Burnaway

[cont.]
Staring at the stacks, she noted the structural similarities with some of her recent paintings. The stack of boxes in the storage unit had obviously seeped into her subconscious. Most in the art world saw the grid structure as a reference to Agnes Martin’s exploration of lines and silences. That work had seeped into her subconscious too. Come to think of it, her subconscious was very full these days. Teresa pulled out a pad of paper and some charcoal and began sketching, using the edge of the eraser to make white lines appear in the columns of grey. She crumpled up the resulting drawing and washed her hands. It was too literal. Her subconscious was much more interesting than her conscious mind, just like peripheral vision worked better in low light than straight on staring.
Whenever non art friends came over, the first question they always asked was where she got her ideas. During the erotic painting era, she thought they expected her to say she was exposing the destructive side of porn, so she told them she was exploring the underlying dynamic of sexual repression in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Then she would laugh, partially at their discomfort and partially to let them know she was joking, and explain that sex was the religion of commerce. Sex sells. Of course her work didn’t sell like hot cakes, but for some reason she felt the need to debunk her friends’ perception of artists as conduits to the divine and assert a bit of conceptual critique for the content. She tended to agree with Chuck Close: “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” “Ideas,” she explained to her closest friend, “are like the Big Bang. One day you suddenly out of nowhere have this explosion of a small idea. In exploring it, suddenly you have more ideas and then even more. Then after years, the entire universe unfolds. It’s like the story about Bach who said he had to wade through musical ideas in the morning when he got out of bed.” The trick to the whole process is having that first one appear and not ignoring it. Where that first one comes from was anyone’s guess. But the caring and feeding required concentration and work. Intuition and creativity were as dependent upon nurturing as logical thinking and reason. Being born with the proclivity was seldom enough. Her mother’s insistence on the virtue of hard work was a good inheritance.
The first boxes to go were the religious materials. She kept the oldest Bible, the one with the birth dates of long dead family members as a genealogical tool for her children. At some point they might be interested. But the three boxes, all the different versions of the Bible and her mother’s notes on all those sermons she attended or watched, the later ones with every inch covered in tight incoherent script, all the cheap framed images of Jesus, the cracked plaster crucifixes – she sat with these boxes open for several hours, debating what to do with them. She should probably donate them to her mother’s church for their archives, but they had abandoned her. Teresa honestly didn’t blame them. It’s so very hard to be kind to someone throwing bottles and hurling insults. Teresa sighed. Her poor mother. The signs of her mental decay were there long before the diagnosis came in. Teresa looked at the religious tracts and actually started hauling them to the car to ship to the church. Amazing, isn’t it, even after her mother was dead and buried, here she was, still trying to earn her approval. After staring at the boxes stacked by the car for a while longer, she decided to recycle what she could instead. Waste not, want not. Some of her mother’s legacy had value. It was important not to lose sight of that.
The gnomes and ceramic deer were far easier to dispose of. Unwrapping them, Teresa could remember the time when she was little and her mother laughed while carefully introducing her to the collection. She remembered the stories of how Grandmother had purchased them, how they came in special little boxes which were ruined in a flood. Her mother would never let her touch them, held them up for her to admire. Teresa remembered those few years before the bitterness crept in and took over. A time before all the rage. Teresa had found all of the figurines in the back of the attic when she emptied out the house. Her mother had forgotten about them, preserving them in pristine condition. She had a quite passionate bidding war going on eBay. The Bambi with brown legs and a butterfly on its tail with Metlox printed on the bottom sold for a small fortune, at least what would have been a fortune in 1942. Who would have guessed? Her mother had inherited thirty-one Bambi figurines, purchased from 1942 to 1960. Their sales price didn’t come close to covering her daughter’s first term tuition but they provided enough for textbooks for most of the year. The gnomes which her parents had purchased early in their marriage for the yard didn’t fare quite as well. Two got no bids at all. Maybe Bambi is recession-proof or gnomes go in and out of style? Well, their yard could survive with the remaining gnomes among the rosemary and lavender. Her father had always told her they made him laugh. She would think of him when she trimmed the bushes around them.
Nine of the boxes contained clothes her mother had insisted on storing. These Teresa donated to a center for battered women. Her mother’s complete lack of style, those lumpy badly knit sweaters in particular, could be considered stylish now.
The rest of the boxes contained household goods: toasters which needed repair, aluminum pots and pans, Teflon so badly scarred that the only use possible was under potted plants in the yard. Sheets and towels with holes. In one of her mother’s lucid episodes, she had directed Teresa what to save, what to discard. Teresa dutifully packed even while knowing that it was mostly junk. The best of the household goods would get stored in the attic for her daughter’s first apartment. Her son’s basketball scholarship pretty much meant that he would live well without any of their help. Not having to pay for his tuition meant that they could afford to re-roof the house. Two incomes barely kept them afloat. Most teachers she knew had a second job. And her husband, an ancient old man to the computer world, was lucky to have any job at all.