SOFIA MILLER

Short Story | Westview High School, San Diego, CA

Self Portrait in Oil

In the days before quarantine, all she asked for was paint.

I brought groceries—beans and bread and strawberries. She scoffed. We both knew the strawberries would rot, uneaten.

I sat the bags down and began emptying the groceries into the fridge and pantry while she hobbled back over to the lime green couch in the square TV room. “Let me make you a smoothie, Abuela.”

She patted down the couch for a remote. “Do what you want. I want paint.”

I began slicing off the heads of the strawberries. “What’s wrong with the paints you have upstairs?”

Tom and Jerry flickered on, reflected in the mirror above the couch. She watched, intently, as Tom’s face flattened to a pancake after sprinting into a wall.

I left the strawberries bleeding and open on the cutting board, then trotted upstairs to the old art room. It was mustier than I remembered. Mold crept along the upper corners, and already, some of the cheaper quality canvas had begun peeling off their boards. I never remembered the floorboards as this creaky, the brush bristles so packed with dust. I used to steal away here on strawberry days when I dripped too much pool water into the house. I used to tread so carefully up those stained carpeted stairs, used to enter the room like it was a museum. Self-portraits in ink were perched so daintily upon coffee table book stacks, sprinkled among empty water jars and landscapes in oil.

I picked up a tube of oil paint from a yellowed, plastic box and unscrewed the cap, or tried to. It took two more tries to twist the tube open, and it became clear as to why: this paint was dead. It hardened into ashes, dried up creeping into the cap, in some last attempt at escape from its own corpse.

I cradled it downstairs, as if it could still break. She was watching a commercial now, one advertising a trip to Cabo, Mexico. “You remember your grandfather and I were going to go?”

I sat on the couch. “Mhmm.” “That was four years ago.”

Tom and Jerry returned to the screen, Tom stepping on a pitchfork and getting a faceful of wood.

I offered her the paint tube. Vermillion. “Do you want the same colors as before, Abuela?”

She raised her shaking hand to grab the tube, but I pulled back.

“You’ll have a smoothie?” I asked.

She didn’t say yes, but I bought every color she asked for anyways. I asked what she was going to paint, but she laughed, said I’ll do it when you’re not looking and sent me for more paint, still. Always, always, she feared running out.

On the second day that I resupplied her paint, she told me not to come inside. Said the walls weren’t ready, that she had so much work to do.

The next time I brought groceries, she invited me to step inside the house again. The walls were bare. Each framed painting had been whisked away, square blocks of preserved white house paint from forty years ago interspersed amongst the rest of the grayed walls.

“Abuela, where did everything go?”

“Oh, those paintings were so tired. They needed to sleep.”

She shooed me out without any other explanation, said Come back with more paint on Tuesday, and I did. I wanted her to have something to do. I wanted her to be happy.

On Tuesday, the house reeked of paint fumes.

I found her kneeling beneath the TV, with nothing playing, while she painted the TV stand. It was a portrait of a young man with tan skin and dark hair, ink smudged across his cheeks.

The blinds were shuttered.

“Mi papá,” she said, pointing to the portrait. “¿Lo recuerdas, nieta?”

“No. Yo nunca….conocer él, ¿recuerdas?”

She turned to look at me, a soft disappointment in her eyes. “Your Spanish needs work, nieta.”

“I know.” When she said nothing else, I whispered, I’m sorry.

I wandered through the rest of the house, trying to hold in my coughs at the stench. The kitchen cabinets were scribbled with sketches of dancers in a ballroom. Men in sleek suits and women in silk gowns and high heels. On the door of the top right cabinet where the glasses go, there were a man and a short woman swaying together, the woman resting her head on his shoulder, and the woman was her.

There was one finished piece so far, tucked away in the living room corner behind the piano no one ever played. It was the portrait of a girl, sitting at a wooden table in the dark, bent over a piece of paper and charcoal, and I’d like to think that this was her, too.

When I tiptoed back upstairs into the art room, there was nothing left. The self-portraits were gone, the brushes gone, the easels and dead oil paint, gone. Everything she had cast into this corner had crawled out.

I opened up all the windows I could to ventilate the house. The windows in the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen, the sliding door leading out into the backyard.

When I left, I’m almost sure that she closed them all.

This Tuesday was the last day I saw her before the state closure. I waited two weeks before coming back for groceries, and when she didn’t pick up the phone, I called the neighbors.

She doesn’t come outside much, they said, but I guess all things considered….

I think she’s working on some project, they said, and I wanted to say, Yeah, I know.

A month passed like this, and I walked up to the door for the first time with a mask on. I called her in my car, after I dropped the bags off onto the floor.

I can’t come inside today.

Things are getting bad.

You need to keep eating.

I said all of these things, except I didn’t. What I said was, “Hey, I left your groceries outside. I wiped it all down for you.” I said nothing of paint, but the new packages were there, too, despite how much harder it was getting to buy them. I wanted her to be happy. I waved goodbye to the driveway monitor from my car.

She called my dad a week later to say that her chest was hurting, and could he please take her to the doctor?

He yelled for me to come downstairs. I was the last person to visit her house.

I was wearing a mask and gloves.

I cleaned everything before I brought it over.

I didn’t even go inside.

I don’t even have it.

These are the things which I wanted to say.

We decided that since I was the one everyone thought gave her the virus, I would take her to the drive-thru test. We waited and we waited

and I waited in my room for the seven days it took to get results. I could see why, suddenly, she wanted so badly to paint.

When the test came back positive, I packed some of my things to take care of her, there, for a while. I was young. My symptoms were mild. I would make sure she ate, drank enough fluids.

But through it all, all she asked for was to paint. She crept downstairs in the untouchable hours. She painted the kitchen into that ballroom. She painted her bedroom into her wedding day. And scattered everywhere, she painted herself pieces of México.

I opened the windows, and they would close.

I asked her to sit in the backyard with me, and she painted herself flowers creeping up the legs of the grand piano instead.

I asked her to sit still, and she wouldn’t, until she had to.

I woke up to the sound of falling, and she was there, crumpled beneath a new sketch of my grandfather on the closet door. Her breaths were ragged. Her vomit had mixed with spilled paint.

When I called for the ambulance, I had to explain that both of us had the virus. They wouldn’t let me come with her.

I stayed in that house and waited and waited and made a strawberry smoothie and waited and watched Tom and Jerry and called my father and wasn’t yelled at by my father when I thought, I thought I would be.

She had pneumonia in both lungs.

The first night of having the virus, I developed a fever. I fell asleep on that lime green couch facing the painting of Abuela’s father who I had never met, trying to think of words to say to him in the language that I had never mastered.

Don’t worry. She will live.

These are the words I wanted to say to him, to her, to me, but couldn’t.

All I could do was sleep in that house with the stubborn windows. Sleep in that house with its guts spilling out. Sleep in that house which held so many faces on its walls. So many forgotten things. Nostalgia lining the hallways, regret lining the pantry.

All I could do was sleep.

When I woke up, it was to birdsong and a chill. The doors and windows were all opened. The sun was allowed to sneak in behind the morning breeze. Abuela’s father was gone. All the littered paint tubes and brushes and pencils remained scattered through the house, but the ballroom had disappeared. The wedding, the flowers, the girl sketching at the wooden table.

I got the call from my father, and I knew.

I picked up the paint tubes, the brushes, the pencils. I took it all with me to the front door, set it down on the porch outside. I prepped the door.

I painted her.