Summer Song
by ANNA REESER
Liz Asch, It's All, It's All, mixed media on paper, 30 x 22 inches, 2016. Art photographed by Anna Campbell. Courtesy of the artist.
Summer Song
ANNA REESER| MAR 2023 | Issue 22
Part I of IV
Summer began like it always had—dewy and green with mild weather. I noticed sprouts in the dirt, wondering what they’d grow to be. Standing behind our new house in Portland, I waited for Aaron to get home from work. Thirty-one, shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans, I looked like my mom in the late 80s. Our yard sloped to a patch of rocks and dandelions the last owner left to chaos. I stood there, balancing on bare feet. Five weeks pregnant, scrawny and tender. Two magenta lines. The plastic test was in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Catherine! Look at you, a mountain goat on the rocks.” Aaron pushed open the screen door, raised his camera to his eye.
It was a comfort to know I would be preserved the way he saw me then—an artist, not a mother yet. We hadn’t been trying. Not seriously—I wasn’t taking the vitamins. But I had gone off birth control the week we closed on the house. And the day we moved, in the spare room, high on the smell of new paint, I told him, don’t pull out this time. Or maybe—don’t pull out anymore. We knew what we were doing, but weren’t we also play-acting adulthood on some level? Hadn’t the white-dress, black-suit wedding been slightly ironic, and the house, with its yellow siding, been almost a commentary on houses with yellow siding?
I remembered my first class in art school, how the professor drew two lines angled to meet at a horizon. In this way, we create space. I waited until Aaron was right there, snapping a close-up of my profile.
“Two lines,” I began.
When I told him, his face was an unformed question. Then his cheeks filled with blood, a proud smile rising up.
* * *
The night I met Aaron is preserved as a short film where I’m played by a brasher version of myself. Six years ago, house party in Seattle, string lights in the yard. The host has a drift boat parked on the lawn—that’s where we are. Art students without goosebumps in the cooling summer night, talking about our thesis shows, tasting each other’s mouths, sharing a tiny vial of cocaine. I’m making linoleum cut prints, investigating abstract forms in the body. Clean, curved lines. A lot of breasts—I tell him they juxtapose vulnerability and empowerment. Aaron takes photos of abandoned buildings—he says it’s because he moved a lot as a kid. I touch his arms. I feel his hand on my navel, my hip bone. Through the brightness of the drug, a thought presses deep into the memory, a hope that this man will always see me like this, even when I am old, or pregnant, or scared.
* * *
The morning after the pregnancy test, Aaron and I walked through Lowe’s. It was an unsettling place, pieces of houses exploded into one huge, windowless void. Aaron picked up a handful of seed packets in the garden aisle.
“The air smells like glue,” I said.
Aaron found the plastic sheeting he needed to turn the laundry room into his darkroom. We had bought the single-family home for art. Our Seattle apartment had been tiny, our practices constricted to digital cameras and five-inch lino blocks. We’d been saving since graduation, then Aaron had inherited the rest of a down payment from his grandfather. We wanted to buy a fixer, really fuck it up with studio modifications, and Seattle was hardening to chrome, it had no give at all. But Portland was still loamy and soft, with Craftsman houses we could afford. We’d found new jobs—Aaron shooting product photos for high-end camping gear, me managing social media for a music venue and a vegan bistro. My friend Nina, already a known artist with a sleeve of tattoos and gallery deals, planned a two-woman print show with me in the fall. Brick-walled gallery, foot traffic. I was supposed to crank out ten editions of ten prints, more than I’d done in years. I would set up the spare room with a block press.
I said, “We should look for a drop-cloth, too. For the spare room.”
“The spare room?” Aaron said. “Won’t that be the nursery?” The word sounded large in his mouth, like it was the first time he’d said it aloud.
I stopped, stared at him. “I need a space—I have a show soon.”
“Well, yeah, but where else would the crib go?”
“The other side of our bedroom?”
Aaron made a face. “You seriously didn’t think about this?”
“Of course I did,” I said, my breath hot.
I walked so fast I lost him. Past door knobs and faucets and cans of interior paint. Pale blue, palest yellow. I’d always understood that someday the room would be a nursery, but it had seemed too farfetched to happen right away. I still had my dog-eared copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon, and whether I was hanging onto my own childhood or preparing for the next one, I wasn’t sure.
At the end of the window aisle, I saw a product called Build-Your-Barn that produced a ten-by-ten-foot shed with double doors. Aaron caught up, looking tense.
“Here,” I said, smirking. “The baby can sleep in this.”
He grinned.
* * *
My childhood is preserved as a watercolor painting—my mom made sure. Sun of a northwest summer in dabs of yellow on the grass. A sturdy sheet of paper, the ovals of paint bleeding together. My mom twirls a brush in water while my father smiles, rolls his eyes. Crayons on the kitchen floor, tinny classic rock on the radio. My mom draws looping lines over the text of a newspaper, the white of an envelope. She gives me paint, markers, pastels. She buys Sunprint Kits and we do them together in the yard, placing leaves from the fir tree in patterns. I know she loves this more than me, but I do have sharper fingers.
* * *
Two days after the test, I walked to an urgent care clinic. After I peed into a cup, a nurse congratulated me on an accomplishment I didn’t feel was mine, then handed me a referral to an OB and a brochure titled “Great Expectations.” I would have my first ultrasound at eight weeks. Walking home, I saw new leaves on a fig tree, tiny hands.
I called my mother up north in Everett.
“Oh, honey, it’s what you wanted!” Over the wind, her voice was like chimes. I pictured her in the damp of my childhood yard, where moss grew like plush carpet.
She was right. Months before, I had told her a fantasy about covering the kitchen floor with newsprint and letting my kid play Jackson Pollock with tempera, like she had done for me. She worked as a real estate agent and collected abstract paintings. She had an eye for color and line, but never the right hands and never enough time, that’s what she always said. Her daughter was the artist.
I paced around the backyard where dandelions were going to seed. Aaron, wearing a fishing hat, was erecting the fourth wall of the Build-Your-Barn for my studio.
“What did the doctor say?”
“I’m definitely pregnant,” I said. I heard my own voice, breathless, surreally bright. Just the word made my scalp tingle.
“Little Bear,” my mother said. “I can’t believe it. But I can! You’re going to love it. The first few months you’re in a haze.” She laughed. “Well, really, the first few years.”
Was that why she’d never painted? Had I come before she had a chance to try? But I didn’t want to know the answer, so I told her about the room that would be the nursery. I told her how it could fit a wooden crib, a changing table, a low bookshelf, a rocking chair. I told her how there were windows on two sides, facing south and east. Saying the words out loud, the room filled with warm light in my mind.
That night, I called Nina while I walked a circuit of my neighborhood. She lived across the river, and I’d only seen her twice since we moved; she was ravenously busy. I wasn’t sure how she’d take the news, but I felt compelled to tell her.
“Holy shit,” she said. “That’s amazing! How do you feel?”
I told her I was half excited, half terrified. I told her the pregnancy wouldn’t affect our show—I had enough time to finish my work.
“I’m not worried about the show,” she said, a little defensively. “It’s not like you’re disappearing. But I bet your art is going to change.”
Her words hit me in the chest. I knew she was right, but I didn’t want to think about how or when.
* * *
By the end of the week, the barn studio was finished. It was just four walls without a roof. There was a problem with the joints; they wouldn’t attach. We threw a tarp over in case it rained.
I pushed the table against the wall, stacked my lino blocks and sketch pads there. My metal gouges, brayers, inks, palette knives, mineral spirits, rags, baren, sheets of translucent printing paper between squares of cardboard. I taped old proofs from the breast series to the walls—thick lines against the skin of the paper. Angle, curve, early confidence. The air in the shed was humid against my neck. I did not understand how my body would create on its own without conscious thought, but it felt good, the pulse and hum of that question. Light rain tapped the tarp overhead, echoing. I perched on the chair, opened a sketch pad. I drew one line and then another.
Anna Reeser’s short fiction is published in The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Masters Review, Fourteen Hills, and CutBank. She has lived throughout the West Coast and is now based in her hometown of Ojai, California. She recently completed a story collection and is working on a novel.
Liz Asch is an author, artist, and acupuncturist based in Portland, Oregon. Her book, Your Salt on My Lips (Cleis Press, 2021), is an ode to eros in queer bodies of the global majority. Her podcast, Body Land Metaphor Medicine, is a free archive of somatic visualizations. Her stop-motion animation film, The Love Seat, played in LGBT film festivals in the US and Canada. Liz holds a BA from Vassar, a Masters in Chinese Medicine, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Eastern Oregon University. Liz has published essays, poems, interviews, stories, book reviews, and artwork in a variety of journals and anthologies, earning her a Pushcart nomination, a RACC grant, and several essay prizes. Liz teaches embodied surrealism and salutary storytelling, with an emphasis on earth activism, creative expression, and public health.