The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  I stop at the recliner. Lilia concentrates on Angela, who gets to the twinkly high part of the song, raises her hands from the keys, and starts it over again.

  “Will you ever stop playing?” is what comes out of my mouth, over the music.

  They both turn and glare at me.

  Okay, fine. Maybe I don’t get Lilia at all.

  In my own bedroom, I switch on Firing Squad to play through the tiny speakers on my laptop. It’s Tuesday, and Victoria’s dance class doesn’t start until six thirty, so I can message her and not get silence.

  Me: Angela’s making me crazy. She’s too good.

  Vic: Jealous????

  Me: It’s not jealousy. I’d rather listen to music than play it. It’s just total confusion about how A can play now.

  Vic: She always had it in her, I guess

  Me: Maybe.

  Vic: I think it’s so cool that

  Vic: someone’s discarded piano showed her what she’s good at

  Vic: It’s like when I think about what if the world’s greatest violinist has never picked up a violin?????

  Me: Well then they’re not the greatest violinist, huh?

  Vic: You know what I mean

  Me: I just want to know what it’s like to have an idea in your head for something you want to create . . .

  Me: and then to create exactly that.

  We could go back and forth like this forever. I shut the door and call her.

  “Remember how I told you that Lilia was some sort of painter?” I check my doorway, because it seems like she should be standing there, nodding and holding a symbolic paintbrush with badger bristles. “Angela told me she even does commissioned work.”

  “Oh yeah? Are you going to ask her to look at some of your paintings?” Vic is probably in her bedroom, satisfied with being alone in that only-child sort of way. “You should make sure Rex is home if you do. I think her stare will hypnotize you.”

  “I don’t know. She’d probably take one look at my stuff and either laugh or scream.”

  “Hey, that’s no worse than your mom’s reaction to your food poisoning picture, and look, you’re still painting.”

  “It’s not just that.” I feel myself diving into all sorts of opinions I may or may not be able to describe to Vic. “It’s not just my weird neighbor possibly telling me I suck, or my mom looking all disappointed and frightened about Food Poisoning #1. It’s the work itself, I think. I love it, but the art doesn’t love me back.”

  Vic is quiet. Quieter. Still quiet. I slump against the stack of pillows on my bed, to where I can see the Picasso posters I hung on the wall in a fit of “needing inspiration” a few days after I won the county show. The tape is coming loose on Three Musicians, to the point that it looks like one musician, the guy with the clarinet, is shortly going to be stuck with the task of keeping the other two from falling, falling, falling onto this tired girl’s decidedly noncubist bedspread.

  “I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. I create these things, and they fight back against me.”

  In the living room, Angela starts a new song. New as in I don’t recognize it, as in maybe this song is coming into being right here, right now.

  “Well,” Victoria says slowly, “I’ve never felt like that.”

  And I guess that’s fine. I mean, if anyone, she would know. Her feet have been chewed up by pointe shoes, and she’s spent more than one movie night with ice packs tucked around her ankles and shins. She’s told me the various ways that dance teachers have sniped at her, and through it all, she seems most hurt by the time one of the few straight boys at Summer Intensive turned down her hookup request. She loves the struggle of dance, and the struggle loves her, too.

  “Keep painting,” Vic says. “Let Angela deal with the creepy teachings of Lilia Solis. Go and work on something of your own tonight.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will.”

  “Aw, come on, dearie. Promise me you’ll do something that seems hard, like painting what smoking feels like, or trying to draw the perfect foot.”

  “I hate drawing feet.”

  “I know! So, promise me.”

  “Fine. I promise.” Except I have been lying to Victoria for a long time now, and sometimes I think I’m being struck with a tiny punishment for this, like each of my days ending exactly one second too soon. I won’t notice this break in time until a day I try to tell her something important, and she’ll be gone before the words slip through space to reach her.

  “Ah, success! And for my next trick, I’ll get Mercedes Moreno to listen to Broadway show tunes for fifteen solid minutes.”

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  “You’ll do it for me. You know you will.”

  She’s right, and it’s wonderful. I let her go so that she can get ready for her class. I nudge my phone off the bed and slide out of my jeans and underwear and lie back and consider her. That’s what I’ve been calling it lately—considering her.

  One thing I’ve held tight in my mind is the day last spring that I realized I liked Victoria. But I wonder if that was really the day, the moment, or was I realizing it a little every day, for months, for years? The day she was the new girl in English class and when I stared at the back of her head and wondered how we could ever get to be friends. The day a few weeks later when she found me at lunch (I was waiting for Bill) and asked what I thought of English, and I tried to be clever and say something like, “The language? It’s not so bad,” and then Bill interrupted me but Vic stayed anyway. The eight hundred times I’ve watched her twist her hair into a ballet bun. The phone videos she sneakily took for me at MoMA and PS1 on her last trip to New York. All the little things and all the big things and all this time, time, time. It expands and contracts. It waits for her but not for me. And if I told her, I think it would stop entirely. She will never never never—

  She will never know.

  six

  OH, LOOK—RIDER is absent today. It’s just Gretchen Grayson and me having a stare-down here at the Orange Table. As in, she stares at my piece, and I stare at hers, and not a word is spoken. It’s not that she doesn’t want to ask: the words “Um, Mercedes, what are you making?” are hanging so precariously over the Orange Table that I expect them to come crashing down into my watercolor palette any minute now.

  Gretchen has made more progress on her lizard painting since yesterday. It is definitely more than a mood piece. Every time I look at it, I snap away from it, and then glance back. Damn those green lizards staring straight into me, with their creepy black eyes, and everything so bold and well-shaded, brown walls bleeding into yellow Gretchen bleeding into the light- and dark-green lizards. Lizard Gretchen is folded into herself, her chest and head slumping, and her little lizardy arms in front of her.

  There’s a new detail on lizard Gretchen, one that’s not even dry yet. Lizard Gretchen’s arms are covered in blood.

  Shit.

  I glance at actual Gretchen, with the long-sleeved cardigan she wears all the time, and our eyes meet.

  “Is this finished?” I point to an inconsequential, lizard-free spot at the top of the painting.

  “I think so.” Gretchen smiles a little. “Something about the color in the upper corners seems weird, but I’m afraid I might ruin it if I try to change things now.”

  I shut my sketchbook on top of the aimless lines and shading I’ve been working on for the past few classes. “So is that what you’re going to enter?”

  Gretchen nods. “But I’m scared.”

  There’s a perfect sentence to be said to her, but I don’t know what it is. I want to tell her I understand, but it’s hard when I don’t. Luckily, Mrs. Pagonis wanders over and sits in Rider’s seat.

  “Ladies! I haven’t checked on your progress since last week. How are your projects coming along?”

  Gretchen and I exchange looks, and I keep my hands on my sketchbook. Mrs. Pagonis has her moment of losing herself in Gretchen’s painting. Oh man—she’s about to get the same reactio
n out of our teacher as she did out of me. I mean, a louder, less resentful communicating of that reaction, sure, but the same in-the-gut feeling that no matter how much you resist being caught in the lizards’ stares, you get stuck there anyway.

  “It’s glorious!” Mrs. Pagonis says.

  Then she asks to see my sketchbook.

  I want to open it and find something finished, something beautiful. But what would that even be? For the first time ever, I want to find myself totally laid bare on the page. If I could open the book and find that, maybe I’d be okay with holding it up to the whole class. Look, I’d say. Look, this is me. But for that to be here, I’d need more than one moment of wanting that.

  My hands sweat. The moment’s gone.

  I flip through my sketchbook for Mrs. Pagonis, and apologize for page after page, and promise her that the real stuff is at home.

  Here is what’s at home.

  One ridiculous canvas that I’ve left sunning on the porch too long.

  One ridiculous canvas that I’ve been trying to forget about, and that I maybe-unconsciously tried to sabotage by way of Florida weather, and even that didn’t work.

  Food Poisoning #2 looks exactly like it did the last time I saw it. Streaks and patches of color, unintended and unbalanced. My mom’s pile of blotchy tissues from the night she left is a better work of art than this. Hell, the peanut butter streaks on the microwave tell more of a story.

  I dig my X-Acto knife out of my supply box and strike it across the canvas. Once, twice, from corner to corner. I carve a jagged square out of the center, a messy oval out of the top right corner. A zigzag of my initials across the center, punctuated with a V, for good measure.

  And it’s not quite enough.

  The canvas is in shreds, so I send it flying off the easel. The clatter I’m expecting is more of a dry thunk as it hits the thin carpet of the porch.

  It’s dark and strange inside the house after being out in the sun. Angela sits at the dining room table with a notebook and calculator, but I can’t pick out the details in her face just yet. I brush past her to where I dropped my backpack when we came home from school. In the front pocket, at the bottom, it should be there—yes. My last Emergency Cigarette. I light it in the kitchen.

  “Seriously, you promised not to smoke in the house,” Angela says.

  “Ange, I need your help with something, just for a minute, and I swear I will finish this outside and you can get back to your homework, okay?”

  “You’re being ridiculous. You promised.”

  “I’m walking outside right now! Can you bring me a kitchen knife and my painting from behind my bed? Please?”

  She goes. I shoot trails of smoke out my nose, the way Tall Jon and Bill taught me.

  “Here you go, Your Majesty.” Angela hands me the knife, handle first.

  “Gracias.”

  I take Food Poisoning #1 in my other hand and place it on the easel. It’s a strange piece. Unsettling in some ways. I guess I can see why Mom insisted I take it off my wall. It’s layers of thick, dark paint, mixed with bits of the Lifestyle section of the newspaper. I hardly remember how it all came together—I mean, I recall the basic things, like how I bought all this glue, thinking I was going to need it to hold the newspaper shreds on the canvas, but it turned out the paint was sturdy enough. I remember painting birds, from flamingos to geese. Some of them were abstract, some more realistic. And I remember how Tall Jon got me Parliament Menthols instead of Lights when I was working on the last few layers of paint, and how they tasted too clean but I smoked them anyway.

  Angela says, “Be careful.”

  I kneel on the worn gray carpet and stab out the cigarette on the remains of Food Poisoning #2. “Do you want to help?”

  “I don’t really understand what you’re doing here.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. Trust me. Take a knife and go.” I hand her my X-Acto knife, and I stick with the kitchen knife. The first slice—it is less a clean cut than a rip. It breaks the layer of newspaper bits. It sends paint crumbs to the ground.

  When they gave me the award, I was smiling. I was wearing a knee-length blue dress and a silver necklace borrowed from my mother.

  Angela stabs through the canvas with the X-Acto knife. An interesting strategy—fill it with holes and let it collapse on its own. I poke a few holes myself, starting with the corners, but then send the knife stripping lines through the layers again.

  Angela came to last year’s county art show. So did Mom and Victoria and Bill and Tall Jon. Mrs. Pagonis and some of the other studio artists were there, too. After the awards ceremony, my misfit entourage and I walked down the hall to the reception—or, rather, I walked, and the rest of them stopped in the lobby where Food Poisoning #1 was displayed. They wanted to take a closer look at this piece I’d been hiding for so long. Mom leaned forward, inspecting the layers, sniffing at them. She frowned.

  I carve the center out of the painting. The feathery mess falls to the floor.

  “Dang, you’re brutal,” Angela says.

  I cough. “Thank you.”

  “Is this your new project?”

  “Something like that.” I point to the top right corner with my knife. “Can you slice that part out?”

  Angela does. And I destroy the other three corners and, hmm, might as well do some more work on the stuff that already fell out. So I tear the feathery heart of the painting in two, hand half to Angela, and let her pull it apart again and again.

  Finally, what remains of both canvases is the wooden backbone frames, with a few ripped flags of fabric still holding on to each. That’s good enough. No one will ever know what was there. No one will ever know that I didn’t know what I was trying to say.

  I flop down on the floor of the porch. Angela and I have both been hit by some of the painted newspaper bits. They are stuck to our hair and clothes.

  “I appreciate the help,” I say. “I’ll clean this up.”

  “I think I’m gonna shower before I do anything else,” Angela says.

  Angela never said anything specific about the painting during its brief period of fame last year, but she tolerated its presence, and that was enough. Bill said it was “cool.” Tall Jon said, “It looks like a bunch of dead birds, and I swear I mean that in a good way.” Victoria congratulated me about a million times and said I was definitely going to get into Ringling or the Savannah College of Art and Design (also known as SCAD, my dream school) or any other art school I applied to.

  How did I not notice that when I tore up the Lifestyle section of the newspaper, I was tearing up recipes and ads for restaurants? A slice of one, covered with yellow: one-half teaspoon vanilla. The judges surely thought that was on purpose. It wasn’t.

  “Are you okay out here?” It’s startling to hear a girl’s voice coming from that side of the porch. Lilia. She emerges from Rex’s house with a canvas in each hand.

  “Yeah. I was just cleaning up.”

  Her hair’s pulled back and she’s wearing a bright green dress dotted with a floral print and paint stains. She places the canvases flat on the floor. Two more paintings in the condo building series, one with a red sky and one with gray. The light from the windows is the same as before. Lilia studies them for a minute, then takes a step back and wipes at her eyes. Nothing I’ve ever painted has moved me to tears.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I say, because that’s my usual refrain when someone I know is crying.

  “Thanks,” Lilia says, just as practiced. She moves away from her paintings and surveys the mess I’ve made, all the strings and feathers of my former pieces of work. “Too bad I didn’t get to see your work while it was still intact.”

  “This was necessary.”

  “I guess it is sometimes.” She smiles, and it’s like the first time I saw a Frida Kahlo painting in person—the thud of is that really what it is? It was, and it is.

  “Can you tell me about your series?” I ask. The destruction of the paintings has made me fee
l lighter somehow, as though now I can reconstruct myself into whatever type of artist I want to be. “Because I know that building. I saw it all lit up like that the other night.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lilia stares at me through the screen. She has long eyelashes and a scar on the side of her mouth. “Did it make you want something?”

  I step back. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean,” she says, “sometimes you look at a thing, to draw it or sculpt it or paint it, and it becomes more than just your subject. It compels you in some way. You want it, you need it. ¿Entiendes?”

  “Um, I guess so.”

  Except I don’t think I do understand. I think that feeling she’s talking about is something I’ve wanted, but not something I’ve ever had. It’s easy to confuse a craving for wanting with the wanting itself.

  But Lilia, with all her paintings in front of her, seems to know the feeling well.

  “So when you saw the building lit up, what did you think?” she asks me, sounding hopeful.

  “I mean, I thought it was pretty weird. I kept wondering about the people in there, and the people in the neighboring buildings. But I felt like no one was seeing the light except me.” I didn’t mean to tell her that last part, but there it is.

  “Yeah,” Lilia says. “I know what you mean.”

  “So how big is this series going to be?”

  “Oh, just you wait.” She stands up straight, hands on hips, like she’s been waiting for me to ask her this question. “If things go as planned, it’ll be huge. It’ll come spilling out the windows. I’ll have to double my rent for all the space I’m taking up, and I won’t even care.”

  It kind of kills me that she feels so strongly about a building.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “I mean,” Lilia says, “it’s okay if it didn’t inspire you. We all have our different subjects.”

  Even my sandals are mottled with the remains of FP #1.

  “Tell me if you want to paint together sometime,” Lilia says.

  And she turns to go, leaving me to look at the red and gray skies, and everything I have to clean up.