Claire Breslow
Mona Lisa
The fact that it is impossible for me to angle the paper towel in such a way to dislodge the mouse droppings from in between the shelf and the back of the cabinet makes me wonder how such a feat could happen in the first place. I sift through H-mart coupons, book spines, a Russian nesting doll of plastic bags.
My grandfather sits in his eroded fabric chair, drinking tea from the pot I unearthed from the pantry. His fingers rest like sardines between where the handle detached from the mug. The sun’s blushing dusk begins to descend through the window as I clean. He looks out the bug-flickered screen, unaware that he was the last thing on my summer to-do list.
The most prominent item in the living room, or at least the first one from this decade, was a UPENN flag taped up above where one would usually find the fireplace. Instead it rests proud above a leaning tower of cardboard. My mother insisted that I bring it for her father: but I doubt Software Engineering meant anything to him. It didn’t to me.
I tackle the next stack. A wifebeater strung along a long forgotten cookbook – as I flipped through the pages it released butterflies of dust to my masked face. Junk mail wrapped in newspaper. The top of an old box came off in pills as I wiped my fingers against its beige. Inside it lay unsharpened pencils, remnants of English flashcards, and one small, scribbly, insignificant square of fibrous paper that I wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been for the tumbleweed of dust stuck to its corner.
She was drawn in such a way for a moment I thought it was something captured by a camera. Her hair dangled gracefully off her shoulder as she rested her head, her eyes looking wistfully above my fingers. Her sharp pale collarbone offset her burgundy sweater and her tear drop breasts – mouth in a slight smile as if I had caught her thinking of her love. My eyes shift from her bitten lips to the light reflecting on the paper, or yet, the light painted onto her wooden background.
“Grandfather?” I ask in English first. Then I remember myself and ask in Mandarin. “Who is this?”
“Yes, grandson?” I remember myself again and ask slowly and loudly. “Who is this in this painting?” I slide over to the side of his chair and let her eyes gaze upon him. I see his eyes smile first before his upper lip ascends in a grin.
“Your grandmother,” He puts one hand on the photo but does not take it until I let go.
The corner of my lip shifts back into my cheek, “Who painted it?”
As if I was simply joking and the fact was clear as day, my grandfather says, “I did”. At first I thought that he was the one that was making the joke. My grandfather was a mail carrier for 55 years.
“You, painted this, grandfather? This is incredible,” I pluck the photo back from him like a leaf from an overripe pineapple.
“In Yangcheng, I painted many,” His sloth hands made it back to the mug. “They would come to buy my work”.
Now I was angry. I grew up with bare walls and graph paper – my first trip to an art museum was in sixth grade after I somehow convinced my mother it was to the science center. I had no knowledge of and no authority to pursue the second half of Liberal Arts. If I had somewhere in my chromosomes, a gene for beauty in the eyes of the youth of my grandmother, preserved after years of inattention, how come it was so forbidden?
The peaks and valleys on my grandfather’s hide relaxed into rivers to flood my anger.
“Your grandmother died in childbirth,” I could only see his eyelashes gaze downwards, “She was 21 years old,”
The math, something that was freshly imprinted in the elasticity of my neurons, calculated when my grandfather first opened the doors to this very apartment. They moved when he was 25. My mother was 4. I would think that was the last time he picked up a brush. Without art, the dust soon collected on the mantelpiece and the windowsills. But my mother grew and learned and studied – she got married and had me. Who grew and learned and studied, and is going to UPENN. For software engineering.
I felt the rivers flood when my eyes met hers once more. Each stroke, each hue, I felt the muse and the medium. I felt the world that she lived through. I felt the world that I live in. I felt the world he left behind.
Claire Breslow
Claire Breslow is a young writer from New York.