Georgia
Sorensen's just walking down the driveway to get her morning paper. Although
it's late December, the brightening air is clear and not too cold. She's
wearing her old bedroom slippers, which she prefers to sandals for short
treks on paved outdoor surfaces. Her husband, Houston, is inside watching
The Golf Channel, where you can see real-time tournament competition from
somewhere on the planet 24-7. He doesn't play, but he loves to be part
of the gallery. Georgia's thinking about their next job, a six-car garage
remodel for a guy who wants to show suitable respect for his vintage Corvettes.
They'll be starting right after the New Year.
Georgia picks up
the reassuringly slender post-post-holiday paper--for some reason, she
can't begin the day confidently, even while she's on vacation, without
mastering the Reader's Digest version of the recent past--and she
notices an AP report about the last session of the state legislature,
which ended several weeks ago. The story got thrown to the national press
before it boomeranged to the local news.
The House Ways and
Means Property Tax Subcommittee has unanimously voted to recommend the
construction of a monument outside the Statehouse memorializing "unborn
soldiers who have lost their lives in the war against abortion." The
monument would be a 6-foot statue of a fetus on a 2-foot engraved pedestal,
placed where it can greet other citizens on the road.
She looks up, a bit-self-conscious in her bathrobe, even though it's only
7:30 A.M. and no car is within earshot. Across the street, Verna Styles
is hauling her plastic Nativity scene off her front lawn. In this neighborhood,
Christmas decorations go up at Thanksgiving, and everybody's got them
safely returned to their own Styrofoam before the Epiphany. She waves,
but Verna doesn't see her. Verna's much too busy, huffing toward the garage,
with Joseph in a chokehold, her other arm wrapped tight around Mary's
tits. She and her husband Dan, the potato-chip salesman extraordinaire,
coddle this enormous eyesore in their basement all year long, so they
can dust it off for the sake of four weeks in December. The damn thing
must have cost them good money.
And Georgia has
an idea.
She hurries back
to the house, where Houston is savoring an incredible sand save in Saudi
Arabia. She goes to her computer, does a Google search on fetus
& picture, and ends up web surfing her way to www.fetaphilia.gov.
She likes the first photo in the developmental sequence best. Stylized,
yet stark and vaguely foreboding. It looks like something a mother could
weep over in Picasso's Guernica. She INCREASES FONT to maximize
the image on her monitor. She gets out a sheet of drafting paper and,
in her version, adds a pair of hiphugger water wings whose left tip is
picking an incipient nose. The right tip is caught in the mid-flap of
a primordial wave. Or maybe it's giving the ultrasound tech hovering just
outside the picture plane the finger. What's art without a little ambiguity?
Once Georgia's satisfied with the preliminary sketch, she does three detailed
studies: front, back, and directly overhead. The God's Eye View, she thinks,
smiling fiercely. She calls it The Greetus, slides everything into
a 10X13 manila envelope, and addresses it to the Chair of the House Ways
and Means Property Tax Subcommittee. Then she sits down with her husband.
Live golf has moved westward with the sun to Morocco. In her own home,
it's nearly noon, and she remembers how she used to lose track of time
in front of her canvases. All the time. All the time.
Georgia Sorensen is a painter. When, fresh out of college, she married
Houston and moved to his home town, she tried to liven up the local arts
scene. Her first exhibition, Painting with My Uterus, was not a
complete success. She couldn't get gallery space because it was all taken
up by bad realistic studies of local landmarks. So she held her show in
the town's independent bookstore, alongside three octogenarians who sold
every canvas they'd brought with them inside of ninety minutes. Then they
patted her hand, mumbled something through their false teeth that ended
with the word dear, and left Georgia to her solitary fury. Goddamn
this town! As long as people could point to it and say, "Oh, it's The
Covered Bridge!" or "Oh, it's The Peachoid Water Tower!" or "Oh, it's
The Duke Power Building!" you could move it. But Georgia's paintings wouldn't
move, and she wasn't one to sacrifice principles.
So she taught Art
in the public schools for twenty years.
This is her first
Christmas Out. Adolescent Free. She's chosen a good year to cut her losses.
With the budget crunch, she wouldn't have had a room of her own any more,
or even a building. She would've been working out of her car, shuttling
from one middle school to the other. She's always helped out with her
husband's remodeling business, painting walls on weekends and during the
summers. She enjoys his deliberate craftsmanship, his quiet efficiency,
and her own sense of accomplishment derived from small, simple jobs well
done: master baths, guest bedrooms, garages, occasionally an entrance
foyer or a screened porch. Why beat your head against a wall when you
could be painting one? Last summer, when the statewide education funding
cuts were announced, she'd done the math--and grimly discovered that she'd
get paid more for slathering latex than for teaching hyperactive thirteen-year-olds
the pleasures of one-point perspective. America! But it does value, Georgia
has learned, good-looking sheetrock. Sheetrock that says you're able to
pay somebody to save you from your own incompetence. Somebody worthy of
your Corvettes. Georgia has come to think of painting walls as abstract
expressionism of a sort--certainly closer to art than what she sees in
local boutiques. She's still never sold anything suitable for framing
in her life.
But, working with
Houston, she does get tips every now and then. Five hundred bucks this
past October, for making sure not a speck of wall paint got on a guy's
oak crown molding. At school, they didn't tip. After she resigned, they
didn't even hire a replacement for her. She wonders where they're putting
all the Ritalin kids now--the ones they didn't dare dump into Algebra
I. Maybe they've made Marching Band into a credit-bearing course.
Georgia hadn't
even taken out her sketch pad in years. But when she read the AP story
about the fetus, she'd felt an anger that she didn't suspect was still
glowing within her, stubbornly warming her entrails. Her Wisdom Tooth
Experience. 1982. She'd just given up her easel in favor of a steady paycheck
and dental insurance. She was walking out of the Graves/Stone Professional
Building in Travelers Rest, still groggy from Dr. Stone's anesthesia.
Dr. Stone, she later learned, shared the building with Dr. Graves (an
elderly black optometrist) and with The Piedmont Women's Health Clinic.
She was new in town, and she hadn't started reading the local paper.
She had an eight
o'clock appointment, before the Women's Clinic had opened for the day.
When she emerged, three hours later, dragging her feet across the gravel
parking lot, she was surrounded by people wearing Halloween costumes--ghosts
and skeletons and Grim Reapers. They called themselves Demon Straighters.
They told her she should be ashamed of herself, for letting God's handiwork
be ripped from her body. She was too groggy to tell them she'd only been
to see the dentist. They evidently thought her face had been swollen and
numbed by well-deserved guilt. By the time she returned to the Graves/Stone
Professional Building for her regular checkup six months later, the Women's
Health Clinic--and the Demon Straighters--were gone. Georgia hadn't been
able to figure out whether she was relieved, or outraged, or both. She'd
never been pregnant, and never wanted to be. After all, she was a teacher.
In
mid-January, Georgia gets a certified letter from the State Capitol: from
the Chair of the House Ways and Means Property Tax Subcommittee. He loves
The Greetus! He promises her $5,000 for the design, once the bill
passes the entire legislature. She holds the letter in front of her husband,
who's rubbing his fingers under the kitchen faucet, trying to get the
last bit of dried spackling out of his cuticles. He doesn't like to watch
golf with dirty hands.
"And I didn't compromise
on the design," Georgia insists. "I drew it with my--"
"I've never liked
working on state contracts," Houston says. "Don't hold your breath."
"Does a fetus breathe?"
"Save the letter,"
Houston says. "For your resume." Her resume, Georgia has to admit, is
a little thin. After twenty years of middle-school teaching, her best
credential is "permanent chair of the selection committee for Bipolar
Student of the Month." Since every EH and LD kid was routinely placed
in her classes, she'd been the logical choice. But with this credential,
the local galleries would have to take her seriously. She could get out
her easel again. "I can't believe it," she says. "A state commission.
After all these years."
"Believe it, honey,"
Houston grins. He kisses her on his way to the hand towel. "When you see
the check."
Three
weeks later, while they're just putting the finishing touches on the six-car
garage, Georgia gets a call on her cell phone. A secretary tells her "The
Greetus Bill" has been modified in committee to include $5,000 "for design
and construction." The woman asks Georgia if she can build it.
Georgia lowers
her looped textured roller into the pan. She's wondering if she should
admit she's never tried sculpture before, never even witnessed sculpture
taking place--unless you counted making sure kids didn't pelt each other
with modeling clay in her middle-school art classes. In college, she dropped
a ceramics course because she'd been afraid of kilns. Finally, she says,
"I'm basically a two-dimensional person."
"That's okay, dear."
The secretary's voice is warm. Reassuring. "It doesn't matter. Even if
we are trying to be as one-dimensional as possible." She seems
to sense Georgia's confusion. "No new taxes," she explains. "It helps
keep us focused. Just keep on going. You're doing great, hon. We're all
looking forward to Greetus."
Even though it's
midwinter, the overhead doors are wide open for ventilation. Outside,
in their client's enormous driveway, her husband's getting the five-gallon
buckets of Concrete Bonding Primer and Epoxy Acrylic Floor Paint out of
the truck. "Who was that?"
Georgia explains.
"What should I do, Houston?"
"One thing at a
time, honey," Houston says. He puts his arm around her waist. "Let's finish
this job up, and we'll work on the next one. Together."
By
the end of the week, the two of them are in Wee B Toyz. They're looking
for a substructure. Georgia has led them into the doll department, but
nothing's big enough--all the babies aren't even life-sized, let alone
six feet. "This is hopeless," she says.
"Nothing is hopeless,"
he says. "Follow me."
They go to the
Boyz Will B Boyz section, where Houston sees a punching bag shaped like
an overweight bowling pin. He takes out his tape measure, which he carries
with him wherever he goes. "Five six and a half," he says. "If we overfill
it with Perma-Crete and add a thicker layer to the bottom, it should work."
Georgia takes out
her new drawings. She was too embarrassed to tell the House Ways and Means
Property Tax Subcommittee that she hadn't made copies, so she whipped
up these new ones from memory. "I don't think we're about to do any better,
Houston. The basic shape's pretty close."
"You can get Perma-Crete
to look like whatever you want. Granite. Sandstone. Marble, even."
"Let's go with
granite. I don't want anything too Greek." She circumnavigates the punching
bag, ignoring the clown's bull's-eye fluorescent nose. "How in the world
are we going to do the flippers?"
"One thing at a
time, honey," Houston says. "One thing at a time."
Continued
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