Lion's Share by Rochelle Rattner Page B

drew her eyes, a little below the horizon line: thick, black, almost closed. Then the heavy-set face (much heavier than the mirror revealed her, as if she were trying to let Ed’s heavier body share the picture). But no, there was something else about that heaviness, something significant she couldn’t pinpoint. She stared ahead, blankly. Ed’s words echoed through her mind—the number of calories in a potato chip, not having time to dream about food. Had he been trying to tell her he’d been fat not long ago?
    Jana recalled Matisse’s “Odalisque” series—the fat women reclining on couches, sensual, beautiful, and the women Titian painted, and Rubens. Fat men could be beautiful also. Any man was beautiful if you cared enough about him. The challenge was to make herself attractive.
    She drew her lips, thick and pressed firmly together, resolute. She drew a cap for the skull, reminiscent of the bathing caps she’d worn as a child. Responding to the pressure of that cap, she drew wrinkles on her forehead. She ran two dark lines along her left cheek, where she’d smudged charcoal a few minutes ago. She outlined the faint moustache that had grown back again, its shadow on the lip and chin. Finally, a little slower now, she placed the entire face in shadow.
    She stepped back to look—something was missing. “You have a wonderful body,” Ed had told her. Not until now did she recall the other half of his comment: “Too bad you have no mind.”
    â€œIt’s like you’re making love with your mind,” Harriman had quipped thirteen years ago, in one of the last classes she’d taken with him. She’d been going through a crisis with perspective, every figure she drew seemed foreshortened. Gary Jeffreys, her closest friend in that class, had set up his easel next to her—she’d been guiding her arm to give her a sense of the follow-through. After Harriman’s comment, she looked down and saw the bulge in Gary’s jeans. If she hadn’t been absorbed by the painting she would have checked her responses before Gary got to that point, yet it was precisely that closeness, that sharing of the mind in the body, that had been important to her ever since. She’d used that memory to console herself every time she saw Natalie or Marilyn rushing about in their endless affairs.
    Now all of the sudden she found herself needing something more from Ed, and her mind was holding her back. She envisioned the brain lines shown in anatomy books, and drew them across the forehead, holding her breath with each stroke. The smudges on her cheek now seemed an extension of those heavy lines. Yes, that was how she felt: weighed down by mind, cowering, clenching her eyes against the weight. But things didn’t have to stay that way. With white paint she went over those horrifying brain lines, trying to blend them in, soften their effect. She ran her fingers roughly across to smudge them further, wiped the paint off on her shirt, then put her hand to her forehead as if trying to relieve a migraine, to free herself from that weight she’d clung to all these years. She had left no room for heart. The mind had covered over her body even, the body Ed had said was beautiful, the body she was suddenly, unexpectedly, proud of.
    At last she let her eyes open. The pictured self greeted her boldly, unashamed. It was almost, but not quite, feminine—almost, but not quite, human. She reached for the can of unscented hairspray and sprayed the canvas. Hairspray was cheaper than the sealants sold in art stores—everyone she knew used it—but she’d fought against that reminder of femininity until this summer. Lost in thought, she sprayed much heavier than necessary. Yesterday a wasp had gotten into her studio and she’d sprayed it in precisely this manner. She’d watched the residue weigh down its wings, watched it struggle to fly, buzzing angrily,