The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  The door opens easily, and I’m relieved to see I’ll have good company. Edie the bartender is the only one here. She’s drying glasses by the sink.

  “Are you open for business?” I sit on a stool and rest my head on my arms.

  “For you, Mercedes Moreno? Sure. Make yourself comfortable.” She smiles and leans across the counter. “What can I get for ya today?”

  “Whatever’s your favorite, I guess.”

  “My favorite?” Edie says. “What if my favorite involves anise, and it turns out that licorice is your most hated flavor? You’ve gotta give me something to work with here.”

  “Ah, okay. How about something with orange juice?”

  “There you go,” she says. She’s not wearing her necktie tonight—just a red tank top and black pants.

  I figure I will sit up straight and attempt normal chatter until I burst. “So do they pay you well here?”

  Edie regards me knowingly. “Not too badly, considering the hours.”

  “Yeah. I work at the deli in my mom’s office building in the summers. It opens at seven. And I have to be there at six thirty, ready to toast bagels and such. You think I’d be tired of orange juice after all that, but I’m not.”

  “This is a version of a tequila sunrise,” she says, pouring something into a cocktail shaker. Our conversation takes a necessary break as she rattles it around in the shaker and then dumps it into a glass.

  “Thanks.” I take a sip. It’s like orange juice poured through a loudspeaker. It’s amazing. “Am I allowed to ask you questions?”

  “About the drink? Sure.”

  “No.” I sink back down again. “I mean about everything else. About how the Estate knows what people need.”

  “Ah. Well, give me a starting point, and I’ll see where I can fill in the gaps for you.”

  “I just—I don’t even know. Tell me how you started coming here. Did you see the windows all lit up one night, too?”

  “Oh! That’s a cool story. You’re going to think this is so blah, but I answered a job ad. It was almost two years ago. I was getting ready to go to college with my girlfriend to study photography—we’d both gotten accepted, we were going to live together, all that fun stuff. But, what do you know, she broke up with me a week before we were supposed to leave. I kind of snapped. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the same school as her, and I also couldn’t go back home, which is a long story. You bored yet?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good.” Edie turns away, drinks from a bottle of water, and then whirls back to me and smiles. “So yeah, we’re at the low point of the story. No home, no school, no job. But I’d worked in a restaurant in high school, and I applied here, hoping they’d overlook my lack of bartending experience. ‘Barkeeper needed for onsite establishment at residential property. Photography experience preferred.’ That was how the ad read.” Edie raises an eyebrow at me. “It wasn’t really lying.”

  I nod, and the amplified orange juice fills me with warmth.

  “I think I’ll have one of those, too.” She starts mixing and pouring again, every gesture sleek and easy, like Vic when she dances, like Angela and the piano. “Anyway, Lilia wasn’t the one who hired me. It was this woman named Mary-Louise. She’s gone now, but she was the one who showed me the ropes, gave me a place to sleep, gave me a space to work on my photos. Pretty sweet deal, I have to say—Mary-Louise gave me a great new DSLR, and an old manual camera, and access to a darkroom.”

  “And what did you have to do for her in return?”

  “Hey now.” Edie looks over her shoulder at me. “I like my job. Didn’t you see me take a lot of pride in mixing that for you?” She shakes up her own drink and pours it out. “Besides this, I used to do some projects for Mary-Louise, but now I’m free to work on my own.”

  “What happened to Mary-Louise?”

  “She got tired. That’s how she explained it to me. She went to Colorado and she was going to start doing nature photography.”

  “Because it’s pretty hard to take pictures of birds or whatever from inside an old building.”

  “Hey, we’re not trapped here. I could go out right now and do a shoot down the beach. But it wouldn’t be my best work, you know?” She tries her drink and smiles. “I heard you’re a painter. So think about those times when you’re painting and it’s going well and you’re so into the work that six hours could pass and people could be yelling at you and none of that would even register. Because of your work. Because your work is so important. Think about scrubbing the edges off that time. Imagine that you never need to have those days when you’re putting off getting started on a painting. And then imagine that you never need to stop.”

  The drink seeps into me, shooting warmth up and down my arms and legs.

  “So, it’s like anything is possible here,” I say.

  “Fast learner. You got it, girl,” Edie says.

  I finish my drink while she sits on the tall chair behind the bar and sips her own. The buzz of brilliant work, of art without an end, is everywhere around us. There are photographs on the walls of this room that I didn’t notice the last time I was here. Are they Edie’s? Are they Mary-Louise’s? Do they belong to the Estate in such a way that it doesn’t matter who took them? They are strange, close-up photographs of the faces of statues. Some are smooth, some are cracked. One shows nothing more than a big gray stone nose.

  “So, okay,” I say, “when you came here, Mary-Louise helped you out and you started a project. After you finished that one, what happened?”

  “Ah. I see where you are. I see it, exactly.” Edie puts her drink down and leans across the bar—toward me, sort of, but far enough away that I know there’s no possibility of us touching. “You’ll get another project. I don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll be perfect for you. Okay? It’ll be daring. You’ll love it.”

  Oh, never mind. She is touching me. My fingertips and her fingertips.

  “You’ll come back, right?” Edie asks.

  I’m pretty sure I will.

  seventeen

  I TRY TO push through the morning like Edie would, if Edie had a best friend whose before-school texts were noticeably absent, and if Edie had first-period studio art, and then German and human anatomy, all before lunch. I spend part of Mrs. Pagonis’s class with my eyes closed, willing the world of the Estate to show itself to me. But there’s a lot to shatter my concentration: morning announcements, the nature sounds CD with its occasional shrieking frogs, and the other members of the Orange Table asking me if I’m okay.

  I’m fine, I’ll be fine, I tell them.

  Between classes, I check my phone and an email from the Savannah College of Art and Design’s admissions department pops up:

  Dear Mercedes Moreno:

  Your admissions status has changed.

  In German, sitting at my desk not as Fräulein Marino but Fräulein Edie the Bartender, I resist checking SCAD’s website for my admissions status. Let it wait. Edie got as close as the symbolic front door of art school, then turned around and found a much more interesting door to pass through.

  Edie doesn’t have a best friend lurking around corners. Crossing the school from German to human anatomy, I don’t see Vic, but I feel her. She’s so very here, in this place where we met. I imagine every place on this hall that her favorite red flats have touched, and soon enough the floor is awash with red, a red that doesn’t love me back.

  Maybe the Estate was right.

  Maybe I should have kept on living in the reality it gave me.

  I have never seen Vic like this. Hair down, flip-flops, jeans (jeans! I forgot she owned any), and a T-shirt from a Broadway show she likes: A Little Night Music. She forgot her usual insulated bag of various raw foods at home, and so she appeared beside me in the lunch line, shooting a longing glance at the pulled pork and fries but emerging with a limp green salad drenched in orange dressing, and, in a move of great recklessness, an oatmeal raisin cookie.

  Her Juilliard au
dition is on Saturday in Miami. She and her mom are driving down on Friday afternoon.

  “Maybe I’ll save this for seventh period,” she says of the cookie as we take our usual places at the Dead Guy.

  I don’t know if it’s me or Juilliard who has broken her.

  “Gotta have some refreshments when heads start rolling,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Seventh period. Your European history class. All those poor folks who got beheaded.”

  She has no idea what I am talking about. Because I am not talking about ballet or modern dance or audition etiquette.

  I wish I had gotten a cookie. Maybe I will go back through the line and get one and leave her to her endlessly pirouetting thoughts. Also, it’s bugging me that every time I see the words on her T-shirt, I think of “No More Blues,” and then of the Firing Squad concert, which Vic knows nothing about. How do I even begin?

  “It’s going to be fine, Vic.”

  “Thanks.” She stabs a lettuce leaf, lets the orange dressing drip from it. “I have to confess, I don’t really know how to talk to you right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever you’ve got going on with Lilia and your project.” Vic’s voice is dry, about as far away from dearie as possible. “Like, the more I think about it, the more I get weirded out. Are you hooking up with her? Is that what all this is?”

  “What? No.”

  “Because you shouldn’t be afraid to tell me if—”

  “I’m not. Really.” I brazenly eat a fry in front of her. “Just forget it. Forget you ever met Lilia. Forget I ever took to you to the building.”

  “I’ll try.” She swishes her plastic fork around in the orange dressing.

  It’s a terrible waste. All that fucking energy and time I spent worrying about how to tell her, if I could really tell her, and now I’m trying to wipe it away. It’s better this way, though—I can live in my moment with her in the Estate, and she can have her audition and her “it’s showtime, folks” and New York City all to herself.

  “Vic,” I say, “you’ve been preparing your whole life for your audition. That’s what I want to talk about. You have, I don’t know, the spirit of Martha Graham behind you.”

  She smiles a little while folding a lettuce leaf in two. “Oh my God, if only.”

  “Too bad you don’t believe in spirits.”

  “I am willing to make this one exception. Oh, Martha Graham, please bestow your gentle ghostly presence on me this weekend in Miami. I promise there will be lovely weather and good food, if you’re into that sort of thing.” She flops backward onto the grass. She is pretty freaking into this. “Martha, Martha, I need you. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for this moment. I’ve annoyed my poor friend Mercedes half to death talking on and on about you. Surely you can take a few hours to visit me in my time of crisis!”

  The kids in the middle of the courtyard look over at Victoria’s performance, and I wave at them, even though they don’t know us anymore.

  Nobody looks at Victoria today in the hallway. (Nobody probably knows what A Little Night Music is. Well, maybe some of the theater kids, but Vic doesn’t hang out with them very often.) I wish I could grab her hand so that we could stride together down the center of the hallway to our fifth-period classes. Anyone who had delicate feelings about such things could move off to the side, but anyone else could fall in behind us and join our confident walk. We could sing the song from The Sound of Music. You know, “Edelweiss.” No, just kidding. And anyway, to try to hold her hand now wouldn’t reek of confidence, but confusion, which is the last thing she needs going into her audition on Saturday.

  I’m not messing this up. I’m not. We are steady and cheerful. We are saying hey to people we know from classes. We go into the girls’ room before fifth period, and Vic stares into the mirror, pulls her hair up and knots it around itself, and then turns away.

  Dear Mercedes Moreno:

  The Committee on Admissions has completed its review of applicants to the first-year class at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Following a careful consideration of your application, I regret to inform you that we cannot offer you admission to the college at this time.

  The only dusting spray in the house is the lemon-scented stuff Mom has always cleaned with. I used to think it smelled terrible, but today it’s okay. Nostalgic. I knew the lemon spray before I knew of SCAD. I knew the lemon spray before I knew Victoria. I can carve out a space in one of those memories that’s little more than a frozen moment: Angela and me sitting on the couch eating tostones and watching cartoons while Mom dusted.

  As the lemon spray hits the piano, I swear the smell gets better.

  “Hey, Angela!”

  I know she is in the next room doing homework. A page turns in a book.

  “Ange, come sit here with me.”

  Another page.

  I perch on the edge of the dining chair that has persisted in being Angela’s piano bench. I position my hands at the keys, letting my fingertips touch them, in that way that makes anyone seem cool and graceful. Moonlight Sonata comes to me in my head, the beautiful way Angela made it emerge in this room, a fully formed thing with skin and hair and guts.

  It doesn’t work the same way for me. I run my hands over the keys, and the song in my head is still Moonlight Sonata, but the sound from the piano is something that would make Beethoven run away crying.

  “Ugh, Mercy.” Angela nudges my shoulder. Her way of saying, Let me show you how it’s done.

  She sits down and does it, and it is as beautiful as last time. And yet, that wasn’t enough to bring her inside the Estate. This morning, I tried to tell her how Lilia and Edie explained the possibilities of the Estate, but she gave me a glum look and walked away before I was done. I want her to know about it so badly. And selfishly, I want to see what she can do when she’s there.

  “What if it’s not a song?”

  Angela stops playing. “What?”

  “What if the key to get you inside Lilia’s studio isn’t a particular song? What if it’s more like a feeling?”

  “Well, you’re the expert,” Angela says.

  “I’m not,” I say. “I mean, Lilia wants me to be, but I’m not. I feel like I’m such an impostor, thinking I can figure anything out about the damn place.”

  I hit the top of the piano with my palm. And again.

  “Okay, okay.” Angela grabs my hand and holds it down. “Tell me what you know. Tell me what you think I should do.”

  Out on our street, it’s almost six p.m. and people are coming home from work. A pickup truck hauling ladders passes, then a minivan I’ve seen before, one that’s covered on the back with Disney magnets and stickers. People are debating pizza or hot dogs in their kitchens. At some point today, Rex must have pulled our garbage cans back up to the house from the curb. The sun’s going down and searing the gray clouds orange at their edges. I know this place so well, but sometimes I feel like an impostor here, too. Not Mercedes or Mercy or Dearie or Fräulein Marino, but rather someone who is caught between two worlds, the one in my head where I am my true, whole self, and the one out here, where I’m always waiting behind a canvas or sketchbook, where no matter how much I wave and jump around and call attention to myself, I still feel like I’ll always be watching everyone else live.

  I will probably feel like that anywhere.

  Except, perhaps, the one place where I can be the best version of myself.

  I keep thinking I could cry. My hand hurts, and there’s a stuffy cloud of sad gathering behind my face. But maybe I’m mistaking the feeling. Because it hits me like a deep, low note of the piano, a thrum that fills my chest and head, that this is a feeling Lilia knows. This is the Estate’s magic—either it has held on to me, or I’ve somehow grabbed on to it. It’s like a helium balloon, bobbing above me, tethered to me by a thin string in my hand. I can keep holding.

  “What do you want most?” I ask my sister. “Like, if you could have one perfec
t moment right now, what would it be?”

  “Abuela would wake up,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, “but what else?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I mean, yeah. But what about the other parts of your life? What’s something you wanted long before Abuela got sick?”

  “I don’t know.” She taps a few keys at the lower end of the piano. “Friends?”

  “You have friends. You were hanging out at Hannah’s place the other day.”

  She gives me a weak smile before staring down at the keys again. “Well, even someone who called you a bitch at the beginning of the year can’t turn away the poor girl whose grandma is dying.”

  “Hannah’s the bitch, then.”

  “Not really. I wasn’t a good friend to her. I get, you know, closed off and weird sometimes.” She sweeps at her bangs. “Anyway, you know what? I don’t feel like telling you all this. You asked me, that’s what I want. Friends, to do friend stuff with. Maybe one of them would like to play music.”

  “Shit, that’s totally what I forgot to do.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair.”

  Angela watches me run out of the room and come back with water and a comb and a towel and scissors. She sits with her back to the piano, and I stand facing her and comb her long, dry bangs into wet black stripes.

  “Stay still,” I say.

  “You know what I want?” she says, her lips barely moving. “I want to have a friend like Victoria is to you. Someone who likes being in the same space as you.”

  “Mm-hmm.” It is harder than I imagined to cut bangs. They’re slippery, and they hold a lot of responsibility. On someone like Angela, with fair skin and thick black hair, they’re the first thing you notice.

  “But it’s one of those things that feels greedy to want,” Angela says. “I don’t even know how to begin. What do I do, like, go up to someone in the cafeteria and declare my undying friend-loyalty?”