I laid out a new palette of the most improbable colors I could find: magenta, emerald green, electric blue, cobalt violet. With a fatter brush I blocked in the squat shape of the vase as it listed to the left, almost off the painting, and then the interior of the bouquet, where the petals were mashed, their yellow hearts rotting. I mixed the paints on the canvas itself, tossing down my brush when it got too grimy and picking up a new one. I worked fast, without care, approximating. In five minutes I was finished.
The teacher had been standing behind me watching for I don’t know how long.
“You caught it” was all he said.
Of course, as I learned later, that’s what Van Gogh did, slather on the raw colors and work them into each other on the canvas, only he used a palette knife instead of a brush. He couldn’t bear the distance between the medium and the subject, the medium and himself, the subject and himself.
The art therapist tacked our drawings up on the bulletin board, with mine in the middle.
“What do we think about these shapes that Sally has created?”
“Trees,” said Rachel. In January her boyfriend had been thrown from a motorcycle and killed as she stood waiting for him on the porch of her parents’ house half a block away. When she first got here pieces of the accident were still in her mind, but now she just looked blank when people talked about it.
“What else do we see in Sally’s drawing?”
“Blood vessels.” Lillith, of course.
I myself was surprised at how thick and violent the lines came out, because I’d started each time with great delicacy, tracing a faint curve and then working it gently into the paper with my fingers.
“Does anyone notice a human shape about this?”
A couple of stools scraped.
“Douglas?”
“I definitely see a tit.”
“Excellent! There’s a head, and a torso—see? And here as you said the curve of a breast, but it’s hazy, like it’s just beginning to emerge.” The art therapist folded her hands in front of her stomach and beamed at me—her newest discovery. “Okay, honey, this is what I want you to do. I want you to study yourself in a full-length mirror. And the next time we meet, draw exactly what you see there, draw from memory.” I could hear Douglas snickering.
As we were leaving, Rachel went up and studied my drawing. “Sally. If this is the face, here, you forgot to put in a mouth.”
One of the upstairs bathrooms had a full-length mirror on the back of the door. I closed the door behind me—I could do this now—and dragged a footstool against it. The only locks in the unit were on the outside doors.
I am tall, even for an American woman, though not as tall as my father. My hair has a reddish undertone, not the pitch black people expect of Asians. I have a big oval face and a square chin—an overdeveloped jawbone, my dentist used to call it. My eyes are long and narrow, with no lashes to speak of, and I have the kind of lips women’s magazines say you should wear very pale colors on, to de-emphasize. The only truly beautiful feature in my face is my nose, which is small and straight, and has more of a bridge than Marty’s—she’s always complaining about her sunglasses slipping.
As for body, I’m big-boned and long-waisted. Hips and thighs, but no chest to speak of, unlike Marty and my mother, who are buxom. My hands are freakishly large—long palms and fingers—bigger than most men’s.
I was not meant to be looked at; I was meant to be one who looks.
Thank God I could still draw.
It was family therapy night. By six-thirty, when we got back from dinner, the dayroom had already begun to fill up. Lillith pointed out a well-dressed couple—Rachel’s parents. Mel, who was from a large Italian family, had a retinue: mother, father, siblings, an aunt or two, even a grandmother. I noticed a man who looked like a haggard Jack Lemmon moving uncertainly around the edges of the crowd. His deep-set eyes, darkly shadowed, were just like his son’s. Douglas. The two of them huddled in the corner, as thick as thieves, the son dwarfing the father.
There was my mother, stopped in the doorway, peering around, sure she was in the wrong place. She was still in her teaching clothes, carrying two Lord & Taylor bags, and she was alone. What did I expect, my sister wasn’t the type to cut a vacation short to go see someone in a loony bin.
When Ma saw me her mouth turned into a line.
“Sal-lee.” Without inflection, as if I were a student she were calling on in class.
Still, she was worried. I could see that.
“Hi, Ma. Come in and sit down.”
As she lowered herself into one of the TV armchairs, my mother inhaled deeply and pulled the hem of her skirt over her knees.
“You gain weight.” I was conscious of her accent, as I always am when I haven’t seen her for a while.
“Maybe next time you could bring some of my fat clothes.”
She snorted, looking more comfortable. “You’re not fat.” She held out a shopping bag. “Some jeans you left, a sweatshirt I found you used to wear at boarding school. Also grapefruit. Your Aunty Mabel sends a whole crate, I don’t think I can finish it all. And look.” From the other bag she plucked an old silk dress I’d bought to wear on my honeymoon, that I had forgotten I owned, even. It was a black-and-pink flower print, wrap waist, with puffy sleeves. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.
“Thanks, Ma.”
She leaned back a little in her chair, appraising the furnishings. “Not so bad, huh? Doesn’t look like hospital. But darker carpet would show dirt less.”
The MH who was going to lead our session came over to introduce himself. To him Ma probably looked like a harmless little old Oriental lady in her pixie hairdo and schoolmarm outfit. I’d heard that her students routinely made the same mistake at their first class—grossly underestimating her.
“I hope Sally is doing all right,” she said to the MH as if this were a PTA meeting and he was my teacher.
“Oh, we think she’s making great progress,” the MH told her, and smiled at me.
Ma leaned toward him confidingly. “How much longer she has to be in here?”
“It depends on Sally, of course. But I think she still has a lot of work ahead of her.”
My mother looked disappointed. It was the same expression she’d worn when she told her friends I hadn’t gotten into Yale.
“I have theory about why Sally gets sick,” Ma said.
“And what is that, Mrs. Wang?”
“She’s the type who needs a husband. It’s so traumatic for her, to divorce.”
“Why do you think she is the type who needs a husband?”
“She’s an American girl but she has old-fashioned Chinese mentality.”
“And what exactly is that mentality, Mrs. Wang?”
“Oh, you know, be a good daughter, be a good wife. Obedience. Confucian law. This is what her father teaches her.”
I looked down at my hands and saw a bit of charcoal under one thumbnail. Surreptitiously, I began to scrape it out.
“I notice this especially when her father died,” Ma went on.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Wang, but why do you always refer to your husband as ‘Sally’s father’?”
My mother looked surprised. “We’re talking about Sally, right?”
“We’re talking about you too.”
“Okay.” I could tell Ma thought the MH was stupid.
“Let’s talk about exactly what happened when your husband died. How did you feel, Mrs. Wang?”
“Of course I grieve, he was my husband. And my younger daughter, she cried for days. But it’s Sally who has really hard time. No crying, no speaking.”
“Is that true, Sally?” the MH asked.
My father had his first stroke near the end of my senior year at boarding school. It was right after I got rejected from Yale, and although no one ever pointed this out to me, they didn’t have to.