I smile. “I wish my mom could have met you.”
“I wish I could have met her as well. What would she tell you if she was sitting in this kitchen?”
“Stop moaning and go paint.”
“Succinct, your mother.”
“Yeah, she didn’t waste words.”
I reach for the knife, cut the bagel in half, and pop it into the toaster. Mrs. Mednikov and I watch a squirrel spring about the branches of the purple-leaved maple outside the window as we eat.
After breakfast, I huddle in a blanket on a wicker chair on the still-cold sunporch. My hands hug the coffee cup perched on my knees.
Look at the work.
Is Krell saying the truth about a person is elusive, that it can’t be captured in a painting—because while he’s painting someone, what is true about them is already changing or disintegrating?
I sip my coffee and a thought creeps up on me. I don’t need to know exactly what’s in Krell’s head, because he’s gotten into mine. Look at the work.
He wants me to be involved—to contribute my perceptions, to question my assumptions.
Look at the work. Engage.
I peer at my unfinished canvas of Julie and the study I made for it. I haven’t gone far enough. I don’t want some-one to just look at Julie, I want people to see they’re wrong about her. That she’s so much more than what they assume when they spy a homeless woman standing on a street corner.
I set down the coffee and stare out the windows. Bright yellow mums as big as my fist dot the garage wall. One is bobbing up and down, and as I follow it with my eyes a memory sweeps over me.
I’m walking to a convenience store with three kids from Advanced Art when we step around a woman pushing a shopping cart piled with mismatched bags. The two guys Josie and I are with snigger and start to crack crude jokes about her so loudly there’s no way she can’t hear them.
She’s dressed so carefully, in a yellow skirt and matching jacket, and little white gloves that aren’t the cleanest, and I know how hard she must work to look the way she does. As Josie and I walk by her, I want to stop and apologize for the two jerks I’m with. I sense this wasn’t always her life, that she might have been a teacher or worked in an office, but something, an illness or an accident maybe, wrenched her out of that world.
I want to apologize, but my classmates are right there, so I don’t. I’m too aware that if they knew how I sleep in my car, and shower in the gym, and stay late in the safety of the auditorium while the theater kids rehearse, they’d judge me just like they judged her.
It’s so easy to judge, I think, to assume a hundred things about people that are untrue, or to blame them for their problems. It’s the opposite of seeing them.
I throw off my blanket and scramble out of the chair. This painting isn’t about me, I try telling myself. It’s about Julie.
But the edge between a normal life and being homeless is razor thin. One accident can push you from one into the other, from being seen to being judged.
I turn the canvas sideways as an image forms in my head. Not one painting, but two on the same canvas, side by side.
One is in color. Julie the way I see her, realistic, but with her aura of bliss that confounds me. But the second panel is black and white. Julie with a dirty rat on her shoulder, the brushstrokes savage and unhinged. Her face is a black smudge, her identity muted. The second panel is the way the world sees her, the fears and prejudices and assumptions about her exposed.
Two images, same woman.
A title comes to me: Seen/Not Seen.
I’m trembling, because I’ve never felt so right about a painting before, and I grin, because right now I don’t care what Krell thinks or if he likes it. This painting is mine.
I sketched us from the selfie Hayley sent me. In the drawing, we’re smiling, heads together, sunglasses holding back our hair—two girls spending a hot summer day at a beach club, not a care in the world.
But when I finished sketching, I dragged a flat white eraser across my face. My features muted, faded into the paper, until all that was left were memories of our friendship.
I’ve drawn dozens of pictures of Hayley, and even though this is one of the better ones, I can’t send it to her.
Hayley and I got together the last week before she headed east to Brown. We hadn’t seen each other since graduation, but she invited me to the beach club.
I picked out two lounge chairs on the sand under a big canvas umbrella and waited for Hayley to arrive. She blew onto the beach, and I leaped up into a hug that felt more theater than real.
Hayley asked if I’d had any trouble getting past the guys at reception and I told her no, they remembered me from last summer. I didn’t tell her I arrived an hour early so I could shave my legs in a hot shower and wash my hair.
Her phone kept buzzing, and in between texts she told me about who was with who and the parties I’d missed and graduation night at Disneyland.
She asked how it was living with Mom’s cousin Dolores, and I told her fine, but left out how I made Dolores up so Social Services wouldn’t get its hands on me.
Hayley asked how I was staying so skinny, and I told her about the diet where you eat for eight hours and fast for sixteen, but left out that I could only afford two meals a day, so it wasn’t hard to stay on.
She told me how she and her roommate were decorating their dorm room. I told her about the room I was moving into at Mrs. Mednikov’s, but left out how I hocked Mom’s guitar to pay the first month’s rent when I didn’t get my check from the Zoich in time.
When we ran out of things to say, Hayley asked if I wanted the staff to bring us some lunch, and I said I was craving a seared ahi salad.
I left out how the women I’d cleaned with all summer spoke no English so there were entire days when I barely spoke.
I left out how no one knew my name anywhere I went. How no one knew I was an artist, how no one had told me they loved me or told me they missed me in months.
I left out how I spent my birthday taking in a free movie at a cemetery so I’d be surrounded by happy people.
I left out how this summer left me feeling erased.
My breakthrough on Seen/Not Seen has me so excited I have to fight the urge to bail on Kevin. There are so many assignments due this week, and only a few nights left in which to learn from Duncan, so giving up most of Sunday, the one day I have free to paint, is killing me, but I promised Kev I’d go on his mystery trip.
During the ten minutes while I wash up and brush my teeth, Kevin worms his way into Mrs. Mednikov’s kitchen. I emerge from the bathroom to find them chatting over coffee, a brown paper bag by his elbow that I suspect is full of the kolaches Mrs. Mednikov baked last night.
My face must convey my confusion. Kevin told me he’d message me when he got here. “Good morning?”
Mrs. Mednikov looks pleased with herself, but Kevin’s not so sure. “I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “Stephania invited me in.”
Stephania? Even I don’t use Mrs. Mednikov’s first name.
“I spied him creeping up my steps like a stray cat,” she says, deadpan.
Kevin waves his finger at her like they’ve been playing mah-jongg together for years and he knows her tricks. “All I did was put the newspaper on the step, and the security light came on.”