Art on Fire (11 page)

Art aficionados, historians, and critics alike have wrestled virulently with deSilva's choice to illuminate two icons of pop culture amid what is arguably one of the most dramatic arenas of human activity: a late-night, inner-city trauma unit. Why, they try to understand, is she concerned with a public service announcement and the cover of a pulp-fiction paperback at the expense of human life?

Says Michael Wright in
Telling My Truth, “Emergency Room
is about alienation. The explicit focus on these inanimate objects amid a roomful of people illustrates deSilva's persistent sense of isolation. The selected objects present two areas where the artist remains eternally unfulfilled: childhood happiness and heterosexual love.”
²⁵
He goes on to say that the poster might express the flagrant neglect of deSilva's childhood. Obviously her parents did not know where their child was.

Lucinda Dialo offers another interpretation. “This work, more than any other by Francesca deSilva, has been ambushed by friendly fire. Scholars are so enamored of attacking one another's shoddy brainwork, that they fail to examine the significant depiction of a young girl, dressed so very closely in the style of the artist herself, scrounging about on the linoleum floor. Is there no intention, no artistic meaning to be found in the girl's positioning—far away from the other humans, far away from the central
metaphors? Isn't it possible that deSilva's intent was to contrast reality (the life or death cadence of an emergency room; the lonely, unsupervised girl on the floor) with the absurd depiction of life presented in these artifacts?”
²⁶

The next three years took much from Isabella and passed it, some might say judiciously, on to her sister. Francesca was chiseled from the rough, boasting two spectacular cheekbones; an olive complexion and dark, wavy hair; a lean, strong body with thick hands and wide feet; and a smooth, watery way of walking—swishing left, pause, right, pause, always stopping a moment in the doorway to investigate before entering a situation, always taking her time. Her voice was deep and rich, particularly for a 16-year-old, escaping from a wide, crooked mouth that, while it appeared to be perpetually on the verge of smiling, rarely did. Her stance was that of a sturdy, young boy: one foot pointing sideways, one hip forward, one hand in her pocket. And in her eyes was a rare intelligence, a gaze that made people uncomfortable, impelled them to check between their teeth, look down at their zippers. Even her teachers had begun to notice her; her gym teacher saw in Francesca shadows of her younger self and took extra time to teach her the basics of meditation, in which Francesca expressed a particular interest.

In tenth grade, she won a state-wide art competition for her series of abstract finger paintings,
²⁷
most of them concerning rodents, moss, and other relics of the outdoors. Her art teacher recommended she attend a school for the gifted, a program fully funded by the state. Only seven students were admitted from her high school, and Francesca was to be one of them. Vivian was skeptical, but Alfonse thrilled at his daughter's talent: It alleviated his guilt (which was beginning to age him unkindly), but also, this particular talent made him feel that Francesca resembled him in some small way. His great-grandfather had been a portraitist, the sort that did harried drawings for small change. Alfonse, too, felt that had he not been strong-armed
into working in the family pizzeria instead of going to college, he might have become an artist. Isabella had inherited her intellectual whatever it was from the Jewish side of the family, but Francesca's gift for art and her appreciation of natural beauty had surely sprung from his lively genes.

She was separated from the high school masses each day by a small van that took her and six other students to an after-school program downtown. There, she sat on the floor with other would-be artists and peered up at female models in bathing suits positioned high above them on a desk. In thick charcoal pencils, they sketched as the models moved in and out of unnatural poses.

Isabella, who had long since refused home-schooling, spent her afternoons reading the distraught poetry of dead females and writing articles for an underground publication,
Born to Die
. Inviting profound dread were Thursdays, the day that the DeSilva family, en masse, traveled ten minutes to Evelyn Horowitz's house, where they subjected each other to an emotionally—if not gastronomically—harrowing meal. Isabella made sure to get drunkest on Thursday afternoons; the mere thought of the weekly dinner—her family stiff as insects pinned to cardboard—impelled her down the carpeted staircase to the liquor cabinet, over and over again.

One particular Thursday, after phoning sporting goods stores and pawnshops to inquire about purchasing a gun (without a permit no one would help her), she glued the bottle to her lips and ingested large, thankful swallows, then shook her head left to right like a dog with fresh kill. She awoke to Vivian hollering: “Pumpkin! Time to go!”

Through a thick blanket of sedation she waded, propelling each foot forward from its spot in the rear. Inside her head, something seemed to have cracked. Air poured in, air that wasn't supposed to be there, freezing the back of her eyeballs, the canals of her nose, the nerves at the edges of her gums. She managed to negotiate the living room and traverse the kitchen. There, hazy through the side door screen, she saw her sister—unless she was hallucinating—seated on the stoop with her legs crossed and eyes closed, her palms facing the heavens, looking like some kind of hippie.

She squinted for a closer look, then pushed the door open and tossed herself outside into the cool air. “
What
are you doing?”

“Shh,” Francesca said. “I'm meditating.”

Vivian appeared on the other side of the screen, wearing a stubborn, artificial smile. She, too, dreaded these family dinners and always outfitted herself with a hardened, I-dare-you-to-crack-this smile, behind which she was made of powdery sand, dispersible by a whistle of air. She carried her fake snakeskin bag by its chain link strap and smelled of Jean Nate. “Okey dokey,” she pressed her face to the screen, cracking her gum compulsively. “You okay, pumpkin?” she asked Isabella.

They floated along cushioned suburban streets that separated the DeSilvas' unremarkable neighborhood from Evelyn's arguably less remarkable one. Cars passed in clusters, followed by the sound of a barking dog came on and faded, followed, maybe, by a distant siren. A sprinkler system hissed. Otherworldly, monotonous music escaped though an open window, preceding the six o'clock news. A phone rang while they waited at a stop sign. Isabella blinked, half awake. She muttered something, smacked her lips, and turned her face toward the cool air.

Alfonse helped himself to some Russell Stovers from the cabinet where Evelyn kept her mahjong supplies.

“Mama,” Alfonse called to Evelyn, who was at that very moment removing the heavy Pyrex pan containing a steaming, thick, and sweet-smelling brisket from the oven. “Did you know that Francesca did a paper on Anne Frank and got an A+?”

He raised his eyebrows at Francesca.

Evelyn put the pan down on two wicker mats in the shape of palm leaves, placed next to each other on the dining-room table. She walked toward the living room, her hands huge inside yellow oven mittens. “Anne Frank? Wha—?”

“They gave me Anne Frank as a topic,” Francesca stated quickly.

Isabella watched her sister with newfound envy. They seemed to have
traded places. Francesca was writing papers on Anne Frank (as if she couldn't in three sentences explain what that was about) and flitting along the edges of the living room, while she, Isabella, exhausted her mental reserves just trying to stop the room from spinning.

Vivian returned from the bathroom, her smile again cemented on her face. “Okay,” she said. “What did I miss?”

“We were just discussing Francesca's paper.” Alfonse sat on one of the couches that was covered in thick, crunchy plastic and located in the back of the living room. Evelyn kept her long living room divided into two sections. The front housed the TV and an older, gold couch covered in a threadbare white sheet, with an olive-colored afghan she'd knitted herself always tossed over one of the cushions. Two ladderback chairs were pushed against the wall. The window was covered in a drab shutter through which the light slid in at interesting angles. Francesca liked to sit in its path and study the contrast of lines on her pant legs and hands.

“What, specifically, was your paper about?” Isabella asked menacingly.

“The relationship between Anne Frank and her sister,” Francesca said, knowing how bad it sounded. She scooted up close to the TV and pulled out the little power button, then studied the tiny dot exploding from the center of the concave glass. She turned it off, waited a few moments, turned it on again. Again, she watched the light grow.

“Do you think the teacher knew about me? And that was why she picked that topic?” Isabella postulated.

“Probably,” said Francesca.

“Definitely,” said Vivian, protective of her poor, sodden daughter, too exceptional to function in the pedestrian world.

Francesca removed a ballpoint pen from her back pocket and absentmindedly began to darken a doodle on her knee. Alfonse came up behind her.

“Look at that,” he cocked his head and chewed a caramel, examining the inky sprawl on Francesca's knee, his mouth full of candy. “Is that a good idea? Drawing on your pants?”

Francesca drew one line after another, on a slant, coloring a Navajo pattern along the bottom of a teepee. She'd been drawing Navajo designs
ever since learning about the various Indian tribes of the West in history class.

“What does it mean?” asked Alfonse.

Francesca ignored him.

“What did you write about Anne's relationship to her sister?” Isabella demanded.

“Well,” Francesca cleared her throat. “I theorized . . .”

“Oooh, big word—” Alfonse mussed Francesca's hair and laughed.

“. . . that part of what caused Anne to act like a brat was that no one saw her for herself. She was always seen in comparison to her older sister.”

“Her sister was the brat!” Isabella sat up.

“That's your opinion.”

“What are you, nuts? Anne Frank was a genius!”

“Like one can't be both.” Francesca tilted her head in perfect concentration.

“Where are you getting your information?” demanded Isabella.

“Bella, everyone is entitled to an opinion,” said Alfonse.

“There's room for both sisters to be geniuses,” said Vivian, feeling ridiculous. She knew full well Francesca was no genius, but to not go along with these ridiculous conversations was to favor one child over the other and she had vowed not to do this. She patted Isabella's sweaty head, looking down at the ruins of a beautiful fortress, a felled forest. Isabella's failure was her failure, too. She didn't know why this was so, but it was. They were both desperate to return to how things had been before that night when all was lost with one celebratory sip of champagne.

“Supper!” Evelyn called.

A basket of challah was set in the middle of the table. A brick of margarine softened in the butter tray next to a bowl of steaming kasha varnishkas. In another bowl were roasted potatoes smothered in margarine. At the opposite end of the table a plate was piled with asparagus that had been cooked so thoroughly it could be sucked with a straw. At center, in a rectangular Pyrex dish, a brisket luxuriated in dark, orange fluid, translucent pearl onions floating alongside.

“Bravo, Mama!” pronounced Alfonse upon tasting the brisket.

“What's the matter with her?” Evelyn jutted her chin toward Isabella, whose head was dipping dangerously close to her plate.

Isabella lifted her head and forced open her eyes. She surveyed herself. “What,” she said.

“Nothing, sweetie. We were remarking how pretty you are,” Vivian winked.

“Yeah, right,” said Bella, looking down at the baggy Yale sweatshirt given to her by Vivian long ago when the prestigious school had seemed her destiny. The treads of her brown corduroys were worn to the dull, flat fabric. Her hair was greasy, her skin pale and yellow.

“You're a very pretty girl.” Vivian cut a piece of tender brisket with the side of her fork.