She had taken the icon home in a bundle of cloth. The curator had given it to her with a shrug; “The last restorer never had the time for this one, sure she is not as glamorous as the altarpieces, but maybe you can give it a try?”.
She had sat on her half ladder in her overalls and stared at the plank of wood propped up on her aisle for a long time. With this grimy “Lady of the people,” her life was at a turning point. They kind of fit together, the two of them. The icon of a secondary altar, from a secondary church in a secondary town in Ukraine and herself. She hadn’t even managed to hold on to her second marriage. With that, she had decided to pull herself together and fetch the vodka. Sipping the cold drink with a dash of lemonade she decided to give a dab at the cape with the alcohol. It didn’t work, the icon was as sooty as ever, but at least she wasn’t drinking alone!
Vodka always made her feel young again. Its rawness reminded her of her study years abroad in Prague and the long nights of her doctoral studies, giving herself a kick to be able to finish the endless reference pages in time, her eyelids drooping from lack of sleep and having to stare at the monitor for such a long time. Around that time was when she had fallen in love with her professor. He was a narcissist; she knew that from the first lesson. She would come home to her small flat and tell Tom about his antics in class. He would laugh and tell her to get over herself, she was just as full of herself as that old fart. He was right in the end; she was so caught up in her Ph.D. and her classes that she never noticed that she was drifting apart from her best friend and her soulmate.
She would have to go over the gold leaf too. The edges of the wooden plank were rough and the mold had eaten off stripes of it, giving the icon a plundered look. She would go and look for new brushes, the acid, and the other chemicals on Monday. A knock on the door interrupted her musings. Her sister was on the front step. She was dressed for work. Well at least she was dressed as usual, Emma could hardly remember her not dressed primly. Probably she had started wearing skirt suits in high school when Em was going through her dark phase of middle school. A travel bag and a computer bag joined the already massive handbag on her right shoulder.
“Can I come in?”
“Olivia, what are you doing here?”
“Here in Arles, or here at your house?”
Her sister was not one for surprises. Her carefully planned life didn’t have space for that kind of chaos. Emma made way for her and took her raincoat waving her in the general direction of the living room. She briefly checked her phone still standing by the door-frame. Maybe Olivia had sent her a message or tried to call and she hadn’t noticed. She had been definitely off the radar for a while. But nope, nothing on her phone either.
“This thing looks like it needs some attention” Olivia was peering cheerfully at the icon over her tortoiseshell spectacles. Those glasses were probably worth all of Em’s wardrobe.
“Yes, I have re-baptized her “Our Lady of the people”. Look on the right side there is probably a floating city under her cape. Well under the dirt too.”
“Mm right.” Olivia lost interest as she caught sight of herself in the mirror and tucked back a few black curls.
Emma moved slowly in front of the kitchen isle. The vodka bottle and the two glasses were still there with the cloth she had used to dab at the icon. Olivia raised an eyebrow catching sight of the bottle.
“I’m so sorry to barge in on you like that.” Em remembered Tom getting furious with her sister in the early days of their marriage. “She always says sorry and she is the least sorry person I know” was his constant reply when Em took her sister’s defense.
“Don’t worry.” Em bit her lip, why did she always sound so sheepish? The vodka was making her feel a bit woozy and teary and the last thing she needed was being scrutinized by her elder sibling.
“I was in Arles for work and just decided to hop by and check up on you”. Her eyes flitted around the house, taking in the dusty parquet, the boxes of takeaway food (ramen and sushi mostly), beer cans piled close to the bin, and the many hoodies strewn across the sofa. Cleaning day was on Saturday since always for Emma. Friday was undoubtedly the worst day to have a surprise visit. Emma pulled on a loose thread of her stained overall.
“Right, we could go out for a beer or something and catch up?”
“Em, it’s eleven in the morning! I was thinking more about lunch”
Of course, shopping lunches, that was their mother’s remedy to all ailments. It was mainly a way to get out of the house and talk. Emma had somehow never mastered the art of it. Olivia seemed to manage to choose a skirt and discuss her latest work issues at the same time. Last time the three of them had gone out like that, Théo was only a few months old. Olivia was choosing baby clothes efficiently and discussing the benefits of breast milking with their mother. Emma was agonizingly bored and had lifted the baby out of the pram only to be snapped at “He is not a cat, Em, hold him correctly”.
Emma closed her eyes to steady herself. Think of the products you have to buy for the icon. In her mind, she visualized her favorite supply shop and started to make a list.
To consolidate the paint layer and make sure it doesn’t peel off with the cleaning, sturgeon glue and some picks, just in case.
“Yes, we can have lunch in the center. Do you want a drink of orange juice in the meantime?”
“Yes please. I like what you did with the plants there”. Olivia had dropped her bags and was wandering around the living room observing her furniture. For once Emma hoped that Olivia’s phone would ring as usual at top volume to tear her attention away from her botched attempt at making her house look nice after the departure of Alfred. Her second husband had always owned most of the books and when he left she had tried to cover up the bookshelves with potted geraniums to fill that gaping void.
Wood putty. The wood was probably full of tunnels. Something to get the bugs out if there were any still in there and to flush any frass out.
“How’s Zelda?” Olivia’s second daughter was a revelation for Emma. At the age of fifteen, she adored her aunt. She would come down from Aix-en-Provence on the train to spend the weekend with her and Alfred. She had a quick gurgling laugh and would perch herself on the edge of the sofa with the dark blue starry plaid on her lap and one of Alfred’s “coffee table books” as she called them. They were mostly history of art grand format hardcovers with glossy pictures.
Now Alfred had moved back to Prague, Emma would have to break the news to her. They had always had a real relationship, Alfred and Zelda. Separate from her own relationship with her niece. She would enjoy watching them discuss paintings while sitting on the pick-nick cloth in the back garden. Alfred doted on her, she had a “fresh point of view”, mostly meaning she would listen to him lecture for hours. Emma imagined that with her husband they made up the perfect get-away for the kid. They never scolded when something broke, Zelda could walk around barefoot in the house and garden and slouch around in her aunt’s baggy clothes and read books all the time.
A set of paintbrushes, the stiff pony ones, and some soft pine marten or squirrel ones.
“She’s fine.”Olivia dumped herself on the sofa in a very uncharacteristic way and rubbed her face. “She’s dating a guy, and we had a fight.”
“Oh! Is it the guitarist or the drummer?”
“You knew??” Olivia’s eyes flashed angrily at her sister.
“Well, I knew she had a thing for this band in her school and wasn’t quite decided if she liked one or the other.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Emma raised an eyebrow at her sister.
“Oh come on, I just want her to be safe, she sneaked out of the house to see this guy. At night!!”
“Maybe you could have asked if she likes someone, given her some advice…”
“It’s not like you are the best person to ask relationship advice to!” Olivia scrunched up her face and sighed “Em, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that”.
She reached out a hand to Emma as the very large designer handbag started to vibrate by her feet. The ringtone cut through the dense atmosphere, it’s high pitched echo bouncing off the bare walls. Alfred had taken most of the paintings with him and somehow that made everything sound louder. Or maybe it was just Emma’s nerves that were on edge.
Olivia was on the phone with what sounded like her son’s karate instructor. Théo had inherited the capacity to manage sports, theater, violin, and perfect school grades from his mother. He was in his last year of high school and everyone had big hopes for him. Ze’ would often rant about her perfect brother. As much as Emma tried to calm her down and tell her that all the best people failed at something and that it made you stronger, she knew that it was easier said than done.
Dimethyl-sulphoxide to remove the original discolored varnish. This part would take a few days and she would have to spend some time at the museum to keep the humidity level stable.
“Okay, I’m really sorry, I didn’t want to be mean. It’s just, you see, Théo is so easy.” Olivia gestured in the direction of the phone. “He is like me. His adolescence has been a bike ride. He never manages to hide anything from us. And most of the time, there is nothing to hide. Ze’, well as you know, she’s different. She gets all archy like you used to.”
Emma snorted and folded her arms “I wasn’t archy. I don’t think that’s even a word. I was just upset most of the time”.
“Okay but why? You had everything you wanted! You never had to fight for things, it was already conquered land when you arrived!”
Emma collected the two empty orange juice glasses with a clank. “If we are going to carry on like this, I may actually need a beer at midday”.
“Am I really that bad as a mother?” Olivia was tearing up now. The point of her ears had gone very pink and she was rubbing her hands together in distress.
“Oh come on, you are a great mother Ollie. Your kids are wonderful and they love you.” Emma rolled her eyes back.
“I thought maybe you could, you know, tell me a bit more how you do with Zelda. She always comes home from her weekends happy. And then I try and talk to her and she gets crabby at me.” Olivia was full-on sobbing at this point. Designer glasses on the top of her head she was blowing loudly in a silk handkerchief. Emma didn’t know that kind of thing still even existed, let alone if you could find it somewhere other than an antique shop.
“Oh, Lord! I think you need a beer too”
Mechanical cleaning could damage the gilding, better to use chemicals, Formic Acid would probably do the job. Deep breath.
“Do you remember when you were like sixteen or something and you wanted to go out with that farmer boy so desperately? What was his name?”
Olivia nodded and smiled through her tears. “Guido, I think?”
“Right. We made that silly plan together, we wrote down all the different things we were going to say to our parents to convince them to send you to that birthday party. It was an utter crap plan, but we believed so much in it. And yes, you did get caught and have a telling off and all.”
“Yes, I would probably have flipped the same if it was one of my kids. Oh gosh, I’m turning into our father.”
Olivia groaned and covered her face with one of the sequined pillows of the couch.
Emma laughed “Don’t you go putting makeup on my extremely cheap market cushions! Come on, not the point. Did you ever regret that?”
“No, it was such a fun day. I remember mostly coming to your room in tears and you building this fantastic and ridiculous strategy. In the end, the party wasn’t that good at all and I came home early and that’s what screwed the plan.”
“I think Zelda needs to have her own adventures,make her own mistakes, as long as you are there to guide her and never shut her out”.
“You were always so wise.”
“No, I was always a sneak. It’s different. I never got told off because no one ever saw what I was doing. I was secondary I guess, less potential and less headache”.
“You can’t mean that! You were always a natural at what you do. It was painful, I always felt cheated out. How could it all be so easy for you? I mean look at that.” Olivia pointed at the icon with a self-explanatory gesture. “You get to restore something beautiful in the calm of your own big house sipping vodka or whatever at midday. While I am stressed out of my boots, with two teenage children with hormones, a team of grouchy architects to manage and a needy husband!”
Deep breath. To coat the wood and secure a better bond between putty and wood, a solution of Klucel E, 10% in ethanol.
Emma shook her head and snorted. “Do you even own boots? I thought that was last year’s fashion.” Sighing she plonked herself down on the couch next to her sister.
“I think you have to let Ze’ do her thing. She is not Thèo, she will never be the same and that’s good. She can find her path and be different. Just don’t compare them. In the end, they only have each other as siblings. They can be each other’s team.”
Olivia nodded and blew her nose again. “When did we stop being a team, Em?”
“I don’t know, maybe when you started to try and fix me like everyone else.”
Emma sighed, everyone had realized too late that her game was rigged. She was the clown of the family, the clown of her group of friends. Always light, always breezy. ‘A light relief’ her mother would call her. But she was never happy. She was only trying desperately to be noticed. An obsession with being abandoned, that’s what her psychologist had told her. Funny thing was, that was what drove most people away. Convincing herself that people didn’t care about her anymore until they actually didn’t.
Some areas definitely needed reconstructing and retouching. The pigment could be bound with Klucel E, 5% in ethanol, and diacetone alcohol as a medium.
“How are things since he left?” Ollie looked at her sister intently. “You never called me back.”
“I… didn’t want to talk about it.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to, but we were worried about you”
Emma sighed “I finally got some restorations to do. The icon. I started working with an antique shop too. It’s not very challenging but at least it pays well. So well I figured I would be okay”.
Her voice cracked. She had never imagined he would actually leave her. Reality had not really sunk in. Even when he emptied the bookshelves or they had that fight that ended with her spending the night on the couch at her friend’s place. It all felt temporary, talking about it made it real, it made it a un-revocable fact.
Olivia put a hand on Emma’s knee. Her sister’s face, now streaked with makeup, looked younger. “Zelda would like to have painting classes this summer. I thought maybe she could come and stay with you for some weeks when school is over?”
Emma’s eyes filled with tears as she nodded, her sister always knew what she needed, even if she didn’t.
“Come on let’s go and get that beer in the center” Ollie winked at her as she adjusted her makeup with a handbag mirror.
PVA glue and Champagne chalk, as filler. To even the gloss of the whole painted surface, of the icon, she would need varnish with a solution of Regalrez 1094, 30% in toluene.
Crafty Poulette 