The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  Dedication

  For Tricia

  This book exists because of two sisters,

  a long summer, and a basement.

  Contents

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Lauren Karcz

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  one

  THE PIANO APPEARS on our lawn the week after our mom left. I am swigging orange juice in the living room, trying to decide whether to take Mom’s car to school. Then I pass by the window and there’s the piano, sitting on the grass, straight-backed and confident as a Marcel Duchamp sculpture on display at MoMA.

  I drag Angela from the kitchen out to the yard.

  “Well, you said you wanted to learn to play,” I tell her.

  “I didn’t think it would happen like this,” Angela says. She taps the key farthest to the right, and it dings out a little note. It sounds like a shy kid speaking out in class for the first time. She plays a few more, and they’re clearer, louder, coming at us in layers. A car drives by and honks at the three of us: the piano, my sister, and me.

  “Mercedes, try it,” Angela says.

  I clunk my hands down in the middle of the piano. A couple of friendly Florida lizards scatter across the driveway in response to the mess of sound.

  “Brilliant,” Angela says. She looks at the keys again, and I think she’s getting ready to stay there and compose a symphony, or maybe a rock opera. I recognize the look on her face as a feeling I had once, and that I wish like hell I could get back: the feeling of being on the brink of creation. It’s heady and sweet, a little like love in the way it fills up your chest, but less dangerous. I mean, less dangerous until you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.

  Angela looks at me pleadingly, and really, what are we going to do, tape “lost piano” signs around the neighborhood? No way.

  The door to the other half of the duplex creaks open and shut, and we’re in the presence of Rex, our neighbor and landlord, a bearded industrial freezer of a man who never likes to be left out of the activity of the neighborhood, whether that’s a backyard cookout or the police stopping by the house two doors down again or the admiration of an upright piano.

  “Morning, ladies.” Rex is wearing his early spring uniform: swim trunks and an FSU T-shirt under a bathrobe. “You need some help with that?”

  “Actually, yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”

  Rex steadies himself behind the piano and pushes it off the rough grass and onto the driveway, where it rolls unevenly to our half of the duplex. Angela, with a massive grin on her face, holds the front door open as Rex angles the piano through the doorway. We both know Rex wants to ask—he wants to ask almost as much as we want to tell him, No, we have no idea where it came from, but it’s a nice distraction, isn’t it?

  “Just, I guess, anywhere in the living room is fine,” I tell him.

  Rex surveys the living room from his vantage point as the tallest thing in the house. Angela and I haven’t moved anything in the room since our mom’s fevered departure for San Juan, and it still holds all the souvenirs of her: mascara-stained tissues on the end tables, a paperback thriller wedged open on the arm of the recliner, her phone charger plugged in and sucking energy from the air. A week ago, all of this was kind of a darkly comic still life about Mom being away for a few days, but last night, she called and told us that Abuela’s condition had worsened. I couldn’t sleep after that—I sat in this room and stared at every little thing she had left behind. It seemed like the most important thing to do at the time.

  “Against the window,” I say.

  “The window?” Angela and Rex say together.

  “Come on, we never look out of it.”

  “I do,” Angela says. “How about on the other wall? We can just move the chair somewhere else.”

  “Wait! Don’t move that chair. I sit in it all the time.” I pick up the paperback from the arm of the chair and hold my mother’s place on page 153. The hero is trapped in a basement and is trying to figure out how to slip through the one thin window at the top of the wall. There’s a twist, isn’t there? Oh yes, the wall itself is weak. He punches at it, then slams a wooden chair into it, and the corners crumble, and he is free.

  “Can you please not smoke in Mom’s car?” Angela says. “She’s going to know.”

  “She already knows.” I hit the button that opens all the windows at once. “And anyway, I might have already quit when she gets back.”

  We’re at that perfect time of year when Florida isn’t dressing up in dusty beads of humidity or ten-minute monsoons. The air is weightless and the morning haze that usually hangs over our street has been replaced with a bright, clear picture of what lies ahead. Like a daytime version of an Edward Hopper painting. Like the world cracked open at the horizon and saying, Oh hey, Mercedes and Angela Moreno, welcome to your day! And we can try to get to that place, but it will hide from us again and again.

  “Time for a Victoria detour?” Angela asks.

  “I already texted her. How can we not do a Victoria detour when we’ve got this sweet ride?” I knock my fist against the plastic body of the gray Ford Focus. Yeah, so Mom’s car is nothing much, but it doesn’t grumble on start-up like my old Pontiac (Mom’s old Pontiac) does, and the stereo system is a thousand times better.

  Angela laughs hard, a big laugh that makes me nostalgic for last week, and I pull my hand back in the window and smoke a little so that my cigarette doesn’t burn itself out in the perfect air of the day.

  Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who famously grabbed a urinal, painted his pseudonym on the side, called it Fountain, and displayed it as art, once decided to bottle the air of Paris. 50 cc of Paris Air, he called it. The first bottle broke—artistically, I’m sure—so he bottled the air again, and displayed it in Philadelphia. Dude could do anything and call it art, or not-art, or anti-art, and people would come to see it. And he could capture a day, a place, a breath.

  At a stoplight, I grind out the cigarette and tuck it away in the Ford’s clean little ashtray. Angela nods at me.

  “I’m surprised Mom didn’t suggest we stay at Victoria’s house,” she says. “We could probably live in the back half of the house and nobody would notice for a week.”

  Yeah, I’ve thought of that myself, maybe more than a few times, but I’m not going to say so. Officially, Vic is my best friend, and that’s it. “Her house doesn’t have a piano, though.”

  Victoria is quiet, because she knows about Abuela Dolores in the hospital in San Juan, and because she knows our mom’s going to be away for a lot longer than planned, and because she probably knows that we don’t know how to feel about any of this yet. She’s good like that, most of the time. And maybe Victoria senses, like I do, that if Angela and I unsettle the air too much, Abuela could die.

  Angela is in the back, her biology book yanked up in front of her face. Vic, sitting in the front, hasn’t put on her sunglasses yet, and her dark hair is down, settled i
n still waves on her shoulders. She comes from a small family where the only people who ever die are the tangential ones: the great-great-uncles in Brooklyn, expiring quietly under a blanket of smiles and stories.

  “Still alive?” she finally says.

  “Who?” Angela asks. “Us, Mom, or Abuela?”

  “All of the above,” Vic says. She glances at me sideways, our eyes lock, and then the sunglasses go on.

  “All accounted for,” I tell her.

  “I can’t even believe you guys are going to school today,” Vic says. “You should stay home and work on your painting, Mercedes.”

  I wanted to see you, that’s all. I could tell her this, because the sedan in front of us is taking its sweet time making this left turn—and then, God, if she liked that I’m only here because she is, we could take Angela to school and head back to the Moreno half of the duplex for the day. Sure, she would insist on getting to her dance class on time, and I’d still have to sneak back into school later to pick up Angela, but we’d have the whole morning. All that time. And the drive to the dance studio, her bare feet gripping the curve of the glove compartment, her hand lying in that brilliant space between our separate gray seats, her fingers playing at the place I burned the fabric with a long-ago Parliament Light before I understood what it was like to have her in the car with me.

  “You always say you paint better at home,” she says.

  I tug at my hair instead of diving for another cigarette. She’s tied tightly into her trench coat, and now her hands curl around the red purse on her lap. I know she wants to say the right thing, the thing that comforts and sympathizes, the thing that cat-nuzzles your leg and then walks confidently away. But if she knew what that was, she would have said it already.

  “Yeah, well, I have a German quiz today.” I think maybe I do. “And I really do need to go to art class. We’re supposed to hear about the county show.”

  I’m the last one to get out of the car, because I’m double-wrangling my art toolbox and a big sketch pad. Victoria pops up behind me and grabs the toolbox, which is the same red as her purse, and she swings it by her side as though it belonged to her all along. I shut the car doors lightly, as though I’m placing a new piece of pottery into a kiln. Maybe I’ve kept a little bit of this morning in the car. We’ll probably need whatever leftovers we can get by this afternoon.

  Angela trundles ahead to the science wing. Vic stops swinging the toolbox and falls into step with me as we head up to Sarasota Central’s main entrance.

  “You look like you’re freaking out.” Vic gives me a small smile, like she’s not sure I can handle a full one. “Name a place.”

  “Umm . . . the Hospital del Maestro in San Juan.”

  “Okay, fine. How many people at the Hospital del Maestro are saying some form of the word shit right now?”

  My mother is one of them, if I know her at all. “How many people,” I begin, “at the Hospital del Maestro are saying some form of the word shit because they can’t remember how they wound up in the emergency waiting room?”

  Vic hands my toolbox to me as she considers this. She unbuttons her trench coat—it’s already getting warm. She has a purple dress on underneath. “I pass. Everything I can think of is gross. Start a new one. Same place.”

  “Okay. How many people at the Hospital del Maestro are having an out-of-body experience right now?”

  “Hey, let’s not get supernatural here.”

  “The unwritten bylaws of this game say I can do whatever I want.” I try to make a grand gesture, Abuela Dolores–style, with my free hand. “Infinite possibilities!”

  “We know them all, don’t we?” Vic says.

  “We do,” I tell her.

  two

  THE TABLES IN the art room are color-coded, for no reason besides Mrs. Pagonis’s keen and pointless interest in organization. Since I started taking studio art at the beginning of junior year, I’ve been sitting at the Orange Table with Gretchen Grayson—that’s almost four hundred school days of not becoming friends with Gretchen Grayson. This semester, we’ve been joined by a dude with the name of Rider, who is always shooting meaningful glances in my and Gretchen’s direction, in some misguided attempt to become the Rebellious Artist Boyfriend of one of us. I kind of want to tell him, I’ve tried your kind. Have you ever heard of Bill Stafford, former king of the SCHS unaffiliated Smoking Corner?

  Gretchen doesn’t notice Rider’s look today, but she is up to her elbows in art mess, as though she’s been here since dawn.

  I open my sketchbook and try drawing the piano, but the outline is stubborn about being a misshapen rectangle. I try shading the left side with a light brown, but it starts to look muddy and I let the half-brown rectangle chill out on my sketch pad rather than turn it into something worse. Screw it, I just want the piano to tell me how to draw it, to start playing itself at night in a way that says, yes, make me abstract, make my corners rounded, give me snakes as keys.

  “Snakes,” I whisper at the sketchbook.

  “What?” says Gretchen.

  “Nothing.”

  Gretchen doesn’t flinch when I drop the brown pencil on the table and lean back in my chair. She has been concentrating hard for the last few weeks on the canvas in front of her. As awful of a day as yesterday was, what with the news about Abuela hitting me like a Ford Focus to the chest, at least I spent first period being proud that I had deciphered the subject of Gretchen’s picture, finally. It is: Gretchen Grayson, as a yellow lizard, surrounded by a bunch of anthropomorphic green lizards in some sort of ornate dining room. I figured out the yellow lizard represented the artist herself when a couple of telling details appeared yesterday: Gretchen’s pearl flower-shaped earrings, and one of her ever-present gray cardigans.

  I think I hate the picture, especially this almost-finished version of it. I hate how, even with the earrings and the cardigan, the yellow lizard doesn’t match Gretchen at all. I hate how the green lizards are staring directly at the viewer. And I hate how I can’t put a real word to how it makes me feel.

  I have a hard time figuring out the truth of simple things sometimes, like whether I prefer coming to studio art over, say, second-period German, with Herr Franklin and his persistent butchering of my name (I have been “Fräulein Marino” since August). I’m pretty sure art class is the winner, but a couple of months ago I was pretty sure I could have completed a shading assignment, too.

  Mrs. Pagonis cranks up her favorite nature sounds CD and sits on her paint-splattered stool at the front of the room. She’s got one of her half-artsy, half-suburban outfits on again: a bright patchwork jacket on top and mom jeans on the bottom. Once I saw her at the Publix with her two kids in a shopping cart. Once I saw her smoking in her car while she was leaving school. Gretchen adores her.

  “I want you to continue your shading projects today and tomorrow,” she says. “Also, I want you to think about what you’ll want to enter in the juried show held by the county this year. You’ll see I’ve posted the guidelines for the show next to the whiteboard, along with photos of the winning pieces from last year, in case you need some inspiration.” She shakes her fingers at us, down-came-the-rain-style, I guess to convey the inspiration that some of us hope to get.

  I am the first one up to the whiteboard.

  The guidelines are the same as last year—basically, art your heart out, kid, and submit your best damn work for display. It can be painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media . . . pretty much anything except performance art.

  A photo of Food Poisoning #1 is taped to the wall under the guidelines.

  It’s weird seeing it that way. It’s a big painting, and here it is reduced to a four-by-six matte photograph. It’s a little like the first time I went to the Salvador Dalí museum in St. Pete and discovered that some of the paintings that looked so huge and regal in my Dalí book were actually small enough to fit on the wall of my bathroom.

  Food Poisoning #1, I still have at home. I used to have it on my wall, bu
t I got tired of my mom telling me how much it scared her, so I took it down and put it behind the headboard of my bed.

  “How’s the follow-up piece going, Mercedes?” Mrs. Pagonis asks.

  “It’s coming along,” I say. Whereas #1 is hiding in my bedroom, #2 is hanging unfinished in the laundry room.

  What’s weird about seeing Food Poisoning #1 again, photograph or not, is that sometimes I don’t feel like I created it. It may as well be Rider’s work, or Mrs. Pagonis’s, for that matter. I don’t know how the artist made the seemingly clashing colors work together so well. I can’t figure out what sorts of brushstrokes were used to make the paint look so alive. I can’t tell what it’s about exactly, but looking at it makes my stomach churn and makes my feet warm and my knees cold, so I think it’s doing whatever it was meant to do.

  Whatever I meant it to do.

  Back at the Orange Table, Gretchen Grayson is shading, shading, shading the background with hues of brown and yellow, and Rider darkens the lines on an intricate pattern. And on my sketch pad—ugh, I left it open and now Gretchen and Rider have probably sneaked smiles at each other about my ridiculous piano drawing. I flip to a new page because the promise of something else is better than the mess I’ve left. I sketch and shade easy things: Gretchen’s metallic purple water bottle, the pale peach face of the Moreno-McBride duplex, the red purse sitting on my best friend’s lap.

  If I ever doubt the existence of a higher power, all I have to do is look at my eyeball. My driver’s license says my eyes are brown, but really, there are a hundred colors in there, and everything is working in balance to let me see myself in this soap-streaked mirror in the girls’ bathroom. I’ve never been sure if the Creator of the Eyeball has a plan for me, or for Abuela or Vic or anyone else, but I feel like she or he or it gives us our possibilities.

  Next to me, Vic pulls back her hair. “Psst,” she says. “Ansley Lyman kind of looked at you when she left a minute ago.”

  But I’m pretty sure she didn’t. And even though I appreciate Vic’s acceptance of my attraction to guys and girls, I don’t know where she gets the idea that I might be interested in someone like Ansley Lyman.