Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [70]
Of course she found it in the last place she looked. If she hadn’t found it, she’d still be looking.
—Susannah Brown
Lena walked into her father’s study with expectations so low, she would have been happily surprised if he’d taken a paperweight from his desk and thrown it at her.
He was thumbing through a stack of papers on his desk. He was listening to Paul Simon. It was one of about three CDs he ever listened to, and he always struck Lena as slightly tin-eared and immigrant in his appreciation. The song was perky and polished, something about a camera that took bright color pictures. To Lena the song was like an A-plus paper, a math problem where you showed your work, a form fully filled out. But it didn’t sound to her like music. She liked her colors dingier.
Her father looked up at her over his half-glasses. He turned the music off.
“Do you mind if I make a drawing of you?” Lena had practiced saying this in her head so many times, the words had long ago lost their ordinary feel and had begun to taste funny in her mouth.
He waved her to the empty seat across from his desk. He was prepared for this. Lena’s mother had no doubt warned and mollified him.
Lena’s paper was already clipped to her drawing board and her charcoal was squeezed into her clammy hand. She hadn’t come in willing to take no for an answer. She sat down. “You don’t need to do anything special.” She’d practiced saying that, too.
He nodded absently. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He was already back to his papers. But she noticed he kept his face angled straighter now, only his eyes cast down. The lenses of his glasses glinted, but his eyes within them appeared shut from where she sat.
She watched him for a long time before she began to draw. She made herself do this. She didn’t care if it made him uncomfortable.
For a while she saw what she expected. She could have drawn his angry face with not only his eyes closed but with hers closed too. This was how she pictured him, and this is how he looked. She saw what she felt, and what she felt was his anger. She had certainly suffered for it. Why else was she here?
She knew what she felt. But what did she see?
She began to wonder. With drawing, you were always pitting your feelings and expectations against what the cold light offered your optic nerves. Like the first time you tried to mix colors to paint water. You thought you’d be using a lot of blue and maybe green. But if you made yourself see, you ended up with a lot more gray and brown and white, and even weird unexpected colors like yellow and red. And if you tried to paint it again, it would all be different. You couldn’t paint the same water twice.
She remembered once standing with her mother on a street corner in Georgetown and watching a painter at work. Her mother let her watch for a long time, and as they were walking away, Lena remembered asking how come he used so much brown.
As a child, you were taught to see the world in geometric shapes and primary colors. It was as if the adults needed to equip you with more accomplishments. (“Lena already knows her colors!”) Then you had to spend the rest of your life unlearning them. That was life, as near as Lena could tell. Making everything simple for the first ten years, which in turn made everything way more complicated for the subsequent seventy.
And now her feelings about her father made a mask over his actual features. She had thought that her challenge would be to paint his anger, to confront it. But now she knew that wasn’t the challenging thing. The challenging thing was to see past it.
She stared at him without blinking until her eyeballs dried and her vision blurred. She wished she could turn her father upside down. Sometimes you could see things more truly when you forfeited your normal visual relationship with them. Sometimes your preexisting ideas were so powerful they clubbed the truth dead before you could realize it was there. Sometimes you had to let the truth catch you by surprise.
Lena looked away and closed