See What I See (2 page)

One Christmas I begged for snowshoes so I could visit the woods in winter. The snowshoes let me see the hares, brown in the summertime, white against the snow. I discovered how you could paint white on white, and the dozens of different shades of white. I invented a whole new vocabulary of whites, from sun white to shadow white.

I head to the woods now, but I carry my argument with my mother with me like a heavy stone. Honestly, I'm not sure about art school. The school said I have talent and I can't imagine doing anything but painting. It's what I want, but I still don't know if I'm doing the right thing. Is it worth making Mom so unhappy? Am I being selfish just like Dad was, thinking only of myself?

My boyfriend, Justin, has been encouraging me. He's in my class at school and I've been dating him forever, but a lot of that is habit and friendship, not something serious. He's a technology geek, and when I told him about the art school, he helped me make a DVD of my paintings to send with my application. The school asked me down last spring for an interview. I told Mom I was going on an all-day picnic to the sand dunes near Traverse City with Justin, and he drove me the four hours down to Detroit. I shriveled when I saw how large Detroit was. Nothing was familiar. The city was crammed with buildings, and even Justin was intimidated by the way cars rushed past us on the expressways as if speed limits had never been invented.

The art school was designed by a famous architect and put together like steel Tinkertoys, with lots of glass and a terrific sculpture garden right in the middle of it. Just across the street is Detroit's art museum. All these things were so close, I could wrap my arms around them.

The school had its own gallery hung with the work of students. As I admired the drawings and paintings, I imagined my own work there. I looked into the empty classrooms and saw the paint-stained easels. Everything seemed
right
. A woman, “Call Me Terry,” interviewed me. Why had I chosen that school? I had asked for a scholarship; what was my financial situation? How long had I been painting? What did I plan to do after I graduated? Did I understand the school was a college and I would be required to take some academic courses, that it wouldn't be just art? I gave routine answers. Then she asked, “Is your interest in art a kind of hobby?”

“Not a hobby,” I said, and without thinking I rattled on about how it was only when I was painting that I was really alive, how I didn't ever want to do anything else, how I wanted to show everyone that you could paint a single leaf a hundred different ways, depending on the season and the light and how you felt about the leaf right at that moment, and I loved that sometimes when you're painting, you surprise yourself by what appears on the canvas. When I finally stopped talking, she told me how much she had liked the work I had sent and how my view of nature was unique—
unique
was the actual word she used. When she promised me the scholarship, I knew nothing would stop me. I ran out to the car, where Justin was waiting, and threw my arms around him. I didn't want to leave the school. I wanted to pitch a tent right there in the middle of the sculpture garden.

The ride back on I-75 took four hours, and in all that time I wasn't able to figure out how to tell Mom. A couple of weeks before my birthday, when Mom asked me what I wanted, I finally got the courage to say I didn't want a gift—what I wanted more than anything was to go to art school. I told her about the interview and the scholarship and how they liked my work. She was furious, and there was a week of angry silence alternating with the banging of pots and pans. Over the summer Mom almost got used to the idea, but now my insisting on staying with Dad had started our arguments all over again.

I have the woods to myself this afternoon as usual. Alone in the woods I stop thinking about the argument and lose myself in looking. I consider a gray football-shaped hornets' nest in the top of a beech tree. The hornets are still flying in and out, but I can imagine the hornets' nest in the rain and snow, peeling away layer by layer, exposing the thousands of little papery cells. In the middle of the pond the beavers have added more branches to their lodge. I see the haphazard way the branches are woven together. Then I discover a castle of moss, the decayed stump of a pine tree covered with humps of bright green moss and shreds of grayish green lichen. Stretched out beside the stump is a pencil-thin green snake. I stare and stare, memorizing the bright green of the snake and the yellow green of the moss and the gray green of the lichen and the snake's little black eye. I hurry home and get out my paints.

M
om stands at the door, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand. I know they're genuine. Mom never uses tears as a weapon. If I didn't have my suitcase to hang on to and the weight of my backpack pushing me ahead, I'd give up right there and then.

In a tight voice Mom says, “Call me as soon as you get to the city.” The restaurant bought her a cell phone so they could get hold of her if something came up and she was needed. Now she put me on her account and gave me my own phone, as if I'm heading for a combat zone and might need backup—and maybe I will.

As I ride with Justin, I can't stop thinking of how Mom looked when I said good-bye to her. With the dark woods lurking behind our house and Mom standing all alone on the porch with a single shaft of morning light falling on her, it was just like a Vermeer painting.

Justin takes me to the bus stop. Mom thinks he's going to drive me all the way to Detroit, but I won't let him. If Dad kicks me out, I don't want Justin to see it happen. He has no idea who my dad is, and if for some reason I have to come back home, I can just make up a story about Dad having to move away for his job.

“We're lucky to be getting away from this place,” Justin says. Unlike me, Justin plans to head for a big city when he's finished with school. He wants to work his way up to the top of something. In addition to being a techie, he's a math genius. Even now, 50 percent of his attention is on me and my plight and 50 percent is on adding up the bus schedule posted on the blackboard over the counter, as if the schedule were a column of figures. Everything Justin owns, and sometimes the backs of his hands and the steam on his car windows, is covered with math problems. If you go shopping with him at a grocery store, he has the exact change out before the clerk even starts to add everything up. He has a scholarship for an engineering school in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I envy him the nearness of Lake Superior and the miles of woods while I'm going to have to survive living in a city, away from all the things I love to paint. “Send me leaves,” I tell him, “and twigs and feathers.”

Justin's growing a beard for school, and his good-bye kiss is prickly, like our relationship. I like Justin, but lately I've had the feeling he considers me just another problem to work out, and once he does he'll lose interest. We're going in different directions. He wants to get away from Larch and I want to come back.

Some of the passengers on the bus settle down comfortably with copies of
Time
and
People
and bags of M&M's, not caring where they are. Others treat their bus windows like TV screens with no remotes, staring hopefully at everything. A couple of young kids across the aisle have a sullen, spooked look as if they've been hijacked. I wonder if they're on a visit to see a divorced parent. I want to tell them they're lucky if they get to see both their mom and their dad, even if it's separately.

I force myself to sit quietly in my seat as everything familiar disappears. I have qualms and wonder what a qualm would look like if you painted it—probably like a bowl of melting ice cream or a dish of Jell-O just before it sets.

I panic a little as I watch the countryside's empty fields and its acres of trees turn into small towns and then bigger towns. The trip takes hours, but it's much too fast. I don't want the moment to come when I have to face my father, but almost before I know it, there is Detroit itself. It seems to me there are many Detroits. First there are the suburbs with large houses and green lawns, but when the bus approaches downtown, I see deserted streets and boarded-up stores and vacant lots like a mouth of pulled teeth where houses once were. It's a city like an Edward Hopper painting with an emptiness that worries you, as if all the people were lost and no one was looking for them. Then suddenly everything comes alive again. There are glitzy restaurants, tangles of expressways, and stunning new sports stadiums. At the baseball stadium's entrance there are two gigantic tigers with welcoming, loopy grins.

I unfold my numb body and stumble out of the bus and into the station, where people sit in long sleepy rows looking dazed, as if they've been airlifted there and then abandoned. Back home I studied a map of Detroit, so I know Dad's street isn't too far from downtown. It's the section of Detroit where I lived with Mom and Dad. I wander outside and smell the city smell that is part cars, part french fries, and part wind kicking up dirt. A taxi driver and I exchange wordless looks. Mine says,
How about it?
his,
Hop in
. When I give the address, the driver says in a regretful voice, “Not far.” He isn't going to get much money. I look at his license posted on the back of the front seat. There is his picture with a big smile, as if he's been waiting all his life to drive taxis. Maybe he has. His first name is Fikry. His last name has consonants and vowels in a strange order I can't pronounce.

“You coming home from a trip, or what?” Fikry asks.

“No. I'm going to stay with my dad for a while, but he doesn't know I'm coming.” I don't know why I say that, except it's so heavy on my mind, it just slips out.

“What are you? Some kind of surprise?”

“No. He knows all about me.”

“Your mother kick you out?”

“No. It's my idea. I'm going to art school here in Detroit.”

“Where you from?”

“Northern Michigan.”

“Snow all the time up there.”

I see blocks of small, well-kept houses that appear to be a couple of hundred years old. The houses are huddled together, looking as if they need protection from all the craziness of the city. Each home has its square of perfect lawn. There are hanging baskets of petunias and pots of geraniums in an alizarin crimson hue. Many of the yards have tiny, immaculate rose gardens. Along the sidewalks run borders of sweet alyssum and beds of daisies and marigolds in bright copper and light cadmium yellow light hues.

“This is the street.”

After the tall busyness of the commercial buildings downtown, here is this village right in the middle of the city. I am amazed. Nothing is familiar. There are churches and small stores with signs in languages I don't understand. I ask Fikry.

“Some Polish, some Albanian and Chaldean. Here's the house,” he says. “You want me to wait and see how the surprise goes?”

“No, thanks.”

Fikry coasts slowly to the end of the block and stops. Curious? Caring? I give him the benefit of the doubt.

Dad's place looks like the rest of the little houses, except his grass hasn't been cut and the only landscaping is a medley of weeds and a couple of empty cans. What is he doing here?

I drag my suitcase up the porch stairs. At the end of the block Fikry finally drives away. I miss him already. I stand there for a long minute, considering whether the smart thing would be to get on a bus and go back to Mom. No. Not yet. I push the doorbell, and when there is no answer, I knock. Nothing. Dad might have seen me and isn't answering on purpose, or he could be lost in his painting and not hear me. Heck, he could have gone back to New York. I try looking in the windows, but the shades are drawn. I knock at the back door. Nothing. I try the front doorbell again. I imagine how I look standing on the porch with my suitcase beside me. Pathetic.

At last the door jerks open. The hair that hangs around my father's shoulders is now thinner and grizzled with gray. His cheeks have sunk, and his skin is the faded yellow of old newspaper. His clothes are a size too large, or his body is a size too small. The hand on the door is scrawny and blue with veins. His voice is weak but furious, and his eyes are like two black weapons as he stares at me. “If you're a reporter, you can get the hell out of here or I'll have the police on you for trespassing.”

I can barely get out “It's me, Dad. Kate.”

He peers at me as if I'm something that has stuck to his shoe. “What do you think you're doing here? How did you find me? This is no time for a family reunion. I'm getting ready for a show and I need to be left alone.”

“You're still painting? You look like you're sick.”

“My health is not your concern, and yes, I'm painting. But I certainly wouldn't be able to work with a child running around the house. I suppose your mother sent you to spy on me. Well, you can turn around and go back to wherever you came from, and you are certainly not to suggest to your mother or anyone else that I'm ill.”

“I'm not a child, and Mom has nothing to do with my being here. She's furious with me for coming. I told you in my letters that I have a scholarship at the art school, but I don't have money for housing. All I want is a place to sleep. I promise I won't get in your way, and if you aren't well, I can do things for you.”