Finally, two canvases I remembered, that worked—one, a painting of a corner of my parents’ attic. A desk pushed against a window with an ancient typewriter set in the center of it, one of the keys permanently pressed down, a paper slipped over the roll, as though someone had only stepped away for a moment, mid-thought, and would return to finish what they were writing. Whatever I had been searching for in that jug of water I had found here; outside the clear glass of the window there was the colorful blur of my mother’s garden, and the sunbeams fell across the floor, illuminating the dust in the air. A spill of photographs spread across the table like a hand of cards, a small box sat on its corner waiting to be opened. Even as I looked at it, I felt the urge to rush upstairs and explore the attic, to look for more of my grandmother’s books, to find photos of her when she had been young and in Paris, before she had married my grandfather, to look for more notebooks to see if she had kept writing after she had gotten married, to find the person she had wanted to be underneath the person she had become.
Instead, I flipped to the last painting. It was a self-portrait, me in my debutante dress, sitting in a window seat at the country club, looking out into the night. Behind me, there was a full dance floor, a blur of tuxedos and ball gowns. Ahead of me, there was only the silent night, and I was caught in between. It was a frank portrait, so honest I was surprised I had had the stomach to draw it, my hair beginning to fall and escape its tight and elegant updo, a fold of flesh on my side pressing out against the white silk, my face blank and plain in the dim light, away from the brilliance of the room behind me. I had titled it Escape, and as I looked at it, I felt a little hitch in my chest, the quiet threat of tears. I had failed that girl. I hadn’t escaped at all. I’d had the chance for freedom, and instead I had run straight into the arms of the life I had known was not for me.
Letting the paintings fall back against the wall, I walked over to a stool in the corner, where the paint-splattered boom box I had listened to all those hours when I painted was still sitting. I flipped it on and pressed Play on the tape deck, and music exploded out of the speakers in a jangle of guitars. At first I laughed, covered my mouth, as though I had unearthed a treasure, and then I wanted to cry, remembering how much these songs had meant to me, how I had spent hours painting to these tapes, not the music they played at school dances, or that the other girls listened to, but music that meant something to me, music that was dark and haunting and beautiful and made everything around me seem more intense, the moon brighter and the night darker and the hours elastic and full of promises they couldn’t keep.
I picked up one of the blank canvases, peeled the plastic off it, ran my hand over the surface. It was smooth, the frame still straight, and I lifted it and set it on the easel, admiring its freshness, the emptiness of it. To me, this had always been the best part of starting a painting: the moment before I did anything, the moment before the paint went onto the canvas and began to shape it into something, the moment when the magic of it was all possible, the emotion in my heart and the image in my mind perfectly aligned, before I spoiled it all by actually touching my brush to the fabric.
Under the easel was the tackle box I had kept my paints in. Kneeling down, I began to pull out the tubes. Most of them were acrylic, half used and now dried up, fossils from another age. But at the bottom were three tubes of oil paint, unopened, that still yielded when I pressed on them. I unscrewed the tops and squeezed until I had three small pools of paint on my palette, found some brushes in the utility sink and rinsed them until they were pliable again, and then I stood in front of the easel, looking at that blank canvas, letting an image form in my mind, and I began to paint.
I don’t know how much time passed, only that the tape had auto-reversed to play the other side and then, when it had finished, started again, twice over. I sang as I worked, the lyrics as clear in my mind as if I had heard the songs only the day before, like muscle memory, an unforgettable pattern. I was sixteen again and spending Friday night down here alone, I was twenty-one and painting out my fear about the future, I was twelve and learning how to pour my heart onto paper, and I was thirty-four and tired and scared and I put all those things on the canvas in front of me.
“Madeleine? Are you down here?”
Startled, I yanked my brush away from the canvas, bumped into the stool where I had rested the palette, and knocked it onto the floor, where it clattered on the concrete, landing facedown. Of course.
“Yeah,” I called back, rescuing the palette from the floor. Well, I thought, looking down at the smears of paint on the concrete floor, it hadn’t been the first time. I walked over to the stairs, looking up at my mother.
“What are you doing down there? I’ve never heard such noise.”
“What, the music? I used to listen to this all the time.”
“Well, it’s terrible. What are you doing?”
“Painting,” I said, and a smile pulled across my face, uncontrollable.
“Oh, I forgot you left all those things down there. We should clear them out. Sharon wants the basement empty so it looks like there’s more storage.”