How to Be Luminous

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  CHAPTER 19

  The Color of Snow

  “Don’t forget, I’m off on my school trip today,” I tell my sisters the next morning.

  My hands move too joyfully as I sign; too exuberantly, too not-Minnie. I can’t help it, though. I’m walking on air. Actually, clunking—I snuck into the Museum of Mum before breakfast and liberated her most teetering pair of shoes: what I remember as bright green suede, with a chunky heel and hundreds of straps. They feel correct on my feet, like the baby bear’s porridge, and exactly the way she ought to be mourned, or enticed home. With bold, bodacious gestures. Skipping school and breaking rules for the first time in my life, going to her studio, making art. Conjuring starlight.

  Emmy-Kate’s head tilts, regarding me like I’ve announced I’m joining the circus. She’s surrounded by a small fortress of sugary cereal and reading matter—an art book, her sketch pad, a magazine, her phone; the attention span of a mosquito—but ignores it all in favor of narrowing her eyes at me.

  Niko frowns, putting down her book—A Matter of Life and Death, by the Professor. Is she having trouble sleeping?—and giving me her full attention. Eff. My plan was to breeze in and out of the kitchen with the lie, acting as though this trip was mentioned ages ago. In retrospect I should have pulled a sick day instead.

  “What school trip?” she asks.

  Emmy-Kate echoes, “Yeah, what school trip?”

  “Mind your own beeswax,” I tell her, then turn to Niko and try to look innocent, deliver the speech I’ve been practicing for the past ten minutes up in the Chaos Cave, my hands wavering. “My art class is going to the National Portrait Gallery. There’s this Cézanne portraits exhibit Ms. Goldenblatt wants us to see. We’re getting a guided tour, then we’re supposed to imitate his style and techniques. I told you about it ages ago, at the start of term.”

  I can’t stop signing, embroidering the lie. Technically, there is a Cézanne exhibition on at the NPG—and Ms. Goldenblatt has been known to take us out of Poets Corner High and into galleries. Just not today.

  “I lurve Cézanne,” signs Emmy-Kate dreamily, forgetting she’s currently not talking to me. “Did you know he astonished Paris with an apple? Get me a postcard from the gift shop.”

  “Are you sure you asked me about this, Minnie?” Doubt clouds Niko’s fine features. “Where’s the permission slip?”

  “I’m over sixteen.”

  “You could still ask me.” She shakes her head, hurt, pushing back her chair and taking her plate over to the sink. Beneath her T-shirt, her shoulder blades stick out like little bird wings, and it makes me want to cry.

  “You look nice,” Emmy-Kate blurts out loud, suspicion tainting her voice. “You’re wearing lipstick…”

  I blush, from the strappy shoes to my hair, which I’ve ironed into a Lady Godiva-esque sheet. Overall impression: probably not going on a school trip. But did I overdo it with the lipstick? I thought I chose a neutral color, but the way Emmy-Kate is glaring, maybe I’m accidentally pouting in fluorescent tangerine.

  “One more word and I’ll put a lock on your window,” I tell her.

  “What was that?” Niko turns around, catching our mouths moving. Emmy-Kate looks mortified at speaking behind her back and retreats into her Sugar Puffs.

  “Sorry,” I sign to Niko, genuinely. “We got carried away talking about Cézanne. So, I’m going to go…” I tell them, creeping backward toward the kitchen door.

  “Straight home afterward, please,” Niko orders, as I hear the sound of mail hitting the doormat out in the hall.

  I nod, tripping on the shoes on the way out of the house, falling over all my lies.

  Chartreuse

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  A color halfway between yellow and green, named after a French liqueur Mum drank when we went to Paris and saw the Venus de Milo and The Kiss. The floral dress I’m wearing, if I remember its color correctly. Algae on the duck ponds. This sunglasses-bright feeling as I walk to meet Felix, like the world is one incredible discovery after another.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Color of Milk

  Uh-oh, I think, as I arrive on the platform of Poets Corner station and see Felix Waters leaning against the wall. The sunshine he’s basking in is marmalade thick, with the same bittersweet taste. It’s on my tongue, a combination of yearning and foreboding. Like Mum said, he’s trouble, overwhelmingly so. I should walk away right now.

  But my feet must have a mind of their own, because they start wobbling along the platform. When I arrive in front of Felix, he jumps to his feet, dark eyes skimming over my shoes-dress-hair-mascara-lipstick-nervous-smile-everything. He leaves a blush in the wake of his gaze—I can feel it radiating from my face, rendering me silent.

  “Hey.” He thrusts a Bluebird Bakery bag into my hand, not taking his eyes from mine. “Breakfast.”

  “Thank you,” I manage. Then I have to look away. I perch on the wall next to him and take tiny nibbles of croissant as we wait for the train. The air crackles with anticipation.

  When we get to the studio, I take a deep breath. With Ash, I felt afraid of what I might find inside. With Felix, it feels like I’m about to unveil my soul. After I open the door, he glances at me for permission, then starts prowling the room. His shoulders unhunch and his posture straightens. It’s like looking at an evolution chart, watching him go from monkey to Cro-Magnon to upright human.

  “Holy shit,” he says over and over again, taking in each new piece of art.

  I walk over to my wheel, disappointed to see the lump of clay I left on it yesterday is dried up. Mum hasn’t been back here overnight. Of course she hasn’t. No one falls from five hundred and thirty-one feet, then climbs back up the cliff and makes art. So why do I feel disappointed? Maybe it’s because I believe that if anyone could pull off such a stunt, it would be her.

  I prize the clay off with a knife, throw it into the recycling bucket.

  Dehydrated clay is never wasted. You can let a pot dry out until it’s ready to be fired, then smash it to pieces instead and reform the dust with water. Stir it up, and it makes the same wet clay you started with. Reincarnation. I stare into the bucket. It’s filled with broken pieces once destined for the Schiaparelli series, destroyed before they ever made it to the kiln. Mum was looking for the shape of something in this clay, and didn’t find it.

  “Minnie,” says Felix. I turn around. He’s standing next to the original Rainbow Series I test bubble, a prototype piece not quite as enormous as the finished work but somehow as gobsmacking. He sweeps an arm around the room. “This is amazing. Everything … Wow. Thank you for showing me. I feel like Frida Kahlo invited me behind the scenes, you know?”

  I nod, swallowing around the clay lump that’s forming in my throat. This. This is how Ash should have responded yesterday. With reverence.

  “I’m going to make tea,” I say, and scurry to the kitchenette.

  Yesterday’s coffee mug is upside-down on the drainboard. I twitch, remembering only that I filled it with water, then boil the kettle and make tea. There’s no milk in the fridge, not even a spoiled and moldy bottle left over from Mum’s last days here. Only an Emmy-Kateish selection of snacks in the near-empty cupboard, Golden Oreos and pink-frosted store-bought sugar cookies.

  When I turn around, clutching two mugs, Felix is standing among the kilns, resting his hand on top of the one that holds Mum’s last artwork. His eyes are closed, his head bowed. Has he looked inside? Has he seen it? With a lurch, it occurs to me that this piece is the closest thing we’ll get to a gravestone.

  “Tea!” I yelp.

  Felix looks up, raising his eyebrows at my Muppets voice.

  “I was thinking,” he says, moving over to the small test kiln. “Would it be all right to start heating up one of these? We could—” He breaks off, taking in my trembling self, and makes it over to me in two strides, lifting the mugs from my hands. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, even though
I’m careering between horror and hope. Yesterday I was so convinced that she was here. Now I’m convinced her body is being pecked by seagulls. The croissant threatens to make a reappearance. I’m completely out of control.

  Felix puts down the mugs on the nearest workbench, then comes back to me, shaking his head. “You’re not fine.”

  He’s examining every brushstroke of my face. And I am so tired of imagining her death—or not—and the way it’s drawn fault lines in my brain. I’m tired of craziness and drowning and disappearing, and of the imprecise words of her goodbye letter. Why couldn’t she, for once, have gone about her life in the normal way? Even the potential ending of it had to be extraordinary. It makes me want to lift up the kiln, last-ever artwork and all, and throw it over Beachy Head. Let Schiaparelli drown along with her.

  “You’re crying,” says Felix, gruffer than billy goats. He lifts a hand to my cheek and starts smudging tears away with his thumb. “Don’t. Don’t, Minnie. I know it’s fucking shit.”

  His words soothe me like a lullaby. How is he the only person who understands, the only one who can sum it up so clearly? It’s all so indescribably awful.

  “Fuck this,” Felix is saying, both of his hands cupping my face now, and somehow his mouth is murmuring into mine and I’m crying into his, a cataclysmic mix of my shuddering sobs and his calming words, the taste of cigarettes as his lips crash into mine. And then I am cry-kissing.

  But with each second our mouths are glued together, I leave my despair behind. Wrapped in Felix’s bonfire scent, there’s only stillness—like someone pressed a PAUSE button on my torment. And when our tongues finally disconnect, I think: Felix is delicious. Then I’m instantly mortified that my first thought wasn’t about Ash.

  My hand flies to my mouth in shame.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have…” Felix trails off, misunderstanding the gesture. He shoves his hair this way and that in distress, then mutters, “Let’s start making the porcelain. I mean, if you still want?”

  “I want,” I say, before realizing what a breathy, double-entendre, Emmy-Kate thing that is to say. Felix’s pupils flare. He frowns, confused.

  Then his arthead self takes over—he has two identities, Batman–Bruce Wayne-style. This one summons all the creative energy in the studio and announces, “Okay, it’s mad-scientist time. Here, take this.” He rummages in his pocket for a scrap of paper and hands it to me, then descends on the workbenches and begins hoisting ingredients up from the storage boxes. “You don’t mind?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, it’s okay.” I’m caressing the paper scrap as if it’s a love letter. These are the words I’m swooning over, in Felix’s scratchy handwriting:

  dry clay powder, hot water, darvan 7, soda ash, barium carb

  He’s so at home in Mum’s space. It reminds me of her at her most uncontainable, this whirlwind of measuring out clay and boiling water and mixing chemicals, finding her equipment, bringing this place back to life. Felix hurls everything into a bucket and turns on a drill with a vroom-vroom-vroom, then stops.

  “Wait,” he says. He rests the drill on the table, wiping curls from his eyes and leaving a smear of dust on his forehead. “I’m supposed to be showing you. I have this tendency,” he explains, “to get carried away with things too quickly.”

  Is he talking about the kiss or the clay?

  I peer dubiously into the bucket. Inside is a soupy mess of recycled clay pieces, weird-looking chemical powders, steamy hot water.

  “Do you want an apron?” I ask, then shake my head, point to his sweater. “Stupid question.”

  “You might, though.” Felix hands me the drill. There’s a spiral whisk attachment at the end, one that Mum usually uses for glazes. “Mix this, and we’ve got porcelain.”

  I dip the drill into the bucket.

  “Sure you don’t want an apron?” Felix asks.

  “I’m okay,” I say, and I am.

  I put my finger on the drill trigger and it roars to life, drowning out everything else. I can feel the tremor through my hands, arms, legs, the way I imagine a chain saw feels. And the mess in the bucket is swirling in circles, gradually resolving itself from lumpy soup to liquid cream.

  I start thinking about this American artist called Anne Patterson, who has synesthesia. In her work Graced with Light, she listened to a Bach concerto, then suspended twenty miles of colorful silk ribbon from the ceilings of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Twenty miles of color! I’d give my left thumb for a single inch.

  The porcelain is turning lighter and lighter. It looks almost weightless. It makes me want to take the sun in my hands like a ball of clay.

  My whole body is shaking as I drill deeper, tapping into lunacy and loneliness. Everything shudders: the bucket, the table, my arms, my legs, the whole effing studio. I’m drilling into unsaid words. Into disappearing mothers and secretive sisters. Into faltering relationships and charismatic new boys, bumbling professors, the chasm in my heart that I will never ever fill, and this aching worry I have: that my brain is as effed up as Mum’s and there’s no way to be an artist, no way to be her, without our stories ending the same way.

  “Holy shit,” says Felix.

  Or at least, his mouth forms the words. I can’t lip-read the way Niko can, but I get the gist.

  “What?” I ask, taking my finger from the drill’s trigger. The room falls silent, except for a ringing in my ears like church bells.

  Felix is staring at me. He’s newly bespattered. I look down. I’m covered too. There’s porcelain everywhere. Thick globules up and down my dress, tiny freckles all over my arms, liquid clay pouring down my tights and onto Mum’s platform shoes and pooling around my feet, spreading out in a shiny lake all over the floor.

  I’ve drilled a hole right through the bucket.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Mum’s voice in my head.

  This is the first time ever, in my whole life, that I’ve hit her genius-zone.

  I don’t know if this is a good thing.

  “Holy shit,” says Felix again, awestruck.

  I say, “Sorry. I have this tendency to get carried away with things too quickly.”

  Then I start to laugh.

  He’s still staring at me. I recognize his expression. It’s the same one I exchange with my sisters whenever Mum stumbles into a sinkhole or announces some new bizarre notion, bathed in starlight. Felix Waters thinks I’ve lost the plot.

  It’s terrifying. As scary as applying to SCAD and not getting accepted, or losing my virginity, or following in my mother’s footsteps (right off a cliff). The porcelain splashes look like The White Album. Unease slides its way into my stomach.

  I put down the drill and walk over to Felix.

  “Forget it,” I say as lightly as I can, putting my hands on his chest. His sweater is splashed and wet. “I’m an idiot. I can’t see in color, remember?”

  He nods, wrapping his arms around my waist, pulling me closer. “Yeah, about that…”

  “Don’t,” I say. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  I want to think about blue. The rich lapis lazuli of Renaissance paintings. The shiny cobalt glaze of Dutch delftware pottery. Yves Klein inventing a brand-new shade of it. Or literally anything except what I just did. What I am doing.

  I look around at all the Day-Glo sun that’s bouncing into the studio, illuminating weeks and days of dust and mourning and absence, then back at Felix. Then I stand on my tiptoes, press my mouth to his, and forget.

  * * *

  “So what happens next?” I ask.

  It’s a couple of hours later and we’re walking back to the studio from McDonald’s, a meandering route that skirts far away from the SCAD campus. There’s a new porcelain mixture resting in the studio, waiting for us. According to Felix, porcelain is like pancake batter—you can’t use it right away.

  “Not much until the kiln heats up,” says Felix, tipping the last fries into his mouth. “We can practice making molds. Or I brought a few along; we can make gr
eenware.”

  Greenware. This is what it’s called when a piece is dry but before it’s fired. After the first firing, it’s called bisque—when the clay melts and hardens into a ceramic. The final step is glazing and firing again. Then it’s finished.

  Felix and I are greenware. There’s still time to break down this tentative thing between us, whatever it is, and reshape it. But Ash and I are glazed. If I smash what we have, there’s no gluing back together the pieces.

  The neighborhood is quiet, wiped of last night’s noise and activity. The only movement is the breeze and a couple of pigeons fighting over Felix’s discarded McDonald’s wrapper. As we turn a corner, he lights a cigarette and asks, out of nowhere: “So, what happens next, with your mum?”

  “Nothing.” I stuff the last piece of hamburger into my mouth and tuck the wrapper into my pocket. “What do you mean?”

  “Well…” Felix prowls along, blowing out smoke. “I don’t know how someone going missing works. You wait it out?”

  “Pretty much.” We come to a stop outside a church and lean against the wall, looking into the graveyard. We’re next door to the Italian restaurant, and the enormity of it wallops me. I almost choke on the burger. Last night I was eating candlelit pizza here with Ash; today I’m kissing Felix. More than once. Who does that?

  “Sorry,” Felix tells the wall. “I thought … I don’t know. You’d have a funeral or a memorial, or…”

  “I’m not sure it would help.”

  “It wouldn’t.” Felix blows smoke over the wall. I watch his profile. “People say stuff like ‘It will get better with time’ or ‘You’ll feel better after the funeral.’ Closure or whatever. Because they want to believe it. But when my mum died it was shit, and it was shit the day before the funeral, and the day after, and it continues to be shit.”

  “It didn’t even help a little, on the day?” I ask, unsure if I want to know the answer.

  “Nope.” Felix clenches his jaw. “Sorry, but funerals suck. They suck donkey balls.”