Writing Is My Drink (13 page)

room. The phone rarely rang. The occasional car rumbled by.

There was nowhere we were supposed to be; we were at the cen-

ter of a universe of two. Nothing competed for our attention.

During the JoJo weekends stuff got
made
: batik sheets, tie-

dyed T-shirts, apricot jam, wool spun from dog hair, elaborate

stories about assertive princesses, crazy stitching on homemade

pillows in the shape of fish, pictures with crayons melted on wax

paper. Many afternoons at JoJo’s were spent in the backyard mak-

ing batiks. JoJo made me believe that it was the most normal thing

in the world to be painting designs with hot wax onto old sheets

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stretched taut across wooden frames. Much of this stuff we made

together most would call
art
, but JoJo resisted the word “artist.”

“I make art,” she corrected. “Everyone can make art. Some

people choose not to.” She was the same grandmother who told

me sternly when I was nine: “You can have things or freedom. If

you don’t deliberately choose, you’ll be stuck with things.”

JoJo modeled for my childhood self the sheer joy of creativ-

ity, but I’d spent most of my adult life forgetting what I’d learned from her, focusing on the merit others assigned to my work instead of the pleasure it had to offer me. The competing roles of

creator and critic forever split me in two. In the book
What It Is
, cartoonist Lynda Barry describes the problem perfectly when

she contrasts the “floating feeling” she had as a child, drawing

and creating stories, with the doubts that have plagued her as a

working artist. Barry says two questions have beleaguered her

and interrupted her enjoyment of her creative process: “Is this

good?” and “Does this suck?” “The two questions,” Barry says,

“find everyone.”

The moment I decided I would apply for MFA programs for

my sabbatical, I became seized with the all-too-familiar doubt

about my writing abilities. Though I was in a better position

than I’d been a decade earlier when I applied to UC Davis with

just my one or two completed triptychs, my doubts had basis.

Besides my obvious lack of finished product, my static idea

of “talent” also held me back. I viewed the world of talent as

divided into the haves and the have-nots. As much as people

offered perspective with comments such as “Of course, the se-

lection process
has
to be rather subjective,” part of me believed that one was either talented or not, and that talent was as obvi-9 3

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ous and tangible as trees and mountains. It didn’t real y occur

to me that talent, or a germ of talent, was just a starting place,

that it could be fostered or not. Or that, in fact, the very point

of participating in a writing program was to
improve
as a writer.

Was my work good? Did it suck? To me, it was one or the other,

and I had to wait to find out the answer.

When JoJo died, my husband, Kevin, Natalie, and I drove

out to California to meet up with family to clean out her house.

While Kevin drove, I studied for the GRE (yeah, I thought I’d

take it seriously this time). I would soon apply to MFA pro-

grams, most of which still required one to take the GRE. As we

drove through the wasteland of Nevada and the irrigated green

of California’s central valley, I tried to drill myself with flash

cards but soon grew restless. I stared out the window and the

movie of JoJo and me played out: I remembered the weekends

at her house, making art, drinking black cherry sodas, singing

along to “King of the Road.” I thought of how in her presence I

grew visible, like a Polaroid picture coming to life. Indeed, JoJo

had been the person who’d insisted one afternoon in the spring

of 1969 that I not lose sight of myself.

My fall from the grace and nirvana of early childhood came

in elementary school. In the cocoon of my girl family—as lop-

sided as it was with my twice-divorced mom and no dad or male

relatives in sight—I was fine, the family baby of whom little was

expected. Show up. Be cute. That was plenty. As a result of di-

vorces and the age gap between siblings, I lived mostly as an

only child. With no one to measure myself against, it never oc-

curred to me to measure at al .

But once I hit the real world, all my failings came sharply

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into focus, and starting on the first day of kindergarten I saw

myself anew. Within the first few hours of the school year, we

were asked to recite the alphabet, which I figured other kids had

learned from doting parents or
Sesame Street
and I had not. I found myself in my first act of fakery as I moved my mouth in

silence while other kids belted out, “A, B, C . . . !” My new self-

image was something like the
Peanuts
character Pigpen, a child caught in the center of a swirling cloud of dirt. School was about

doing
, and all the things we did were either right or wrong. Write the alphabet. Recite the alphabet. Say your numbers. Now in

Spanish. At recess: Catch the bal , throw the bal , defend your-

self. Whatever the task, I felt that I was not doing it right or as well as other kids, and each day, each week, each school year,

that feeling of incompetency was seared into me more deeply.

Anxious erasing ripped apart my math worksheets. The ball flew

past me as I stood with eyes scrunched closed. I fell off the curb

watching the girl with the perfect braids fly down the street on

her purple mustang. Other kids possessed essential knowledge

that eluded me. I was so behind, I’d never catch up.

In the third grade a letter arrived stating that I’d been placed

in the class for gifted children. Thus began my first case of im-

postor syndrome. I knew a mistake had been made, and once I

was in the class messing up, I would be swiftly placed back with

the commoners. One of the girls in the new class—I will call

her Kimberly, for at her essence she
was
a Kimberly—had long been the object of my competency envy. And of all the things

she could do—keep the objects under her desk lid looking fresh

and organized all year, swing across the monkey bars like a real

monkey—I envied Kimberly the most for her painting.

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In this world in which competencies were measured and

evaluated, I suddenly realized that art was something that could

be compared. I’d once drawn and painted with abandon at JoJo’s,

but now I knew that some art was
better
than others. I knew with certainty that Kimberly’s art was better than mine. Original

images and bold colors filled her paintings. She always seemed

to have a plan, a subject in mind—a valley vil age, a symmetri-

cal family of four—that seemed important and was nothing that

would’ve ever occurred to me to paint. The subjects of my paint-

ings were solely determined by which paintbrush I happened to

pick up first. Pink = heart. Green = grass or, in season, perhaps

a Christmas tree. Although no one had ever said so, I
knew
that each of my paintings possessed a fatal flaw, a flaw not always

locatable but still inevitable and indisputable.

On one particular day, we were standing as usual before our

easels in our blue vinyl aprons, our white papers clothes-pegged

to the easels, our wel s of green, red, yellow, blue, and black

lining their troughs. Suddenly, a golden butterfly appeared on

Kimberly’s white paper, and inside each wing concentric lines

mirrored the wing’s perimeter, the lines of pink, orange, and yel-

low growing closer together until they final y closed in on the

center of the wing: a slender flame of fire-engine red.

We were just miles from the epicenter of the Summer of

Love, and butterflies, toadstools, and lackadaisical daisy chains

were everywhere. But Kimberly’s butterfly seemed especial y hip

because of the genius addition of the concentric lines that were

also very much a part of our Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Cali-

fornia. At eight years old, she had her finger on the pulse of the

culture. And I wanted that finger to be mine. If my fairy god-

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mother had landed in the classroom at that moment and asked,

“Would you like to trade places with Kimberly? Would you like

to
become
Kimberly?” I would’ve said, “Do it.”

The next weekend I was at JoJo’s again. She’d just come back

from visiting my dad on his ranch in Mexico and had brought

back a bunch of powdered dyes now stored in squat Gerber baby

food jars that lined the shelves of her studio, the Spanish names

of the colors announced in JoJo’s block draftsman printing on

a strip of masking tape across each jar:
AZUL, ROSA, NARA-

NJA, VERDE,
the colors all the more intoxicating translated into Spanish. I felt a thrill thinking about how much potential was

locked into each jar.

As the hot wax streaked across my sheet canvas, I felt an un-

familiar feeling of confidence in my design that day. I was eager

to see JoJo’s reaction as I boldly pulled the brush up, up, and up, forming the arch of the wings, and then tightening and tightening in concentric lines within the wing. We talked of other

things as we worked, letting the wax cool and then removing

the sheets from their frames and plunging them into the magi-

cal buckets of
rosa
and
azul
. And final y our batiks hung on the clothesline, pulsing in the breeze, as JoJo and I took our break

on her back steps. She smoked her usual Pall Mal , letting her

mouth hang open to let out a gust of smoke, as she stared at

our batiks. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t, so

final y I asked, “So do you like it?” pointing at my ultra-hip but-

terfly with its devil-may-care antennae.

“It’s okay,” she said flatly.

“Oh,” I said. I hung my head and began to watch a trail of

ants marching along a crack in the cement stairs.

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Final y, she added: “It doesn’t look like you.”

I froze: How could she
know
? The silence rose between us

until final y I said in a small voice, “I sort of got the idea from this girl at school.”

“That explains it. Didn’t think it looked like something you’d

come up with.”

“I know. This is much better than my pictures,” I said, a hot

mix of shame and defeat brewing inside me.

JoJo shrugged. “I like your pictures. This is sort of ordinary.”

“That’s a
great
design!” I said, annoyed.

“I liked that cat you did last time.”

I cringed inside, thinking of the cat with the stupid grin and

huge triangular ears.

“Ugh!” I said. “I hate that cat!”

“Wel ,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette, “you’re wrong.

That cat has the real you in it. And you’re gonna have to get used

to the real you.”

Our magical weekends together ended after I was ten and moved

to Canada when my mother married my stepfather. JoJo never

came to visit, which made sense—my mom was marrying away

from her family—but still I missed her. And then when I was

sixteen, my girlfriend Cate and I came down and stayed in her

guest room for a week, and she let us do whatever we wanted,

including drink her Ernest & Julio Gallo rosé and smoke packs

of Virginia Slims cigarettes. Eventual y, I saw her at least once a year once I was out on my own, passing through California on

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the way to somewhere else or on the way back, until my dad’s

funeral when I was twenty-five. He’d been her only child.

It was six months after the funeral that I moved to Califor-

nia with my half-baked graduate school plan. This was the first

time there was a true falling-out between JoJo and me. A family

friend had told her I’d said that I was mad because my dad had

left my siblings ten thousand dol ars and me only five. She was

so mad at me she wouldn’t talk to me, though I’d just moved to

the area and knew almost no one. The worst part of that then

was that I probably
should
have been annoyed that I’d been so obviously designated as less important than my siblings by my

father, but I wasn’t. I was grateful to get
anything
.

But now I’m pretty sure I understand what was happening

with JoJo. She was grieving for her son like crazy. At his funeral

she’d told me that she wouldn’t miss him because she’d always