Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

He suspected that Ella Yorke was in this last camp. She seemed almost happy to be there, raising her hand in group sessions, standing around by the sorry excuse for a library, earnestly staring out windows, always annoyingly smiling and meaning it. Jacob found himself passing the hours imagining how she’d ended up there: bad breakup, penned some dramatic Plath-esque ode to sharp cutlery in an English class somewhere, meeting with perplexed teacher, misfired hysterics, a call to campus security… et cetera, et cetera? Or was she more the shut-in type? Cutting class to watch SOAP Network, first a few hours a day, then eight, then twelve, then twenty? Who knew? She could be utterly batshit. Secretly collecting the tabs off soda cans to trade with the Plutonians when they came to harvest everyone’s earlobes for fuel.

But Jacob had a hard time believing it was anything like that. Her biggest aberration was that she seemed so damn sincere about everything. He kept expecting to come in to find she had been released, but every time she was still there. And it began to be a strange reminder that he was still there, too. He hadn’t exactly decided to take Dr. Feingold’s advice to take the year off and avoid major life changes, yet every time the idea arose of actively pursuing something, he’d beg off.

“Why don’t you go back and get your master’s degree?” Oliver asked him one weekend as he lay in bed beside Jacob. “Don’t you think Irene would have wanted you to?”

Jacob stared up at the clean white carpet of Connecticut sky. What Irene would have wanted for him — he could answer ten different ways at ten different hours of the day.

“Or try something new, if you want. Jacob Blaumann,” he said dreamily, “ master of law! You could do your own television serial.”

“We just call them shows here,” Jacob said. “Cereal’s for eating.”

Jacob had actually grown fond of the schoolboy Briticisms. He liked to imagine Oliver as a young boarding-school student, lounging around like this on Saturdays and enjoying the occasional company of men. During the week he was hardly ever in the mood, but on Saturdays he was like a giggly teenager who’d stumbled onto this new, secret activity.

“I’ll be Jacob Blaumann, Master and Commander!” Jacob said, stretching his arms to frame the opening titles.

“A master… piece!” Oliver clapped and Jacob left to take a shower. Minutes later he tried hard not to hear Oliver whispering on the phone to someone through the tiled wall. “No, he’s seeming better, I think.”

Toward the end of March, Jacob was reassigned to afternoons, and this involved watching over Sissy Coltrane’s group in the art therapy “laboratory” (her term). Sissy led the group through middle-school-level exercises: sketching their shoes, sculpting little bowls, banging out campfire songs on tambourines. Ordinarily it was the sort of rotation that Jacob would have begged Oliver to get him out of, but Jacob didn’t complain. Through a haze of clay dust drifting up from misshapen pottery, he kept half an eye on Ella Yorke.

It wasn’t as if he was seeking out information on her, just taking note when something appeared. Paul, one of the other orderlies, told him she was seventeen and had been in and out of Anchorage House four times over the past two years. This time she’d been admitted during the Christmas rush and after her thirty-day evaluation had been cleared to stay. She was supposedly so smart that, despite having missed portions of her junior and senior years, she had graduated in the top 5 percent of her class and been accepted at Columbia. But after one semester she was back on medical leave.

This week Sissy had them work on self-portraits in acrylic paint. Everyone was given a little two-by-one-foot canvas and a hand mirror to work with. Ella had worked on her self-portrait, spending two whole days endlessly erasing lines and redrawing them, walking a few paces away to see how it looked from a distance, then rushing back to make some tiny adjustment. Once she spent the entire hour just mixing brown paint, adding a little more umber, a little more ochre, a little jet black, to get the shade right. She’d hold the brush up to her own hair for comparison.

Jane and Annabeth snickered. They had plastic garbage bags over their smocks and held their brushes far away, as if they were CDC agents and the paint were a deadly pathogen. Jacob had a terrible urge to paint polka dots all over Annabeth’s picture. The boys made slapdash efforts: cartoonish versions of themselves with stick-figure arms, carrying hockey sticks or driving race cars. There was an epic game of paper football flicking they were always trying to resume.

When everyone else was washing out their paintbrushes in the sink, Ella sat at the table, daubing paint onto the canvas, then stabbing it repeatedly into the jar of milky brown-black water. Then she took a final, displeased look at her painting and slumped forward, mashing her cheek silently into the moonscape of dried paint that covered the table.

Sissy was occupied by the girls at the sink, so Jacob went over to see if she was all right. “It doesn’t have to end up in the Met,” he said.

“It’s all out of proportion,” she replied. “These stupid plastic mirrors are so warped.”

Indeed, the cheap hand mirrors were rippled like puddles frozen in midbreeze.

“They won’t give us glass ones,” Ella muttered. “Somebody might, you know—”

Jacob nodded knowingly. “Try to find out who’s the fairest of them all?”

Ella laughed so loudly she seemed to even surprise herself. She lifted her head up and clamped one hand over her mouth, but Sissy wasn’t even looking.

Jacob leaned forward to examine the portrait more closely. The warping wasn’t the problem so much as the hollow grin — teeth gritted and lips pursed, as if the girl in the picture had just sucked a Warhead.

“Here’s your problem. This is not what a smile looks like. This is what it looks like when someone is being operated on without anesthesia.”

Ella’s smile grew so large that it overpowered her face, launching her cheeks up so high that they all but hid her dark brown eyes.

“See, there you go. Draw that.”

Ella froze, picked up her mirror quickly and looked into it. “I look like a… like a…”

“What?”

“Like a mental patient.”

Jacob laughed so fast that he had to cover his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like that at work, or even alone with Oliver.

But Ella didn’t seem to see the humor in it. She dropped her head back onto the table. “No wonder my love life’s such a drag.”

“Well, you really can’t judge a smile in captivity like that,” Jacob said. “They’re much nicer in the wild. See, there. Like that.”

Ella stared into the mirror again. “It’s a vicious cycle. I look in the mirror, hate what I see, then paint what I see, hate what I paint, look back in the mirror at myself hating what I painted. It’s actually a perfect analogue for the major depressive experience.”

“The major depressive experience? You make it sound like a semester in Spain.”

“This basically is my study abroad.”

Jacob looked over at Sissy, who was now showing someone the proper way to Saran Wrap a paint palette to keep it fresh for the next day.

“I had a friend who was an artist,” he said, immediately annoyed at himself for using the past tense, “and she told me self-portraits aren’t really about faces but what’s going on behind the faces.”

Ella considered this. “If I painted that , they’d seriously freak.”

“So?”

“So then they’ll think I’m still depressed, and I won’t be able to start school again in the summer session so I can catch up on all the bullshit that I’m missing every stupid awful second that I’m stuck in here trying to get myself to be fucking normal .”