“I never thought I’d have to tell you this, but we kind of have school tomorrow.”
“They’re the opening act. They’ll be done early. Come on, you haven’t been to a show in ages.”
“You always tell me they aren’t fun,” I say.
“That’s because you’re not there,” she says.
“You know what kind of awareness you need?” I ask. “Introvert awareness.”
“Great idea,” she says. “I’ll make the posters. Right after we come up with a pithy hashtag for the #leavethehousesoyoudontlapseintoadepressivespiral movement.”
(That is definitely too long to trend.)
“Come on,” she says. “Please? I need you.” When I stare at her, unmoved, she clasps my hands. “Todd’s ex is going.”
“Sheila Super Tits?”
“Exactly.”
I let out a long, slow sigh.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“Glory hallelujah,” she says. “Now, can I convince you to come to Cinda’s? Basil ice cream is supposed to be seriously tasty.”
“Tempting,” I say. “But I’ve got to go make something of myself.” She opens her mouth, and I cut her off. “Caro, it’s fine. Mother just wants what’s best for me. Like vitamins.”
“Yeah,” she says, troubled. But she doesn’t look convinced.
5
Have you ever considered yourself an artist? A sketcher, painter, sculptor; a knitter, baker, dancer, DJ, chef, writer, musician, poet, street artist, singer, freestyle rapper, builder, bookbinder, blacksmith? An actor, photographer, filmmaker, gardener, game designer, programmer? Soldier, sailor, tinker, spy?
If you’ve done any of these things, you are an artist.
If you’re an artist, then you do this thing because you love it, even though it’s hard. And on the best days, you feel like you’re flying. And on the second-best days, you remember the feeling of feathers.
But if you’re an artist, you also know what it’s like to think that your work might not be very good. To think sometimes that your work might be terrifically bad. That some days, the tracks you lay down or the colors you mix up or the papier you mâché are actually decent—are actually good—but other times, all you can feel is how heavy and clumsy your hands and feet are, and how far you have to go.
And you also know that no matter how far you are from where you want to be—even with that voice inside your head saying, this is bad—this is melodramatic—who are you kidding? Yourself?—And you kind of gently talk yourself into it. You kind of gently begin to believe, I’m not that good at this. I’m just messing around. Why would anyone like my stuff, anyway? Even then—
There’s some part of you that hopes deep down that another person might look at your art and catch their breath. That they’ll see the light of everything you want to be glimmering there. And they’ll know you, not for who you are, but for what you want to be. They’ll see you and know you have the ability to burst into flight.
6
But wait, Morgan. Didn’t you say just a few chapters ago that hope is the thing that drags you into the abyss?
To which I respond: What’s the point of making art that doesn’t drag you to the brink of the abyss?
7
The Loblolly Gallery is south of town, where the city crumbles away into pockets of countryside: tractors parked by the side of the road and the trees swathed in cicada song and kudzu vines. The GPS leads me to a rain-heavy orchard with a shady drive. A magnificent peeling red barn peeks through the treetops. A large reclaimed wood sign in mod block print reads: lob.lolly.
Okay. So it’s a kind of a Dwell magazine wet dream version of Southern living. (Dear New Jersey: please stop moving here and exclaiming about how charming we are. Please. Please?) But my system is flooded with too much adrenaline for me to feel much besides !!!!! as I cross the nearly empty gravel parking lot, portfolio under my arm.
Inside, the barn is vast and sterile, the floor a slab of cement so white it sends electric feather curls sparking through my vision. In its center, in a lonely pool of spotlight is an enormous taxidermied elephant, frozen as it rears into the air. Alcoves run down the shadowy sides of the enormous room. I realize after a second that they’re the barn’s old horse stalls, cleaned out and turned into individual artists’ display spaces. If things go well today, my drawings could be hanging there someday. The thought makes me a little dizzy.
A group of people emerges from one of the horse stalls, laughing. I recognize them from school just as the black girl in the front looks up. I watch her realize at the same time that I do that it’s way too late to pretend we don’t recognize each other, and so we both wave awkwardly and put on big smiles like This is really cool! You! A person I know! In public! I pray to God that they’ll keep walking, but instead they turn and come my way, which, given the number of times I’ve gone to synagogue in the last decade, is probably deserved.
“Hey, guys,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Hey,” the girl, Celeste, says. She eyes my portfolio but doesn’t say anything about it, for which I am deeply and instantly grateful. “Guys, do you know Morgan? She was in my art class last year.”
“Hi,” I say, like I don’t recognize every single one of them from AP Government, from freshman bio, from homeroom—classes during which I kept myself carefully apart, waiting for the day to end. They smile and nod back, a smattering of heys.
“We’re checking out the circus exhibit,” Celeste says. And then, like it’s the easiest thing in the goddamned world to bat away years of social awkwardness, “You wanna join us?”
I waver. There’s a yes floating somewhere behind my lips. Like saying that—and ducking away for the afternoon from Mother’s expectations, and hanging out with this girl who’s a scary-good painter and who could swap critiques with me, and these casually cute boys with nerdy glasses and comic book T-shirts and sun-dusted cheeks—would be the easiest thing in the goddamned world.
But then—
When we got too close—
And they wanted to know what my deal is, really—
And they saw me not as I want to be seen through my art, but me, weird and twisted up and broken—
What then?
They look at me expectantly, these people for whom yes is the easiest thing in the goddamned world. Then there’s a clack of heels on the floor and a voice saying, “You must be my ten o’clock. Morgan Stone?” And I nearly crumple with relief.
“Yes,” I say. “Hi. Sorry.” I risk a glance at Celeste and Co. They’re still staring, and in shock, but they seem far away now, like we’re looking at one another over a wall.
I stand awkwardly behind the impeccably groomed woman (Karen, I remind myself) at a desk of rough-hewn slate. The stone shimmers in the light like crushed velvet as she expressionlessly thumbs through my portfolio. I run my fingers over the seams of my pockets, fighting the urge to babble in terror. I’ve always been top of my art classes at school, but now, in the expensively curated air of this gallery, all I can see is my inadequacy. The uncertain lines. The sloppy mark-making. All the ways in which this is a perfectly excellent AP Art portfolio and how little that means in the hard, cold adult world. Karen makes polite noises from time to time, but they puddle limply in the air between us, convincing no one.
“I’m sorry about my mother,” I say at last.
“It’s fine,” Karen answers, but her smile seems copied and pasted. “Do you . . .” she begins, and then falls silent.
“Oh,” I say startled. “That’s not supposed to be here.”
It’s the drawing I began last night: the waif-thin girl with the hole in her gut. It seems even more of a howl today: a dark whirlpool, sucking up her life.
Karen says nothing. She studies the picture. My heart gives a painful thump as she turns and looks at my own body.
“Tell me what’s going on in this one,” she says.
And this is the moment, right? It would be so easy to tell her the truth. To lift my shirt and show this person my worries and fears and wounds, and hope she knows how to transform them into everything I want to be.
But I don’t feel like I’m about to lift into flight. All I can hear in my thundering pulse is Mother’s voice: don’t tell don’t tell don’t tell. The blinding flash of my father leaving.
“It’s about anorexia,” I hear my voice saying, smoothly. “It’s commentary. About how anorexia consumes more than just you. You know?” I want to go back and delete the vapid you know? from the air, but I can’t, so I barrel on. “It consumes your world.”
“Mmm,” she says. She sits on the edge of the table, stares up at me hard. “Do you have an eating disorder?”
“No,” I say, quietly.
Karen aligns the edges of the papers with a finger and slides the portfolio closed.
“I’ll be straight with you,” she says. “You’ve got promise. But—”
“But I have to keep practicing,” I finish. The same thing they told me at Artspace. At VAE.
“No,” she says. “Well, yes. Without a doubt. But more importantly, you have a lot of living to do. Morgan, your style is wonderfully expressive, but your focus is all over the place. You have a strong voice, but you’re not sure what you’re trying to say yet. And that’s okay. You’re seventeen.”
She pushes the portfolio into my arms. “Don’t be political about things you’ve read on the Internet. Art comes from experience.” She nudges open the door. “Go have some.”
Celeste and her friends are in the parking lot when I return to the main gallery. I can see them through the glass, jumping off of the low stone wall, posing for pictures against the gleaming-leaved apple trees.
Go. Have some experience, I tell myself. But there is a special kind of humiliation in failing in front of people you—kind of—know, and I’ve got heartbreak written all over my face.
I wander through the hall instead. The taxidermied elephant turns out to be part of an enormous installation, a full-scale circus parade of frozen figures. There are dogs and strongmen, a gorgeous trapeze artist in peacock feathers, a tangle of brightly clad limbs in the process of spilling from a clown car. the greatest show, reads a moodily lit sign in Helvetica on the floor. In small font, below: a full-scale, plaster-cast circus parade that challenges the function of linear time, allowing the viewer to walk the length of the parade forward or backward—speeding up, reversing or pausing this childhood experience as he or she chooses.
I stare up at the elephant, its trunk raised in triumph. I wonder how heavy it must be, what a strain to keep that face aloft in the lonely nights after the gallery lights go out. Its glass eyes glitter in its face.
I turn away and walk the length of the frozen parade—the silk-suited acrobats, the dancing girls, the lions—and I feel a sudden, desperate urge to run. To fling myself backward, past the balloonist, past the popcorn man, to the moment before I messed everything up, the moment when Karen looked at my body, and to say, like it’s the easiest thing in the goddamned world, Yes. Yes, this is me. This is my experience. This is the story I can’t figure out how to tell.
Instead, I just keep walking the length of the line like everything inside of me isn’t screaming, wondering how long I’ll let the frozen parade of life stream silently by.
On the way home, I call Caro. “Don’t try to set me up with anybody.”
“Tonight?” I don’t say anything, and she squeals. “I love you.”
“You owe me,” I say.
But I feel a secret flush of excitement as I watch the landscape retreat again under its blanket of city concrete, the sun bent like blinding gold on the windshields of passing cars. The portfolio tucked away in the back seat for now as I step on the gas and let the hot summer wind catch my hair, speeding toward home an experience the rest of my life maybe something new.
8
Caro gets home from Cinda’s at six, and by eight we’re in her room, getting dressed to go out. Or, rather, I am getting dressed to go out. Caro bounces around for the first hour in nervous excitement, chattering about plus-sized model campaigns before finally, nervously, donning a honey-colored dress with a swooping décolletage.
“Look at my body!” she proclaims. The shimmering fabric outlines her in small geometries: arcs and curves and ellipticals. “Aren’t I magnificent? Aren’t I punching preconceived notions of fatness equaling lazy, ugly and unlovable in the face?”
But forty-five minutes later, she’s lying listlessly on her bed, reading Lolita in full eyeliner while I stand at the mirror, paralyzed with dread. I own three nice tops and hate them all. Two make me look like a queer Jewish grandma. The other makes me look green.
“This is the worst,” I groan, for the sixth time in an hour.
Caroline squints a dark-fringed eye at me, turns a page.
“Has he killed the mom yet?” I ask.
She sits up. “Damn it, Morgan.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Be honest, does this make me look like a yenta?”
“Dollface, you don’t look a day over forty.” She turns back to her book. “Let me know when your midlife crisis is over.”
I tug at the hem, evaluating octogenarianism. Caro’s notes flutter above the mirror: Gender oppression is perpetuated by body oppression. Riot is not diet. Start a revolution: stop hating your body.
“Let me look through your stuff,” I say.
“Go for it,” she says. She picks up her phone. Something on the screen makes her smile, likely a text from Boring Todd, or Sierra, or Emmeline or one of the other million people who love Caro even though she insists on spending her time with grumpy, prickly me.
I dig through Caro’s closet, plunging my hand deep into the curtains of fabric like I’m aiming for Narnia. I emerge clutching a small cerulean T-shirt. It’s a child’s souvenir tee, sporting a picture of an orca and the legend My uncle went to Sea World, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt. “Uncle” has been crossed out, and “Best Friend” carefully Sharpied in. The i is dotted with a heart. I feel a little rush of warmth.
“Why, why, why do you still have this?” I ask.
“Because you gave it to me,” Caroline says, not looking up.
“When we were eleven,” I say.
“Because I’m a sentimental fool,” she says.
“That’s for sure,” I say. I hold the T-shirt up against my chest and smile despite myself, remembering the first time I saw Caroline. We were six. She’d charged up to me on my first day at my new school and informed me I was sleeping over at her house on Friday. “Why?” I’d asked.
“Because you’re the new kid,” she’d answered. “And being the new kid sucks, so I’m going to be your friend.”
I tug the T-shirt over my head. The armpits pinch, and the whale warps across my chest, but it kind of, barely fits.
I turn to Caro, grinning. “Hey, bestie,” I sing-song.
She snorts and chucks a fox-shaped pillow at me. “Hey, gonna-make-us-latie. Come on, get dressed. They’re going on in ten minutes.”
I catch a glimpse in the mirror as I turn back to the closet and hesitate. The Hole peeks out from beneath the shirt’s hem, which ends just below my rib cage. I see it every day—I painstakingly clean it with a washcloth every time I shower—but suddenly it’s just there. On display. It is startling, eye-catching against the blue. I glimpse pieces of Caro through it—the ripple of blonde as she sits up, suddenly paying attention; a flicker of hand laying the book down on the comforter, Lolita an afterthought.
And what if she said, in this moment, Do it. You look gorgeous. Embrace your nonnormative body, get out there. She might say, I found some blogs about Hole acceptance, didn’t I tell you? Here, let me send you a link. What might my whole life l
ook like?
I look at Caro, and she looks at me, and I’m waiting, poised, for the everything that could come next.
But instead, she sighs. “Morgs, quit screwing around. We’ll miss the whole set. Just wear the purple one; it wasn’t that bad.”
Something in me quietly crumbles with relief, or disappointment or both as she collects her phone and rises from the bed, flipping off the light. “I’ll wait for you downstairs, okay?”
I linger in the room a moment after she goes, illuminated only by the orphaned light of the stairs. The blue of the shirt is washed to a dusky graphite in the half-light, the puff-painted orca glowing eerily. I raise my arms, and the air of the bedroom threads cool and velvet through the Hole. I look like a bead that’s lost its necklace.
A note over the mirror reminds me to start a revolution and no one else can give you permission to start loving your body.
Maybe if I keep waiting for someone else to recognize me, I’ll be waiting forever.
And what if, in this moment—
I finally quit waiting?
I look at the girl in the mirror to see if she thinks I’m crazy, but she just stares back at me. Like all she needs is for me to say go.
I swallow down my fast-beating heart. Then I cover the shirt with a bulky sweater and head down the stairs.
Caro’s fussing with her swooping décolletage when I drop into view. She lets her hand fall and looks up at me, the anxiety on her face laced through with hope. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t crap out on me, Morgan, please,” she says, earnestly. “Sheila’s probably going to show up in mirrored hot pants or something.”
Hole in the Middle Page 3
