Jon does not like me painting at night. “When else can I do it?” I say. “You tell me.” There is only one answer, one that would not involve the loss of his own time: Don’t do it at all. But he doesn’t say this. He doesn’t say what he thinks of my paintings, but I know anyway. He thinks they are irrelevant. In his mind, what I paint is lumped in with the women who paint flowers. Lumped is the word. The present tense is moving forward, discarding concept after concept, and I am off to the side somewhere, fiddling with egg tempera and flat surfaces, as if the twentieth century has never happened. There is freedom in this: because it doesn’t matter what I do, I can do what I like. We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened. The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless. I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder. Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal. Jon sits in the living room, having a beer with one of the painters. I am in the kitchen, slamming around the pots.
“What’s with her?” says the painter.
“She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.
I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”
Chapter 62
S ome of us from the meetings are having a group show, of women only. This is risky business, and we know it. Jody says we could get trashed, by the male art establishment. Their line these days is that great art transcends gender. Jody’s line is that art so far has been mostly men admiring one another. A woman artist can get admired by them only as a sideline, a sort of freaky exception. “Titless wonders,” says Jody.
We could get trashed by women as well, for singling ourselves out, putting ourselves forward. We could be called elitist. There are many pitfalls.
There are four of us in on the show. Carolyn, who has an angelic moon face framed in a Dutch cut with dark bangs, calls herself a fabric artist. Some of her pieces are patchwork quilts, in inventive designs. One has condoms stuffed with tampons (unused), glued onto it in the shapes of letters, spelling out WHAT IS LUV? Another is done in florals, with an appliquéd message:
UP YOUR
MAN
IFESTO!
Or else she makes wall hangings out of toilet paper twisted like rope, braided and woven with reels of outdated girlie movies, the kind that used to be called “art films.” “Used porn,” she says cheerfully. “Why not recycle it, eh?”
Jody does store mannequins, sawn apart, the pieces glued back together in disturbing poses. She, fixes them up with paint and collage and steel wool stuck on at appropriate places. One hangs from a meat hook, stuck through the solar plexus, another has trees and flowers painted all over her face like fine tattooing, with a delicacy I wouldn’t have suspected from Jody. Another has the heads of six or seven old dolls attached to her stomach. I recognize some of them: Sparkle Plenty, Betsy Wetsy, Barbara Ann Scott.
Zillah is blond and skimpy, like the frail flower girls of a few years back. She calls her pieces Lintscapes. They are made from the wads of feltlike fuzz that accumulate on drier filters and can be peeled off in sheets. I have admired these myself as I stuffed them into the wastebasket: their texture, their soft colors. Zillah has bought a number of towels in different shades and run them repeatedly through the dryer, to get shades of pink, of gray-green, of off-white, as well as the standard underneath-the-bed gray. These she has cut and shaped and glued carefully to a backing, to form multilayered compositions that resemble cloudscapes. I am entranced by them, and wish I had thought of this first. “It’s like making a soufflé,”
Zillah says. “One breath of cold air and you’re dead in the water.”
Jody, who is more in charge than anyone, has gone through my paintings and chosen the ones for the show. She’s taken some of the still lifes, Wringer, Toaster, Deadly Nightshade, and Three Witches. Three Witches is the one of the three different sofas.
