She looks like she’s going to say something, but doesn’t. She’s guarded; although I sense she’s becoming more isolated, the only time we talk about anything that isn’t to do with my weight is our discussion on the conjoined Wilks twins from Arkansas. But I can’t be too confrontational right now, not as she’s heading into the kitchen to do her stuff, then emerging with my scrambled egg whites, smoked salmon, and wholemeal toast, which I love.
— I really do appreciate what you’ve done here, I tell her in between mouthfuls of our food. She dispenses a kindly smile as she sits on the chair, eating off her own plate, balanced on her lap. Her eyes are circled and tired-looking. — Now you couldn’t keep me out of this place if you tried. It’s saved . . . it’s saving my life.
— I’m glad you feel that way. She puts her fork on the plate and pushes her hair back, — You really are making progress, and you’re looking so much better. Forty-one pounds is good. She chomps on a slice of toast.
— Yes, but now I feel that I need to start taking responsi-bility, I tell her, watching her eyebrows raise. — I need to get a balance. If you gave me my phone I could record my own exercise, food, and weight on Lifemap—
Lucy scoffs, — Don’t insult the both of us.
— I need to be out of here. I need to get back to work.
That bladed glint in Lucy’s eye returns, the one that negotiates against reason, as she shakes her head, lowering her plate to the floor. — You’re not ready.
I feel something perish inside. I try to remain composed. — Lucy, what gives you the right to make that call?
— I earned the freakin right, and she springs up, stepping toward me. Standing over me, she lifts up her top, displaying that ripped abdominal wall. I almost feel like I could grab it, like the rungs of a ladder, and climb my way to freedom. — This gives me the right! Eat your breakfast, she barks.
I hear the girlish trill of my voice in pathetic retort. — Bring me some books!
But she’s turned on her heel with a flourish, heading off and leaving me with my food and my thoughts.
I had to get out of Potters Prairie. The town was like an open prison. The wide streets, the big lots surrounded by pine and fir trees, the endless gray skies. People were quick to tell you how much they were shopping and praying—spreading stupidity, passing it like a baton to the next generation. It was the currency of Middle America. An hour and a half away sat the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Prince came from Minneapolis. Nobody came from Potters Prairie. I had to go somewhere else, a place that would let me see things differently, would let me become the kind of woman I desperately wanted to be.
In downtown Minneapolis, in a Chase Bank not far from Dad’s store, sat my college fund of Grandma Olsen’s $65,000 dollars, gathering dust. My spoiled, entitled kid’s share of Grandpa Olsen’s trucking business, that wheezy, bony-fisted old man I barely knew and had zero connection with. Yet through him buying a truck in another age, another world, driving it all over the Midwest, then buying another and employing somebody to drive it and so on, his granddaughter—a small, lazy, fat girl in a suburb who struggled to do minimal chores—would be able to sculpt and paint. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been thinking about him, that frugal man of few words. When he stoically traversed all those road miles, could he ever have imagined he was doing it for this?
It would certainly be anathema to Mom and Dad. I had to be sneaky with this one. So I researched business studies options online, settling for the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University. It had the advantage of being located in downtown Chicago, close to the Institute of Art. I told my parents I was planning to enroll there. — What’s wrong with a school in the Twin Cities, cherub? Surely a state college would be less expensive? Mom asked. She called me “cherub” a lot, because cherubs are small and fat.
I told my folks DePaul had one of the best records in the Midwest for placing graduating business students in employment. Dad applauded my enterprise and gave me his blessing. — There’s a head on those shoulders after all.
— But I’ll miss you so much, Mom cried.
I was off for sure, but I wasn’t going to any business college. My destination was art school. I caught a bus to Chicago, and checked into a cheap B&B in Uptown. I was scared; the place, and the surrounding streets, seemed full of disturbed and outright crazy people. I kept my room door locked at all times. Fortunately, I quickly found a basement room on Craigslist, in an apartment near Western Avenue. I got a job in a local video rental store and lived on coffee and cigarettes. Soon I was down to 120 lbs, shedding with the speed of somebody suffering a terminal illness.
I was way too young to get into bars, and didn’t have the courage to attempt using a fake ID, so my social life was limited to coffee with my co-workers. I started hanging out with a guy called Mikey who worked part-time at the store. He was two years older than me, a creative-writing major at Columbia College. With his rash of spots and an Adam’s apple that bobbed like a pig in the belly of a snake, Mikey looked nothing like Barry, but somehow reminded me of him. He was a sincere, sweet guy: perhaps a little full of himself, but essentially harmless. (I would later realize that this is possibly the most offensive thing you can say about anyone.) We talked a lot about movies and went to see a ton of them at the Gene Siskel and Facets. He insisted on reading me his stories, which I thought were pretty lame, but we made out and soon he was clumsily helping me free of my virginity like it was a heavy old greatcoat.
The weather was so brutal; I wanted to cry whenever I stepped out the door. Potters Prairie was cold, but that first Chicago winter—the icy snowdrifts exacerbated by the wind blasting off the Lake—relentlessly hunted me down. I could literally feel my eyeballs freezing and jaw cracking as soon as I stepped outside. I could see why the electric and gas companies were forbidden to switch off power to any households during January, February, and the first two weeks in March. It would have been tantamount to committing murder. Getting to that bus stop and taking the short ride to work and back home was a fearful, punishing twice-daily ordeal. Growing up in Minnesota, you knew snow. You’d dived into it, squashed it to the form of a grenade to chuck, shoveled it from driveways, and driven tentatively in it. You’d watched it from behind glass in your heated tank of a home, as it fell for days into thick layers that stayed frozen for months on the bleak earth. City snow was different: after a benign arrival, it offered nothing but bleakness and grime. Yet when spring came on, it was like a switch being pulled. The city seemed to thaw instantly, with blossoms opening on the tree-lined streets, almost before your eyes.
As per the late Grandma Olsen’s instructions, I got the college money released into my own bank account on my nineteenth birthday. Before that, I’d been operating on my video-store paycheck and an allowance Mom and Dad sent from home, in the mistaken belief I was at DePaul Business School. I insisted that I was paying the first year myself from my savings, a “gesture” that had Dad looking at me in genuine awe, like I was a budding entrepreneur.
I went to all sorts of lengths to maintain my deception, even going to DePaul campus and buying branded stationery from the college store and obtaining copies of the various semester programs. But all I was waiting for were those two vital spring days which I knew, even in the depths of that bone-shaking winter, would determine my destiny. The week leading up to them I barely slept, I was so shattered.
Then it was time; I went to the Art Institute to apply for what they referred to as “immediate decision.”
This process happened over forty-eight hours: an educational-opportunities version of the Black Friday post-Thanksgiving sales. I took my portfolio to the Institute’s ballroom, and was issued with a number: 146. Then I joined the other applicants; there were 250 of us, all sitting at several round tables. When their number was eventually called, the candidate took their portfolio upstairs and presented it to a member of staff. The professor then went away and got someone else to agree, or disagree, and you were in, o
r not, as the case may be. The decision really was made right then and there.
So I went through the terrible procedure, sitting nervously, sometimes looking around at all the other hopefuls. Some struck up conversations; the cool, the entitled, the anxious, and the deferential. But mostly I kept my head buried in Spores of Destiny, the latest Ron Thoroughgood novel.
Then, number 146 was called, and my skeleton seemed to step outside my flesh, pick up my portfolio, and walk to a station. When the rest of me caught it up, I saw that I was sat in front of a lazy-eyed guy of about thirty-five, who wore a leather jacket. He looked very like (but wasn’t) the “artist” who came to talk at the college in Minneapolis. I was so nervous at first, I just couldn’t speak, merely look into his wearily compassionate eyes. Then, when I started, I thought I’d never stop. I talked about my comic-book drawings of superheroes. About how I loved to draw and paint everything I saw, replicating it. Then how that wasn’t enough, how I needed to transform it, and how all my paintings, drawings and models had to have not just an idea behind them, but a story. I was lost in my tale, exhilarated, but then grew self-conscious again, and ran out of steam. The leather-jacketed guy went impassively through my portfolio. I felt gravity pushing my head down, trying to screw it into the table. I could almost feel the tendons in my neck snap with the effort of keeping it upright. Then he looked up and I heard him say, — Interesting. Could I ask you to wait here a while?
Then he left and he didn’t come back. The clock on the wall ticked by. My self-sabotage tendency was in overdrive; I was thinking I’d made an irredeemable fool of myself, by just blabbering on like that. I grew edgy. I wanted to go, to just get out of there. My period was heavy and I needed to change my tampon. So I went to the bathroom. Then, for some reason, no, not “for some reason” but because I was hamstrung with anxiety, I picked up my portfolio and walked out into the sun. I immediately saw the leather-jacketed guy outside on the big front steps of the building, smoking a cigarette and talking to a pretty girl. They were laughing. I obviously thought that I was the target of their humor, that he was telling her about this silly little fat kid from Otter County, Minnesota (although I wasn’t fat anymore), who drew comic characters and had the arrogance to think that she was an artist. I was about to sneak past them and just run away, thoroughly defeated, when he saw me and called out my name. — Lena!
I wasn’t even going to stop. He shouted again, more formally this time. — Miss Sorenson!
I had no option but to turn around to face him. I could see him, through my bangs, but I couldn’t lift my chin, felt the point of it pushing hard against my chest. I had never in my life been as painfully aware of the crippling passivity of that reflex.
— Where did you get to? I thought you’d run out on us. I’m afraid it’s not that easy. I glanced up to see his face crinkled in a sardonic smile. — We’re offering you a place here.
— Really? I gasped, looking up again.
— Yes, really.
I couldn’t believe it. This had been a pervasive, all-consuming fantasy of mine ever since that talk at the college. And now my life was going to change on the basis of a casual assessment and a couple of perfunctory sentences from a complete stranger. Then I surprised him, this artist, whom I would later learn was called Ross Singleton, by bursting into tears. — Thank you, I sobbed, — thank you for this opportunity. I won’t let anybody down.
— No, Ross Singleton said with a wry grin, — I don’t think you will. Anything else I can help you with?
— Can I have a cigarette? I asked, daring to smile at the other girl. Her hair was blond and cut into an asymmetrical bob. In her expensive clothes she was the epitome of cool, and I instantly saw my old high-school cheerleaders, to whom I’d previously afforded that designation, as unsophisticated hick girls. And instead of a sneer, or a look of cold embarrassment, a warm, open smile and an outstretched hand came back my way. — I’m Amanda. I got in here too!
— Lena, I said, as Ross proffered and lit the best cigarette I’d ever had. My head spun as I looked across the street, to the sign indicating the start of Route 66. I giddily watched the tourists and prospective students milling around in the sun. Endless possibilities were dancing ahead of me. Ross Singleton left me and the other girl, Amanda Breslin, from New York, to go back to his interviewees. We went for a coffee and talked excitedly about art school. Then Amanda raised her hands to the side of her face, and manically stamped her feet against the floor. — Oh my God! This totally calls for a celebration!
She took me to the bar at the Drake Hotel, ordering a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Astonishingly, they never asked us for ID. As the champagne bubbled and fizzed in my skull, and we talked about our respective plans, I had never been so happy in my life, and I wanted the moment to go on and on. I felt a hollow thud when Amanda had to get the El out to O’Hare to catch her flight back to New York. We swapped email addresses. She went home to a life I imagined as wealthy, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated; I returned to my basement and the video store. I couldn’t wait for the term to begin.
In the run-up, Mikey grew more clingy, regularly showing up at my place on Western and talking about “plans.” He was obviously sensing that my art-school objectives were going to form a glacier-sized wedge between us. — We’ll both be downtown. We can meet at lunchtimes!
I nodded with contrived enthusiasm, as Columbia College was close to the Art Institute, but in my heart I knew I wouldn’t be seeing much of him. Everything I did would be about art school. Mikey was like the boyfriend I should have had in Potters Prairie, the one to leave behind. It seems trite and cruel to say that he was the Barry King who survived, but being locked up here has taught me to be honest with myself, and that’s exactly what he was.
I quit the video store, deciding that most of my time before becoming a student would be spent reading, sketching, and painting. I was anxious to get away from my Western Avenue neighborhood. While it was cheap and technically in the Ukrainian Village, it was by Humboldt Park, on the fringes of a Latino neighborhood, which was no stranger to gang activity and shootings. So I would take the Blue Line El downtown, where I hung out in the Harold Washington Library, in coffee shops, and, most of all, at the Art Institute itself. I’d see all those important-looking people examining the pictures, sculptures, multimedia installations, ancient artifacts, and I wanted to tell them as they browsed over the art, or discussed it in the coffee bars or bookstore: I AM LENA SORENSON AND I HAVE A PLACE HERE. I WILL STUDY TO BECOME AN ARTIST.
But most importantly, I saw two things there, which I was constantly drawn to, and that would inspire my own art and thus change my life. The first was Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954), where I was initially pulled in by the juxtaposition of his name and the theme of his painting. With my morbid obsessions, I was drawn to Bacon’s view of us all as potential carcasses. The second work that really moved me was the sculpture of a batlike man, by the French artist Germaine Richier. I read all about those artists and others, studied every school, period, and great work. I went to see all the new exhibitions that came to town, explored all the galleries. By the weak lamplight in my basement room, I would read, draw, and paint, until I fell into my bed, exhausted. Then get up, full of excitement, and gratefully do it all over again.
I went back to Potters Prairie for a spell, ostensibly to see my folks before starting my second year at DePaul Business School. My real motivation, though, was to photograph and sketch my hometown.
My mom looked at the slimmed-down me in a kind of perplexed terror. It was as if she was just about to start a sentence but didn’t know what to say. Dad just asked me about my classes, only half joked that I’d soon be running his hardware business; things seemed to have had a minor spike. The thought made my blood run cold. I cursed Menards’ incompetence; they had long had Twin City Hardware on the ropes, as Lucy might say, but couldn’t seem to land that knockout blow. But Dad was manifestly pleased with me; the solitary occasion he yel
led was when he saw me watching an old Pee-Wee Herman show on TV. — This is just stupid! And strange! Turn it off!
The only strangeness that struck me was that of these small-town people. They could talk about something utterly mundane; how their kids were doing, what was going on with their car, or the everyday humdrum items they’d bought from the store, and easily waste half an hour on each subject. I wanted to scream: leave me the fuck alone, I can’t listen to you waste your life! Then successive waves of guilt would flood me, as I knew that most of them were decent people and I had no right to feel superior.
Returning to Chicago, I started to paint the town scenes from the pictures I’d taken and the sketches I’d done. Then I populated it with zombie-like figures whose decomposing, peeling skin exposed the angry flesh underneath.
And here, locked in this absolutely mundane but also so utterly outlandish tower prison, I can feel my own flesh, not slackening and hanging off, but tightening and toning.
32
CONTACT 13
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To:
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: Thank You!
Lucy,
Many thanks for your email: that puts my mind at rest! So relieved that Lena’s turned the corner (in no small part due to your encouragement, I’ll bet) and is happy in her life and her work.
Yes, I know what that girl is like when she puts her mind to something, so I’m going to quit playing mother hen and let her get on with her project. But if Ms. Sorenson deigns to surface and grace us all with her presence, do let me know!
Best,
Kim
PS Perhaps a girls’ night out in Miami Beach in spring?
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To:
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: Sounds Good!