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Show work of defusing the situation, translating his anger into something we could handle. Though if I really think about it^about all those times when tears ran down my face as my father raged-the sting in my nose and eyes, the urgent feeling in my stomach, were more like crying than laughing, closer to pain than joy. During the same year that my family built the garage, my mother took me to the National Gallery of/Art for the day. I felt very adult, wandering the galleries with my mother, wearing an A-line skirt made from the wool my father brought back from Asia and boots that came to my knees. In those years, I tried to dress like her. No longer a child but not yet an adult, with no older siblings to guide my fashion decisions and a year away from having a job that would allow me money to buy the Guess? jeans and Forenza sweaters that other kids had, I wore clothes that my mother and grandmother sewed for me, classic skirts and turtlenecks, pants with pleated fronts, thin leather belts, high-necked, puffy-sleeved rayon blouses, and even the occasional hat. That day, we looked at Matisse's cut outs and the fabulous mobiles of Calder, the work of Pollock and Rothko, and the paintings of Mary Cassatt, an artist who felt too feminine for me, too sweet. What I remember most that day were the Picassos, especially those from his blue period, heavy, sentimental paintings that oppressed the viewer with their relentless palette of blues. At the end of the day, my mother bought a reproduction for me, a print of heavy cardstock that cost fifty cents and was no bigger than a sheet of typing paper. The painting I chose was Picasso's The Tragedy, painted in the first years of the twentieth century, when the painter was a teenager and living in Barcelona away from home for the first time in his life. 191 |