Pop told me to join him on the beach this morning. He hadn’t asked. He
didn’t ask for anything that wasn’t loaned money or a rum and coke. He opened
my door and the squeak of it woke me, just barely, from my sleep.
“Come on,” he said.
I was up.
I’d watched his morning ritual before, pressing my nose up against the front
windows that overlooked the beach to see my grandfather, feet bare in the surf,
painting until the sun was up. I’d stare and imagine it was me, crafting
masterpieces that would end up on gallery walls, tugging my soul out with a
paintbrush and framing it later.
It was different now, to watch it up close. I trailed behind Pop, carefully
stepping to the left of his footprints as he shuffled down the dock and over
the sand dune. He had a canvas and a fold out easel propped under his arm. In
his other hand, he held a small wooden case. I knew that inside it were five
rows of hardened gouache, eight rows of red-handled paint brushes, and two
finely sharpened pencils, the professional kind with a metal butt at the end
instead of an eraser. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which made him appear softer
against the almost-risen rays of sun. No hard lines left. He looked like a
grandpa, I thought, which was something I’d stopped thinking about him many
years ago.
We walked in silence until we reached the edge of the surf. The sand was
hard and cool, like the night was still in it, like it hadn’t woken up yet.
There was something special about it, that I was the first foot to touch it
today. Maybe the sand I touched now would be in a three-year old’s sandcastle
later. But first, it had been mine, squished up between my toes and clinging to
the back of my heels.
“You don’t paint anymore,” It was Pop. If it was anyone else, it would have
been a question.
“What?” I asked, looking up from the sand. He’d set up his canvas and was
squinting at it. I realized I was holding my breath. I should be taking notes,
I thought, but reminded myself that I wasn’t an artist anymore and probably
never had been, so it didn’t matter. He continued to stare at it, tilting his
head back and forth. And then he licked his thumb and dragged it across the
middle of the canvas. This was the difference of being up close, I could see
the slick wet shine of his spit, the very DNA he’d given away to this painting,
to this morning, to me.
I sighed, letting out the breath I was holding. “I don’t,” I said. I felt my
stomach start to warm in disappointment. I looked away from him and at the
horizon. The sky was just waking up, soft rays of orange fought behind the
clouds to be seen. I wished I could paint it. Not just that, I wished I could paint
it so someone would look at it and know how it felt, right now, to stand on this
beach and look at this sun and be and feel everything I am.
“Why not?”
I stared at him, unfamiliar with the way questions sounded in his
voice. The crackling, unrehearsed upward twist at the end of his words, too
high to be casual. He cares. It sat in the air between us, still and
delicate.
Why not?
I thought of endless nights I’d spent running on two hours of sleep and four
cans of red bull, bent over half-finished paintings I already hated. I thought
of how I could never mix the right shade of green. Of the time in between
critiques spent crying in the Rogers building’s bathroom. But most of all, it
was the way it felt when people said, you’re Paul Kerrison’s granddaughter?
And how it wasn’t a compliment anymore, but an assessment I’d already failed.
Looking at paintings and thinking: so this is my soul tugged out? And feeling
nothing at all.
Rachel Loring 