61 kg and falling
I wanted to be thinner. Trapped in the expectation of an almost impossible ideal I knew I would get told by the people who judged me for being too fat that I was now too thin, that there was something wrong with me. They would lecture me that I needed to watch my weight for health reasons and not be vain but also care about my looks. And smile, always smile, because beauty comes from within.
I put on an extra layer of make-up to cover each pockmark on my dry skin, sculpted my eyes with illusion and my cheekbones with treachery. I was the femme-fatale, running through a twenty minute ritual every day just to summon the person trapped behind the mask.
Art had always been my escape, escape from the endless trial of college, from endless and pointless tests. Today I wanted to escape from my own reflection.
As students we joked about how school never tested our ability, just our memory, because memory was something a teacher could measure, something they could strike through with a red pen. For me, Alameda College was a daily grind of vapid souls pulled by some invisible string to each class, run by the type of people you knew were going to be your boss one day.
I signed up for an evening art class, not because I had any dream of becoming an artist, but because I needed something creative to do to stop myself going crazy. I signed up without telling my parents because they would give me a different kind of lecture, tell me how it wasn't appropriate for a young lady to associate with those types, or how it wasn't a commercially viable prospect and would interfere with my studies.
Both my parents worked as financial attorneys, their lives revolved around business meetings, paperwork, things that didn't really matter to me. They couldn't look at a painting without discussing how much return on their investment it would get them; they never spoke about the color in a Jackson Pollock or the texture in a Renoir, or how it made them feel. They were dry of life and if I turned out like them I would kill myself.
That's not a euphemism.
I had to pay a deposit for the evening art classes, all my savings from odd jobs and stock taking at Kohl's, so now I just had to figure out how to pay for the rest of term. I was confident that something would come up – as my friend Sue always said, I was born under a lucky star.
The other students and I stood nervously behind our easels in our first class, waiting for instructions. How To Be An Artist 101.
I counted twenty people, mostly students from the college but some as old as forty. An equally nervous teacher, with a mess of curly hair that bounced when she walked, introduced herself as Olive. At the front of the concrete-floored room a tatty old armchair sat alone on a raised wooden dais.
Olive shifted her large frame uneasily from side to side when she talked, swishing her patterned sarong and scuffing her sandals while she told us we would be drawing a beautiful goddess today. "No, not me," she said, laughing nervously and avoiding eye contact with us, "but first you must cover your page in lines. To create a work of art we must first destroy something perfect."
The person standing next to me tried to cover her laugh with her hand, dropping her pencil in the process. As she straightened up she looked up into my eyes.
"Hello," I said involuntarily, shocked by the blueness and the whiteness of her gaze.
"Hello. Who are you?" The pretty, blonde girl held out her hand in greeting as if I should kiss it. I shook her hand lightly, feeling her thin fingers immediately pull away from mine.
"I'm Sophie. Sorry, you are...?"
"Anabelle," she said, her accent thick with an Italian, or perhaps Portuguese crush.
"Is this your first class?"
Anabelle wiped her hand on a cloth hanging from her easel, the hand she had shaken my hand with, perhaps to tell me how greasy my skin was.
"It is. I just wanted to try something new, you know? I hope the goddess isn't too fat."
I laughed nervously at her, adjusting my sweater to cover up the bump of my stomach, because maybe the comment she had made about the model was directed at me. "I guess so," I continued. "It's tough though, I've been trying a few different diets but nothing seems to stick."
"Oh wow, you're dieting? But you look great!" Anabelle said, reaching into my personal space and running her lithe fingers from my belly to my hips. "Okay, a few lumps here and there," she said as she looked me over, "but you'll get rid of them."
Her hand lingered on my hip, invading, but not threatening. It felt like she was drawing over the curves, or rather where the curves had been two months ago.
My stomach profile was almost where I wanted it and my ribs had subtle definition through my skin. I was a product of my boyfriend's strict fitness program so I wasn't really worried about my weight. Not then.
Next to Anabelle stood another girl, with sunken eyes and a sullen expression. I could see her pale scalp through her thin hair, dyed black with streaks of burgundy. She didn't greet me, she just stared at me, or rather, through me. Her hands stayed hidden under the cuffs of her sweater.
Anabelle smacked her on the arm. "This is Mia, my sister."
"Hi Mia." I said, holding out my hand. Mia didn't respond.
"Not literally my sister, though," Anabelle said, "she obviously looks so different to me."
Mia looked me up and down without saying anything. I pulled back my hand from empty air.
At the front of the class a young woman wearing a white bathrobe stepped through the doorway at the back, walked to the dais, looked around for a few seconds, and let the robe fall to the ground. A rustle of papers filled the room as people avoided looking and tried to look at the same time.
The first thing I noticed was that her short, red hair matched mine. Her beautiful body slid gracefully into the old chair while she delicately moved herself to a pose with her legs hanging over the armrest. We all pretended there wasn't suddenly a naked person in the room.
"Oh my god," Anabelle whispered behind her hand at Mia, "what an oinker." Mia broke out of her spell, put her sleeve-covered hand in front of her mouth and giggled.
The model didn't hear her, or if she did she pretended not to notice. I think I saw her smile falter for a moment before she found her composure again.
Olive gave us a few faltering directions and we started to draw. I could tell that Olive didn't really know what she was doing; whenever a student asked her to demonstrate something she didn't correct the student's mistakes, but scribbled a mess all over the page, ruining the student's work. We drew silently for a few minutes, scratching and erasing to find the person in front of us.
I broke my gaze from the model and glanced at Anabelle, her sleek and bony hands playing gracefully over the page like an orchestra conductor. She had exaggerated the model's features, making the proportions look twice their actual size. I thought mine was pretty good, but I wasn't sure. Art is so subjective.
I caught sight of Mia staring at me.
"What do you think?" I asked her to break the tension. She stood back and took a look at my drawing, rubbing the dark rings under her eyes as if she was struggling to focus. She scratched her elbow aimlessly and I caught sight of bruises on her arms; like Anabelle she seemed quite thin. I figured she got beat up or fell down the stairs, or had some exotic disease, which would explain her sullen mood.
"It's okay," she said and went back to her own drawing, her thin, dark hair falling back down over her face to hide her expression.
The first half of the session ended and we took a break, standing around the room, chatting or sharpening charcoal. Anabelle and Mia stood in the corner, occasionally looking around the room and laughing. Mia kept checking her phone, apparently annoying Anabelle because she pushed Anabelle's phone away and motioned me to join them.
"Hey, come out with us later, we're going to get burgers," Anabelle said, smiling a pair of lips painted a shade of nude designed to make her lips look like they had no lipstick on. Anabelle wore a white skirt but no smudge of charcoal had touched her, while my jeans were covered in stripes of black where I had leaned into the easel.
"I don't know. I'm watching my weight."
"Aren't we all? Relax, we won't let you pig out. We're sharing one."
"Okay, that sounds fun," I said, glancing at Mia while she texted with both thumbs, oblivious to the world around her.
We started the next session; Olive walked around and gave us more bad advice.
"Your lines are too straight," she told me, grabbing my pencil from my hand. She scribbled over my lines, destroying all my effort from the last hour. After messing up my perfect drawing she moved on to the others. Bitch.
I caught him looking at me from across the room, a pair of brown eyes topped with curly brown, tousled hair that decorated a round face, popping up from behind his easel and popping back down every few seconds. He caught sight of me looking at him and ducked down, pretended that he had been drawing the model all along. It looked like he wasn't drawing the naked goddess in front of the class – he was, in fact, drawing me.
I ignored him and continued with my drawing, trying to draw with my own style but follow Olive's confusing instructions. Olive announced she was taking a smoke break. My curiosity bubbled over and I walked over to the young man's side of the class, carefully stepping over canvas bags and backpacks, trying not to bump anyone, until I was standing behind his easel. I was curious to see what he was doing and was instantly amazed and embarrassed, because he had captured my likeness perfectly and the drawing of me was very clearly naked.
"Hmm," I said, causing him to jump in fright and draw a stray line that almost intersected my boob. He looked at me with an awkward smile, like a puppy caught peeing on the rug.
"Hi," he said, trying to cover up the drawing with a chubby arm without looking at it. "Sorry. Couldn't resist." Caught with nowhere to hide, he relaxed his arm and with a lump of erasing putty dabbed away the stray line.
"You're supposed to be drawing the model."
"I know. Sorry. I just, you know, want to draw real people."
I didn't know whether I should be flattered or insulted, so I decided to delay my feelings for a while. "Well, don't do it without asking first, okay?"
"Okay." He looked down at his feet.
"Anyway, I don't look like that," I said, mesmerized by his beautiful drawing, "I'm fatter. You should be honest if you draw real people."
"Okay." He didn't look at me or say anything further, so I walked back to my easel and continued my drawing. I caught sight of him pulling the sketch from his easel, taking out another sheet and focus on the model instead of me. It shouldn't have mattered, but then why did it feel like I had just kicked that puppy in the face?
Comments (0)
See all