North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  “What?” Jacob asked, his gaze penetrating.

  “Nothing.” My denial was rote, a knee-jerk reflex of my mouth.

  We drove in silence for a while, more because I think Jacob wanted to give me space than not having anything to say.

  “And this is Nest & Egg. We don’t need to go in if you don’t want to,” I told Jacob when we approached my gallery near the end of Main Street. This had to have been the world’s shortest and worst tour on record. Neither of us had dressed for the cold, him out of some warped fashion statement that precluded warm outer garments and me out of impatience to hurry Mom from home. I was lucky I had slipped on my boots. So basically every few yards, we had ducked into a store, even the ones that sold awful T-shirts imprinted with things like My Paw-Paw Loves Me, complete with bear prints.

  Obviously, Jacob took his touring duties seriously, because the look he sent me was pure are you kidding? He grinned. “And miss out on the chance to see your messy studio?”

  “Who says you’re going to see my studio?” I asked, getting the distinct and unpleasant sense he was approaching the gallery as an anthropological study where he’d ferret out more clues about me.

  Instead of heading straight inside to warmth like a sane person, he leaned in close to the poster I had created for all the exhibits lined up for the next year. That sign was now hanging in front of the gallery to entice town shoppers and winter sports enthusiasts to visit Nest & Egg again . . . and again. I shivered, hugged my arms tight around myself.

  “Great font,” said Jacob, straightening.

  “Thanks, I found it,” I told him, surprised he noticed. Most people don’t see the difference between old world typefaces like my favorite Bembo, with its gorgeous delicate curves, from the supermodern ones, like plump Bodoni. For a full two days, I had congratulated myself for locating the perfect old-fashioned typeface — Windlass — a font that would have been at home on a fifteenth-century map, perfectly matching the mood for the new year’s overall theme: Journeys Beyond. The Twisted Sisters’ choice, not mine. I personally thought it sounded like a mortician’s tagline, but I had been overruled.

  The parchment-colored ribbon I had glue-gunned to the back of the sign was tied in a lopsided bow and listed drunkenly from the iron stand. Clearly, Lydia’s work. She may have been the initial visionary behind the gallery, but she roved through life the way she had once painted: with huge, broad brushstrokes, leaving detail work to others like me.

  Compulsive, true, but freezing or not, I couldn’t let the bow stay crooked. I had to fix it, make the length of the ends match, the loops perfectly symmetrical.

  “What are you doing?” Jacob asked as I slipped the sign off the metal hanger that one of Lydia’s former lovers had welded as a good luck gift. I tried to ignore him when I set the poster on the ground and retied the bow, an impossible task when he started guffawing. There is no other way to describe the braying emanating out of that boy.

  “What?” I snapped.

  His lips barely moved but his words were clear: “Control freak.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He blinked innocently and then said, “But you’re pretty messy for a control freak.”

  At first, I thought he meant my poster design, which had more elements than my usual posters, namely a large compass rose like the one I had doodled on the jeans that I was wearing, faded now after a few washes. In January, we were featuring Journeys Beyond Time with a show full of timepieces, paintings, sculptures, and one enormous hand-carved grandfather clock. But then I choked when I saw my artwork under April’s show, Journeys Beyond Place. When had the Twisted Sisters substituted the piece we had agreed to feature — a family tree created in encaustic, using an old wax-painting technique — with one of my collages? And when had I ever agreed to be in a show?

  “Oh my God,” I gasped.

  My stress ratcheted up another level when I saw that it wasn’t just any collage, but the one I had made for Mom — now displayed for all the world to see . . . including Dad.

  “You didn’t say anything about starring in a show,” said Jacob. He looked at me curiously. “Your dad, too.”

  “What?”

  Jacob tapped the poster again. Directly under my name was my father’s: Dr. Grant A. Cooper, special guest speaker, The History of Cartography.

  “This can’t be happening,” I breathed out.

  “You didn’t know your dad was coming, did you?” Jacob guessed softly.

  “I didn’t even know I was in a show.”

  But the implications of this poster, my name, Dad’s presence sank in. A couple of days ago, I had broken the news to the Twisted Sisters that not only wasn’t I applying to art school, I wasn’t even going to Williams College. Hell hadn’t broken loose; silence had, cold as a whiteout blizzard. Clearly, the Twisted Sisters — who else would have led this foolish charge? — decided to map the future they thought I ought to have.

  The enormity of the show hadn’t occurred to them. How could it? I kept such a strict church-and-state, never-the-twain-shall-meet separation between them and my parents, they had no idea of what Dad was truly like.

  Chapter twelve

  Gerrymandering

  “WHAT ARE YOU GUYS THINKING?” I demanded, shaking the sign, my writ of war.

  Clearly, I shouldn’t have called earlier to let Lydia know I might swing by this morning, but I had needed her to move my Beauty Map off my desk in the off-chance that Jacob would want to see my studio. The Twisted Sisters were more than prepared for me, just as they were anytime a new artist was invited to visit the gallery before their show. Lydia, Beth, and Mandy advanced upon me, a squadron of gray-haired cheerleaders wielding their blue and white pom-poms dangerously. I glanced at Jacob, had enough time to groan but not to warn him about the upcoming embarrassing spectacle.

  The women now shook their pom-poms vigorously in the air. “Terra! Is! Here!”

  It was a quirky gallery tradition, funny and somewhat heartwarming when the Twisted Sisters were welcoming new artists into their community. But embarrassing when that new artist happened to be me, and when a boy who I thought was cute looked on.

  I couldn’t have been happier to resemble a human eggplant than I was now, because the Twisted Sisters stopped shouting as soon as they got a good look at my purpled cheek, swollen alarmingly.

  “Oh, Terra, are you sure you should be here?” asked Lydia, her brows puckered with worry, her pom-poms listless at her sides.

  Beth, who worked in oil paints — hence, her perpetually ruined clothes — nudged her, meaningfully. “Remember?”

  Remember what? Then I recalled how I had told the gallery coowners (okay, lectured them) before the laser surgery that I’d come to work during the last half of Christmas break when my face returned to some semblance of normal so long as they didn’t make a big deal about it. Lydia recovered quickly, going all grandma-cheerleader on me, now back to shaking her hips.

  “God, just stop. You’re going to hurt yourself,” I told Lydia. Mandy, the youngest of the Twisted Sisters at sixty-six, crouched in preparation for her signature Herkie jump. I had no doubt that Lydia would copy her. “C’mon, Mandy, don’t egg her on.”

  Beth flipped her hair, braided into one ropey strand, over her shoulder. “You know the tradition.”

  Lydia nodded her head so vigorously, her silver curls bobbed like a dog shaking off a dip in the ice-cold Methow River. She punctuated each word with her pom-pom : “What . . . are . . . you . . . afraid . . . of?”

  “You guys,” I said. “God.”

  Short of knocking Beth’s arm out of my way, tripping Mandy, or yanking the pom-poms from Lydia’s hands, I couldn’t even set foot into the gallery space. Suspecting imminent success, they created an arch with their shimmering pom-poms that I was supposed to run under.

  “Come on,” encouraged Lydia.

  That’s when I noticed Jacob’s smirk. Unlike Erik, who would have slunk out of the gallery at the first sight of all this
gray hair, Jacob was leaning against a bookshelf, looking like he had nothing better to do than witness my imminent humiliation.

  “There’s a glass gallery across the street,” I told him, ignoring the collective intake of offended breath from the Twisted Sisters because I referred him to our competition. “I’ll meet you over there.”

  But Jacob looked entirely too amused to budge until the Terra Rose Cooper Show was over. I glared at him. His smirk widened into a grin.

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t want Jacob to see me doing anything idiotic — he had already seen both me and my mom at our worst — but I didn’t want him to see my artwork. And that, I knew, was hanging up. Otherwise, why the grandma-cheerleader antics? According to Nest & Egg tradition, every debuting artist was feted with this surprise pom-pom routine, technically having been invited to see a piece of their artwork on the wall. It was a visual nudge for the new artists to finish the ten pieces required for their show. More than a couple had gotten cold feet and never delivered. I wondered now whether the idea of an encore performance with the pom-poms had simply scared them away for good.

  “So, we’re waiting,” chimed Jacob, gesturing at the expectant arch of pom-poms.

  I swear, Magellan didn’t have it this hard circumnavigating the world. There was no way out of this.

  “Fine, fine,” I grumbled, trying to ignore Jacob snickering in the background. And then, like every other debuting artist before me, I ran under the arch of outstretched arms and shaking pom-poms, and stopped directly before my collages. Three of them were hanging on the center wall, the space of honor reserved for the headlining artist.

  “What do you think?” asked Lydia softly, coming to my side. “Don’t they look gorgeous?”

  They did. Framed, my collages actually looked finished. Real. More

  than that, they looked like they belonged on a wall, rather than resting in hodgepodge stacks on the floor. I chanced a glance at the Twisted Sisters, wondering if they recognized their lives in these collages. But Lydia’s green eyes glinted in the gallery lights, showing nothing but maternal pride.

  Anyway, how could they possibly know that hidden among the fragmented maps and artifacts like buried treasures were their stories, collected the way I did scraps of paper, car parts, sugar packets: Beth and her world travels. Lydia and her crusading causes. Mom and her kitchen accoutrements.

  “Tell me now that you aren’t an artist,” Lydia said. “Tell me now that you don’t belong at art school.” When I turned toward her, she quickly conceded, “Or Williams.” Her voice turned into a muted, frustrated wail. “The school your parents want you to go to doesn’t even have a fine arts program!”

  For a moment, it was hard to disagree while the Twisted Sisters stared at me expectantly, these gift givers who only wanted to deliver unbridled delight.

  “Oh, you guys” was all I could manage. It was odd how much easier it was to accept my dad’s criticism than these women’s opinion, as if there were something suspect about their high regard for me and my work. Embarrassed by all the attention, I studied the exhibit poster that had been forgotten in my hands. Even though the type size of Dad’s name was the same as mine, it loomed on the page, his very presence casting a shadow on my sanctuary.

  “Once your parents see this, how could they not insist you go to Williams at least?” asked Lydia.

  No, if Dad saw this, how could he not ask, Is this really art?

  Like a siren’s song, his seemingly innocent rhetorical questions pulled down the unwary, drowning them in self-doubt. Dad might as well have been here, holding my head steady so that I could take a good hard unflinching look at my collages. What I saw now were inane efforts at making a statement: Mom’s collage map wasn’t even done. I had chickened out of calling Magnus tohelp me with the wire. The edges of the maps I had sliced with a dull razor blade were fuzzy, because I had been too lazy to change it for a new one. Now, I wished I could recut each one of those maps, create utterly clean border lines. But they were affixed as permanently to my canvases as Dad’s dismissal was fixed inside my head.

  I couldn’t divulge any of that to the Twisted Sisters. The truth felt too close to betraying Mom. Too close to admitting that my family fell far short of their own happy households, their well-adjusted and successful children. I smiled weakly and then shook my head, more firmly.

  “I can’t be in the show,” I said, redrawing the boundary line back to where it belonged before my gerrymandering mentors messed with it. They were artists; I was a studio manager for artists.

  Now, it was Jacob’s gaze I felt as acutely as yesterday’s laser on my cheek. Without knowing how, only just that he did, Jacob saw through the protective layers of my denials, down to my core. I didn’t like it. Not at all.

  Lydia guessed, “All of us get queasy at the thought of other people looking at our art. But it’s part of being an artist — showcasing your work. Sharing your visionary statement with others.”

  How could I answer with the truth? All roads leading to my insecurity shared the same starting point: Dad, the prime meridian.

  “One,” I said, and spun around, my back to the collages, “the framing is better than the artwork.”

  “You know that’s not true,” protested Mandy, who truly did excel in finding the right frame to best show off art.

  “And two,” I continued, ignoring how my heart pounded the way it did whenever I geared myself up for an encounter with Dad, my tension building until I could skitter right out of my skin. “We’re going to witness three major temper tantrums from the other artists who aren’t going to want to share their show with an amateur.”

  No one looked convinced, not the Twisted Sisters. Not Jacob.

  Trapped, my face throbbed in time to my pulse. There it was, my way out of this too-intense scrutiny. So I deployed yesterday’s surgery, a menstrual-cramp type of excuse that would end all argument. And I said flatly, “My face hurts. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

  Just as I suspected, no one argued with that, not when I took the collages down, one by one, and left them there on the floor.

  No sooner did I reach my studio than my cell phone vibrated in my back pocket, the tickling of a guilty conscience. It was Erik. Of course.

  “God,” I said, hitting my forehead. I had blown off Erik’s voicemail yet again last night and then forgotten to call him this morning when I was chauffeuring Mom. I softened my voice, dousing it with the usual happy, carefree lilt that I added whenever I spoke to him: “Hey!”

  “Hey, what’s up, stranger?” he said.

  “Not much,” I answered in a low voice. Liar, I berated myself, even as I peeked downstairs to see the fallout of my diva-esque departure. From where I stood, stationed behind a wood column carved with twisting vines and leaves, I could safely eavesdrop on Jacob’s conversation with the Twisted Sisters. He was crouched before my collages, inspecting them. Even up here, I felt more transparent and more exposed than going barefaced in public. Vaguely, I heard Erik on the phone, followed by an expectant pause. I asked, “What?”

  “My cousin Max is here, remember?” he repeated patiently.

  “Yeah. Are you having fun with him?”

  “We were going to catch the late show. I can pick you up at eight.”

  “Oh,” I said, my breath letting out in a deep sigh. It was a long hour’s drive to the nearest movie theater. Even if it had been fifteen minutes away, I didn’t want to go, didn’t want to try to disguise my cheek. Absently, I rubbed my hands together and winced, noticing for the first time the thin line of blood welling on my thumb where one of the hanging wires must have scratched me. “I’m still not feeling so great.” Technically, that was true. My face hurt, and I wished I could curl up into a deep Rip Van Winkle sleep. Wake me when college starts. Yet here I was in the gallery, wondering what another boy thought about my art.

  And thought about me.

  I couldn’t help but peek over the railing when Beth’s voice carried
effortlessly to me: “And how do you two know each other?”

  Then I smiled at the intimate, teasing tone in Jacob’s voice, as though he knew I was eavesdropping: “Terra ran into me. Literally.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Erik asked.

  I left the catwalk to sit heavily at my desk chair, brushing a sliver of origami paper off my otherwise pristine work surface and into the garbage can beneath my desk. On my desk was Erik’s Christmas present, his collage, still an empty canvas, cotton duck, nothing more.

  “I’ll be better soon. I promise.” But I had the feeling he wasn’t inquiring about my health.

  “No, I meant —”

  “I have to go, okay?” It was ironic that Erik finally seemed ready for our first real conversation beyond his personal best time pinning his opponent, his weight loss, his pickup truck. This was the conversation I’d wanted to have all along — but now, I didn’t have the heart to start. Or the energy to finish us. Gently, I told Erik, “I’ll call you later, okay?” And this time, I hung up first without waiting for his reply.

  “So,” said a voice from behind me, one I already recognized. Despite myself, a tiny flare of excitement brushed away the last of my lingering guilt.

  I swiveled around in my chair, away from Erik’s nonexistent collage. Jacob was leaning against my door frame, looking around my studio curiously, nodding as if what he saw only confirmed his deepest suspicions. I became acutely aware of my neat bins, the rows of matching tins, all of it labeled precisely. The labels themselves were tied with satin ribbon, orange on one side, green on the other.

  “So this is messy,” he said.

  “I just cleaned up.”

  He eyed the trash bin with its one tiny sliver of paper. “Uh-huh.”