A Piece of the World(71)

As we sit in strained silence I see Al’s gaze rise up the wall above my head again. He looks at me for a moment, then back at the wall.

“What?” I ask.

He lifts his chin.

I shift on my seat, craning my neck to see what he’s looking at. It’s a painting, a large painting, and it fills almost the entire wall above my head. A girl in a yellow field wearing a light pink dress with a thin black belt. Her dark hair blows in the wind. Her face is hidden. She’s leaning toward a shadowy silver house and barn balanced on the horizon line, beneath a pale ribbon of sky.

I look at Al.

“I think it’s you,” he says.

I look back at the painting. The girl is low to the ground but almost appears to float in space. She is larger than everything around her. Like a centaur, or a mermaid, she is part one thing and part another: my dress, my hair, my frail arms, but the years on my body have been erased. The girl in the painting is lithe and young.

I feel a weight on my shoulder. A hand. Andy’s hand. “I finally finished it,” he says. “What do you think?”

I look closely at the girl. Her skin is the color of the field, her dress as bleached as bones in the sun, her hair stiff grass. She seems both eternally young and as old as the land itself, a line drawing in a children’s book about evolution: the sea creature sprouting limbs and inching up from shore.

“It’s called ‘Christina’s World,’” he says. “Betsy titled it, like she always does.”

“Christina’s world?” I repeat dumbly.

He laughs. “A vast planet of grass. And you exactly in the middle.”

“It’s not quite . . . me, though, is it?” I ask.

“You tell me.”

I look at the painting again. Despite the obvious differences, this girl is deeply, achingly familiar. In her I see myself at twelve years old, on a rare afternoon away from my chores. In my twenties, seeking refuge from a broken heart. Only a few days ago, visiting my parents’ graves in the family cemetery, halfway between the dory in the haymow and the wheelchair in the sea. From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole.

Christina’s World.

The truth is, this place—this house, this field, this sky—may only be a small piece of the world. But Betsy’s right: It is the entire world to me.

“You told me once you see yourself as a girl,” Andy says.

I nod slowly.

“I wanted to show that,” he says, gesturing at the painting. “I wanted to show . . . both the desire and the hesitation.”

I reach for his fingers and draw them to my lips. He’s startled, I can tell; I’ve never done this before. It surprises me too.

I think about all the ways I’ve been perceived by others over the years: as a burden, a dutiful daughter, a girlfriend, a spiteful wretch, an invalid . . .

This is my letter to the World that never wrote to Me.

“You showed what no one else could see,” I tell him.

He squeezes my shoulder. Both of us are silent, looking at the painting.

There she is, that girl, on a planet of grass. Her wants are simple: to tilt her face to the sun and feel its warmth. To clutch the earth beneath her fingers. To escape from and return to the house she was born in.

To see her life from a distance, as clear as a photograph, as mysterious as a fairy tale.

This is a girl who has lived through broken dreams and promises. Still lives. Will always live on that hillside, at the center of a world that unfolds all the way to the edges of the canvas. Her people are witches and persecutors, adventurers and homebodies, dreamers and pragmatists. Her world is both circumscribed and boundless, a place where the stranger at the door may hold a key to the rest of her life.

What she wants most—what she truly yearns for—is what any of us want: to be seen.

And look. She is.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, growing up in Bangor, Maine, my father gave me a woodcut by a local artist inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. It reminded him of me, he said, and I understood why: our shared name, the familiar Maine setting, the wispy flyaway hair. Throughout my childhood I made up stories about this slight girl in a pale pink dress with her back to the viewer, reaching toward a weathered gray house on a bluff in the distance.

Over the years I came to believe that the painting is a Rorschach test, a magic trick, a slight of hand. As David Michaelis writes in Wondrous Strange: The Wyeth Tradition, “The down-to-earth naturalism of Wyeth’s paintings is deceptive. In his work, all is not as it seems.” Andrew Wyeth’s paintings always have an undercurrent of wonder and mystery; he was fascinated with the darker aspects of human experience. You get glimpses of this in the arid, dry-as-bones grasses rendered in startlingly precise detail, the wreck of a house on a hill with a mysterious ladder leading to a second-story window, a lone piece of laundry floating like an apparition in the breeze. At first glance the slim woman in the grass appears to be languidly relaxed, but a closer look reveals odd dissonances. Her arms are strangely thin and twisted. Perhaps she is older than she appears. She seems poised, alert, yearning toward the house, and yet hesitant. Is she afraid? Her face is turned from the viewer, but she appears to be gazing at a darkened window on the second floor. What does she see in its shadows?