“Like I said, you can have until the end of this week, but not a day longer,” Isabella says, with a tap of her long fingernail. “Now go back home and get to work.”
2
Three days later my studio is a chaotic explosion of paint and wasted canvas.
Shit,I think, sitting slumped over in the mess of it.What the hell am I going to do?
I’m breathing hard, sweat dripping beneath my sports bra and into my overalls, and my stomach hurts—I haven’t had a proper meal in days. Moments like this make me miss my mother. If she were alive, she would bring over dinner and a big thermos of decaf chai, help me come up with a solution, and soon we’d be laughing about this over a glass of wine.
The pain wells up in my chest. God, I miss her.
It was my mother who encouraged my creativity as a child. Photography, drawing, crafts, and, in high school, painting. A single, working mother, she could never live out her dreams of being an artist, but she made it a point to send me to art camp each summer.
This eventually led to my acceptance into RISD, where I majored in painting. That’s where I first remember thinking:Talent only gets you so far. I need to work harder.And so I was determined to study the masters. My mother would drive up from our town house in New Jersey to Providence to get me, and then we’d drive to New York City together, her asking me endless questions about school, and me showing her mysketchbook and telling her about my art classes. The way she praised my progress made me beam with pride. I promised myself that I would someday become a working artist, like she’d always wanted for herself.
My mother and I wandered the Met, discussing our favorite paintings and imagining hilarious stories for their subjects. My mother loved the Impressionists—Cassatt, Degas, Sorolla—while I was drawn to the Dutch golden age painters, like Rembrandt and Vermeer. She’d go on about the Realists, the Romantics, the Surrealists, connecting the paintings to literature and philosophy. The depth of her knowledge fascinated me. And yet she was interested in people, too. She befriended everyone she met but only revealed her truest self to those who interested her deeply. I still think often about those conversations we had. She wanted a vibrant, romantic life, filled with art, and yet she was forced to work as a nurse and stifle her creativity.
When she was at Columbia, my mother lived a more carefree life. To pay for school, she danced at a nightclub in the Village and posed as a model for art classes. She’d been a visual arts major and intended to work as an artist in the city, but when she got pregnant with me her senior year, she switched to a more practical nursing degree, taking another three years of school to complete it.
It was on one of our trips to the Met that I asked whether my biological father liked art.
“Yes, yes he did,” she said, and hesitated. She looked at me as if trying to decide whether or not to say what was on her mind. “I know our life isn’t always easy, and maybe you would have been better off if your father was around, but I wasn’t much older than you are now when I got pregnant ... I did what I thought was best for us at the time.”
I looked at her, confused by this sudden expression of regret. She’d been a wonderful mother. I’d never doubted her love for me or her decision not to stay with my father. She’d shown me a picture of them at a jazz bar together, and that was enough. “Mom, it’s okay,” I told her, taking her hand. “I had the best childhood. You did a great job raising me.”
She smiled, sadly, and squeezed my hand. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
A tight sensation in the center of my chest makes me sink to the floor of my studio. It’s a mixture of nostalgia, grief, and deep longing. If she were around, she would have known exactly what to do. Someday I want to have a daughter of my own and teach her everything about life that my mother taught me, but first I need to get my career off the ground, find a way to support myself, and not have to choose between a dinner out with friends and buying more canvas and paints.
I don’t realize that I’m crying until I reach up and feel the tears on my cheeks.
Wiping my eyes, I look at a framed picture of my mother and me, and guilt rushes in: I’ve made more in tips at the bar in the past month than I have from selling my paintings all year. All those years and money spent on my art, wasted.
Outside on the street, the evening air clears my thoughts. I walk west through SoHo and then turn right on Seventh Avenue and stroll through the West Village. I’m rounding the corner of Bleecker and Grove when I notice a woman in her late sixties staring at me. She’s wearing a wool coat that looks too warm for this weather, is carrying a small red purse, and has a matching cashmere scarf wrapped tightly around her neck.
Do I know her from somewhere? Did she come to a gallery show? Is she a friend’s mother?
I avert my gaze and walk more quickly. Something about the way she is staring makes me uncomfortable.
Twenty minutes later I’ve completed my walk through the West Village and nearly forgotten about the strange woman. But crossing the street, I see her again on the other side of the road, watching me in a way that makes my skin prickle.Has she been following me?
Pulse quickening, I descend the steps of the Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue station, hoping to catch the F train back to the Lower East Side. There are a few people milling about, and the sight of them immediately comforts me. When I sit down in the train, I feel silly and laugh to myself. Why was I so scared of that little old lady?
The next afternoon, frustrated by my lack of inspiration, I go out to get lunch and coffee, and as I open the door to the building, a piece of paper flutters to the ground. Curious, I bend over and reach for it. It’s a flyer for an estate sale in the West Village:Antiques, Jewelry, Paintings. Everything Must Go.
My mother loved estate sales. Maybe this is just the distraction I need to get me out of my head. I walk toward the West Village, shivering in my light sweater. Since yesterday, the temperature has dropped ten degrees, but the sun is still bright despite the crisp chill in the air.
My mother took me to estate sales all over the city. “You don’t need a man to buy you jewelry,” she’d say, holding up an antique earring. When I was in elementary school, she dated a few guys here and there, but none of them ever stuck around.It was my fault: She had to spend all her time taking care of me, so there was no time to find love for herself.
My heart skips when I step into the town house. The interior is old yet impeccably maintained and smells faintly of chai and vanilla. Dark wood, framed still lifes on the walls, a bookshelf with jacketless hardcovers, and a Steinway grand piano under a crystal chandelier. You can tell that an artist lives here. Even the furniture and rugs are carefully chosen and placed.
“The sale ended a half hour ago,” a female voice says, and I look up to find a woman in her sixties with gray hair and pale-blue eyes.
“I’m so sorry—I didn’t see the time,” I say, and as she steps closer, I go quiet: It is the same woman whom I saw watching me yesterday.
When she sees me, her face softens, and she becomes so warm that I feel silly for fearing her. Up close, she is several inches shorter than me and much frailer. In fact, there is not a single threatening thing about her. I try to picture the woman staring at me yesterday, but it was dark, and she was far away. She probably isn’t the same person.
