“Sometimes.”
“You do? Oh my God. Are they cute?”
“Val!”
“Of course. Why would I sculpt them if they weren’t?” said Clover, and laughed. Clover laughed a lot but we never felt that she was laughing at us, the way you do with some grownups.
When Clover wasn’t wearing blue, she wore pale pink. Every so often, gray. Blond colors. But mostly she wore blue. Blue cotton dresses, blue gingham artist smocks, sheer blue nighties, lacy blue bras and underpants: I know, because she always hand-washed them.
She hand-washed almost all of her clothing, actually. We thought that was funny at first. She’d swish around the apartment wringing her clothing out in a bucket full of lavender-scented soapsuds. Actually it was a white-painted champagne bucket that she told me Aunt Theo had gotten from some hotel in Paris. The paint was chipping now, but it still looked pretty dashing to me. In fact, like a lot of Aunt Theo’s things, it almost looked better because it was chipped—because it gave off an air of history. Back home, Valentine and I just tossed everything into the washing machine. This ritual of hand-washing was something new and grownup. It made Clover seem like such a lady.
Rules, Aunt Theo had written to us in a second letter on the same lavender-colored paper as the one before.
Clover, your chaperone, will have a private bedroom and bath. You are not welcome to them, but everything else in the apartment is yours for the summer. Clover is an artist and needs time to herself during the day but most importantly in the morning. In the evening she will be game for anything.
The apartment had two floors and Clover slept on the top one. Valentine and I went to sleep every night next to each other on the hard little twin beds with brass headboards. We understood that this was only appropriate at our age, sharing a bedroom together. We were still girls. Clover was a woman.
Other times, when Aunt Theo was in New York, the top floor was her bedroom. Clover only lived there when Aunt Theo was away on her travels. One time, we asked Clover where she lived the rest of the year.
“Out of an orange suitcase,” she said, with that light little laugh of hers.
“Why orange?” said Valentine. I knew she was wondering that because Clover always wore blue.
“It’s Hermès,” said Clover, and explained to us that orange was the color of the Hermes brand.
I’ve noticed this thing about Valentine: she won’t let things be. I get it when grownups go silent. And I don’t mind filling in the blanks in my head.
But not Valentine. She kept right at it. She said: “Why don’t you live here? You could sleep in our room, couldn’t you?”
“Girls! You don’t understand. Aunt Theo believes in alone time.”
The way she believed in skirts but did’nt believe in trousers, the way she believed in letters but not e-mail … I was trying to keep track of it all so one day I too could understand.
“And then,” Clover went on, “if I were here, how would she entertain her gentleman friends?”
The phrase entertain her gentleman friends was quite beyond us, especially when we both knew Aunt Theo was well into her sixties by now, and even Valentine stopped pushing it. One couldn’t be interested in that side of life then; one simply couldn’t.
The next afternoon when Clover was out doing some errands, Valentine yawned and said, “You know what I’d like to do right now?”
“What?”
“Go upstairs.”
I was about to say, “Oh, Val!” But what I ended up saying instead was: “Me too.”
We were giggling as we made our way upstairs. The banister was painted this bottle-green color but the paint was chipping. Well, that wasn’t unusual: most everything at Aunt Theo’s was chipping.
“Do you think that means she’s very poor or very rich?” Valentine asked.
“Neither,” I said. “It’s just her aesthetic.”
“Her aesthetic? Oh, Jesus. Who are you trying to sound like? Clover?”
“No.”
But Valentine had caught me. I was trying to sound like Clover, though I hadn’t noticed it before she pointed it out.
We went up the green staircase till we got to a landing with the same brown-and-white diamond parquet floor as the lobby of the apartment building. There was a salmon-colored velvet cotton curtain you had to tug at to cross into the bedroom. I liked this odd little space. It made you pause. It made you wonder what the bedroom would be like, rather than you jumping into the bedroom right away. But Valentine pulled at the curtain impatiently and then, all at once, we were standing there.