By Garner Behnke

She’s barely listening the first time he asks her. She lies on her back in the bed with her head propped on her own two pillows and one of Eric’s. With one hand, she holds her open book on her raised knees. The thumb of her other hand is in her mouth. She mumbles, “Yes,” around her thumb and keeps reading. Eric lies on his stomach beside her. His one remaining pillow rests beneath his chest and his book lies flat on the bed in front of him. He holds it with both hands, but he is looking at her.

“When?” he asks.

“Whenever you want.”

This time she takes her thumb out of her mouth, although she knows he is quite adept at understanding her even with it in. She merely hopes he’ll be more satisfied thinking he has her undivided attention. And then she can go back to reading her book. It’s very good. It’s the kind of novel she really likes, a story within a story. Eric’s book is about art history. He has been reading bits of it aloud to her all evening. But nothing that she’s heard so far seems related to the question. He wants to make some kind of mask of her face, a death mask. Why not? She thinks briefly and puts her thumb back in her mouth.

The smell is unfamiliar. Oil paint, turpentine, charcoal, gesso – these smells she knows. They signify Eric and the pattern of the last twelve years. Plaster, even dry, is a whole new smell. And there is a jar of petroleum jelly on the table. In the kitchen corner that Eric uses for a studio, the materials are all assembled.

“What . . .?” she starts to ask before she remembers. They are going to make a death mask of her face.
She’s used to having her portrait made by Eric. He’s made them in lots of forms. There is a complete photographic record of her morning routine in Chapel Hill – standing in their turquoise kitchen in sweats holding a rusted teakettle, just out of the shower with glasses and wet hair, leaning over the sink to put in her contacts, ready to leave the apartment in the green turtleneck and the black walking shorts she used to wear with tights and laced oxfords. Her English schoolboy outfit, Eric called it.

In Texas, he painted her sitting cross-legged with no shirt. In the painting, her breasts are neon acrylic yellow. “Do they really sag that much?” her mother asked when they all went to Eric’s opening.

The most recent portraits are small oil paintings on wood. Most of these sold, all to the same woman. It’s odd to think of them hanging in someone else’s living room. There is one of her with her thumb in her mouth and the other hand tucked beneath her chin. In another, she lies on the unmade bed with a bare leg draped across a pillow.

Once they had been invited to a party at the woman’s house. She had been embarrassed when someone referred to her thumb sucking.

Though these portraits are clearly her – – her short hair, her voluptuous features, her round thigh, her thumb – she never feels that they are her. Do I look like that? She always wonders, the same way people question their own voices on a recording.

She looks over the death mask materials hesitantly. Suddenly, she is nervous.

“Do you have to cover my whole face with plaster?” she asks. “How will I breathe?”

“We’ll put two straws in your nose. It’ll be okay.” Eric starts mixing the plaster. “You’d better use the bathroom and pull your hair back with something.”

She pulls her short brown hair back with a blue hair band and uses the toilet. Returning to the kitchen, she says, “I think I better have a drink first.”

“Are you scared?” Eric asks.

“How long will it take?”

“A few minutes to apply the plaster, then about 40 minutes or so for it to dry. We have to coat your face with Vaseline first.”

“Where do you want me?” she asks. The kitchen is crowded with unstretched canvas and dirty dishes. A big piece of particleboard leans against the largest wall, with drawing paper stapled securely to it. On the paper is the charcoal drawing Eric’s been working on.

“Um . . . on the table, I guess. Hang on a minute.”

He goes to the living room and returns with an end table. He moves the plaster and petroleum to the small table and pats the cleared space. “There you go,” he says.

She steps up to the kitchen table and sits down on the edge, swinging her legs.

“Do I have to lie down?”

“Yeah,” Eric answers, starting to mix the plaster. “Lie back so it doesn’t run.”

She lies down on the table and turns her head to watch him. He is still mixing the plaster, getting everything ready. She tries to imagine she’s lying on the beach somewhere with warm sunshine and the anticipation of cold beer and spiced shrimp.

The thick, industrial smell of the Vaseline surprises her. “Close your eyes so I can get your eyelids,” Eric says.

She lies with her eyes closed and imagines what he looks like bending over her face. His touch is soft. “You okay?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’m going to start applying the plaster,” he tells her. He places the ends of two straws in her nose.

She takes a deep breath. The plaster feels cold and heavy. She’s okay until he starts to cover her closed eyelids. She feels her chest tighten and a coldness in her throat. It’s hard to swallow.

Eric, I can’t. But she only thinks it.

“Hang in there,” Eric says, as if he hears her.

The beach is gone. She is in the hospital last August with meningitis. The pain is so bad that it has blocked out every sight and sound. Eric holds her hand. There is an IV in her left arm so she can’t suck her thumb. She thinks she is going to die.

“Almost done.”

Eric argues with the night nurse about her medication. He tells her he has called her mother and her sisters and they are flying in. Is she going to die?

“This is the last bit.”

Visitors wander in and out of her hospital room. Her dad calls, crying. Eric holds the phone to her ear so she can hear him. She is going to die.

“Now, it just has to dry,” Eric says.

She can’t speak through the plaster. He takes her hand. “I set the timer on the microwave. Forty-five minutes.”

“Just a sec, I’ll get something to read,” Eric says and lets go of her hand. It feels like a long time before he comes back. Aloud, he reads Betsy and the Great World, a favorite since childhood. She lets her mind follow the story, allowing the hospital and last August to fall away.

They glided off into the Grand Canal. Dusk had fallen, but there was a moon. It turned the street of water into an even more incredible street of trembling silver. When the clamor of the station died away, there was no sound but the soft splash of an oar and some distant music. Betsy spoke of the silence and Mr. Regali said, smiling at her, “The Grand Canal is in the shape of an S. Italians say this stands for Silenzio.” ¹

The plaster warms as it dries and tightens on her face. She feels the panic returning and focuses on Eric’s voice.

After a while, the cast begins to pull away from her face as it continues to dry. She can wriggle her nose and her eyebrows.

When the timer goes off, she’s startled. Eric carefully pulls the plaster from her face. She thinks for a moment her eyelashes will come off with it. When it is all off, she stares at the mask. It doesn’t look like anything.

It takes weeks for Eric to recast the mold they made. She almost forgets about it in the routine of work and teaching. On a Tuesday, she comes in from work to find it waiting on the coffee table. She is amazed and surprised. It is her face.

Her sleeping face.

¹ Hart, Lovelace M. Betsy and the Great World

Garner Behnke is a writer and poet. She lives in Frenchtown, NJ with her artist-husband and two dogs.