Drawing Conclusions: Part 9
By the time we got to the city, through crosstown traffic, and found the right building at the College of Fine Arts campus, the organizers were frantic. A plump woman in a flowing caftan rushed us at the door saying, Sharon? Good! This way. Hurry. We had to start without you. I had no idea what, exactly, had started but obediently matched her pace. We dashed down a hall. Papers tacked to a bulletin board fluttered in our invisible wake. A janitor in a gray uniform steering a bucket on wheels, stepped aside to let us pass. Ammonia fumes burned the inside of my nose. Mother, who refused to be rushed, fell gracefully behind.
As Ms. Caftan turned the corner she called out She’s here! She’s here! Five photographers standing in a clump at the back of the gallery looked my way. About time, one muttered, I got a four-thirty at City Hall. Ms. Caftan, all nervous apologies, ushered me to the front of the room where an elderly man in a gray suit and two high school kids holding stretched canvases waited. She squeezed me between a boy and the girl in a daisy-print mini and black tights. The gray suit man congratulated me. The teenagers said nothing. My professionally framed portrait of Mother lay propped against one wall. Ms. Caftan thrust it in my hands. She squared off my shoulders. A photographer told me to hold the painting higher. Gray suit man placed one spotted hand on the shoulder of mini dress girl. He said, Cheese, which for some reason made them all laugh. Everything after that was just bright flashing lights and faceless voices barking orders. Turn this way. Look over here. Tilt it down, it’s glaring in the flash. Would it kill you to smile, kid? And from the gray suit man to me: Why so glum little artist? I hope you’re not thinking of cutting off an ear! Big laughs from behind the blinding lights. And then it was over.
Daisy dress girl said thank-you to no one in particular, then slipped away to join a handsome blonde I took to be her boyfriend. A reporter had a few questions for gray suit man. Ms. Caftan said, only a very few. The other student wandered off. The photographers talked F-stops and film speed as they packed lenses in camera bags. I looked around for Mother.
I found her in a dim hall posing on a staircase for a guy wearing three cameras around his neck and a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. They ignored me. The photographer patted the bulging pockets of his safari vest, feeling for additional film. He raised the largest camera to his eye. Mother smiled into the lens .
“Beautiful, Betty! Beautiful,” he said, shutter clicking. “Now turn around! Put your right foot on the first stair.”
I thought Mother would admonish him for being so rude. Instead she complied, coyly looking back over her shoulder like a fashion magazine model.
“Good! Good! Go to the top of the stairs,” he said. “Then come back down, eyes on me.”
Mother laughed coquettishly. She glanced my way.
“It will only be a minute,” she scolded as though I’d complained. I’d said nothing. I stood in the shadows, waiting.
(short story from The Cardiff Review; image @194angellstreet)
