Little Fires Everywhere(61)
At three o’clock, after her classes ended, she went to work again. Twice a week she had shifts at the Dick Blick, selling art supplies to her fellow students, or restocking the back room. She talked art with the older students, and they told her what they were working on, why they preferred knife to brush or acrylic to oil, or Fujicolor to Kodachrome. In the back room, her boss—who had a daughter about Mia’s age and thus had a soft spot for this girl, working multiple jobs to pay her rent—allowed her to keep the pencils and pastels that had snapped in transit, the paint tubes that had leaked, the brushes and canvases that had been dinged or come unstapled. Anything that could no longer be sold Mia took home and repaired, restretching the canvases or mending them on the back with tape, sanding the splintered handle of a brush, sharpening two half pencils to use in place of a whole. In this way she was able to acquire a good portion of her supplies for free.
Three evenings a week, Mia boarded the 1 and rode to 116th Street, where she put on a different uniform and waited tables at a bar near Columbia. The undergrads she served tended to be either haughty and obnoxious or leering and obnoxious, more so as the night wore on, but they tipped her, and at the end of a good night she might have thirty or forty dollars in her apron. She ate the last bites of their burgers and their forgotten fries and the stubs of their pickles for dinner and folded all the cash into her jeans pocket.
She scraped her way through the first year with some money saved even after her rent was paid. Now and then, when she called home—for she did call home, she and her parents all insisted there was no ill will between them; they asked politely how school was doing and showed, or at least feigned, interest in her answers—Warren asked if it was worth it. He had always been the happy-go-lucky one, ready to take things as they came; she had been the driven one, the ambitious one, the planner.
“It’s worth it,” she assured him. And she would tell him about her classes, what paintings she’d studied that week, and her favorite, the real reason she woke at four thirty every morning and stayed up late every night: photography.
When she spoke of Pauline Hawthorne, her tone was half the adoration of a schoolgirl for a crush, half the adoration of a devotee for a saint. It had not been clear, at first, that it would turn out that way. On the first day of photography class, the students had sat upright at their desks, each with a 35mm camera and two notebooks—as specified by the supplies list—in hand. When class began, Pauline strode to the back of the room, flicked off the lights, and, without introducing herself, clicked on the slide projector. A Man Ray photograph burst onto the screen before them: a voluptuous woman, her back transformed into a cello by two painted f-holes. Complete silence filled the room. After five minutes, Pauline twitched her thumb, and the cello woman was replaced by an Ansel Adams landscape, Mount McKinley glowering over a lake of pure white. No one said anything. Another click: a Dorothea Lange portrait of a Dust Bowl woman, her dark hair in a deep part, the merest hint of a smile lifting the corners of her lips. For the entire two hours of the class this continued, a survey of photographs they all recognized but which—as Pauline must have realized—they had never spent much time looking at. Mia, from her reading at the library, recognized them all, but found that after she’d stared at them for long enough, they took on new contours, like faces of people she loved.
After the two hours had passed, Pauline clicked the slide projector off and the class sat blinking in the sudden brightness. “Next class, bring the photo you’re proudest of,” she said, and left the room. They were the first and only words she’d said.
The next class, after much thought, Mia had brought one of the photos she’d taken with her large-format camera. Introduction to Photography focused on handheld cameras, but Pauline had said the photo you’re proudest of, and this was hers: a shot of her brother playing street hockey in their backyard, their house and the rest of their neighborhood spread out behind him like miniatures. She had climbed all the way to the top of the hill behind their house to take it. On entering, they found index cards with each student’s name pinned up on the walls around the classroom, with clips fastened below them. At two minutes past the hour, Pauline entered—again, without introducing herself—and the class gathered beside each photo in turn, Pauline commenting on the composition or the technique of the picture, students timidly answering her questions about point of view or tone. Some were carefully constructed scenes; one or two had attempted something artistic: a silhouette of a girl backlit by an enormous movie screen; a close-up of a tangled telephone cord wrapped around a receiver.
Mia and the rest of her classmates had braced themselves against Pauline’s questioning. After that first class, they’d been sure she was one of the dragons, as the harsher teachers were known: the ones who delighted in making their students uncomfortable, who thought the best way to push students out of their comfort zones was to bulldoze them into rubble during critiques. But Pauline, it turned out, was no dragon. Despite her no-nonsense air, she found something in each photograph to highlight and praise. It was why—despite being well established—she chose to teach the beginning students. “Look at how the little sister is laughing here,” she said, tapping one of the family portraits. “She’s the only one not looking at the camera—which gives you a sense that there’s something outside the frame. Is she a rebel? Or does this hint at the whole family’s spirit?” Or: “Notice how the skyscraper here looks like it’s about to pierce the moon. That’s a thoughtful choice of perspective.” Even her criticisms—which were as common as her praise—were not what Mia had expected. “Water is hard,” she said simply, when someone pointed out that a photo of a waterfall was badly blurred. “Let’s suppose this was done on purpose. What effect does it have?”