Art Lessons

by Katherine Koller

  When we’re almost at Babci’s, the car slows down and my heart speeds up. The boys start slapping each other again. Stella and I get out, with our knapsacks and our dolls, and Daddy gives us some quarters to spend. Babci kisses us, my little birdie to me, honeybunch to Stella. Even the boys let her because she’s holding a steamy cup of coffee for Daddy and three paper bags of warm cinnamon sugar-dusted homemade doughnuts.

  Then it’s just the girls and Babci and the fairy light of her tiny TV. We cuddle up each side of her, wrapped carefully in our quilts on the ouchy couch. I check for leftover dressmaking pins lined up over Babci’s heart on her burgundy dress and stick them to the big black magnet on her coffee table. We each have a plate with two doughnuts and eat them slowly, licking up every single crumb. Babci changes channels, looking for a show with singing or dancing or skating. Babci likes anybody with sequins, like Elton John. Tonight it’s Cher. Babci likes her, but says she’s too skinny and invites her to come have some doughnuts and we laugh. After, Babci played her Liberace tape again on our old video machine Daddy set up. Babci loves Liberace because he’s Polish. But his glissando piano playing makes me and Stella fall asleep. At the end, Babci wakes us up with her clapping.

  We phone Mom before we go to bed.

  Are you lonesome, Mommy? Stella says. I listen on the phone.

  I’ve got the dog, and I’m making something pretty ...

  She’s playing her “Bridge over Troubled Waters” really loud, so I can’t really hear.

  Goodnight, Mom!

  Sleep tight!

  We climb in the cloud bed, under the satin feather comforter that sounds like queen robes and has a sheen like red and gold sunset. It smells like doughnuts under there, because Babci puts them in the bed to keep them warm when they come out of the oven. When the light is off, we count in Polish. I say it, then Stella does.

  Jeden. Jeden.

  Dwa. Dwa.

  Trzy. Trzy.

  We never get to five, which sounds like pinch!

  In the morning Babci takes thick airy honey toast out of the oven in her creaky little kitchen, all warm and wooden. Then we play while she sews for her ladies. She shows us the outfits she’s making so we can pick fabrics for our Barbies.

  Babci sews and sews and sews in her workroom and comes out with something almost finished. We spy on her. Her birds chirp in the bushes under the corner windows and her teeny radio plays tinny music. The sewing room smells like new fabric and metal and sewing machine oil and the damp of the ironing board.

  Go play. I working now.

  I say that exact same thing, the same way, to Stella when I’m doing my art, at home, and she listens to me because she’s heard Babci say it.

  Babci gives us a shoebox of scraps and scissors and needles and thread, and we sew what we can. We dress our Barbies in strips, making little tied-on ragged skirts and pinned-on shawls and balled-up hats. Then Babci, like the night mice in The Tailor of Gloucester, takes our designs and finishes them overnight. The next morning, we have matching ball gowns with sequins on top and long flowing velvet below. Mine is deep green and Stella’s is midnight blue. Our dolls look like Cher. Mom will pretend to be jealous because she never had Barbies, but Babci made all of Mom’s tap dancing costumes and we get to use them at Babci’s for dress-up.

  After lunch we go down the alley, through a skinny boardwalk between two old yards of tall weeds to the candy store on the next street. Babci calls it the Chinaman store, but the man in the white moustache and dark blue flat cap talks like the Queen. The candy is in red packages with Chinese writing. The man puts our candies in a little white paper bag, one for each of us, smoothing them with his whole hand, like Daddy used to touch Stella’s head when she was a baby. I ask the man if he has any grandchildren. His eyes go watery and he holds up three fingers and says, China. Then he puts a chocolate gold coin in each of our bags for good luck. We remember to say thank you like Babci said and we run all the way back.

  While Babci steam-presses her work from the morning, we’re supposed to water each plant in the garden with a bucket and a ladle: two ladles for tomatoes and one for everything else. It takes five buckets and Babci watches from her window, where the ironing board stands. I water while Stella mostly looks for worms and bugs and talks to Mrs. Sekula over the fence that leans backwards and forwards. Babci tells us not to touch the fence in case it falls down on someone. Mrs. Sekula can’t really speak English, but she and Stella compare insects over the wavy fence. They look at a bud on her apple tree, and Mrs. Sekula shows how the bud will open like her fist, into a finger flower and then a round apple. Stella makes her smile. I like Mrs. Sekula’s smile because she’s missing her front teeth but she does it anyway.

  Babci won’t let us watch TV with her in the afternoon. We peeked once, and it was all whispery talking. And yucky kissing. Babci likes it to learn her English. Mom says it’s called soap opera and Babci never skips a day.

  Now is my story. Go play.

  She does her hand-sewing at the TV and we are not allowed to go in her bedroom to look at the angel candles so we go upstairs, where she used to have boarders, to explore. There were people living in the basement, too, when she had Dziadziu. I only remember him from his pictures and his gravestone, pure black, the same as his hair. In the honey-coloured hope chest upstairs, we find Mom’s old school work wrapped in carmel tissue pattern sheets. I want to keep the pencil drawings of ruby flowers, shaded and outlined like from an old-fashioned library book, and Stella wants the big one of a ladybug, but no, Babci says, those are no for you. Stella gets ready to wail, so I show her how to trace it in the window while she holds it up. Then I make Stella colour it herself, and it’s not at all like Mom’s in the end but Stella loves it.

  I want to phone Mom to ask her about her drawings but Babci won’t let me.

  Leave her a little bit lonely today.

  Babci says lonely like it is as normal and natural as growing. I tell her about being lonely on the steps at home that time the door was locked, and how her sparkly Easter card saved me, and she holds both my hands and says it’s my turn to send her something. Babci loves getting mail. She reads her Polish mail at night, in bed, with her glasses and a big ahhh as she slits the envelope with a little knife on her night table. She reads aloud, so her Dzaidziu angel can hear. I promise that if I ever go anywhere, I will send Babci a postcard.

  Babci has a whole box of postcards, from when she was young and alone in Canada. She lets us play with them. We try to figure out where they are from by the stamps. Polska is easy but others are not. Some are from African countries and Argentina. The writing stands up tall and curly like Babci’s and all of it is Polish.

  Babci teaches us Polish while she’s cooking fried potatoes and pork chops and making creamy sweet lettuce salad. We clean out her spice cupboard. She says it, then we say it.

  Dobry. Good.

  Lalka. Doll.

  Mleko. Milk.

  We sniff in each spice jar like Babci does when she uses them. There are no labels, so we put them in colour order, lightest to darkest.

  White garlic salt.

  Yellow mustard powder.

  Orange paprika.

  Green dill weed.

  Brown cloves.

  Black pepper.

  When Daddy comes to pick us up it is already night.

  We carry bags of food to take home: leftover angel-food cake with rhubarb sauce from Babci and my favourite, sauerkraut carrot kapusta and Ukrainian sausage from Mrs. Sekula, for you mama. There is also a secret bag of boys’ jeans with the knees mended so invisible that the boys don’t even notice when they put them on.

  I wave until Babci shrinks to a wiggly dot on the road behind us. On the way home I don’t see the gravestone store. On my side of the car, I get the glow and smoke and the fry smell of the A & W and settle into the sleepy quiet of the dark drive.
Suddenly home, the lights glare. Louis wags his tail as he sits quietly beside Mom, who’s wearing something from Glamour, probably, with makeup and a new perfume.

  Mom bustles us to bed, oohing at our new doll clothes and aahing at the scores the boys made. Daddy turns off the lights. While Mom says goodnight to us, Daddy lights a new green candle at the kitchen table. He doesn’t even grumble about it, but puts a saucer under it to catch the wax. It smells like pinecones. Later I hear them drinking tea. Louis lands like a rug under the table. I try to listen to their talking, but all I hear is Stella’s little-sigh breathing in the bunk bed above me and the boys snoring in the next room and the running hum of Babci’s sewing machine, smoothly, surely, sewing up our seams.

  Forest of Friends

  Mom’s baking cookies. But not for us.

  You can always tell when the cookies are to give away because she doesn’t give out the spatula for anyone to lick. She gets red in the face and stamps her foot when the boys scoop their fingers in the dough and take a big hunk, running out the door before she can swat them with a dishtowel. There are raw eggs in cookie dough, so I don’t ever eat it. But the boys don’t care. They eat everything.

  They’re boys, says Mom, often. Human garburators.

  When I’m mad at them, Mom says there will come a time when you will be very interested in boys. I don’t know. The only boy I ever liked so far is Freddy, since I was four. But he moved away to a new school.

  I suck in the oatsy chocolate aroma of the cookies baking and try to hold in the goodness, but sadness pricks through. My friend Annie is moving, too. Mom is making cookies for Annie, Annie’s baby brother Ben and their mom. They’re moving today. The dad already moved, to somewhere else, with a new lady who is having her own baby. Annie and her mom and Ben are going to the small town where her Granny lives. Annie’s Granny has frizzled grey hair falling down from the top of her head. She has a big smile of clicking false teeth and says for me to call her Granny, too. She visits a lot. Granny loves holding baby Ben and taking him for walks. She says she’s an outside girl. She has a suntan even in winter and likes to play basketball with us. And when the boys want to play, too, she makes us stay and be on her team, girls against boys. The boys get baby Ben. So if he cries or needs his soother, the boys have to do something about it and then Granny passes to us, we shoot and the girls usually get a point. We won three games!

  The driveway is finally dry of snow. Before, when you missed the ball it landed in the slushy alley puddles. Now I only have Charlie and Tom to play with, but they hardly ever let me have the ball. I only get it if it runs down the alley. They don’t stop calling at me until I bring it back.

  The cookies are for the long drive away. No nuts because of baby Ben. Granny says he’s got a sniffer like a smart dog, and no one can hide a cookie from him. He wails like his finger is caught in a door if he doesn’t have two cookies, one in each hand. Granny always puts the baby under the apple tree for naps, and his little nose wiggles when the snowflakes fall and the wind whispers on his cheek. It breathes on him like Granny blows on his hot cereal, and his eyes flutter closed and his mouth drops open. Catching flies, Granny says.

  Mom’s making the cookies extra crispy so Ben can gnaw on them all the way to Vulcan. It sounds like a scary place, but Annie says it isn’t. Granny knows every single person who lives there and everyone calls her Granny. They’re driving right after the leftovers lunch that they’re eating right now on the porch. The movers have already taken everything away.

  Annie doesn’t think she’ll see her dad very much anymore. She’s pretty sad about that. If I couldn’t see my dad, nothing would make sense. Days and nights would be mixed up, like on a different hemisphere. At least baby Ben will have Granny to teach him basketball. Even though her mom says they’ll visit, Annie doesn’t think so. She’s moved before. We could write letters, Mom says, be pen pals. I tried that with Miss Trepanier, and she never got a chance to write me back. But Annie says for sure she will write to me. She promised.

  Freddy still writes to me. He sends me a birthday card every year and I send him one I’ve drawn myself, because we’re twins. Not like his twin sisters from a different daddy who is black, but because we have the same birthday and are the same age every August 3. Our moms met in the hospital. He sends cards by famous artists, even from when we were five.

  I still have the first card, with Vincent van Gogh, Vase of Roses, on the front and Hppy Birday, Your frend, Freddy, on the back. I keep all of Freddy’s cards.

  Freddy gets me. Mom keeps track of his address from his mother who moved to Toronto. They phone each other and have laughing talks. Freddy and I will keep sending cards to each other because we are the oldest friends each other has. Freddy moved to Toronto for a while, but then he went to Geneva, Switzerland.

  He now lives with his real dad, a famous scientist who travels around the world, so Freddy goes to private school. I asked him what it feels like to sleep at your school. He said he reads a lot. He takes French, German and Latin besides his scientist subjects. For our eighth birthday, it was A Sunday on La Grand Jatte by Georges Seurat, signed Joyeux anniversaire, Le Fred.

  When we turned nine, he sent from Four Tulips: Grote Geplumaceerde (The Great Plumed One), and Voorwint (With the Wind) (detail) by Jakob Marrel, and I had to look up what he wrote in a German dictionary: Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Friedrich.

  This year, for birthday number ten, he wrote calligraphy in peacock blue ink and sent Giovanni di Paolo, Paradise, with the note, Felicem diem natalem, Fredum, mcmxc.

  Because Freddy zips through school grades ahead of everyone else, Mom says he will go to finishing school in a few years before he goes to university. Finishing school is where you learn riding, diving, skiing, sailing and dancing. I think that might be tricky for Freddy, but he’ll figure it out.

  Have fun getting finished, I wrote on his card. I made a clump of bare black trees with the sunset behind them that looked like stained glass, in ink and coloured pencils. I wonder if he saves my cards, too.

  I get back to drawing, where I feel sunshine and float even though I’m sad. When I’m drawing or thinking about pictures, my feelings fly away. Miss Trepanier told me that about reading but it works with drawing, too. It’s probably the same for Charlie and Tom and their sports. When I have to bike down to the park and call them for dinner, they don’t hear me at all. I think they’re ignoring me, but maybe they really don’t hear me. I don’t hear them when I’m at my desk. Or if I do, it’s like I’m far away, like they’re across the field when I call. I have to ring my bike bell to get their attention. They usually sneak up on me and jab me at my desk to get mine.

  I’m making a picture of Annie and me and some trees we climb. We’ve named them. I’ve put the ones we like from different parks all together on one page. I’m not writing their names because they are our secret. The trees will tell her who they are by the way I draw them. I’m not using colour because the trees aren’t happy and, besides, they are just starting leaves. We’ve only had one spring, one summer, one fall and one winter to play in them. One year, but we played almost every day. Spring Break started yesterday and today Annie is going and we’re not even finished Grade Five. I wish we could go explore the river valley one last time. We find treasures and make gnome houses and Annie always makes me giggle.

  Mom pops the warm cookies into a tin and, as soon as they’re in there, the buttery dough smell in the kitchen fades. Mom leaves out the extra ones: the sort of burnt ones, too close to the edge of the pan, so they have a sidewall. I’m not sure I can eat any. Besides, before I get down and up from my desk, the boys beeline in and grab the rejects and hurry outside to snarfle them up.

  Mom wants to see my drawing. She knows who the people are, but she doesn’t know about the trees.

  That’s Sunnyside. That’s Swinger, this is Spyer and that one’s Picnic.

  The names bubble out
of me, but it doesn’t really count because Mom doesn’t know they are secret and, anyway, Annie is going.

  Mom says, what about that first day, when the two of you ran to the corner park to find pussy willows?

  I draw in a few fuzzy bushes in Forest of Friends. When we came back that day, the moms were drinking tea and giggling. Mom remembers, because she’s taking a big breath. I take one, too.

  Don’t forget to sign it, she says.

  So in the corner I put, For Annie, and in the pussy willows but kind of hidden like artists do, my name. And two pine cones on the forest floor. For when we played squirrels.

  Wait, says Mom, when I finish.

  She takes the drawing and goes in Dad’s office and uses his super-duper desk photocopier. The kids aren’t allowed to use this machine, and when we have to photocopy a homework sheet from a friend, or our birth certificate for soccer, only Dad or Mom can do it. Mom has never photocopied my art before, so I’m curious. It’s a line drawing, with no shading, so the copy looks printed like a poster. The lines are the same thickness. The erase marks don’t show. It makes it look finished, like Mom’s drawings at Babci’s house. But mine looks like it’s from a book that’s fresh and new. It doesn’t feel like it’s mine, without my smudges. It could be from outer space, like the Christmas cards the school made from my Christmas tree drawing one year. They made boxes and boxes of them and sold them to all the families at school. But the picture didn’t look like mine anymore. It looked like an illustrator did it. I wonder if we have any more of them, because that card was the first art I’ve published and I want to send one in the mail to Babci.

  I’ll find one for her, Mom says. You’ll have to keep it safe until Christmas. And this, she holds up the photocopy, is for you.