Many thanks to Maplestyle and myimm0rtal for their help.
Thank you for reading! BelieveItOrNot and thimbles.
Chapter 13.
"At least it's not too hot yet." My mother startles me out of the streets of London and back into my living room. I close my book and set it on the coffee table.
"I didn't hear you knock." Typical, my screen door admits her without a struggle. I suppress a groan when I see the camera hanging from her neck.
"It's almost ten o'clock." She means, Why aren't you dressed?
"It's Saturday." And I'm on vacation. I don't tell her that. She'd probably try to rope me into taking some class with her.
My mother moves into the kitchen, turns on the tap and rinses my cereal bowl, then my mug. She opens my dishwasher, but of course, it's in need of emptying so she places my bowl and mug back where I'd set them next to the sink.
"You need to get this damn door fixed, Isabella." They're both here. Fantastic. "It's stuck."
"It worked fine for me," my mother says. "I wasn't rough with the handle. Your father, always barging around like a bull in a china shop." She lifts her eyes heavenward, and I watch, mystified, as she pulls the broom out from where it's tucked beside the fridge. She must have put it there at some point. Muttering to herself, she waves it at the cobwebs creeping across the ceiling. I leave her to it and move to wrench the door open for my dad.
"We would've called," he says, "but your mother left the cell phone at–"
"It's fine." I swear, they only have the one between them so they can argue over it. "What've you guys been up to?"
"Farmers' market." He takes off his hat. "Your mother's on some new kick. Can't buy anything from the supermarket. They're evil, those places. I tagged along to see you." He tickles me under my chin.
"Multinational corporations are ruining the world, Bella," my mother calls out. "I won't contribute to the ice caps melting." The broom snick-snicks across the kitchen floor.
That floor doesn't need to be swept. I'm always walking around the the house barefoot, and I can't stand to get crumbs stuck to the bottoms of my feet. I use my Dustbuster regularly in there. Still, she has this way of making me feel like I'm living in filth.
"Says the woman who keeps eating beef." My dad pushes his glasses up. "Organic, pasture-raised, or kept in a goddamn palace, cows still fart. And it's the methane gas–"
"I need to pee," I say. My dad nods toward the bathroom door, as though I had asked him for permission.
I kick the door closed and sit on the edge of the bathtub, porcelain digging into my butt, my toes cold on the tile. Their voices may have quieted on the other side of the door, but not in here, not in my head. I can still hear arguments from years ago, remember how their bickering continued through me when one or the other was not around.
"Renée, none of my shirts are clean."
My mother looked at me. I eyed the clock on the oven. I was going to be late for school. There was no way this argument would subside within ten minutes.
"Your father thinks it's my job to keep him clothed because he was raised by a misogynist." She raised her voice, "You know, a Y chromosome doesn't prohibit you from being able to use the washing machine."
I filled my mouth with oatmeal, didn't point out that last week she'd told him to quit doing the laundry before he wrecked all her clothes.
"Don't marry anyone as lazy as your father, Bella, whatever you do." It was hard to stomach the advice my mother dished out on relationships when I lived in the ruins of hers.
My dad came downstairs and asked me, "You ready to go yet?" like I was the one who had taken half an hour to settle on an outfit. I bit back my smart-ass reply and picked up my school bag.
"It's not because she's a woman." He backed out of the driveway, his hand braced on the passenger seat headrest. "It's because she's a damn control freak. She doesn't want to do it, but the way I do it is never the right way."
I knew better than to say anything, or to take a side, or to even look like I was thinking about taking a side. So I stared straight ahead, watching the wipers sluice through the raindrops on the windshield. Everyone would already be in class.
I had the door open before my dad brought the car to a complete stop. Hood up, arms wrapped around my folder, bag thumping on my back, I bolted across the parking lot. Eyes half closed against the rain that spattered my face, I didn't see the puddle.
One foot, then the other—it was deep enough to swallow my feet to the ankles. I'd had to squelch my way around campus all day.
.
I stand up and wash my hands though they're clean. I find my dad on my sofa, buried in the newspaper. The glass doors are open wide and the breeze is toying with the pages. He snaps them straight again.
"Looking good out there." He doesn't lift his eyes from the sports page. "It's a shrewd idea, Bella. Value-adding."
Not once has it crossed my mind that the work I'm having Edward do will increase the resale value of the property. And yet my shoulders straighten, my chin lifts a little, at my dad's words.
I don't tell him I'm on vacation either. That wouldn't be shrewd. "Are you sick or something?" he'd ask. "You should really be saving that for an emergency. Bank it up. Can you get paid out for it? That's worth looking into."
I save him his breath. "Drink, Dad?"
"Do you have Diet Coke? That one won't let anything with an artificial sweetener cross her threshold. Thinks it'll contaminate her from inside the can."
"I think so. In the pantry." After I pour it for him, my mom leans through the doorway, waving me out. "Great opportunity for a picture," she says.
I brandish the photograph Gianna left with me. "Look," I tell my mother. "You don't need to take a picture. I already have one for you."
She takes it from me, her lips pressed together as she studies the image, and I already know it's not going to be enough to get me out of today's photography session.
"I suppose she took it with a cheap little point-and-shoot." My mom looks up at me but doesn't wait for an answer. "I mean, it captures the moment well enough. But composition-wise, it's relatively uninteresting, don't you think? Centering your figure like that. Cutting out the other person." She hands the picture back to me. "Anyway, it would be a little odd to include someone else's… voice in my narrative, wouldn't it?"
I let her lead me outside and pose me where she wants me. I squint at her to block the sun and she tells me I'm smiling funny. "Relax."
By the time we're inside again, my dad's asleep with his head tilted back against the sofa, the newspaper fallen to his chest. There's a half-drunk, watered-down glass of Coke on the table in front of him. Their life together must be exhausting. I glance at my mom who's shuffling through the photos in her camera, perhaps deleting the ones she disapproves of.
"Doesn't your life exhaust you?" I ask.
She looks up from her camera, her fingers frozen in their spot in a way that shows me what a mistake I've made in asking. "Excuse me, my life? I keep busy. So what? There's no point in sleeping one's life away."
I meant the life she's assembled with my father, but I don't clarify.
She leans over and swats at my dad's shoulder to tell him it's time to go. He shakes himself awake, opens his eyes wide then relaxes them a couple of times. Have to wake those up, too. He adjusts his glasses which have fallen askew on his face. We move in a clump, almost like a family, to the door and onto my porch.
"Should you be out here in your night clothes?" His question reminds me that I'm still this other version of daughter to him, not the one he pushes to make him proud, but the one he's meant to protect. All those times he'd made similar remarks to me—"Aren't those shorts a little short for school?" he'd asked as I sat in the passenger seat, eyes fixed on the road ahead, waiting for that white building to come into sight.
"What? They're shorts." I tugged the ends lower on my thighs.
As if prompted from that same old cue card, I say now, "They're just sweats."
Not until we stand in my driveway, my dad unlocking their car, does my mother remember the reason for their visit in the first place.
She hits the top of the trunk. My dad pops it open, revealing my mom's haul. It's stuffed with fresh fruit and vegetables—she even has a cooler in there. "For the meat and milk. And the yogurt. It's organic, Bella, and it's divine."
She moves a bag of apples over and pulls out a canvas tote bag with a smiling head of broccoli printed on it. "They had a stall at the markets. All sorts of information about growing your own vegetables. When to plant them and harvest them and all that. There're some seeds and some recipe cards, too. I thought maybe you could use them."
I pull in a breath. The air caught in my throat stops me from telling her that my veggie patch is spoken for, that Edward will be planting neat rows of seedlings soon. Because that's irrelevant. They say it's the thought that counts, but most of the time people say that when actually, not much thought was involved. But this canvas bag with its crumpled packets of corn and cucumber and watermelon seeds, this thought counts.
I reach for my mother and I hug her. Kind of. Half a hug. I wrap one arm around her and I think too much about what I should do with my hand and how long to hold her and I smell the incense clinging to her hair and the Opium she has worn for as long as I can remember.
"Thanks, Mom."
She pats my back, never having enclosed me in her arms, not offering so much as a light squeeze. I step back and drop my arm. I guess the hug was more for myself than for her. She obviously wasn't in need of one, not from me.
Mrs. Crowley passes on her bike. She waves to us, then her hand quick-falls back to the handlebar. The bike staggers a little. Seeing her like this adds warmth to the coldness that had begun to build in me. I put my hand on my ribs.
"Dad," I say, "do you live in the past or the future?"
"We're always in the present. No way around that."
Yeah, I want to say, but the present moves too quickly. You can't hold on to it. Only I realize he wouldn't understand that. It's not concrete enough for him.
"Speaking of the present, the show about that trail in New Guinea's about to start." He rounds to the driver's side of the car.
My mom raises her voice, just to make sure he can hear her. "Your father can't be away from the television set for more than a few hours. It's not good for his brain. He's going to turn into a vegetable and I'll have to spend my retirement doing everything for him."
My dad shakes his head. "She's retiring? From what?"
I fold an arm across my chest. My dad calls out a goodbye over the rumble of the engine and then they're gone. My breath comes out in a whoosh.
Back inside, I drop the bag on the couch. My father's glass still sits on the table. I pick it up and it leaves behind a ring of condensation. I think of Edward wiping down the kitchen counter, putting his shoes away in the closet, his toys in the garage. Thirty-three years of marriage, and my mom still hasn't managed to 'train' my dad to use a coaster or put away his own glass.
.
Main Street, normally choking with rumbling cars and exhaust fumes, has been blocked off and forested with umbrellas and tents. Under their canopies, artists of all kinds are at work. A painter stands in front of her easel, spreading color across canvas. A potter, his wheel spinning, shapes clay beneath his fingers. One woman draws on the pavement with chalk, a crowd gathered around to watch her work. Stands display sarongs and skirts made of hand-dyed silk, and others sell handcrafted jewelry fashioned from every material imaginable.
I buy a pair of wrought silver earrings. Handmade from recycled metals, their card proudly states. A mime haunts the stall. His painted on sadness and exaggerated hand gestures weird me out. I look at the ground as I sidle around him, in case he's the type that takes eye contact as an invitation to include me in his act.
A safe distance from the mime, a young guy sits, palms on the ground, actually painting the canvas with his foot, steering the brush with his toes.
"Would you look at this!" an elderly woman says to her friend.
"He's painting the scene." I point to a row of booths straight ahead. "I love it."
"How does he do that?"
"Lots of practice. I don't think it gets any weirder," I say. "Unless someone can paint with their belly button or something."
"I'd bet that's out there somewhere," the woman's friend says.
"With the right contraption, I don't doubt it." I step away, envisioning the inventor of some belly button painting device. There's a career no kid imagines they'll fall into as an adult.
I find another stall where a guy about my age is selling "repurposed garden gnomes." Repurposed as in he takes a hammer to them and uses the ceramic chips to create mosaic patterns on plates and cups and picture frames. Kind of like the pot Sprout lives in—though more haphazard and with a cooler backstory. I buy a set of mugs for Emily. She'll get a kick out of the murders committed for their creation.
I dig my phone out of my bag. No missed calls. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Emily was meeting Rachel for coffee this afternoon.
I asked Emily if she wanted me to go with her, but she told me to "go ahead and look at the arty-farty stuff." She'd be fine, she said, unless she wasn't, in which case, she'd end up at my place.
I contemplate giving her a call, just to check. For someone who doesn't shed tears easily in front of other people, she sure let them go when she talked to Rachel a few days ago. They slid down her face and got caught in her smile and her voice. I was compelled to hug her, hug the tears away, but I resisted, let her have the moment to herself. I sat silently, waiting to see if she needed me. If she reached for me, I'd be there. Just as I had resisted the urge to embrace her then, I resist the urge to call her now. I double check that my volume is at its highest level and slip my phone back into its pocket in my purse.
A few steps away, a stall manned by two women swathed in saris is dwarfed by rolls of colorful cloth planted upright in wire bins. On the trestle table in front of them are at least half a dozen pairs of scissors. Big, heavy ones that look more like something Mr. Crowley might use to prune his garden than the "sewing scissors" my mom is forever annoyed at my dad for misusing.
One roll of fabric stands out from the rest. It's vivid without being gaudy, bright, but not so much that it makes me squint. Even wrapped around the cardboard mast, I can picture it hanging from ceiling to floor over my bedroom window.
The woman in the orange sari asks if she can help me. She smiles when I point out the fabric. "The batik? It's lovely."
Tinted like a sunset, the dyes run horizontally, mingling in places and creating new colors. Pink and purple bleed into turquoise, yellow and orange seep between them. I stand the roll straight up. Actually, it's more like a sunrise.
"Could I use this type of fabric to make curtains?"
"Absolutely. It will let quite a bit of light in, but if you wanted a heavier curtain, you could have it lined."
Maggie will be able to sew them for me, no problem. I don't want them lined, though. I want to wake up in the morning with the sunlight filtering through.
The woman tells me the price, and estimates how much I'd need to curtain my bedroom window. I scrunch my toes against the soles of my sandals as I try to add up how much I've spent today.
She reads the card dangling from the top of the roll. "This fabric was produced in Indonesia, by a textile company run entirely by and for local women. That's why it costs more than most batiks."
I take twelve yards.
As I stuff the paper bag of mugs into my purse, I wish I had brought a bigger tote. I crook my fat bundle of fabric in an arm and wander to the Art Wall.
Instead of a painting today, the whole area is on display. Quilts hug the trunks of trees and pillars are dressed in fabric to look like enormous crayons. I walk between them to the gallery and, inside, the blasting air conditioning instantly cools me. I head straight for my favorite spot, where they let the few local or amateur artists get some exposure. Decades ago, this gallery began as a gift shop called The Artery, which sold local art. It grew over the years, in size and objective, into what it is now, with only this small section preserving The Artery's early heart.
A mixed media piece on canvas takes up half the wall. It's bigger than me, feels bigger than life. I step back to take it all in. The artist must have had to use a ladder to reach the top. Did her arm get tired, I wonder, and did she have to take breaks between the longer, reaching brush strokes?
It's the same girl in three stages. The first one: hair, long and frazzled; a collage mask makes her appear faceless save her eyes which are closed. I can see in her mask perhaps all the important things she's discovered or experienced. The second one: no mask, but a loose hat hiding her eyes; her shoulders slightly weighed down, just the impression of a mouth, a thin gray line. The third one: full face in view, eyes a bit lowered, her expression soft but pensive; her nose and mouth take complete shape, lips curved at the corners like she's in the process of a smile that isn't yet fully realized. Falling down the side of the canvas are the words: She said she could... So she did.
"What do you think?" His voice rumbles like he's parched, like maybe he has just come in from the hot outside. His knowing tone somewhat invokes the third girl's contemplation.
It's as if he anticipates my response before I share it. I answer without moving my eyes from the art. "It makes me wish I were an artist. It's like sometimes I'm looking at my own thoughts, like artists manifest thoughts into paintings and hang them on the wall. How do they make it look so easy and so impossible at the same time?"
"A lot of people try to get their art shown here," he says. "We accept, maybe, two percent of them. People do think it's easy. The majority of them don't know what art is."
I turn to look at him, a suited man in his thirties or early forties, this manager or owner of the gallery. He wears a badge on his lapel.
"To you," I say.
"Pardon?"
"They don't know what art is to you. To someone else, maybe it's art. Surely for the person who created it."
He laughs toward the ceiling, the sound deep and irritating. It's the kind of laugh people use when a kid does something cute. "It's not as simple as that."
"If it looks like art to a person, how can someone else say it isn't?"
"I understand where you're coming from. I've heard it a lot. It's a juvenile view. Creativity, a good eye, these are great qualities to have, but they do not amount to art."
"Why not? If it makes others feel something."
"Traffic makes me feel annoyed. That doesn't make it art." He gestures to the piece I've been enthralled with. "This work suggests our artist has lived this journey of self-accomplishment. Maybe it was created from her life's core. Or it could be she has painted a fairytale. Is this young woman a real person or a character? The symbols on the mask might be personal, might not."
Attention back on the mask, I spot a poodle I hadn't noticed before, and what looks like a recipe card tucked partially behind a clock without hands, the recipe too obscured to decipher. A lost beloved pet? A recipe finally mastered? That is what these would represent to me, but not necessarily to her, not necessarily to anyone else.
The man continues. "It incites these questions, but the true answer doesn't matter. Because, artistically, this is more than life experience. Look at the proportions. The lines. Look at how the brush strokes flow as if blown by a breeze, even through color changes and different mediums. They draw your eye from left to right. You're reading her, and the last thing you see are the words. And by the time your eyes are pulled there, they're a nod to what you've already surmised."
"It's like they're lifting off the canvas." I want to touch the letters to see if they are as raised as they appear. I let my hand glide toward the work of art, but dare not touch it, especially not in front of this man. My fingertips tingle.
"It's not without flaws. There could be more life in the eyes when they're finally revealed, unobstructed. That's the point of hiding them in the first place. More original wording could have been used. It's not a masterpiece, but it works. And one result is it communicated with you, which pleases you. That alone doesn't qualify it as art, but it adds to the quality. It brings value to it."
Value. The same word my dad used yesterday in reference to my landscape work, though this man doesn't mean monetary value. My dad said value and it had me standing taller, proud. This man says it and I feel it inside me, in that place between heartbeats that makes your chest swell.
I shift the material to my other arm and shake off my now free muscles. Despite my initial aversion to him, I can hear that artist's passion in his voice. This Gallery Man cares about art as much as someone in his position should.
"I'll let you in on a secret. This artist, Siobhan Quinn, is in her sixties."
I'm taken aback. I had expected the artist to be near my age, the art so modern, the subject so relatable to my generation. I question myself, why I'd made such an assumption.
He moves on and I watch him go, his shoulders back, head held high. Self-assured. He holds power and knows it. Not just power over artists either, but over the public and the kind of art to which we're exposed. It doesn't seem like a bad position to hold, as long as the power is used right. But like art, how do we decide what is "right?" He must believe he's doing it right. I believe it, too.
In my last year of college I'd taken a literary journal class. A few of us volunteered to read through Professor Cameron's slushpile. I still remember the sound of collective click-clicks on our laptops as one short story after another was rejected. Sometimes we knew from the first paragraph that a piece wasn't the right fit, or that it was too similar to so many others we'd already read. "Next," our keyboards seemed to say for us. We joked about producing a beat from the rhythm of our rejections. We were limited to the number of pieces we could pass on to the rest of the class to read and further narrow down. At times it stung to reject some talented writing, dumping it into the same category as all the rest when it had truly shone as different, better. But a thrill ran through me when a piece I'd approved was voted on and accepted by the class majority. People were going to read that writer's work because I'd moved it into the right folder.
I think now of the bravery it takes for artists to offer their work to the world. It might be displayed, eventually sold; it might be scrutinized; it might be rejected; it might not even be considered art. I think of the toe-painter just outside. Can he also paint with his hands or is he better with his foot? His way of painting could be seen as unique, or it could be seen as a gimmick, more act than art. The woman who designed my material—I shift it from arm to arm again—someone whose art becomes part of other creations: dresses, scarves, or, in my case, drapes. I had paid no mind to technique when I bought it. I only felt what it could offer me. It showed me what my bedroom lacked now, without it. That has to be art.
As juvenile as it may be, I think I prefer Edward's position on art. I wonder if he thinks a work has to be technically good and recognized by other artists in order to be art. I'll ask him tomorrow.