I’m surrounded by giants.
In the center of the outdoor work area is one of Guillermo’s massive couples but unfinished, and against the far fence is another mammoth work called Three Brothers. I’m trying not to make eye contact with them as Guillermo demonstrates different techniques on my practice rock. Let’s just say, they’re not the jolliest of giants, those three stone brothers. I’m wearing every piece of protective gear I could find: a plastic suit, goggles, and face mask, because I did some research on the health risks of carving stone last night and I’m surprised any stone sculptor lives past thirty. While Guillermo instructs me on how not to bruise the surface of the rock, how to use the rasp, how to do something called cross-hatch, how to choose the right chisel for each task and what angles are best suited for what kind of carving, I try unsuccessfully not to dwell on Oscar and the stolen love note I gave him. Probably not my best idea, both the stealing of the note and the giving of it. Impulse-control issues, clearly.
Trying to be subtle, I manage a few questions about Oscar in between others on chisel position and model building. I find out the following: He’s nineteen. He dropped out of high school in England and took the GED here and now is a freshman at Lost Cove U. studying mostly literature, art history, and photography. He has a dorm room but still sometimes stays in the loft.
However, I realize I’m not being as subtle as I think with my questions when Guillermo puts his hand under my chin, lifts my face so our eyes meet, and says, “Oscore? He is like my—” He brings his fist to his chest to finish the sentence. Like his heart? His son? “He fall in my nest when he was very young, very troubled. He have no one.” His face is full of warmth. “It is very strange with Oscore. When I get sick of every last person, I am not sick of him. I do not know why this is. And he is so good at chess.” He holds his head like he has a headache. “I mean so so good. It make me crazy.” He looks at me. “But listen carefully. If I have a daughter, I keep her in another state from him. Understand?” Um? Loud and clear. “When Oscore breathe in, the girls come rushing to him from everywhere, and when he exhale—” He makes a gesture with his hand to indicate all the girls being literally blown away, blown off, in other words: blown to bits. “He is too young, too dumb, too careless. I was the same once. I have no idea about women, about love, until much later. Understand?”
“Understood,” I tell him, trying to hide the sinking disappointment in my gut. “I will bathe in vinegar, down some raw eggs, and start looking for a wasp nest ASAP to put on my head.”
“I do not understand this,” he says.
“To reverse the leanings of the heart. Ancient family wisdom.”
He laughs. “Ah. Very good. In my family, we just suffer.”
Then he drops a bag of earthenware clay on my table and commands me to make the model, first thing, now that I know what hides inside the practice rock.
The sculpture I’m seeing is two round bubble bodies, shoulder to shoulder, every part of the figures, spherical and full, curved bulging chests pregnant with the same breath, heads tilting upward, gazes sky-bound. The whole thing about a foot across and high. As soon as Guillermo leaves, I start building, and before long, I forget Oscar the Girl-Exhaler and the heartbreaking story he told me and the way I’d felt in that jail cell room with him and the note I put in his pocket, until finally, it’s just me and NoahandJude.
This is the sculpture I need to make first.
When I finish the model, hours later, Guillermo inspects it and then uses it to pencil different reference points on my practice rock that mark where I’ll cut in for “shoulders” and “heads.” We decide the boy’s outer shoulder is the first point of entry and then he leaves me to it.
It happens right away.
The very moment I put hammer to chisel with the intention of finding NoahandJude, my mind goes to the day Noah almost drowned.
Mom had just died. I was at the sewing machine with Grandma Sweetwine, one of her very first visits. I was working on the seam of a dress, when it’s like the room shook me, that’s the only way I can describe it. Grandma said: Go, only it was more like a tornado blowing the word at me. I flew out of my chair, out of the window, slid all the way down the bluff, my feet touching the sand as Noah hit the water. He didn’t come up. I knew he wasn’t going to. I’ve never been scared like that before, not even when Mom died. There was boiling liquid in my veins.
I ram the chisel with the hammer, watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could across the face.
Because how could he have done this?
How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?
He told me he hadn’t been trying to kill himself, but I didn’t believe him. That first jump was different than all the others that followed. That time he was trying to fling himself off the earth for good. I know he was. He wanted out. He’d chosen to leave. To leave me. And he would have had I not dragged him back.
I think the valve inside me that loosened during the conversation with Oscar has popped its gasket. I’m whacking the chisel with such force now my whole body’s vibrating, the whole world is.
Noah had stopped breathing. So there were these moments when I was in life without him.
For the first time. Not even in the womb were we apart. Terror doesn’t come close to describing it. Fury doesn’t come close. Heartbreak, no. There is no way to describe it.
He wasn’t there. He wasn’t with me anymore.
I’m starting to sweat in the plastic jumpsuit as I slam the hammer into the chisel with all the power in me, forgetting proper angles now, not caring about anything Guillermo just taught me, remembering only how my anger toward Noah wouldn’t go away after that. I couldn’t get rid of it and everything he did seemed to compound it. I went to Grandma’s bible, desperate, but it didn’t matter how many rosehips I put in my tea, how much lapis lazuli I hid under my pillow, I couldn’t get rid of the rage.
And I’m feeling it again, as I cut into the rock, as I drag Noah out of the ocean, as I rip into the stone, wanting us out, out of the treacherous water, out of this suffocating rock, wanting us free, when I hear, “So that’s why you did it?” It’s Mom and Grandma in unison. When did they become a team? A chorus? They say it again, their voices a duet of accusation in my head. “So is that why? Because it was right after that. We watched you do it. You didn’t think anyone saw. But we did.” I position the chisel on the other side of the stone and try to hammer away their voices but I can’t. “Leave me alone,” I hiss under my breath, peeling off the plastic suit, ripping off the face mask and goggles. “You’re not real,” I tell them.
I stumble into the studio, feeling rudderless, hoping their voices won’t follow me, not sure if I make them up or not, not sure of anything.
Inside, Guillermo is absorbed in another clay piece—so far, a man, all huddled up.
But something’s wrong in here too.
Guillermo’s bent over the bent-over clay man. His hands are working the face from behind and he’s talking in Spanish, his words growing more and more hostile. I watch in disbelief as he raises a fist and heaves it into the back of the clay man, leaving a hollow that I feel on my own spine. The blows come fast after that. The guy’s bloody ferocious, Oscar had said. I think of the punched-in walls of the cyclone room, the smashed window, the broken angel. He steps aside to inspect the damage he just inflicted, and as he does, he catches a glimpse of me and the violence in his fists is now in his eyes and directed at me. He puts his hand up and motions me out.
I back into the mailroom, my heart slamming inside my chest.
No, it’s not like this at CSA.
If this is what he meant about putting yourself into your art, if this is what it takes, I don’t know, I really don’t know if I’m up to it.