* * *

  —

  On the street, Lina found a file cabinet and dragged it to her apartment.

  She sat on the floor in sweats on a Saturday night with a stack of papers. She was twenty-two years old and trying to be good at the things her mother had failed in. Money, to start with. She had loan statements, financial aid letters, tax forms, and hourly CETA time sheets from the gallery. A W-2 form from the Barnard Student Center, for her summer hours in the clay room. She was filing when she picked up the phone to hear Lauren say she was getting married. She wanted Lina and Jess to be her bridesmaids. “Really? That’s great,” Lina said, though she didn’t envy her friend. Lauren was twenty-two years old, too.

  The next morning, leading a clump of middle school boys and retirees through the dim back halls of the Met’s armory, Lina had an idea. Maybe she could shape an undulation, in three dimensions, like draped cloth, in a harder material. Could you cast a dress in iron?

  She’d crammed for weeks, the names of knights, princes, kings, the dates of battles and tournaments, but the first question she received, from a preteen boy, was “How did they go to the bathroom?”

  The codpiece was not removable, the metal molded to the body.

  She explained that though we think of armor as military, this one wasn’t made for combat; it was a fashionable costume for the entertainment of crowds.

  61.

  Donnie made it to the Chinatown park by himself. He played a few rounds of xiangqi, but he was stumbling over moves. When he’d been here in this same park, whispering in Dino’s ear, they could win. Maybe it had been Evan’s presence. Evan hung out now with other nerdy kids who worked in UCLA labs. He had some kind of NSF grant. Neurophysiology. Donnie was still friends with Dino, who no longer played street chess. Dino tried to take both boys to Mount Pinos to see the eclipse of 1979, but Evan couldn’t go. Donnie wished he’d come.

  When Dino and Donnie arrived, a lot of people were there already, including families with kids and their ninety-year-old grandparents. The sky darkened and a hush came over the crowd. At some point—it was sudden—stars began to pop into bright view. Then shadow bands flew over them, wavy lines of dark. As the moon blocked the sun and the sky went black, the silence was complete: no birds sang, no words were spoken.

  Donnie was covered with goose bumps. But it only lasted a minute.

  Book 5

  Family Week

  62.

  Dr. Moss called Lina to ask if she was coming west for the holidays. Julie had told him she might not. Was it normal for a hospital superintendent to call a patient’s daughter? That’s what we get for her being in so long, Lina thought. Customer service.

  She looped the phone cord around her wrist. No, she wasn’t coming. For two lonely days, she figured, she’d work ten. She didn’t tell the doctor this or that she’d run out of money. She said her old friend was getting married here on New Year’s Eve and she was a bridesmaid. Her mother didn’t need her, Lina told herself. Her brothers would be there. For the first Christmas since Lina’s mother went into the hospital, Julie was flying back to Michigan.

  “I’ll see that we hold her medicine Christmas Eve,” the doctor said, in a low, kind voice, “until after you two have a good talk.”

  As if such a thing were possible. A Christmas five years ago Dr. Moss had promised her mother would recover. Lina held the receiver after he hung up. All of a sudden, sadness flooded her. She’d never not gone home.

  On Thanksgiving, she and Troy had cleaned the clay room. Troy was in love again, with another full-figured woman who didn’t think that his being an artist was such a good idea. With a below-zero wind-chill factor, Troy wore the gray wool coat that had been his grandfather’s when he’d moved north during the Great Migration. They walked out under scarves of color in the sky to the Cuban Chinese place and ordered their usual black beans and rice. Troy splurged on the holiday special. “Have me some swine.” By the time they left, the holiday was over everywhere.

  But for Christmas, Troy was taking the train home to Baltimore.

  * * *

  —

  Lina had made a series of square canvases, all bouquets, with different backgrounds and varying stages of freshness and decay. But this week she was going to cast a standing metal dress. Hollow inside. A sheath. A friend of a friend was lending her a studio in the corner of a Brooklyn foundry with a setup for pouring molten bronze.

  * * *

  —

  Isaiah Polk, an adjunct with a bigger reputation than any of the full-time teachers since a young Hollywood star began collecting his paintings, was giving critiques.

  Lina slipped into the back of the room.

  He projected a slide: a suburban house, a sprinkler on. Egg tempera. Lina wondered how the painter had made the beads of water so transparent.

  “What’s wrong with this?” Polk asked.

  People raised their hands, eager to identify their classmate’s mistakes.

  “Something familiar. That maybe needs blasting out,” he said. “Let’s have another.” Lina had two slides in her pocket she didn’t volunteer. Polk flipped through the images, which included Martine’s dollhouse, complimenting only one, a piece of plumbing equipment mounted on a wooden rectangle. Lina wondered if it had been cast.

  “Flush-valve gasket,” the di Suvero assistant mumbled. His hair, from the back, looked as if he’d just gotten out of bed.

  * * *

  —

  “Sounds like it’s working out at the gallery,” the department secretary said when Lina turned in her CETA work logs.

  Lina shrugged. “It’s a job.”

  “You know, sometimes we belittle what comes to us easily. You have a talent for gallery work, but you chase this other thing that may not be as natural.”

  “You mean…art?”

  “Don’t throw away what you’re good at.”

  Weights shifted inside Lina. Maybe she couldn’t do this. The welder who’d mounted the toilet valve was telling Martine about a Christmas party. He really was handsome. He invited Lina, too, writing down his address.

  Lina hadn’t seen him with Doc Martens recently.

  * * *

  —

  She tried to buy a thick Russian novel from Etienne on Christmas Eve. He rang it up and handed her the book in a bag. He was store manager now. The receipt read: $00.00.

  “Fuck,” she said to him. “I’m gonna have to find a new store.”

  He smiled, reached out, and touched her cheek. The time between their meetings had stretched and by now they only saw each other here in the bookstore, as they had at the beginning. But there was something extra.

  She bought clementines, bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon at the gourmet grocery. As she walked home with the treats, it began to snow.

  Flurries fizzed and danced in the airshaft outside her window. Twice, she lifted the phone to call her mother. But it was three hours earlier there. She should have flown home. Finally, she reached the facility. A nurse coaxed her mother to the phone and they had a nearly normal conversation, the first in years.

  “Are you doing something now?” her mother asked.

  “I’m just in my apartment. Sitting by the window looking at the snow, talking to you.” The radiator banged.

  “Are you getting ready to go out?”

  Her mother had always wanted her to go to parties.

  “I was invited someplace, but I may stay in. I bought a bag of groceries.”

  “Oh, go! Put on a dress and go. You know, Lina, you are a beautiful girl. You’ve got to let people see you.”

  Tears crossed Lina’s face. She was grateful that her mother still thought she was beautiful. She hadn’t been beautiful for a long time. She used to discount her mother’s appraisal—she was her mother—but today it was calming, even generative. “I want to work. That’s why I’m not there. I’m trying to paint your flowers.”

  “I know, but one night won’t make such a difference.”

  I know. Lina had told her something important—her work was tied to what her mother did now every day—but she couldn’t tell if her mother had registered this.

  “Snow,” her mother said. “I wish I could see that. Is it white everywhere?”

  “It’s been swirling. Now it’s beginning to stick.” Below, on garbage can covers and a low wall, a layer of white had collected. “Are they caroling there?” It was 1978. Lina had been to five hospital Christmases. She knew the rituals. Carolers strolled from the men’s geriatric ward to Menopause Manor and from there to the new forensic building, where they sang behind a chain-link fence. Incarcerated patients put their fingers in the metal openings, leaning close to hear.

  “I stick to myself. You know,” her mother said.

  “Donnie and Walter will come.”

  “Donnie’s here. We’re playing checkers. He’s trying to show me a new game.”

  She heard her brother in the background. “We have the ward to ourselves. They’re showing It’s a Wonderful Life in James Hall.”

  After Lina put down the receiver, she sat motionless, sad without the energy of grief. Talking to her mother loosened her. It didn’t matter what Isaiah Polk or anyone thought about her slides because art would be made somewhere and it didn’t matter whether or not it had her fingerprints on it. She had seen some beauty as the parade passed; there would be more, too, after her time.

  The buzzer startled her. For a second, she imagined her brothers here.

  Luis, the doorman, said through the intercom that she had a package. She went down the elevator in her socks. A woman in the lobby was objecting to the Christmas tree. “This is not a Christian building,” she said. A retired geographer thumped in on a walker. “We’re expecting Empire Szechuan,” she told Luis.

  Lina took the box upstairs to open in the morning, but as soon as she closed her door she tore through the layers of tissue to a padded jacket, no, a coat, a long white coat, light as a T-shirt, made of down. People had been talking about these sleeping-bag coats. They were warmer than fur, Martine said. Lina put it on. In the mirror, her dark braid fell against the white. She felt augmented. She called Walter and started to leave a message. “Thank you. You didn’t have to. I mean I have a coat. Not a warm one but…”

  He picked up. “I didn’t send you anything yet. I’ve been driving to the Central Valley looking for corners every night. Have you ever heard of Hayward? Neither had I.” While she listened, she emptied the May Company box, rustling with tissue, and found a plain index card. Merry Christmas. From Mom and us in Donnie’s penmanship. But who paid? Lina had received a check from Julie inside a tin of cookies, sent from Michigan. The idea of Donnie with money made her uneasy. How could a high school kid buy a coat?

  The past year when the phone rang, Lina’s first thought had not been their mother, but Donnie.

  Walter asked, as he did on every call, if Lina was dating anybody.

  “Not really. How about you?”

  “I leave at ten at night to go scout the Central Valley; it’s easier to see corners when there’s no traffic.”

  “You’re looking for another place?”

  “They want two more. It’s easy money. But I’m not the best date. What would I say, Wanna come to the rodeo? We’d be the honored guests of the mayor of Clovis. Not a real draw for your urban woman.”

  “Tonight some guy I hardly know invited me to a party.”

  “I’d go if I were you,” Walter said.

  * * *

  —

  Lina dressed for the party, to honor her mother, trying on most of what she owned.

  She walked to the subway in the snow wearing the new white coat. It was light and warm. She’d never really talked to the welder. She wondered what his apartment was like.

  Troy was always saying he was looking for his Black queen. Who would be her person? Why did love seem so important, especially at Christmas?

  Lina panicked when she saw the coat rack in the hall outside the apartment. She didn’t want to leave the coat. She unzipped and kept it on.

  She didn’t recognize anyone besides the welder and, across the room, Martine, who was tonight wearing a white blouse with a lace collar. The welder seemed even more good-looking in his apartment. There was nothing on the beige walls. She noticed two of his pieces on the kitchen countertop among many bottles. Two wooden blocks holding what looked like parts of machines. “Are those cast?” she asked him.

  “No, the only cast piece is the one that looks like a boomerang by the window. All the rest are found objects.” He drew her attention to a tall totem-shaped pole made of carved wood that looked like a Brancusi. “Bread riser,” he said. “From an upstate bakery.” A hanging wooden mobile had been inside a primitive 1930s wash machine. “Wanna gimme your coat?”

  “That’s okay.” She was grateful for his attention. She wanted to ask him about pouring metal. They’d never had a class together. Had he noticed her anyway?

  He stood next to her and began talking to the group that had gathered. “Yeah, Polk told me I’m going to be the next big thing.” He looked modest, even pained, saying this, as if he couldn’t help being the next big thing. She was glad now that she hadn’t said anything about her work. He had no reason to think she was any good.

  Parties were acutely hard. She wanted to talk to Martine, but she never understood how one was supposed to exit a group. Did you need an excuse? She mumbled the words “ladies’ room,” then found the bathroom (to make the excuse true). In a few minutes, she went to where Martine was, but she didn’t know how to fit into that conversation, either. Lina’s mother, when she’d been herself, could do these things; she’d smiled, her eyes alight and roving like those of a volleyball player.

  Martine had once defended a painting of Lina’s when the encaustic guy said her work wasn’t about anything. “It’s just flowers,” he’d complained.

  “And weeds, in an iconic soup can,” someone else added.

  “It’s a moment of peace,” Martine had cried out, “on pretty rough ground.” The can sat on burned-out crabgrass, littered with cigarette butts. Lina was grateful, though she felt exposed; Martine had noticed her rough ground.

  When Martine went to get her coat, Lina got up to leave, too. The welder clipped a single leash on a large pit bull’s collar and also a small terrier’s and said, “I’ll put you two in cabs.” It was snowing more seriously now, the broken lines of white slanted and rapid.

  Martine put a hand on Lina’s arm. “You working?”

  Lina nodded.

  “Good.”

  “You?” Lina asked.

  “Trying.”

  “I know.”

  Martine said she’d walk, so the welder accompanied Lina to the subway. The underground train car was raucous, like a better party. That night, Lina cried looking at her walls. Donnie had never seen her apartment. Her mother never would. There’d been a moment, hearing the buzzer, when she’d thought they were all there, about to come up on the elevator.

  * * *

  —

  She melted wax in a pot on an electric hot plate on the floor of her studio, then dipped panels of felt into it. She wrapped the wax-soaked fabric around balled newspaper to make a form, like papier-mâché. She wanted the shape to be full and voluptuous. It took two days to get the contours right. The sheath was four and a half feet tall but light. She carried it to a corner of the clay room.

  Three days after Christmas, she made the ceramic mold. She liked glomping on the clay. She had to wait another two days for it to dry and then she fired it.

  It was no longer easy to carry. She wrapped it in packing plastic and then held it across her lap in a taxi to Greenpoint.

  She wore gloves and goggles, as she’d been told to, when she poured the metal, but she burned her thumb anyway. The studio smelled like singed wax.

  She arrived early the next morning with a hammer to break the plaster casing. It took all day. Her iron dress stood there, as she’d pictured it.

  Coughing from the plaster dust, she cleaned the studio, wrote a note to leave with a thank-you bottle of Scotch for the friend of a friend. She needed a dolly to get the sculpture into another taxi to her studio.

  One Saturday, a retiree had asked Lina how the Met had transported the armor there. Some suits had been shipped disassembled with elaborate numberings, like a Lego kit.

  Others were treated like statues.

  Lina tried to keep the retirees laughing. “You could buy a town house for the price of this helmet.”

  63.

  Jess pulled at the neckline of her bridesmaid’s costume in front of the mirror. Mrs. Moses had sent them each a lime-green chiffon gown.

  “It’s just for one night,” Lina said.

  “But I hate meeting people looking bad.”

  Lina hadn’t thought of that. She’d been worried about whether they had to reimburse Mrs. Moses for the dresses.