“No,” exclaims Gillette. “I paint with those—that’s to keep Tatum’s hands off. She’ll eat anything. They make a nice texture, so I use them sometimes instead of brushes. They’re poison anyway—they’re Amanitas whateveryoucall them—somebody told me what they were called—the scientific name I mean—but I forgot. But the English for them is ‘destroying angels.’ ” She makes a noise I can’t describe—something between a sigh and a whinny. “Actually, Tatum influenced me to do this—I mean the idea of it. When she was a baby and I gave her her first watercolors, she’d take anything. I mean she’d grab anything and everything and paint with it. I had to watch her all the time. Anything and everything. It just seemed so primitive, and so right. That you really could paint with anything. And then when her dad and I were on this camping trip I just grabbed this handful of mushrooms and said why not? They’re really wonderful to paint with. It was her dad who told me what they were, actually. He thought I was just crazy enough to put them in the soup. All mushrooms look alike to me, but that’s the first thing they teach you, that some mushrooms are poison and you shouldn’t just go grabbing any of them. That’s the first thing they teach. But I never would have thought to use anything but a brush if it hadn’t been for my baby. So anyway, when I tell him what I intend to do with them, like an experiment, he looks at me like I’m still in playschool. That’s the way he is about art. It’s a drag. An artist should marry an artist, but then that’s a drag too. So what do you do? If I’d pulled a Gauguin, I’d have felt like a louse. So I brought Tatum with me. But what do I win? The rocking horse?”

Catherine hands Gillette the bowl of destroying angels, and Gillette sets it down on a high chair that must have been Tatum’s when she was a baby and begins painting—twisting one mushroom after another in a paint dish like a shaving brush and then applying it to the canvas: The mushrooms are so fragile that after a few strokes one breaks, and she discards that in the trashcan and picks up another. They are fragile, but they seem in some places to give a thicker, more full-bodied texture than ordinary brushes; in others a finer, more delicate, almost elusive texture, as if she’s hardly touched the canvas.

“That’s really great,” gushes Catherine.

“Thanks, but I wish I were growing, but I don’t have time to grow . . . Uh, there’s a box of nachos on the table if you guys want to nibble on something . . . or if you’d rather have raisins, something else?”

“No, I like nachos. Will it bother you?”

“No. I could paint through the Blitz. I know a woman who actually did.”

Catherine grabs for the box. I shake my head when she asks if I want some. She starts crunching.