Art Lessons

by Katherine Koller

  When I get home, I take out the Barbie sketchbook from under my bed, wipe away the dust bunnies and draw Mrs. Sekula’s tree. I make a flipbook, like Freddy showed me once way back in kindergarten: it makes a movie, Cassie, try it. It starts with the bare, sad tree, then gets one lemon, and then more, and limes, until the blossoms start, and fall, and then the green apples that turn to red. I use coloured pencils for the lemons, limes and apples. The tree is in ink, and the blossoms and leaves are outlined only. When it is done, so the Barbies don’t show, I glue on a drawing of the first, sad, forgetful tree.

  I leave Stella inspecting the bare ground in our backyard and Mom wondering about a patio on the dead stretch of lawn, and take Annie’s yellow ball to the sink. The colour of the ball melts to butter as the dirt scrubs away. I carry the ball, small enough to hide in my hand, upstairs to my room and position it on my new shelf. Then, like a puff of fresh air, for one second, long enough to be real, like a warm dreamlight, I feel that Annie is okay. It is magical. I know for sure, but I don’t know how. Like letting go of a balloon and watching it float overhead. Like Mrs. Sekula, watching her blossoms fall off in the rain, full of faith that there will be fruit.

  In my own yellow room with the door locked and the window open, I have faith, too. It feels like floating, like it always has, but now I have a name for it. Trees have it, so why shouldn’t I? I don’t know if it’s the same as Babci’s faith in her bedroom altar, her candles and God, but it is mine.

  The tree I’m working on now is one of many elm trees on the neighbourhood boulevards, but this one is a dancing tree. I admire it every day on my walk to junior high. Last year, when the city was doing road construction on that corner, I worried that they’d hurt it or cut it down, but the workers surrounded it with a temporary wooden box to keep it safe. When the box came off I borrowed Mom’s camera and took shots from many angles and put the prints on my cork wall. It’s the only tree I’ve ever seen that has a curve like the backbend and waist and hips of a dancing girl, with a sprig of leafy twigs coming out her bottom like a little skirt, and arms reaching up, overhead, embracing the sky.

  Hollow Oak

  Cup-a-Noodles for lunch. Groan. That means waiting in the line-up at the Grade Eight microwave. I nibble at my grapes because I’ve got no one to talk to. Except the Weird Lady. She stands at the microwave in her flimsy plastic gloves, a roll of paper towel under one arm and squirt bottle in the other. She’s really short. While you wait, she opens your jacket and reads your T-shirt. Great. Today I’m wearing my SOUL shirt. I zip up my hoodie.

  Nobody talks to the Weird Lady. In the hallway, you zoom away in the other direction if she shuffles up in her dirty old raincoat, done up tight, a worn saddlebag across one shoulder. She writes down the words from your T-shirt with a turquoise pom-pom pen in a matching notebook and makes you say them out loud. Then she repeats them. It’s pretty weird.

  The guys ahead of me ignore her. They’re wearing hockey jerseys and she writes down Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and the great team they left behind, the Edmonton Oilers. Like she’s never heard of them. Like I say, weird.

  So she comes up to me. But before she can unzip my hoodie, I use Dad’s hockey advice and get on the offence. I ask her a question. It’s so loud in the lunchroom I have to bend down to her ear and shout.

  What’s your name?

  Yeva.

  Where are you from?

  Russia, Germany, Japan and Iran.

  Wow. She’s like a walking Social class.

  I ask, why do you write down everybody’s words?

  To learn English.

  Why T-shirts?

  I like kids.

  I leaf through her notebook.

  Puma.

  Reebok.

  Ralph Lauren.

  But she’s fast. She pulls off her plastic glove and unzips my hoodie.

  So I explain SOUL. With difficulty.

  What’s inside you that nobody sees, I say.

  Yeva pats her chest, and has a lot of trouble pronouncing it, but I’m patient. My noodles are still warming up.

  Me inside, she says.

  She’s got it. I nod.

  The jerk behind me hyena laughs.

  Then I read his T-shirt: BREED. I define that one for Yeva.

  Rabbits, many babies?

  Yeva titters like a bird.

  The guy turns red. I’m not sure he’s completely clued in.

  I can’t see any of my friends, so I eat my noodles while reading the notice board, but Yeva follows me there, both gloves off now and points to words in her notebook. I try to explain that Nike and Adidas are brand names. I know from my brothers that Nike is the Greek goddess of victory and Adidas is code for All Day I Dream About Sports.

  I get her to take her raincoat off and point to the label, and then she understands. It’s Burberry. I’ve seen this in Babci’s Vogue. Yeva knows quality, I guess, but just doesn’t wash it. She smiles like I’m her new best friend. I hope not. She makes me circle all the designer names in her notebook.

  There’s a lot of label love here. This is junior high.

  In the hallway, I avoid everyone, because they’re mostly taller than me, but I really avoid Yeva, the only one who isn’t. The Weird Lady has no boundaries. We learned about it in Health. If you touch someone’s T-shirt as they walk past you, you’re invading their personal space. Yeva grabs and she has a strong grip. She also goes for wrists, hoods, belts, bags, headphones, anything to make you stop and show her your shirt. She has eyes that dig. Claw hands. And a piercing voice, like a magpie.

  What’s that say?

  Lots of people have stopped wearing T-shirts with words, me included. Who wants to get attacked by a refugee?

  But she picks me out of the crowd day after day. She wants a conversation. That’s why she’s here, to learn the language. I don’t think she needs the few dollars a day for being a lunch supervisor until I see her select an unbruised apple and a Mandarin orange, still tucked in its green tissue paper, from the garbage can. Some kids throw out anything not in cellophane, including homemade sandwiches. But Yeva only takes discarded fruit. Mom makes me bring home my apple cores and orange peels in a Ziploc bag for the garden compost, but she also wants evidence that I ate my fruit for the day.

  Yeva doesn’t have grandchildren at this school. I asked. That’s lucky, like that wouldn’t be social suicide. Her kids live in far-off places.

  Singapore. Yeva says it’s the cleanest city in the world.

  Miami, Florida. The oranges there are the best.

  Inuvik. She’s never been. But she’s going soon.

  Or at least that’s what she says. I’m not sure I believe her. I’m pretty sure people who garbage pick also pretend. She has no grandchildren yet. She wants some. She’s learning English so she can talk to them when they are born. She doesn’t like going to classes because they go too slow. She knows seven languages. I count them on my hands.

  Russian is first.

  Then German,

  French,

  Ukrainian,

  Japanese,

  Persian

  and English.

  Those last six are from kids at school grounds, at parks, in shopping malls. To test this, I ask her to say, Hello, my name is Yeva, in all seven languages. She does it without even a beat in between each, counting backwards from English by pinching each of my fingers. Creepy, much.

  I should have known to watch out for her out of school, too. At Southgate Mall, Sue and Kimmy and I are at the food court when Yeva spies us, yelling, eh, eh, eh! She sits down with us just as we’re digging in to our stir-frys. Kimmy and Sue have their mouths full, trying to finish fast. Yeva stares at my chow mein and tells us her life story in one minute.

  Bad men kill mother and father. Bad men has axe. House on fire. Sisters run. I climb tree. House burns. Cat
climbs tree to me. Sisters no come back. Find nuts, fill pockets. I go to city, to auntie. I sew for auntie. Six years I hide. Cat dies. I go. No tell auntie. Your age, I get job. In factory. I sew. Owner keeps me. Sew all day. Cook and clean at night. Nice house. Nice family. New language. German. Four children. They teach me. Family moves. I find husband. Good man. Three babies. He dies. I sew at home. Smart children. Go to good school. Boy at Inuvik. Cold there. Cold always. You nice. Nice girls. You talk to me.

  My friends haven’t finished swallowing. They get up. They don’t want to be nice. It’s been a long winter and they have an agenda.

  Come on, Cassie, we need to find shoes!

  In a minute.

  Hurry up!

  Meet you at Payless.

  I wave them off.

  Yeva is still inside her tree of memory. I fold my paper napkin. I tell her about my Babci, who hid food wrapped in cloth napkins during the war. She was only a child, but she was sent to hide the white bundles in a hollow tree: sugar, butter, flour, tea. Soldiers moved through the woods, but she and her little sister went out to play around the tree and bring back what was needed in big pockets sewn inside their coats.

  Yeva nods. My Babci, like Yeva, has been in the woods.

  Eat you lunch, Yeva says, and I am lost in the dark forest, too.

  I wonder if Babci and Yeva sew away their bad memories. I wonder if that’s why they make clothing, which is useful like the pockets that saved their lives. I only make pictures.

  Kimmy and Sue are still trying to get my attention, and suddenly I feel the sting of Thirteen Forever, like Freddy signed his last card: John Singer Sargent, Figure in a Hammock, Florida. I ignore Kimmy and Sue.

  I offer Yeva my stir-fry. I’ve only managed to eat a few forkfuls. She accepts it, and my unwrapped chopsticks, and expertly eats down to the carton. I sip on my 7-Up. I wonder where she lives. She’s got a battered suitcase on wheels that she pulls around with her. It’s got tiny stickers stuck on top of more stickers. They’re fruit stickers: Ecuador bananas, California oranges, Washington apples. That’s how many pieces of fruit from the garbage cans at school?

  I wonder if she’s homeless. But then she began life alone in a tree.

  No, she says, I go. All the time, I go.

  Where? I ask.

  Inuvik! To my son.

  She pulls out her ticket folder and shows me the date. Monday. I’ve never seen an airline ticket up close before. As Charlie and Tom would say, sexy, wow.

  How long will you stay?

  Long! Long time.

  I wonder if she’s been sleeping outside to get used to the cold. In the bus shelter. She probably loads up on fried food first. People in the north eat a lot of fat so they don’t feel the cold, Dad says. He gets Kentucky Fried Chicken when he works up in Norman Wells. Mom can’t stand the smell of KFC, but Dad takes us kids to the drive-in for car suppers with the windows open, sometimes.

  And then?

  Then Florida. To my girl, Darah.

  I think of Yeva making lines like a net on the map of the world, from north to south and west to east. If you don’t live in one place, does that mean the world is your home, a nest with threads from every place you go? And everyone you meet is your friend? Or has a thread that sticks to you?

  Good food. Thank you.

  It’s okay. Glad you like it.

  Where go your friends?

  I’ll find them.

  Behind Yeva, Kimmy and Sue wave to get me away. They’re laughing. How can they laugh at bad men has axe.... I climb tree?

  I wait until Yeva finishes and pull out my sketchbook from my floppy leather hand-me-down bag from Mom. I want to know what kind of tree. She points at the one in my book most like the one she hid in.

  Leaves falling down, she says.

  I wish I had my tree book from Dad. To identify your trees, from their cones, their bark, their leaves, he said.

  I sketch a few shapes of leaves. On a blank page, Yeva traces the curvy in and out lines of the oak leaf with her thumb. I outline her marks with my pencil.

  Smells like tea? I ask.

  She nods, slowly. Taste bad.

  She’s tasted them? Mom collects and crushes oak leaves to get rid of slugs.

  Bitter, I say.

  She asks for the spelling and writes in her own book: bitter makes you cry.

  I write in her book: good luck.

  She knows that one and draws a shamrock beside it.

  I draw a little globe and add Yeva in her raincoat at the top of the world and, because I know from Social class that in Inuvik there aren’t any trees at all, I sign my name with a little pine: Your Friend. I need to send a tree with her. To let her know her story has a place to grow.

  I leave Yeva in the food court reading the inscription over and over, smoothing over the page in her notebook. I used Babci’s Polish name for me, Kasia. Yeva says it like Babci.

  Yeva will start a new notebook for Inuktitut.

  I’ll put her in my oak trees. Y was here, scratched on the trunk, or maybe just a Y in the pattern of the bark, hidden, and a Z, too, for Zofja, my Babci.

  Kimmy and Sue pull me into the closest shoe store, the most expensive one.

  Do you wanna be weird like her?

  Kimmy pounces and protects at the same time, steering me out as soon as the saleswoman asks if she can help us.

  She ate your food, Sue says. Is she going to eat ours?

  We watch as she packs their stir-frys into one carton and ties it to her rolling suitcase.

  Scavenger, Kimmy says.

  Gross, says Sue.

  She must be hungry, I say. We won’t see her again. She’s leaving for Inuvik.

  Like we believe that.

  Yeah.

  She showed me her ticket. For tomorrow.

  That’s a relief, says Kimmy.

  Good riddance, says Sue.

  I’ll never forget her.

  But Kimmy and Sue haven’t heard me because they are already in the next shoe store. Then I’m with them, and I’m looking at a brown boot on a high shelf. But I’m seeing an oak tree and feeling its trunk in the dark, reaching up and wondering what’s in the hollow.

  Tree Day

  The dragon roar of a chainsaw fires up. A tree truck is parked outside and three guys with gloves on get ready to change my life. My alarm clock chimes weakly under the screaming growls outside my window. The giant grandmother spruce that I have listened to and loved since I was born is coming down, even though it’s green and healthy. If it were mine, I’d strap myself to it. But it’s not. It belongs to a lady who lives alone.

  I won’t have this tree fall on my roof. It’s leaning. See? In a big storm, it could kill me, she said to Mom and me over the fence.

  We looked up, and then at each other. The tree seemed straight to us.

  And, she said, the roots are buckling my brickwork. I could trip and break a hip, and then where would I be?

  But we’ve never seen her use her patio. Talking with her at the fence is rare.

  Also, it’s clogging my plumbing. Costing me the earth to fix.

  It must cost a lot to take it down, Mom says.

  Should have done it a long time ago.

  As if it’s somehow our fault, that she needed a barrier between our yards, but if we weren’t there, with all our kids and balls and noise, she would have cut it down sooner. I think she just wants to live longer than the tree. I know the tree better than I know her, and I’ve lived next door for fourteen years.

  They start by trimming off branches, bottom to top. One guy, who looks like he lives in trees, shimmies up. He leans back into the wide leather belt holding him away from the tree, ripcords the chainsaw, slices and drops bountiful, fanned boughs. I’m supposed to be eating my breakfast, but today Shreddies have the texture
of bark. I sip my orange juice, thinking how oranges live on trees susceptible to frost. And saws. Then I try an apple slice, and my eyes well up. It’s murder.

  I’d ask to stay home from school but I’m not sure I can watch. As I pull the gate closed, a squirrel jumps on the guy up the tree. His chainsaw whines as the critter comes in for round two, but the guy cuffs it away again with his elbow. The squirrel bounces onto another branch destined for destruction. I smile. Creatures, unite.

  I breathe in the smell of the boughs. They’re full of special hormones that make you feel good. I saw that on a nature show. Different trees have different healthy hormones. My tree’s parting gift. The next moment, I have to hold my breath. Chainsaw gas pollutes the tree’s fragrant sacrifice. It makes me lightheaded. The saw drowns out the chittering of the squirrel.

  In class I feel draggy. I keep drawing her, the grandmother tree, in Language Arts. She was there before any of us. Except maybe the woman next door, whose yard will now open wide to our backyard. No more privacy. No more shade. No more birds. I’ve collected the sticky cones for crafts and wreaths and, before then, play food with Stella, and my cheeks get wet in Math. My teacher excuses me to go to the washroom. Instead, I sneak outside and sob against the red-brown brick wall of the school facing the parking lot. When I stop with a shuddering sigh I still hear the chainsaw squeal, two blocks away.

  What’s wrong?

  It’s Darryl, the kid who plays bagpipes. He’s never in class. He wanders the halls, doing odd jobs for teachers. Gifted, I’ve heard Mom say, which sounds like Freddy. Freddy’s smart and thoughtful, but I wonder how Darryl is gifted. I’ve never even heard him talk to another kid before.