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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

 

In which the artist is overcome

by the spontaneous impulses

of her subconscious.

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            THE GUN is smooth, cooler than my skin, and I heft it twice for the pleasure of feeling its weight. Silently, I aim the barrel at my unsuspecting target, a mere twenty feet away. One twitch of the finger, one burst of noise, and it’s done: the bullet shreds skin and flesh and sends strings of sinew into the air, where they hang for an instant before dropping to the ground, the smell of sulfur lingering. A high, bright flash of yellow speeds from a fir tree, a tanager sounding his raspy alarm. I lower my weapon and take stock of the damage.

            The Blue Hubbard squash rocks violently on the edge of the log before landing with an ignoble splat on lush, wet grass, its guts spilling and filling the air with a faintly nutty fragrance. I circle the carnage, debating whether or not to fire again, but the composition of blue-gray rind and amber pulp is perfect. I unload my Smith & Wesson, and position a freshly gessoed canvas on the easel. I’ve always loved painting en plein air.

            “I hear gunfire. You must be working,” Alice says, as she comes through the garden gate. A sudden sun break sets her red hair aglow like Rosetti’s La Ghirlandotta.

            “Yes, just shot the last of the squash.”

            She tiptoes to the log, keeping spiked heels clear of rain-soaked ground, and eyes the remains. Then she eyes me. “You forgot about the wedding, didn’t you?”

            “Oh, no …”

            “Oh, yes.” She veers around last year’s lone remaining tomato plant, a shriveled tangle holding one last stubborn, desiccated fruit. It looks even more pitiful in the verdant explosion of spring, and I make a mental note to shoot it.

            “Dang, and this composition is perfect.”

            “Don’t worry, it’ll look even more bizarre tomorrow.”

            Following me inside, she heads into my bedroom, banging her leg on the desk that juts past the door frame. “Damn!” She rubs her thigh. “You’d think I’d know by now … damn.”

            A stack of books at the farthest end wobbles before tumbling off, monographs on Valie Export and Suzanne Lacy, and I pile them on the bed, handy for midnight reading.

            “What are you going to wear?” She opens my closet.

            “This.” I fan out the sides of my dress.

            “You’re kidding. Don’t you have something with color? Something that fits?”

            “Technically, black is a color, if we’re talking about the pigment of tangible objects. Which we are.” I pull grass from between my toes and slip into my clogs.

            “You are such a nerd.” She says this affectionately, while rifling through my clothes. The scent of cedar wafts from the closet. “What happened to that flowered dress I gave you?” She turns to scan me, her inspection stopping at my feet. “Eva, you cannot be serious.”

            I look down too, then up at her. “What? They’re comfortable.”

            “Rubber shoes? Really? What if you meet a man you like? Do you want to meet him wearing rubber shoes?”

            “Did we learn nothing from the last three?” Those setups — respectively, a car salesman with four ex-wives, a personal trainer who couldn’t pass a reflective surface without checking his hair, and a city planner from Idaho who was drunk before the appetizer came — represent only a fraction of her matchmaking efforts.

I squeeze past her to the bathroom and get the scissors to even up my bob. “Should I cut bangs?”

            “No.” She takes the shears and snips pieces I missed. “Your hair’s like corn silk. Hopefully, it’ll distract from your shoes.”

            “Give it up,” I chuckle. “You don’t want to get involved with anybody, either.”

            “That’s different, I have Eileen to look after, for all eternity and beyond.”

            “And you’re still pining over a man you haven’t seen in decades.” I regret it the minute I say it. “I’m sorry …” I whisper.

            Pursing her lips, she looks away and waves a dismissive hand. To distract her, I hold up the nearest footwear, a pair of chunky black boots. “How about these?”

            “It’s April. What about a belt?” She rummages through my closet again. “Honestly, what have you got against showing off your figure?”

            “Alice, I love you to pieces, but I like things the way they are. Simple and comfortable.”

            “Oh, I love you, too, sweetie. I just want you to be happy.” She pulls me in for a hug, the sweet, smoky scent of Je Reviens unchanged since college. “Get your dorky clogs in gear and let’s go.”

 

~

 

            Alice and I met on our first day of classes at the Northwest Art Institute in Portland. I’d gotten in on a scholarship, after growing up in the Sisters of St. Philip Children’s Home because my parents died when I was four. Philip was the patron saint of pastry chefs and Special Forces, but fortunately the sisters also recognized the importance of art.

            When I was ten I discovered painting, thanks to a sweet-faced, elderly community volunteer named Miss Bert, who noticed that I was remarkably less high-strung with a paintbrush in my hand. Unfazed by the turgid scenes I cranked out, she nodded supportively, showing me how to blend shadows into the gushing head wounds of the nuns so they looked as real and grotesque as possible. Sadly, her tutelage ended all too soon, but she left me with something no one could take away: I had discovered my métier.

            Because I was not what you would call highly desirable, adoption-wise, I lived at the orphanage until I went to college. Besides being pathologically shy and running away from people, I also had a habit of throwing up when I was nervous. The Sisters tried several times to circumvent this neurological tick by not feeding me on what was euphemistically called Visitor’s Day, with the unfortunate result of impressive dry heaving on my part and a whole lot of bug-eyed visitors, many of whom left early. The combination of my white-blonde hair, matching skin, and giant ice-blue eyes probably added to the overall Children of the Corn effect. I guess you could say I was a late bloomer.

            I was completely unprepared for life outside the orphanage. Not only was the world a lot bigger than I was used to, but no instructions came with it. On the first day of college, stripped of the constant supervision of  the nuns, I  found myself  standing like a stone in the alien landscape of the campus, rivers of people flowing purposefully past me in every direction. A tall redhead stopped, all neon pants and platform sneakers, crimped hair in a scrunchie.

            “Know where you’re going?”

            “The Rodgers Building?”

            “Orientation. Me, too. You must be a freshman.” Her green eyes were rimmed with sparkly blue eye shadow, fascinating because the only makeup I’d been allowed was Chapstick. “I’m Alice. What’s your name?”

            An hour later, as the room emptied around us, she fished a tangle of keys from her fanny pack. “Wanna go to O’Toole’s for lunch?”

            I nodded mutely, without any idea what or where O’Toole’s was, and the next thing I knew we were whipping around in her old Impala convertible, narrowly missing parked cars while she rummaged in the glove compartment for a CD. Mission accomplished, she turned up the volume and hung her arm out the window, singing along to Love Sneakin’ Up On You.

            I hung my arm out, too, and smiled at her.

            She smiled back. “You ever think of cutting your hair, kiddo? You’d look bitchin’ in a bob.”

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~

 

            O’Toole’s Restaurant was managed by Ethan, a big, good-looking Canadian who was Alice’s boyfriend. The minute I saw them together I knew they were made for each other; a kind of calmness came over them both, and a sweet respectfulness that seemed to me like a sign of the real thing. After he locked the doors for the night and ran the vacuum cleaner, Ethan put on Pearl Jam or oldies and raided the walk-in freezer for mangled slices of cheesecake, many of which became mangled after he went in. Then the three of us sat around in the candlelight, drinking wine and nibbling and pondering the future, to which, until that point, I hadn’t given much thought. Sooner or later Crimson and Clover would come on, they would get quiet and dreamy-eyed, and before long they’d head to Ethan’s apartment, while I went back to the dorm and imagined a day when I might have a boyfriend of my own.

            Most of the teenagers who exited the orphanage attacked their newfound freedom with the gusto of an Amish kid on Rumspringa. Not me. After living in such a tightly circumscribed world, it took time and effort on my part to venture past the new boundaries of the art studio and my dorm room, unless I was with Alice. There was also the matter of my twenty-four/seven indoctrination in Catholicism, which resulted in the feeling that God Himself was watching me closely, every minute of the day, and His was not a benign attention. Gradually, however, I began to tiptoe into the wider world, first staking out a table at a coffeehouse near campus, where I propped up an open book as camouflage while people-watching. And what interesting people I saw! I still remember a woman with waist-length curly blonde hair, a wide black headband covering her forehead; it was the most elegant, exotic style I’d ever seen, which speaks volumes about fashion at the Home. But most of all I was transfixed by the students’ remarkable ease and confidence, as if their right to walk the earth and be happy doing it was granted by a different God than the one I knew.

            Eventually, my curiosity emboldened me to get a bus pass. I was only brave enough to go to places we’d been with the nuns, so my first destination was Washington Park, where they had taken us to the zoo. Why they did, I don’t know, because that whole outing was one long earful about how dangerous animals are. Sister Mary Concepta, in particular, was so terrified by the African wild canines that she had a panic attack at the Predators of the Serengeti habitat, an episode so dramatic it resulted in my lifelong fear of dogs. To this day, I remember her gulping air and gasping about dogs eating your face off and regurgitating it for their young. Later there was another incident in the Aviary, with Sister Mary Irmengard, which caused me to cross birds off the list as well.

            But as I ventured out on my own, there was so much else to explore in the park. I discovered the arboretum, the rose garden, and my favorite, the lovely and tranquil Japanese garden. There, amid the moss-covered rocks and koi ponds and waterfalls as delicate as Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, under flaming Japanese maples in fall and gossamer cherry blossoms in spring, I found respite from the relentless buzzing of my overactive nervous system, and it became a refuge where I found courage and calm while I explored the city in ever-widening circles.

~

 

            As graduation drew near, Alice and I busied ourselves looking for jobs. She took a position as an in-house art advisor for an upscale furniture company, which later led to her highly successful career in real estate. I was hired by a theater company to paint backdrops, which unfortunately led to an introduction to my ex-husband.

            One day not long after graduation, Alice broke up with Ethan and refused to talk about it, and six weeks later she went to City Hall with a DJ she met at Django Records. The marriage lasted about as long as an LP and produced her daughter Eileen, that loveable and flightless little bird, now grown and still living at home searching for her purpose in life. The DJ moved to LA, where he recently married yet another twenty-two-year-old. He calls Eileen once a year, at Christmas, after which she spends a few days in bed eating Oreos. Alice did not and does not discuss Ethan, which is how I know he is the pain around which the rest of her life has closed, like woundwood around a lost branch.

            My marriage lasted considerably longer, thanks to Catholicism and my naivete. In the years since I finally left, I’ve immersed myself in the joys of being single like a rescued lab monkey turned loose in the trees. For me, those joys aren’t about all-night revelry or coming and going as I please, but rather the sweet, private pleasures of the solitary life: leaving half-finished projects in piles all over the house, discharging firearms whenever I want, and having milkshakes for dinner while binge-watching The Wire, which I didn’t see when it came out because I was busy navigating Mel’s fits of what the professionals call Narcissistic Rage — not something you expect to encounter when you’re fresh out of college and envisioning your future. The proverbial last straw was finding an old journal in which he had written in lurid detail about bullying his ex-wife until she broke down on the stairs, sobbing and incoherent. His closing comment, the one that turned my blood to ice as I finally grasped who and what I was dealing with, was: You don’t have to hit the bitch.

            I heard myself saying “I want a divorce,” at which point he collapsed on the couch in histrionic sobs, the too-familiar flip side of the rage coin. I remember standing in that doorway, one foot in, one foot out, part of me still somehow thinking it was my duty to suit up and wade into the swamp where he awaited rescue. But at just that moment he raised his head, gasping for air as if surfacing from underwater, his weeping operatic, his face grotesque, and my body — smarter than my brain — simply went out the door. It was instinctive. Visceral. I was through.

            When he finally left the house, I went back and packed a bag, drove to Alice’s in Pony Rock, and never looked back. It took a few years for the nightmares to subside, ultraviolet montages in which he came into my new home and stole or broke things that were precious to me while I hid under the bed. For the most part those have passed, although once in a great while he still pops up like a horror movie ax murderer if I’ve had an especially stressful day. But other than that, it’s a mercifully closed chapter.

            My home now is my sanctuary, my refuge. I’m through with relationships. That part of my life is over.

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© 2025 | Pamela Taylor

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