The Starfish Sisters: A Novel(37)
It took me literally a decade to recognize that my love of flowers and the sea has always been the direction I wanted to take with my art. This direction, illustration and flowers. Color. Bold, bright color.
All the things they looked down on in art school.
The plan had always been for Suze and me to go to New York City after high school, and room together in a garret we imagined would be romantic. Instead, when it came time to apply to schools in the city, I was afraid. Afraid to be rejected, afraid I would never measure up, afraid to be so far away from my father and my grandmother and all the things I understood in Oregon. I did want to go to art school, but in the end, I only applied to schools in the Northwest. I got in to both Seattle and Portland, and chose Seattle only because my grandmother told me I needed to at least get that far away from home.
Embarrassed at my small ambition, I lied to Suze and told her I didn’t get into anything in New York. I asked her to come to Seattle with me, but she was dead focused on making a name for herself on Broadway. Like millions of girls before her, she headed for the bright lights.
I headed up I-5 and dived into art school. It was fantastic from the start. I loved my classes and made friends. My teachers encouraged me and pushed me. It was the most I’d ever liked school.
Sometimes it scared me. I didn’t always want to push the envelope, or make ugly paintings to get oohs and aahs. Not that everyone did that, and it’s not that fine art is all strange or ugly. It’s not. But when I was in art school, the things I loved were beautiful paintings of giant flowers and pensive women looking out windows. They were very much not in fashion.
I met Derek my second year. He was in my studio class, and was generally acknowledged to be the most promising artist in our year. His work was bold and harsh, with lots of nudity rendered in thick lines, and he had a confidence that was rare for a nineteen-year-old.
The first time I saw him in class, I was absolutely smitten. His hair, so thick and black and shiny, falling around a face as beautiful as a dark angel’s. He was the kind of guy who should have been with the pretty girl from Omaha in figure drawing, but for some reason, he liked me back. He liked my paintings, the size of them, the colors I used. He loved my breasts and painted them—both painted on them and painted renditions of them on canvas. It was embarrassing to have him show that work in class, and I always blushed when I saw someone look at me, measuring.
It was a hot, hot love affair. We had sex everywhere, in a thousand ways, as horny as only nineteen-year-olds can be. My passion for art was subsumed by my lust for Derek, and he used that to his advantage. He often dropped comments that only one artist could be primary in a relationship. It terrified me. Would he leave me for a non-artist?
God, the things we do for sex and love! I want to go back in time and shake that smitten child. Suze tried. My grandmother mounted an entire campaign that included a trip to Paris on my winter break junior year.
They failed.
For two reasons, really. The first was that I landed with an instructor that fall who loathed my work. Loathed. He loathed women, but I didn’t get that then. I just thought there was something wrong with me, with my grasp of the finer ideas of art. Derek landed a modest show, and the instructor loved him.
And only two years after she arrived in New York, Suze was invited to come to Hollywood for a screen test. For the lead role in a book we’d both adored, a historical about a beleaguered and fierce woman who makes her way triumphantly through the world.
When she landed it, so easily, I was both desperately proud and wildly jealous. She was always going to be the star in the world, and I was always going to be the mouse.
Derek and I started living together at the end of my sophomore year. We’d been dating the whole year, spending nights at his crowded, shared apartment, where no one ever did the dishes and the air smelled of dirty shoes and beer. At the start of the summer, both of us had good jobs waiting tables, so we found a tiny cottage, just a bedroom and kitchen, a postage stamp of a bathroom, and a living room barely large enough for a couch and a single chair. I filled the windows with houseplants and bought used pans and dishes at Goodwill that I used to make dinners and bake the treats we loved to eat when we were stoned. I developed a little fame over my muffins and scones and quick breads, thanks to Amma’s instruction.
The reason we chose the cottage was the big shed in the backyard. It was unheated and not really big enough for the canvases Derek was painting, so he continued to use the space he’d rented in downtown Seattle, while I set up in the shed, sweeping out the spiders and dirt. It had two big windows that faced north, and enough room for an easel and two long tables against the far wall. A rolling cupboard held my supplies.
The year in that house, June to June, was one of the happiest times of my life, despite the fact that art school was kicking my butt. I loved the people, loved being around other artists and the wild, far-reaching imaginations that made conversations so much fun. At parties, someone always had a guitar or a banjo or a recorder to play music, and someone else would read poetry they’d written, and we’d have loud debates about the palette of Kahlo or the technique of Matisse or the differences between Impressionism and Fauvism. I loved only thinking about the work and what was emerging, and having paint under my fingernails like Amma.
But the truth was, that summer between sophomore and junior year, painting on my own in that studio of my own, I had to face the reality that I didn’t love postmodernist styles, or abstract anything. I loved representational work, and things that Derek and most of the rest of my peers and teachers rolled their eyes over. I loved paintings that were too girly for words—flowers and cats and windows and interiors. I loved Matisse’s cats and William Morris patterns and New Yorker cover illustrations—oh, to have a cover on the New Yorker!—and saturated pinks and oranges and blues that everyone thought too overt. Too much.