The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  “That’s not a terrible idea.” Oops, the scissors move when I laugh. Snip. A half-inch chunk of one section of hair falls into my hand. I try to comb the shorter section under the longer hair, and mix up the strands so that the shorter ones are hidden within longer ones. “Keep thinking about it. And I’ll do the same.”

  Because I will.

  Because I think this could be her moment—and mine, too. This could be what gets her into the Estate.

  After dinner, in my own bedroom, sitting under the Three Musicians picture, I keep writing and erasing texts to Victoria. What’s up?, the usual standby, looks so self-conscious sitting there by itself on the screen. Delete. I cut Angela’s bangs—one of those things I normally wouldn’t think twice about telling her, but right now seems too invasive, for everybody involved. Like, why am I trying to nudge the everyday blahness of my evening into her life?

  Better to go with something practical.

  Do you need a ride tomorrow?

  Her thoughts, her hesitations, appear as a series of three pulsing dots on my screen.

  Vic: Nah my dad will take me

  Me: I want to hang out with you before you leave for Miami.

  Vic: I really don’t have much time . . .

  I’m thinking. She’s thinking. I am about to dive back into practical suggestions of dates and times that we might be able to see each other, which we haven’t done in years. We haven’t needed to. I know her life, and she knows mine.

  Vic: Maybe dinner tomorrow?? My mom is making cauliflower crust pizza

  Me: Uhhh (deleted)

  Me: Really? With your parents? (deleted)

  Me: Wait, the crust is made of cauliflower? How does that even work? (deleted)

  Me: [pizza emoji, trash can emoji, pigeon emoji] (deleted)

  Me: Sure.

  I turn off the lamp and lie on the bed with my hands behind my head. The house phone rings in the kitchen and I don’t move to answer it, figuring that Angela will run for it in a minute. Yep, off she goes. Her talking-to-Mom voice appears, but I can’t tell from what she’s saying if there’s any good or bad news. Abuela in the hospital in San Juan. Me in my bed here in the Moreno-McBride-Solis house of oddities. And Victoria in her room across town, probably getting ready to go to sleep in her big iron bed, underneath her Broadway posters and that one picture of a steely-eyed Martha Graham on her wall. I don’t know why, but I like the mental image of the three of our beds lined up in a row, and all of us asleep, breathing through our dreams in succession.

  “There’s an email from Mom.” Angela is about ten steps ahead of me in the getting-ready-for-school dance. Her cereal is the bow to the morning, while my messily peanut-buttered toast is the creaky warm-up. The tingle of magic from last night is gone, and I don’t know how to will it back.

  “Is she still annoyed at me?”

  “If she is, she’ll remember it in a couple days. She just wanted to let me know that Tío Mario is getting ready to take over.”

  “She’s coming home?”

  “That’s her plan.”

  “And that doesn’t piss you off? She’s supposed to be there. God.”

  “I want her to come home, Mercy.” A couple of weeks ago, she would have been teary, or close to it, while saying this. Now, she is dry-eyed and direct. “She can’t stay on leave from work forever. And I miss her. I don’t like any of this anymore.”

  Since we’re not picking up Victoria today, there are still fifteen minutes before we need to leave for school. Angela realizes this too, and shuts herself in her bedroom to finish her cereal. I can’t believe I didn’t see that Lilia was the latest in a line of people to brush off Angela after Angela has given so much of herself. A line of people that includes Dad, Hannah, and me.

  I take one more bite of the peanut butter toast and march over to the front door. Maybe Lilia is home, maybe she isn’t. Maybe I’ll tell Rex everything I know about his tenant. Maybe I’ll inform Lilia that I’m not doing any more projects for her until she starts the piano lessons with Angela again. Maybe I’ll sit on the floor of Rex’s living room, among the pictures of dead redheaded folk, and I’ll wait until Lilia gives me an answer or I come up with one myself.

  On the floor of the foyer, something white gleams up at me. The sketchbook Lilia gave me the other night, the one in which I drew the perfect picture of Abuela’s old house that could never have been drawn anywhere else.

  I flip the cover open.

  The house, the swaying palms, the little goat. They’ve all survived.

  Somehow, Lilia kept the Estate’s magic intact. Somehow, she got this picture out.

  I clutch the sketchbook to my chest. It’s clear Lilia knows what she’s doing.

  It’s a beautiful morning, and I bet it’s the same or better in San Juan and I’m thankful that Abuela is living through it even if she doesn’t know she is. Angela throws her stuff in the backseat of the Ford, but I need an extra minute to be sure that my sketchbook has a comfortable place to sit. Every time I open it to look at the picture of the house, there’s a strange, sweet pressure in my chest. I can’t even talk about it—not yet. It’s a newly cut feeling that still needs sanding down.

  One thing is that I’m glad I didn’t tell Angela about the impromptu Firing Squad concert. Talk about a way to make her never want to see the floral-dressed one again.

  “Hey, you’ve been killing it at the piano lately, you know that?” I say to Angela over the music she keeps turning up on the Ford’s stereo. “You should come back to Lilia’s studio with me before Mom comes home. I feel like things are different now.”

  The speakers crackle. Angela switches the stereo off.

  “I don’t think anything’s different,” she says.

  We pull into school and I grab a spot at the back of the lot. Some of the Smoking Corner citizens wave to me, and I smile back out of instinct, but I doubt any of them can see it. Angela falls into step with me on the walk to the front doors.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I’m sure we won’t even have a piano in a few days. You think Mom’s going to let us keep it in the living room?”

  “I guess we’ll see.”

  When she returns, our mother is going to feel like a visitor in her own house. It’s our house now, isn’t it? Rex pays the mortgage, and Mom’s name is on the rental agreement, but it’s really mine and Angela’s and, in a way, Lilia’s. It’s our new habits, our new rules. It’s how we’ve reversed Mom’s cooking traditions and now we have enchilada sauce from the jar but homemade mac and cheese. It’s how I always fall asleep alone in Mom’s bed but sometimes find that Angela has crept in halfway through the night. It’s when a couple of Vic’s annoying shirts from Alabama popped up in our laundry. It’s Angela not asking a thing about Vic, but seeming to know enough. It’s all that, and the damned piano.

  Mrs. Pagonis loves the house sketch. “You’re really coming along, Mercedes,” she says brightly, and I want to ask her if she’d like to go out to the parking lot and have a smoke and talk about this strange place I know, this studio where every beautiful and terrifying thing seems possible. But I won’t.

  “It’s cool,” Gretchen says after Mrs. Pagonis has moved on to the Green Table. “Is that a real place?”

  “It was my mom’s house when she was a kid.”

  The story of the picture threatens to come out of me. But I push the drawing closer to Gretchen and let it tell her as much as it can.

  I flip through my old sketchbook, the one that holds my art-class history, some of which looks a lot like Gretchen’s. The shading assignments, the attempted still life, the practice on perspective. I’m tempted to tear the house picture out of the new sketchbook and place it in here, as if to say, yes, this is who I am now. But the picture seems too fragile for that, as though handling it in the wrong way could make its pencil lines retract from the paper, back into space.

  Gretchen smiles and hands the picture back to me, laying the sketchbook lightly on the palms of my hands as though
she knows how important it is. I will fill this sketchbook, maybe inside the Estate, maybe here in art class, maybe somewhere else entirely, but I will do it. I turn each page—blank and white, full of possibility. A zillion people have said that before me, but I think at last I understand.

  Wait—there’s a page in the center that has a telltale Sharpie marker stain on it. I flip another page to find what bled through. In one corner of the page, there is neat handwriting in bright blue.

  If you still want to work here, come see me. I need you to do a self-portrait.

  Ah. Edie was right. I have my new project.

  eighteen

  MRS. CABALLINI HAS never not been worried about me.

  “Are you sure you want a second cup of coffee?” She squats beside me and looks straight into my eyes.

  “Oh, yes,” I tell her.

  Meanwhile, Victoria, the refuser of dessert and coffee, is sitting in the chair across from me, drinking water as though it is the only thing holding her together. Her hands tremble and her face has almost no color. She has the Juilliard flu.

  “Hey, Vic,” I say, “let’s go over your outfits for the trip one more time.”

  She takes several long seconds to realize what my motivation is here. At least she doesn’t say something like, Why would I need fashion confirmation from someone who always wears the same pair of purple shoes? I take my coffee to go and we head to Vic’s room.

  She flings herself onto the bed, and I settle on the desk chair, which is willow-tree-draped with clothes of all kinds. I set the cup of coffee—which, okay, I didn’t want or need—on top of a stack of books on the desk. Paperback novels, probably her comfort reading for the trip.

  “You haven’t packed, have you?” I say.

  “I haven’t even gotten the suitcase out of the closet.”

  “That’s commitment.”

  “I know.” She smiles. “I keep thinking about what I would be doing this weekend if I wasn’t going to test the effects of extreme stress on my nerves in Miami.”

  “I don’t know.” I try to lock eyes with the picture of Martha Graham on the opposite wall, but it’s impossible. Martha is staring at a point in the distance, and she’s waiting for that point to move, but I don’t think it ever will. “Maybe at practice?”

  “No. That’s what I mean. Even you can’t imagine me out of that world—this world, I mean.” She gestures around herself, at the stack of dance clothes topped with pointe shoes next to her on the bed. “I can’t be anything but this.”

  “You can if you want. No one’s stopping you. I mean, your parents might be sort of pissed, but they’d get over it.” This is true. If Vic decided to take up physics in place of dance, her parents would spend about a week in mourning before buying her a graphing calculator. “But like you always say, you dance because you love it.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m sure this is just a temporary annoyance.”

  “Vic, go to the audition. If you decide you don’t want to go to Juilliard, then you will have at least met some interesting people and taken a trip to Miami.”

  She nods—well, bobs her head up and down, as though tricking me into thinking she’s nodding. God, I hope Vic doesn’t pull something outlandish, like telling her mom she’s going to the audition and then disappearing to spend a Catcher in the Rye–type weekend alone in Miami, having an odyssey of booze and self-discovery.

  She studies the toes of a pair of pointe shoes. “I hope things aren’t weird between us when I get back.”

  I grip the stack of clothes on her chair, their fabric soft on my hands, though the skeleton of the chair pokes out. “Yeah, I feel the same.”

  “It seems like you’ve got some magic or something, dearie.”

  Another second thought about the cup of coffee. I swallow a gulp. “It’s not mine. I mean, I looked for it and found it, but it’s still not mine.”

  Martha Graham keeps her eye on the prize, and I stare her down instead of looking at Victoria.

  Martha, girl, you’re so focused, but on what? Was your whole life about artistic expression, or was there something else you needed? When you wanted to tell someone how you felt about them, did you use words, or did you just downward-spiral your way across a stage and hope they understood?

  It’s not particularly graceful, but I cross the room, take her suitcase from the closet, and flop it open on her bed. I leave myself enough room to sit on the corner of the bed, with one of the four carved posts jutting at my back in uncomfortable places.

  Vic shakes her head at me. “I almost want to ask if you’ll take me back to your art studio, but I’m scared of what might happen.”

  “Me too,” I tell her.

  And we are close again, almost as close as we were that night at the Estate. Her right leg is up against the suitcase, and I grab the leather corner of it so that we’re touching the same thing. She hates confusion. She hates the feeling of being on edge—she needs the steps and counts laid out for her. And yet, here I am, throwing deviations in the path of hers that leads neatly from here to Miami and then to New York. The look on her face is one I haven’t seen before, and I’ve got a whole catalog of Rare Looks of Victoria Caballini from which to draw. The look from ten seconds after she broke up with Connor Hagins, as she strained to stay completely cool while he walked away. The look when she found out she was doing the Rhapsody in Blue solo in the first Gershwin show. Even the look when I brought her flowers to the theater. None of those. Or any of the dancing looks or any of the late-night looks or the early-morning looks.

  “We shouldn’t, though.” Vic brushes her hair back and spits these words at the suitcase. “This audition is everything, and I just . . . I can’t shake my confidence before it.”

  “Yeah, your audition for a school you’re going to drop out of.”

  “Shh!” Vic points to the door. Then she pulls the suitcase to the middle of the bed and throws a pair of pointe shoes and an armful of tights and warm-up clothes into it. She’s committed. For all our talk of possibilities, when it comes to Victoria, there is only one.

  But after everything, after years of dance classes and companies and performances, the possibility quivers.

  “You’re scared,” I say.

  “Duh. We’ve covered this.”

  “No, I mean, you’re scared of not getting in, but you’re scared of succeeding, too. You’re scared of dropping out of Juilliard, or not having the life you want by the time you’re supposed to drop out of Juilliard. All of it scares you.”

  Victoria swipes at her forehead. Her hair is down and messy, and her dress is one I’ve never seen, purple with little birds all over it. Birds in nests, and birds suspended in fabric flight.

  There’s a possibility, small but visible, that I may never see this dress again. That she may leave for New York straight from Miami, and that she’ll change her phone number and make her parents swear not to give me her address.

  “But you’re afraid, too, dearie,” she says. “You’re scared of what you want. Sometimes you take a step forward, but then you retreat again. Always.”

  Martha Graham has no use for me. I stare at the floor.

  “If you need to tell me anything important, then just do it,” Victoria whispers. “Because I think you’re holding on to something.”

  She doesn’t know how right she is. But she has been wrong about me so many times that I can’t give in to her right now. Vic is not that good at commitments. Vic is good at moments—sometimes moments that last a few days, or a few years, but still, every time and place and person in her life so far is something or someone she’s going to leave behind. I wanted to be more than a moment to her. I wanted the world to spin tightly around us, holding us close, keeping us together.

  I don’t think she’s going to let me be that person.

  “I mean, okay, maybe I’m wrong,” Vic continues, grabbing the stack of books from the desk and layering them on top of the clothes. On one cover, a guy and a girl stare longingly at
each other over a fence. On another, a silhouette walks through the rain in Paris. I want to sit next to her and read them (I’ll take the Paris one). “But it bugs me to watch you get so close to what you want and then . . . you know, run away again.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say quickly, hopping up from the bed and returning to the desk chair. “I’m, like, working on the biggest damn art project right now. I’m putting myself out there.” But the center of me seems to collapse, my guts and heart trying to swap places. I steady myself with two hands on the side of Vic’s desk.

  Maybe Vic was right in calling the magic mine.

  It is. I shouldn’t ignore that anymore. I’m connected to the Estate just as much as Lilia is, and I need to get back there, to my studio, to figure out how I should do my self-portrait.

  Vic goes back to packing, and I grab a handful of the clothes on the chair and bring them to her. She takes them without managing to brush my hand. She’s coordinated that way.

  Are you going to miss me?

  Are we going to talk about this when you return?

  Was this, indeed, inevitable?

  These are the things I want to ask her.

  But we’re quiet until Angela pops in from the other room, finished with dessert and coffee with the Caballinis, hinting that she’d like to get home, hinting that it’s getting awkward to be sitting there.

  Vincent van Gogh wasn’t a slouch about the self-portrait. Neither was Frida Kahlo. Rothko loathed them. Warhol consented to them. Marc Chagall parodied them. And the esteemed Lilia Solis claims she doesn’t care for them, but that having one is “part of the project.” And so, here we are.

  “Nice view.” I lean against the window and stare out into the Gulf of Mexico, which on a calm night like this seems black and tired and almost defeated. We’re on the other side of the building now, and six floors higher than before, and from here the gulf announces itself.

  “It really is.” Lilia’s voice is clipped and kind of sad. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes.” I turn away from the window and continue not sitting on the dusty concrete floor. “But I need to know, are there some rules about what it should look like? Colors? Shapes? Size? Are you going to say something all mysterious-like, maybe along the lines of, ‘Whatever you create, it must be true to yourself’?”