North of Beautiful (39 page)

“You were wrong, Mom,” I said.

She looked startled and I thought she’d apologize, her instant reaction. Instead, she asked, “About what?”

“Susannah didn’t need to remind you of who you were. You remembered all on your own.”

She nodded proudly, pointing at herself and then at me. “We both did.”

And she was right.

Later, as we trudged back home, out of habit I pulled the keys from my pocket before we even reached the driveway just to have them ready in my hand. They jangled, a ringing of freedom as clear as any bell peal.

I held the keys out to Mom. “Do you want to drive?” I asked her and gestured down to the greening valley below. We didn’t have to go all the way to China to see beauty. Or to have an adventure. They were both right here, literally in our backyard. “The snow’s melted.”

At first, she looked scared at the thought, then just thoughtful.

“Maybe I will.” And she took the keys from me.

No sooner did Mom ease the car into the Red Apple grocery store’s parking lot than she slammed on the brakes. Luckily, no one was behind us. And we were only going about five miles per hour so there was no risk of whiplash.

“I don’t believe it,” she whispered.

There, coming out of the store was Dad, toting one small grocery bag against his shoulder as if it were a child. It was as incongruous seeing him here as it would be seeing Mom at the Naked Spa Norah had been raving about — or finding her now in the driver’s seat. He spotted us at the same time I did him, stopping so suddenly that plumes of dust flew around his feet. His look of shock and disbelief mirrored Mom’s before his changed to embarrassment. Brusquely, Dad nodded at us and without any further acknowledgment, he slid into his truck as though he were in some kind of witness protection program for husbands whose wives finally had their say.

I stated the obvious: “He went grocery shopping.” Well, sort of. Mom’s idea of grocery shopping was filling the trunk, the more bags the better; I could only imagine what was in Dad’s lonely-looking bag, perhaps a grapefruit, a couple of bagels, and a frozen chicken. But he had gone.

Dad exited from the opposite side of the parking lot, while Mom and I idled near the entrance. As he drove past us on the street, Mom unclenched the steering wheel and finally parked the car at an awkward angle, sprawling into two spots, but I didn’t point that out. Everyone else could find a space around us.

“I don’t think I’ll go grocery shopping after all,” Mom said.

“Where do you want to go instead?”

She adjusted the rearview mirror belatedly — and I could only hope that she had been able to see her blind spots on her drive here. “I think I’ll just walk around for a little while.”

I was going to offer, I’ll come with you. But she had a lot to think about, and only she could figure out what she wanted to do with this olive branch Dad was extending to her, whether she’d snap it like a twig or accept it and hope it’d flourish.

When she dropped me off at the gallery, I was grateful that no one else was there — no one to distract me with conversation about my trip to China or ask me about my college plans. Just blissful solitude. I hurried up to my studio, dropped the maps on the ground, and salvaged my Beauty Box from my backpack. Then I placed the photographs from China on my desk under the bright light. Everything was unpacked, laid out. A blank board waited. But all my ideas, my inspiration had fled.

I was lost.

I wiggled in my chair, waiting for an idea — any idea — to over-take me.

Nothing.

I rearranged the pictures on my desk, browsed through the baskets of raw material.

Nothing.

I could almost hear Jacob, telling me that being lost was just another way of saying you were exploring. That the most direct route to a geocache might not be the right one. Like the path I had been following: hurrying through high school to get to college only to be-come a mini-Merc, married to my BlackBerry. I didn’t want that future anymore.

I swung my leg impatiently. My foot knocked over a canvas beneath my work table. I leaned down to pull it out. My Beauty Map. The one I had kicked under my table, hoping that Jacob wouldn’t see it that first time he visited my studio. I had forgotten all about it, hidden there, never hanging it up. Now, studying my work, the map didn’t look finished so much as empty, all the blank white space of undiscovered territory surrounding those images of plasticized beauty.

God, had I been following the wrong set of coordinates my entire life, my eyes set on Beauty instead of True Beauty?

I opened my Beauty Box and dumped out the contents: the dermatological brochures of all the latest and greatest treatments that I used to collect, the fashion magazine articles I clipped, those before-and-after shots of women undergoing the knife and accepting poison to change themselves — the lines on their faces repaved like old roads, their bulbous noses whittled into aristocratic ridges.

All of those images, I ripped up now. I didn’t slice them with a brand-new razor to create clean, sharp edges. I tore them. Messy strips, tiny confetti — all of them, mismatched pieces of a puzzle that were never meant to be put together.

Done.

But where did I go from here?

I squared the collage on my worktable. The model with the fake violet eyes stared back at me from the center of my Beauty Map. That was my focal point? My North Star that I had been following so futilely? If I tried to strip her off of the board, it would ruin the collage.

Ruin . . . or make real?

I scraped at a corner of the glued image until a tiny edge lifted from the board. I pulled. A sliver of paper ripped off unevenly, leaving the surface mottled like peeling paint on an old building. It scared me, how ugly the effect was. But I didn’t allow myself to doubt. Over and over, I tore until the model was zebra-striped, her beautiful epidermis interspersed with frayed dermis.

I had always felt a foreigner in this made-up Land of Beautiful, and it was a relief to see Extreme Beauty for what it really was: fake, make-believe, insubstantial.

I would build on top of it, use its history as my foundation.

My foundation. I smirked, working even more quickly now.

From the basket on the floor, I grabbed my white paint, poured a little into an old salsa container. And then I shook out a few drops of my makeup into the paint, stirred, marbleizing beige into the white paint. But the foundation disappeared, the paint remaining resolutely white. So I dumped a healthy teaspoon. Still not enough. Then, like a mad scientist — or Mom getting good and ready to create a wholly new recipe — I just dumped the whole darn bottle in. It felt deliciously decadent and wasteful, yet so right when I slathered my concoction on one side of the model’s face. The other, I left alone.

Which one looked more real? Which side more beautiful?

Then still working fast, I layered all the scraps from my Beauty Box around her head, building on top of that outline with those fragmented words promising miraculous change. Photoshopped eyes, noses, mouths. Surgically enhanced breasts. I stepped back to get perspective. The Land of Beautiful was missing something.

Since Mom didn’t have an opinion what to do with the pieces of China map, I placed them all back into the geocache, the way Aunt Susannah had wanted, save one piece. That, I had held onto, intending to put it into a geocache some day; I hadn’t been sure where, only that I would know when I found it. I found my cache, right here, taking shape before me. I stuck that torn map fragment now over the model’s mouth.

I frowned at my collage map. Something was still missing, but what?

There had to be inspiration in all the bits of the world I collected in the baskets above my desk. With my eyes closed, I reached inside, letting my fingers roam, touch, discard until I felt a tiny stub of metal. I pulled it out. The crumpled piece of my car, the warped piece I had salvaged after crashing into Jacob’s Range Rover.

That, I placed on top of the Land of Beautiful. I made a note to myself to call Magnus, that cantankerous artist who worked in metal, and ask him for a lesson. What was the worst he could do?

Make me feel dumb? Inadequate?

Dad had done his damnedest to do that, to steer me to Terra Nullis, that godforsaken empty land where one might survive but never flourish. To keep me in Terra Incognita and remain a girl as undiscovered as Unknown Land itself.

He had failed.

I crossed my arms and took another step back to see how my creation was shaping up. It was literally shaping up. I was surprised. The layers were building, one on top of another, not a flap map, but a topographical one, complex and multidimensional.

Note to self: keep my dorm room locked next year.

Without so much as a warning rap, the door to my studio flung open and Karin’s voice blared: “There you are. I bumped into your mom — she was walking! — and she told me you were here. How was your trip? Where were you at school? God, I’ve been dying to talk to you.”

I sighed softly, hating to be interrupted while I sketched the last of the cartouches. There were five different styles of mapmakers’ marks in all, each one of them flourished around my name. I hadn’t been able to decide which I liked best. Perfect, I could ask Karin for her opinion now.

Still, it irritated me how she strode into my studio without my invitation and without apologizing for interrupting. Her dainty bronze sandals, dulled from its covering of fine Methow dust, nearly spiked the maps on my floor.

“Hey, watch where you’re going,” I said, frowning at the trail she was haphazardly bushwhacking to me. I leaped out of my chair to stash the maps safely under my desk.

“God,” she said, “what happened in here? Looks like you had a tantrum.”

“I’m making art.” I had waited a long time to say those words, and I thought it would be hard to use them, that the claim would be too big for me. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. I had grown into the words.

“Not that I would blame you if you threw a conniption fit.”

“Why would I throw one?”

“You know, if you called Erik. . . .”

I set down my pencil. “How do you know about it already?”

“Well, there was a party last night.” She peered at me through her thick fringe of lashes. Now, she perched on the edge of my desk, oblivious to my collage drying behind her or of the cartouches I had been doodling on paper. “He was hanging out with Alicia.”

I think we were both waiting for my jealousy to rear its ugly head. But it didn’t even bother lifting its cheek off the floor.

“Good,” I said, meaning it. “I’m glad for him.”

“Call him now, and he’d give you another chance.”

“What if I don’t want another chance? What if I’ve moved on?”

“I don’t get you. How could you let the best thing that’s happened to you go just like that?”

“He was a good thing, Karin. A great thing. But not the best thing.”

“And what? That Goth guy is?”

I glanced at the picture of Jacob near her hand. “His name is Jacob.”

Karin shrugged, dismissing anything I could have possibly said in Jacob’s favor — that he had an uncanny ability to find beauty in the most unlikely places: our arid Valley with its cash crop of rock and dirt. A squalid neighborhood in Shanghai still using chamber pots for toilets. And my birthmark.

As much as I hated the grid that Dad had tried to box me in, I chafed at this invisible fence that Karin had erected around me. What may have started as protective — she had designated herself as my champion in ballet, after all — had become suffocating. I unshackled the collar I didn’t even realize I was wearing and told her firmly, “Karin, I don’t want to be with Erik, and I’m cool with that.”

“Why not?” She began her litany of reasons: “He’s pretty cute, he’s a stud —”

“And I don’t love him.”

“It’s that Goth guy, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s me.” I paused, and then drew my line harder into the rocky soil of our friendship. “When you keep pushing me to stay with Erik, when you talk about him as the best thing that’s ever happened to me, it makes me feel like I’m so ugly I should be grateful to have him as a boyfriend.”

“I never said that.” Offended, Karin frowned, her face scrunching up. God, I had to tell Jacob: physical beauty was temporary. A vessel without soul. I didn’t want to be her vessel anymore, filled with only what she thought was best for me.

I didn’t back down. This was my line, fortified by my will, declared with my voice. “I don’t want to be with a guy who doesn’t notice me half the time.”

No answer.

I shrugged, said what I had to, decided I didn’t need to explain myself any further. I was about to wave at my work, my art work, tell her that I was busy when Karin surprised me. She leaned over my sketches of cartouches. Before she had barged in, I was about to select the best of them and scan it into the computer so I could touch it up.

Karin asked softly as if she had never noticed my art before either, “What are you working on?”

“My cartouche. It’s kind of like a mapmaker’s logo. Which do you like the best?” I asked her now, moving my sketches closer to her so she could see them better.

She passed a cursory look at them, her face losing its pinched expression. “They all kind of look the same to me.”

“They’re not. They’re all different. You just have to look closely.”

I wasn’t sure if Karin would, but she leaned down, drawn to my cartouches. Three were set within scrolls, and the other two inside heraldic shields. I had embellished one with cherubs, another with curled ribbon. And one with a sea dragon that I knew wasn’t for me at all.

“This one,” said Karin, pointing to the simplest one, flourished into the shape of a heart. “This feels like you.”

“I think so, too.”

“You know, these are amazing.” Her eyes gleamed now as if her idea factory had switched on, mind whirring, while she transformed the idea of a cartouche into something new. “Can you make one for me? For my podcast show, since it’s basically about mapping new relationships? Maybe my name could be in an iPod screen instead, or —”

I interrupted firmly, “After I finish mine.” And then I laughed, because her brainstorm was only now starting. Within an hour, she’d have iterated the original idea at least fifteen times. I pointed to my work-in-progress and said, “I really want to finish this now. I’ll call you later, okay?”