Burnaway

[cont.]
Whenever Jack left for work, Odessa was besieged with an onslaught of New Age clichés, more than anybody could stomach. Tiffani’s refrain that Odessa “return to joy” was particularly irritating because it was always followed by a list of “affirmations.” At the top of the list was to close the gallery, sell the business and the house (“release the weight of your material possessions”) and buy a condo near them in Brussels so that she “could spend time every day with the little darling.” It would be “a way of moving forward.” Since Tiffani’s parents weren’t volunteering to move, Odessa interpreted this as Tiffani telling her that now that Dennis was dead, her life was over and she could only find meaning as an unpaid babysitter and personal shopper. Hearing Tiffani’s mother and father repeat “Family is everything” so many times didn’t help a bit either.
The defining faux pas of the visit was when Odessa commented that the elegantly bleak view from the row of narrow windows in the living room was beautiful. Tiffani immediately gushed that she had to have beauty in her life. “In beauty all is made whole.” Odessa grew up in a picture book little town surrounded by the beauty of mimosas and Spanish moss in Mississippi and as a little child had witnessed firsthand the bigotry and rancor of her neighbors during the racial integration of schools. “I really wish it made all whole,” Odessa said sadly. Beauty, in her experience, did not lead automatically to uplift. It’s one of life’s ironies: even the most beautiful art could be created by total jerks and owned by even worse sorts, with no demonstrable uplift. Tiffani, though, scolded her for the comment, “Silly woman. Don’t you know that if you ‘wish,’ it will never be yours because the universe will not respond. This is why affirmations must be in the present tense, never the future tense.” Odessa decided to keep her thoughts to herself from this point on, hoping to avoid more installments of “how to add light to your life” or “eliminate failure from your vocabulary.” Instead, she nodded silently and smiled. Fortunately, Tibby was a sweet natured child. On her final day there, Odessa was left alone with the baby. It was a great day, watching the comedy of the tiny little girl learning to toddle from chair to table. Tiffani got quite upset when she returned to the apartment to find Odessa crying, the happy baby in her arms. Odessa wanted to explain how wonderful and painful it was seeing the shape of Dennis’s eyes looking back at her, the lopsided curl of his smile on this little face. She wanted to explain but since Tiffani responded to every comment she made with more earnest protestations “to fight her self-defeating mental imaging,” “to learn to love her pain,” she just stood there while Tiffani blessed her out for passing on all that negative energy to the child. She refused to let Odessa touch the baby again, even to kiss her good bye.
Despite what Tiffani believed, chanting “I will move on” three times every morning while doing deep breaths won’t magically make it happen. Odessa reckoned that Tiffani was uncomfortable with death and was trying in the only way she knew how to fix the grief and make it go away, so she struggled to keep a smile through it all and not let her irritation show. Jack loved this young woman so she had to learn how to interact with her, but she couldn’t help wondering why joy was so all fired important to Tiffani and her parents. All the exhortations were less like wanting genuine joy and more like demanding that she maintain an acceptable mask of it. Like grief was selfish. Maybe it was nothing more than a defensive gesture, a way of deflecting any potential suggestion that Tiffani was somehow failing as a mother. And that’s not an unreasonable fear. Every mother fails in one way or another. Children want everything and that’s just not possible to give.
When Odessa failed to respond properly to Tiffani’s admonitions, Maggie became the recipient. They started out simple, like “Give Odessa a BIG HUG and get her OUT of the house!!!!” “Cure her Unhappiness by sharing a SMILE.” “Get OUT of the PAST and into JOY.” They morphed rather quickly into exhortations. The first obnoxious one was a list of yoga instructors for her to use. “Take real yoga classes and take Odessa WITH YOU. Your lives need to be more in HARMONY with the universe. These meditations you say you do are FOOLISHNESS. You need PROPER instruction by someone with training.” When Maggie ceased responding, Tiffani began campaigning to convince Odessa to sell the gallery – “is it worth anything beyond the property value?” and “She will be so much HAPPIER if she abandons art to focus on her FAMILY!!” The killer was “You know how toxic art is to your adopted mother!!!! She needs to purge all the poisons by moving. To start FRESH!! YOU can convince her to move into the LIGHT!!!! She needs to return to her AUTHENTIC self!!!!” Were they talking about the same woman? An Odessa without art was impossible for Maggie to imagine. Art really was her passion and her pleasure. What happened on that trip that made Tiffani so convinced that art, not Dennis’ death, was the source of anguish? Maggie texted her: “Odessa’s grief process has to unravel at its own pace and the job of family is to support her, not to order her around.” After she sent it, she thought maybe she was a bit blunt but some folks just don’t take hints unless they are hit smack dab across the head with a two by four. Tiffani stopped contacting Maggie directly altogether.
But as far as backfires go, Tiffani was relatively easy for Maggie because she was so far away. Barbara was a different story.
Out of the blue Maggie started receiving a bunch of text messages and emails with thoughtful attachments, reminders of all the good times they had together. Barbara had made a huge mistake, she said, and wanted Maggie back in her life. The sudden insistence on reconnecting left Maggie wondering why, after over eight months, Barbara changed her mind. Had the blonde jilted her? Was it because her last film flopped?