Sketches of Mary
By Marianne Szlyk
For
Once She Was Good 1991
After “The Library” by Anna Lee Hafer, n.d.
Then Frankie stood before her as if he’d known where she’d be in the maze of bookshelves and worn armchairs. She suspected that his father had sent him to the library to “learn something,” as Frankie claimed he often did. Frankie had quit school, so his father assigned him little tasks. He was supposed to be watching a science program on Channel Thirteen, but the old man had caught him cracking up at Popeye kicking butt and taking names in deepest darkest Africa on some UHF channel. For the past week, Frankie had been laboring over a twenty-page paper on the cartoons’ cultural significance. Mary had offered to help him do research at the library, but he had shrugged her off. She wondered if he was finally going to accept her help.
“We got tickets for Chuck Berry tonight at the Apollo. Wanna come?”
“Me and Pops. Alicia has a big paper. So you’ll take her ticket.”
Mary closed her notebook. Alicia was Frankie’s younger sister who tagged along sometimes when they played music in the subway station. They let her sing backup and whack a tambourine. Once, during the week, she and Mary met to go thrifting. Everything fit Alicia, a slight girl, and nothing fit Mary’s curves. Alicia still went home with nothing, and Mary paid too much for a tiny purse.
“You’re gonna come, right?”
Frankie’s voice sounded so loud, but most of the librarians and the other students had left to go drinking.
He barely waited for Mary to slip her Calculus book and notebook into her backpack. As she hoisted it onto her shoulders, he led her out of the library.
“Don’t I have to change? Or at least drop off my backpack?”
Frankie interrupted his monologue about Popeye. “Yeah, sure.”
“Wait outside. Compose your paper about Popeye’s cultural significance. Wasn’t it due yesterday?”
He laughed.
Frankie’s father met them at the diner closest to the subway station. Mary didn’t recognize him except that he was a taller, thinner, older version of Frankie. The same black watch cap, the same wire-rimmed glasses, the same black leather jacket for the October chill minus the spikes and studs, of course. Except that Frankie was straight-edge and his father smoked throughout dinner, barely talking, just stubbing his half-smoked cigarettes into a heaping plate of French fries. They were not real food, he said. Not that he ate anything anyway, Mary noticed, as she chewed and swallowed the last of her bacon cheeseburger and then wiped the juice and ketchup from her fingers with a cloth napkin.
They took a taxi up to the Apollo. Mary shrugged. She and Frankie would have walked, but it was the father’s money, not hers. Then Jacob started talking. He had an audience, that is, the Haitian cab driver, a young man who rapped and played guitar. Mary listened a little. She couldn’t help it because she sat in the middle. She faced her friend, inching towards him as his father spoke loudly, even gesturing, brushing his hands against her arm, her hair once or twice.
Maybe if she’d been a good girl. . . but she told herself that this was nothing as she paid attention to Frankie, nodded firmly, added her opinion. She told him that her father adored Chuck Berry, had seen him a few times back in Texas. She could feel Jacob’s hand balance himself against her thigh as he shifted position. She told herself that this was nothing. Jacob was making a point about guitars to the driver. The back seat was cramped, sticky, uncomfortable. She’d rather walk with Frankie, let the old man ride and talk the cabbie’s ear off. She’d rather listen to Frankie’s stories about sneaking into ABC No Rio, the downtown venue where punk rockers and poets performed for free.
Maybe if she’d been a good girl, she would have begged off the evening, remembered that her mother was going to call her. She would have just taken her own taxi home, praying that her cash would cover the fare. But she didn’t want to disappoint Frankie. And she wanted to see Chuck Berry, to tell her dad all about the concert.
So she stayed and let Frankie’s father pay for her cab ride home. The music was great. She stood up all night to sway her hips and pump her arms, even when Frankie and his father were heckling the opening act. She was glad that they were riding in separate cabs. They were going in different directions. And he was just a boring old man, dropping names of people she didn’t know, moving around as if he were still a star in a limo. She hoped that she would never see him again. She hoped that she would see Frankie. That they would meet at the subway station tomorrow and play some more songs. She wanted to go alone with him to ABC No Rio.
MOMA, 1992
The old man, Frankie’s father, used to like to sketch Mary, but she thought of herself as a collage, one of Braque’s collages, a still life made of wallpaper, newspaper, scraps of drawings, all at odd angles. But she wasn’t a still life. She was in motion – like this painting in front of her. George Braque’s Man with a Guitar. This painting that she might write about for Art History class. This painting that she was studying at MOMA.
She didn’t think that Frankie’s father was much of an artist. He drew her as a stringy-haired blob on white paper. She was in motion, whether she was playing guitar with her ex-friend Frankie in the subway or kickboxing to the Clash in her dorm room or back home riding her pony, Mamacita. You couldn’t figure out who she was. Just like in the painting, only the nail in the far corner was discernable. The rest was a blur on paper the color of a smoker’s lungs.
As her friend Deb said, men can’t see women for who they are. Maybe even Braque couldn’t. He lived so long ago, died in 1963, ten years before she was born. And, as the Art History professor told the class, male artists have always objectified women. No wonder why Frankie’s dad couldn’t see her for who she was. He was a grown man when Braque died.
Mary yawned, then stretched. She walked away from the painting to look for Deb. A more diligent student, her friend was taking notes on some other painting by Picasso. Deb didn’t trust her feelings or her memory. She also took notes in class. No wonder that she could tell when men didn’t see women.
Mary decided that she would write about Man with a Guitar. She stomped her boots, shook her dark, glossy hair, let her purse swing. She wanted to go. It was a long bus ride back to campus and her typewriter. Still Deb was smiling to herself, scribbling in her tiny notebook, the one she always carried in her purse. Mary could not catch her friend’s eye. She thought about running out of MOMA, the way she ran out of Frankie’s dad’s brownstone last time, sprinting as if anyone would really chase after her all the way to the bus stop. The old man smoked too much anyway.
Mary figured she’d look around for a pay phone, make a phone call, then come back. Deb would still be taking notes. They could ride back to campus, maybe even have an early dinner together. No, she’d start work on this paper. This time she’d write it right away. She unzipped her purse and felt for a loose quarter. She wanted to tell someone about the painting she had just seen. Deb was busy. She wished that this someone could be Frankie, the friend she had already lost.
Inspired by: Man with a Guitar, by Georges Braque (France), 1911-12,
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79048
Man with a Guitar, 2000
Perhaps Braque’s man with the guitar was Frankie, the boy she used to play with in the subway not so many years ago. It was never about her, as her father and her husband and his family had reminded her so many times. Still Mary thought that she was looking at what she might have been, the Future of Man. If only they could have kept on playing in the subway, in the park, on campus. If only she hadn’t followed him home.
But
now she did laundry; assembled lunch from containers of lunch meat, string
cheese, and apple slices or grapes; and drove her daughters through their
over-watered Colorado. The Frankie she had known would have wondered where the
water came from to make this desert bloom. But if she had still known him, she
would not be here. She would not be blonde. She would not wear a tight neon
pink t-shirt and faded mom jeans. She might still be barefoot, though.
Frankie, she read, was now the Future of Man. He was the narrow-faced,
narrow-hipped man with a guitar. She had read somewhere that he had had laser
eye surgery. She suspected that he plucked his eyebrows. Even his short, curly
hair seemed hard. It glinted in the spotlight. Mary read about him every so often
on the computer she kept in the laundry room. She downloaded his songs from
Napster. Especially once she realized that her husband didn’t know about her
computer’s incognito mode, her secret sites. Not knowing about them, he
couldn’t check her search history. And her daughters were upstairs watching
their animal videos from Blockbuster.
Mary, on the other hand, supposed that she was the Past of Woman. When young, she had been a pear-shaped thing, a blob with black, stringy hair, someone whom an old man past fifty liked to sketch. Now she was an almost-young mom, holding her matching laundry basket close to her while her daughters watched videos about cartoon dragons in the family room. She had become a character, the main character, in the infuriating but ultimately inspiring novels her mom used to read after the divorce. The Future of Woman was Frankie’s Asian wife or just maybe her older daughter Neveah who took her Medical Barbie on mission in Africa.
Frankie was Braque’s Man with a Guitar, the Future of Man given the name of his band. You could not see his hand. You could barely discern his instrument. But you heard it. You heard it cut through the crap of all the music she listened to these days while she drove her daughters around, while her husband was home. You heard Frankie’s guitar urge his partners on: his wife, her brother, even Rashaun Mackey the seven-foot drummer who rapped “I’m so bored with the NBA.” The future was a whirr of sharp noise and dull colors. Both obscured the body. The noise shattered the surfaces so that you could not recognize what was beneath the dark layers of animal and human skin: blood, heart, mind. Only she knew what was beneath what she heard on Napster. Only she knew why Frankie and Rashaun were cursing her, the dumb whore, on that song she couldn’t unhear.
All too long ago, not quite ten years ago, Frankie was a skinny high school senior with acne, with eyebrows and glasses like his father’s, with a guitar he had saved up for despite his family’s money. Frankie and Mary played old songs and their songs in the subway station near her college. She was the girl with the guitar, her glossy black hair, long for the ‘90s. Until, a month into their brilliant career, she accepted Frankie’s invitation to stop by his family’s home. Until she let his father sketch her in his studio. Until she became this bird with her perch in the past. Not the woman with a guitar.
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/124420
Mary
always thought she’d be the girl, head turned, gaze fixed on the photographer.
Everyone else, her friends, her family, would look the other way, chat with
each other, read their Bible, take notes on the day’s passage, not know that
someone else was taking their picture.
But this was not her Colorado where most days she forgot to look up to the sky,
its clouds, even the mountains. For her, the mountains and clouds were made of
laundry, her daughters’ toys, and groceries. But this picture from 1969 was not
from her 1999 Colorado of green lawns and cathedral ceilings.
This church in the picture was without bells or a steeple. It could have been a
doctor’s office or an acupuncturist’s. It stood on the outskirts of Colorado
Springs, a few years before she was born. In black and white, on the wall of
the Hirschorn, the close-cut grass looked hard, dry, sharp enough to pierce
thin-soled shoes. The mountains were worn down. Even the sky was blank, a
background of palest gray paper, without the architectural clouds that drew her
into Robert Adams’ photographs.
Mary was not against church, per se. She went while she was in Colorado, when
she was married and had kids. Of course, her husband and his family expected
her to. Before she met him at BYU, she’d sit in churches. Kim, her friend at
her first college in New York City, invited her to St. John the Unfinished
once—not to a Sunday service but just to sit in a pew and think. Kim told her
that cathedrals in Europe did not have pews. Americans invented pews just like
they had invented cars, shopping malls, and fast food. If they had gone to
Notre Dame or Chartres back in the day, they’d both be standing barefoot. Maybe
they’d be nuns because only nuns could read back then.
Sitting and thinking in St. John the Unfinished actually had helped Mary.
Sitting on the hard pew, not daring to look up or out to God, she knew she
could go back to her mother. Even if it meant going to Mass every morning, to
the Mass without music, before breakfast, often before dawn. Her mother would
protect her, help her. She still would. All Mama could do now, though, would be
to pray. She was so ill these days.
Tucking back a strand of her now-gray hair, Mary wondered what kind of person
her first child had turned out to be. She knew who her two daughters were. But
what about her son. He’d be a man, almost thirty. Maybe he played guitar in the
subway like she used to. Maybe he went to art museums like she did. She tried
to picture him outside this church in the photograph. He’d be appraising the
photographer coolly. Or he would scowl at him for taking a picture of this
Bible study class. She did not know him at all. He could be reading or
chatting, though, not realizing what was going on behind his back. Anyways, his
adoptive parents had shaped him.
Mary shuddered. She turned on the heel of her thick-soled shoes, Skechers, to
leave the exhibit entirely. She didn’t want to think about Colorado anymore. Or
New York. Even if the people in the class were friendly, welcoming. Even if
they saw her for who she was, just like Kim did, that weekday afternoon in the
cathedral near her university when she was thinking, waiting, just not praying,
on the day that she knew she was pregnant.
Transformation Masks 2022
At the gallery on Vancouver Island, Mary gazed at the two masks on the wall the color of dawn sky. One was of an eagle; the other of a demon within. The eagle was so serene, its hooked beak like a prow skimming the cold, dappled water. It belonged in the island’s skies, piercing the clouds. Here the clouds were blankets, sagging, sinking down to the giant pine trees, the rocks, the ground, even the asphalt of the parking lot. The demon, however, emerged from within.
It wasn’t always a demon. Another inner mask looked saintly. It could be floating on calm waters past trees, past rocks, past the western edge of the continent. Some of the other inner masks on the wall looked scared although she figured that what appeared to be masks’ expressions of horror were just airholes for breathing.
She wondered if she could transform from the mother who kept losing her children to other parents, the aging child who needed rescuing by her mother, the musician who no longer owned a guitar, the woman who was drawn to art but never picked up a pencil or brush.
Perhaps all these years she had had it all wrong. Her external mask should have been serene, seeming to fly above all: troubles with men, troubles at work, the Colorado mountains that would have trapped her had she stayed there in that marriage, that family. Her inner mask would be wild, with its breathing hole that let her dance. Only after her children had grown and her mother had passed would she discover her own wildness.
“I have wasted my life.” Mary smiled, remembering that poem from a class she had taken in New York so many years ago. Perhaps she had wasted her life. Perhaps everyone did.
She remembered reconnecting with Deb, her college friend who had left to work with the People with AIDS Coalition. OK. Perhaps Deb hadn’t wasted her life. She lived in DC, worked for a global non-profit, had married a man she met in Zimbabwe, had adopted a son who played soccer. Deb seemed proud of her life, her family, her small house just outside the Beltway, her pictures of people she had worked with, people she had saved.
Mary thought of her mother in another small house, this one by the ocean in Venice, CA. Mama’s adopted daughter Rose was caring for her now, cooking her meals, helping her put on colorful clothes from Amazon, driving her to doctors, taking notes while the doctors, some of them women, spoke. Mary would fly in for an occasional visit, sing for her mother, play songs on the guitar Mama had bought from her years ago.
Had she wasted her life? Mary shrugged. It was her life. No one else’s. She walked over to the bin of photographs of these masks, all small enough to fit in her carryon with her flat shoes and black and white clothes. She considered buying one of these prints, something she could afford. It could be a picture for her bare wall at home. It could be a gift for Mama, a picture of her daughter, the girl in motion.
Eagle transformation mask, by Kwakiutl artist(s), (Canada), 19th century. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/216806169546779340/
A Time When She Was Happy
At the sound healing yesterday, Mary stopped right in front of my mat. She crouched down to ask me why I never wrote about when she was happy. Or when I was happy. She nudged the sole of my foot with her pointy-toed boot to get me to speak.
I was thinking. I couldn’t speak, at least not quickly enough, for this dark-haired girl in a perfect squat that must have made her thighs burn.
Instead of rising up, Mary crouched down further, not even steadying herself with one hand. I envied her being able to squat in jeans and pointy-toed boots. Of course, she was a fictional character, so I could have imagined her landing on her butt after a minute or two.
She said she had been blissfully happy in Eastern Oregon, in the desert outside of La Grande. Of course, she would have been happy anywhere with Gideon, but she had been particularly happy, wandering around behind the cheap motel with him. He held her hand, but not too tightly. His much larger hand enveloped hers, and their gait matched each other’s much more than it usually did. That night he showed her the stars above, many more than she had ever seen before. She remembered how dull and empty skies in New York had been. Lights bloomed like pink algae, choking everything else in the sky’s pond. Some nights rain and snow fell from the sky like dead stars. Other nights, on her way home from the library, she barely looked up.
But there, in Eastern Oregon, she had been happy, amazed by the bright stars that crowded the sky. These stars were like frost on the windows of a magical morning. Gideon then pointed out some of the stars he knew. She recognized only Orion’s belt. She felt she could be happy there, even in this scrubby landscape before the sun had risen. Before the sun flooded over this dry landscape like acid. She felt that no night animals ---no snakes, scorpions, or coyotes—could harm her, Gideon, or their baby.
Write about moments like these, Mary told me. Moments when she had been happy. Even then she did not mind driving back to the university. She did not mind driving back to the university, leaving the desert and the stars behind her for the trees and fog.
She added that she had been happy at times in New York, but living in Oregon she didn’t think too much about her past life. She didn’t miss the skyscrapers, the diners, or the snow. Okay, she missed the art museums, but she didn’t think much about them. Instead, after doing the dishes, she looked out to the dry, pebbly mountains beyond the other side of town. She wished she could paint them the way they held her close to this place that she never believed she’d find.
Dreams to Repair a Broken World
If anyone was Mary’s frenemy, Alicia Gottlieb was. But here Mary was helping to raise Jimmy after Alicia had died. Not that Alicia had named Jimmy that. The name on the birth certificate was Jacob Anahata Rosenthal. But Mary had told both Katy and David that she could not raise a boy with that name, the name of the man who had blighted her life, who had turned a brave girl into a cowardly woman. After much bickering over impossible alternatives, they had settled on James Haliburton Rosenthal, after Mary’s father. They had changed his name for her.
Sometimes she imagined that Jimmy was the son she had given up almost thirty years ago. Or that he was the child that she and Frankie could have had. But no, she forced herself to look at who Jimmy was: a tiny, curly-haired boy who gravely held her hand while crossing the street, who sometimes ran ahead in the park, but not the way that Frankie’s son would have. Jimmy climbed jungle gyms, not trees and bookcases. He was an old soul. No, she corrected herself. He was an only child of old parents.
He was not a typical child, though. One weekday afternoon she had wheeled him into the exhibit on German Expressionism, the Anxious Eye. She supposed that he was really too old to be in a stroller, but he seemed to like not having to walk long distances. He wasn’t too heavy for her yet. His legs weren’t too long for the stroller either. Anyway they had stopped at Kirchner’s sketch of two bathing beauties at a pond, not the kind of art that excited her. Before she moved on to something better, Jimmy said to her, “Jacob draw Mommy.”
At first, Mary knelt down to pry a tiny sketch pad and the big crayons from her backpack. Some people, including his grandma Katy, still called Jimmy by his old name from time to time.
He shook his head when she brought him the crayons. She shrugged her shoulders and put them back.
Later she wondered why he had said that. He never called himself Jacob. He called himself Jimmy. The women in the picture did look like Jacob’s sketches—if he had sketched long-armed, broad-shouldered women with messy hair. On a third or fourth glance, one of the women was actually a man, something Jacob never would have drawn. But the sketch looked like Jacob’s style when she knew him: loose, rushed, without color or vanity. She wondered what Kirchner had thought about his sketch. Was it something he valued? Or was it just something he did to keep himself busy? Yet here it was on the wall of the National Gallery of Art. Mary imagined that Kirchner’s partner had saved that sketch and others, just like Katy saved all of Jacob’s random sketches, even the ones of other women, even her, even Frankie and Alicia’s mother. Mary shuddered, foreseeing an exhibit of all those sketches in the not so distant future.
A month or so later Mary was fixing breakfast for Jimmy, spooning out yogurt, cutting up apple slices, and arranging tiny graham crackers on his favorite plate. He padded into the kitchen and told her out of the blue “Jacob sorry.” Remembering the incident at the National Gallery of Art, she wanted to stop what she was doing, lay down the knife in the sink, and curl into a ball. She didn’t think she’d cry. Not in front of the child. But she’d take long, deep breaths and try not to think about how different her life could be if Jacob, Jimmy’s late grandfather and her ex-lover, had said earlier that he was sorry. Perhaps that was what he had been doing when he stopped by her mother’s house in Venice and Fr. Quinn had warned him away. Or what Jacob had been doing when he met her in Salt Lake City at the only coffee shop in town. They had fought over her newly permed hair, her pink polka dot dress with the thin white belt, and the Roy Orbison song playing on the juke box, the one she wanted to dance to. She was already dressing for someone else, not Jacob. And he would soon remarry Katy, his true love.
She finally asked Jimmy: “How do you know that Jacob is sorry?”
“He tell me.”
“When you were asleep? Dreaming? I dream about him sometimes.”
He nodded.
Mary wondered where this dream took place and what Jacob looked like. She supposed that he was the young, unstooped Jacob Gottlieb with his flowing hair and nimble fingers, the one on the album covers, much younger than she was now. No, that was how she dreamed him. Jimmy would have seen his grandfather as an older man but not the bald, bent, blind man of his last two years spent with a gurgling oxygen tank. Not unless he were in Hell. She wanted to ask Jimmy if his Mama Alicia had been there with him. But no, it was enough that Jacob was sorry. Years later, perhaps too late, and as an apparition in a young child’s dream. Even if it wasn’t enough for most women, she’d accept it.
To find out what Jacob was sorry for and to remonstrate with him, she would have to meet him in a dream herself. She still dreamed of him from time to time. Once she left Utah with him. Their plane turned into a bus navigating NYC’s narrow streets. When they stepped off together at the brownstone, he disappeared. Other times she was seeking him. Once she glimpsed him sitting in the café at MOMA. In this dream, she walked past him looking into the distance, smoking a Gitane, and not touching his cooling cup of black coffee. Not seen, she scurried to a bus stop and back to campus. She felt very peaceful, waking from that dream. She felt the same way now as she brought Jimmy’s breakfast to the table.
MOMA 1992 and Man With a Guitar were previously published in Mad Swirl.
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