranger, Anna wanted a comic that reflected the dramas of real life. And not just any life. Her own.

  She decided to draw a scene that marked a moment of intense emotion, the scene that had come to mind so vividly when she heard the contempt in Goldie’s voice upstairs. The drama had taken place in Goldie’s living room at the Sherry-Netherland, at the end of Anna and Ford’s first and only visit to New York. Although, throughout the weekend, Goldie had remained ostentatiously civil, Anna had seen immediately that her grandmother did not approve of Ford. It was clear in the way Goldie curled her lip when she looked at his clothes, which were clean and neat but vin ordinaire, as Goldie would put it. And Anna heard it in the way Goldie spoke to him. No matter what her grandmother said—“You’re ordering beer at JoJo?”—she always managed to sound appalled. By the time Anna and Ford stopped by Goldie’s apartment on their way to the airport, Anna understood the complete failure of the visit. She suspected that Ford had recognized it as well, though he only mentioned Goldie one time when they were alone, saying, “You and your grandmother are more alike than anyone else in your family.” Had she refused to have sex with him that night?

  For her drawings, Anna envisioned three comic panels, a triptych of disaster, so to speak. The entire drama took place in about ten minutes, and now, all these years later, she found it hard to believe that a few heated words could have had such long-term and drastic consequences. In drawing it, she hoped to understand more precisely what had happened then.