The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  The door to Lilia’s apartment on the second floor opens easily to reveal the homiest version of the front room I could imagine. She has decked the place out with a little couch, a floral easy chair, a floor lamp, and a coffee table. The lamp burns politely over the whole situation, annoyed that I took so long to get here.

  And in the purple room, there are now two single beds. Angela is sleeping, her breaths slow and satisfied, because I suspect you probably sleep really well after you’ve had the best night of your life.

  Me, I think I still have some work to do.

  At some point, there is nothing to do but draw.

  I begin in a dusty corner of the eighth-floor room by brushing away the cobweb tent that has formed and then wiping part of the surface clean. I take a sharpened drawing pencil I found in the kitchen and try to set myself free on this massive, imperfect canvas.

  I doodle on the wall. This is the only sort of thing I can stand to assign the stupid word doodling to—crooked lines and asymmetrical ocean waves and drunken circles I draw when I am trying to make sure I’m not drawing anything. Ruin. Edie’s word keeps coming back to me, a parade of ruin-ruin-ruin tromping through my head, and it’s the last thing I want to do to anything here. Maybe I’ve found the way to actually ruin a piece of art within the Estate—to have absolutely no vision for what it should be.

  Except that the lines of my doodle remind me of the Naples house, which was built in a “modern” style twenty years before I was born, and never aged well. When we lived there, I called it a cubist house out of love, but I haven’t thought of it in that way in a long time. I think Gris and Picasso and their pals wouldn’t have found anything particularly artistic about it.

  Wait, no, that can’t be true. I have to believe, if I am ever going to finish anything, that there’s art to be had anywhere, whether it’s New York or Savannah or that ugly old house that was probably glad to see us go. And it’s a part of me more than almost any other place I can think of.

  So onto the wall it goes: the house, or my memory of it. Its proportions are those of my elementary-school mind, when the living room was mostly ignored and the thick, crunchy grass of the front yard seemed to go on forever. It is now seven inches tall, tucked into this corner, its street lost to the cracked baseboard of this room. But it is here, and already I feel much less lonely.

  I keep going. I draw Angela the way I remember seeing her the first time, tiny dark eyes opening within a bundle of pink blanket knitted by Abuela, and a wordless thought forming in my head that I would know this girl forever. I draw my parents, standing next to each other, not touching, stuck in different years—my dad looks like he did when I knew him best, when he would give in to my begging every middle-school morning to save me from the social jungle of the school bus, and my mom looks the way she did when she left the house a few weeks ago, pained expression and floppy hat and all.

  There’s no color to any of this yet. That will come later. For now, the outlines are enough.

  I clean out another corner and sketch the first girl I ever drew, maybe the first nonimaginary person I ever drew. It was this girl from summer camp, Mia Cortelyou, and I covered a whole drawing tablet with this girl’s face before I spoke a word to her. She was the first person I was fascinated with, the first person whose life I wanted to know, and since I thought I was never going to know it, I spent hours making it up with a set of colored pencils. Mia Cortelyou was the friendliest girl, the most adventurous girl, with a house full of ponies and puppies and exotic reptiles. And when she and I were the only ones from the old group who returned the next summer, and when she acknowledged this and said we should be friends, I was shocked. Did I want to know Mia, and her true history? I thought I did, but I resisted keeping in touch with her when the summer was over, so that I’d never be invited to her house, so that I’d never have to become part of her terribly normal life.

  In this picture, there are two Mia Cortelyous: Mia the adventurer, riding bareback across a long landscape, and summer-camp Mia, looking shy and pretty in shorts and a T-shirt and old sneakers.

  Mia was my first crush. That is as starkly obvious to me now as the gaping hole in the door, but to admit it in those words, to have her on the wall in front of me—these things are new.

  And there’s so much wall space left.

  This is going to be harder than I thought.

  “Hello?”

  Sun streams in through the single, uncovered window. Footsteps on the concrete. It’s Lilia.

  “Hey.” I sit up and rub at my eyes. Lilia is dressed as though she has responsibilities somewhere other than the Estate today—she’s wearing black pants and a floral button-down shirt. The flowers remind me of one of Abuela’s scarves, and that’s enough to shock me out of my sleepy state.

  “I didn’t mean to doze off here. I just wore myself out. And also, this rug is way too comfortable for a rug.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lilia says, walking around the perimeter of the room. “I wanted to make sure you were still around.”

  “Yeah. Until tomorrow, when my mom comes home.”

  She nods. “You’re doing a good job here.”

  “It’s the start of something. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the color or with, you know, the whole rest of the room.” One of the penciled-in Mia Cortelyous seems to peek over at me. Not only will I have to revisit her, to give her color and depth, but I’ll have to do it again and again, with so many pieces of my life.

  “It’s the start of something. Keep going.” Lilia smiles at me. “Feels like it’s going to be a good day.” She produces a set of keys from her pocket and hands them to me. “Take these. Keep them with you. In case you ever find one of these doors locked, you’ll now be able to get in whenever you need.”

  “Sure.”

  “When you finish the work here, you’ll be able to get up to the top floor,” she says.

  “Which key is that?” They’re all pretty much the same.

  “Ahh, the one with the green tape on it, I think. I haven’t been up there in a while. Once I finish a piece, I try not to look at it again.”

  “Your work is up there?”

  She is turning to go. “Yes. And yours could be too, if you like.”

  “What, is it some kind of museum?”

  Lilia considers this. “I suppose that’s it. It’s for those of us who are making decisions here, about what kind of work we need.”

  “How long have you been here, Lilia?” I ask, looking up at her. Her long hair. Her strange but familiar face.

  She turns away, comes to a stop in front of the biggest blank patch of wall, runs her hands over it as though testing its strength. “I don’t really know. Feels like a long time.”

  She leaves me with myself, and with the keys.

  Oh man. It’s almost nine. Victoria is for sure on her way to the audition right now, if she’s not already warming up. I type out a text to her, wrists and palms and fingernails aching as I do: I am breaking both of my legs for you at this very moment!

  She says nothing back.

  It’s weird how we got to be here—the one decision after another that led to us knowing each other. My parents getting divorced and my mother thinking she could “start over” up the coast from our old home, Vic’s parents deciding to ditch their previous careers in corporate real estate to sell medical equipment in Florida, the school deciding to put us both in Ms. Donohue’s third-period English class in sophomore year (although I like to think that even if we hadn’t had any classes together, we would have spotted each other in the hallway and detected our Friend Chemistry, would have walked toward each other while working out the least awkward way to ask the other to hang out at Starbucks sometime). And I like to think that I’m more to her than someone she knows on her way to going somewhere else, but I’m not sure. I don’t want this to be the end of us.

  How does she fit into my self-portrait?

  What is the first thing about her that comes to m
ind?

  Lilia dropped off some newly sharpened drawing pencils, so I grab one and take to a clean space of wall. Pointe shoes. The stern face of Martha Graham. The sleek field of pink comforter I have woken up to at her house. Maybe I could draw the whole city of New York to represent her. Anything but her kissing me. I’ve already given that to the Estate once—no way am I leaving it here again.

  I wonder how long I can keep this pencil raised, poised at the wall, unmoving.

  “Hello in there!” comes a voice from the doorway. Angela.

  “Come on in,” I call back.

  She bounds into the room and sits on the floor without even noticing its state of filth. “Oh my God, Mercy, can you believe it?”

  “No.” I really can’t. Every time I think about Angela onstage with Firing Squad, I have to stop and be sure that I didn’t dream it. It’s exactly the type of thing I would dream up.

  “We kept playing.” The grin on her face is as wide as the gulf. “They showed me how to play some of their songs. They said I was really good.”

  “So, what’s next? Are you all going on tour?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Angela’s old shyness brushes her face. “They said they’ll be here for a little while, and they asked me to keep practicing with them. Oh, and they asked about you, too.”

  “What about me?”

  “How long you were staying.”

  “Ange, sit on this lovely rug with me, please.” I scoot over and she takes the side farther away from the big blank space where all the important things are supposed to go. “They want me to stay here, don’t they? Just like Lilia and Edie and apparently everyone else.”

  “Who’s Edie?”

  “Another artist. She lives here.”

  “That could be us!” The grin again. “We could live here, in our own apartment, and you could work on your projects and I could keep playing piano and Mom could come visit us here and we wouldn’t have to bother with anything else.”

  “You would like that?”

  “I think so.” She looks around. “Lilia told me you were working up here now. This is your assignment?”

  “Yes. It’s a self-portrait. I mean, that’s what it will be.”

  “I can hardly see it.”

  “You have to get right up next to the wall. It’s all in pencil for now.”

  Angela gets up and walks around the room, kneeling down every so often to see the details of one picture or another. She stops in the corner nearest to the window. “Hey, is this supposed to be me?”

  “Yup.”

  “Cool,” she says. “In a band and immortalized on a wall, all in one day.”

  It’s nice to see her happy, so nice that I wish I could have her sit cross-legged in the center of the room for the rest of the day, a humming little jar of joy. But I realize I can’t ask that of her, not that she would accept even if I did. She finishes her tour of the room, checks the time, tells me I should take a nap eventually. And then she’s gone, off to practice with my favorite band, which is still the weirdest thing in the world.

  I keep drawing. I clean more areas of wall and stand on a folding chair to reach the higher parts and the corners of the room. I snap a pencil in two and fling it toward the doorway. I grab another pencil, and use it and sharpen it and use it some more until it is shorter than my pinkie finger. I’ve got shiny gray pencil stains on both hands and elbows, and my wrists feel tired and heavy. I guess it’s time to stop for a while.

  Back in the second-floor studio, Lilia or Angela or someone has left a plate of cheese and crackers out on the counter, and there’s a pot of warmish soup on the stove. I have some of both, and then I collapse in the purple room, on the untouched bed next to Angela’s bed. If I were to take Angela and Edie and Firing Squad’s suggestion, I wonder which apartment would become mine. Would I have to wake up in this purple room every morning (or afternoon, if I was left to figure out my own schedule)? Would Mom come to visit, or even be able to visit? Would Vic laugh at me and completely blow me off for planting myself here in Sarasota?

  Angela shakes me awake. “She’s got a flight. She’s definitely coming home.”

  The purple room, still.

  I stretch out my arms. My wrists have stopped groaning at me—it’s time to start working again. “When? What time?”

  “Monday afternoon,” Angela says. “We don’t have to pick her up. She’s going to take a shuttle from the airport.”

  Angela saying that has a strange way of bringing Mom closer already, as though her plane ticket has brought a ghostly presence of her into the room. She’s the type who asks questions after missing five minutes of a TV show—I can’t imagine how much she’d flail around in the unfamiliar context of the purple room if she was able to see us now.

  I stand up, put my shoes back on, and grab my phone from my back pocket.

  It’s actually here. A text from Vic:

  I made it through all the dance parts of the audition.

  I made it to the interview!

  That’s amazing, I text back. And because she’s probably busy getting hugged by her mom or congratulated by various random passersby who detect her awesomeness, I add in: When you get back, we have to celebrate.

  “She’s leaving,” I say, to my phone or to the walls.

  “What?” Angela says.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Vic. Why are you still wearing that Wonder Woman shirt?”

  “I just like it. It smells fine.”

  “Next thing you’re going to tell me that if we live here, we don’t have to wash our clothes, right?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Angela says. “It’s entirely possible.”

  I keep working. It’s Saturday night, maybe early Sunday morning. Music bounces in and out of the air, and I am filling the walls. There are some of my friends from Naples, and some general compadres from the Smoking Corner, and Tall Jon, and even Bill, because why the hell not. The art room from school comes out as sort of a cubist version of the real thing, with Mrs. Pagonis looking more like a geometric scarecrow than a human being, and Gretchen Grayson as a lost figure from one of Picasso’s paintings about the bathers. But not too much like Picasso. Actually, do I even like Picasso, or have I spent a lot of time convincing myself that I do?

  I scrub at the triangular hands of Gretchen with the pink pencil eraser, but the lines stay as though I’ve carved them into the wall.

  If Lilia was around, I’d ask her—are everyone’s projects like this, or is it just a trick of my project that the secrets I put on the wall are apparently stuck here forever? If Lilia was around, would I have the courage to ask her that? Would she ask what I’m afraid to commit to the wall, and would I be able to tell her? Because there’s so much. There are all the crushes on boys and girls, the ones I felt so strongly and the ones that pricked at the backs of my knees and then faded away. There’s the thought that I’m glad my parents divorced, and that it was a relief when Dad moved away and we didn’t have to know each other’s day-to-day selves anymore. There are all the times I have lain in my bed at night and considered Victoria, and how, after everything that’s happened between us, I wonder if my feelings are going to stay there, trapped under blankets, for the rest of my life.

  I drop the pencil and roll it over to the corner where I’m keeping all my supplies.

  The girl sitting here right now, dejected and guarded and covered in dust—how can this be the best version of me?

  I will have to come back here and figure it out. But right now, both Mom and Victoria are on their way home.

  twenty

  IT’LL BE GOOD to see her. That’s what I’m telling myself. That’s what I told myself this morning when Angela and I were on our way to pick up Victoria, even though she and her dad had already left for school when we arrived at her house. After second period I walked by her locker, which was closed and kinda lonely looking, as though its current occupant hadn’t bothered to come by to grab her English and trig books. I don’t know why I keep thi
nking she’s avoiding me, or that I’m avoiding her. She’s not, I’m not. It’s lunchtime. She is across the courtyard, approaching the Dead Guy from the opposite direction that I am.

  She stops.

  So do I.

  The sun is insistent today, and with Vic standing in the shade of the school building and me standing in a bright, treeless patch of grass and dirt and lunch trash, we can barely see each other. The courtyard kids, Connor and his latest girlfriend and all the others we used to know, turn around and look at us. None of this fazes Vic. She is, as Bill once put it, a High School Nihilist, well-versed in the ways of not giving a shit about being seen alone. Her dresses and heels and nice hair—those things are for her alone. That’s part of why I love her.

  “Mercedes!” she calls out. “I can’t believe I didn’t see you this morning!”

  We come together at the Dead Guy, even though it’s way too hot to be here for very long. This is our place. Could I really ever ruin this? Ruin us?

  Mom’s not here yet. Angela rushes into the house to straighten a few things, and I peek into her car (now abandoned for my old Pontiac) to be sure it gives off the impression of being neglected and stationary for the time its rightful owner has been gone. She’ll know what happened when she looks at the odometer (if she looks at the odometer), but that first look is important. It passes the smell test.

  I shut the door, and the airport shuttle pulls up.

  I shift into Daughter mode as well as I can; actually, it’s easier than I thought it would be. A big smile and a wave. Seeing that her face looks a little tanner but basically the same. Meeting her at the shuttle and asking to take her bag and realizing I need to hug and kiss her, too, and trying to do that with the bag in hand.

  Okay, maybe not so easy. I’ll leave it to Angela to get it absolutely right.

  “Mom!” She bursts out of the house, barefoot, races down the driveway, and throws herself into our mother’s arms. Mom kisses the top of Angela’s head at least a dozen times before she lets her go. They link elbows and walk like that together as Mom tips the shuttle driver, and then Angela, clever girl that she is, somehow talks Mom into walking in through the back door. I’m left to bring in the suitcase.