Mnemonic (27 page)

Across northern Italy and along the south coast of France, I gazed out the window of the train and thought about legacies. How we are shaped by people we barely know or not at all. Their lives touch our own in the faintest of ways, like the pattern of graffiti on beech bark leaving its mark on damp paper or the whorls of our fingers, texts encoded in our bodies (the dark ink of wooden letters staining my hands). The swarthy pigment of my skin is partly the story of a young man travelling steerage to North America and finding his way to Phoenix where barely a trace of him remains — only a name on a census, and the designations “Single” and “Boarder.” And the town itself only a tiny mark on the landscape — a clearing, a monument; though its dead lie in the ground with their cryptic stones. And who knows what messages might be imprinted in the trunks of trees? The names of lovers, a cry of despair or joy, a date with no other note.

Within the next few years, I hope to travel to Bukovina and see its monasteries, those forests of beech trees. I will do this for myself, and for my father, who never indicated much interest in what might be there, if anything. Without the language of the country, I'll try to find something of my grandfather, something as solid as names in a graveyard in Ivankivtsi, or as transitory as the sound of birdsong on an autumn morning. And for my father, I will plant a copper beech beyond my garden, a small pinch of his ashes in the soil if possible, roots nourished by his memory.

Arbutus menziesii

Makeup Secrets of the Byzantine Madonnas

And take great care, if you want your work to come out very fresh; contrive not to let your brush leave its course with any given flesh color, except to blend one delicately with another, with skilful handling. But if you attend to working and getting your hand in practice, it will be clearer to you than seeing it in writing.

— Cennino D' Andrea Cennini,
The Craftsman's Handbook

It was late spring. I don't remember the weather. I was twenty-two years old. We were in his studio, and I was taking off my clothes — jeans, no doubt, and a baggy sweater. A bra. Cotton underpants. I had agreed to recline on the divan in the light-filled room and allow him to paint me.

I wasn't thin. In fact, I was quite plump. The idea that someone found me beautiful made me throw my usual caution about my body to the wind. Or at least my clothing to the floor, before I found a position which I felt I could maintain for an hour or so while J. mixed paints and began the process of putting me on canvas.

The canvas was already prepared, I remember — he favoured a glue sizing made from rabbit skin, and gesso for the ground. He was working
alla prima
, wet paint on wet, hoping to complete the painting in a single sitting. I don't remember if he underpainted, though I imagine there was some basic drawing first, to block out the design. But he wore little glasses when he painted, and he peered at my body through them in a clinical manner, not missing a thing. I thought of my large breasts (heavy even then before years of nursing the children that arrived later in the decade), and the heft of my thighs, and hoped he wasn't disappointed. He wasn't.

It was just that once that I took off my clothes and from that occasion, he made hundreds of sketches, several large paintings that I know of, and even a folio of prints in various media. The second time he met my husband, four years later, he presented him with a set of the prints. I was amused to see myself in poses I knew I'd never affected. I realized how a man's imagination can turn a woman into anything he fancies — wanton, careless as she arranges her hair, gazing over her shoulder, opening her mouth a little as though she is aching for love.

Arbutus has a limited range on our Pacific Northwest coast. It's shade-intolerant and likes well-drained soil, sending its roots deep for water. The trees don't like to be moved. They don't like to be too far from the sea — a tree after my own heart.

Arbutus trees are declining throughout their range, in part because the areas they favour are also areas where people are increasingly drawn. I think in my own community of the recently developed Daniel Point, where huge houses occupy land that was once home to many arbutus (though to be fair, many property owners have included the trees in their landscape plans). I think, too, of Vancouver Island, where retirement communities have taken over slopes once occupied by groves of arbutus and Garry oaks, which are often companions. Like the oaks, they are sensitive to changes in their drainage and root system areas. Fire used to be a factor in creating favourable habitat for these trees, eliminating the conifers that tended to take over, providing too much shade for the arbutus to thrive.

Arbutus are signature trees of a particular landscape — they love bluffs and help to stabilize them with the far-reaching nature of their roots. Think of those cliffs along the coastal highways knitted together by arbutus roots!

Occasionally at a craft sale someone will be selling a small bowl or spoon made of arbutus wood, and I marvel at its clean appearance. The wood is very hard and smooth, with a tight grain, though apparently it dries unevenly and is brittle, making it difficult to use for flooring and bigger projects. I remember sailing with a friend many years ago on Haro Strait, stopping on a small island for lunch (he baked muffins in the galley's wood-burning oven). He was delighted to find an arbutus log on the beach and promptly cut it into short lengths for his stove. He said nothing burned hotter or more reliably.

The Straits Salish on southern Vancouver Island tell a story of a Great Flood, that survivors in what is now Saanich tethered their canoe to an arbutus on top of Mount Newton. I think of that tree, deeply anchored within the bedrock of the mountain itself, hardly concerned by the rising waters all around it, and how such stories speak to the specific, how we are shaped by the familiar made numinous, often by its reliability. Someone had noticed that particular arbutus and remembered it when the waters began to rise. That faith was rewarded. Like the Nuu-chah-nulth story, on the west coast of the Island, which tells of people weathering a flood by tying their canoe to bull kelp (rooted deep in the ocean floor), this speaks to careful attention resulting in survival.

First take a little dish; put a little lime white into it, a little bit will do, and a little light cinabrese, about equal parts. Temper them quite thin with clear water.

— Cennini,
The Craftsman's Handbook

I knew nothing about paint. To watch the mixing of colour was alchemy. The palette was a mess of pigments, and J. kept mixing vigorously with a brush. Dab, mix, dab, peer at me through those glasses.

We talked throughout about painting. Our favourite artists — Augustus John, Gwen John (whose work we liked even more than her brother's), Sutherland, Balthus, Picasso, Pisanello. We talked about relationships between artist and model, how for some painters an ikonic image was constant, guided them, served as a deep source of inspiration. J. had always painted dark-haired women, and showed me canvas after canvas, each of the models bearing a resemblance to each other, to me.

I wanted to know the names of the colours — titanium white, ivory black, yellow ochre, ultramarine, cobalt blue, Venetian red, alizarin crimson, viridian green, terre verte, light cadmium red. There was poetry in the colours, their ability to change and alter when nudged with a little of another. And how to organize them on the palette, remembering the order; the dark colours looked similar to me, in dark mass, but a little white dabbed on the edge of the mass revealed blue or dark green.

J. explained the process of taking a good sketch to the canvas, using a grid, using charcoal or a pencil to keep the elements of a design intact. “Don't worry about buttons or eyes at this stage,” he said, studying my body, mixing the colour for my nipples.

Touch up the hair with verdaccio; then with this brush shape up this hair with white. Then take a wash of light ocher; and with a blunt bristle brush work back over this hair as if you were doing flesh. Then with the same brush shape up the accents with some dark ocher. Then with a sharper little minever brush and light ocher and lime white shape up the reliefs of the hair.

— Cennini,
The Craftsman's Handbook

In that particular context, I suppose I was a muse. It took me years to recognize this. A young woman is often the last to recognize her own attractions. I grew up in a family that didn't praise. We weren't unusual. My mother's background was Presbyterian. If I looked in the mirror for too long, or expressed too much interest in my appearance, she would tell me I was vain. And yet — oh paradox! — my mother wanted me to have curly hair like Shirley Temple (a perfect child, with her blond curls, dimples, and a sweet nature). Mine was disappointingly thick, brown, and straight. Never mind, that's why the home permanent was invented. I remember afternoons spent crying in a haze of ammonia as my mother wrapped sections of my hair with paper and rolled them onto small curling rods before drenching my scalp with Tonette. I'd weep as my mother wrapped and my father would say, “That's the price of beauty,” and I cried even harder: “I don't want to be beautiful. It's Mum who wants me to be!”

The perms never worked. I never looked like Shirley Temple. I'd have needed short hair to begin with, and someone who knew that one had to begin high on the scalp with the curling rods instead of rolling them from the bottoms of the strands. So I'd have smooth hair from the crown and then uncontrollable frizz for the last four inches.

The perms coincided with Easter, and there was a new dress and hat for the Easter church service. I was mortified at the way the frizz hung below the brim of the straw hat. It took weeks, even months, for the perm to settle down, and it was always a grave disappointment to my mother, and to me — for I wanted her to be happy with how I looked. Yet each year, the resurrection of the Lord prompted the ritual of the perm.

In my early teen years, I'd been very aware I wasn't the kind of girl boys my own age were drawn to. I was a little taller than average — 5'6" — and not thin. I was dark-haired, dark-eyed. One of my best friends was very fair, with blue eyes, delicately pretty. When we went to parties together, she was swarmed by admirers. Beside her I felt gawky and plain. Once I waited in the car while a boy walked her along the waterfront, kissing her in the moonlight while I tried not to watch.

But later, when I was seventeen, I began to attract another kind of attention. There was a man who did deliveries for the pharmacy where I worked on weekends. He'd look at me in a deeply admiring way, seriously, and I felt like he was taking my clothes off in his imagination. He had an old Rolls-Royce, I remember, and often suggested that he drive me home after work. As I lived about three blocks away, I'd refuse him, politely, the way I'd been taught to treat those older than me. He was older than my father, after all, and I was not comfortable with his interest.

One of the pharmacists used to follow me into the lunch room and try to rub against me. He had a crewcut and pop-bottle glasses, terrible breath, and a wife who always wanted a substantial discount when she bought makeup from the cosmetician. I could not imagine kissing him — or for that matter, lying with the delivery man in soft grass somewhere hidden from the road — for surely that was his intention.