Life Drawing
Margaret Willey
Lily gave an unusual amount of thought to what she should wear to her first ever private conference with her first ever university art teacher. She sensed from his appearance—shaved head, piercings, paint-spattered jeans, black T-shirts—that he mistrusted conventionality. Lily wasn’t herself an adventurous dresser; she went more for invisibility—off-white shirts and khaki slacks, sensible shoes. She wore her straight hair in a ponytail, no make-up or jewelry. Still, she prepared somewhat by taking a shower and wearing a bra and rehearsing what she might say, what adult thoughtful questions she might.
Why don’t you like my drawings, Mr. Zelensky?
She wanted to better understand what he preferred; he had been scrawling B’s and even a few C’s on her assignments without comments or suggestions.
No one had warned her not to take her first university art class from a young Expressionist with a Slavic name. He was new to the faculty and apparently up and coming in the art world and Lily had gotten the last available space in Intro to Figure Drawing. She’d learned from her advisor that Moses Zelensky was ‘already famous’. She had never before had a teacher who looked so avant-garde; her beloved high school art teacher had been a grey-haired, kindly matron.
The first sight of Mr. Zelensky, reed-thin and scowling, striding forcefully through the hallway of the Art Center, had filled her with determination to excel. She’d won the Senior Class Art Award at her high school, mostly for silk-screened posters that she voluntarily designed for all the school plays and concerts. And perhaps also for her willingness to try every medium—drawing, painting, pottery, silk screen—with curiosity and enthusiasm. In fact, during her senior year the art teacher had given her permission to ignore assignments and create anything she wanted. She had enjoyed this brief reign; it had motivated her to pursue a college art major.
Now, with midterms approaching, her confidence was shaken.
What am I doing wrong, Mr. Zelensky?
His assignments consisted mostly of drawing body parts, primarily hands and feet. He required his students to draw on coarse drawing paper and work large, using black chalk, conte crayons, and soft pencil. The students were required to draw themselves, using mirrors and selfies. Lily had never been asked to draw herself. She did not see her own face and body as worthy of so much effort; still, she did her best, drawing and re-drawing, putting in extra hours at the lab, referring to her notes about each assignment, paying attention to the efforts of the students whose work he seemed to like, of which there were exactly two—one male, one female.
These two students usually kept Mr. Zelensky from a state of utter frustration about teaching a freshman class, but not always. He sometimes left the class in agitation, muttering to himself, disappearing for long stretches during the three-hour lab. When he would return, reeking of cigarette smoke and occasionally alcohol, he would look first at the efforts of his favorites. The female student had a name that Mr. Z seemed to enjoy pronouncing—Mah-ree-ka. During the first month of the drawing class, he often used her work to show the rest of the class what he was looking for. “Mah-ree-ka has given us a sense of danger here.” he said, pointing to a larger-than-life, slightly distorted image of Mareeka’s left foot. “How dangerous it is to be a human, yeah?”
He used terms that Lily had never heard used with regard to art: ‘danger,’ ‘tension’, ‘distortion’. His favorite word, with regard to all efforts, seemed to be ‘struggle’—he pronounced it stroh-gill. Lily was confused by this, but not, at first, discouraged, despite the fact that her efforts were barely acknowledged. At the end of the first month of class, she had received, no feedback—only check marks on her drawings indicating that they had been seen, along with an occasional mediocre grade. Each time she saw a scrawled check mark on a drawing, she felt a pang of longing for the warm responses from her high school art teacher: ‘lovely as usual’, ‘fine effort’, ‘great job, Lily’.
Now, prim and nervous, Lily crossed and uncrossed her khaki-clad legs, waiting on a plastic chair for her first private conference. She’d been instructed by the art department secretary to arrive at Mr. Zelensky’s private office at 8 a.m. with her portfolio. He came twenty minutes late, wearing a ragged, paint flecked-hoodie, smoking a half-gone cigarette. He carried an oiled canvas briefcase on one shoulder and black coffee in a cracked mug in the opposite hand. He seemed annoyed to find a student waiting for him.
Lily said quickly, “I made an appointment, Mr. Zelensky. The secretary said to meet you here.”
“Are you in one of my classes?”
She nodded. “I’m Lily Marsden. Intro to Drawing. I brought my portfolio.”
She laid it on a table in front of him, inviting him to examine it, so as to help him remember who she was. He put out his cigarette and pulled a few drawings from the portfolio, scowling, nodding, recognizing his own noncommittal markings.
Lily, standing behind him, began her inquiry. “I would like to know—”
“No, I would like to know,” Mr. Zelensky interrupted, turning to face her, “why it is so hard for you to follow my instructions.”
She did not know how to answer. It was something she had never before been accused of. “I do follow your instructions,” she protested weakly.
He scoffed in disapproval. “I tell you what I want you to do, you do something else.”
The accusation shocked her. “Sometimes I don’t understand what you want,” she confessed. She was struggling to stay composed.
“Maybe you don’t want to get better as an artist, eh?” he growled. His face was suddenly a bit too close to hers.
“No, I do, I do want to get better.”
“Then try harder, yeah?” As he said this, he thumped the side of her head with his knuckle, not hard, but sharply—a dismissive gesture. Then he turned his back. The conference was over. Lily left the art building, and did not come back to class that day, a rare, but necessary, unexcused absence.
The next week, midterm grades were sent out. Lily received A’s in all of her classes except her art class. Mr. Zelensky had given her a C+, the lowest grade that she had ever received in her life. She was too ashamed to tell her parents, too discouraged to discuss the grade with her advisor. For the next several classes, she came late and left early. She stayed at the back of the studio and avoided speaking to anyone. She made no eye contact with Mr. Zelensky. She became even more invisible, unable to see what he wanted his students to see, unable to participate.
After midterms, the Art Department featured an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the current faculty, including the department’s new star. Lily felt obligated to see the show. She went in the morning, when the gallery first opened, hoping to avoid other students. Moses Zelensky had three enormous paintings in the exhibition—fierce, map-like abstractions with titles in a language Lily didn’t recognize—Polish? Russian? The paintings seemed to be landscapes, each with a profusion of horizontal lines. Lily did not understand them. They were a mystery, and their mysteriousness accused and unsettled her. Tension, distortion, stroh-gill, she thought.
Someone silently stepped beside her and Lily realized with dismay that it was Mareeka. “It’s Lily, right?” she asked. “I see we had the same idea. We have these gorgeous paintings all to ourselves, don’t we?”
Lily, surprised that Mareeka was talking to her, nodded shyly, and then gestured to largest of the Zelensky paintings. “I like this one,” she lied. She pronounced the painting’s title hesitatingly: “Massah-rike.”
“Mass-er-rick,” Mareeka corrected. “Masaryk. It’s the name of his University in Czechoslovakia. Where he studied art before he came to the United States.”
“How do you know that?”
Mareeka smiled a secret smile. “He loves to talk about his art journey.”
Lily did not know what to say to this, and Mareeka, perhaps losing interest, moved along to the other paintings.
After midterms, Mr. Zelensky announced that they would be drawing from nude models for the remaining weeks of the class. “Is the only way to capture the mystery of the human body,” he said. His tone was scolding, as though he was already disappointed in how this would go.
“How many of you have worked with live models before?” he asked. Only Mareeka raised her hand, smiling proudly. Mr. Zelensky did not return her smile, but he held Mareeka’s glance for a brief, charged moment.
When the lab was over, Lily made a point of leaving the room behind Mareeka. “Where did you draw live models?” she asked.
“I went to a private school in Boston,” Mareeka told her. “Very arty and progressive.” These were hardly the words that Lily would have used to describe her own large, magnet high school with its graduating class of over five hundred students. This had never bothered her before. Now she felt vaguely unworthy.
Still, she moved up beside Mareeka and asked earnestly, “Any advice about drawing live models?”
“Look deeply,” Mareeka replied, tossing back her dark mane of hair. Her brown eyes were ringed with kohl. “It will be so good for you, Lee-lee.” She said this with a certainty that Lily did not share.
Ten minutes after the next lab started, the model—a female in her thirties, or perhaps forties—came into the class wearing a short kimono. Her feet were bare despite the dirty art room floor. Her hair hung loose, straight and brittle. She was plain-faced and very thin. She avoided the eyes of the students as she approached a platform that had been set up for her in the center of the room. Mr. Zelensky had already brought his Harley-Davidson into the studio; now he muscled it onto the platform without assistance. A black helmet was hanging by its strap to one of the handlebars.
The model had apparently been instructed to wear the helmet, because she reached for it and put it atop her head, buckling it with visibly shaking hands. Then she removed the kimono, under which she was completely naked. She draped the kimono over the back of a chair on the edge of the platform and then climbed aboard the motorcycle. All of this happened in complete silence; the only sound was the model’s flesh squeaking as she settled herself on the cycle’s leather seat.
Lily had not realized that it was possible to be as naked as this stranger was in a room of fully-dressed people. The woman had a rash on her neck and across her upper chest, perhaps from anxiety. A 4-inch scar ran across her belly, above a ragged triangle of pubic hair. Her breasts sagged; her nipples were dark brown. The motorcycle helmet, which was too big for her, tilted awkwardly to one side of her small head.
Lily could not bring herself to pick up her conte crayon. She could not lift her arm to the easel, could not draw the unfortunate woman, seated precariously on Mr. Zelensky’s motorcycle. Behind Lily, Zelensky’s voice cut through the silence. He asked the model to please lean forward so as to better grip the handlebars with her hands. This made her breasts fall frontward, pendulous and dimpled. The handlebars were a stretch for her; she grimaced with the effort of reaching for them. The ill-fitting helmet listed to the other side of her head.
“What are we seeing here?” Mr. Zelensky barked.
Cruelty? Lily thought.
“Struggle?” his favorite male student offered.
“Stroh-gill!” Mr. Zelensky echoed approvingly. “Open yourselves and draw the stroh-gill!”
Lily became aware of a palpable anger rising within her. She put her hands into her lap and lowered her head. She took several deep breaths and gathered her strength and made a decision. I have to get out of here.
She waited until Mr. Zelensky had moved from behind her to the opposite side of the room, issuing instructions, pointing and gesturing. The model was juddering with the effort of leaning and balancing. Lily picked up her portfolio and her handbag and slipped from the room.
To her dismay, Mareeka ran out of the room after her, calling her name in the long hallway of the Art Center “Lee-lee, Lee-lee! What’s wrong?”
Lily slowed down, but kept walking. She could not have explained her mental state. Mareeka surprised her by grabbing her free hand. Lily looked down at their joined hands, saw that Mareeka’s was smudged from blending conte crayon in her drawing. She wanted to yank her hand away, but Mareeka clutched it more tightly, her face lined with concern. “Oh, Lee-lee,” she said. “Did Helen make you uncomfortable?”
“How do you know the model’s name is Helen?”
Mareeka shrugged. “She often models for Mo. She’s an excellent model, very pliant and natural.”
Lily shook her head. “She was trembling. She was embarrassed. Her breasts were like . . . old. I couldn’t look at them.”
Mareeka frowned with both sympathy and disapproval. Then she asked Lily something that Mr. Zelensky had asked her at their ill-fated midterm conference. “Don’t you want to get better as an artist, Lee-lee?”
“I’ll never be a real artist,” Lily said. It was a great relief to say it aloud.
“You’re giving up!” Mareeka exclaimed softly. “Don’t give up, Lee-lee. Do you want me to talk to Mo? I’m seeing him later today.”
“Please don’t say anything about me. Please. Just do whatever it is that you two usually do together.”
When Mareeka drew back at this inference, Lily hurried away.
The next week, Lily dropped Life Drawing. It was too late for her to get any sort of refund, but she could not bear the thought of drawing other nude models, or drawing anything, in Mo Zelensky’s class. Nor could she bear the thought of getting a failing grade in an art class, her once métier, her faded dream. She would take the W. Over Christmas break, she would recover and regroup and redefine her goals.
Her parents were sent her grades, as was normal in those days, but they were both too busy to really look at them, assuming of course, that Lily would receive high marks. Lily rehearsed telling them she was no longer an art major, but never got around to the conversation. At one point, before she went back to college after the holidays, her mother asked her absently what art classes she was taking Winter semester.
“No art classes,” Lily said and waited for her mother to question this news.
But her mother had already moved away, heading for the kitchen, where she was preparing a dinner of leftovers from Christmas Day for her other six children. Lily called to her mother, “Were you wondering why I’m not taking any art classes?”
“You just relax in there!” Bonnie called back. “We’ll talk later!”
“Because I’ll never be a real artist,” Lily said, but softly; her mother didn’t hear.
Back on campus, Lily avoided the art building, feeling like it was a place of danger and shame. One morning, after her English Literature class, she bumped into Mareeka in the student union. Mareeka had changed her looks—cut her hair to chin-length and streaked it—black and yellow. She wore large hoop earrings and a black sundress under a denim jacket with flecks of paint on her wrists and on the turned back sleeves.
“Why did you drop out of Life Drawing?” Mareeka asked.
“Who told you I dropped out?” Lily asked. Then said quickly, “Oh, I know who told you.”
“Mo didn’t tell me” Mareeka said. “He dumped me when the semester ended. I just assumed you withdrew because you never came back after Helen modeled for us.”
“I’m an English major now,” Lily said.
“He screwed me over, Lee-lee. Gave me a fucking B+. But I got him back, I reported him.”
Lily didn’t want to talk about Zelensky. She asked Mareeka, “Are you still an art major?”
“Of course. Art is my life. Especially painting. I’m working on a black and white series about dead trees.”
“I haven’t made any art since I dropped the class,” Lily confided. “Not even a sketch.”
“I would die if I couldn’t make art,” Mareeka said. “Don’t you miss it terribly?”
Do I miss it? Lily thought. She wasn’t sure. She felt burned and humiliated whenever she pictured herself at her easel in Life Drawing 101. Trying to figure out what he wanted. Trying to be good enough. The disastrous conference. His scorn. The first blistering sight of her midterm grade. The naked woman on the motorcycle, her sad breasts drooping behind the handlebars.
She changed the subject and told Mareeka, “My English teacher likes my writing.”
“That’s good, Lee-lee. Maybe you will write something about the Life Drawing class, yes?”
Lily shook her head, unwilling. “I need to put that whole first semester behind me.”
“Oh, me too, that bastard. But I bet you will write about it eventually. Won’t you?”
“Never,” Lily said. She closed her eyes as she said the word again: never—a prayer, a promise, a form of resistance at her own expense.
Margaret Willey
Lily gave an unusual amount of thought to what she should wear to her first ever private conference with her first ever university art teacher. She sensed from his appearance—shaved head, piercings, paint-spattered jeans, black T-shirts—that he mistrusted conventionality. Lily wasn’t herself an adventurous dresser; she went more for invisibility—off-white shirts and khaki slacks, sensible shoes. She wore her straight hair in a ponytail, no make-up or jewelry. Still, she prepared somewhat by taking a shower and wearing a bra and rehearsing what she might say, what adult thoughtful questions she might.
Why don’t you like my drawings, Mr. Zelensky?
She wanted to better understand what he preferred; he had been scrawling B’s and even a few C’s on her assignments without comments or suggestions.
No one had warned her not to take her first university art class from a young Expressionist with a Slavic name. He was new to the faculty and apparently up and coming in the art world and Lily had gotten the last available space in Intro to Figure Drawing. She’d learned from her advisor that Moses Zelensky was ‘already famous’. She had never before had a teacher who looked so avant-garde; her beloved high school art teacher had been a grey-haired, kindly matron.
The first sight of Mr. Zelensky, reed-thin and scowling, striding forcefully through the hallway of the Art Center, had filled her with determination to excel. She’d won the Senior Class Art Award at her high school, mostly for silk-screened posters that she voluntarily designed for all the school plays and concerts. And perhaps also for her willingness to try every medium—drawing, painting, pottery, silk screen—with curiosity and enthusiasm. In fact, during her senior year the art teacher had given her permission to ignore assignments and create anything she wanted. She had enjoyed this brief reign; it had motivated her to pursue a college art major.
Now, with midterms approaching, her confidence was shaken.
What am I doing wrong, Mr. Zelensky?
His assignments consisted mostly of drawing body parts, primarily hands and feet. He required his students to draw on coarse drawing paper and work large, using black chalk, conte crayons, and soft pencil. The students were required to draw themselves, using mirrors and selfies. Lily had never been asked to draw herself. She did not see her own face and body as worthy of so much effort; still, she did her best, drawing and re-drawing, putting in extra hours at the lab, referring to her notes about each assignment, paying attention to the efforts of the students whose work he seemed to like, of which there were exactly two—one male, one female.
These two students usually kept Mr. Zelensky from a state of utter frustration about teaching a freshman class, but not always. He sometimes left the class in agitation, muttering to himself, disappearing for long stretches during the three-hour lab. When he would return, reeking of cigarette smoke and occasionally alcohol, he would look first at the efforts of his favorites. The female student had a name that Mr. Z seemed to enjoy pronouncing—Mah-ree-ka. During the first month of the drawing class, he often used her work to show the rest of the class what he was looking for. “Mah-ree-ka has given us a sense of danger here.” he said, pointing to a larger-than-life, slightly distorted image of Mareeka’s left foot. “How dangerous it is to be a human, yeah?”
He used terms that Lily had never heard used with regard to art: ‘danger,’ ‘tension’, ‘distortion’. His favorite word, with regard to all efforts, seemed to be ‘struggle’—he pronounced it stroh-gill. Lily was confused by this, but not, at first, discouraged, despite the fact that her efforts were barely acknowledged. At the end of the first month of class, she had received, no feedback—only check marks on her drawings indicating that they had been seen, along with an occasional mediocre grade. Each time she saw a scrawled check mark on a drawing, she felt a pang of longing for the warm responses from her high school art teacher: ‘lovely as usual’, ‘fine effort’, ‘great job, Lily’.
Now, prim and nervous, Lily crossed and uncrossed her khaki-clad legs, waiting on a plastic chair for her first private conference. She’d been instructed by the art department secretary to arrive at Mr. Zelensky’s private office at 8 a.m. with her portfolio. He came twenty minutes late, wearing a ragged, paint flecked-hoodie, smoking a half-gone cigarette. He carried an oiled canvas briefcase on one shoulder and black coffee in a cracked mug in the opposite hand. He seemed annoyed to find a student waiting for him.
Lily said quickly, “I made an appointment, Mr. Zelensky. The secretary said to meet you here.”
“Are you in one of my classes?”
She nodded. “I’m Lily Marsden. Intro to Drawing. I brought my portfolio.”
She laid it on a table in front of him, inviting him to examine it, so as to help him remember who she was. He put out his cigarette and pulled a few drawings from the portfolio, scowling, nodding, recognizing his own noncommittal markings.
Lily, standing behind him, began her inquiry. “I would like to know—”
“No, I would like to know,” Mr. Zelensky interrupted, turning to face her, “why it is so hard for you to follow my instructions.”
She did not know how to answer. It was something she had never before been accused of. “I do follow your instructions,” she protested weakly.
He scoffed in disapproval. “I tell you what I want you to do, you do something else.”
The accusation shocked her. “Sometimes I don’t understand what you want,” she confessed. She was struggling to stay composed.
“Maybe you don’t want to get better as an artist, eh?” he growled. His face was suddenly a bit too close to hers.
“No, I do, I do want to get better.”
“Then try harder, yeah?” As he said this, he thumped the side of her head with his knuckle, not hard, but sharply—a dismissive gesture. Then he turned his back. The conference was over. Lily left the art building, and did not come back to class that day, a rare, but necessary, unexcused absence.
The next week, midterm grades were sent out. Lily received A’s in all of her classes except her art class. Mr. Zelensky had given her a C+, the lowest grade that she had ever received in her life. She was too ashamed to tell her parents, too discouraged to discuss the grade with her advisor. For the next several classes, she came late and left early. She stayed at the back of the studio and avoided speaking to anyone. She made no eye contact with Mr. Zelensky. She became even more invisible, unable to see what he wanted his students to see, unable to participate.
After midterms, the Art Department featured an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the current faculty, including the department’s new star. Lily felt obligated to see the show. She went in the morning, when the gallery first opened, hoping to avoid other students. Moses Zelensky had three enormous paintings in the exhibition—fierce, map-like abstractions with titles in a language Lily didn’t recognize—Polish? Russian? The paintings seemed to be landscapes, each with a profusion of horizontal lines. Lily did not understand them. They were a mystery, and their mysteriousness accused and unsettled her. Tension, distortion, stroh-gill, she thought.
Someone silently stepped beside her and Lily realized with dismay that it was Mareeka. “It’s Lily, right?” she asked. “I see we had the same idea. We have these gorgeous paintings all to ourselves, don’t we?”
Lily, surprised that Mareeka was talking to her, nodded shyly, and then gestured to largest of the Zelensky paintings. “I like this one,” she lied. She pronounced the painting’s title hesitatingly: “Massah-rike.”
“Mass-er-rick,” Mareeka corrected. “Masaryk. It’s the name of his University in Czechoslovakia. Where he studied art before he came to the United States.”
“How do you know that?”
Mareeka smiled a secret smile. “He loves to talk about his art journey.”
Lily did not know what to say to this, and Mareeka, perhaps losing interest, moved along to the other paintings.
After midterms, Mr. Zelensky announced that they would be drawing from nude models for the remaining weeks of the class. “Is the only way to capture the mystery of the human body,” he said. His tone was scolding, as though he was already disappointed in how this would go.
“How many of you have worked with live models before?” he asked. Only Mareeka raised her hand, smiling proudly. Mr. Zelensky did not return her smile, but he held Mareeka’s glance for a brief, charged moment.
When the lab was over, Lily made a point of leaving the room behind Mareeka. “Where did you draw live models?” she asked.
“I went to a private school in Boston,” Mareeka told her. “Very arty and progressive.” These were hardly the words that Lily would have used to describe her own large, magnet high school with its graduating class of over five hundred students. This had never bothered her before. Now she felt vaguely unworthy.
Still, she moved up beside Mareeka and asked earnestly, “Any advice about drawing live models?”
“Look deeply,” Mareeka replied, tossing back her dark mane of hair. Her brown eyes were ringed with kohl. “It will be so good for you, Lee-lee.” She said this with a certainty that Lily did not share.
Ten minutes after the next lab started, the model—a female in her thirties, or perhaps forties—came into the class wearing a short kimono. Her feet were bare despite the dirty art room floor. Her hair hung loose, straight and brittle. She was plain-faced and very thin. She avoided the eyes of the students as she approached a platform that had been set up for her in the center of the room. Mr. Zelensky had already brought his Harley-Davidson into the studio; now he muscled it onto the platform without assistance. A black helmet was hanging by its strap to one of the handlebars.
The model had apparently been instructed to wear the helmet, because she reached for it and put it atop her head, buckling it with visibly shaking hands. Then she removed the kimono, under which she was completely naked. She draped the kimono over the back of a chair on the edge of the platform and then climbed aboard the motorcycle. All of this happened in complete silence; the only sound was the model’s flesh squeaking as she settled herself on the cycle’s leather seat.
Lily had not realized that it was possible to be as naked as this stranger was in a room of fully-dressed people. The woman had a rash on her neck and across her upper chest, perhaps from anxiety. A 4-inch scar ran across her belly, above a ragged triangle of pubic hair. Her breasts sagged; her nipples were dark brown. The motorcycle helmet, which was too big for her, tilted awkwardly to one side of her small head.
Lily could not bring herself to pick up her conte crayon. She could not lift her arm to the easel, could not draw the unfortunate woman, seated precariously on Mr. Zelensky’s motorcycle. Behind Lily, Zelensky’s voice cut through the silence. He asked the model to please lean forward so as to better grip the handlebars with her hands. This made her breasts fall frontward, pendulous and dimpled. The handlebars were a stretch for her; she grimaced with the effort of reaching for them. The ill-fitting helmet listed to the other side of her head.
“What are we seeing here?” Mr. Zelensky barked.
Cruelty? Lily thought.
“Struggle?” his favorite male student offered.
“Stroh-gill!” Mr. Zelensky echoed approvingly. “Open yourselves and draw the stroh-gill!”
Lily became aware of a palpable anger rising within her. She put her hands into her lap and lowered her head. She took several deep breaths and gathered her strength and made a decision. I have to get out of here.
She waited until Mr. Zelensky had moved from behind her to the opposite side of the room, issuing instructions, pointing and gesturing. The model was juddering with the effort of leaning and balancing. Lily picked up her portfolio and her handbag and slipped from the room.
To her dismay, Mareeka ran out of the room after her, calling her name in the long hallway of the Art Center “Lee-lee, Lee-lee! What’s wrong?”
Lily slowed down, but kept walking. She could not have explained her mental state. Mareeka surprised her by grabbing her free hand. Lily looked down at their joined hands, saw that Mareeka’s was smudged from blending conte crayon in her drawing. She wanted to yank her hand away, but Mareeka clutched it more tightly, her face lined with concern. “Oh, Lee-lee,” she said. “Did Helen make you uncomfortable?”
“How do you know the model’s name is Helen?”
Mareeka shrugged. “She often models for Mo. She’s an excellent model, very pliant and natural.”
Lily shook her head. “She was trembling. She was embarrassed. Her breasts were like . . . old. I couldn’t look at them.”
Mareeka frowned with both sympathy and disapproval. Then she asked Lily something that Mr. Zelensky had asked her at their ill-fated midterm conference. “Don’t you want to get better as an artist, Lee-lee?”
“I’ll never be a real artist,” Lily said. It was a great relief to say it aloud.
“You’re giving up!” Mareeka exclaimed softly. “Don’t give up, Lee-lee. Do you want me to talk to Mo? I’m seeing him later today.”
“Please don’t say anything about me. Please. Just do whatever it is that you two usually do together.”
When Mareeka drew back at this inference, Lily hurried away.
The next week, Lily dropped Life Drawing. It was too late for her to get any sort of refund, but she could not bear the thought of drawing other nude models, or drawing anything, in Mo Zelensky’s class. Nor could she bear the thought of getting a failing grade in an art class, her once métier, her faded dream. She would take the W. Over Christmas break, she would recover and regroup and redefine her goals.
Her parents were sent her grades, as was normal in those days, but they were both too busy to really look at them, assuming of course, that Lily would receive high marks. Lily rehearsed telling them she was no longer an art major, but never got around to the conversation. At one point, before she went back to college after the holidays, her mother asked her absently what art classes she was taking Winter semester.
“No art classes,” Lily said and waited for her mother to question this news.
But her mother had already moved away, heading for the kitchen, where she was preparing a dinner of leftovers from Christmas Day for her other six children. Lily called to her mother, “Were you wondering why I’m not taking any art classes?”
“You just relax in there!” Bonnie called back. “We’ll talk later!”
“Because I’ll never be a real artist,” Lily said, but softly; her mother didn’t hear.
Back on campus, Lily avoided the art building, feeling like it was a place of danger and shame. One morning, after her English Literature class, she bumped into Mareeka in the student union. Mareeka had changed her looks—cut her hair to chin-length and streaked it—black and yellow. She wore large hoop earrings and a black sundress under a denim jacket with flecks of paint on her wrists and on the turned back sleeves.
“Why did you drop out of Life Drawing?” Mareeka asked.
“Who told you I dropped out?” Lily asked. Then said quickly, “Oh, I know who told you.”
“Mo didn’t tell me” Mareeka said. “He dumped me when the semester ended. I just assumed you withdrew because you never came back after Helen modeled for us.”
“I’m an English major now,” Lily said.
“He screwed me over, Lee-lee. Gave me a fucking B+. But I got him back, I reported him.”
Lily didn’t want to talk about Zelensky. She asked Mareeka, “Are you still an art major?”
“Of course. Art is my life. Especially painting. I’m working on a black and white series about dead trees.”
“I haven’t made any art since I dropped the class,” Lily confided. “Not even a sketch.”
“I would die if I couldn’t make art,” Mareeka said. “Don’t you miss it terribly?”
Do I miss it? Lily thought. She wasn’t sure. She felt burned and humiliated whenever she pictured herself at her easel in Life Drawing 101. Trying to figure out what he wanted. Trying to be good enough. The disastrous conference. His scorn. The first blistering sight of her midterm grade. The naked woman on the motorcycle, her sad breasts drooping behind the handlebars.
She changed the subject and told Mareeka, “My English teacher likes my writing.”
“That’s good, Lee-lee. Maybe you will write something about the Life Drawing class, yes?”
Lily shook her head, unwilling. “I need to put that whole first semester behind me.”
“Oh, me too, that bastard. But I bet you will write about it eventually. Won’t you?”
“Never,” Lily said. She closed her eyes as she said the word again: never—a prayer, a promise, a form of resistance at her own expense.