Detention

                I started having an interest in art after I realized it was something I could succeed at, besides swimming.  As a freshman in high school, I considered majoring in art history in college.  Right now, in December 2016, I am a sophomore taking a sketching class at Larabbe Academy, the high school I have always wanted to go to in junior high, that is far from my house, in the distant suburb of Wilmette. Whenever I would pass it as a child, my stomach would turn with joy at the site of the fountain at the front entrance.  It seemed like a place where wealthy people would live, as the surrounding homes and buildings looked well-to-do.  My middle class family was able to afford the tuition because of the trust fund my grandma left me.  Otherwise I would have had to attend the public school a mile away from my house, where some of my grammar school friends went. 

Last week a girl named Laurie stood in the center of art class, one hand propped on her side, the other her head.  Her Larabbe Academy polo was tucked into her brown khakis, and one of her gym shoes was untied.  On her left arm, a candy stripe bracelet was bright, even though it was fairly worn out.  Her blonde hair was up in a bun and her green eyes were bright under the classroom light.  The details of her pose made it easy for me to sketch her, using a pencil, and the black chalk that Ms. Keller handed out.  Ten minutes into class, Ms. Keller made her rounds, placing the two tools on the left-hand corners of each desk. 

“Just let yourself go,” she said, pacing from one end of the classroom to the other.  “No one can tell you how to draw, it’s something that comes naturally. It’s like riding a bike.”

                I felt the energy of the classroom, and this guided what I felt when I drew.  My Dad could draw.  One thing we agreed on is that he is a good drawer.  I kept the sketch he drew of me as a three-year-old hanging in the back of my locker. 

Me as a Three-Year-Old

The other day I looked through his sketchbook from his time in college for the fiftieth time.  The best thing he drew as a teenager, in college, was the garage that was adjacent to the cabin we have in Indiana, which he inherited from his uncle.  There were many angles and elements of shading that could easily be transferred from third to second dimension. The garage and cabin weren’t painted.  They were the grey that one associates with oak, turned rotten from rain.  The only form of color that was in the same environment was the grass that lie before the porch, a good ten feet away.

Our Cabin in Indiana

 In contrast, the art studio was bursting with color, the walls covered with paintings that I told myself at the beginning of the semester I would never be able to mimic, and sculptures, grey and dimensional, sitting on top of the bookshelves under the classroom windows. 

                The first time I saw Ms. Keller draw, I knew drawing was something I wanted to be good at.  To be able to transfer an image on paper seemed amazing.  Drawing made feel more in control.  I wanted to sketch everything.  One of my favorite things she drew was a rose. 

Ms. Keller’s Rose

My first attempt of sketching a toy poodle Ms. Keller placed in the center of the classroom was terrible. 

  My First Attempt at Drawing: A Toy Poodle

As I was trying to sketch the curls of the stuffed animal, Ms. Keller approached me from behind and placed her hand on my shoulder.

“Wow, Mariah, you are doing a great job with shading.  Keep it up.”

And so, I did.  From day to day, I sketched the poodle, a book, Kevin, the tall football player in his uniform, and then Laurie.  The girl to my right, Lindsey, would occasionally look over to what I was drawing. 

“It looks just like Kevin,” she said, in response to my third drawing.  I noticed her blonde hair often fell over her eyes as she drew, and she would tuck it behind her ear, with the predisposition of something out of a book.  I wondered if she really thought I was a good drawer, or if she was just trying to be nice.  Her sketch of Kevin looked kind of like mine, but she drew more attention to shadow and detail.

The Facial Profile of Lindsey’s Sketch

And my ability got better with practice.  The last thing I sketched before Ms. Keller asked me about the mural in the lunch room was Laurie.  Ms. Keller asked me to stay after class to talk, so I waited by her desk while the rest of the class filed out of the classroom.

                “The art club has been asked to paint a mural on the north wall of the cafeteria after Christmas break.” She placed her right hand on the side of the desk.  “I see you have made progress, with sketching, and chalk.”

                The bell rang.  I ran my hand over my ponytail and propped up my backpack so that it fit better.  I had lunch next, so I was in no hurry. 

                “But I am only an amateur,” I said. 

                “I understand,” she said, “But it wouldn’t take much experience.  The other art teachers and I have already decided it is just going to consist of the letters “LA,” and a blending of maroon and gold, our school colors.  Really it would just require perseverance, and from what I have seen of your work, you would be the perfect candidate, you and a few of your classmates.”

                So, I said yes.  And she said we would start in a few weeks, meeting after school and Saturday afternoons twice a week for a few hours; sketching out the mural, and then painting in the outline.  I walked out the art studio doors, glowing, yet slightly intimidated.  I asked myself, who would I be working with?  Would they be better artists than me?

                I walked up the hall, towards the cafeteria for lunch.  I started to think about how things have changed since I was a freshman.  I was incredibly overwhelmed by all of the people I didn’t know.  I was the only person from St Joseph’s grammar school that went to Larabbe.  Even now, after time had passed, I was a stranger to many.  I was a stranger to the boy passing me, listening to his headphones and vibing to, most likely, rap.  I was a stranger to the girl walking down the hall, behind him, wearing a sweater with a stripe across the front, that was way too big for her.  I thought to myself, what would happen if I just walked up to them and started talking?  What’s up, I would ask the boy listening to music; My favorite rapper is Dr. Dre, who is yours?  I have his new album, 2001.”   What if I went up to the girl and asked her, How are you?  Is that your boyfriend’s sweater?  My brother has one just like it. 

Sketch of My School Hallway

                I went to lunch, did some homework, got through the rest of the day, and went home.  I finished some of my homework early for the break, then went to bed early. 

That night before I went to bed I looked at myself in the mirror.  I pulled my brown curly hair in a bun before brushing my teeth and washing my face.  I smiled at myself in the mirror, my braces gleaming, my blue eyes squinting at the brightness of the recently changed lightbulbs over the mirror.  I noticed how short I was, and how badly I needed to pluck my eyebrows.  I grimaced at the pimple on the center of my nose.  I folded open the covers, climbed into bed, and fell asleep.

                I drifted to sleep quickly, and then I had a dream.  I was walking through the halls of my grammar school, but none of it looked familiar.  As opposed to the walls being lined with drawings made by children and homework and tests marked with A’s, the walls were blank, and empty.  I walked for what seemed like fifteen minutes, until, from a distant point of view, I saw the exit.  It was a few feet from the eighth-grade homeroom.  Just as I approached it, and got to the end of the hallway, I saw a painting, on my right-hand side.  I remember it was the painting that was in the children’s crying room in the church (the room where parents and their babies sat during mass so that the crying doesn’t interrupt the ceremony) where the students of St. Jospeh’s attended mass services occasionally. 

“The Child’s Bath” by Mary Cassatt

                I looked out the window of the door leading outside, and instead of there being grass, sidewalks, trees, and parked cars, there was just red.  I felt trapped, not knowing where to go.  I froze, and then I turned and stood directly across from the painting.  I remember the painting being in my art class text book.  It was called “The Child’s Bath,” but under the painting were the words: “The path from childhood through adolescence is filled with beauty.”  I traced my hand over the tub where a woman was washing the feet of a young child.  I could feel the discerning lining, the different levels over the paper left by the paint, giving the painting that element of third dimension.  The piece could have been a cross between a painting and a sculpture.  At that moment, my stomach turned.  I felt as though I was falling, but I was just standing still, in front of the painting.  Then I could see the water swishing, back and forth, swaying with the action of the feet moving in the water bin, being washed.  The young girl looked up to me, smiling with dimples, but the woman continued to look down, washing the girl’s feet.  It felt like I was having a dream inside of a dream.  The girl pointed to the pitcher of water, so I ran my hand over that.  Instead of it just feeling like dried paint, it felt like cool porcelain.  I breathed in heavily, once, then twice; and then the painting turned into a red whirlpool, a hurricane, a cyclone, moving outside in, until all that was left was the same red as outside.

                And then I woke up.

                I felt exceedingly happy inside, but with every moment that passed, that happiness that came from the dream left me.  What lingered was how happy I felt when I ran my hand across the depth of the lines of paint, and the porcelain of the pitcher.  I felt the way I did sometimes when I had a dream, when something in the back of my mind remained joyful.  The dream led me to believe that I would have a great time painting the mural at school.  Working with paint may be a new thing for me, I thought to myself. 

 The first day of painting the mural would be the first Saturday after break, and I was looking forward to it, until I got detention for violating dress code.  I got the detention, surprisingly, during the last class of my day, on the first Monday back from winter break.  It was during my honors English class, and even though I was sitting at the back of the class, I was called out by Mrs. Murrows.  Just as I was one of the last people to leave the room at the final bell, she told me that that was “the last straw” (I had worn the pants with patched pockets many times, to feed my need to rebel against a pointless rule, and each time she told me not to wear them again), and she gave a me a Saturday detention, which was served not by spending the afternoon sitting in a classroom doing nothing, but instead, by doing some constructive work, like re-shelving books in the library, or cleaning up the cafeteria, after school.   I wasn’t that upset about the detention, I had gotten them before.  The reason it didn’t bother me that much is that lots of students got detentions.  You could even say getting a detention made me feel more included.  While this is true, I had never gotten a Saturday detention before, and I was not looking forward to it.

It was cloudy and drizzly out the morning of my detention.  The detention room was next to the main office, across from the library.  When I walked in there were many empty seats.  There were two whole walls of windows, and the blazing sun infiltrated the room and almost blinded me.  The tiles were olive green and the teacher’s desk was in the front of the room, which, to me, looked like the back of the room.  I sat next to a guy that I didn’t know that well.  Coincidently, he was the stranger I knew best at school.  He was a floater, like me.  I liked being around him because he was calming, and a bit charming.  He never smiled but he seemed happy when we talked; his eyebrows shifted up, and he had dimples when he laughed.  He liked drawing on my stuff; my pants, my notebooks.  The favorite thing he had drawn for me was the lockers that we sat in front of so many times after school.

John’s Sketch of Lockers

 Sometimes when I would stay after school waiting for the bus after swim practice, he would walk up to me and sit down.  We would hardly talk, but when we did, it was about important, private things, for strangers.  I would ask him what were his life goals while he would draw on the cover of my assignment notebook.  He was my best friend, even though I hardly knew him.  It seemed like he could see what was going on in the back of my head, like he could answer my questions before I even asked them.  He went to a preppy grammar school in a neighborhood far from mine.  He wore brown skater shoes and also always a sweatshirt over his collared shirt.  His face had a little bit of acne, like mine, and whenever I saw him in the halls in the morning I could see the shine of oil on his forehead.  When I passed him after lunch on my way to English, his hands were always tucked in his pockets.  He gazes at the floor intently, and it always makes me wonder if he looks up after I pass him.  It made me wonder how he felt about me; it made me wonder if he looked up after I passed him.  He seemed timid, yet there seemed to be something there under the surface that needed to be tapped. 

                So, I sat next to him.  The proctor, Mr. Johnson, was at the teacher’s desk.  His grey hair was parted on the side and he wore a checkered suit. 

                The proctor called my name, even though it was just John and I.  I raised my hand.

                “Here,” I said.

                “John Bernard,” the proctor said.  The boy sitting next me raised his hand.  “Here!”  he said.

                After Mr. Johnson gave a speech pertaining to the rules of detention (mainly that we need to do the job we were assigned to, “if you want to be able to leave,”), he assigned us something to do for the day.  John and I were to clean the cafeteria.  We walked together out of the detention room, past the bunch of lockers where we sometimes hung out after school.  The halls were light yet dark; the carpet was dark purple, the lockers a maroon red.  The ceilings were green.  At the entrance of the cafeteria there was a large bulletin board where posters and bulletins of happenings and club meetings were posted.  John took the key to the back of the cafeteria out of his back pocket, that he had hooked to his keychain that held a bunch of other keys.  He opened the door and we walked in.  There were buckets half full of soapy, dirty water in the corner.  There was a large closet that I opened up to find bottles of cleaning detergents.  Next to that was a closet with two brooms and a vacuum.

Fifteen minutes into mopping the cafeteria floor, John looked up from his mop with a stone-cold face.

“That is where the mural is going to begin to be painted later today,” he said, pointing a finger from his free hand up to the wall across from the counter where pizza was served.

The fact that I was among an art patron thrilled me.

“Did Ms. Keller ask you to paint it, also?” I asked.

“Yeah, she did,” he said, looking back down.  He seemed grumpy.  His jeans were almost too baggy, and he had circles under his eyes.

The wall where the mural was to be drawn and then painted was blank, a mild shade of yellow.  It was composed of bricks, and it was a good ten by twenty feet. 

Brick Wall in the Cafeteria

The blankness and blandness of it made me think of myself.  I felt like I didn’t have an identity at school. Whatever identity I did have I kept hidden, behind textbooks and sketchbooks.  The thought of making the mural made me happy, like I did at that moment with John.

“You okay?”  I asked.  “You look tired.”

He ran his hand through his hair and then shoved it back in his pocket.  He looked down to the tile floor for a few seconds, then resumed mopping. 

“Just family problems.  Nothing you could help me with.” 

He smiled and his dimples showed.  I could see the shine of oil on his face, like he hadn’t washed it in a while.

We mopped the floors, wiped off the counters of the cafeteria, and cleaned the table tops.  The morning had turned into afternoon when we decided we had done a good enough job. 

“Let’s get out of here.  We wouldn’t want to interfere with the art club and the mural painting,” he said.

“No worries,” I said, trying to be positive, “We can still help painting the mural after school Monday.” 

We were done.  John and I turned around, facing the rest of the cafeteria.  The only thing there besides us was the music playing lightly, penetrating throughout the stereos at all corners of the cafeteria. 

John and I were standing in the back of the cafeteria, standing in front of the wall where the mural was to be drawn later today.  John and I wouldn’t be able to participate, today, because of the school rule about detention.  I looked at the blank wall, alive with possibilities.  I thought of the paintings that I had seen before in my art text book.  If I had the ability, I would paint the next “Man with a Guitar,” right then and there.

  “               Man with a Guitar” by Vincent van Gogh

I would splatter the cement with different shades of green and yellow, with hopes of portraying the talent of Jackson Pollock. 

         Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Seaweed”

John zipped up his pullover and turned to look into the window in the door. 

“Have you ever heard of the forbidden office?” he asked, accentuating “forbidden office.”  He then walked behind the counter and disappeared for a moment, and then he walked back into sight and beckoned me to his side. 

“It’s right behind here,” he said.  “Come with me. This was the old detention room, before we were born.” 

I pushed open the heavy wooden door and walked into the large office with John.  There was a rectangular desk in the corner, a brown, suede sofa lining one side of the room, and a large painting on another wall.  I recognized it from my art class reading, it was “Starry Night,” painted by Vincent van Gogh. 

 ‘Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh

Claude Monet, “Water Lilies”

Next to the painting was a painting by Claude Monet, “Water Lilies.”

“I wonder what is behind here,” he said, the creaking of another door filling the room. 

Then all of a sudden, in my viewing of the Vincent van Gogh painting, a rush of energy surged through me.  The stars were bright with the bright of night.  The dark brown mass that looked like a tree almost took center of the painting, but for me, the subjects were the houses and church lining the ground.  The colors of paint were many, but blue, for me, was dominating.  The lines framed a dream for me, so much that I wanted to be part of it.  I traced my finger around the circles of the stars, across the brown branches, over the houses of the town.  The beauty of the painting resolved any feelings of despair that might have saturated me, and the sound of John’s voice boomed out.

For a second, I was alone. 

“Holy crap!”  I heard him yell.  “There is a spider the size of a tarantula in the corner.  Let’s get out of here.”

John paced profoundly out of the office.  I followed him.  I felt a rush of energy go through me, as I thought I could have been the one to discover the spider.  Was that for worse or better?  Maybe the essence of my raw talent drew me to the paintings so that I didn’t have to deal with the fear of the tarantula.  I was the artistic one of us, as John was the brave one, just like the tree of Starry Night was the brave one and the houses and church lining the bottom were beautiful. 

We walked back to the detention office, told the proctor that we had done our job, and the detention session was over.  John and I walked through the halls to a lobby.  He was expecting a ride from his mom, me from my dad.  He slid against one pole down to the ground, his jacket partially sticking to the top of the column, until he adjusted it, so that he seemed comfortable.  I was about to sit down across from him until he welcomed me over to his side.  He opened up his Adidas backpack and took out a notebook with the cover of a bird sitting on a branch, looking up to the clouds. 

John’s Sketch of a Bird

“Is that a diary?”  I asked.

“Nope, it’s my sketchbook,” he said.  “Do you want to see it?

I nodded, and he handed me his sketchbook.  I put it in my lap and flipped through it.  There were pictures of things like animals and landscapes, but there were also drawings of arbitrary things, like chairs, and stereos. 

  John’s Landscape

                          John’s Chair

                              John’s Stereo

I made my way through ten pages, and then I asked him:

“What motivates you to draw like you do?”  I asked.

“It’s something I’m good at.” he said.  “I also like writing, so sometimes I draw what I write, or write what I draw.  I think one of the most important things in life is beauty, and I like expressing myself through it.” 

He stood up and bundled his scarf against him, put his gloves on, and took my hand.  I laughed.

“Where are we going?”  I asked.

“Where aren’t we going?” he said.  He led me out of the lobby, and into outside.  The sun was framed by branches of oak trees that reached out on either side of the patio.  There were birds flying and squirrels pacing across the cement.  The yellow and green grass framed the squares we were standing on.  It felt like magic, and the moment was beautiful. 

At that moment I felt something I felt for the first time in high school.  I felt like I had a true friend; maybe something even more.  The way he looked me intently in the eyes made me want to laugh.  It made me think of how different he seemed during school, shuffling across the floor.  I took my hand and rubbed his buzz cut.  My stomach rotated as he smiled and his dimples showed.  I had finally made a friend.

The wind threw itself against him and me, so that I was blinded for a moment, until he brushed my hair out of my eyes. 

“This,” I said, “This could be considered beautiful,” he said, taking my right hand with his left.

“Maybe we could draw it.”