Alison's Final

Alison Caplan

Women and Children: Narrative Experiments

"A Child of the Aristocracy in his Rich Archaic Clothes"

An Imaginary Narrative for Diane Arbus’ Child with Toy Hand Grenade

      “Dad! Dad DAD! I’ve got to have this gun. Come on Dad Please! We’re going to play cops and robbers and I’m soooooo tired of using my imagination. It’s really important that I have this gun,” exclaimed Colin as he bounced up and down erratically in the toy aisle of the Five and Dime. His parents had recently gone through a very messy separation and he was determined to make some good out of it in the form of plastic nic nacs, marbles and whoopee cushions.

      “Son, that’s too expensive and what are you going to do with that thing? I don’t want you to take it out in the park. What if someone mistakes it for the real thing? What happened to that tennis racket I gave you? Wouldn’t you rather play tennis with your brother?” grumbled Sidney. He was finally home from the tennis tournament circuit and had agreed to take his three children for the weekend. His nearly ex-wife was headed to D.C. to see the Mona Lisa, which was on loan to the National Gallery thanks to a special request by John F. Kennedy himself. He could just imagine the complaints he’d hear from her if Colin came home with a toy rifle or handgun.

      
      Colin’s gangly frame and asthmatic condition didn’t make him the most likely candidate to follow in his father’s footsteps, maybe gun slinging cops and robbers games were the best career training opportunities he would get Sidney thought. Colin’s hands shook with disappointment and the high of the sugary box of Junket pudding that he had broken open in the pantry earlier that morning.  As Sidney wandered off to pick up shaving cream, Colin noticed the toy grenades. He stuffed one in each pocket of his jumper as he slinked up behind his father.

      
        “She was so beautiful, the way her eyes just followed you as you approached her,” exclaimed Patricia Wood to her neighbor Nancy Mermelstein who was making her daily social rounds through the apartment complex. “She was surrounded by armed guards and she had this little velvet curtain around her, but it was her eye that really grabbed you as you waited in line. We waited for two hours in line but around the half hour point I could see her staring at me. Women just don’t have that beauty or grace anymore, even that poor slut Marilyn Monroe God rest her soul. Colin, cover your ears or go to your room honey.”

      As Colin stomped off to his room, he palmed the plastic toy grenade in his pocket and overheard his mother hiss, “Mona is so pure and beautiful, not like that whore my Sidney ran off with.”  Colin slammed the door to the room he shared with his older brother, also a Sidney. He plopped down on his brother’s bed, with its prime location pressed against the window. Pulling the toy grenade out of his hand, he squeezed it. His windpipe tightened as if he was breathing through a straw. He took deep and careful breaths to calm himself as he slid the grenade back and forth between his hands, thinking about his parents and their recent separation, his phantom father with his world tennis championship, his ridiculous girlfriend, and the tennis star/ prodigal son Sydney riding his coattails. He grew angrier as he thought about it all, the grenade in his sweaty palm. He pulled the pin out of the grenade, creating a disappointing pop noise before it had barely left his hand and floated down to the alley below with an anti-climatic clunk.

      She’d wandered into the park at 72^nd Street. She was anxious to test out her new camera, a twin-lens reflex Rollifex. She was growing tired of the commercial work. Sure she’d been published in the Times, but she was looking to do something different. Who was going to take a Seventeen magazine fashion spread seriously? She was going to apply for a grant, a grant that would allow her to document people, all different types of people. She wanted to test her camera, her skills, her ability to capture people, get to the root of what they are thinking, feeling. The playground seemed like a good start, but she could already feel the mothers eyeing her, worrying that she would make off with their children, their husbands. She walked up to a prim and proper looking woman in a crisp white dress and pearls accompanying two little girls in almost identical dresses trading a toy baby carriage back and forth.  She was excited at the opportunity to capture almost twin looking girls and approached them with care. “Hello girls. Why don’t you look lovely in your dresses with your baby dolls today! My name is Diane and I’d love to take your picture. The mother rushed over, exclaiming, “No you may not! Who are you?” Click. She took a picture, frame one, advance to the next frame. Get away from my girls you creep!” As the mother screamed one little girl’s upper lip began to quiver, she let out a scream and began to bawl. Her mother grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her off, the other little girl teetering along behind them with the baby carriage.  

      Frame two, “Hey lady!” “Hey lady, take my picture!” A gangly little boy in jumper crawled down from the big oak tree and approached her.

Frame three; a woman walks by with a little dog. He poses, hands on hips. She notes his dirty knobby knees. Click.

      Frame three, he wanders over to the drinking fountain and takes a drink the shoulder strap of his jumper falling off. As he makes an effort to adjust the strap he spays his face with water and playfully squirts water at the camera. Click.

      Frame four, he reaches into his pocket and palms the grenade with his hands on his hips he smiles. Click.

      Frame five, he pulls out the grenade. “What’s that you’ve got there?” she inquires. “Oh just my trusty grenade. I have it with me in case of a major emergency or attack or something,” he says smiling, with a smile toothy smile that would follow you across the park. Click.

      Frame five, “Can you not smile for this next one? Just think of something that makes you mad or really upset.” Click.

      Frame six, he thinks about his parents, all the screaming and bickering, the tennis games he’d had to sit through without fidgeting. He grasps the grenade in one hot sweaty hand and forms a tense claw with the other.  He is gawky, awkward and knobby kneed. He’s no Mona Lisa, but his eyes still follow. “Lady can you just take the picture?” he gasps his windpipes tightening. Click.

Mickalene Thomas, Girlfriends and Lovers (detail), 2008, rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel

Girlfriends and Lovers
The table cloth reveals Les Demoiselles in their blinged out Sunday best
Like Pam Grier with iced coffee skin in bedazzled floral print rayon
Sitting upon their curule throne like ancient magistrates
Apple bottomed as if their ankles were dislocated by an invisible torque
Fleur-de-lis wrap their tentacles around gold lame kente cloth
Jagged mountain peaks burst with triangle teeth

Chuck Close, Linda, 1975-76, acrylic and graphite on gessoed linen

Linda
Laurel
Lydia
Leila
Leya
Laila
Rose
Ruth
Renee
She has had many names in her life. Before she was born, her mother agonized over a name for months. She loved Laurel, Lydia, anything that started with L just rolled off her tongue. Due to Jewish tradition she was pressured into Ruth, but they never called her Ruth.
She went by her middle name Leya so it was surprising for her to be called Ruth as the teacher went through roll call on the first day of school. After she arrived home sobbing her mother told her she could go by any name she liked as long as it began with an L or R. She chose Linda. It was a shiny and modern sounding name that became the number one name in the country by 1960.


How did she know? Names have become a bit of an obsession with her lately. Names and lists. She makes laundry lists of names like some make grocery lists. Bread, milk, apples. Her list included an Apple, but only because some ridiculous celebrity had chosen to name her new daughter Apple. 

Linda: meaning serpent, pretty, quite a contradiction, but one that made sense when applied to her. She changed her hair the day before she sat for the photo. She was due for a change and sitting for a photograph was the perfect impetus. When she looks at the painting she can smell the chemicals of the permanent like some artists smell linseed oil and oil paint. She had never tried a perm before, but her hairdresser had recommended it as a way to give her hair more body. She wanted to make sure she stood out enough to be immortalized in one of his paintings. He was bad at remembering names, recognizing faces. She wanted him to remember her. She never realized that he would struggle over those grided frizzy locks for months and months.


She’d come to know herself through the painting. It was like a mirror, projecting the real Linda- not so shiny and modern-wrinkly, large pored and frizzy. She rarely saw it anymore. It lived in a museum in the Midwest that she had never visited, but she maintained the permanent throughout the years and every time she looked in the mirror she saw it- Linda, a photorealistic painting by Chuck Close.

Malcah Zeldis, Rita 1988, oil on fiberboard  

Rita
Academic rules are broken as
Margarita dances the Hitchy-koo in her long black gown
And Malcah paints the features flat, as if they are pasted on
A mask only her peasant Johnny Farrell can see behind
Eight different visits to the salon to achieve a waterfall of iridescent red
In Technicolor on a steep toboggan ride as bright lights glimmer and gleam
She croons, shims and shakes
Bringing on a ‘Frisco quake
 

Sandy Skoglund, Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981, Cibachrome print  

Poem from the perspective of a grounded teenager
Glub glub
Swish swish
Back and forth it swam
Frantically after being poured in a large glass
Back and forth
No place to go except the three-inch diameter of the cup
The dime store fish
Transferred from bag to bowl
He knew it would die shortly
Never knowing much outside the confides of his room and the toilet bowl

William Merrit Chase, Girl in White, 1901, oil on fabric

A Letter
Dear Ms Carr,

      Here are photocopies of some of Irene’s drawings. She lived for many years in England before she passed away, but always retained her madcap nature. We don’t really feel like the painting reflects her true personality, depicting Irene neck high in lace and silk like that. Chase was driven to create a painting similar to Whistler and Great Grandpa Dimock wanted something that reflected his work in the textile industry. He died shortly after the work was completed and we decided to sell it once things became a little less gilded when the Great Depression rolled around.


      Maybe these drawings will give you some insight into who she was. After Mr. Chase painted her portrait she started to fancy herself as some kind of an artist. She rarely painted, but she kept a sketchbook throughout most of her life. Sometimes she’d find a quote or a headline and create an illustration for it. For example, in the first illustration you’ll see she started by pasting a newspaper headline onto the page that says “New sterns for old vessels”.  She interpreted the vessel as a very Rubenesque old lady trying on sterns, new undergarments. At the bottom of the page you’ll see that she’s scrawled, “Yes, I think this model controls Madam’s diaphragm very nicely.”

       As you can see several of the drawings are sequential and tell very funny stories, while the later ones that I included are a little political. Irene, like all of us, hated the whole Nazi concept, which the drawing makes clear.  In that illustration you’ll notice a German solider hunched over a large plate of food and beer. As he gobbled away you can see an overworked tired mother holding a broom and grumbling to herself. The caption reads, “Let German women breed warrior men and delight in breeding them.”

      I think the works that tell you the most about Irene in relation to the painting is a series of images in which a mother criticizes a her daughter for not being ladylike enough. Irene was fun spirited and tomboyish. Her parents were often critical of her dress and behavior, which is really why she chose to run off to England. Just looking at the painting I could tell how uncomfortable she was in that itchy looking dress. I’m sure she was swinging that staff all over the studio.  I imagine Chase may have had trouble keeping her still, but he still gave her a halo, the way he framed that mirror behind her head.

      Ah, Aunt Irene! How we miss her. Hope this material lives up to your expectations and you’re able to somehow use it. We look forward to seeing the Chase exhibition.

Sincerely,
Ira Glackens