She walked around among us as we worked, helping one student smudge out a part that wasn’t right, helping another begin to draw the place where a branch shot out from the trunk. “May I?” my mother said before she took the crayon from Mary-Ellen, addressing her as if she were an adult.
“I want you to try to capture the spirit of the tree,” she said. “Not just the way it looks, but the life force inside it.” It surprised me that no one smirked at this, that everyone continued to draw with the focus I lacked. Earlier I hadn’t wanted to be associated with her; now I hoped to be singled out as her daughter, the insider, possessor of knowledge the others didn’t have. I thought she spoke in a language no one understood but me, and I was ashamed of understanding it myself; but the other students listened as if they, too, understood, and were not ashamed.
It was difficult to see the tree only as it looked. It felt like writing with my left hand. The idea of the tree kept creeping back into my fingers and into my eyes, so that I had to move fast when I saw something, before it became the idea of the tree again.
“Close one eye if it helps,” she said. I tried it; the world flattened. And then something unexpected happened: the branch I was drawing didn’t jut. It was no longer a branch but a shape made of light, inside other shapes made of light. A thrill to see it. The tree was just a shape, nothing to do with branches. I drew it quickly, the way it looked, not the way it was.
There, I was finished. I’d seen it for a moment. It was enough.
We began to use the watercolors, adding a layer of color to the drawings we’d made.
“Trees need sunlight, water, nutrients,” she said. “But if they have too many, too abundantly, they also don’t flourish. Some struggle makes them stronger, makes the fruit trees produce better fruit.” She would repeat this idea many times over the years, past the point when I understood it was a metaphor.
“See colors as they are, not the ones they’re supposed to be,” she said.
She’d shown me once how an orange in a bowl can be blue, reflecting sky, or purple in shadow, or white with glare. When this sight happens, she said, it’s a surprise; that’s how you know it’s true.
There’s no such thing as a color without a color around it. Even the color of the paper is not nothing. Everything matters, not just of itself, but in relation to everything else. At some point she must have touched her face, maybe brushing a strand of hair away, and when I looked, she had a brown smudge across the ridge of her nose. “Mom,” I said, “you have charcoal on your face.”
“It doesn’t matter, Lisa,” she said.
Before the parents came, she went around and made comments, looking at our drawings. She called it “the Critique.” “I love the composition,” she said to one student.
“Beautiful, subtle,” she said to another.
She found Joe’s picture particularly impressive. “This part,” she said, pointing to the hills, “is sublime. Wow.”
In mine, she complimented the swishy movement of the tree but said it was incomplete. I’d finished too quickly, she said, drawing and painting impatiently, as if the whole exercise had been a race.
“Steve’s supposed to come over and bring the bed tomorrow.” She said his name like we knew him. He’d offered to bring this bed over twice already, but then he didn’t show. My mother had curtained the small alcove with a skylight off the living room, and this was where the bed would go, replacing the futon on the floor where I slept when I didn’t share her bed. His girlfriend, whom we’d never met, had even called my mother to apologize, promising that this time he’d show up.
Steve. I knew so little about him. He was like those Michelangelo sculptures of men trapped in rough stone, half smooth, half rough, that made you imagine the part inside that had not yet come out.
“He didn’t come last time,” I said. We’d waited for an hour. Maybe he didn’t know what bed to buy; maybe he didn’t know how to find our house. Maybe my mother told him the wrong time.
“He’s promised to come this time,” she said. “So we’ll see.”
We waited inside first, and then we went outside to the asphalt circle and watched the street. I was so excited for his arrival that I’d worn my nice dress, given to me by the rock climber, and I was fluttery in my stomach. Cars passed outside the driveway. Each one held the possibility of being him. We waited. “I don’t think he’s going to come,” my mother finally said after some time. We went back inside. I felt like I’d been emptied out. The day, charged with excitement, newness, extravagance, and mystery, unlike other days, changed back into a dull and ordinary day. Just us again, and nothing to do.
“Let’s go for a skate?”
When my mother and I went roller skating, our favorite thing was to find the soft cement. If you were walking, the seam between one type of pavement and another was not obvious, but on skates you felt a clear difference between the two. We said the soft pavement was “like butter.” Transitioning onto the buttery parts after the rough, jangly pavement—the roughest parts vibrating up through my knees and hips to made my cheeks shake and my eyeballs itch—felt like floating.
One section we’d found was near the lot on Oak Grove where we used to live. Our old detached studio, along with the main house, had since been ripped down and replaced with a brown-shingled Comerica Bank. “Your umbilical cord is buried in the dirt somewhere underneath that bank,” she said when we passed it. This disturbed me; surely other mothers didn’t bury umbilical cords in yards.
The soft cement was located in front of a faux-Palladian office building, with two swooping walkways curving up over a rock garden to an entrance door made of tinted glass. The cement on the ramps was silken, lined with curved iron banisters. We skated in a circle up one, down the other, and back up again.
She kept glancing at me as we skated; I didn’t let on that I knew she was looking. “You know, you’re just the daughter I wanted,” she said. “Exactly the one. On the farm before you were born there was this little girl, three or four years old, with her mother. A little Taurus girl, precocious and smart. I thought, I want that.”
“I know,” I said. She’d told me the story before. (“I don’t only love you,” she’d said often. “I also like you.”) “And he named a computer after me?”
“He pretended he hadn’t, afterward.” And then she told me the story—again—of how they’d named me together in the field, how he vetoed all her choices until she thought of Lisa. “He loves you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know he loves you.” This was hard to grasp. “If he saw you, really saw you and understood what he was missing, how he wasn’t showing up for you, it would kill him. He’d be like this.” She stopped skating and grabbed the railing and clutched her heart, gave an anguished, grief-stricken look, hunched her back as if she’d fall over and die.
I tried to think of what he’d been missing. Nothing came up.
I heard from a few people much later that in those days my father carried a photo of me in his wallet. He would pull it out and hold it up at dinner parties, showing it around, and say, “It’s not my kid. But she doesn’t have a father, so I’m trying to be there for her.”