Sunlit Keys and Yellow Daisies

It was seven in the evening on April fourteenth. It was raining outside. I stood staring at a yellow sculpture the size of my refrigerator, resembling a refrigerator. I would have thought it was a refrigerator had the golden plaque underneath not read “The Sun.” And yet, somehow, staring at “The Sun,” I still knew it was raining outside. 

There was a woman on the opposite side of the sculpture. She wore small glasses. Her cheekbones seemed to protrude higher than the bottom rim. Her hands were extended towards the textured paint of the sculpture, as if she were warming them on the flames. 

“Look away,” I said. 

“What?” she asked. 

“You’re not supposed to stare at the sun,” I slipped into a fit of laughter. She moved on. 

She wore an emerald dress that I found quite lovely. Prettiest art in this entire museum. Swirls of emerald and silver spiraled from her neck down to her waist. The skirt moved behind her like gentle waves. She walked over to where a white canvas covered the entire expanse of the left wall. A tiny goldfish was painted in the bottom right hand corner of the canvas.  

The brush strokes on its fins suggested movement, but of course, it did not move. The woman had a genuine sheen to her eyes and a smile that appeared to be welcoming the fish to leap from its canvas onto her skirt. It would have been much happier living in her skirt, jumping over  the waves of the soft fabric flowing behind her spider-veined legs. Perhaps, too, she’ll make her way to the Calla Lily sculpture in the gardens out back and they will pull their roots from the soil and offer the fish a home in their stems. They will wrap around the woman’s waist, and their petals will provide shelter from “The Sun.”

~ ~ ~

I swallowed a fish hook once, on purpose but I told my father it was an accident. I saw a fish swimming upstream. At first I thought it was just a golden stone shifting along the bottom of the river, being pushed by the quick layer of current close to the sand. I thought that maybe I would wade into the river and pick up the stone. I thought that maybe I would add it to the mosaic I had been working on. What I really wanted to do, though, was place that cool stone into my mouth. It looked refreshing, and I'm sure it wasn't salty. At first I loved the taste of the sweat collecting on my upper lip. I tasted like a fish. But then I became bored and really salty and I tasted too much like a fish, so I wanted to place the stone in my cheek so I could taste something like water. 

“Fish,” my father said. 

“Yes?” I said, and then I realized he wasn't addressing me. 

I swallowed the fish hook because I wanted to be playing the piano. I thought that maybe I would say, “Dad, I swallowed a fish hook,” and he would say, “Helen, why would you swallow a fish hook?” and I would say, “Because I hate fishing,” and then he would take me home so that I could play the piano.  

Instead, I couldn’t speak. The hook lodged itself in my throat, into the back of my tongue. My father called me an idiot with his eyes. He kept rolling them in the way my mother always told me not to.  

The doctor was a kind man, and he told me I could still play piano without a voice.

My mother had an ivory grand piano that overwhelmed our small living room. The beige loveseat and side tables were crammed in one corner, and the piano owned the rest of the room. Its keys were painted yellow, and one daisy was painted on top of the piano stool. Nana painted that daisy with pale yellow petals and a yellow-green center. I didn’t know the paint was fresh, so I sat on the stool and plucked away at a new piece my mother had composed. The black music notes danced off the page, as easy to read as Goodnight Moon. 

I left a trail of daisies around the house that day, and Nana had to paint a new stool. 

~ ~ ~

I had been standing by “The Sun” for half an hour. The woman with the skirt and the fish and the Calla Lilies had moved on to the Renaissance exhibit. I walked past the canvas and said hello to the fish, then rounded the corner and came upon Andy Warhol’s replication of a Brillo Soap Pad box. This is what I had come for. It was new to the museum, added just a week prior, though I couldn’t return until that day, April fourteenth. Still, I wasn’t allowed to touch the art. Don’t touch the art, they said. 

In third grade, my class went on a field trip to the local zoo. Ms. Rose’s class went to the large cat exhibit first; Mr. Jurgen’s class, the primates; Mrs. London’s class, birds or butterflies; and Ms. Lemon’s class, the arctic exhibit. We lined up against a cool metal fence. A net hung from one end of the fence to the other, there to catch falling wallets or children. An arctic landscape was painted on the walls: snow capped mountains, blue icebergs, gray clouds ready to burst with painted snowflakes. Large plastic icebergs drifted in the yellow stream flowing around a makeshift cave. I could just barely make out a mass of white fur hidden in the shadows of the cave. 

“Polar bear,” Ms. Lemon said.

I could see its belly rise and fall with every slow breath. Its hair looked crusted and thick. It had rained the day before. Browning leaves floated in the stream. It was humid, and the back of my neck had begun to sweat. 

“Children, listen to me,” Ms. Lemon announced to the class. All eyes turned towards her, except Johnny who tried to throw rocks at the polar bear. 

Ms. Lemon told us that polar bears are arctic animals, that they feed on birds or fish or sometimes seals, that they hibernate during the winter, that they are protective of their young, that they are endangered because we drive cars and smoke and use hairspray. The polar bear woke from his sleep, probably because Johnny hit the top of the cave with a rock and it chimed off the sheet metal roof. We fell back into our frontline of curiosity and watched as the bear emerged from the cave.  

He was slow. His head hung heavy below his shoulders. He walked to the yellow stream and lapped up the water. Lemonade, I thought. 

The way his shoulder blades protruded from his back upon each step reminded me of the dog I used to own before it had a heart attack. His name was Indigo because the veterinarian said he had a blue coat. I had a blue coat, and it didn’t look anything like Indigo’s fur. I wanted to name him Moo because the veterinarian said he was an Australian Cattle Dog. Thinking about Indigo made me sad. I felt as though one of Johnny’s rocks had just been lodged in my throat, but I swallowed it quickly before the tears began. 

Ms. Lemon had been talking the whole time we were watching the polar bear emerge from his cave, drink the yellow water, scratch his behind on a faux glacier, and rest in the shadows once again. 

“He is already dead here,” I heard Ms. Lemon whisper, intentionally loud enough for at least six of her students to hear.  

I thought she was talking about Indigo, thought she had read my mind. I thought, Of course he is dead. He had a heart attack. He wasn’t even blue. It wasn’t until after the big cat exhibit, the emu that looked like a half-plucked chicken wing, and a chimpanzee with no teeth that I realized Ms. Lemon had said the same phrase for all the exhibits.

He is already dead here. He is already dead here. He is already dead here.  Like an itch between the shoulder blades, her lamenting was the bear claw back scratcher I bought for my brother at the zoo’s gift shop: instant relief. 

I could still hear Ms. Lemon whispering in my ear, close enough that I felt her sticky lip-gloss on my lobe and smelled the black coffee on her breath, but then I realized it was a woman over the intercom saying that the museum would be closing in fifteen minutes. 

I remained at the sculpture. I read the golden plaque under the artwork:

Andy Warhol

Brillo Box (Soap Pads) – 1964

No longer did I hear the sound of Ms. Lemon’s voice ringing in my mind, but my own. It echoed from one side of my mind to the other and back again. It sounded hushed and timid. I couldn’t quite figure out what memory was emerging, but it was dense and made my temples ache. The longer I stared at the Brillo Box, the clearer the memory became. I was in Chicago. My father chose the early-morning tour of the university so that we could get an earlier start home. He didn’t like the city. Said it smelled like gasoline and that made him uneasy. 

After the tour I stepped away and told him I was going to give my mother a phone call. Instead, I stepped into the side stairwell of the university and rehearsed what I would say to him on the drive home. I whispered so the words didn’t echo up the stairs and into the hall where my father was waiting with a brochure on the university’s physics program.  

My jaw began to ache as I thought of the water fountain in the front lobby of the university and how icy the water felt on my tongue after chewing a piece of Spearmint gum and how I spent so long at the water fountain because I was afraid to tell my father I wanted to pursue a career in art. The word felt wiry on my tongue. It began teething at my throat.

~ ~ ~

I stared at the fake Brillo Soap Pad box resting on the stand in front of me. I prayed that the woman in the emerald dress would return and remove it from my sight, remove it from the sight of everyone who entered this place. I began to itch. I scratched my right forearm, then the left. The itch didn’t subside. I removed my boots, exposing my yellow wool socks, then stepped lightly onto the platform. Reaching down, I etched my initials into the box on the blank white slate on top. Thin white paint chips jammed under my fingernails. It was euphoric. I screamed out, “I could have done this!” and somehow they knew exactly what piece I was standing by. 

Typically it was a man who would escort me out: a security guard, a noble bystander. That day it was a woman: thin-lipped, gently brushed in a light shade of rose, hair pinned back, nameplate said Mary. She was somehow more attractive and less inviting than both Demacio and Charles, my favorite escorts. 

She led me by the arm to a room with two red chairs and shut the door. She dialed 911 and removed a stack of white papers from a filing cabinet. I wondered what it would be this time. Two weeks? Four weeks? Perhaps this would be my final visit to this museum. I bowed to her before I sat.

“Thank you, Ms. Lemon,” I said to the floor, then sat on the hard leather seat and picked paint chips from my nails.