And We're Off

by Dana Schwartz

  Which of these is Great Living American Artist Robert Parker’s most famous work?

  A) Nighthawks

  B) American Gothic

  C) The Reader and the Watcher

  D) Water Lilies

  Ding ding ding! The correct answer is C, The Reader and the Watcher, that image of a living room with two figures, a young girl on a couch reading and a man by the window, looking out anxiously at something off the canvas. It’s been praised for its ambiguity and tension. There have been at least two books written about what The Watcher is looking for: His wife? A lover? A mob boss after a drug deal went wrong? The distant promise of the American Dream? Most scholars have concluded that the stub of a still-burning cigarette in the figure’s right hand represents class anxiety.

  Seeing that painting was always the best part about taking class trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. Our teacher would announce that the painting was by Robert Parker, and then she’d pause, half-remembering some gossip from the art teacher or one of the other parents about someone in the class having a connection to the esteemed Chicago art figure, not quite confident enough about it to actually say anything. And then some kid would elbow me in the side and ask if it was by my dad, and I would say, a little louder than I needed to, “Actually, my grandpa.” Cue the jealous glances and slack-jawed teacher.

  Twice in elementary school, Grandpa came to my class to teach workshops, creating a fluster of superintendents, principals, and teachers all trying to make a good first impression.

  “Let’s use watercolors to paint the sky—darker at the bottom, lighter on the top,” he’d say, flicking his wrists and rolling up his sleeves to paint an example, while we, a group of seven-year-olds with no idea how lucky we were to be getting an art lesson from the Robert Parker, would try to imitate his paper as best we could with our Crayola watercolor sets. While other kids drew the sun as a butter-yellow circle in the corner of the page, I knew, even then, that my landscape should have a clear source of light coming from off the page, illuminating the Tim Burton–round hills. Mine was always the painting that the other kids would pause behind and stare at when they crossed the classroom to get another brush.

  “Runs in the family,” a teacher would say with a knowing smile, and Grandpa would wink at me and dip his paintbrush again, like we were sharing a secret that no one else would ever understand.

  Thankfully, “The Chicken Dance” ends, but the DJ replaces it with “YMCA,” so it’s hard to say whether there’s any real improvement. Instead of watching the flailing, middle-aged upper arms jiggling on the dance floor, I keep flipping my coaster, trying to snatch it faster out of the air every time.

  A little girl sees my trick from the dance floor and abandons her parents to run up to me at the bar. She barely reaches my boobs.

  “Are you playing catch?” she asks. I don’t recognize her—she must be on Ms. Wright’s side of the family. (It’s going to be weird to have to start calling her Tina.) Her purple dress already has an almost black streak of a ketchup down its front. A little bit of ketchup is also in the girl’s hair.

  “Uh, sorta,” I say, and I demonstrate the coaster flip one more time.

  “Cooooooooool.” The girl tries to snatch a coaster of her own, but she’s barely tall enough to reach the top of the bar, let alone flip the coaster and catch it in midair.

  “Here.” I bring one down to her and toss it straight up into the air like a Frisbee and catch it again. It’s not even a trick, but she seems enthralled. She grabs the coaster with both of her tiny hands and waddles off to show someone else the miracle that is gravity.

  Since the bar-trick thing didn’t attract anyone over the age of eight, I decide to take a more aggressive approach with Ryan Gosling Bartender. He’s slouched against the fake wooden wall behind the bar, still playing with his phone.

  “Hey,” I say. He looks up. “How’s it going?”

  He shrugs. “Not too bad, I guess. You?”

  I look down at the cocktail napkin. “I guess I’m doing . . . all Wright-Holmes.”

  He doesn’t laugh at my terrible dad joke, and I can feel my neck getting hot. “WHISKEY, STRAIGHT UP,” I say loudly.

  The bartender slides his phone into his pocket and turns to look at me, one eyebrow cocked. Oh god, why did I say that? What does “straight up” even mean? He’s going to ask for an ID and call the police, and I’m going to get kicked out of my own father’s wedding. There’s no way my mom is going to let me go to Europe alone if she has to bail me out of jail for underage drinking. What was I thinking? I don’t even LIKE whiskey. I’m pretty sure it tastes like someone burned down a log cabin using chemicals of questionable legality.

  Before the bartender even has time to react, I duck below the line of the bar so quickly that there should be a cartoon whoosh! sound effect. As I contemplate whether to continue crawling along the length of the bar or make a break for it toward the bathroom, I hear a voice crack through the murmur and music of the party.

  “Nora!”

  Instinctually, I freeze. Still, somewhere deep inside my animal brain, I associate that voice with not knowing Euler’s theorem. Hearing Ms. Wright call out my name autocompletes in my head to “Have you got the homework for today?”

  She’s wearing a long-sleeved lace dress that would probably be pretty if it weren’t on the math teacher marrying my dad. She’s also still wearing her red, thick-framed glasses. You’d think a person would want to take those off for her own wedding, but I guess she’s a fan of the librarian-with-eleven-cats look. I wouldn’t have gone with mint green and peach as a color scheme for a wedding either, but to each her own, I guess.

  “Nora! You look . . .” Ms. Wright—Tina—pauses, as if she’s deciding whether or not to acknowledge the fact that I’m currently crouching on the sticky floor of a hotel ballroom.

  “Dropped something,” I say, quickly standing up. “It’s great to see you. Thank you so much for having me.”

  She looks confused. My dad comes up behind her, wrapping his arm around her waist. It took about a year of seeing them together before I could witness something like this without dry-heaving, but now I’ve reached the point of almost being able to contain a grimace.

  “Sweetheart. You look fantastic.”

  That’s the thing about dads: They never actually know when you look fantastic. He has no idea that this dress is almost six years old or that I spent a grand total of thirty-seven seconds on my makeup because I was running very, very late to a ceremony in which I had the all-important job of reading a poem (“I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart”). But I smile and give my dad a hug, careful not to rip the taffeta of my dress as I raise my arm. And, in the spirit of gracious benevolence, I give a hug to my new stepmom, Tina, even though she’s wearing red-framed glasses to her own wedding and chose a mint-green-and-peach color scheme.

  Tina looks over at my dad, then back at me. “Nora, we are just so happy you’re here and a member of our family. And we just want to let you know that of course you’re welcome in Arizona any time.”

  Dad smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “It’s our home. I mean, your home too, really. Tell Alice—I mean, tell your mother—that we say you’re welcome any time.”

  I don’t respond. Tina looks at the floor. The sweat gathering in my armpits decides to amp up production. My dad clears his throat and continues, “Your mother couldn’t make it tonight, huh?”

  “No,” I say, not making eye contact. “Stomach thing.”

  We all know I’m lying.

  “She’s—everything’s good otherwise?” Dad asks the floor.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I notice the way Tina and my dad both fidget with their rings the moment Alice comes up.

  Do I tell them that I still hear Mom crying in the bathroom sometimes? Or that she demands to know the first and last name of every single
person I’ll be hanging out with every time I want to go out with a group of friends that includes one or more guys, even though I’m about to be a senior in high school? Or that every morning she presents me with a new article she printed about how many artists don’t make a living wage and how I need to fall back on “practical skills, like engineering, or math, or science, Nora, something you can actually use to get a job. I know my father was successful as an artist, but you need to remember in addition to being extremely lucky, he didn’t sell his first painting until he was forty-five years old. Are you really willing to wait that long, Nora?”

  “She’s great,” I say. “We’re both great.”

  My dad takes a step closer and claps a hand on my shoulder. “Nora is going to be traveling to Europe to work on her art this summer,” he tells Tina, and I wonder why she doesn’t already know. “Which cities are you traveling to again?”

  “Paris, Brussels, and then three weeks at the Donegal Colony for Young Artists, and then Florence, and then London, and then home,” I recite.

  “An artists’ colony!” Tina practically yelps. “That’s a big deal, Nora!”

  I start liking her a little more.

  Dad gives me a squeeze. “You have more talent in your little finger than I have in my entire body. Must have gotten it all from the Robert Parker genes.”

  Just then, a woman in a dress like a big-top tent begins to tear up at Tina’s elbow, and the two of them screech and hug and Dad gives me a look that seems to say, Women, right? We share a smile, and we don’t talk anymore about Mom, because he and I both realize he should be worrying about cutting the cake, and giving a speech, and moving from Chicago to Arizona.

  He doesn’t need to worry anymore about the sad, bitter divorced woman who just became exclusively my problem.

  3

  “OKAY, I’M JUST telling you, no one in Europe wears jeans.”

  “What?”

  Lena holds up the pair of boyfriend jeans I spent a full five seconds folding and throws them across the room. “My sister studied abroad in Barcelona, and that’s what she said.”

  I twirl the green streak around my finger and stare for a few seconds at the already overstuffed carry-on sitting on my carpet. “Okay, but then what do they wear?”

  “I don’t know,” Lena says. “Leggings? Skirts? Probably skirts. Everyone is way fancier over there. If you’re not, like, in heels and a sweater or something, they’ll know you’re a tourist. Or a scarf! People wear scarves in Europe!”

  “Well, I don’t have a scarf. What about these?” I hold up my New Balance sneakers. “Should I just not bring gym shoes?” I pass the shoes to Lena. She smells them for absolutely no conceivable reason.

  “Do you have, like, nicer gym shoes?”

  My knees creak and pop as I stand up from sitting down for so long, trying to fit half a closet into a suitcase twenty inches long (“European airlines have different carry-on restrictions,” Lena told me knowingly).

  “How about these?” I extract a pair of Vans from the floor of my closet. They’re still scribbled with pop-punk lyrics I wrote in Sharpie back when everyone in middle school was struck with the collective delusion that that was cool. I wind up like a softball pitcher and throw one as hard as I can at Lena.

  “Ow!”

  “Oh, shut up, you know that didn’t actually hurt.”

  Lena rubs an invisible lump on her arm. “It hurt a little.” She forgets the pain as soon as she notices the writing on the white rubber sole. “Oh my god, ‘You call me up again just to break me like a promise’? What is this, The Script?”

  I grab the shoe back and attempt to fit both sneakers along the side of the bag. I manage to get them in, only slightly displacing my raincoat. “You know full well it’s Taylor Swift.” I sing, a little louder than I need to, with mock-angst, over-exaggerated diction: “You call me up again just to break me like a promise. So something something in the name of being honest.”

  “‘Casually cruel,’” Lena supplies.

  “Ha! I knew you knew it! Don’t pretend you didn’t try to cut your own bangs when you saw Taylor had them.”

  Lena slides onto her stomach. “Oh my god, I think Nick cut his own hair last year, because he had the worst haircut in the world. Hold on, I’ll find a picture.” She’s already extracted her phone from her back pocket before I can say a word. She swipes past a few old photos from Nick’s Facebook. I’ve seen them all a dozen times—poorly focused shots of Nick in striped Hollister polos with the promised terrible haircut uneven on his forehead, not quite covering the craters of early teenage acne on his face.

  Just as I reach to grab the phone to get a better view, Lena pulls away. “Oh my god, I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, and I almost mean it.

  “No, you asked me not to talk about him. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been . . .” I think for a moment. “Months.”

  Here’s where, in my imagination, Lena turns to me and says something like, “No, I can tell that it still bothers you, and of course it would. Even though you didn’t date Nick that doesn’t mean you didn’t have feelings for him, and as your best friend I should respect that.” Or, ideally, even better: “Oh my god, I forgot to mention, you were so right about Nick. He is a colossal douchenozzle of a human being, a parasitic emotional vampire who makes girls think he cares about them and then moves on when he gets attention from someone else. How did I not see it before? Every girl at NSHS knows now, and no one is going to date him ever again.”

  Instead, she rolls over once, checking Twitter on her phone. “Honestly, I totally see exactly what you said about him. Sometimes I ask myself why I still want to date him at all when he can be such an asshole. Like, flirting with other girls in front of me? Sorry, I mean, obviously you know better than anyone.”

  I want to shout at her, “If you can see it, then why do you want to date him at all?” But I don’t. I get off the bed and sift through my makeup, trying to figure out what will fit in a Ziploc baggie. It’s my own stupid fault for not saying anything when she asked whether it would be weird if she and Nick hung out together, just once.

  “Oh my god, of course not!” I said, doing my best impression of the super chill girl who never had feelings for Nick at all because the two of you were never actually dating.

  It’s too late for that. Now I just need to empty my brain completely of Nick and refill it with anxiety about the trip.

  “Okay,” I say. “So . . . one pair of jeans—” Lena raises an eyebrow. “Dark wash jeans. One pair of leggings. Two T-shirts, one going-out top. And all the underwear I can fit.”

  “So how are you going to get the, um, projects back to your grandpa? Like, are you going to keep them in your suitcase? Or . . . ?”

  Shit. I didn’t think this through. “Do you think I should bring stamps? Wait, it’s different in Europe. Fuck, I didn’t think of that.”

  One of the caveats of my free trip to Europe is that, in addition to visiting the best museums in each city, I have to complete assignments of Grandpa’s choice and send the resulting pieces back to him. The sealed manila envelopes are still on my desk, each labeled in Grandpa’s all-caps handwriting: PARIS, GHENT, FLORENCE, LONDON. I’m under strict instruction not to open each one until I get to the corresponding city.

  Lena spreads out the envelopes like a card shark and fans herself. “Why don’t you ask your mom how he wants you to send them? Or, like, ask her if they have FedEx in Belgium.” She uses the envelopes to make it rain like she’s in a rap music video.

  “Ha.” I pick the folders up and file them neatly in the front compartment of my backpack. “We haven’t even spoken in days. It’s like a stranger rented a room in our house on Airbnb.”

  “Practice for college, I guess?” Lena says.

  “Did you know dorms at RISD are coed? When do you think I shoul
d let that tidbit slide into a conversation with my mom about my future?”

  “How’s your application going, by the way?” Lena asks. She, of course, being the perfect paradox of a stoner overachiever that she is, has already finished writing personal essays for her first fifteen choices. We’ve been planning for her to go to Brown and for me to go to RISD since eighth grade.

  “It’ll be going much better,” I take on an exaggerated French accent, “wheen I zee all oof zee fine art zhat Yuuurupe haz to offer.” I take a drag on an invisible cigarette and twirl a curlicue mustache.

  “What’s the place you’re going to called again?”

  “Donegal Colony for Young Artists. DCYA. Do I need to make another Post-It note to stick to the back of your phone so you remember?” Maybe it’s all the pot, but Lena has a terrible memory.

  She doesn’t answer. Instead, she slides across my bed like it’s the hood of a cop car in an action movie. “IT’S FUN TO STAY AT THE D-C-Y-A! It’s fun to stay at the D-C-Y-A.” She struggles to figure out arm positions that create a convincing D. I refuse to engage. I’m back to packing.

  “Are you going to update your Tumblr while you’re gone?” Lena is the first, and possibly only, fangirl for Ophelia in Paradise, the Tumblr where I upload all the cartoons I draw—some of the commissions and some that I’ve just doodled for myself. My own doodles are mostly modern-day versions of characters from books I read. A drawing of Katniss Everdeen representing Team USA in archery at the Olympics got, like, eight hundred thousand reblogs.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “I mean, I could, but I figure I’ll be busy with my grandpa’s assignments and with the DCYA stuff.”

  “Hey,” Lena says. “You’re not going to have to take a train to the airport, are you?”