Chapter Three
San Francisco is, if nothing else, a city of perspective.
Our steep streets might be a pain in the ass to drive on, but they also allow for some of the best city views anywhere around the world.
The darkest alley can spill right onto a front-row view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The most unassuming house can reveal the full downtown skyline through a kitchen window.
In a lot of ways, real estate prices in the city are based more on what you can see rather than where you can walk to.
At least, that’s the mantra that keeps renovation architects like my mother constantly in business.
She glides through the front doors to Chez Moi, the French-style bistro she always suggests when I meet her for lunch. If you ask me, the chairs here are way too stiff, and the food portions are never big enough. But Mom never asks me.
“Ivy!” she says loudly as she reaches the table. I stand, and she pulls me into her arms for one of those big, tight hugs usually reserved for a good friend you haven’t seen in forever.
I love these hugs. I never get them at home.
By the time Mom walks through the door in the evenings, she usually kicks her shoes straight across the room of our narrow apartment and heads directly into the bathtub.
At home we’re always drained and worn out and all too eager to disappear into our own corners.
These lunch dates get to be a kind of fantasy for both of us, where we each pretend we’re something different.
When Mom hugs me like this, I pretend I’m an adult already, just fluttering in and out of her life for a quick visit.
That way she’s happy to see me, every time.
And while Mom hasn’t exactly spelled it out, I’m guessing she probably likes pretending she’s my friend rather than my mother.
She always says being a mom has aged her like nothing else.
I know she misses when she was young and free to go wherever she wanted, to do exactly as she pleased.
Which is, incidentally, kind of how she got saddled with me.
The thing is, I don’t have another parent.
I don’t know if Mom ever wanted there to be another parent, or if she was dead set on handling things herself.
She doesn’t really talk about why it’s just the two of us, and I don’t ask.
All I know is, she’s really glad I’m almost grown and out of the house.
That makes two of us.
Mom sits across the table and picks up the menu, her eyes skimming back and forth, probably ping-ponging between the only two entrees she ever orders.
“How’s school?” she asks.
“Busy,” I respond from behind my menu.
This is the answer Mom likes best. If I say “easy,” Mom will berate me for being lazy and not pushing myself. If I say “hard,” that’s even worse, because “public schools aren’t supposed to be hard, Ivy.” But “busy” is good. It means I’m staying above water but swimming like hell under the surface.
“How’s work?”
“Busy,” Mom says, sighing heavily.
“Did you finish the hotel this week?”
She shakes her head and pulls a file from her bag, then opens it flat on the table between us. It’s a blueprint for the boutique hotel she’s rebuilding in Pacific Heights. Mom’s finger lands over the central staircase.
“The balustrade rails are spaced one inch too wide,” she grumbles. “Three and a half inches. That’s city regulation. We’ll have to redo all of them.”
“Shit.” I twist my head, following the staircase on the design as it wraps around to the second and third floors.
Mom leans back in her chair and folds her arms. She’s flustered, of course.
But she also looks secretly happy whenever she talks about work like this.
The page in front of us represents an entire hotel that she designed.
With construction crews working under her direction.
It must feel amazing to create actual jigsaw pieces of the city, crafting doorways and window frames and staircases that could be here for hundreds of years after she’s gone.
I push the file gently back toward her. This is exactly the kind of thing I want to bring to a Chez Moi lunch once I get into the Paris College of Art, or even later, when I’m off working on my own stuff.
I don’t actually know what it is I want to do with art yet.
But that’s what study-abroad programs are for, right?
Someday, one way or another, I’ll have an impressive showcase of work I can nitpick and complain about.
Something that proves to Mom that the things I’m doing are important too.
“You know…” I say. “We’re actually getting pretty far on the yearbook layout.”
“Mm.” Mom stares into her water glass.
“Most of the filler pages are done, which is where we get to be really creative.”
Mom snorts.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Oh, it’s just…yearbooks are like grade-school dioramas, aren’t they? You can call them creative, but they can’t really escape their form. I mean, who’s looking in a yearbook for anything other than their own photo?”
“Sometimes yearbook layouts can be artistic,” I say carefully.
My hands twitch over my bag. Before I can stop myself, I’ve pulled my laptop onto the table, exactly where Mom’s blueprint was.
I don’t even have to click to find the document—it’s always the first thing waiting on my desktop.
I rotate the screen to my mom and sit back in my chair.
She flicks her eyes to me. “What is this?”
“It’s the yearbook,” I say. “This one’s not like a diorama, Mom. Go ahead. You can scroll through it.”
She sucks her teeth for a moment, then finally leans toward the screen, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling—
“You’re going too fast,” I blurt out.
Mom sighs. “Ivy, this is how I look at things. Do you know how many seconds a work of classical art gets appreciated for in a museum?”
“You’re not even giving it fifteen seconds,” I argue. “And this is your kid’s work. Don’t you think parents should spend a little more time looking at stuff their kids made?”
“As opposed to a piece of actual art?” Mom raises an eyebrow. “God, I hope not.”
I lunge across the table and snatch my laptop back.
“Don’t cause a scene,” Mom says through a clenched jaw. She checks over her shoulder and offers a dazzling smile to no one in particular.
“I’m not causing a scene,” I hiss. I sniff back any wayward tears and sit up taller.
“This is important to me.” I chew on my lip a moment, deciding whether or not I want this to be the exact moment I tell her about Paris.
Dream scenario, I would wait until I had already received my acceptance letter.
Or at least until I sent my application in next month.
But there’s no point holding off any longer.
I clear my throat. “I’m using this as my portfolio for an art program in Paris.”
Mom blinks like a camera flash has just gone off in her face. “Art school? You want to go to…art school?”
“It’s just one year,” I say defensively. I pivot the laptop back to myself and slowly scroll down the document, lingering on all the little details it took hours to get right. “But if I get into the program, then, yeah. I want to go to art school.”
I wince and wait for Mom to launch into one of her lectures. Whatever the topic, I know my mother, and when it comes to anything regarding me or the choices I’m making, she always has plenty of opinions.
But for some strange reason, she doesn’t share any of those opinions right now.
She just keeps sitting there, wearing an expression I’m certain I’ve never seen on her before.
Usually I can detect her mood in an instant.
I know impatience by the shift of her mouth, pride in the angle of her chin.
But the current crease down the top of her nose is all but foreign to me.
If I didn’t know better, I would say she almost looks… pitying?
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
Mom doesn’t answer. She presses her fingers to her mouth, clearly working over a response.
But here’s the thing about Mom: She always says what she thinks.
She’s not afraid of being blunt or harsh.
In her mind, measuring someone with lofty expectations is a compliment in and of itself, leaving her free to share as much detailed criticism as she wants. So something is up.
“Mom. What are you thinking?” I say it louder this time.
Mom’s fingers drop to her chin, and she parts her lips in a sigh. She false starts twice like this until, finally, she splays her hand toward my computer.
“This…isn’t art.”
My mouth fills with tar.
“What,” I say. My voice is so dead that I can’t even make the word into a question.
Mom sighs again. “It’s extreme competence,” she explains gently. Damn it if her gentle voice isn’t the cruelest sound I’ve ever heard. “And, hey, look at me. Architects are masters of extreme competence. But we’re not artists either.”
I stare at her.
“I tried to do the artist thing, Ivy. I understand where you’re coming from. But you can’t just show off a little photo collage project and call it art. Art is more than skill, or even mastery, for that matter. Art is…bigger. It’s narrative.”
“I have a mission statement.” I murmur this so quietly that I’m not sure if I’m talking to Mom or just to myself. She hears me anyway.
“I’m sure you have some nicely written paragraphs on something like the past and the present intermingling, and that’s fine,” she says, even though it’s so obviously not fine that I would laugh if I weren’t so close to crying.
“But there’s no real story in this,” she goes on.
“You’re not even in this, Ivy. The problem is—”
Mom’s voice becomes a foghorn blaring somewhere over my head.
The problem is, my own mother has just taken a dump on everything I’ve worked on over the last seven months.
The problem is, she doesn’t even think it qualifies as art.
The problem is…she might actually be right.