Art on Fire (6 page)

“You built this?” Lisa circled the hut.

“Actually, this is just a rough version of what the final thing will look like.” Francesca put her hands in her pockets and sloped her shoulders, masking her pride. “You can go in.” She bent down and pulled back the chamois door. Lisa peered in cautiously, then crawled through the threshold. Her navy cardigan sweater hiked up her back, exposing knobs of white spine.

“Wow!” she called from inside, inhaling the damp smell of the woods. She moved to the back wall to make room for Francesca and patted the floor, fingering the many bottle caps fastidiously pounded into the dirt. “Tiles,” she said.

The air was moist and syrupy, like being under covers: the heaviness, the closeness of breath. The girls filled every inch of the interior. Lisa grinned, so pleased to have escaped Isabella and to find herself here, with this girl instead. She felt safe. Her breaths spread into wide aisles of air. She giggled, which she never did, and found the widest part of the hut. There she sprawled on her back, pressed her feet to one end, her head to the other.

“Lie down,” she said, folding her hands behind her head and exposing her pearly stomach.

“I'm too tall.”

“So bend your knees.” With black eyes, Lisa stared far into Francesca's face, pulling her down without moving: a magician extracting a rabbit from his hat.

Everything in Francesca's life seemed to have changed. She landed so close to Lisa, she could feel the steady rhythm of breathing, see the pulse in Lisa's neck. Her feet extended under the chamois door, out into the cool air. Water beat the river rocks; a car passed on Riverview
Street; the wind whispered and tugged on the frail autumn leaves.

“Don't you want to ask about my mother?” Lisa turned onto her side and faced Francesca. “Everybody wants to know something: how she did it or who found her. Why she did it or how high the building was.”

Francesca stared at the ceiling and felt that, like always, she was failing some essential test. But these were not the sort of things she wanted to know from Lisa. There were other things she wanted to ask. Under her bed, for instance, were finger paintings she'd made on huge pieces of shiny paper. She wanted Lisa to look at them and guess what they were.

“Do you think my sister's smart?” she asked.

“My father says she's crazy.”

“He does?” This was not a bad answer. “What about me?”

“He's never met you,” said Lisa. “But he hates Americans.”

“I'm not American. I'm half-Italian, half-Jewish.”

“He hates Jews. He hates everyone but Chinese. That's why we live in the ghetto. With other Chinese.” Lisa swallowed hard. “My guidance counselor says I'm wrong, but I know my mother did it because I lost the big chess game. It was my first defeat. You might have heard about it; it was in the papers and magazines. There were even pictures.”

Francesca nodded, though she hadn't.

“She lived for my chess matches. If it hadn't been for her, I would never have learned to play.”

“Do you like chess?” Francesca asked.

“I love it,” Lisa said. “I love all the pieces.”

Again, Francesca nodded. She, too, had always admired the intricate, distinctive figures.

“My feeling is that each one has (1) motivation, (2) moral character, and (3) a purpose in relation to the queen,” Lisa said, bending back one small finger on each of the three attributes, for emphasis. When she saw that Francesca would not interrupt, that she seemed to listen ardently, Lisa continued, espousing her philosophy of the game, how it functioned as a replica of the world, a miniature society, complete with cruelty, loyalty, and class struggles. “The pawns are poor
Chinese people,” she spoke with great authority, “the under class. The Queen is Chinese, beautiful and mean, with huge boobs, always wearing velvet against her white skin. I call her Jacqueline, because I love and hate the name. And the King is American. He's stupid, with a red face and blue eyes and gray hair. No one takes him seriously, especially Jacqueline. She makes all the rules. She invented the game; that's why she gets to do whatever she wants. She hired the horsemen, twins named Billy and Willy. The rooks were just pieces of the castle until she brought them to life. And then there are the pawns: sycophants.” Lisa made a disgusted face. “But you can only trust the Bishops. They're noble and good. And they can cross the board in one long stroke. So they're very effective.” Lisa flipped onto her back, her legs spread flat like a corpse. She lay like that for a moment.

“You can kiss me,” she said.

Reflexively, Francesca leaned back. She'd wanted to kiss Lisa since they'd sat in her room, but she felt sure it was a perverse thing to want. She'd wanted to touch Lisa's hands, even though Lisa was a girl. She'd wanted something she could not define since that first meeting in the hallway.

“Don't you want to?” asked Lisa.

No, no, no, thought Francesca. She nodded.

“So?” Lisa puckered up and waited.

Francesca leaned over slow as a bending branch, inching her face closer and closer until she could feel Lisa's breath across her lips. She pressed her mouth down onto Lisa's and held it there, perfectly still. How complicated it was, the dry moist soft cool sending her body orbiting into space, then thrusting into deep, wet earth. Her head was dizzy. She leaned her weight on her hand so as not to collapse like a building onto the girl's small frame. Her mouth slackened, lips parted, making room for Lisa's tongue. And then it came, the tongue, feeling in her mouth nothing like her own tongue, making the world open like a door into hot sunlight. She felt herself bleed inside. Lisa hooked her feet around Francesca's legs and pressed hard at every possible intersection, until they were moving and rolling, bearing no resemblance to the two awkward, introverted girls they'd been all their lives.

“They're back, Mom!” Isabella bellowed, her arms folded across her chest. She pulled the door open and let Lisa and Francesca into the foyer, trying not to stare at Lisa's underwear showing through her wet, pink pants.

The smell of butter, chocolate, and grease followed Vivian out of the kitchen, where she'd been making tollhouse cookies. She wiped her hands on a dish towel.

“She'd never seen the river,” Francesca said.

“Is that right?” Vivian's voice was sweet and sharp. “Isabella, why don't you run upstairs and get Lisa another pair of pants and we'll put these sopping wet ones in the dryer?”

Lisa dripped on the floor. Her thumbs moved in circles at her sides. Vivian knew it had been only months since the mother's suicide, that the girl must be fragile as a soufflé. “Go on honey,” she said gently. “Take those off.” She squatted down and skinned the heavy fabric from Lisa's body.

Isabella returned, carrying a pair of white pants.

“How ‘bout a towel, Bella?” asked Vivian.

Still winded from her last trip upstairs, Isabella ran up again, pulled a white towel from the rack in the bathroom, panting exaggeratedly, her shoulders rising and sinking on each breath. Vivian dried off the bright red legs, cold and skinny as hoses. Lisa stood in her clinging undershirt, looking at Francesca's darkened, muddy sneakers. Cautiously, she placed one hand on each of Vivian's shoulders and stepped into the pants, several sizes too large, that Vivian held open before her. The thick, soft material bunched at the belly; the hems hung well below her ankles. Vivian rolled bulky cuffs, patted Lisa's hips. “There. No one died, right?” Isabella shot her a horrified look. Vivian immediately regretted her choice of platitude, but, oh well, nothing to do about it now. She smiled. “Run upstairs and I'll bring your pants when they're dry.”

Francesca began to follow Lisa upstairs.

“You,” Vivian reached out and grabbed Francesca's belt loop, stopping her at the third step from the bottom. “Where do you think
you're going?” she whispered. “You'll help me in the kitchen and leave your sister's friends alone. What's the matter with you? Trying to steal your sister's best friend.”

“Hah!” Francesca said, then crashed her mouth closed.

Vivian let go of Francesca. She bent down and mopped up the water with Lisa's pants. “Your sister is special, Francesca. She may not be the easiest person to get along with, but we have to make concessions for her. We have to nurture her so she can develop some social skills.”

“What are social skills?”

“A successful way of interacting with people in the world. I can't explain this now.” She opened the front door and wrung out Lisa's pants on the front stoop, standing back to stay dry.

“Can I have a cookie?” Francesca asked.

“You can lick the bowl. The cookies are in the oven. And then I want you to stay in your room until dinner.”

“Fine with me,” Francesca muttered, thinking how she'd been kissed. Nothing else mattered.

Rake
is a haunting portrait of an ordinary household tool stuck, upside down, into the soft soil of a suburban yard, the green tines fanning prophetically toward the nighttime sky. The sky is an eerie backdrop, lit from behind, a sheer shroud of cheesecloth or gauze over the not-quite-right neighborhood. Behind the rake is a house in which a teenage girl, probably a babysitter, sits in an armchair. She stares ahead into a puff of gray light—the unseen television, its picture bloating out into the room. We watch her through a large picture window with no curtain, privy to only her profile, dark hair, and reclined posture. She lounges lazily, perhaps loafing on the job.
¹⁰
The door to the house is halfway open; only a screen door separates the young girl from the predatory world.

In a 1994 article in
Caleidoscope
, Lucinda Dialo unveiled her theory that
Rake
is a metaphor for Rape. The demonic within the mundane, the threat lurking in the “whitest, most placid neighborhoods, the neighborhoods where we're assured we are safe.”
¹¹
Others have elaborated on this interpretation, pointing to the open door as evidence that in this painting, the real story is about to happen.

Phillip Hamil, columnist for
Illustrated Gent
, dismisses Dialo's interpretation as “. . . feminist paranoia. deSilva would have been offended by this distortion of her meanings, the idea that nothing in her work—not even a gardening tool—is exempt from the onerous duty of representing misogyny or sexual perversion . . . There is no evidence of deSilva's hatred
of men. She was, in many ways, one of the boys, and was revered by the men who had the good fortune to know her.”
¹²

Of the use of light in
Rake
, Hamil writes, “deSilva's knack for setting and mood is unrivaled. The light in this painting—the gray/purple/blue/white/yellow hue which, to my knowledge, has never before been achieved, not even in the most spectacular L.A. sunset, not even in Van Gogh's sunflowers—looms over the painting like the impending apocalypse.
Rake
, as deSilva herself told me in one of our many discussions about her work, is about Godlessness, all that is cold and soulless. The garden tool is man—not the gender, but the species—evil, defiant, its broad shoulders clawing avidly in every direction. deSilva emphasizes her loss of faith in humanity by reducing the female subject to a set piece and featuring the rake front and center, as the protagonist.”
¹³

Other interpretations abound. Cynthia Bell, in
Lesbians in Oil
, theorizes that
Rake
is less a metaphor for Rape, than Race, and that beyond race, it is a meditation on homosexuality, specifically lesbianism. The painting is concerned with “otherness,” according to Bell, the rake representing the alienated other, forced to remain out on the lawn like a second class citizen, well into the nighttime hours. The rake, she says, “is deSilva keeping her polite distance from the object of her desire, in this case the babysitter, who it may be postulated, represents Lisa Sinsong.”
¹⁴

Michael Wright, in his examination of the link between art and mental wellness,
Art That Heals
, asserts that the rake represents Alfonse DeSilva, whom he claims Francesca hated and feared. “The rake, a tool
Alfonse wielded throughout the day, is presumably an innocuous object, set against a garage wall and there expected to remain all through the night, beside fertilizer and shears and shovels. But deSilva shows us the rake as she'd have us see her father: prowling the neighborhood, stalking his prey, when he ought to have been in bed with his wife.”
¹⁵