Art Lessons

by Katherine Koller

  I didn’t ask, she says, sending him a flirty glance. He’s much too young for me. But I gave him my card anyway. You never know, he may have a friend who needs to sell a house. Or buy one. In my work, I need to meet people.

  Even at the pool?

  Especially at the pool. When I take a day off, like today, I build my contacts. Everywhere I go—shopping, to the gym or the hairdresser. Everyone needs a place to live, so everyone needs a good realtor.

  But I think Auntie Magda talks to everybody because, actually, her hobby is boyfriends. Mom listens to Auntie Magda on the phone a lot, but when she hangs up, she shakes her head and sighs. Even Charlie and Tom adore Auntie Magda, and their buddies seriously ogle her. She brings Charlie and Tom sports magazines and posters of their favourite players, and once she and a date even took them out to an Oilers hockey game, with expensive tickets given to her by a client. The boys still talk about the points Gretzky made that night, and how hoarse they got from screaming and that was four years ago, just before he got traded. Last time Auntie Magda came over, she let the boys take turns driving her around the block in her white convertible. She calls it Baby.

  When it’s time to go home, I’m stiff from reading and burnt, back and front, even though I put my T-shirt on over my bathing suit a while ago. In her pool bag, Auntie Magda carefully packs her mini transistor radio, her Baby Oil in its own little plastic bag with a pink twist tie, her snack containers, her cigarettes, her golden lighter, her business card case and her towel. She wears a white sheer cover-up that shows her tan right through. Her lipstick is still perfect because she only drinks out of a straw. She slides her terra cotta toes into her flowery sandals in the change room and out we go to the hot parking lot.

  Baby, she croons. Like it really is one.

  We get in the sun-heated seats, and I’m glad for the warmth because I’m a little chilly from my damp suit under my shorts on the windy drive home. I shiver, once, and at the next red light Auntie Magda drapes her towel, which is still dry, over me. When Auntie Magda drops me off she says bye, my dear, and wait, I need to inscribe your book. She takes out Dziadziu’s black fountain pen, the one she says is lucky for her real estate deals, and slowly, elaborately, writes loose left-leaning letters on the front page: With much love from Auntie Magda, July 22, 1992, a heavenly day together.

  Buzi, buzi, she says, reaching out to me.

  So I give her little kisses like she does, both cheeks, buzi, buzi. Her warm honey scent still lingers near her neck.

  I want to go in and change and get some aloe gel for my back and read for the rest of the day and night. I thank Auntie Magda again for the book and the swim and the lunch and the bikini, even though I hope I’ll be too big for it next time and never wear it again.

  Family Tree

  I am not an octopus! Mom yells.

  Everyone shuts their mouths, as if she might sweep out her tentacles and smack us with her suction-cups. The boys need their lunches double-large because otherwise they’ll eat it all after morning practice, I need a permission form for my Grade Seven field trip to Drumheller, Dad needs a signature on a paper for the bank and Stella needs her zipper fixed and a Kleenex and a hug. Mom’s got the plastic mustard bottle ready to squirt us all with yellow octopus ink.

  Instead, in the moment of quiet, she gets us all what we need, and we hurry out the door, to school, to work, to play. Mom has the dishwasher, the morning’s breakfast dishes, lunch makings, school letters, game schedules and newspapers in a jumble about her. I take a last look before I leave. Her arms are moving so fast that it seems like she has more than two. If I blink, I imagine at least five or maybe an octopus eight, at full speed. I smile inside, but it creeps outside, and Mom grins back at me.

  See you later alligator, she says.

  I keep thinking about octopi. I wonder how they manage all their arms. I try to figure out how one arm would know what the other seven are doing. There must be a built-in brain in each tentacle that sends messages to the other ones, so they don’t all end up doing the same thing or all forgetting to do the same thing. And what if they lose one? I know that a starfish can re-grow arms, but what about an octopus? I look it up during library time: if an octopus arm is cut off, it grows back! It’s called regeneration.

  After school, it’s sunny, but I don’t want to hear the plunk-plunk of the boys playing basketball on the driveway or the little-girl opera of Stella making food out of sticks and pinecones and sand. I go where I always go after a long loud day at school. At my art table, I’m in my cloud, safe from sound except Mom cooking supper, listening to French CBC. French talking on the radio sounds like music to me because it’s so fast and I only understand a word here and there. Mom listens to keep up her French. She says once you know one other language, it’s easier to learn the next one.

  I’m working on another tree. This one is in a British Columbia forest, where we went last summer on holidays. Stella and I felt like we found the enchanted forest because of the moss on the ground and lichen dripping from the trees. There were so many colours of green, all so glossy and wet, that even on a sunny day it was dark and mysterious. We made a fairy garden from sticks and rocks and moss. I’m doing a watercolour trying to get that moist look on the trees from misty rain. I want to show the hush in the enchanted forest, the feeling that magic can happen there.

  There’s a wail from the driveway. Not the usual whooping of the boys when they score, but the scream for Mom that says they’re going to the hospital. Mom turns down the stove, grabs her purse and quilting bag and leaves me in charge. When I yell that I don’t know what to do, she runs out with her arms up, her way of saying, wing it! Then she rushes off to the van with the bleeding boy and sends the unhurt one inside.

  He fell, says Tom. But he wouldn’t let go of the ball, so he fell on his arm. Tom slaps his right arm below the elbow.

  My gut shivers. Poor Charlie.

  Probably busted it, says Tom.

  Tom says it like it happens everyday, but it’s not his fault and not his turn, so no big deal. It’s way worse when the boys get into fights. They turn into snotty screaming monsters, wrestling each other in the leaves, rolling and flailing, bruising and beating up the one person in the world they can’t stand to be without. Even Louis tries to break them up, barking until they stop.

  Tom hoists his knapsack on one shoulder and Charlie’s on the other and takes a box of cereal and a half-full double carton of milk upstairs. When one brother is at the hospital, the other one does homework. Like a prayer.

  In my forest, I paint in a second tree that has fallen beside the first one. It balances the standing tree, and makes it less lonely, even though the second tree is broken at the bottom of the trunk. The broken trunk will grow new branches because trees, like octopi, regenerate.

  But supper waits, half-made, and Stella hiccups from hunger. So we get busy. Stella sets the table. She drops a glass, which breaks in two clean pieces, but she wipes the area with a damp paper towel so Louis won’t hurt a paw on a tiny shard. I check all the pots and turn the rice right off like Mom does to steam it. I taste the sweet and sour ribs, add a plop of hot sauce and stir everything to make sure nothing is burning. I make the salad and we dress up the table with flowers and napkins. Stella insists on making name cards. I get a ladybug on mine. Mom gets a spider (Stella’s favourite). Tom gets a black beetle, Stella gives herself an ant (the queen, of course) and Dad gets a bee. Charlie has a pupa because he’s at the hospital.

  By the time Dad gets home, he’s talked to Mom, who quilts during the wait with Charlie. He’s had an X-ray and is in the casting room. It calms her to stitch, especially when the boys are getting stitches, but also at music lessons and soccer practices and basketball games and even movies. I’m the same, with my sketchbook. Her hands, like mine, like to be making.

  The four of us eat dinner, quietly. I try to get Dad to guess my secret ingredient, b
ut he eats too quickly and drinks a lot of water. Tom, who eats at wild-animal speed, catches a ride to the soccer field with Dad, who’s going straight to the hospital to trade places with Mom. Which leaves me with Stella the picky eater, Louis begging for any scraps and dishes to load. I turn French CBC back on. I pick out a few words: bonne nuit, la lune, chez la maison.

  Mom arrives home, famished, to find the kitchen only partly cleaned up. I left the food out for her. I didn’t do the counters yet because Babci phoned, and I had to tell her the whole story of Charlie. Mom scrubs out the sink. She eats while she wipes counters and reorganizes the fridge.

  I drift back to my art table and my watercolour. I don’t like the way it has dried, but I try a few more layers of colour and the tree trunks get more solid and the branches are less wispy, so I decide it’s after the rain instead of in the rain.

  Whatever magic that was there has already happened. You can tell I got interrupted. I’ll have to start again.

  Mom makes plates for Charlie and Tom, who always eat again when the wounded one comes home. She works up to her usual octopus speed. Then she pauses.

  Your arms took over for mine.

  Stella, too. That makes four arms, Mom.

  Your brothers’ would make eight.

  She holds one arm in the other as if it was Charlie’s broken one, willing it to regenerate.

  Octopus Mom. She has two arms for each of us.

  Lemon Tree

  The paint chip says Dusk Sunflower but it reminds me of the heart-shaped golden leaves on the whispering aspens in fall. The wall colour I’ve picked out by myself and painted with Dad turned out pretty intense. It’s darker than I thought it would be. Mom suggested that we buy a shade or two lighter, but I’ll grow into it. In summer, maybe it will be less shocking when there’s more sun in here.

  I finally have my very own bedroom and an art space all my own. Dad put a lock on the door, too. I’ve moved my art supplies from the sunroom into built-in bookshelves beside a real drafting table from a friend of Dad’s, an architect. We made one wall half in cork to tack up two-dimensionals. Spread above my art table, under the window, we installed a long inspiration shelf for three-dimensionals: coloured glass, rocks, feathers, buttons, shells, pinecones, keys, balls, spools and my animals from Dad, the stone bear and a new one, a bird carved from bone. I rearrange this shelf often. Some days I put it in colour order, and some days from light to dark. Also textural order, smooth to rough. To make my ideas pop, some days I add random bits I find in my jacket pockets or I clear everything away to focus on one object.

  Dad moved his study to the basement, so Stella could have his old office upstairs for her bedroom. He painted it a serene Eau de Nil Green even though Stella’s as laid-back as her lizard. She also has jars of live insects and a small aquarium. Mom didn’t let her have rodents when we shared a bedroom, but now there’s a gerbil. Stella has to keep her door closed, like the boys, because of the smell, but she won’t open her window in case it gives her creatures a cold.

  The boys still have their room together because one wouldn’t know what to do without the other. Now that they’re teenagers, they look more and more alike. Lots of people mistake them for twins even though they’re a year apart: same dark hair, braces, fast moves and long legs. Tom tries to be taller than Charlie, faster than Charlie, tougher than Charlie, hairier than Charlie. They didn’t want anything changed in their room when we renovated, but Mom got them new sheets anyway, and she finished their matching quilts. I never go into their musty mess. And now that I’ve got a lock, they won’t be coming in here ever again.

  The boys got into big trouble. They were in charge while Mom and Dad were out. They found my sketchbook in the kitchen, the new one from Auntie Magda that’s bound in real red leather, and used it to write game plays with their horrible Grade Twelve hockey friends, and then tore their pages out. I heard them and got it back, but then they got into Dad’s whiskey and Mom’s wine. Charlie and Tom had to buy new whiskey for Dad, sherry for Mom and a sketchbook for me.

  They give me a pink Barbie sketchbook. I throw it in the garbage.

  Since when do you not like Barbie?

  Tom, when was the last time I played Barbies?

  Besides, my Barbie outfits aren’t schlocky like the ones you buy. Mine are haute couture by Babci. They could be in a museum someday. They don’t look anything like the pink sparkly workout Barbie on the cover of that sketchbook.

  Charlie pulls the Barbie book out of the garbage. He holds it out.

  Come on, Cassie, we just used a bit of your paper.

  It’s for my art and it’s private!

  We thought you’d like this one.

  I don’t say anything so he chucks it back in. I don’t say anything to either of the boys for a week, I’m so mad. They also get yard work, and I get a holiday at Babci’s, alone. Before I go, though, I rake through the garbage for the Barbie sketchbook and shove it under my bed. To remind me how mad I am.

  Today Mom’s got a lost look, like the stick trees outside. All the leaves have fallen, and the trees look chilled, like they can hardly wait for snow to cover them up. She calls me down from my new room to move the playhouse. I haven’t been in it since way before I could fit in the door. I never liked the playhouse because it was dark inside. Stella doesn’t like being indoors anywhere. She prefers the wind and everything that flies in it.

  I’ll put my gardening stuff in here, says Mom.

  Dad made it. He keeps a photo in his office of the day he finished it, the one and only time us four kids were in the playhouse together, poking our heads out its two little windows. The boys were already twelve and eleven.

  Mom and I get Charlie and Tom and Stella and we all lift and slide and plunk the playhouse down on the gravel in the side yard. Mom’s cleared it and raked the gravel level. Louis sniffs and gets in the way. The playhouse now leaves him less space for his doggie business.

  But it’s more private than before, says Stella to Louis. You’ll like it.

  Louis gazes at her with adoration. He trusts Stella completely.

  Annie and I were going to have a sleepover in the playhouse, but we never did. I’ve sent her two birthday cards. I wonder if she’s moved again, and I’m happy if she has, because I only got one note from Vulcan, Alberta: Vulcan is dead. I keep sending her cards anyway because I like making cards. Mom does the addresses and stamps. I saw her photographing one before she put it in the envelope. She photographs quilts she gives away, too.

  In the backyard, a big bald patch stares up at us. Without the playhouse, the yard looks like a spaceship lifted off and killed a square of grass. Stella stirs and pokes and oohs in the blank spot. Bugs awaken in the cold, and scramble for cover. There are centipedes and beetles, spiders and worms. I bend down with Stella to watch and some muddy yellow pokes out of bleached weeds. It’s a ball, a small bouncy ball from a birthday party loot bag three years ago. From Annie. She gave me the yellow one especially, because it was the same colour as Babci’s apples, and Annie loved them. I snatch up the ball and hope Annie has an apple tree in Vulcan. I’ll put one on my next card for her.

  The day I get my holiday away from my brothers and they get to rake and bag leaves, I get a princess lunch alone: fluffy white sesame bread, cold sausage, horseradish mustard and garlic pickles. After, Babci sends me to the basement for a box of apples to take next door. Mrs. Sekula has an apple tree, but it doesn’t make apples anymore, so she envies Babci’s, which overflows with tangy yellows, perfect for szarlotka cake, every year.

  Mrs. Sekula’s tree forgets, Babci says.

  Ever since Mrs. Sekula’s husband died and her two daughters married and moved away and never visit, her apple tree has not bloomed. Babci told Mrs. Sekula to get rid of her bitterness and maybe the tree will remember to fruit again.

  I bite away my own still-burning bitterness at my brothers by c
homping on another pickle, which fizzes like 7-Up. When I take the apples next door, Mrs. Sekula’s not home so I leave the box on her back steps. Hanging from her tree, there’s a plastic lemon tied on with a strip of raggedy fabric.

  Babci used strips of ripped white cotton once and only once to twist my hair into ringlets. I had to sleep overnight with bulges of tight rolled fabric at my scalp. When I complained the next morning, she said, sometimes you suffer. Then she combed each ringlet carefully around her finger into a sausage, and tied a yellow satin bow on the top of my head, to go to her church bazaar. I let her do it for the bazaar, for the delicate egg and pickle sandwiches with their crusts cut off on paper doilies, the fancy tea cups, the plants and knickknacks for sale, the pretty Polish ladies. With my own money, I buy a white crocheted doily, its complex lacy windmill pattern transfixing, to me. Babci doesn’t like them. Too fussy, she says. But I’ll tack it to my bedroom wall, and let the gold shine through.

  Every time I visit Babci’s after that, I check on Mrs. Sekula’s tree. Every time, there’s another lemon. Sometimes, a lime. Babci laughs, and gives me a plastic lemon, not quite empty, from her fridge. I suck on the last of it for the thrill of straight lemon juice and, without being seen, toss it under Mrs. Sekula’s tree. The next day, it is neatly tied on. I keep count over the winter. I wonder if this is a Ukrainian Christmas tradition, to decorate an outside tree with lemon “balls.” I save a lemon and a lime from home, too, and leave them on the falling down fence for Mrs. Sekula the next time. I even get Mom to buy a few extra lemons and squeeze them into a jar so I can take another one of each to Mrs. Sekula the time after that. They stick out, yellow and green in the snowy yard. By spring, I count seven lemons and three limes.

  On Mother’s Day, Babci asks Stella to set the table and sends me to the garden to collect fresh chives for the sour cream. Mrs. Sekula sits on a wooden kitchen chair with its back broken off. She gets up and calls me over to the fence, speed-talking in Ukrainian, but I don’t need to understand her words: her tree is full of blossoms. The lemons and limes still hang here and there, in the froth. She points to the bees, in love with her tree, and I nod and grin. She claps her hands and smiles so wide she loses her wrinkles. I try to reach one of the lemons to take it down but she stops me, tears in her eyes. She wants to leave them. And I understand. The lemons and limes remind her how much she wanted the apples, and they make the apple blossoms somehow holy. She’s sacrificed her own bitterness like empty limes and lemons. Instead of hiding them, she shows them, to let it go.