“So these are what I make,” he said softly.
“It’s beautiful,” my mother said. I hoped she was faking.
“This is a powerful crystal,” he said. “And I found the eagle feather on a walk.”
“An eagle feather. That’s incredible,” she said. She took it in her hand, reverent.
“But you don’t really like them, do you? The sticks?” I said, when he wasn’t around.
“I do,” she said.
“They’re just sticks. He’s not a real artist like you.” I wanted to remind her of her talent, the calm woman in the windy mess of papers.
“I think they’re more than that,” she said. “I mean, he wraps them. It takes a lot of time. Certain sticks call to him. Nature speaks to him. I might even make one myself.”
“Oh brother,” I said.
“Really. I might.”
“They’re sticks, Mom. Sticks.”
“Okay. Maybe they’re a little silly,” she said.
She was back.
My mother worked a few afternoons per week as a waitress at a restaurant and patisserie nearby, where she’d brought me once. She told me the secret: the owner, a pastry chef who sat in the back making the petits fours, cut the strings of frosting between the cakes by using his tongue to lick the metal nozzle of the frosting bag. When I came to visit her there, I ordered a cake anyway. I wasn’t usually allowed to eat sugar and it was too delicious to care about germs.
“The world is made of more space than matter,” she said a few days later, when we were at home. She was reading a book about quantum physics, and it put her in an expansive mood. She said the atoms are so far apart that there isn’t a difference between space and matter, because matter is mostly made of space; even if it looks like a body, a couch, a table, it isn’t, it’s space—and if you could really see this, you could walk through walls.
My mother said that some enlightened mystics could propel themselves through walls, as if walls did not exist; they knew something about quantum physics, even if only intuitively, of the vast spaces between atoms—larger than football fields, she said. I’d never seen a football field. These mystics were not prone to the same illusions of divided space as we were, and because they understood the false quality of solid matter they were no longer forced to abide by physical laws. There were anecdotal reports, she said, of gurus being in two places at once, speaking with two different groups of people at exactly the same time.
She told me about this in our living room. I tried to imagine the bedroom beyond the wall, to believe in the absence of matter so thoroughly that it dissipated before me. For a breathless few hours the next day—after I put my finger in front of my nose a few inches, focused beyond it, and my finger faded to semitransparency—I thought I could see through my finger. I was capable of miracles. Walls would be next.
Lifelines
When I was in second grade, my mother taught a weekend art class for me and five other students. She drove us to a local farm called Hidden Villa where we would draw and paint from nature. “Two to a seat belt,” she said.
I sat in the front, squished against Mary-Ellen, who had short hair and dimples and a steady, calm way of breathing I could feel against my back. My mother loaded our equipment into the trunk. Each student had a small folding easel, a Masonite board on which to clip or tape the paper, a watercolor paint set, a charcoal, an eraser, and a soft cloth.
“What are we going to draw?” Joe asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “We’ll find something when we get there.”
She wasn’t like the other mothers; she and I weren’t like other families. I worried that, as our teacher, she would reveal us, how strange we were.
A few days before, I’d walked in on my mother squatting on top of the toilet seat, perched up high, her trousers around her knees like a curtain, her feet planted on the rim.
“What are you doing?” I asked, horrified.
“I learned it in India,” she said. “It’s a better position. Close the door.”
The farm was inside hills covered in bay laurel trees with thin trunks dropping yellow half-moon leaves, a bright green strip of miner’s lettuce along the road. The air was glassy and fragrant with the smell of the trees. It was a triangle of flat land surrounded by layers of hills, owned by a family that had made money on asbestos. My mother said asbestos was insulation that turned out to be a kind of poison, and I thought about this at the farm, how clean the air was, how lush the farm, yet built on the proceeds of poison.
We collected our equipment and followed my mother into a field near the parking lot, where a small, barky tree stood up in isolation. A few leaves clung to the branches, shoots of grass like whiskers grew around the base of the trunk, with dirt clods visible between the neon blades. This one, she said.
We arranged our easels in a semicircle. Past the tree was a fenced garden, a barn, some sheds; beyond those, hills wrinkled up together at the end of the narrow valley like pinched skin. Tree, green grass, blue hills, then purple hills, sky—it would be hard to get the whole scene onto my small piece of paper.
“Stick the easels deep into the dirt to stabilize them,” my mother said. She went around and pushed our easels into the rough ground, adjusting them, displaying her natural authority and comfort with the physical world, her bold speech and movements new to me, even a little frightening. Once we’d taped the paper to our Masonite boards, she stood in front of us with a pointed brush in one hand, her other hand held up flat like a page. “I want to show you how to use a brush before we start,” she said. “You don’t want to press down, head-on, like this”—she demonstrated, making the hairs on the brush splay out on her palm like a mop—”but draw the bristles along the paper in one direction, moving with, instead of against, the hairs.” I had known for years how to use a brush and was annoyed to be instructed like the others.
We began to draw. The square-edged conté crayons were brown sticks that looked something like the branches themselves. We would paint on top of the drawing, to add color. “Don’t draw the tree you think you see,” my mother said. “Draw the tree. Trust your eye.”
I wasn’t sure where on the page to make the tree begin, from where it should grow up through the gradations of hills to the sky—the ground with the grasses took up almost as much room as the hills, I noticed, now that I was really looking at the scene before me. I worried my tree might end up in a tiny spot in the center, surrounded by the blank white space I knew my mother abhorred.
“That first mark takes courage,” she said, glancing at my blank paper. “And remember: there are no straight lines in nature.”
I made a few straight marks.
“A spill on the ground can be more interesting than a drawing,” she said. It was a phrase I’d heard her say before, from one of her teachers at community college. When she and I drew together, she wouldn’t let me use the black paint that came with a set, insisting that black was not a color, and that if I looked harder, I would see something else. She didn’t believe in the “bad guy” and the “good guy” in books or movies either, and became angry with me when I referred to characters that way. To me, such titles, such a color, offered relief because they seemed like ledges where one could rest.