by Yocheved Friedman
This excerpt is taken from a larger personal memoir “Wise Lessons on How to Frame Portraits: Dust Jackets and Double-Sided Tape”
I am walking through the art room. The first thing I love about it is the old-style key that Bobby uses to open it. Maybe it’s the original key that came with the house—makes me think of Victorian chandeliers and brass doorknobs that are too ornate. And then there’s the room itself. It’s everything an art room should be and that’s what makes it memorable. It faces the back of the house, which opens into a forest beyond the driveway. If I were an artist, I might imagine days where I sit looming over that driveway searching its secrets for inspiration. In the afternoon, the sun must flood this room, hitting against the wooden mantel, the fireplace, the mounds of frames cluttering the corners. My grandfather mounted each canvas himself. The largest painting in the room is also one of the oldest: the scene of a school classroom, paintbrushes and a canvas against an aisle on a black and white checkered floor. My grandmother tells me the story of when she painted it, how young she was, the flaws in her work back then, her own art teacher… Some of the smaller paintings on the mantel are of dancers which remind me of De Ga. It is in this room that I painted my first oil, the first time I received a formal art lesson from my grandmother. Ironically, I can’t remember the concrete details of that day, the potency of its colors, the weather outside. Was it cold, the end of the summer maybe? I just remember the main ideas of this memory, the bare bones that shade its essence, the inkling that that we were painting and it smelled of clean canvases and turpentine. The idea of chalky fingers, sanded with paint dust. I remember the bits of our voices, the smell again, over and over running in and out of my conscious memory like liquid dreams. It occurs to me now, perhaps it did then too, that we don’t really paint often. That the culmination of my grandmother is the sum of our sparse paintings that stand out so intensely because they are sparse, all the while unclear because they were so few. Today, my grandmother is not the same woman she used to be. Her body is weaker than her mind and it frustrates her.
When I have come myself, flying in during rush hour from the train and finding my way through the corridors of Mount Sinai, I realize that time is the devil that has made me feel so grown up. Next to my grandmother, who is laying in her bisected room across from the Harlem projects, I feel the relentless crush of getting older. It was only yesterday that we sat in her art room, went tagging up and down the avenues of Springfield. That big green house, the chest yawning somewhere inside.
This is a story about art. Bobby is the one who taught us how to draw faces. She is the one who explained how to use turpentine in oil painting, how to skim the edges of our brushes with the faintest hint of paint.
The stories I have heard from my grandmother are the texture of oil on chalky canvases that are now collecting dust in the art room. They are like her pieces of art, her paintings scattered about the earth, recovered in the stairwells of houses, the back drop of a living room, the alleyways of our family homes. There are even strangers that keep her paintings, people she’s never met, who have come across her work in art shows and auctions and in this way, her art, like our memories, are strewn about the mineralized layers of the East coast to this day.
“You can tell a good artist,” she’d say, “by how clean the tips of their brushes are.” I’ve always believed that I was drawn to art because of Bobby. People would look over my shoulder as I drew, hold my drawings when they came for family dinners. “You’re going to be an artist like your grandmother,” they’d say and I grew up wondering if it would be true. I was always just an artist because she was, my skill always contingent on her own. Maybe I have been drafted into the fates of all little girls wishing to be like their grandmothers, the age-old tale of granddaughters and grandmothers.
Today, as we sat in the waiting room at 10 West Mount Sinai, peering over at the view of the East River and the highest tip of the island, I asked Bobby what the city was like when she grew up here in the 30’s. She told me about riding the subway in from Queens every morning to her office on 34th Street where she worked as a secretary before she got married. She told me that the city hadn’t changed much since then. I couldn’t bring myself to believe it, couldn’t understand how the city had managed to retain so much of itself while huge portions of my life had transformed so drastically. There was no green house, no drive up to Springfield, no smell of new canvases, and yet, somehow, the city loomed like an iron shadow, unforgotten and undisturbed. I just kept peering over at the projects on the other side of 98th Street, minutes away from the park, as the Long Island Amtrak raged past, thinking about how different this place had been in the 30’s. Everything was once black and white, or so it always seemed in the cusp of yellowing memories. I put on a song by Bing Crosby for Bobby and watched her sing to his “Million Dollar Babe” in the middle of the waiting room, just past noon. This was her city, the one she was born to; every morning she went up to Midtown and came back to Brooklyn College for night classes. Was it all really the same to her? After so many years spent away in Massachusetts, reeling in the open space like lost kites. Every time I looked out beyond the buildings uptown, all I could see were the black and white strokes of yesterday. When the heat on the subways became unbearable, and the rush hour crowd became overwhelming, her books lay on her chest like heavy souls. Could all this have been here when she was a child, my age, burrowing into the city to seek her fortune? Could it all have been left so unmoved and unbothered, even after grandparents had long been replaced by grandchildren who drove themselves up to Harlem on a freezing Sunday morning to visit their memories? When I saw her today, the way her face became the shape of growing grass, I wondered if it wasn’t regret I saw, or just the trace of old settling in. Could this be what it’s like to suddenly become old, to realize that the city had always been there, staring back on these cold, winter afternoons? Realizing that time spent somewhere else, perhaps Springfield, did not mean that the city did not go on without you, carrying on before it even noticed that you were gone.
For a long time, I just peered out of the tenth-floor window of the main building, looking out at the mindless city stretching before me. It had exchanged so many hands, and yet it was comforting to know that it was all still there, hung up in its glory like old, drying memories.
