Chapter Five #2
Mrs. Dawson moves through page after page, letting her papers slide to the floor before positioning a fresh one and carrying on.
At one point she tosses her pencil to the floor and picks up a newly sharpened one.
When she finally speaks, I have little idea of how much time has passed.
Minutes? An hour? She says, “Pencil today, but it’s really a shame not to have color in here.
Your hair. It’s got copper, russet, sunlit gold. I can’t wait to explore it all.”
Next Mrs. Dawson has me shift in and out of a series of poses. The sun has moved, which seems to thrill her. “These shadows! It’s entirely new now.”
As she works, scratching away, occasionally taking quick breaks to attack the tip of her pencil with a small sharpening knife, I slip into a sort of trance.
At first I think of Kit, wondering how he’s passing his day.
I hope he gets himself out to play. There’s a group of kids who play stickball in the alleyway just behind our boardinghouse any day it’s not raining.
Will he ask to join? I’m happy he has Titania at least. He’s such a shy boy; he doesn’t make friends easily, especially now that I’m not there with him.
Eventually, my mind goes blank. Like a sky without clouds.
Staring off toward the window, I allow myself to take a break from any thinking or worrying, to just be.
And when Mrs. Dawson looks up, declaring to the quiet room, “I think we are done,” it feels as though I resurface from some deep and thoughtless place.
I blink back to the present—the rectangular room with its mess of easels and brushes, the chemical tang of turpentine, the view of the kitchen table and Mamma with her knitting, which is now the full sleeve of a maroon sweater.
Glancing back out the window, I see that the sun truly has traveled across the sky. We arrived here in the morning; now it must be well into the afternoon. “How long has it been?” I ask.
“Five hours,” Mrs. Dawson answers, making a slow circle with her wrist. There’s a pile of papers scattered across the floor around her feet. “And I could have kept going. I’d gladly ignore the cramps in my wrist, but I fear for you. I don’t want an unhappy artists’ model.”
I smile at this, a bit flattered to be referred to as an artists’ model.
It sounds so fashionable. But then a beat later, I notice my neck aches.
My shoulders hum with a dull burn of fatigue.
What’s more, I’m famished. And I realize we haven’t eaten—not lunch, not a bite since my early breakfast of bread and a small cup of coffee in our room before Mamma and I left for the day.
Mrs. Dawson steps slowly toward me, saying, “Evelyn, as I suspected, you are a natural. The expressiveness of your features. And the way you held your poses…why, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such total stillness from a model.”
All those nights of forcing myself not to move, not to disturb a weeping Mamma beside me in bed. I suppose they were good for something.
“Excellent work today. I really mean that. As I said, a natural.”
Funny that she calls it that, “natural.” Feels to me more like being a statue.
And then, as if skimming the thoughts directly from my mind, Mrs. Dawson says: “Surprising how much hard work goes into simply posing, isn’t that so?
It’s more than merely being still. It’s keeping your body and your face at rest, while also entirely engaged.
Not many can manage it. As I mentioned when you first walked in, you have a command I’ve rarely seen. And without any study.”
I don’t look in Mamma’s direction, nor do I feel the need to correct Mrs. Dawson, to tell her that I learned such total stillness from the schooling of our shattered life.
Mrs. Dawson goes on, “Bravo, dear girl.” With that, she presses something cold into my hand.
I look down to see four quarters. A dollar!
For just a few hours of sitting there. I think no more of the cramps in my shoulder as I stare in amazement at my full hand, and then back up at Mrs. Dawson.
She flashes me half a smile, then asks: “Would you like to see how they turned out?”
She takes my other hand in hers, and I walk with her toward the easel she was using. She leans over to pick up a few of the many pages. “See for yourself,” she says, offering me the top one.
I glance down at it, stunned by the rendering of the face that appears before me in black, white, and every shade of gray.
Mrs. Dawson has managed to create a glow that shines out of my dark eyes, with only a pencil on paper.
I marvel at how she’s shown the shadows of my face, the swell of my lips, the warmth of my skin.
I so rarely see my own image—we have just one small handheld mirror, Mamma’s.
A relic of our previous life, the handle carved of rosy-pink enamel, small pearls forming the letters of Mamma’s initials.
Her wedding present from Daddy, something with which she refused to part.
But she doesn’t like me to touch it or look into it.
Even so, the face that stares back at me when I do occasionally steal a peek has never looked as expressive or as interesting as the penciled faces I now see on the papers sprawled before me.
I look back toward Mrs. Dawson, and she’s staring at my face on the paper with the same look of wonder—even disbelief—that I felt just a moment ago when she pressed four quarters into my palm.
When she pulls her eyes away from the sketch and meets my gaze, a silent moment passes between us.
Like before, it feels imbued with something akin to the sacred, silent and yet full of meaning.
The golden cord of that moment is ripped as a sudden commotion fills the front entry of the studio and a figure comes striding through the door. A woman. She looks at us, at the mess of papers across the floor, and declares: “Hope I’m not disturbing! Didn’t realize you’d still be at it.”
Mrs. Dawson, who appears entirely unfazed by the unannounced arrival of this woman into her studio, breaks from my gaze to turn toward the newcomer. And then, with her voice soft, she answers: “Yes, well, when you come across lightning, and you happen to have a jar, it’s best to try to catch it.”