The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  Victoria texts me that her Juilliard audition has been confirmed—it’s three weeks away. Cool, amazing, great, awesome, I text back, at rhythmic intervals. She will make it: there will probably be an interview, during which she will talk about her worship of the queen of modern dance, Martha Graham, and she will scatter charming details about her many well-worn copies of Blood Memory, Martha’s autobiography, and how she and her parents sought out Martha’s childhood home on one of their leisurely yet educational summer vacations.

  But none of that will even be necessary—the Juilliard people will know they want her for their school by the way she strides through the door and postures herself into a chair. They will see the streaks of music and joy and feeling left by her footsteps. They will say lovely, thoughtless things that will fall out of their mouths and crawl to the door. Her feet will turn out in the perfect way, and the Juilliard people will shove their smiles into the angle they make.

  Ah, damn it. Juilliard. They’re not even good enough for her.

  “She responded today,” Mom says. We’re on the phone after dinner. “Just once, for a half second. And no one saw it but me! I don’t even think the nurses believe me.”

  I sit by the window of my bedroom, braiding the fringe at the bottom of my curtains, the way I did when I used to talk to Bill on the phone. “What did she do?”

  “I touched her hand, and it moved. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to grab my hand or push it away. The nurses think I’ve been here too long and I’m making things up.”

  “Did they tell you that?”

  “No, no. I saw it their faces. They’ve started smiling at me more. Longer.”

  “Maybe they’re getting used to you.”

  The dogs are yapping, and Mom clunks around Abuela’s kitchen, and it’s so hard to imagine that apartment without Abuela in it. Who’s watering the flowers, who’s sitting on the big pink sofa? “I don’t think so, I don’t think so.” She takes in a deep, deep breath, as though she is sucking air all the way from Florida to San Juan. “Mercedes, when was the last time you talked to her?”

  “I guess about five days before the stroke.”

  “Did you tell her—did you—” She’s crying now. Shit. I hate hearing her cry. It’s long and loud and full of vowels, and sounds like she’s releasing something held inside for years. “Did you tell her that we love her and we are always thinking about her? Because I feel like I didn’t say it enough. I feel like it was one of those things I said at Christmas and on Papi’s birthday and no other time. Did you tell her?”

  “Yes,” I say. Has she stopped crying yet?

  “I didn’t tell you this. But I remember a couple weeks ago when you said you were sending her some of your pictures.”

  “Not pictures,” I say. “A painting.” It was a little square of canvas that I had painted with sort of a representation of the colorful buildings in Old San Juan. It was sloppy in places, the paint too thick. But I liked it, because it reminded me of Abuela, and I was pretty sure Abuela would like it, because it would remind her of me.

  “I’m sorry, mi vida.” She sniffles. “I didn’t send it. I took the envelope out of the mailbox. I couldn’t let her see it, if it was going to be anything like that food poisoning thing you have in your bedroom.”

  That thing. That useless thing that isn’t in the house anymore, that isn’t anywhere. That I created, and that now has completely ceased to exist.

  I am the god of my artwork. Unless, of course, my mother intercepts the US Fucking Mail.

  “Well, where is it now?” I ask.

  “At my office,” she sniffs. “Locked in my desk drawer.”

  “Shit, Mom,” I whisper. “Just . . . shit.”

  Angela finishes her evening practice with a note of finality that reminds me of the triumphant end of the Firing Squad album (track nine, “Always Something Left to Love,” with the winding refrain that makes you think it’s going to fade out—I hate songs that fade out—but then brings itself home), and then goes to her bedroom to do homework. I slip into the living room and sit on her makeshift piano bench, and I run my hands over the wood. Someone had loved this piano and polished its wood and kept it clean before it wound up on our lawn. I lean into it, rest my head on it, stare down its keys without touching them. Maybe it’ll yelp out a note, or guide me to play a song that’ll give me all the answers: about Victoria, about Abuela, about how to create something that’s more meaningful than a mood piece.

  Thrum-bum-bum. The sound is messy and tired. It’s the sound of a girl who doesn’t know how to play music banging on an old piano. The sound of my continued trying and failing. I run my hands down the keys, and I swear they un-tune themselves as I go. My eyes fill with tears. I can’t play, I can’t paint, I can’t ever be Victoria’s girlfriend. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

  The piano opens at the top, revealing a bunch of little pins and hammers that connect to the keys and their strings. Even the beauty of its pattern makes my chest ache. This is a work of art. This, too, can be destroyed.

  I pull at one of the pins, bending it, and then another and another. Everything inside me tightens as I do this. I shouldn’t have touched it, but to have its music out of our lives, even temporarily, is exactly what I need. If I could break the strings and crack the keys, I would. If I could tip the entire wretched thing over, I would do that too.

  “Mercy!”

  Angela’s face is cracked. Pink. Something essential about her is torn apart.

  “What?”

  “What? You look at me with your hands in my piano and say, ‘What?’” She rushes over and clutches both ends of the instrument. “Stop touching it! Are you trying to break it?”

  I take my hands out and tip the lid until it slams.

  “I can’t believe you,” Angela says. She sits at the piano and glares at me while her hands move up and down the keys. My face burns at the sound. The sound, the sound: it’s perfect. Nothing has changed.

  She’s still playing as I put on my purple sandals and grab a sweater and the keys to Mom’s car. She’s still playing as I stare at her from the front doorway and she doesn’t see me. She’s still playing as I stumble out into the yard, and I can think of only one place that has given me beauty and sense and comfort and light. Only one place to go.

  Firing Squad (track seven, “The Getting Is Good”) pleads at me from the stereo, and I take the curve toward the gulf. If this is where Lilia gets her inspiration, then maybe there’s going to be something here for me, too. I’ve always resisted using things like beaches and sunsets as backdrops for my art, but maybe ignoring them in favor of food poisoning is what’s gotten me to this point.

  The stretch of condo buildings comes into view. The normal ones first, with their dim orange lights burning in some of their windows and big sedans turning in and out of their parking lots. And then, yes—the building, mine and Lilia’s, pops up from behind one of the taller ones. It’s just as bright as it was the other night. My head hums like it did the morning that Angela played with Lilia for the first time, whirring with a pure sense of music, like I’m savoring the last beats of an amazing concert.

  Or maybe not the last ones. Maybe this is the beginning instead.

  A sign at the building’s driveway reads Red Mangrove Estate. I signal right and pull the car (my mom’s car) into the chipped parking lot. It’s the only one here.

  Because I left the house in such a rush tonight, I don’t have any of my usual art stuff with me. I feel naked without my sketchbook and at least a couple of decent drawing pencils. The only thing in my tote bag is a verb conjugation worksheet from German class. I dig a pen out of the glove compartment and sketch the basic outlines of the building. There is something about this place that wants to be captured. (Immortalized is too grandiose, considering the fate of the two Food Poisonings.) In one way, it’s a hulking mess of natural resources built when Florida was trying to cram as many rich senior citizens as possible along the shoreline. In another way
, I want people to know how the moonlight hits it, and how the waves sound beside it. And the building seems like it wants other people to know, too.

  Did it make you want something? Lilia had asked.

  I tuck my phone into my tote bag and my bag under my arm, and I leave the car and take a few steps toward the building. The light’s so bright I expect it to make a noise of its own, but the waves are still the loudest thing around. I’m closer to the beach than I’ve been in months, though there’s a thicket of weeds around the Red Mangrove Estate and the parking lot that I’d have to drag myself through to get down to the water.

  But that’s not where I want to go.

  I cross the parking lot. The windows’ light glints on my skin for the first time. I want—no, I need—to see inside, but a set of tall glass doors stands as a fortress to the building’s interior.

  A terrible, mechanical squeak above me. One floor up, a window is opening.

  “Hey, you made it.” Lilia pushes her face against the narrow space where she has wedged the window open. “Come on up to the second floor. The elevator’s broken. You’ll need to take the stairs.”

  The doors aren’t locked? I want to ask her, but she slams the window shut.

  The once-automatic center doors stay tight, but the regular door on the right pulls open. The lobby is quiet, but not silent—somewhere there’s a swish of air, as though the building is having its life breathed back into it. A lonely emergency light sears everything a dusty shade of yellow.

  The doors to the elevator are open, but the actual moving box that would take me upstairs is stuck, suspended between the lobby and the second floor.

  I used to have to go to my dad’s office on school holidays when I was little. I would bring a case of markers and draw on scrap paper pulled from Dad’s recycling bin. But as soon as he got up to go somewhere, I would escape. I would race to the stairwell and run up and down the stairs, stopping at each floor to poke my head out and see how the hallway on floor eight was different from the hallway on floor seven.

  The stairs in this building are in almost the same place as the stairs in Dad’s old office tower in Naples. It’s hot in here and the walls seem to be sweating dust. If Dad were to find me here, now, he’d have the same reaction he did ten years ago: Mercedes, why do you keep doing this? I was never a good troublemaker—I was predictable, and I had no fear.

  The door to the second floor swings open before I can grab the handle. Lilia, of course.

  For someone who clearly didn’t care for Vic’s grand entrance the other night, she sure likes making them herself.

  “Hey, Lilia.”

  She’s still wearing the paint-splattered dress from earlier. Her hair is down and her face is smudged and dusty, as though she’s had to crawl here. She smiles at me—Frida Kahlo again.

  “Well, you’re here. Do you want to get started?”

  seven

  “THIS IS YOUR studio?”

  Lilia pushes a small brown chair toward the center of the room for me. “It’s a temporary space.”

  “It’s very quiet,” I say. “My sister told me you had a commission.” My sister, my sister. I feel like, before I do anything else, I need to dig through the photos on my phone and find a picture of a grinning Angela to remind me that Lilia has done brilliant things for her, that Angela lives with me in a house owned by Rex, who rents to Lilia, and that Lilia’s space has a totally normal chair in it, waiting for me.

  I sit.

  “That’s true,” Lilia says. “What you’re seeing here is part of it.”

  But what am I looking at? There’s a canvas leaning against the wall, drying, but it’s not much more than the fuzzy blue and green beginning of some sort of landscape painting. Maybe the real art is the room itself—it’s an old living room, showing leftovers of the usual Florida pastels, but transformed into its own beast. It’s as if she’s taken Florida apart, squeezed out most of the pink and white and muted orange, and pieced this place together with the remains. The light pink carpet has been zigzagged with black lines, and the walls are murals, with the loose human forms on one wall giving way to abstract color and shape on another. Lilia is turned away from me now, so I dare to glance at the ceiling. Yes, it’s been transformed, too: soft primary colors resting underneath a layer of household items. Empty plastic soap bottles, a couple of toothbrushes, a hair dye box.

  “That’s not finished yet,” she says.

  I’ve been staring. I keep staring.

  “Don’t worry, they’re glued on well,” Lilia says. “And they’re clean. You won’t get dripped on.”

  Maybe she’s involved in some sort of condo building restoration project, like maybe the mayor of Sarasota realized they weren’t having much success filling the beachfront buildings with rich seniors anymore, so they decided to try to fill this place with . . . rich people who like conceptual art? Who knows.

  Lilia, figuring correctly that I plan to sit here and look around for a while, goes over to a laundry basket full of junk for the ceiling artwork and starts rifling through it.

  “What kind of adhesive did you use?” Oh my God, of all the questions I have about this place, the one that pops out is about glue.

  “Rubber cement at first, but I switched to superglue after a couple of the soda bottles fell.” She holds up a Stove Top stuffing canister and a Goya black beans can. “Which do you think should go between the boxes of laundry detergent?”

  “The Goya, I guess?”

  She faces the can as if she expects it to smile back at her. “Okay. Why do you think so?”

  “Umm, personal nostalgia, for one thing,” I say, “but also I guess because there’d be some contrast between the height of the laundry soap boxes and the Goya can.” Goya, though. Like the Spanish artist who started out painting royals and moved on to disturbing stuff like Yard with Lunatics. Maybe Lilia is pulling a trick on me. There are a couple of places in this room where a Goya-style lunatic could pop out. “But also, I don’t know, the sizes of the stuffing can and the boxes work well together.”

  “Mercedes.” My name said the Spanish way, with just the right shape of the vowels and the r. Hardly anyone says it that way. “So much of art is making choices, don’t you think?”

  “Sure.”

  “So which do you think?”

  “The Goya can.”

  “Great. That’ll give me a theme for the next section of ceiling.” She tosses the Stove Top container back in the laundry basket.

  I meet Lilia’s eyes, interrupting her from surveying her work again. “So, when you asked me if I was ready to get started, is this what you meant?”

  “Um. No.” A small smile crosses Lilia’s face. “You’re at the beginning of something amazing, amiga. When you’re here, you’ll be able to create what you most want to create.”

  “I’ve tried that before, though.”

  “You haven’t. Not like this.” Her voice is firm. She turns back around to her recyclables and art tools. “Anyway, the last time I saw you, you were kind of doing the opposite of painting, you know?”

  “I know, I know.”

  There isn’t a single person in my life who would understand why I’m here right now, and I wouldn’t even try to explain it, because, well, that’s my choice. A conversation at the Dead Guy with Victoria about this place would lead to many horrified expressions and questions upon questions. Victoria would ask why I don’t just take another painting class at Ringling. But I didn’t tell her much about that painting class I took while she was off dancing in Alabama. I didn’t tell her how my chest filled with rocks as I walked into class, and how I spent too much of my time in that classroom trying to get the air through the few tiny spaces. I didn’t tell her how the older woman sitting to my right asked to “borrow” a paintbrush, and still has it on permanent loan. I probably should feel the chest rocks right now, but I don’t. Lilia’s studio is cool and quiet, and if it expects anything of me, I think I might be able to live up to whatever that is
. If I really focus on sound and sort out the air, the conversation of the waves comes to me, their sentences long and overlapping.

  “And you know what, Mercedes?” Lilia concentrates on applying glue to the Goya can. “No one outside this building ever has to see what you create here. No one even has to know you’ve been here.”

  I want to ask her, Oh, and how does that work? But everything about Lilia is so sincere in this moment. The truth of her words sinks into my skin. No one has to see or know. Maybe I could run down the halls hollering about my love for Victoria. Maybe I could stage a piece of performance art about the destruction of the Food Poisoning pieces.

  These possibilities leak in and out. What I really want is what Lilia’s doing, her carefree sense of creation.

  I take in a breath. “So where do I paint?”

  She looks over her shoulder at me. “Go down the hallway here. Try the second bedroom on the left. Oh, and there’s plenty of paint and brushes and stuff in the kitchen.”

  I’m still sitting in the brown chair.

  “Look, I felt scared, too, the first time I came here. But I promise you’re going to discover something amazing. All you have to do is start. Think about what you’ve always wanted to paint, and you’ll be able to do it.”

  “I’ll try it.” I stand up. “But I can’t stay for too long.”

  In the kitchen, I grab a couple of colors of paint: red, blue, black, white. It’s thick latex wall paint, but you’ve gotta use what you have. There are two new brushes and a cup of water and a palette. Sitting by the sink is a brand-new roller, which I tuck under my arm, because why not? Lilia nods at me from the living room, and I walk down the hallway.

  The door to the back bedroom sticks at first, but then flings itself open. I flip the light switch and three dim bulbs hanging in a bent ceiling fan come on. How did so much brightness outside give way to so much dullness in here?

  I guess I could do my part to make it brighter.

  Think about what you’ve always wanted to paint.

  Well, there’s one thing to scratch off that list: symbols related to food poisoning. I flop down onto the carpet—thin and pink and rough. I hate trying to paint people’s faces, and their feet. I have never wanted to paint dogs or horses, whether realistic or abstract.