DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Locked In

                I started having an interest in art after I realized it is something I could be successful with, besides swimming.  As a sophomore I considered majoring in some type of art in college.  Right now, I am a sophomore taking a sketching class at Larabbe Academy, and I love it.  Basically, someone or something stands or sits in the center of the room, and I draw.  Last week my friend Laurie stood in the center, 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 not tied.  On her left arm the candy stripe bracelet I made for her birthday was bright, even though it was fairly worn out.  Her blonde hair was up in a bun and her green eyes were dim under the classroom light.  The details of her pose made it easy for me to attempt the sketch her, using a pencil and black chalk that Ms. Keller handed out before class.  Ten minutes into class, she 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.”

                Had the classroom not held so much energy I wouldn’t have felt what I needed to feel to draw what I did.  My Dad could draw.  The other day I looked through his sketchbook, for the fiftieth time.  The best thing he drew was the garage that was adjacent to the cabin we have in Indiana.  There were many angles and elements of shading that could easily be transferred from third to second dimension. But the garage and cabin weren’t painted.  They were the grey that one associates with unstained wood, almost grown rotten from rain.  The only form of color that was in the same environment with the garage was the grass that lie before the porch, a good ten feet away.  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; sculptures, grey and dimensional, sitting on top of the bookshelves under the 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 to another source seemed amazing.  My first attempt at the toy poodle Ms. Keller placed in the center of the classroom, to me, was a joke.  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.  I sketched the poodle, a book, Kevin, the tall football player in his uniform, and then Laurie.  And things 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 about the mural, so I waited by her desk while the rest of the class filed out.

                “The art club has been asked to paint a mural on the north wall of the cafeteria after Christmas break,” she said, placing one foot in front of the other, and her hand on the side of her desk.  “I see you have made progress, with sketching and pastels.”

                The bell rang shrilly.  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 partially asked and partially told. 

                “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 yellow, our school colors.  Really it would just need 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 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.  As 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 here.  Even now, I was a stranger to many.  I was a stranger to the boy passing me, listening too 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, yet looked very comfortable.  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?  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. 

                I went to lunch, did some homework, got through the rest of the day, and went home.  I finished my homework early for the break, then went to bed early, as I was so tired.  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 to me.  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 at least 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, where the students of St. Jospeh’s attended mass services occasionally. 

                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, until 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 different 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 level over the paper left by the paint, giving the painting that element of third dimension.  At that moment, my stomach turned.  I felt like 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, 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 the cool porcelain.  It was like having a sixth sense that could only show itself in my sleep.  I breathed in heavily, once, then twice; and then the painting turned into a red whirl pool, a hurricane, a cyclone, moving in a circle form, 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 ceased.  The more I tried to remember it, the more it left me.  But what lingered was how happy I felt when I ran my hand across the depth of the lines of paint, and the preclean of the pitcher.   That 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 said to myself. 

                 The first day of painting the mural would be two weeks away, and I was looking forward to it, until I got detention for violating dress code.

                Back to school after Christmas break was exhilarating, but depressing at the same time.  My parents got me a new sketch book and some colored pencils.  I had told them that I want pastels, chalk or pencils, and they just told me that I would be a good artist no matter what I drew with.  I guess I should have been happy with their input regarding my artistic abilities, but it just made me feel like they didn’t take me seriously.  That was why I felt happy to be among my fellow peers again; because we were all on the same level, with most stuff.

                I got the detention, surprisingly, during the last class of my day.  It was during my honors English class, and even though I was sitting at the back of the class, I still got 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, and many times had 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, doing some constructive work, like re-shelving books in the library, or cleaning up the cafeteria, after school. 

I served it that Saturday.  The detention room was next to the main office, across from the library.  When I walked in there were many empty seats.  There was two whole walls of windows and the blazing sun infiltrated the room so that it partially blinded me.  The tiles were frog 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.  Sometimes when I would stay after school waiting for the bus after swim practice, he would walk up to me and just sit down.  We would hardly talk, but when we did, it was about important, private things.  I would ask him what were his life goals while he would draw on the cover of my assignment notebook.  He felt like my best friend, even though I hardly knew him.  It felt 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.

                So, I sat next to him.  The proctor was sitting at the teacher’s desk.  His grey hair was parted on the side and he wore a suit that looked like it came right out of the seventies. 

                “Greg Klien,” he called, propping his crossed feet up on the table.

                Someone from the front raised their hand. “Here.”

                “Felisha Jacobs.”  The teacher said, seemingly proud of his repetitiveness. 

                A girl with red curly hair raised her hand.  “Here!”  she yelled.

                The proctor got to the part of the list to where he called my name.  I raised my hand.

                “Here,” I said.

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

                After Mr. Johnson gave a speech which was long and winding, he assigned everyone something to do for he day.  Greg was to answer phones at the main office, Felicia was to reshelf books at the library, and John and I were to clean the cafeteria, starting with mopping the floors.  John and I walked together out of the detention room, past the bunch of lockers where we sometimes hung out after school.  The halls were comfortable 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 got 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.

Twenty minutes into mopping the cafeteria floor, John looked up from his broom with a stone-face.

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

The fact that I was amongst a fellow art patron thrilled me.

“Did Ms. Murrows 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 you could tell from the circles under his eyes that he hadn’t slept much last night.

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

He ran his hair through his hair and then shoved it 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.” 

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

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

“How does that work, anyway?” I asked, “Are you guys going to sketch it out, or do you just start painting right away?”

He started to say something before he shoved his hands in his back pocket.  Seeing that it was empty, he checked his other back pocket, then his front two pockets. 

“I left the keys in the detention room.  We are locked out.  I didn’t know that the door would lock behind us, I would have put something there to keep it open.”

John and turned around, searching for some form of life, throughout the rest of the cafeteria.  The only thing there beside us was the music playing lightly, penetrating throughout the stereos at all corners of the cafeteria.  The Peter Gabriel song played:  In your eyes, the light the heat; in your eyes, I am complete….

I was alarmed yet enthused.  John and I were stuck in the cafeteria, but at he same time we were left in a place where a massive amount aesthetics were about to make their course.  I looked at the blank wall, alive with its possibilities.  If I had the ability, I would paint the next “Man with a Guitar,” right there and then.  I would splatter the cement with different shades of blue and green, with hopes of portraying the talent of Jackson Pollock. 

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

“No one is outside,” he said.  He then walked behind the counter and disappeared for a moment, and then he walked back into sight and beckoned me to his side. 

“There is an office behind here,” he said.  “Come with me, maybe we can look through the desk drawers and find an extra key out of here.” 

I pushed open the heavy wooden door and walked into the small office, with John by my side.  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. 

“Maybe there is an extra key in the third drawer,” he said, the sound of papers being pushed aside infiltrating 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 fire 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 flames, over the houses of the town.  The beauty of the painting resolved any feelings of despair that might have permeated me, uuntil the sound of John’s voice boomed out in success.

 

For a moment, I was alone. 

“Found it!’ John exclaimed from the other side of the room.

John paced profoundly out of the office.  I followed him.  The fifth eighties song of the day was playing on the cafeteria overhead stereo.  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 the biggest 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 beckoned 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. 

“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.  I made my way through about ten pages, until I asked him:

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

‘It’s something I’m good at.  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 started laughing.

“Where are we going?”  I asked.

“Where aren’t we going?” he asked.  He led me out of the lobby, and into the outdoors.  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. 

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

“This,” he said, “This could be considered beautiful.”

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.