How to Be Brave

by E. Katherine Kottaras

  But it’s Christmas Eve. I should do something. Really. My dad will be home from work soon, probably in a bad mood since Christmas is on a Thursday this year, which means he has to close the restaurant on a weekday and, of course, also means money lost.

  I don’t think my brain can take any more inane suggestions from Netflix. (Based on your taste preferences: Witty Independent Romantic Dramedies Featuring a Strong Female Lead and Anime! Huh?) And my back is starting to hurt. I peel myself off the couch. I can work up some last-minute Christmas spirit before Dad gets home. Maybe dig out the decorations. Light some candles. Muster up some goodwill and joy. Positive thoughts, Georgia. It’s been a while.

  I can do it, I think. My mom was always able to make the day mean something, even when things were awful. Maybe because it wasn’t about her—it was about us. Last Christmas, my mom somehow got us excited about the holiday, even though she had just come home from the hospital after having her fourth stent in six years. That last one was an especially rough procedure since they had to reach a part of the heart that is usually pretty hard to get to, and she was in the CCU for ten days before she could come home just two nights before Christmas Eve. Still, through her breathing tube, she instructed us to “get everything ready for Christmas.” A few Christmases before that, she wasn’t feeling well, either, because she had just started dialysis, so we skipped going to Oak Lawn and stayed home and watched A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Miracle on 34th Street while my dad threw together a pastichio dinner. Even so, every year she directed my dad and me to get a small tree and pull out all three boxes of decorations from the communal basement, and I’d drape the entire house in twinkle lights and foil garlands. And somehow she always managed to fill the living room with mounds and mounds of presents. I think she shopped all year and hid them under her bed. It was usually cheap crap from the sales racks of Marshalls and World Market, but she loved watching us rip open our gifts and the wild mess of papers that we’d have to swim through each Christmas morning.

  This year, we’ve only really managed to buy a tree. Well, it’s not quite a tree. It’s a tiny rosemary bush that my dad bought at Trader Joe’s last week, but other than that, the decorations consist of a string of picture-perfect photo cards sent by the various branches of the suburban clan and other long-lost relatives and compatriots of my dad’s who check in only once each year when the U.S. Postal Service allows them to conveniently relay how wonderful and perfect their lives are without actually having to talk to us. We haven’t sent Christmas cards in five years, maybe. Last week, one night at the restaurant, Dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s not supposed to ask, that Mom never asked, that asking ruins the fun. Instead, I told him some art supplies, canvases and pastels and new oil paints, and he lit up when I said that, so I guess that’s good. There will be some presents.

  I can salvage this. I dig through the crap drawer to find the key for the basement storage gate. I head down the back stairwell to the basement and unlock the gate. I switch on the light. Each tenant has been allocated one ten-by-ten section of space for whatever stuff won’t fit into our apartments, like the bikes we never use, the suitcases we never pack, and, of course, our dusty holiday decor that we need only once a year. There are two other apartments in the building, one above us that houses a young hipster couple and one below us where our landlord lives. Janice is a crusty old woman who owns like ten different buildings in the area. We hardly talk to any of them, which is fine. It’s a quiet building, fairly cheap. That’s all that mattered to my parents.

  Young hipster couple’s space is filled with things like kayaks and tents and skis. Janice’s space is filled with furniture—mattresses and dressers and chairs. She sometimes rents empty apartments to vacationers or businessmen. I think landlording must be her life because there are no other signature details here to define her. Or maybe she has other spaces in other buildings where she stores her personal stuff.

  Besides the bikes and the luggage we never use, there are boxes of books and papers down here that are all my mom’s. And not just a few. A dozen boxes, at least, all from her grad school days. Mostly books on postmodern art and all of her research on Lee Mullican. She couldn’t bear to throw them out, I guess. Besides that last letter, she never wrote anything personal, but she saved everything she read. This is my inheritance. Old musty books in an old musty basement. They’re all mine.

  Fortunately, the Christmas boxes are right at the edge. I lift the flap of each one. I don’t need the ornaments, so I put that one aside. The second one has stockings and Christmas books that my mom used to read to me each Christmas Eve when I was a kid, but I figure Santa isn’t coming tonight, so no need for that stuff. The third one has most of what I need. I hoist it out of the space, lock up the gate, and carry it up the steps back to our apartment.

  I dress the living room in garlands. I wrap the twinkly lights around the fireplace that’s never worked. I plug them in and shut off the lamps. That’s a start. I dig into the box and find a few candles—cinnamon spice and pine—and I light them. At least we’ll have a hint of home-baked cooking and deep forest air. I pull my dad’s presents out from my closet and place them next to the little rosemary bush on the coffee table. There. That’s a little better. It’s starting to feel like Christmas in here, after all.

  My dad’s key rattles at the door. I run to open it.

  “Merry Christmas!” I yell. I’m smiling for the first time in two weeks.

  Dad looks at the room, drops two heavy bags full of food from the restaurant on the dining room table, turns on all the lights, and goes into the kitchen without saying a word about the decorations. Without wishing me a Merry Christmas back.

  “Dad?” I follow him into the kitchen. He’s taken off his hat and heavy coat and thrown them on the counter. He’s drinking a glass of water and shaking his head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Georgia…” He says my American name. That’s not good. “Your art teacher, what’s his name? Mr. Marquez? He called today.”

  Oh, shit.

  “He calls to tell me that you are not going to school. That you are missing for a whole week? What is going on?”

  What the hell? Marquez rats me out on Christmas Eve? I thought he believed in me. I thought I was his star student.

  “Dad…” I could tell him everything. That I’m also failing chemistry. That my heart’s broken in eight million pieces. That I’m alone. That I’ve made terrible mistakes. That I miss everything about how it used to be. That I tried to keep my promise to her, but I failed.

  No words come, though.

  “Where were you?” he demands.

  “Nowhere,” I mutter. “Starbucks. Burger King. Just sitting at random places, reading and stuff.” And getting high, I think.

  “Why you are not in class? What does this mean?”

  “No reason. Just … really, Dad. No reason.”

  His eyes scan my face. He’s searching for something in me, but it’s like he doesn’t really see me standing here before him.

  He walks past me into the dining room where he left the bags of food. The heavy smell of chicken and potatoes seeps from the bag. There’s probably enough there for tonight and tomorrow, for our holiday dinner.

  He pulls out a chair and sits down. I join him.

  But there’s nothing to say.

  He stares at his hands. “No more of that, okay? I mean, what will people say if they hear Georgia Askeridis is running around the city, cutting school and all this?”

  What people? We don’t have any people.

  “I want you to be a good girl. You are always good girl. Kaló korítsi, okay?”

  “Okay.” I nod.

  “Mr. Marquez, he says that you have a big project coming up. A big art project? You have a lot of work, yes?”

  My Mullican project. I haven’t worked on it in weeks.

  “You do good on it, and he says he won�
�t record all the absences, he won’t tell the principal. You have to go to him on Monday after your break ends with this big project finished.”

  What? It’s not due for another few weeks, after break. Is Marquez seriously going to make me work on my supposed vacation?

  “You can do that, yes? Then you will not get in trouble, he says.”

  “Yes, Dad. I can do that.” I say this, but it’s the last thing I want. To spend my lame vacation obsessing over a dead artist who my dead mother obsessed about.

  “Good, then.” He nods to himself and then looks at the bags of food. “Let’s eat now.” He stands up, unloads the Styrofoam containers onto the table, and then shuts off the lights.

  The Christmas lights twinkle again, but it just doesn’t look the same.

  My dad leans over and kisses me on the forehead. We eat in silence with the TV on while the candles burn down to nothing.

  * * *

  When I was fifteen, I chipped my front tooth while eating an apple. The dentist, Dr. Crespo, said that I was most likely grinding my teeth at night, and he prescribed a $350 night guard that was supposed to relax my muscles and clear up the terrible headaches I’d been having for over a year. His assistant put some plastic goop in my mouth, had me bite down, and created a mold that was used to shape the night guard, which I was supposed to wear every night. When I went in a week later to try it on, Dr. Crespo had me put the guard inside my mouth and sit for a few minutes. Drool poured out the corners of my mouth. “Your brain thinks that there’s food there, right?” he said. It felt more like someone’s knuckles were digging into my jawbone. “But after a little while, a few minutes, even, that sensation will fade away. Your brain will stop registering the awkwardness and your body will ease into the discomfort.” I drooled for another couple of minutes and then it stopped. He was right. I hardly even felt it in my mouth.

  I spent two months trying to wear the damn thing. Every night, like clockwork, I put the plasticized sentinel into my mouth and fell asleep. And every morning, like clockwork, I woke up to find the damn thing on my pillow or lost in the covers or sometimes even on the other side of the room—on the floor by the door or somewhere on my desk. I’d chucked it in the middle of the night. Even while unconscious, my body didn’t want to experience the sensation of someone digging a fist into my face.

  Go figure.

  Life without Mom is a little like that. At first, it was all pain and tears. Every day was hard. I’d wake up, and the sun was there, still shining in the sky, but the world didn’t make sense anymore. Then, little by little, especially with the list, that pain faded even more. I cried only once a week instead of every day. And then I even stopped crying. I moved forward.

  Christmas feels like someone stuffed that night guard back into my mouth and stitched my lips closed. On the outside, I’m keeping it together for my dad, but inside—inside—there are no words to describe how deep the hole goes.

  We do it, though—Dad feigns surprise with his undershirts and socks, and I actually am happy to receive the art supplies, though now they’re a bit tainted with the errors of my ways.

  At the end of the day, after the presents and the leftover chicken and eight hours of Christmas reruns on TBS, I pack up the garlands and lights and candles, and Dad puts the box by the door so I can bring it back downstairs tomorrow. We survived. Another holiday without Mom.

  * * *

  I take the box down to the basement and dig out a few of Mom’s boxes to carry back upstairs. It takes a few trips, and I’m out of breath after the first actual exertion of energy that I’ve had since the tribal dance class. I throw the boxes on the floor of my room and collapse beside them. I went online and found plenty of basic info on Lee Mullican, but I have this feeling that I need to find something else. I don’t care what Marquez said. This isn’t about losing myself. It’s about finding her. It’s about understanding her. There are just so many questions I didn’t get to ask: Why didn’t you follow your own advice? Why didn’t you do everything? Why weren’t you the one who lived a life without fear?

  I feel like her obsession with this Mullican guy might give me some answers. And if I’m going to paint something meaningful, I have to understand why this guy mattered so much to my mom. This is as much about me—and my unanswered questions—as it is about her.

  First I read her thesis. It’s seventy-three pages and titled “Unifying Forms: Male and Female Energy Bodies in Lee Mullican’s Work.” It’s long, well written, and overly academic. I learn about Eastern meditation practices (which my mom never did), receive more verification that she adored his work to no end, and am ultimately convinced by my mom that despite the fact that he was a male artist working in a male world, Lee Mullican was a feminist at his core.

  But it’s not what I want to find. I dig through the boxes. They’re filled with photocopied papers from the LACMA and Smithsonian libraries, copies of other people’s essays, and old photos and Lee Mullican’s sketches. I was too young to understand what she was doing, but I remember these same papers piled on the dining room table. We ate in the living room for a few years until she completed her final thesis and show, and then, except for the paintings, she finally moved everything downstairs.

  I keep digging until I find my mom’s copy of An Abundant Harvest of Sun, the book that accompanied the LACMA exhibit. I remember when she bought it. I remember when it was brand-new. Now it’s worn and tattered and musty from being in the basement for so long.

  I also remember her obsessively poring over this book. This was before you could find a lot of stuff on the Internet about him, and she liked it because it had good reproductions of his most famous paintings. I flip through the pages, through the accompanying pictures of his paintings and sculptures. Mullican loved the abstract just as much as my mom, but his paintings were more ethereal than hers. They look like cave paintings or crop circles or postmodern stained glass for a church where the attendants are all stoned.

  I skim his bio. Lee Mullican was a bit of a hippie. At one point, he said that he sought “the opening of a new world, opening the mind into a kind of cosmic thought,” and then it continued into her most favorite line: “ideas that went beyond what one saw, beyond form.” My mom underlined this two times and gave it a big heart. I believed her when she said that she had never done any hard drugs, but I really can’t believe she never, at the very least, smoked up. I mean, she was an art major. I guess I’ll never know. I page through the book. I’m amazed to see so much of his hand in my mom’s hand. He loved pattern and repetition and color, and so did she. Because of him, she used a printer’s ink knife when painting so that the color popped up out of the canvas, the rhythmic lines created a three-dimensional effect. Mom did this with her women’s bodies that now line the walls of our hallway. She liked to make them blur and zigzag. Her women were tribal. They danced.

  Except for that last letter to me, she never wrote down anything personal, but she loved to write in all of her books—underlines, stars, reminders to herself in quick scribbles. This one is filled with her notes. I run my finger across her handwriting. Mine is exactly like hers. It’s like I could have written them.

  I wish I could talk to her about why she loved this guy so much. I like his work fine, but she loved it. Was somewhat consumed by it. She had other painters she loved, too—the big names of the post-impressionist and modernist periods, as well as lesser-known surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and Man Ray, but she felt a kinship with this man in particular. She said once, “It’s as though he’s painting my soul.” I was too young to ask why. And now it’s too late.

  Instead, this is what I have:

  She has highlighted: “As you are working through this process of painting, the painting’s there … but you’ve gone through this metaphysical process … more than anything. And it’s a meditative act … the canvas is there before me. And it’s this attitude that makes the painting appear … and you’re not quite sure how it got there.” And beside it, she wrote:
“YES. Extension of self/yet not self.”

  And this: “I pulled the essence of nature down over my head.” Next to it, her handwriting reads: “Submersion/retreat. How to live fully engaged and still maintain separateness from suffering, from failure?”

  She has underlined and starred: “The freedom of abstraction appealed to Mullican, the fact that an abstract painting could ‘be upside down, it can be any way, and it’s still okay.’” And next to it, she’s written, “Like life.”

  She wanted more for me even though she couldn’t do more for herself. Even though she felt like she was submersed in her own failures. She wanted me to be the brave one. She wanted me to do everything.

  But being brave isn’t about living every minute exhilarated. It’s about waking up and knowing that despite the worry and the sadness and the deep, dark fear, you’re going to go forth anyway. That you’re going to try anyway. That you have a choice, and you’re going to choose to live, today, bravely.

  Maybe that’s all any of us can do. Maybe that’s all I can do.

  My mom did that, for a long time. She lived bravely through the hospitals and the procedures and the constant fear of death. The reality of the inevitable.

  Maybe she didn’t realize it, but I know she tried. I know she moved through each day with the suffering and the fear, as well as the desire for a fully engaged life, as best as she could. She was the one who kept us going.

  And she’s gone now.

  But it’s okay.

  It’s still okay.

  Life will turn us upside down, and it will still be okay.

  My mom thought so. Lee Mullican thought so. Sitting here on my bedroom floor, surrounded by nothing else but the ghost of my mom’s infatuation with another ghost, I don’t have much choice but to think so, too.

  I’m trying, Mom. I’m really, really trying.