The Suburban Strange (3 page)

Celia was pleased with her work, but upon reflection she feared she had disobeyed the teacher’s instructions, and her blood raced when it was time for the class to pin their drawings up on the wall for the critique. Would he reject her, no matter how good her drawing was, because she hadn’t drawn the plastic fruit or the plaster column? Celia was tempted not to care, because she had found the joy drawing gave her—the joy of capturing a person on paper. But she couldn’t be sure. What if the teacher had wanted something else? She tried to think of something she might stammer in her defense.

They spent a few minutes looking at each other’s work before the teacher began the critique. Everyone else had drawn something from the still life. Most of the sketches were amateurish, including the one Celia’s subject had pinned up, a timid cartoon of the vase draped with fabric. The girl with the black bob had noticed herself on the wall and was studying Celia’s portrait. Then the teacher took over and worked his way down the wall. His notes were brief, but Celia could tell he was good at his job. He talked about using one line instead of many, and about when it was right to show something with space instead of lines. When he reached Celia’s drawing, he said, “This is lovely. Someone is not going to learn very much from me. Whose is this?”

Celia felt the hair-dryer blast of panic when she half raised her hand and everyone focused on her. But the instructor gave her a kindly look. To Celia it was the same as if he had dumped ten pounds of confetti on her. Then he moved on. Her pulse slowly returned to normal. She had survived.

The subject of her drawing made a beeline for her after the class. “I’m Regine,” she said. “You are really talented.”

“Thank you! I’m Celia.” Usually Celia did anything to avoid speaking with strangers, but this was the best possible scenario in which to attempt it. She felt herself in a position of strength, and she wanted to reassure this girl, Regine, the way Celia would have wanted to be reassured if the conversation had been about anything else. “You picked the hardest things to draw.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel better.” Regine smiled. “I do not have the natural gift for this that you obviously do.”

“I’ve been drawing for a long time,” Celia offered.

“How old are you, sixteen?”

“Fifteen.” Celia knew Regine was implying she was too young to have been doing anything for a long time, but in this case that was like doubting the sea legs of a child who had grown up on a boat. Every day of every summer Celia could remember, her mother had begged her to leave her sketchbook behind on the dining room table and go outside for just a little while, please. Once, years ago, Celia’s father had cajoled her into a girls’ camping group, but after a few drenched weekends he had admitted he was as miserable as she was, and her days at the dining room table were restored. She spent them copying the faces of models out of advertisements in her mother’s magazines. For Celia drawing wasn’t an escape. She didn’t populate alternate universes with fanciful characters. Drawing was her way of knowing the world. She studied the people around her, imagined how they felt, what they thought, what they dreamt, and then she tried to capture these ephemeral things in a portrait. In a way, people weren’t real for her until she had drawn them a few times, from different angles. They were safer on paper, too—no sudden movements, no betrayals. Regine couldn’t know it, but by rendering her on paper, Celia had welcomed Regine into her life in her own timid way that first day of drawing class.

“Where do you go to school?” Regine was composed and not intimidated even after she had conceded her lack of talent. Celia admired her for it.

“Suburban. I’ll be a sophomore.”

“I go to Suburban! Wait, were you there last year?”

“No, we moved across town a month ago.”

“I’ll be a junior. We are going to have to be friends in this class. I’ll tell you all about Suburban, and you try to show me how to draw something—anything.”

Celia had agreed, a little surprised by how easily it was happening. From the next class on she had sat with Regine. Regine’s drawing skills would not improve much over the summer, but she didn’t hold it against Celia.

“My first love is making collages,” Regine explained as they settled in next to one another the following week. She reached for her bag and pulled out a little album designed to hold a single photograph in each of its page sleeves, with an oval window on the front to let the first image show through. Instead of photographs, Regine had filled the book with a series of twenty-four tiny collages that told a dark story of unrequited love, assembled from fragments of text and images clipped out of magazines. A beautiful woman sat next to a beautiful man with smooth white hands as he drove a luxurious car. She stood in the background, watching him drink from a fluted glass. She peered out from under a curved staircase while he looked up at a stained-glass skylight, a tear on his cheek. A cluster of mismatched words cut from different advertisements read,
He caught me staring but soon his eyes moved on.

“It’s beautiful,” Celia said, turning back to study each page again.

“Thank you. But I couldn’t have drawn any of it to save my soul. It’s all other people’s things that I’ve stolen.”

“Still, it’s so creative, so delicate. And collage—” Celia was going to say collage was difficult. She had tried it on a few occasions and always made a mess with the glue. But Regine cut her off.

“I know—Schwitters, Cornell, Picasso—everybody does it,” Regine said dismissively. “I still wish I could draw.”

Celia didn’t recognize the first two names, and she had thought Picasso was a painter. She heard both pride and insecurity in Regine’s voice, and she didn’t know what to make of it. She let it go and admired Regine’s latest outfit. This week it was a sleeveless black sweater and a pleated gray skirt. Regine had knotted a gray and cream silk scarf at her throat, tucking the ends into the neckline of the sweater, and Celia thought this girl had such a flair for wearing black and gray, she must have been dressing that way since she’d begun to walk. To Celia, Regine was a cross between a silent-movie star and a creature from a foreign fashion magazine. Regine brought a fan to class with her on hotter days, waving it in a short arc below her face during critiques, and Celia wondered how someone could do something like that and not be ridiculed. But Regine made it look so natural, so glamorous; no one possibly could mock her for it.

Celia felt like a different kind of foreigner in her own barely considered clothes—compared with Regine, she might as well have arrived on a boxcar of a freight train, using a flannel shirt interchangeably as a hobo’s bindle. Celia glanced down at her loose T-shirt and cutoff jeans and hoped Regine was looking only at her drawings. In that moment Celia discovered a new desire to dress like Regine, but she had no idea how to go about it. Celia’s frizzy hair escaped from behind her shoulder and she pushed it back, wondering if it could be as smooth as this cool girl’s.

“Are you excited about a new school?” Regine asked her.

“Curious, I guess. I hope it’s better than my last one,” Celia said.

“It’s all right. Some parts are better than others, but that’s true of any place, isn’t it? Having good friends can make any place bearable. What kinds of things do you like?”

“I don’t know,” Celia said, wondering how one was supposed to answer such a question.

“Well, what kind of music do you like?”

Celia never had considered her musical tastes. “I don’t know . . . I just listen to whatever’s on the radio.”

Regine scoffed, “That’s not good music. There is so much amazing music that isn’t on the radio. None of my favorite bands get played on the radio.”

“Then how do you know about them?”

“My friends told me about them, and gave me things to listen to,” Regine said, and then she smiled conspiratorially. “Like I’m going to do for you.”

It was a thrilling thing for Celia to hear, not so much because something hidden would be revealed to her, but because Regine had just implied she wanted to be Celia’s friend.

That day after class Regine had retrieved a compact disc from the glove compartment of her sleek black car to lend to Celia. Celia’s mother pulled up as the transaction was taking place, and when Celia got into the car she asked her who the girl was. “Regine. She’s in my class,” Celia said, unsure what more she could explain to her mother, since Regine still was a mystery to her, too. Celia turned her attention back to the CD and studied the old black-and-white photo of a tornado on the cover. She had no idea what to make of the title—
Tinderbox
—or the name of the band—Siouxsie and the Banshees. The tornado in the photo was not the theatrical type that carried Dorothy away and only killed witches. It writhed against the sky like a poisonous snake, and the weather-beaten barn in its path would not be going anywhere in pieces larger than splinters. In Celia’s hands the CD seemed like an artifact from a country worlds away from Oz—ominous, yet oddly beautiful. It felt like a piece of Regine, which she had sent home with Celia.

Celia could remember as if it were yesterday the miraculous afternoon when she had lain on her bed and listened to
Tinderbox
for the first time. She wished to never forget that feeling. Hearing that music had been like seeing a color she never had seen before, or finding a new room in the house where she had lived for years. Celia hadn’t realized pop music could sound like that: prickly and ominous but passionate and smart at the same time. She pored over the photograph of the band and wound up reproducing the image in her sketchbook while she pondered these severely beautiful people, who wrote songs about the temperature when the most murders are committed and the destruction of Pompeii by volcanic explosion. She listened to Siouxsie’s throaty voice singing about fearing someone but calling his name, and she wondered what that felt like and how someone could find herself in that situation. These songs weren’t something to distract her for three minutes, like the songs on the radio. This album challenged her. It made her think about things she hadn’t considered before. And it was beautiful in ways Celia hadn’t known things could be beautiful.

It upended her week. Time she would have spent laboring over a page in her sketchbook was spent sprawled across her bed, her ear close to the speakers of her CD player. By the time she returned
Tinderbox
to Regine the next week, Celia had made a copy for herself and nearly memorized all the songs. Regine was exuberant when she heard Celia’s reaction.

“I knew you’d like it!” Regine clapped her gloved hands. “There are so many things I want to show you!”

Regine meant what she said. Each week she lent Celia a new CD and eagerly heard her reaction to the previous one. “You don’t have to like it all. I’m just trying to figure out what your tastes are,” she explained. Celia didn’t understand quite what Regine meant by that, because every new song was a revelation to her. As her collection of dark musical treasures grew, so did her appetite for them. She played some of her new favorite songs for her mother and enjoyed her mystified response.

After a month, her mother said, “I’ve never heard you talk about anyone as much as you talk about Regine. Why don’t you invite her over?” It took two more weeks for Celia to work up the nerve, and then she was mortified when Regine readily accepted. Celia felt as though she was going to receive a distinguished ambassador, and she judged her own house wanting. She had plenty of conflicted feelings about the house. Her family had started building it shortly before her father had died two springs ago, leaving Celia and her mother to move into it alone. If they had stayed in the old house, memories of her father would have crowded every room, but in the new house it felt sometimes as though she had left him behind. Either way, the white siding and green shutters and evergreen trees didn’t feel impressive enough for Regine. Worse, she thought Regine might actually get a rash if she entered Celia’s pink bedroom, which was dominated by a ruffled pink queen-sized bed. But Regine had come, and if she passed judgment she was too gracious to let it show.

Perched on the edge of Celia’s bed, seeming every bit the foreign dignitary in a vintage-looking dark plaid jumper, Regine said coyly, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” She handed Celia the sketchbook she had brought. Celia reached for her own and turned it over to her. Before she even opened Regine’s volume Celia could tell it was of a different species than hers. The outside was covered completely with all manner of stickers, most with names of bands or graphic designs. One sticker advertised a Hong Kong company that specialized in obscure rock T-shirts. Celia believed without a doubt Regine ordered T-shirts from Hong Kong, and she was sure T-shirts looked very different on Regine than they did on her.

On the inside of Regine’s volume, page after page was covered with hundreds of things she had collaged intricately together, no space left blank. The battered binding had stretched almost double to accommodate all the paper. In one picture a rustic woman sat at a farmhouse table piled high with hundreds of crisply folded men’s white dress shirts. There was a black-and-white image that looked like a film still of a wide-eyed Scandinavian woman in a drab room. Another picture showed a woman in profile, her blond hair cut in a severe bob halfway down the back of her head and shaved to the skin underneath. There were portraits of men named Olivier Theyskens and Hussein Chalayan, and photographs of dramatically lit rooms and foggy tree-lined courtyards. She saw a copy of a poem by Emily Dickinson alongside a picture of a dancing woman with her wrist pressed to her forehead as she bent over, kicking her long white skirt up behind her. There was a page on which all the images contained spirals: conches and staircases and raked stone gardens. On another page everything was a shade of blue. Celia thought Regine must have spent years compiling this book. She wished she could look out her window and see the world Regine had pressed into these pages. “This is amazing.”

“Peter Beard is my idol,” Regine said proudly. “If you’ve seen his books, you’ll know I’m an amateur compared with him.” Meanwhile, she was paging through Celia’s sketchbook as though it were an illuminated manuscript. Celia knew what Regine was seeing: portraits of Celia’s mother and father, sketches of people she’d copied from photographs, a few attempts at landscapes and still lifes, and some self-portraits from the mirror. There were studies of hands, torsos, dancers in motion, but Celia spent most of her time drawing faces. Her greatest talent was in capturing the life in someone’s eyes, the subtleties of a facial expression.