See What I See (10 page)

“It's fantastic,” I tell her.

“I've been designing like crazy, and my auntie's been working nonstop making everything. Someone at school made a flyer for me for her class project, and I've got them everywhere. I even have a website, and someone from the local newspaper is coming to do a story. I wanted to quit school and do this full-time, but Auntie says she'll kick me out if I quit. Anyhow, school's not so bad. I made friends with this girl who does the coolest jewelry with African beads a friend of hers in the Peace Corps sends her, and I promised her she could sell it here.” She lowers her voice. “I met this supercool fellow, J.K., who is learning to design cars. He's already won a prize. You should see his clay model. It's not all clunky like most cars. He says he wants it to look like it was shaped by the wind.”

Lila's aunt calls in to us, “Don't think I don't know why you're whispering, Lila. Boys. You came down here to go to school, and that's what you're going to do, or I'll send you right back to Flint, and there's no plane that flies from Flint to Paris like there is in Detroit, girl.”

I unwrap a painting of Belle Isle I've brought for Lila and her aunt. I blush as I give it to her. “I promised you a painting, but you don't have to hang it up or anything.”

Lila is quiet for a minute and I don't breathe. Then she pokes me and says, “I knew you could paint, but you're good. You are
real
good.”

I'm happy. I know Lila isn't the kind to just tell you what you want to hear. Yet in spite of her praise something hurts. I complain, “Look at you. You've got everything: school and your own shop with people actually buying your creations. I'm not going to school, and no one sees my paintings. They're just sitting there gathering dust.”

“So why don't you try to sell some paintings?”

“Where would I sell them, and who would want to buy them?”

“Some of the kids at school have a co-op gallery with art students from Wayne State. It's just a hole in the wall, but they sell stuff. Some of the regular galleries even go down there and take things. Give it a try.”

I'm afraid of being judged. Dad said my work was no good. If the gallery says the same thing, I'll lose heart. I don't know.

*  *  *

Somehow I get my nerve and the next afternoon I call Ruth, sign her book, and take two of the Belle Isle paintings that I've framed with cheap metal frames to the Tergiversate Gallery. Crazy name. I looked up the word in the dictionary and it said “to repeatedly change your opinion,” so I'm hoping the gallery is open to all kinds of art.

I have a hard time finding the gallery, which is hidden between a cleaner's and an all-night drugstore. The gallery is in what looks like an abandoned store. The windows, with big bites missing from the glass, are boarded up so you can't see inside, but the boards have been painted with squares of bright color and there is a sign:
TERGIVERSATE GALLERY
.

A guy and a girl about a year or two older than I am are hanging pictures. Landscapes, portraits, explosions of colors, abstracts, color field, superrealism, even some images that aren't painted at all, just projected onto the wall. Everything is here. The boy gives me a quick over-the-shoulder glance. He's thin and pale, with long black hair and one of those funny little beard things beneath his lower lip. “No more! No more!” he shouts. “Take them away!” I hurry toward the door.

“Shut up, Pearce,” the girl says. “Let's see what you've brought. But I warn you, he's right. We're loaded.”

I fight the impulse to walk out of the gallery before someone tells me my work is no good. Pearce comes over and wrests my paintings from me. “Don't be modest,” he says.

He looks at them a long time, and I'm shriveling. “Europe?” he asks. “You've been traveling?”

The girl, who has a long blond braid snaking down to her waist, is curious. She walks over and gives the paintings a long look and says, “It's Belle Isle, stupid.”

Pearce looks angry at his mistake. “Of course. I should have known.”

“I like them,” the girl says. “They're in.”

Before I can take a breath, Pearce says, “I'm not sure, Diane.” He's still embarrassed about not recognizing the island, but Diane is already walking around the gallery holding the paintings, looking for a place to hang them. She tells me, “You've captured the island and something more. It doesn't look like just Belle Isle. What you've done is make it look like all the lonely places in the world.”

Pearce doesn't say anything, but he takes down a huge painting of a rat and helps Diane hang my two paintings in the newly emptied space. We all stand back and look at them as if we're art critics from the
New York Times
. I'm thrilled, but at the same time I'm desperate to get the paintings back, terrified at having them out of my hands and exposed for all the world to see. There are things in the paintings that I have a sudden urge to make better.

Pearce offers me a pop, and Diane says, “If you're not doing anything, you can help us hang the show. We're running short on time.”

“There aren't any bosses or committees here,” Pearce says. “Everybody works, and everybody has a say.”

“What he means is it's chaos,” Diane says. “Scream-ing arguments, late nights, hurt feelings, but this is our second year.”

Five minutes later I'm up a ladder with a hammer. For a while I just do as I'm told, but when they tell me to hang two paintings side by side that fight with each other, I object. After a minute Diane says, “Right, split them up.”

We call for pizza and work until everything is on the walls. Then we stand there pleased with our work. In our eyes the shabby, chilly gallery is the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre all rolled into one.

“Opening's Thursday night,” Pearce says. “Bring a friend.”

I hurry home, worried about Dad and Ruth. I didn't expect to be so late. When I get there, Dad is sitting at the kitchen table, lapping up a bowl of tomato soup that Ruth has heated. She has buttered a little stack of crackers for him, which sits next to the soup bowl. Dad gives me a smart-alecky wink that says,
Who needs you?

Ruth whispers to me, “He wasn't going to eat, but I told him we get extra points for preparing and serving a dinner to an elderly person, so he said he would.” Aloud she tells me, “I'd stay and do the dishes, but I've got homework.”

I sign Ruth's book, give her a hug, and run her home. When I get back, I find Dad in his studio. The painting of Ruth in the enormous chair is amazing. She appears wonderfully poised and smiling while all around her is this outsize, frightening world of giant chairs and tables and the enormous overpowering room.

“Where were you this afternoon?” Dad asks. “You're supposed to be here taking care of me, not wandering all over the city.”

“Ruth seems to do a better job than I do.” I'm pleased that Dad has even noticed my not being there.

“That's because she minds her own business,” Dad says. “I need her back to finish the painting.”

“She's coming Thursday night.”

“Where are you going?”

“I thought we were minding our own business.” Then I tell Dad all about the gallery opening. “They took two of my paintings.”

The affable, mild man disappears and there is Frankenstein's monster. “A gallery opening. Just an opportunity for people who want to be seen. You'll cheapen your work by putting it in a fly-by-night gallery. You're not ready to show yet anyway. You're nothing but an amateur, a Sunday painter. You can't paint until you know something about life. That little child who comes here playing at taking care of me knows more about life than you do. Did you know her father deserted the family, and her mother has to work and leave that child alone?”

Furious, I scream at him, “Sounds just like the story of my own life!”

He turns pale and starts to gulp for air like a goldfish thrown out of a bowl. He sinks down on the couch, gasping. Frightened I go to him, but he waves me away. I dial 911. I live a dozen lifetimes until the ambulance comes, the siren on, the red lights pulsing. In seconds the medical-emergency team is taking off Dad's shirt. They bring in some kind of contraption, a defibrillator, one of them tells me. They get a stretcher and strap Dad onto it and wheel him out the door. What have I done?

I lock the house and drive to Receiving Hospital. I search the emergency room, but Dad's already been taken to urgent care. Two hours pass. I keep hoping Thomas will come and tell me Dad's okay, just more fluid in his lungs. They'll get rid of it, and he'll be fine.

A doctor, not Thomas, tells me Dad has had a coronary incident, and they have admitted him to intensive care. He says I should go home and come back tomorrow. There's nothing I can do. With a terrible pang of guilt I tell myself he's right—I have already done it. I sit in the waiting room another hour, wanting to be close to Dad, but when the nurse gives me a worried look, I leave. The Red Wings hockey game is just over, and the expressway is full of cheering fans on their way home. The cheering seems unfair. Don't they know about Dad?

Tonight when I call Mom, I'm in a reminiscent mood, looking to escape from my worry about Dad to another time and another place. “Do you remember when I was little and you took me to Lake Michigan for a picnic and you went swimming far out in the lake and I started crying because I thought you would drown?”

Mom knows me inside and out. Right away she says, “Kate, you sound funny. What's the matter? Do you want me to come down there? I have a couple of days of vacation coming and it's the slow season at the resort.”

Now I'm making Mom worry. “No, I'm fine.” I don't want Mom telling me to come home or,
worse
, coming down here herself. I search for an explanation for the way I must sound. “Well there
is
something,” I tell her. “I had two paintings accepted by a gallery. The show opens Thursday night, and they're already up on the gallery wall.”

“That's terrific, honey. Can you get someone to take a picture for me to see?” There's a pause. “I suppose he's pleased.”

“Oh, you know Dad. He's cool about it.”

Somehow I get through the rest of the conversation, answering questions and asking a few of my own, but as the call goes on, I'm afraid I'll lose control and scream, “Help!” At last I sign off.

I think of November up north. It's deer season. The deer pole will be up in our little village, the gutted deer hanging in a row as the hunters show off their trophies. Before daylight I'd have been in the woods behind our trailer, stamping out the tracks in the snow so the hunters wouldn't be able to find our deer.

When I awaken to the cheerless Detroit daylight, I dial the hospital. Dad has had an uneventful night. How can that be? How can a night when you're taken by ambulance to the hospital and you're in intensive care be uneventful?

I shower, gulp down some coffee, and take off. There are strict visiting hours for intensive care, and I have to wait. I sit with other unhappy and frightened folks in a lounge where coffee is available. There's a stack of magazines that must reflect the taste of the people on the hospital staff: golf, parenting, decorating magazines. I read them cover to cover and remember nothing. When I read one over again, everything is brand-new.

At last we're allowed into intensive care, where the patients' beds are gathered around the nurses' station like kindergartners around a favorite teacher. I find Dad, who gives me a cross look as if this is all my fault, and I know it is. He has an IV going, but the frightening paleness is gone.

“I want to get out of here.”

“We have to talk with the doctor.”

“That boy doctor from the convenience store was here.”

“Thomas.”

A staff doctor appears. He's probably already seen a dozen patients by now, so he's skipping the bedside manner, giving all his attention to the heart monitor over Dad's bed. He fools around with his stethoscope. “How are we doing?” he finally asks, as if there are several people in Dad's bed. Or maybe I'm included in his question.

“I want to be released,” Dad says. In a threatening voice he adds, “You can't keep me if I want to go.”

“Oh, no,” the doctor says, and sizes Dad up. “We can release you right away. If this is your daughter here, she can alert the funeral home so there's no time wasted.”

Dad shuts up. The doctor has won, and now he's the gracious host. “Actually you're doing very well. We just want to make you comfortable and take a look at what's going on. You'll be on your way home in a day or two, after we've adjusted your medication and gotten rid of the fluid that's accumulating in your lungs and putting stress on your heart.” He makes a few notes on the chart and moves on.

“What did he write?” Dad asks.

I look, but it's all scribbles and weird medical talk.

As I leave, Dad says, “Not a word to Morgan.”