North of Beautiful Read online

  “So . . . ? Any news?” called Lydia, the oldest of the Nest & Egg cofounders, from the lofted studios. She had probably cranked her hearing aid, listening for my arrival.

  As she started toward the staircase, I muttered under my breath, “Oh God,” and hustled past the handmade note cards and small crafts up front in our gift shop, bypassing the café and espresso cart on my left. With my eyes on her, I called, “Just stay there, Lydia.”

  But did she listen? Do flat maps depict the Earth accurately?

  In a town where everyday dress was backcountry camping — the tourists in SPF clothing and high-tech hiking boots, the locals in beat-up T-shirts and water sandals — Lydia took it upon herself to personify local color. She was an artiste, damn it. So in a flurry of torrid purple and teal batik (her designs, naturally), Lydia picked her stubborn way across the catwalk in her ridiculously dainty shoes.

  I rushed across the open gallery space now. “Lydia, stop!” At the bottom of the steps, I added more loudly this time, “I’m heading up.”

  The fewer trips Lydia made on the staircase, the better. Whether she admitted it or not, her footing had gotten less sure in the last year. Just six months ago, she stumbled in the parking lot out back and broke her wrist. Then two months ago, she missed the curb altogether and tripped. Luckily, she hadn’t broken anything else then. No matter how much the other Twisted Sisters and I nagged her, Lydia refused to move to one of the ground floor studios or to wear orthopedic shoes despite being eighty-nine.

  “Did you hear something?” she asked at the top of the stairs, her faded green eyes gleaming expectantly behind her purple glasses.

  I shook my head and took the stairs two at a time while holding onto the steel railing fashioned into sinuous vines.

  “You’ll hear soon enough,” she said. “It just takes longer for mail to reach us here. But, really, you should be going to —”

  “Rhode Island, I know.”

  “My grandsons attended RISD,” Lydia announced as though this were news to me. The way Lydia spoke, her syllables overly articulated, the Rhode Island School of Design was the only place in the world worth attending for anyone with artistic talent. “You still have time to put in your application.” And then with a condescending sniff: “I suppose if distance is an issue, there’s always Cornish in Seattle.”

  Distance was the deciding factor for choosing Williams — the farther from home the better. Until three months ago, when Mrs. Frankel handed me the application to Williams, I’d never even heard of the college. But then I read the materials, learned about its reputation for being a small, highly respected school, one that had more art majors than any other, one where you could study art history as well as have studio time, one that graduated titans of business. One that was 2,800 miles from home. Williams College was tailor-made for me. I couldn’t let anything derail my escape out of Terra Nullis, the empty wasteland of my home. Not even Lydia.

  “I can do art without art school,” I said lightly as I hugged Lydia. “You did.”

  “But —”

  “Oh!” I pulled back from her, pretending I had just remembered something incredibly important. “I need to finish the poster.”

  “What poster?”

  “The one for next year’s shows, right?” I ambled down the catwalk, deliberately slowing my normal race-walk pace so that Lydia wouldn’t have to work to keep up. While she detailed the information that had to be included on the poster, I slid the door to my studio space open, dropping my backpack on the floor. It landed with a thunk next to my foot.

  The artist spaces at Nest & Egg weren’t large or lavish but resembled the Japanese sleeping pods I read about in one of my travel magazines: tiny compartments I couldn’t wait to rent someday like other businesspeople. I’d catch some Z’s for a couple of hours before attending a meeting or hopping onto another flight. Two people could barely fit in my treasure box of a studio, but Lydia followed me inside. Lack of space was only one of the reasons I cast a worried look at Lydia. Mostly, I didn’t want her to see the collages I was working on, not until they were done. Maybe not even then.

  How were the Twisted Sisters — Lydia, Beth, and Mandy — going to take it that I had created collages of their lives, stolen from stories they shared with each other over the last three years with me listening in? As soon as the gallery opened, I started hanging out, uninvited and probably unwanted. I mean, really, a twelve-year-old lurking around a gallery doesn’t do much for art sales.

  Anyway, on a day when they were all twittering and flustered about a new graphic design program (Lydia even smacked the monitor as if that would change the font), I shooed them away. One newly designed invitation for an artist’s reception later, I became the first Nest & Egg “intern,” paid in free art materials and studio space. As soon as I was of age, they promoted me to Goddess of All Things Technical, the official title on my business card, and a bona fide paid position.

  I was too slow to hide the canvas on my table. Lydia immediately spotted my work-in-progress, scrutinizing it intensely just the way Dr. Holladay had studied me earlier today. Worse than feeling vulnerable, I felt like a traitor, because it was Mom’s life I had on display, naked and exposed when she wanted nothing more than to gloss over her life with an impermeable all-American sheen.

  The collage was papered with packages of baking soda and cream of tartar from the 1950s that I had bought off eBay. At the center was a magazine ad of a housewife, vacuuming in heels, pearls, and a dress so ironed, it could have been armor. I had replaced the woman’s face with Mom’s rodeo queen portrait, taken long before she ballooned. All of this was set atop a photocopy of the architectural drawings for our kitchen. Over the collage I had draped a rusted section of barbed wire, uncertain how to attach it.

  “You’re almost done with this, aren’t you?” Lydia asked me now without lifting her eyes off Mom’s collage.

  “Almost,” I said.

  “You need to ask Magnus how to work with this wire.”

  “I’m afraid to!” It was a safe admission; we were all a little intimidated by Magnus’s temperamental bluster. Prima donna or not, he was one of our most popular artists, metal being his medium. Not only had a part-timer in the Valley collected seven of Magnus’s pieces, but a software tycoon had recently commissioned an enormous work the size of a small car.

  “Well, yes, there’s that,” murmured Lydia.

  I was relieved. She understood. But then Lydia leaned over my worktable and with her bent fingers, she gingerly touched the wire. Her eyes lifted, asking me for permission. I nodded. She drew the wire down a few inches, transforming it into a crown of barbed thorns around Mom’s head.

  Envy and wistfulness shot through me at how Lydia could so swiftly deepen merely decorative to thought provoking, changing Mother in Domicile to Madonna of Domestic Prison. “How did you do that?”

  “It was always there. Sometimes, you just need to play with your art.”

  Uncomfortable with Lydia’s probing look, I straightened the tools of my trade on my worktable — razor blades, extra sharp paper-only scissors, gloppy medium — and almost had to laugh, because that was exactly it. What I did was craft, a trade. I made collages; I designed wrestling team logos, for God’s sake.

  “This isn’t art,” I told Lydia.

  “How can you say that?” She crossed her arms and jutted out her jaw, her battle stance.

  Luckily, the bell chimed, cutting Lydia off. From downstairs, we heard the unmistakable clumping of cross-country ski boots on the floor. Lydia and I grinned at each other, even if the tourist-slash-potential-customer was nicking our floor with every thoughtless step. The gallery needed money badly. Smack in the middle of prime summer tourist season, forest fires burned through thousands of acres for a solid three weeks in August. No one but emergency crews came to the Methow then, and the firefighters didn’t exactly have time to peruse or support the local art scene.

  I was about to head downstairs, but Lydia held my ar
m. “Finish this,” she ordered, her knuckle-swollen finger pointing at my canvas. Those arthritic hands could no longer make the art that her mind still saw.

  “But —”

  She left me then. I followed her out to the catwalk, but stopped at her fierce words: “I’ll do my work; you do yours.”

  Still, I held my breath until Lydia made it safely down to the gallery floor and greeted the tourist with a cheery “hello,” as though there were no place she’d rather be than at the cash register.

  Back alone in my studio, I picked up a blank canvas from a stack in the corner that I had bought in bulk a few weeks ago. Instead of finishing Mom’s, tackling the impossible of turning good to great, I could start something new. Something for me.

  How did the old mapmakers handle all that expectant blankness, waiting to be filled with destinations when they had never ventured farther than their town walls? They relied on explorers to discover new lands, pathfinders to whack out new trails, and patrons to fund their work. I was none of those.

  I toyed with a couple of old skeleton keys, all rusted shanks and heart-shaped heads that I had discovered at a garage sale in Omak. They were the last things I expected to see, trapped like fossilized dragonflies in a glass jar.

  How much easier would life be if I just had a key to my fate map?

  I leaned back in my chair and stared at the wind deities at each corner of the reproduction maps that surrounded me on the walls: Zephyrus in the west, Notus in the south, Euroas in the east, and the nastiest wind of all, the one that shot icy blasts, Boreas, who commanded the north. The front two legs of my chair crashed to the floor. Mrs. Frankel, Lydia, Dad, and Erik — they were my own wind deities, buffeting me with their competing wishes. Mrs. Frankel, who wanted me to go to Williams; Lydia, who lobbied for art school; my dad, who’d only pay for state school; and Erik, who wondered why I’d want to leave for school at all. God’s wings, the cartographers called them. Maybe. I dragged my gaze off the old map of Europe now, but still felt their wishes beating on wings so strong, I’d be blown off-course if I didn’t stay focused.

  So I ignored the blank canvas, set aside Mom’s nearly completed one, and powered on my laptop to start the poster for next year’s exhibitions. I had to earn this week’s paycheck, heralding real artists and their real artwork.

  Chapter five

  T-O Maps

  MOST MORNINGS, I SPRANG OUT of bed at five sharp — and not because I was a natural early bird. Hardly. While my face might have been far from ideal, I made sure my body came as close as humanly possible. You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.

  This morning, though, I lingered in bed for a few extra warmth-filled minutes, tired from studying math until late and then from suffering insomnia until later. Thank you, Dr. Holladay. The presence of her brochure in my bedroom was as palpable as her voice: Take it. And Erik’s: Why not fix your face? Finally, I just had to bury the dermatologist’s information under my bed.

  That didn’t stop me from wondering whether this surgery actually might do the trick. But wondering is just a breath away from hoping, and I couldn’t stand dealing with the disappointment if yet another surgery failed. So I hauled myself outside now to let the frigid winter air shock some sense into me.

  See, after twelve years of intensive laser therapy — once a quarter starting when I was four months old and tapering off to a yearly visit when I turned ten — Dad deemed my face a lost cause. All those laser blasts may have lightened my birthmark a smidge, but that was like measuring the difference in darkness between two and two fifteen in the morning, the “improvement” so imperceptible.

  The air outside smelled so strongly of evergreen and juniper, I could taste Christmas in my mouth. A scant half inch of new snow had whitened the ground overnight, covering yesterday’s mud-stained old snow, recasting it fresh, beautiful. Frozen, it made a satisfying crunch with my every step. Bundled up like an Arctic explorer, I was glad no one saw me with the headlamp around my forehead — or my face au naturel. The risk of anyone witnessing either was pretty low this early. Not even Karin knew about my pre-dawn exercise routine, and I never dissuaded her from her assumption that lucky genes endowed me with a naturally lean and toned body.

  I switched on my headlamp, and with a deep breath of lung-freezing air, I started out. For five months a year, I looped around and around our property, stamping out my own T-O map — the medieval circular map that used a T to divide the world into three parts. By the time I reached the first bend on the trail, my legs had warmed up, my muscles loose and free.

  Running in snowshoes takes a certain rhythm. The trick is to slide them forward but land firmly so that the metal claws underneath dig into snow. That way, you don’t slip and fall. After four circuits, my leg muscles ached. I plodded on, brooding about Dr. Holladay’s brochure. After that port-wine stain conference a couple years ago, I had promised myself never to imagine my life without my birthmark. Years of fruitless treatments had something to do with that. But mostly, it was the girl who had been trotted out at the conference as the poster child of a new laser therapy, proof that stubborn port-wine stains could be completely erased.

  “So,” said the proud scientist on the stage, Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, “tell everyone how you feel now.”

  I don’t think he expected her response. I know I didn’t.

  “Well, yeah, I feel different,” she said in a high, halting voice, “but everybody made such a big deal about my face afterward, it was, like, God, was I really that ugly before?”

  I didn’t know how to process that — no one in the audience did. The awkward silence in the ballroom made me hyper-aware of my two hangnails and the dandruff dusting the shoulders of the man sitting in front of me. But now I thought I knew what that girl meant. It’s not like I’d come to love my birthmark — not by any means — but I’d grown used to it the way I’d accepted that Dad’s my dad. Both are permanently inked on my fate map. Why tempt disappointment?

  I was on the homestretch of my seventh loop when I tripped on a sagebrush, half hidden by the heavy snow. With any luck, by April, high school would be bordering on distant memory, and the snow would melt enough for a proper run. Freezing in the cold now, I thought wistfully of my spring running route, even that one last hill my brothers nicknamed Agony for its pure, brutal incline. But all my workout routes — spring running or winter snowshoeing — circled me right back to my real Agony: home. From the trail, the kitchen lights gleamed against the dark. I wasn’t ready for Dad yet. So I stayed on this well-trod path for a couple more loops.

  An hour and a half after I’d set off, I opened the mudroom door to hear Dad already snipping at Mom: “Are you sure you need to use all that butter?”

  It wasn’t even six thirty, which meant that Dad was getting an early start on his daily harangue. Instead of being a cartographer, he wished he had been a professor. But what he really should have been was a director, the way he lived to tell everyone what to do, when to do it, and most of all, how to do it better. Knowing nothing about the subject matter never stopped him from giving stage directions. Like this critique of Mom’s cooking. As if he’d ever held a spatula in his life.

  “I doubt your doctor would be fine with you eating even one one-hundredth of that. All you have to do, Lois, is make smart substitutions.” Like a rattlesnake, there were warning signs that Dad was ready to strike. And when he did, his words were swift, precise, deadly. Like now. “You wouldn’t be so fat if you’d just use your brains. Cooking right is a matter of being intelligent and resourceful.”

  I strained, but didn’t hear Mom’s response to his needling. I never did.

  As tempting as it was to head back outside or upstairs for a shower, I gripped the doorknob on the mudroom door and then eased it closed soundlessly. Sweat dripped down my back while I stood there in the mudroom, the sports bra damp under my breasts. I shed my polar fleece jacket, holding it to my chest
.

  “Isn’t Beth your age? Now there’s a woman who doesn’t eat bacon.” Dad’s insinuation was as pungent as the bacon sizzling in the kitchen.

  God. Today had to be the day I got the acceptance to Williams.

  Dad continued, “You know, you could use the sharpest cheese available, and then halve the recipe amount. It’s really very simple.”

  Never engage Dad when he is in one of his moods. Just fade into the background. That was my brothers’ modus operandi. They’ve faded so far into the background, you’d forget they were even part of the picture. Take Claudius. He was a senior at Western Washington, a scant three hours’ drive away, but did he ever come home for the weekend? And Merc? He worked as far from here as possible, first San Francisco, then Boston, now Shanghai.

  But I couldn’t recede away, couldn’t stay out of it, not when Mom’s hands were probably trembling as she waited for Dad’s next attack — a snide comment here, a pointed remark there. Reaching back, I opened the mudroom door and slammed it to announce my arrival, then deliberately clomped loudly down the hall.

  “Hey, Mom, Dad,” I said, greeting another unhappy morning in the Cooper household. I grabbed a glass out of a cupboard and filled it with water from the fridge, all the while casting Mom surreptitious looks to check how she was doing. Around three years ago, Mom’s stomach went from a shy dip over her waistband to an all-out nosedive. Now, standing at the counter, her stomach rested on her thighs, her breasts on her stomach. Her body had become a worn-out totem pole, settling on itself. It hurt to see her giving up, giving out.

  “How far did you run today?” asked Dad, spoon en route to his mouth, where each bite would be chewed fifteen times exactly, no more, no less. I didn’t have to look at the contents of his spoon to know what he was eating. Mondays and Wednesdays it was oat bran. Every other day, cholesterol-lowering oatmeal dampened with non-fat milk, no brown sugar, no raisins, nothing to sweeten its plainness.