Harder

by Robin York

  “All day?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “You’re always making me do stuff on the weekends.”

  “I thought you liked doing stuff.”

  “Not all the time.”

  “We don’t do stuff all the time.”

  “Every weekend.”

  “You don’t want to do stuff with me?”

  She shrugs. Forks up her pancakes four or five inches. Splat.

  “Was it fun over with Rikki and Laurie?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “What movies did you guys watch?”

  “I don’t know what they were called.”

  “What were they about?”

  “There was one with these boys whose dad took them to an island and they killed him by accident.”

  “For real?”

  “No, it was just a movie.”

  Her tone of voice says I could not possibly be more of a moron.

  “Was it R-rated?”

  “How should I know? It was from Russia. There were subtitles so you could understand what they were saying.”

  “What was the other movie?”

  “It was like … I don’t know how to describe it. Kind of old-timey, but it wasn’t old, and there were boats and stuff? I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Rikki said it was nonrepresentational, which means it wasn’t really about anything.”

  “What’s the point of a movie like that?”

  “It’s what they were watching.”

  “I mean, is it supposed to be pretty to look at it, or some kind of commentary on the human condition, or what?”

  She shrugs.

  I wait a beat, but that’s all I’m getting out of her. “Did you have bad dreams over there?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. Why wouldn’t you?”

  “It was nice,” she says. “Their guest room has the softest blanket in the whole world, and one of those mattresses like on TV that’s made of foam. When you lay down on it you sink in like you’re going to sleep in an alien pod.”

  “I’ve never slept on one of those.”

  “It wasn’t very comfortable. But it was cool.”

  Having temporarily forgotten she’s supposed to be annoying me with the pancakes, she cuts off a sliver of a bite from the edge. Too sweet. I can tell by the way she chews slow and drinks a lot of water afterward.

  “You want me to do the pancakes over?”

  “Nah. I’m not that hungry.”

  “All right.”

  I get up to do the dishes. I place the stopper, squirt soap into the sink, watch steam rise off the stream of hot water coming from the tap. That was the longest conversation I’ve had with Frankie in ages, and I don’t want to wreck it.

  “West?” she says to my back.

  “Yeah?”

  “What did Mr. Gorham say?”

  A real question about a real thing, asked in a civil tone of voice.

  I could fucking cheer, it feels like such an accomplishment.

  “He said he’ll take care of things with this Clint kid. You won’t have to sit near him on the bus anymore, or in class.”

  Silence.

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Thanks.”

  I swallow over a lump in my throat. “I didn’t do much, but you’re welcome.”

  While the bubbles rise in the sink, I think about what else there is to talk about. About how to get from surviving to thriving. I haven’t got a clue, so I think about what Caroline might say.

  “He wants to get you doing more gifted and talented stuff.”

  “He always says that.”

  “It sounds like he thinks it’s pretty important.”

  “I don’t want to do it.”

  I turn to look at her, trying not to let on how much her statement worries me. My sister looks sallow under the kitchen lights. She’s sitting with her arms and legs crossed, a stubborn frown fixed on the far wall.

  “Sure you do,” I say.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t, okay?”

  “No, look—”

  And then I stop myself, because I can hear my volume rising, and no.

  Not going to be that man.

  I recognize the way she looks right now. I’ve felt that mask on my own face, that hard set to my jaw, that steel in my eyes. All I’m going to accomplish if I keep after her right now is to make her dig in further.

  I don’t know what her reasons are, but she’s got them. Me and her—we’re alike that way. So instead of giving her grief, I ask, “What do you want?”

  Her eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t want pancakes for breakfast, you didn’t want to move here, you don’t want gifted and talented—what do you want, Franks? You want to go back to Silt? You want to take art lessons after school? You want me to find this Clint kid and punch him in the face? What?”

  Her eyebrows are drawn in, her face sharp. “I want to go to my room,” she says.

  I close my eyes and breathe.

  This is what I’m getting from her right now, and it’s fine. It’s not what I want, but I can live with it.

  “I’m trying to do right by you,” I say. “You know that.”

  She nods, slowly.

  “So think about what I asked, and when you know the answer, tell me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” And then, as though it’s an afterthought—as though I haven’t been thinking about how to tell her all morning—I say, “Caroline’s coming over later.”

  “What for?”

  “To study. And she’ll probably stay for dinner.”

  “Good.”

  Frankie starts down the hall.

  “She might stay the night.”

  Frankie stops on her threshold. “Like, in your room?”

  I clear my throat. “Yeah.”

  “Gross.”

  Then she disappears, closes the door shut behind her, and I’m standing there like a jackass, unsure whether to count that conversation as a success or a failure.

  There’s snow flurries that afternoon. It’s too early for snow.

  I’m watching them fall in fuzzy, lazy swoops when I see Laurie come out of the house and go into his workshop.

  Frankie’s in her room. She came out a few minutes after our talk, asked me for a ruler and some paper from my art class sketchbook, and then returned to her cave. Later, she emerged again and said her pencils all sucked and she had to use the set I bought for my art class.

  I gave her one of them and the sharpener. She disappeared.

  Bored with my reading, I text Caroline.

  It’s snowing, FFS.

  She texts back, I noticed.

  When are you coming over?

  Little while. I’m writing.

  You think the roads are slippery?

  It’s melting, Oregon boy. Too warm for it to stick.

  Come over, then.

  What are you doing?

  Reading about Stalin.

  How’s Stalin?

  Megalomaniac. How are the Irish?

  Such a problem.

  Come over.

  I need to finish this draft.

  Come over.

  Yeesh.

  I grin.

  An hour?

  Two.

  Bah.

  You’ll survive, darling.

  Call me that later when I’m fucking you.

  In your dreams.

  I know, right?

  Quit texting me or I’ll never finish.

  See you in 1 hr. 58 min.

  GOD.

  Satisfied, I put the phone down. Frankie comes out with a paper in her hand.

  “What?” she says.

  “What what?”

  “Your face.” She points.

  I run my hand over my mouth and chin. I’m still smiling. “Caroline’s coming over,” I report.

 
“You told me that already.”

  “Yeah.”

  She shifts from foot to foot. “So I guess she’ll be over a lot now, huh?”

  “She might.”

  “You know, she was my friend first.”

  “She was my girlfriend first.”

  “But that was a long time ago.”

  “It was last spring.”

  “And you fucked it up.”

  “Who told you I fucked it up?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Like anybody needed to tell me.”

  “Yeah, well, I fixed it, so now we’re gonna have to share her.”

  “Will she still pick me up from school?”

  “I think you better ask her that when she gets here.”

  “She’s coming now?”

  “In a couple hours.”

  Frankie waves the paper at me. “I want to run over and give this to Rikki.”

  “Can I see?”

  She flips the paper over and shows it to me. It’s a portrait of a woman—glamorous, all hair and lips like a fashion model. It’s shaded and intricate, with decent perspective. Fucking impressive. Way better than her other drawings.

  “You made that?”

  “Rikki showed me how. You just make a grid on the magazine and then you make a bigger grid on the picture, and you draw it one square at a time. It’s easy. It’s not really like drawing at all.”

  She hands it to me, and I can see the faint gridlines now and some details that aren’t quite right—a squinty eye, the jewelry cartoonish where Frankie drew what she thought it was supposed to look like instead of what it actually looks like. Still. “This is amazing.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Franks—”

  “Can I take it over to Rikki’s?”

  “Yeah, if you get dressed first.” I give her the picture back. “Would you make me one next?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just to have it.”

  “I guess so. Sure.”

  “Great.”

  She leaves the room, and I hear a dresser drawer open. When she comes out, she’s wearing jeans—normal jeans, not huge ones—and a giant sweatshirt. She opens the front door. “You should draw your own,” she says. “It’s really easy. I could show you how.”

  I follow her to the door. “After dinner. I’d like that.”

  She smiles up at me.

  “Careful on the steps,” I say. “It’s snowing.”

  “Okay, Grandpa.”

  I watch her make her way down, one hand gliding over the powder on the railing. Then she’s off, running across the yard without a coat, snow falling in her hair.

  Laurie’s moving around in the space outside his workshop. I wanted to talk to him, so I throw on a coat and head down the stairs myself.

  I find him buried to the elbows in a big gray metal box on stilts, peering through a small glass window while a compressor hums loud over a low hissing sound that stops and starts, stops and starts.

  I don’t come out here much, and when I do it’s usually because I’m grabbing Frankie for hanging around too long. I don’t blame her for wanting to hang around, though. Laurie’s workshop is sweet. It’s like a barn crossed with a carport. Inside, there’s a space like a hayloft full of rusted-out pieces of scrap metal and a row of stalls that makes me think the place was a stable once. Each stall holds a different kind of supplies—wood and metal, ceramics, rubber, glass.

  The open-air part under the carport roof is where he does welding. There’s a big compressor just inside the door, propane tanks, face shield, huge gloves, I don’t know what-all else.

  I’m still trying to figure out what the fuck the story is with the gray metal box when the compressor kicks off and he steps back.

  “Hey, West,” he says.

  “Hey, Professor Collins.”

  “Laurie.”

  I can’t call him Laurie to his face. It’s not only because he’s a professor—it’s also because he’s my landlord and he’s got a Wikipedia page that calls him an internationally acclaimed multimedia three-dimensional artist.

  “What is that thing?” I ask.

  “Sandblaster.”

  “What are you blasting?”

  “Glass.”

  He withdraws his arms, unscrews the wing nuts on either side of the window he was looking through, and extracts a beige shape.

  “That’s … what is that?”

  “It’s a hammer.”

  “A glass hammer.” It’s almost entirely wrapped in masking tape, like a hammer mummy with just the round surface you hit with and the bottom of the handle showing. “What for?”

  “It’s a series. Tools. This one’s just a study—I have a commission to do a big one. But the logistics are a pain in the ass.”

  He takes his mummy-hammer inside the barn. I hear water running. I edge closer to the sandblaster, curious what it looks like inside.

  There’s a brass-colored nozzle attached to a hose laying on top of an open plastic grid. The nozzle must shoot sand at the glass, and then the sand falls off and through the grid to come out the hole in the bottom.

  Neat.

  Laurie comes back out drying his glass hammer with a paper towel, a roll of masking tape dangling from his fingers. Unwrapped, the hammer is aqua blue, shining, and I want to touch it. I want to wrap my fingers around the handle and pound something with it—which is all wrong, because it would shatter if I did that, and I’d be fucking disappointed.

  It reminds me of Studio Art last week, how Rikki was debating with Raffe about what art is. Raffe said art has no purpose—that if something has a purpose, it’s not art. And Rikki said the opposite. That the purpose of art is to make you feel or think, and a lot of the time both.

  Art provokes a response, she told us. Be provocative.

  “You want to try the sandblaster?” Laurie asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Give me a minute to mask it again.” He wraps tape over the polished surface of the hammer, leaving one strip around the handle bare. “So what we’re doing is blasting off the polish to give it a frosty surface.” The hammer is heavy when he hands it over. I touch the strip, cool glass beneath my fingertip.

  “Put it inside there,” he says. “Careful with it, though—I had that thing in the kiln more than a week.”

  “Just to cast it?”

  “Yep. You have to bring the temperature up slowly, hold it there, bring it back down just as slow. Otherwise it’ll crack, explode, God only knows. Glass is fussy. Took me eleven tries to get that hammer.”

  Eleven tries. A week in the kiln for each one. This thing is worth a fucking fortune in fuel and labor.

  I place it on the grating carefully, close the observation window, and push my hands into the gloves. They’re bulky. The nozzle is hard to hold on to. When I first pull the trigger, the hammer jumps from the compressed hit of air, and I almost drop it.

  “Good,” Laurie says. “Just do that back and forth evenly.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until it’s done.”

  It’s meticulous work, satisfying. After I get the hang of it, I relax enough to say, “I wanted to thank you for watching Frankie last night.”

  “No thanks necessary. It was fun.”

  “She behaved herself, I hope?”

  “Always,” he says. “And I was happy to see your truck wasn’t out here when I went to bed.”

  A minute passes. Laurie comments, “Rikki says you’re doing well in Studio Art.”

  “I’m spending three times as long on that class as everything else, just praying to get out of there with a B.”

  “She says you have an interesting mind.”

  “I have the least interesting mind in there.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I tilt my head toward the sandblaster. “This kind of stuff is easy for me. Machines, problems, figuring out one step after the next. But Rikki wants me to be creative, and I’m not.”

  Lau
rie seems to accept this. He’s quiet for a while. Then he asks, “You ever use a wheel to grind glass?”

  “No.”

  “Want to try?”

  I do.

  I want to see the kiln, too, and find out what it costs to run it for a week. Ask what happens when you scale it up—what kind of logistics problems does he mean? How’s he going to cast a giant hammer? Can he make it in pieces?

  “I’d better get back to my reading,” I say.

  I draw my hands out of the box and turn the art back over to the artist.

  He takes the hammer and holds it lightly with his fingertips, flipping it one way and the other.

  “How’s the factory?” he asks.

  “I’m giving notice. I need to find something where I’ll be home more with Frankie.”

  “You want to work for me?” he asks. “I need an assistant. Flexible hours. Decent money.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Stuff like this. Finishing. Polishing. Answering email or phone calls. Whatever I don’t feel like doing, to be honest. I’m behind on this commission. I could use the help.”

  “Shouldn’t you hire an art major?”

  He waves the hammer in dismissal, making me worry he’s going to drop it. “I’ve been trying, but I can’t find any who know fuck-all about tools. You seem like you know tools. And like I said, Rikki thinks your mind is interesting.”

  “I guess—yeah. I would. As long as you know what you’re getting. You need references or something?”

  He laughs. “You’re twenty-one years old, you’re raising your kid sister, studying your ass off, doing night shifts at a window factory. You could be an ex-con and I’d still probably hire you. Under the table, though, okay? I don’t want to deal with taxes.”

  He holds out his hand.

  I shake it.

  I mean, fuck, of course I shake it. Even if the money’s only so-so, the job’s perfect.

  But when his fingers grip mine, I’m not thinking about Frankie or the paycheck. I’m thinking about what’s inside that workshop.

  Compressors and welders and kilns, polishing equipment, all kinds of shit I don’t know the names of. Tools to learn how to use. Systems to work out.

  It takes me a minute to figure out why my heart’s beating so fast. It’s been such a long time.

  I’m excited.

  That night, Caroline’s in my bed.

  She sits with her back cushioned by my pillow, her hair down over her shoulders and her arms, tongue toying with her tooth gap, typing on her laptop.