Subject Object
Subject - Object
Coming in the winter issue
When drawing hair, she was always careful to not assume the gender of the object. The subject — such semantic lapses would always drift in and of her dialogue, but in such a slight way where no one would ever quite correct the error out of their overwhelmingly artificial caucasian politeness. She did not have an accent, per se, or at least not in the stereotypical fresh-off-the-boat fashion. But her words were never quite slurred right, never with that clean glaze of a conventional American accent. There were the irregular exhalations that always made her sentences sound a little foreign, the slight lisp, the unclear glottal stops, and hurried rhythm that accompanied every sentence of a bilingual child of immigrants, as if trying to make up for lost time. It was things like these that were so small and transitory but so ever constant that preoccupied much of her thoughts these days.
But that skill was what she was here for. Noticing and fixing these small things worked better in visual words than spoken words ever did for her. Studio art class lasted for just over two hours, but she found that she was thinking about the class — the models, the people, the person who sat across from her — for more than that time throughout the day.
She was surprised, as was everybody else, when he’d volunteered to model for figure drawing. He was probably the shyest person in the entire room, cut class semi-regularly, yet he was sitting there, projected above the class. She figured he was probably there to raise his grade, but then again it was one of the most uncomfortable ways to do so. Their teacher was a man with high standards, never quite satisfied with this or that, so that there would always be odd jobs to do around the class. Strangely she felt proud of him sitting up there even though they rarely talked.
She started with the general shape of the body, then found it wasn’t so much of a body than it was a line of loose limbs obscured by his baggy clothes. In between the drawing on her paper and seeing him up there she felt a sudden pang of something that was not quite jealousy but a mix of a certain sort of wistfulness and melancholy. Nothing made her quite as apprehensive as drawing androgynous people, mostly because she’d been in the same situation not quite a week ago, sitting in the same hot-seat projected three feet above the ground in the same cross-legged posed for an hour straight so that when she’d settled that foot back on the ground she felt nothing but expanding numbness, as if her leg had suddenly been transformed into that loose sack of unknown leftover meat cuts later stuffed into hot dogs. But more disconcerting was the people directly in front of her who talked in loud whispers as if she could not hear them. My drawing looks like a boy, yo. A snort from the adjacent person. She looks like a boy, bro.
…Thanks? she had thought, resisting the urge to glance up. It was not quite the insult that it was supposed to be. There was this odd sense of validation in being called a boy, even if it was in a derogatory way. And so now, when drawing him, she left his hair for last.
Their teacher called for a halt to figure drawing and announced that the second half of class was devoted to drawing gourds, with charcoal in chiaroscuro. In the hot-seat, he uncrossed his legs, feeling as if the crossed leg had been anesthetized and that perhaps he was a soldier limping on one charred leg and with a sorry stump for the other. But he made it back to his seat by the back of the room, slowly, and sat back down, legs uncrossed and instead both planted firmly on the ground. An unusual sitting position for him, but one that needed to be for the time being. The girl across from him had gotten his gourd out from him, and he nodded, and he saw a slight smile dart across her face. They really never talked, but he knew that she knew exactly what it felt like right now, that post art-modeling sense of elation and aversion and curiosity, this indescribable feeling of being the center point of the universe for thirty artists for an hour straight. And then he crossed his other leg, angled his sketchbook on his lap, and squinted at his gourd through the darkened room, and through his peripheral vision, saw her back-lit shoulders like a sort of informal backdrop to his gourd drawing, squinting as he did, though he was not sure if she was squinting at him, too. Didn’t she already have the time for that? But then he remembered drawing her, too, and the damn drawing — the hair he never quite finished, and the glances he kept stealing upwards during gourd-drawing, the accidental eye contact, and the speed at which he looked back at his canvas.
Drawing a gourd was much less nerve wracking than drawing a person, she realized. Plus, the room was dark for the chiaroscuro shadows. She’d need to finish the hair tomorrow — the rest of her drawing was complete and beautiful, a perfectly serene sketch of a cross-legged person, head angled slightly downwards, and then the abrupt baldness on top.
She noticed that he routinely looked up from his drawing to brush his hair out of his face, a rare instance in which his line of sight directed straight at her. She felt this strange relationship between the two of them, unacknowledged but constant, and one that she hoped was not one-sided. Yet she doubted it was. She was well aware of all his little glances upwards, the neck at the angle so that it was not completely focused on the work below but also on the person across from him, the minute adjustments in his own posture when she changed from cross-legged to both feet on the floor. This skill was a generous gift from a less than idyllic childhood that had taught her that well enough. One of her greatest tricks if you wanted to sneak a glance at a person without them knowing was to blink slowly out of your peripheral vision. You’re looking at them with your hooded eyes and it looks like you’re just squinting, and nobody can say otherwise.
She’d usually see him once or twice before studio class on their daily travels up and down the school, almost always accompanied by this boy with dyed purple hair. She couldn’t shake the subtle feeling that it was more than friendship between the two, though she knew so many things she had wondered about had just turned out to be a sort of personal delusion. But it was simply the way they walked together, and the way he moved his face away from the boy as if to say, yes we have a secret and we’re flaunting it in public. The way his body leaned casually into the other when walking, too close for comfort. Friendship? Homoeroticism? She could not quite put a finger on it.
Then yet again she could not pass a final judgment. Did she not, too, spend a slightly excessive amount of time with her friend who also just so happened to have dyed green hair? Did people also not think they were involved? She knew he’d seen her with her green-haired girl, and she’d seen the way his eyebrows raised slightly, his longer-than needed stare.
The way she unconsciously flung a hand around her green-haired friend’s shoulders when she knew people were watching. The way she started inadvertently walking into her body, pretending like she had a temporary limp on whatever foot was closer to her. Sometimes she’d tousle her hair for fun, seeing the ends fall balayage to her shoulders and tease her about them looking cauliflower-ish, but really it looked quite lovely. It wasn’t exactly strange what she did — girls are touchy all the time anyway — but she was aware of what she was doing.
And at times she caught herself and felt ever so disgusted. It was the possessiveness of her father sprouting out from her own hands. The way he used to pointedly, almost as if to take ownership, drape his arm around her mother’s shoulder. This quasi-chokehold around the shoulder snaking up towards the neck, as if to say, I’m going to make you mine no matter what.
She glanced down at her arm and felt like she was part of some crude cosmic joke. The same lines on their forearms. Even the damn veins looked the same. The way she clutched charcoal like he clutched his chopsticks, the way the same veins on the inside of the wrist pulsed back and forth like the way he stabbed away at his rice in the rare nights they ate together. The silence, extending.
In school, she was chronically private about her artwork and preferred to work with her sketchbook in her lap, slightly inclined off the table. She told herself that privacy was not the only reason for it. Her back was always bothering her — leaning over on the desk was never comfortable. School was never comfortable.
And she noticed how he eventually copied her. Except he burrowed his head deep into the table towards his lap, so that his hair would shag over his eyes save for the artwork below. Blind to the world for an idyllic hour. Occasionally she would look up and he would never see her looking. She wondered if that was intentional.
Sometimes he’d disappear from class for days and the teacher would ask: “Have you seen him? It’s been a while…” And everyone would be silent. And she’d think about if he had thought about it too, when being absent, how invisible he was and how the class — the entire class — did not know him, how no one would notice if he disappeared silently. How strangely freeing that thought was. And then she realized how much she wished she could answer her teacher at that moment. How lonely the empty chair across from her made her feel even though they seldom talked. And then she thought how sad it was that he did not know she thought this way.
She wondered what his home life was like. Whose immigrant parents would willingly let a boy grow their hair out or a girl chop it to their ears? She thought back to the spring, when she spontaneously chopped her waist-length hair to just below her ears. Suffice to say: not Daddy’s little girl anymore. People looked at her differently. She looked at herself differently. At that point her parents had simply accepted that she was Different with a big red trouble D.
It grew since then, feathering out to her collarbones. Now that she thought about it, his hair was around the same length. Odd how they were perhaps living the same life in different ways and did not know it.
She should concentrate more on art. Did he think about the Titanic scene, too, and how ironic it was to be deeply invested in drawing a gourd while having a constant presence in the other’s peripheral vision? So much unspoken tension in a studio class. It was not romantic or sexual in the slightest, no. Artistic tension. Muse-like tension. She was proud to have coined that word herself. So much jealousy and hope and elation no words said.
The way he wore an elastic hair band around his left wrist that was always on the verge of slipping off. She briefly wondered if this was the subtle way that feminine men could experience the thrill and i-don’t-care-what-happens feeling of wearing a top with a plunging neckline without it being obvious, then realized that such a substitution was a rather sad and barren truth. But she did know that he knew he seldom used the hair band to actually tie up his hair. It was more about the comfort of having a constant around your wrist than actually doing your hair. Like something reminding you of your beating pulse and tethering it to your body. Something physical, begging you to not let go.
But for girls she knew it was more than comfort. It was sharing your hair tie with the girl whose name you don’t even know but you give the hair tie to her anyway because she has to run to gym class with that old creep who insists that every girl ties their hair up. That beautiful camaraderie of being a girl in a world of old creeps.
Briefly, she thought about how that teacher stared at her after she chopped her hair off last spring. It was simultaneously freeing and frightening. She shivered, and glanced up. A phantom breeze drifted through the room.
She wondered what it was like for long-haired men and their hair, or if they even knew how to style it. Most of them kept their hair loose around their shoulders, which was in ways understandable. They never had an older girl to teach them about hair, she was assuming, or an over-eager younger girl who would give you the ugliest hairdo ever, but you still wore them because that younger girl did them for you so eagerly. He preferred to keep his hair loose around his shoulders. In a way it reminded her of a well-groomed poodle. Then she cringed at how terrible of a compliment it would be if she ever uttered it aloud. Then again, that analogy was good for drawing it properly.
She found it amusing how these long-haired boys were more concerned about their appearance than she was, how they faked using their phones at a slight incline but they were really looking at the black screen of it, at their own reflection, and how they brushed a few strands across their face until they gave a double take at themselves and put their phone away, still dissatisfied. How she did all those things in the past but got tired of it. How they crossed their legs, and how long and elegant their legs looked simply because they were taller. How when they sneezed on a rare occasion, you could feel their palpable embarrassment in the air, as if apologizing for their sneeze along with their maleness. A sort of opposite version of a manspread.
Was it the same for them, she wondered? Did they notice the way she seldom crossed her legs — part of it from gender, yes, but mostly because of a bad back — the way she never felt entirely included with most feminine friendships? Did he pick up on anything? How girls would always talk and laugh in the bathroom together, and how she’d feel so foreign and alien and completely out of place? She wondered what it must be like in the boy’s bathrooms. It must be infinitely worse for him.
Last five minutes, their teacher bellowed. She looked back down at her drawing in the hazy dark, the constant thoughts coming to a slight halt, and found that she had unconsciously been sketching a human face into the curves of the gourd, the small bumps like birthmarks, the inner grooves like the soft cartilage that composed an ear.
And then their teacher turned on the light. The class groaned as they always did, whether from the sudden outpour of brightness or the long day or their unsatisfactory drawing or their charcoal-dusted hands.
Today was not a groan day for her. She looked down at her drawing in the light and almost gasped.
It was like no other drawing she had ever done. There was a beautiful dramatism to the still gourd, the end tendrils melting into soft curls like the unfinished hair on her subject drawing, both the subject and the object and the tangible and intangible meeting each other at an intersection somewhere in the dark, on the far road ahead, snaking into the night.
