In April, three heavy packages arrived. Mrs. Anjani’s dishes; they were old, a beautiful green glaze. Lina kept them in her closet, where they’d be safest. Treasures for a future life.

  Every time she managed to work, she painted a can of flowers. Flowers drooping. Fresh-cut stems. One blown dandelion in an evanescent silver it had taken her a week to make.

  58.

  Dino called to ask Donnie why he didn’t see Evan anymore. He said it might be good if the boys got together. It would mean a lot to Evan.

  Donnie liked Evan fine. He’d just been busy for kind of a long time. People asked him to go to the beach at night. He rode along and sat in front of the big bonfires they built in the sand, sometimes getting up to find a piece of driftwood to throw onto the pyre. This is what high school kids did in Los Angeles during the seventies. They packed themselves into cars on cold nights and drove to Santa Monica, then trudged through the marine layer toward the loud waves. They lit fires in pits already dug out, lined with ashes and bits of charcoaled wood from older embers. They cooked hot dogs on long sticks and roasted marshmallows with a somber air. Some of them stalked off in pairs, to find a spot far enough away from the circle to feel alone on the sand under a blanket, to talk about their secrets, which mostly had to do with their parents’ sadness, and so the shapes their bodies made together couldn’t be seen. But Donnie just sat, hugging his knees, and stared into the flames. It felt important to be here at the edge of the world late late at night, uncomfortable, the cold of deep sand seeping up, even through blankets.

  A few kids had cars; many more jammed into them. Others hitched rides home. Most stopped at Ships all-night diner for hot single-dish pie à la mode before returning to their sleeping, troubled houses, which seemed more peaceful in the dark.

  Before he got off the phone, Donnie asked Dino how he was.

  Okay, Dino said. Still the same.

  Did you pass that test you were always dreading?

  No. I’m taking some time off. Getting some things together. Then I’ll go back and take it again. How’s your sister? She still liking school?

  The day after that call, Donnie went to the computer room, but Evan now played games that he didn’t understand. They tried to start a round of Chinese chess, but nothing took. Donnie didn’t return to the computer room, but whenever he saw Evan in the halls, he invited him to the beach with people on the coming weekend. And once, November of junior year, Evan went. He sat in his creased khakis next to Donnie on the uncomfortable sand. People offered him food from the long sticks, but other than that they went over and around him the way they would a log or a rock. Evan didn’t like any of it, Donnie could tell. Evan shook his head like a bird shaking water out of its feathers. He left at ten, walking to the pay phone to call Dino to pick him up. Donnie closed his eyes, listening to the waves boom.

  Dino didn’t call Donnie again, and when Donnie saw Evan in the halls that year, he seemed happier. He understood that they couldn’t follow each other where they were going. It was a real break, but nothing mean.

  That November night on the beach, before Evan left, Donnie asked, “How’s your family? Your mom still cooking?”

  “It’s a little better now that I’m the only one left,” he said. “She has no excuse for making stuff I hate. And some of it, I’ve started to eat.” Evan thought he was heading the wrong way, Donnie knew, toward stupidity and even danger.

  But there was nothing Donnie could do: this was his one and only life.

  59.

  Walter surprised Lina, knocking at her door, the fall of her senior year. She felt fluttery in the chest, honored that he’d come. “I had to see you here at least once before you graduate,” he said. “Since you don’t like sending pictures.” Etienne had taken a picture of Lina in front of the art building and she’d overnight mailed it to the hospital. Walter’s building had opened; he’d sent her a picture of him cutting a ribbon. She took him to the Hungarian Pastry Shop; they bought cookies in the shape of horseshoes and hurried to the clay room, where Lina had to work. She introduced her brother to everyone, even to people she hardly knew. She led him to Larkin’s studio, to show him the painting she loved. Lina admired most of Larkin’s paintings, but none as much as this one. Lina thought if she ever had money, she’d buy it. She’d never before wanted to own art. “Maybe I’ll buy it,” Walter said, and a familiar rush of envy welled up in Lina. The painting wasn’t even done yet, she said. When they arrived, Larkin’s studio was locked.

  They talked about Donnie. Walter was moving back to LA pretty soon; he’d found an apartment with a red door. She should move back, too, he said.

  One of Lina’s teachers was trying to talk her into applying for the MFA program. This same teacher—who happened to be Troy’s adviser—was in charge of scholarships. If she got in, she’d stay an extra two years to receive another degree in art.

  “What would that degree be worth?”

  Troy had asked his adviser the same thing. The adviser took out his checkbook. Doug Cannon, it said. M.F.A.

  “You’re pretty sure if you apply, you’ll get in?” Walter asked.

  Lina wasn’t sure. Her work wasn’t as good as Larkin’s; maybe it wasn’t good at all.

  “You can’t judge yourself like that,” Walter said. “This woman Larkin, she may have had a different start.”

  Lina took him to the bookstore and he bought a book called Learning from Las Vegas, which Etienne discounted without Walter even realizing it. She’d been seeing Etienne over a year now, but it wasn’t like having a boyfriend. Every three or four weeks, she’d read until closing time in the bookstore and they’d go to one of their apartments. She still hadn’t introduced him to anyone.

  When Lina and Walter returned to the Barnard studios, Larkin stood working, humming along to what sounded like ancient church music, a cigarette in her hand, the dog asleep at her feet. Lina didn’t want her brother to see the painting, propped against the wall, but Larkin showed it to him, saying, “That’s the one she likes.” Walter glanced at it for a moment but was more taken with the girl in a brown slip dress. He asked her to join them for dinner, but she said she had to paint. Lina opened her own studio. Her brother walked around the walls, standing a minute in front of each painting. He finally said, “She’s got nothing on you.”

  That day, Lina felt as if she had everything. When Walter left the next morning, she went to the Brancusi room in the museum and sat on a bench for an hour, bereft.

  * * *

  —

  Putting her slides together to submit, Lina remembered what her brother said and tried to think of life as an unfair race. She privately hoped she could still win, without handicaps, in the regular race, only later. She was just preparing now. Practicing. Her mother was still healing. It was possible to imagine her own future—in an apartment with old arched windows and white walls, a boyfriend setting croissants on a green plate—but it was becoming harder to picture her mother’s. Could she live in that apartment with Lina?

  Lina and Troy threw pots past midnight for a Christmas sale. The night before she flew home, Etienne carried his Morris chair to her apartment. Etienne’s sister had won Miss Physique New York, and he was driving her to Ohio for a regional competition. A movement was starting in female bodybuilding to use the same standards as the men’s. No more bikinis. The chair was folded; he showed her how to open it and adjust the back. He was giving it to her for Christmas, he said. It was the thing of greatest value that he owned. Should she accept it?

  But she wanted it and she did.

  * * *

  —

  At home, Lina drove to Malibu to see Ceci, who’d left the store and started her first clothing line, inspired by surf culture. Sue was wearing braces now along with her kids, Ceci told her. Kim had stopped working. She’d become a customer instead.

  Walter took her to see the old aerospace plant he and Ken hoped to make into a mixed-use shopping center. An enormous shed, with concrete floors. In back of his Clovis outlet, Walter said, they’d built a block-long sandbox. They’d hauled in shovels and long black hoses and the place was full of kids now, their moms sitting at the picnic tables drinking coffee.

  For this one, they wanted to dig out a pond. But the empty structure, forlorn as a garage, didn’t look like a shopping center.

  * * *

  —

  After Christmas at the hospital, Donnie put their mother to bed and they had a late second supper in Julie’s apartment, what she called “midnight carbonara” and a saffron cake with cardamom. Walter offered Donnie a room in his new Santa Monica apartment, and Donnie said no, it was okay. Walter asked again and Donnie said, “I’m good. Thanks.” Julie glowed, tucking her bare feet up under the couch pillow, pleased that Donnie chose to stay. But why wouldn’t he? Julie had become a great cook.

  Donnie had a used motorcycle and offered Lina a ride. She rode on the back to see Walter’s new apartment, a cottage in a line of connected cottages, with its own fireplace and walled-in garden. Still, Donnie on that thing on a highway seemed to her like a beautiful kid with a needle in his arm.

  * * *

  —

  One spring day, passing the trash bins behind the art building, Lina saw the painting she’d loved bent up, in a corner. She gasped and felt a pain in her side hauling it out. The canvas had been slashed, ruined, paint had chipped off. She ran to Larkin’s studio, but it was locked.

  A few days later, with a group holding to-gos in front of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, Larkin stood with the dog’s leash braceleting her wrist, a streak of pink paint in her hair. Lina nudged into the circle where people were talking about Nicaragua. Lina thought Martine was only a little better than she was and that made Lina mad at herself for her laziness. She envied Martine’s white blouses, too. Other people, she thought, didn’t deserve their reputations. But Larkin had a sheer, deep talent. It was unmistakable.

  Lina waited until they were alone. “I saw your painting in the garbage. I always wanted to buy that one someday.”

  “Wouldn’t have sold it.” Her dog pulled at its leash. How could someone their age even have an animal?

  “Why did you throw it out?” Lina winced at the shrill whine in her voice.

  “Couldn’t finish.”

  Two people walked by with their arms around each other’s waists, a horizontal S.

  “You have a relationship?” Larkin asked.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. And I’m sick of it. Sick of the whole damn thing. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anybody,” she said, and patted her dog. “This one’s teaching me how.”

  * * *

  —

  Lina and Troy both got into the program with scholarships.

  Troy said they’d have to get serious now.

  “We’ve been serious,” Lina said.

  “No more task-irrelevant pursuits.”

  They stood in the clay room unpacking boxes of glaze. Troy paged through a cookbook. They wondered if their new MFA classmates would be better than they were. Other art majors whose work they admired were veering off, to do different things. Only Martine and another Barnard girl who wore Doc Martens were going to be in the program with them. And one quiet guy they’d always liked who painted arachnids.

  * * *

  —

  Lina didn’t want to make a big deal of graduation. Nothing was changing. She’d stay in her university apartment; she’d keep her same job. Her mother couldn’t come. But Julie and Walter insisted on flying out, and so she sat and stood and walked through the whole ceremony, all the while thinking of tomorrow, when it would be a regular day. She met Troy’s mother, standing in a magenta suit holding a bouquet of long-stemmed roses.

  Julie brought a camera. She said she’d send pictures to Mrs. Anjani’s nieces. Mrs. Anjani had died in February. Julie was staying only one night in New York because she didn’t like leaving Donnie alone.

  “Don’t you want to see anything? He’ll be fine,” Lina said without being sure of that at all. She had the sense that Donnie had given cause for worry that Julie wasn’t telling her on what she kept calling her “big day.” Lina preferred small days. Julie gave her a picture of herself and their mother, wearing white creased nurse’s caps, on the day of their UCLA nursing graduation.

  60.

  Two sculptors had driven an old Chevy truck cross-country. One of them wove on her grandmother’s loom. Clumpy, undyed-wool stalactites hung from her studio ceiling, and she’d painted all six walls, including the concrete floor, deep blue. A woman from Southern California cut up old orange-crate labels and pictures of migrant farmworkers to make standing scrap-screen collages. Decorative, Lina thought, even if political. A small woman with a boy’s haircut sat by her studio window all day working on layered ten-by-ten oil paintings of clouds. She listened to the radio while she painted with very small brushes that resembled makeup tools. She was trying a technique Rembrandt used to render lace. A tall, dark-haired welder who’d done construction in Montana had somehow landed a CETA job interning for Mark di Suvero his first week east of the Mississippi. He was extremely handsome. That couldn’t have hurt, Lina said to console Troy, who’d applied to di Suvero’s shop twice and never heard back. Another good-looking guy made big abstract canvases with cratered surfaces by mixing pigments into a tin pot of melted beeswax on a hot plate.

  Lina’s paintings were still mostly of plants. Weeds and flowers. She wasn’t eager to show them to new people. She knew instinctively what the guys would think. She sometimes wondered if Troy really liked what she did. They’d long ago established a mutual respect and continued to confirm, in small ways, their belief that they were more serious than the others. More serious and, though they never said it, better.

  Troy’s studio was always a mess. He cut out news stories and sometimes single sentences, then glued them onto a base, painted over them, and eventually slashed cuts in the surface to show the layers. He was also making papier-mâché globes, not quite circular (he wrapped the pasted paper around balloons), painted them black, and then did freehand shapes of the continents, some places smaller and others larger than they really were. Lina liked the globes; they were pretty and playful, but she privately wondered whether he wasn’t starting too many different things to go deep. His work always suggested a political or moral meaning, though, and hers didn’t. But then, even her favorite sculptures—those Roman torsos—weren’t particularly moral, either. They were only beautiful.

  “Remember Larkin?” she said. “How do you quit art?”

  Troy shrugged. “She didn’t want the life.”

  And the life was, if anything, worse. Graduate school proceeded much like undergraduate, except that everyone was now desperate.

  * * *

  —

  A rising star in the ed school was hiring artists to work with public-school fourth graders. Troy got the job. The MFA secretary, an older woman who’d gone through the program herself, promised to find another job for Lina.

  “Do you have something to wear for an interview?” she asked.

  Lina dug out the skirt Julie had sewn and wore it to meet Harry Beckstein, the owner of the Evergreen Gallery, who hired her after two questions. He needed help, he said, but didn’t have much time to train her. She would pick things up. So she took the subway to Chelsea three afternoons a week and sat in the airy, symmetrical room waiting for customers. She wore the skirt with black tights. Another girl worked there mornings and explained how to be when people came in. You busied yourself at the desk as if you were doing paperwork. You had to seem as if you barely noticed them.

  The girl who wore Doc Martens walked the halls with the di Suvero welder. Lina wasn’t beautiful anymore, she’d decided. She was trying to learn not to mind. She wasn’t sure what she thought of romance, anyway. Troy was usually in love and it always ended badly. The women he dated seemed enchanted with him at the beginning, but later became nervous about life with someone who earned nine thousand dollars a year. His current girlfriend brightened up whenever he mentioned his teaching job. She hoped he’d apply to the ed school.

  In studio, people criticized the weaver’s stalactites. Lina protested. “They remind me of Eva Hesse. Even Rothko. Agnes Martin.” The weaver looked at her as if she’d thrown a rope overboard. Everyone else looked down or away.

  People called the two weavers “the witches.” Lina remembered the hive of discarded clothes at the hospital and thought about what she could do with it. But textile was considered a craft medium; female. She still wanted to be in the major league.

  Besides studio, they took technique classes taught by city artists who arrived in taxis.

  “I don’t like the people they talk about,” Lina told Troy. “Why doesn’t anyone mention Hopper? I hate Picasso and all that great artist stuff.”

  “You take Picasso too personally,” he said. “Got to admit, guy could paint.”

  She admitted. She stood before Boy Leading a Horse every time she went to MoMA.

  Her own paintings felt flat and two-dimensional. When she tried to build up her surface, it looked like mud.

  * * *

  —

  The secretary got her hired to teach, after all, a Saturday-morning class on medieval battle armor at the Met. During her afternoons in the gallery, she researched. The original curator of the Arms and Armor Department was a zoology professor at Columbia. He’d first been the curator of fishes at the Natural History Museum. He believed if you displayed a dinosaur with one leg missing, people would think dinosaurs had only three legs, so he hired European craftsmen to make the missing pieces of the armor and shields. To this day, the Met had a smithy and hundreds of tools, still in use. She read for two weeks before even seeing the collection, then went at opening time on a Wednesday. She was surprised by the articulation, the edgeworks of gold. The armor was as fine and intricate as jewelry.