The Gallery of Unfinished Girls
Lauren Karcz
one
THE PIANO APPEARS on our lawn the week after our mom left. I am swigging orange juice in the living room, trying to decide whether to take Mom’s car to school. Then I pass by the window and there’s the piano, sitting on the grass, straight-backed and confident as a Marcel Duchamp sculpture on display at MoMA.
I drag Angela from the kitchen out to the yard.
“Well, you said you wanted to learn to play,” I tell her.
“I didn’t think it would happen like this,” Angela says. She taps the key farthest to the right, and it dings out a little note. It sounds like a shy kid speaking out in class for the first time. She plays a few more, and they’re clearer, louder, coming at us in layers. A car drives by and honks at the three of us: the piano, my sister, and me.
“Mercedes, try it,” Angela says.
I clunk my hands down in the middle of the piano. A couple of friendly Florida lizards scatter across the driveway in response to the mess of sound.
“Brilliant,” Angela says. She looks at the keys again, and I think she’s getting ready to stay there and compose a symphony, or maybe a rock opera. I recognize the look on her face as a feeling I had once, and that I wish like hell I could get back: the feeling of being on the brink of creation. It’s heady and sweet, a little like love in the way it fills up your chest, but less dangerous. I mean, less dangerous until you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.
Angela looks at me pleadingly, and really, what are we going to do, tape “lost piano” signs around the neighborhood? No way.
The door to the other half of the duplex creaks open and shut, and we’re in the presence of Rex, our neighbor and landlord, a bearded industrial freezer of a man who never likes to be left out of the activity of the neighborhood, whether that’s a backyard cookout or the police stopping by the house two doors down again or the admiration of an upright piano.
“Morning, ladies.” Rex is wearing his early spring uniform: swim trunks and an FSU T-shirt under a bathrobe. “You need some help with that?”
“Actually, yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”
Rex steadies himself behind the piano and pushes it off the rough grass and onto the driveway, where it rolls unevenly to our half of the duplex. Angela, with a massive grin on her face, holds the front door open as Rex angles the piano through the doorway. We both know Rex wants to ask—he wants to ask almost as much as we want to tell him, No, we have no idea where it came from, but it’s a nice distraction, isn’t it?
“Just, I guess, anywhere in the living room is fine,” I tell him.
Rex surveys the living room from his vantage point as the tallest thing in the house. Angela and I haven’t moved anything in the room since our mom’s fevered departure for San Juan, and it still holds all the souvenirs of her: mascara-stained tissues on the end tables, a paperback thriller wedged open on the arm of the recliner, her phone charger plugged in and sucking energy from the air. A week ago, all of this was kind of a darkly comic still life about Mom being away for a few days, but last night, she called and told us that Abuela’s condition had worsened. I couldn’t sleep after that—I sat in this room and stared at every little thing she had left behind. It seemed like the most important thing to do at the time.
“Against the window,” I say.
“The window?” Angela and Rex say together.
“Come on, we never look out of it.”
“I do,” Angela says. “How about on the other wall? We can just move the chair somewhere else.”
“Wait! Don’t move that chair. I sit in it all the time.” I pick up the paperback from the arm of the chair and hold my mother’s place on page 153. The hero is trapped in a basement and is trying to figure out how to slip through the one thin window at the top of the wall. There’s a twist, isn’t there? Oh yes, the wall itself is weak. He punches at it, then slams a wooden chair into it, and the corners crumble, and he is free.
“Can you please not smoke in Mom’s car?” Angela says. “She’s going to know.”
“She already knows.” I hit the button that opens all the windows at once. “And anyway, I might have already quit when she gets back.”
We’re at that perfect time of year when Florida isn’t dressing up in dusty beads of humidity or ten-minute monsoons. The air is weightless and the morning haze that usually hangs over our street has been replaced with a bright, clear picture of what lies ahead. Like a daytime version of an Edward Hopper painting. Like the world cracked open at the horizon and saying, Oh hey, Mercedes and Angela Moreno, welcome to your day! And we can try to get to that place, but it will hide from us again and again.
“Time for a Victoria detour?” Angela asks.
“I already texted her. How can we not do a Victoria detour when we’ve got this sweet ride?” I knock my fist against the plastic body of the gray Ford Focus. Yeah, so Mom’s car is nothing much, but it doesn’t grumble on start-up like my old Pontiac (Mom’s old Pontiac) does, and the stereo system is a thousand times better.
Angela laughs hard, a big laugh that makes me nostalgic for last week, and I pull my hand back in the window and smoke a little so that my cigarette doesn’t burn itself out in the perfect air of the day.
Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who famously grabbed a urinal, painted his pseudonym on the side, called it Fountain, and displayed it as art, once decided to bottle the air of Paris. 50 cc of Paris Air, he called it. The first bottle broke—artistically, I’m sure—so he bottled the air again, and displayed it in Philadelphia. Dude could do anything and call it art, or not-art, or anti-art, and people would come to see it. And he could capture a day, a place, a breath.
At a stoplight, I grind out the cigarette and tuck it away in the Ford’s clean little ashtray. Angela nods at me.
“I’m surprised Mom didn’t suggest we stay at Victoria’s house,” she says. “We could probably live in the back half of the house and nobody would notice for a week.”
Yeah, I’ve thought of that myself, maybe more than a few times, but I’m not going to say so. Officially, Vic is my best friend, and that’s it. “Her house doesn’t have a piano, though.”