Artist's Daughter The: A Memoir Read online

  “Your eyes. They’re so blue,” he said. No surprise. A remark I often got at first meetings. Then he said something I will never forget. “They look just like my mother’s.” He paused as though recognizing the weight of his comment. It was heavy with innuendo about genetics and generations and what should be and what wasn’t. His mother, my grandmother. Her eyes, mine. A relationship that should be sacred was nonexistent.

  “Her birthday is next week,” my mother reminded him. “She’ll be nine.” Another indicator that things weren’t as they should be. How would a father not know his own child’s birthday? It’s as if he needed to be reminded of my very existence.

  He reached out and touched me with tender, stroking motions—my arm, my hair, my face. I looked up at the canvas awning, down at the table, over his shoulder into the restaurant. I didn’t want to be impolite, but he seemed to be asking me for something I couldn’t give.

  When it was time to go, we all stood up, and he put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed from the side. The hug felt uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and forced, not what I thought my father would feel like. I thought there would be a familiarity with this man. I was disappointed there wasn’t. But I couldn’t help being hopeful—a long-held habit. Maybe when the awkwardness passed, when he knew me, I would know what it was to have a father’s love. That gaping hole would be filled.

  ii

  ITALY

  We were a pair of traveling adventurers, my mother and I. We spent my first birthday on Crete. We watched the New York Harbor from the Statue of Liberty’s crown when I was five. We walked through the ruins of Mount Vesuvius in Naples when I was eight. And now we were headed back to home base, the Pacific Northwest. Every daughter looks to her mother to see what a woman is supposed to be. I knew mine was unique. Independent. Traveled. Confident. Beautiful. I saw those qualities in me because I saw them in her.

  Right before my second birthday, we left Barcelona for an island off Seattle. We arrived in America just in time to celebrate the country’s bicentennial. My mom has a picture of me on a rocky beach, standing next to a piece of driftwood, waving a little American flag on a stick and wearing all red, white, and blue.

  A few of our years on the island, we lived with a man I called Daddy. When he decided he didn’t want a ready-made family, he left, confirming the title Daddy meant “one who abandons.” His breakup with my mother was also his breakup with me. It was then I started asking my mother about my “real father,” and she told me his foreign name. Until our meeting at the café, the only thing I remember knowing about my father was his first name. It surprised me. I didn’t know anyone with that name. I was just learning to write, and I wrote it in crayon across the top of my pictures.

  After the man I’d called Daddy left, my mother decided a fresh start was in order. We started making plans to go to Europe. A year before that hot Barcelona afternoon, my mother and I arrived in Rome with two one-way tickets and five maroon and navy suitcases, a matching set she bought for our adventure. The suitcases ranged in size from extra-large to tiny and made me feel like we were going on a safari. My mother figured she’d find a job when we arrived in the country. That’s how she’d always done it.

  “Do you all have a place to stay tonight?” a talkative woman sitting across the airplane aisle from my mother asked. “I have a reservation at a pensione at the top of the Spanish Steps, if you want to share it.”

  “Okay,” my mother replied without appearing to give it much thought.

  I looked up from my Nancy Drew book in surprise. “We don’t even know her,” I whispered to my mom as the plane was descending.

  “That’s what you do when you’re traveling. Rome is expensive. This will cut our night’s stay in half.”

  When our cab pulled up to the pensione, I saw a white stone staircase the width of three buildings and the length of a block cascading down to a street below: the Spanish Steps. The three of us stepped into the reserved room, felt the stale air push against us, and found only one bed.

  The chatty stranger turned to me. “Let’s go up to the rooftop and sleep. It’ll be cooler up there.” Obviously an extrovert, she figured an eight-year-old was better than no company at all.

  “I’m not so sure,” my mother answered. Sharing a room with a stranger was one thing, having her take her eight-year-old daughter alone to the roof was another. Besides, my mother had warned me not to be the “ugly American,” an obnoxious person who showed up in a different country and demanded to know why no one did things like they do back home. “You want to blend in,” my mother said. I knew the look she was giving meant she doubted this woman was very good at blending in.

  “Please, Mommy! I’m not even tired.”

  My mother made a comment about jet lag, and I decided it was permission. So the stranger woman and I took blankets and pillows up to the rooftop patio and laid them on top of cushions from the patio furniture. We listened to the traffic of scooters buzzing and honking through the night as our bodies fought the idea of sleep in a new time zone. My mom kept coming up to check on me, but I wanted to stay with the talker.

  The next morning my mom and I sat at a little table on the same rooftop, where breakfast was being served. It was included in the price of the room, so we weren’t going to miss it.

  “Where are the pancakes?” I asked.

  “Here, try these,” my mother said, pointing to the words fresh figs on the menu. “It’s fruit.”

  “I want pancakes. Where are the pancakes?”

  “Here, have some bread and cheese.” She pointed to another item on the paper.

  “I’m hungry. I want a real breakfast.” I was not going to be tricked into believing that bread and cheese was breakfast. “Is there any cereal?”

  “This is breakfast in Italy.”

  I wasn’t sure about Italy.

  From bustling Rome we boarded a creaking train and headed to towns pulled from my mother’s memory, places she’d visited when she was younger. Our cash reserves were sparse and the school year was starting soon, so the need for a job was growing urgent.

  I watched from the train windows as countryside and beach sped by, a blur of sun, water, and sparkles. Farms that looked like places I’d only seen in picture books, old women dressed all in black, and chickens running across dirt streets.

  At each new town, my mom scanned the phone book for private language schools and placed a cold call, offering her services as an experienced teacher of English as a second language. Her résumé included years in Peru, Barcelona, New York City, and most recently Seattle, where she taught refugees from Africa and Asia to speak the language of their new rainy home. She was no college student backpacking through Europe. She was a professional, with a master’s degree in ESL and a child to support.

  We quickly developed a system for boarding the trains. The second-class cars were the Southwest Airlines of Italian travel, with people waiting in line outside the train doors and scrambling to find seats once they opened. Small and quick, I was able to squirm past the grown-up-sized bodies and suitcases and, if lucky, find two seats together. Then I would lay my body across both seats and avoid eye contact with the Italians, who were annoyed they’d been outpushed by a foreign child. My mother followed, her arms overflowing with our five matching suitcases. When we didn’t get seats, we were crammed in the walkway, sitting on the bigger bags, trying to catch a breeze from the open windows.

  The small factory town we landed in was not the picturesque village my mom envisioned when we started on our Italian trek. Terni is nestled between Florence and Rome in the region of Umbria, which is famous for its hill towns: Perugia, Todi, Assisi. Towns surrounded by stone walls built to protect them in medieval times and perched on hills with centuries of history at every step. But Terni, a major train-switching spot, had been bombed during World War II. Quaint and historic were replaced with high-rise apartments from the sixties and seventies. It was our landing spot because, not surprisingly, no other Americans wanted to live and teach English there. Unlike the postcard-worthy towns, Terni had a job for my mother.

  Nearly thirty years later, these stories of my childhood feel disconnected from my life as a married mother of four. My current routines of making school lunches, scheduling around naptimes and church on Sunday, don’t match with the continent hopping of my early years. But I think my eight-year-old self would have liked to know where her life was headed, because the downside to adventure is insecurity.

  Even as I write these pages, I have a wheezy baby on my lap, home only hours from our latest visit to the emergency room. I have a toddler napping in a crib that she doesn’t want to admit she’s outgrown, and two reading and writing freckled girls who need to be picked up from school. That eight-year-old girl in Barcelona, that only child, would have been pleased to know that I almost always have a child at arm’s reach and my fridge is full of Diet Coke.

  iii

  APARTMENT

  Before our good-bye at the café, my father had invited us to his apartment the following week for a birthday lunch.

  “I will make paella,” he said with a confidence I would later call arrogance. “You will like it. I am quite good at it.”

  My mother nodded. “He is a good cook.”

  I was surprised she knew this. Why hadn’t she ever shared this critical fact before? I had heard almost nothing about my father from her, which made the comment even more surprising, like I was just learning they’d had any kind of relationship. As long as I can remember, my mom was matter-of-fact about the birds and the bees. At nine I knew where babies came from, or at least how they were conceived, but I was still shocked at this familiarity that suggested a relationship. I had never really thought of my father in terms of my mother. And I never really would. M
y relationship with him would remain separate from her. Theirs was a thing of the past that my mother saw no reason to talk about.

  A week after our first meeting, my mother and I stepped into the cool, stone-tiled lobby of my father’s eight-story apartment building. The lobby was a modern contrast to the musty castles and dark cathedrals I’d spent the last year touring. We were greeted by a rotund doorman sitting on a stool behind the desk. Other than characters in books and movies, I didn’t know anyone who had a doorman and was instantly impressed.

  The doorman pushed down on the desk to hoist himself up and escorted us to the elevator. Pulling back the black iron accordion gate, he stepped aside for us to step inside. The antique gate he pulled closed behind us was a reminder that we were still in the Old World. We peered at him through the gate’s bars like inmates at a jailor who had just locked their cell. He smiled at us and disappeared from view as the elevator went up. We watched in silence as the floors scrolled past us one by one.

  Walking into my father’s apartment was like walking into an art gallery. The stark white walls and floors and black leather furniture showcased the artwork displayed on the walls and underfoot. These were not pieces he’d collected from exotic travels; these were ones he’d created with his own long-fingered, age-spotted hands. It turned out the dirt I’d noticed under his fingernails days earlier was actually paint. Paintings in the entry had random objects I recognized protruding from them: razors, women’s underwear, satin gloves. Stepping into the living room, I saw tapestries hanging from floor to ceiling. There were no landscapes or women standing next to lakes with parasols—what I pictured when I thought of artwork. More like blobs of fabric and yarn with swirly strands protruding. On the floor were bushy mounds of woven rugs. I wasn’t sure if they were meant for walking on.

  “This is where I sleep . . . the bathroom . . . the kitchen,” he explained as he gave us a quick tour of the apartment. I pictured him eating breakfast at the table in the living room. I wondered what he wore when he sat there. Did he read the newspaper? Drink coffee? Was he alone?

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I have something to show you.”

  He took us down a few floors in the caged elevator to see another apartment, his studio. As we stepped into the huge room, the natural light flooded in from a wall of windows. We stepped around drop cloths and half-completed pieces on the floor as he talked, and his tone became much more animated than it had been upstairs.

  “This one,” he said as he pointed to a painting on the floor with red and yellow vertical stripes, “has the colors of the Catalan flag.” He led us to the second side room dominated by two looms used to create the tapestries he was known for. Spools of yarn taller than me leaned against the walls. The paint fumes hit my nose, and I took a thousand mental pictures.

  His voice got more excited with each piece he described. I was impressed and unimpressed at the same time. Impressed because I’d already learned from my mother that his art wasn’t just a hobby; my father was well known and respected in Spain. He lived in this upscale apartment building because he sold his work for what appeared to me to be a lot of money. Unimpressed because I wasn’t there to see tapestries. I wanted him to turn to me, ignore the loom next to us, and apologize for being silent and absent up to that point. To promise me a new beginning. My mother later said that sharing his art with me was his way of sharing himself. I didn’t see it. I wanted something more.

  Back in the kitchen, I watched as he chopped onions. Cooking wasn’t a talent I’d imagined in my father, but it sat well with me. It sounded domestic, caregiving. On our way to his apartment that day, my mother had explained that paella is a traditional Spanish dish. But as he stirred the rice, he instructed me that this paella was made with seafood because his was a Catalan recipe. He held up a shrimp as proof. From Catalonia, the province that surrounds Barcelona, butting up to the sea and to France.

  “We are Catalan, not Spanish,” he explained. We? He was putting me in a category with himself. I liked it.

  “No, we are not Spanish.” His face scrunched as he said it, the very thought creating distaste. “Borders. They don’t mean anything.”

  I thought we were in Spain. I was confused, but I listened intently.

  “We are Catalan. We speak a language no one else in the world speaks.”

  Years later he would tell me the Mediterranean is the cultural center of the world. “Look at all of the best food, music, and art,” he would say. “It comes from the countries that surround the Mediterranean.”

  Maybe artists are always self-focused, or maybe having people treat you like a celebrity shapes your personality, but I would later see these comments about the center of the world as further evidence of his outlook on where he stood in it.

  But standing there in his kitchen, I didn’t understand what he was saying. I hung on to every word anyway, hoping for clues to where I fit into the “we,” and held my questions in for later pondering. How did I, the bubble-gum-chewing, Muppets-loving, tennis-shoe-wearing American girl fit into this larger “we”?

  “We will separate from Spain one day.” He nodded as he said it, agreeing with himself. I got the feeling I didn’t need to be there for him to have this one-sided conversation.

  His eyes suddenly lit up. “I have something to show you!” Wiping his hands on a towel, he walked into the living room and I followed behind. He pulled a large book off the bookshelf. The spine displayed his name in all caps. Opening the book, he quickly flipped through the glossy pages until he found what he was looking for and placed the open book on my lap.

  “I made this for you.” I looked down to see a photo of a painting with red at the top bleeding down into dark, and in the bottom right-hand corner a small, blonde figure—a child, faceless, with two blue smudges for eyes. He pointed at the title. Solitut D’Alexandra. Alexandra’s Solitude. Next to the title was written 1980, the year it was painted. That would have made me six years old. He was thinking about me then, years after we left Barcelona. He was thinking about me being alone. Worried about my solitude. Why didn’t he come find me? My soul screamed it as I stared in silence at the picture.

  “It will be yours someday,” he said. “I’m saving it for you.”

  Great, I thought. Just what I want, a painting of me with no face, and I have to wait for you to die to get it. He looked at me with expectation. I could tell he thought I would be excited.

  I was beginning to wonder how this relationship was going to play out. I had come with hopes of trips back and forth across the ocean, of my own spot in his apartment, like kids I knew with divorced parents who had some things at their dad’s place. I dreamed of going to art shows and museums with him and being introduced as the artist’s daughter. Of him taking me shopping, buying me outfits and toys, not in the discount basements of the department stores like where my mom and I shopped, but in the Daddy Warbucks kind of way, with the entire store’s staff attending to me while dancing a choreographed routine.

  My hopes morphed quickly into fantasies that I knew wouldn’t come true. It was safer that way—to keep my thoughts on the impossible. I’d be less likely to be disappointed when they didn’t happen.

  iv

  ZOO

  A few days later my mother and I met my father at the zoo. This was now our third meeting and I was still waiting for the familiarity to kick in. I watched as my father greeted the other invitee to our outing: his adult daughter, my half sister. Tall like my mother, she gave him two quick kisses on the cheek and laughed as she rested her hand on his arm, speaking to him in Catalan. She flashed my mother a warm smile, and they exchanged an awkward handshake. Then she turned to me, her smile broadening. I instantly liked her, even though there was nothing about her that made me think of a sister. She was in her twenties and lived with her boyfriend. She probably wasn’t interested in Nancy Drew or Chinese jump rope.