by Laura Tucker
“I bet my mom would like these,” I said, breaking the silence and dropping one of the brass faucets into Apollo’s palm. “Five for a dollar.” He looked at it closely and then nodded and pulled two bills out of his wallet. The woman who had come out of the store handed me a small brown paper bag, and I counted ten of the tiny faucets into it.
My mom and my dad and Apollo and Alex’s mom all met at art school in Brooklyn, even though my mom and Apollo are the only ones still making art. My dad can draw anything; he’s the one who taught me. But now he only works on other people’s art.
My mom, on the other hand, can’t help but make things. Over breakfast at a coffee shop, she’ll knot napkins and the wrappers from our straws, using a drop of water or coffee or juice to mold the paper. By the time we’ve finished our bacon and eggs, she’ll have turned the whole table into a sculpture garden. One time, she didn’t like a book I brought home from school about the first Thanksgiving, so she cut it up to make a collage about the Pilgrims stealing land from the Wampanoag and the diseases they brought that practically wiped out the tribe. Another time, my dad asked her to sew a button back onto his favorite shirt, and she stitched geometric patterns, wild like vines, up the sleeves instead. The next time he wore it, a lady on the street offered to buy it off him for a hundred bucks.
Apollo and I turned off Canal Street onto Mott. Little kids chased one another up and down the narrow block while moms squeezed melons and grandpas smoked between the parked cars. We stopped at a fruit and vegetable stand where Apollo bought a bag of the tiniest mangos I’d ever seen, the size of walnuts. The green beans right next to them were as long as my forearm. Honestly, the size of them is the only special thing about them. We get them at Wo Ping with garlic and ground pork, and they taste exactly like the short kind.
My dad says observation is a muscle that artists have to build. You have to choose the details you include in a drawing, and to choose them, you have to see them. “Don’t draw a cartoon of what you think a strawberry looks like,” he’d always tell me. “Look at a strawberry, then draw what you see—not what you think you see.”
So I practiced my observing. Most of the stores on Mott had big metal garage doors that rolled up in front instead of windows, making it hard to tell where the sidewalk ended and the stores began. At one place, whole fish stared back at me from beds of melting ice, sparkling purple-brown and blue and silver underneath metal hanging scales. Pink shrimp, cooked and cleaned, lay next to grey ones with their heads still on. At the back of another store, I saw an aquarium crowded with silvery brown carp, and another one, the water dark with eels.
I looked into a woven wooden basket almost as tall I was, standing by the curb. Inside were hundreds of live crabs. The slow chitter of their claws moving over the hard bodies of the others made me shiver. They had greenish-greyish-brown bodies, and beautiful blue claws.
“Lapis,” I said out loud, and Apollo smiled.
Lapis lazuli is the stone you grind to get ultramarine, the most beautiful and the most expensive of the blue pigments. It used to cost so much that Michelangelo had to leave a corner of one of his most famous paintings unfinished because he couldn’t afford the paint. Lapis is expensive now because it comes from Afghanistan, which is in a war with Russia, so it’s hard to get. Apollo has some, though. And before you grind it into ultramarine, lapis has streaks of grey and brown and white in it, the same colors as the crabs.
Apollo said, “They tell me that in Old San Juan, the streets are cobbled with bricks cast from the waste that comes from making iron, brought to Puerto Rico three hundred years ago as ballast in the bottom of Spanish ships.”
The stones they used to make New York’s cobblestones came as ballast on ships from Belgium. My dad told me that.
“The iron made these bricks blue—all different shades. Imagine! Ordinary streets, paved in cobalt, azure, indigo.” Apollo smiled down at me. “Perhaps you and I will go to Old San Juan one day, and dance on bricks the color of a blue crab’s claws.”
I looked at the crabs crawling on top of one another, going nowhere, and wished I could tell Apollo about my mom. But the emptiness on her face when she said she couldn’t go back scared me into silence.
Maybe—if things didn’t get better, and my dad wasn’t back yet—I could tell Apollo. Maybe he’d let me stay with him for a while.
The two of us stood there for a minute more, watching the crabs.
“I didn’t know they had cobblestones anywhere but here,” I said finally.
Apollo nodded. “Paris is famous for them, actually.”
Paris. In France, where my dad was.
We were quiet the rest of the way to Hwa Yuan.
STILL IN LOVE
As soon as we saw Hwa Yuan’s neon sign, my stomach started to grumble again. It only got worse when we went inside.
Apollo and I took two seats at one of the big round tables. A big family was already seated at the other half, everybody happily talking at the same time. Not for the first time, I wished I understood Chinese.
A waiter came over right away with a metal teapot, filling the short amber glasses in front of us with steaming hot tea. I put a lot of sugar in mine; Apollo doesn’t put any.
We didn’t even bother to look at the menu, because we always get the same things: Szechuan pork, cold sesame noodles, and water vegetable, which is sort of like spinach but crunchier and less disgusting.
We drank some tea, and I said, “It sounded like your girlfriend was pretty mad about dinner.” I was pretty sure this one’s name was Sari, but not sure enough to say it. I did know that she was a sound artist, whatever that was. The last one was an art critic. The one before that was a mime.
“Eh, that one,” Apollo said with a dismissive flick. He took a swig of his beer, then pushed the bottle over to me so that I could remove the label.
“You’re always friends with them after you break up with them. It’s the boyfriend part you’re not good at.”
Apollo shrugged and took his beer bottle back, rubbing with his thumb at the sticky glue I’d left behind.
I pressed the damp label I’d peeled off the bottle onto the circle of green glass covering the Pepto-Bismol–pink tablecloth, meticulously smoothing out the wrinkles. “Are you in love with her?” I asked. It was a rude question, but Apollo would rather answer a rude question than do what he calls “chitchat.”
Apollo thought for a moment. “I am not in love with her, no,” he said. “But we have a good time together, when she is not so mad.”
“How come?” I asked. “How come you’re not in love with her? Is she pretty?”
“She is very pretty, Olympia,” he said. “But many people are pretty. Pretty, thank God, is not everything.” He waggled his eyebrows, then struck a pose with his hand behind his head like a model in a magazine. The family across from us found this very amusing.
“Is she nice?”
“Yes, she is very nice. She is a good person. And smart. But those things aren’t everything, either.”
Then the waiter came with the food, and the two of us dug in. We made a lot of noise. It’s not rude to slurp noodles; what you’re not supposed to do is bite them.
When I was little, the waiters used to rubber band a wad of paper between the tops of my chopsticks to make them easier to use, but last year Apollo showed me how to use them the regular way. It’s not hard, but your hands have to be big enough.
Pretty soon Szechuan peppercorn firecrackers were going off in my mouth, and my lips were burning in a way that made them feel like they were twice their normal size. After a few more bites, my whole face had gone numb, all the way up to the bottom of my eyes.
Zombie Chinese.
When we started to slow down, something occurred to me: Apollo always had a girlfriend, but he never seemed to be in love with any of the women he went on dates with.
“H
ey, Apollo? Have you ever been in love?”
That surprised him, and he chewed away at the noodles in his mouth like he wished they weren’t in there.
“I’m just curious,” I told him. Curiosity goes a long way with Apollo, which is good because I can’t do anything about mine. I never understand when grown-ups say, “Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know.” I always want to know.
He chewed some more, swallowed, and then there wasn’t anything to do but answer me.
“Yes, Olympia. I have been in love.” He sighed and looked around for our waiter, holding his beer bottle up to ask for a new one.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. She married someone else.”
That surprised me. “What? How could she marry someone else when you loved her? Was it because of the way you look?”
That made him laugh. “No, I don’t think so. It was complicated. There were other factors.”
The waiter came over with the new beer, but Apollo didn’t drink from it right away. The family at our table laughed uproariously at something the mom said, and the dad slapped his knee in appreciation, something I’d never seen outside of a cartoon. I turned to see if Apollo had seen it, too, but he wasn’t looking at me. He picked up a piece of pork, inspected it for a minute, and then put it down on his plate, squaring off his chopsticks.
Then it hit me.
Holy cow, I thought. He’s still in love with her. That was why Apollo couldn’t fall in love with someone new. He was already in love with someone.
I thought about the poor sound artist—Sari, or whatever her name was. She probably didn’t know that getting stood up for dinner was the least of her problems.
At that very moment, the mom across the table started to tell a story. She waved her hands and talked so fast and loud that Apollo and I didn’t even have to pretend that we weren’t watching. If you can’t help being a naturally curious person like me, eavesdropping is an excellent hobby. Apollo is also a champion eavesdropper; he says it’s how his English got so good.
When the mom saw we were watching, her gestures and eyebrow waggles got even bigger. Then—with a gigantic wave that started out looking like she was welcoming a king and turned into a gesture that looked more like she was decapitating a chicken—the story was done.
The punchline made everyone at the table clap and laugh. Apollo and I were so caught up in her dramatics that we clapped, too. Shy suddenly, the mom dropped her chin to her chest and smiled while the rest of the family talked excitedly, repeating the final gesture to make the others laugh.
Apollo had gone back to messing around with the food on his plate. He looked sad, sadder than I’d ever seen him, so sad he looked almost handsome.
Whoever she was, it was serious.
“Hey,” I said. “Tell me about a color?”
He knew I was trying to distract him, but still he looked relieved. He leaned back in his chair and took a long pull on his beer.
“Have I ever told you about Egyptian brown?”
I shook my head, a little disappointed. Brown is my least favorite color.
“Well, Egyptian brown was the color in the nineteenth century. Many artists swore it was the best brown paint they’d ever used: soft and velvety, with warm, sweet tones of yellow and green. It was transparent, too, which made it perfect for skin, or to depict the plaster walls of a room in the magic light of the late afternoon.”
I imagined painting my mom’s room as it had looked that afternoon, the sun leaking weakly into the dim room through the white cotton curtains covering the window, my mom lying without moving in the bed.
“But it was controversial. Some painters said that it was unpredictable—that the color was never the same twice, that you never knew what would come out of the tube. Others complained that it was hard to work with, that it cracked and changed the chemistry of other paints if you mixed them.”
This is very common with the paints that we mix by hand. Not all of them play well together, Apollo says. It’s the type of thing you have to know.
He continued. “They don’t use it, this Egyptian brown, anymore. Do you know why?”
I shook my head, humoring him. Apollo is not usually boring when he talks about color, but so far, this had not been great.
Apollo sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Because they ran out of mummies.”
“What?” I said this so loud the family at our table looked over at me in alarm.
“You heard me: They ran out of mummies. Egyptian brown, also known as mummy brown, was made of ground-up Egyptian mummies mixed with myrrh and white pitch.”
I was so appalled, I could barely make words.
“They were painting with people? With ground-up dead people?”
“Well, people and animals. The ancient Egyptians mummified a great number of their pets as well so that people would have company in the afterlife. Mostly cats, but others, also—even an alligator! Digging up mummies was a booming trade for the Victorians. They made medicines from them, and fertilizer; they unwrapped them for fun at parties. And, of course, they used them to make Egyptian brown.”
This was the most disgusting thing I had ever heard of. I didn’t care how nice the brown was. I didn’t even feel great about sepia, which comes from the ink cuttlefish make when they’re scared. Plenty of things make nice browns, and most of them are just plain old dirt.
“Apollo! Would you paint with a ground-up dead person?”
“Of course not. But many artists didn’t know how Egyptian brown was made until the paint companies had to explain why it was getting so hard to come by. The painter Edward Burne-Jones felt the way you did when he found out. The story is that he took his last remaining tube of Egyptian brown out to his yard and gave it a proper burial.”
I pushed my plate away, disgusted now by the slimy brown sauce, thinking about all the hours those artists had spent pushing paint made of dead people around on a canvas. What it would feel like to look at the work you’d made with that paint, once you knew?
Apollo signaled for the check and laid the money to pay for it in the little plastic tray. We said goodbye to our friends at the table and to our waiter and to the lady who’s always at the cash register up front, and then we were back out on East Broadway.
It was cooler, almost cold, and I hugged my sweatshirt tightly around me, the little faucets heavy in the kangaroo pocket at the front.
A few blocks later, Apollo broke the silence. “You are very quiet, little bird. What are you are thinking about?”
I’m thinking about my mom, who did not get out of bed this morning, and I am wondering if she will get up tomorrow. I am trying to figure out how I can get my dad to come home if nobody—not even you—knows what he’s doing or how to reach him. And I am worrying about what will happen to me if he doesn’t.
I didn’t say any of that.
“I’m thinking about Egyptian brown,” I said, which was also true. “I can’t stop wondering if it’s possible to make something beautiful out of something awful.”
Apollo’s face looked handsome-sad again.
“A lot of people would say that’s exactly what art is,” he said, taking my hand, and I let him.
We didn’t talk much on the way home, either.
A LONG WAY DOWN
“Hold up. I forgot my sweatshirt,” I told Alex, who was sitting cross-legged on the loading dock outside my house.
It was Saturday morning, and we were going to Washington Square Park like always.
“Race you,” Alex said, already halfway up the building wall.
One of the things that Alex likes to do best is climb. He can climb anything, including a lot of things that regular people can’t, like the front of my building. “Alex the Cat,” my mother calls him, or sometimes, “Alex the Cat Burglar.”
To get up the f
ront of my building, he jumps from the standpipe on the sidewalk onto the decorative brickwork running up the front, the grooves barely deep enough for the tips of his fingers, wedging the rubber soles of his sneakers into the cracks to climb. Then he reaches out to grab the metal ladder coming down from the fire escape, swings himself up and over—and more often than not, comes in through our window without knocking, which my mom does not enjoy.
Alex makes stuff like that look like it’s no big deal. I once jumped off a wall that was taller than my dad because Alex had made it look so easy, and I practically broke every single bone in my body and bit my tongue in half. He’s good at normal sports like baseball or basketball, too, but he doesn’t like them as much as he likes messing around. You know that part in Singin’ in the Rain when the other guy, not Gene Kelly, runs straight up the side of the wall and does a flip at the top and then lands on his feet at the bottom? We found an old mattress on the street one time, and Alex pulled it up to a wall and spent the entire day practicing that move, and by the time it was dark, he could do it. I wouldn’t let him try it without the mattress because I am not in the business of scooping sidewalk brains, and also we are both scared of his mom. Still, it was pretty cool to watch him run straight up the side of the wall like that.
Even though I use the hallway stairs like a regular person and go as fast as I can, I never, ever beat Alex to my apartment when he’s climbing up the front. That morning was no different: I whipped open the front door of our apartment, only to see Alex through the window, lying on his back on the fire escape. His arms made a comfortable pillow for his head, and his eyes were closed like he’d been out there for hours; he wasn’t even out of breath.
With his eyes closed, he couldn’t see the face I made at him, which didn’t stop me from making it.
My sweatshirt was on the chair next to my bed, right where I’d left it. Everything, these days, was right where I had left it. I’d been buying an extra can of peanuts from Mr. G for myself, and a bag of apples from C-Town. There was a small pile of cores on the trunk in front of the couch.
