Sunset Park

sweater, not bothering with panties or a bra, just her bare skin under the soft fabrics, wanting to feel as loose and mobile as she can this morning, unencumbered for the day ahead. She takes her drawing pad and a Faber-Castell pencil off the top of the bureau, then sits down on the bed and opens the pad to the first empty page. Holding the pencil in her right hand,she raises her left hand in the air, tilts it at a forty-five-degree angle, and keeps it suspended about twelve inches from her face, studying it until it no longer seems attached to her body. It is an alien hand now, a hand that belongs to someone else, to no one, a woman’s hand with its slender fingers and rounded nails, the half-moons above the cuticles, the narrow wrist with its small bump of bone sticking out on the left side, the ivory-shaded knuckles and joints, the nearly translucent white skin sheathed over rivulets of veins, blue veins bearing the red blood that meanders through her system as her heart beats and the air moves in and out of her lungs. Digits, carpus, metacarpus, phalanges, dermis. She presses the point of the pencil against the blank page and begins to draw the hand.
    At nine-thirty, she knocks on Alice’s door. Diligent Bergstrom is already at work, a swarm of fingers darting across the keyboard of her laptop, eyes fixed on the screen in front of her, and Ellen apologizes for interrupting her. No, no, Alice says, it’s perfectly all right, and then she stops typing and turns to her friend with one of those warm Alice smiles on her face, no, more than just a warm smile, a maternal smile somehow, not the way Ellen’s mother smiles at her, perhaps, but the kind of smile all mothers should give their children, a smile that is not a greeting so much as an offering, a benediction. She thinks: Alice will make a terrific mother when the time comes…a superior mother, she says to herself, and then, because ofthe juxtaposition of those two words, she transforms Alice into a Mother Superior, suddenly seeing her in a nun’s habit, and because of this momentary digression she loses her train of thought and doesn’t have time to ask Alice if she would be willing to pose for her before Alice is asking a question of her own:
    Have you ever seen The Best Years of Our Lives ?
    Of course, Ellen says. Everyone knows that film.
    Do you like it?
    Very much. It’s one of my favorite Hollywood movies.
    Why do you like it?
    I don’t know. It touches me. I always cry when I see it.
    You don’t find it a little too pat?
    Of course it’s pat. It’s a Hollywood movie, isn’t it? All Hollywood movies are a bit contrived, don’t you think?
    Good point. But this one is a little less contrived than most—is that what you’re saying?
    Think of the scene when the father helps prepare his son for bed.
    Harold Russell, the soldier who lost his hands in the war.
    The boy can’t take off the hooks by himself, he can’t button up his own pajamas, he can’t put out his cigarette. His father has to do everything for him. As I remember it, there’s no music in that scene, hardly a word of dialogue, but it’s a great moment in the film. Completely honest. Incredibly moving.
    Does everyone live happily ever after?
    Maybe yes, maybe no. Dana Andrews tells the girl—
    Teresa Wright—
    He tells Teresa Wright that they’re going to get kicked around a lot. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. And the Fredric March character is a drunk, a serious, nonstop, raving alcoholic, so his life isn’t going to be much fun a few years down the road.
    What about Harold Russell?
    He marries his sweetheart at the end, but what kind of marriage is it going to be? He’s a simple, good-hearted boy, but so damned inarticulate, so bottled up emotionally, I don’t see how he’s going to make his wife very happy.
    I hadn’t realized you knew the film so well.
    My grandmother was crazy about it. She was about sixteen when the war broke out, and she always said The Best Years of Our Lives was her movie. We must have watched it together five or six times.
    They go on talking about the film for a few more minutes, and then she finally remembers to ask Alice the question that prompted her to knock on the door in the first place. Alice is busy now, but she will be glad to break for an hour after lunch and pose for her then. What Alice doesn’t understand is that Ellen isn’t interested in doing a portrait of her face, she wants to make a drawing of her whole body, and not