Picture Us In The Light(52)
When you draw something it matters every time that you’re the one who drew it. I’ve always believed that. Like, what did you glimpse in a person’s expression? What do you have to say about them? Why is your perspective, yours of all the billions of people on earth, worth trapping on a piece of paper and showing to everyone?
Harry read somewhere once that the reason your life flashes before your eyes when you die is that your brain always responds to information with all the knowledge it’s built in the past, and so when you’re about to die it shuffles frantically through everything it knows for clues about what’s happening, what it’s supposed to do. I always wondered if that happened to my sister, too, if she was still too small for that or if maybe it was just that her images were small too: her mom, her dad, her favorite toys, the view of the ceiling from her crib. (I drew those things once, in a strip.) Anyway, in that final burst of Sandra’s memory, I can’t help thinking about how maybe I would’ve flickered in and out and how I wonder if she ever knew I didn’t mean for things to go the way they did.
But of course not. Of course more important thoughts would’ve fought for her attention before they went dark, and of course I didn’t matter to her any more in her last minutes than I did during all those years and years with her I threw away. Of course she didn’t forgive me.
I wish I could do the drawing—I wish a lot of things—but there are lines you don’t cross. That one’s mine.
The thing about high school is that no matter what happens between you and someone else, you still get up each morning knowing you’re going to face them approximately eighty times that week—all of it resurrected there in the hallway between periods/in the rally court at lunch/in class.
Which is to say that Tuesday morning I see Regina coming down the hall and I lift my hand to wave, but she turns away fast without acknowledging me and goes in the opposite direction. My face catches flame. I look around to make sure no one saw.
All week Regina avoids me as much as she plausibly can, and all week it knifes me every time. It’s striking how fast the glow from Neighborhood disappears.
But something happens at the end of that week: I get a call from Araceli Padilla, who runs Neighborhood, to tell me that one of my pictures sold. I’m so surprised I can’t think of anything to say for a good ten seconds. I knew it was technically a possibility, but I think the things you dream about most sometimes seem less possible—you imagine them so much, so many different ways, that they take on a kind of otherworldliness you only recognize as fantasy.
“Wow,” I say finally, recovering. “That’s—wow. Thank you so much. Which one was it?”
It was the portrait of my mom I drew last year—one of the dozens and dozens I’ve drawn trying to capture that expression on her face the day she told me about my sister. It’s imperfect, and her expression’s off, but I like it because I think there’s something cohesive in all the small vignettes that I drew to compose her face, and because I think even if I didn’t quite nail the expression, something about her, some essential quality, still comes through all the same.
Araceli doesn’t know who bought it; it was one of the new cashiers who rang it up. All day, all through the Calc quiz and the AP Econ group project and the in-class essay for Lit, I think about that, imagining that picture going home with someone. It’s dumb, but part of me misses it. I should’ve taken better photos of it. I didn’t expect anyone to actually buy it.
I wake up Saturday morning weirdly determined to believe everything will be all right. Maybe every artist has dry spells. Vivian Ho made it sound like it’ll never be easy, that the struggle is part of things, and maybe that’s okay, maybe I’ll be better for it someday.
I decide I’ll tell my parents about the picture, mostly because I know how excited they’ll be. It’ll be instant gratification. I’ll have to lie and say I learned about the exhibit online—they’d hate that I went to San Francisco without telling them—and that I mailed the pieces in.
When I come out to the kitchen they’re both sitting there at the table like they’re waiting for me.
“Sit down,” my dad says, motioning. When I do, slowly, my mom sets down a bowl of re gan mian in front of me. She never cooks breakfast anymore. Alarm bells go off in my head.
“We have something to tell you,” my mom says.
My mind flashes back to that search history about divorce and my heart stutters against my chest so hard it knocks my breath away. I shouldn’t have sat down. I press my fist against my chest to try to steady my heart. “What’s going on?”
I can name the exact tacit negotiation taking place in the way they look at each other: which of them it will be to break the news. My mom gives in first.
“You should remember that in fall you go to RISD,” she says in English, then switches back to Chinese. “That is the most important thing. You will work hard and achieve your dreams there. Your future is secure.”
She looks at my dad for help, but he’s staring down at his noodles. She inhales sharply through her nose. The freezer is making its clattering sound and the light overhead is flickering.
“Daniel, we’re moving. You’re already accepted to RISD, so—”
Another heart palpitation, this one so hard I feel it down to my palms. “What do you mean we’re moving?”