Trompe l'Oeil by Nancy Reisman

remained on the cheap, the color values erratic. In high school, Nora kept a few of Meg’s reprinted Annunciations ; in college, she taped postcards and museum sale posters to the cinder-block walls, reproductions she imitated in her own first paintings. When she first lived with James, she’d save exhibit postcards friends mailed from abroad, or pick them up at local shows, or cut pages from old books or magazines. The Dutch, the Italians, a handful of the French, stored in shoe boxes she’d cover in colored gift-wrap. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Ruisdael, Da Vinci, Bernini. La Tour, Matisse, Vuillard. The Magdalens she’d call “sad Marys.” The backs of many remained blank, as if waiting for inscription, though some had vacationers’ scribbled messages, dates and stamped locations. On the dresser of the bedroom she shared with James in Blue Rock, Nora kept two small frames in which she displayed favorites; on the wall beside the north window hung a corkboard on which she posted others, changing them according to mood.
    Rarely, she’d hang a portrait—say, a Vermeer—in the kitchen, above the girls’ semi-fauvist paintings and drawingsof flying kids and orange swans, or tiny boats skimming over the blue outline of a hand. Her drawings from school she kept in a thin brown portfolio in her closet. In a happier moment, two of her paintings—the ones Theo kept—hung in the upper hallway at Blue Rock. A pink-toned Vuillard-influenced interior, and a portrait of Nora’s mother reading.

ANOTHER SUMMER
    She dreamed of driving in the rain in what seemed to be Paris, though she was driving a station wagon. It was an uncomplicated plot: she needed to get home before the school bus carrying Theo and Katy; she needed to pick up Molly from the babysitter. She was running late—why was she running late? She’d been visiting her other life, a friend, a museum, something that James and the children had no part in. And now she was driving, and though brick buildings and green parks flashed by, she seemed to be driving in place.
    How transparent, her dreams, but recognizing their transparency did not prevent their repetition or the accompanying anxiety, or alter her waking life. Of course, in this dream Molly lived, and waited at the babysitter’s (though where were Sara and Delia?), and for a moment after Nora awoke, Molly still waited, and then the dream gave way. Wind gusts whipped the side of the house, and when they subsided she could hear the little girls in their room, Delia chatting then calling for her.
    She did not speak to James about these dreams, believing he’d be irritated by their repetition or by her dream portraits of him: he was never there to pick up the children, never there to collectMolly from the babysitter’s (though in truth, he devoted weekends to the family). But the days and weeks accumulated when they’d forgo not only talk about dreams, but anything beyond the tasks of the day, both of them in rigid traces. Some days Nora had no chance to shower, others no chance to eat. Often, James returned at eight, exhausted. Small daily affections, ordinary endearments—at first with subtexts of a promised later —took a perfunctory spin as the fatigue accumulated, the space between them widening. On bad days, “sweetheart” meant What now? or Again? or No . Not the first marriage sustained by etiquette, but after a while, you begin to lose track. Some days, James appeared to her as dreamless and drone-like, if also—and unjustly—impatient. Her weeks seemed a cast-iron box containing the house and children, which she hoisted and carried without respite, few moments to acknowledge she was lonely.
    Yet this: the salt breeze, the taste of salt breeze. Always she took solace from the shore—even returning from the supermarket, you’d move from the main onto secondary roads and then, finally, near the cliffs of Blue Rock,