Nanny, Rose, and I

A painting showed a young woman what love looked like. And then it came to life.

I had just finished my sophomore year of college and was in the final stages of a very bad relationship with my most serious boyfriend to date. Of course, I didn’t realize it was the end; I didn’t even fully realize how bad it was until much later. All I knew was that my declarations of love were met with unhappy, awkward silences. This guy was not one to maintain any illusions; he got a kick out of me, enjoyed sleeping with me, perhaps was even fond of me. But he would never pretend to love me. Despite this, he liked the idea of moving to Boston with me for the summer—a city about three hours from our school in northern Vermont. It would be fun to spend time in an urban environment, we agreed. We found meaningless, temporary jobs. We sublet a tiny fourth-floor walkup in the Back Bay that smelled strongly of natural gas. Every crevice in the bathroom was lined with mold. It was a wretched apartment, but the bedroom had a bay window that overlooked the Fens, at the far end of which sat the Museum of Fine Arts, white and stately and vaguely Greek. We slept on a futon on the floor beneath that bay window; I would often creep out of bed in the middle of the night to sit on the sill and look across the darkened green at the museum. I wished the situation were different; I didn’t know how to make it so. I suspected that things might get worse before they got better. That summer was hot, and we had no air conditioning. The fourth floor was stifling. I was a Vermont girl—summers at home smelled like hay, like mown grass. Here, the overwhelming odor of rotting garbage rose up from the sidewalks. To my horror, rats—displaced by the Big Dig and emboldened by the abundant trash—skulked on every street corner. My mall job became a cool, climate-controlled refuge. Rather than get on the cramped Green Line, I walked 40 minutes home, making frequent air-conditioned pit stops along the way; my last stop would be the museum, sitting squarely in my path. I passed through the main rotunda, but didn’t have the money to pay the admission fee, and so I continued through to the other side, on my way to my temporary home with my temporary boyfriend. It was because of these strolls through the museum entry that I learned that admission was free on the first Saturday morning of every month. I took advantage, walking silently past that summer’s big exhibit—something Japanese, I think—and heading deeper into the permanent collection. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Heavy, dark oils in gilt frames sat blankly on white walls; I practiced my good museum etiquette of shuffling from portrait to portrait, tilting my head, letting my eyes glaze. And then I turned, and straight ahead were Nanny and Rose. The painting portrays a young woman in a plaid bathrobe, sitting on a screened-in porch on a tree-lined street, the sun slanting in behind her, a golden retriever lying contentedly near her red stocking feet. A mug of tea rests on the table next to her, along with a jar of honey. The woman (was she Nanny or Rose? I didn’t know) looks you in the eye, a Mona Lisa-ish smile on her lips. It wasn’t hot where she was; no stench, no rats roaming freely in the streets. Here in this painting it was cool, maybe a little breezy; that’s why she wore her robe. In a few minutes this woman would get up and take the mug to the kitchen and maybe leash up the dog for a walk. But right now time was holding steady. She looked so confident, so peaceful, so self-aware. She was living a charmed life, and I wanted it. She looked directly at the artist, and directly at me. I was young, but I wasn’t blind. She was loved; I could tell. I covered my mouth with my hand. The breakup wasn’t long after. I stopped eating and sleeping for a while. I dropped out of school, forgoing a scholarship year abroad, something I’d worked hard for. I moved back home, crawled into my childhood single bed, and wept for days. And then, after a while, life marched on, just the way everyone tells you it will; the tears dry up, you shake your shoulders, put on a jacket, head back out into the thick of things. Two years later, I fell in love again. Chris made me laugh so hard I could hardly catch my breath. We talked till sunrise. I leaned my head on the pillow, kept thinking I would fall asleep, but interesting things kept needing to be said. He took me to breakfast at a diner, and when I tried to pay for myself, he refused to let me. “You get the next one,” he said. It was both the same and different—there was the same intensity of emotion, the same longing to be with him as much as possible, and yet there was a new calm. During one still moment, I thought to myself, with ringing clarity, I am happy. I headed to graduate school, moving away; soon after, Chris moved to be near me. In the space of a couple of years, we married. We got jobs; we left them for new jobs. We moved again, and then again. We bought a house in Northampton, Massachusetts, a place filled with screened-in porches and tree-lined streets and dogs. And it was there, 10 years after I’d first encountered Nanny and Rose, that I ran into them again. We were having dinner with new friends in our new town. It was the first time we’d been to their house, and they were giving us the tour. As we rounded a corner into the hallway, there she was—still smiling, looking me straight in the eye just as she had a decade before, the dog still nestled by her feet. It was a poster-sized print, cheaply framed. I stopped short. “I love that painting,” our new friend said. “That’s Nanny and her dog, Rose. They live here in town.” Our friends had met Nanny and her husband, the painter Scott Prior, and knew exactly where that porch was—which street, which house. It was all right here in our new hometown. Amazingly, we were in it. Somehow I had maneuvered my life right into that charmed painting. Driving home that evening to our new house, I rolled down the car window, inhaling the late-spring air. Our new home had a porch. Our puppy was waiting inside for us. Chris steered the car with one hand, his free hand holding mine. Twelve years have passed, and the print now hangs on our bedroom wall. Most mornings when I wake up, I’m involved with the details of getting into our day—brewing tea for Chris and myself, waking our two daughters for school, mentally ticking off the list of tasks that await me. But occasionally, if I’m lying in bed for a few minutes longer than usual, if the sun hits the wall in just the right way, my eyes rest on Nanny and Rose. Nanny’s mug of tea is forever hot, Rose is forever a spry young dog. I’ve met the real Nanny now, in passing, but when I stop to look at that print, it’s not Nanny I see anymore. It is myself.