Penelope
Hunt really did mean to paint when she got home from school that day. On the way home she had purchased three new
canvases and eight fresh bottles of paint and her head was so chock full of
ideas that it was almost too much for her to keep focused on the road because
man, what her teacher had said was so inspiring and made her want to inspire
others so that they too could feel the way that she felt! But when she got home, Tommy called her to go
out and he was the first boy she ever let touch her and he was very popular and
handsome and he had a scholarship to a good school so she didn’t want to let
him down because he was what her mother called “a keeper” and given that her
father had run away on them, a keeper sounded like a pretty good thing so she
went out with Tommy and ended up staying at his place really late so that when
she got home she just collapsed into bed and slept for like twelve hours.
When Penelope woke up the next day she had a 103 degree
fever, nausea and a headache, so she spent pretty much the whole weekend laying
in bed watching the TV her brother moved into her room for her and vomiting into
a bucket telling her mother to please not cook her any food because it only
made it worse. By Monday she felt good
enough to go to school and a good thing too because it was finals week and she
was so close to graduating with a perfect GPA and now was no time to mess it up
on account of some silly illness. So she
hit the books hard, both in school and out of school, eating and studying
simultaneously, only stopping occasionally to sleep or go to the bathroom or
talk on the phone with Tommy, and not painting because she had turned in her
final for art already so that she could focus on the harder classes, and it
paid off too because she aced all her finals and graduated at the top of her
class. So then it was time to focus on
writing her valedictorian speech and on preparing for the summer marketing internship
her uncle got her which started a week after graduation, and soon enough
graduation happened and her speech went great and she was invited to all the
popular kids’ graduation parties, then she started her internship which was
challenging yet rewarding and in July she lost her virginity to Tommy and was
very convinced she was in love with him but then he dumped her in August and
she spent much of that month on the couch watching TV and thinking of excuses
to keep from having to go to work.
Then it was August 20 and it was time to go away to
college which was new and exciting enough to pull Penelope at least partially
out of her slump and get back to her usual overachieving ways so she packed up,
got in the van with her mother and brother, and drove the three hours it took
to get to what would become her new hometown.
She brought along her clothes, her computer, three towels, two sets of
bed linens, a hygiene kit, a set of dishes and utensils, the textbooks she was
able to locate on EBay, a backpack, a case of Ramen noodles, her iPod, and two
framed photos (one of her best friends at prom and one of her family from their
last vacation), but because dorm rooms are small and Penelope had an unknown
roommate on whom she wanted to make a good impression by not infringing upon
her side of the room—because of this the three still-blank canvases and the
unopened bottles of paint were left behind.
She started as an undecided major but her internship experience
and her roommate Clara’s own interest in the field influenced her to major in
marketing which she did and committed to and was great at, completing the four
year program in three and a half years, landing a solid job afterward, and
moving in with her then-boyfriend Donald whom she eventually married and stayed
with. And in all this time there were
many occasions where Penelope experienced a desire to create art, but it wasn’t
until she was pregnant with her first child that she felt that same rush of
inspiration she had felt way back in her last weeks of high school.
It happened when they were deciding how to decorate the
nursery and she had the idea of painting each wall herself with a scene from a
famous children’s story. She spent weeks
drawing up sketches, buying the necessary supplies, and talking to experienced
painters about the specific considerations for such an endeavor. But right when she was ready to begin
painting, somewhere in the middle of the third trimester, she went into early
labor and gave birth to a tiny but healthy baby boy whom she loved dearly and named
Adam, and the exhaustion that only new mothers know combined with a particular
knowledge of the psychological effects of exposure to certain colors and the
worry that paint fumes would be dangerous to her premature baby, Penelope
decided to just put up some blue wallpaper instead because wallpaper doesn’t
generate fumes and because blue is supposed to be soothing.
It’s been said that once you have kids, your life is no
longer yours; it must be devoted to them.
This was true for Penelope. She
did have her own life, but she also ended up having four kids, for whom and
with whom there was always something else to be done all through their early
years into their teenage years and college careers, all the way through to when
they started having their own kids, her grandchildren, one of which is me and
it wasn’t until she got the shakes real bad and was diagnosed with the disease (four
months the doctor gave her) that she again felt that intense inspiration to
make art that would change people.
I was still a kid and she was living in our guest bedroom
at this point when one day, a week or so after the diagnosis, two men arrived
carrying an enormous wall-sized canvas. “Upstairs,
please! First door on the right!” she
told them. When they had left, she sat
us all down and told us that she was going into her room to paint and that no
one under any circumstances should disturb her.
She then had me carry several jugs of water and a giant box of granola
up to her room. These I sat next to her
table where already gathered were several sketching pencils, two stacks of
paper, and a plethora of paints and brushes.
She then kissed me on my cheek and gently pushed me out of the room,
shutting and locking the door behind her.
Over the next week I caught sight of grandma only three times as she
crept from her room to the bathroom and back, but on the 7th day I
literally bumped into her as she turned the corner of the hallway. She was startled, and dropped several of the
sketches she had been carrying, which I then picked up and handed back,
admiring her work as I did so. When I
handed her the pile, she promptly walked downstairs and threw every last sketch
into a lit fireplace. “I am finished,”
she said.
Penelope never re-entered that room and it remained locked
for the rest of her life, two months as it turned out, which was spent mostly
on our living room couch. When she
passed, she left a note telling us all that she loved us and that the key was in
her left pocket. At this point we were
all pretty broken up and hoping for some inspiration, so we hastened to her
room to behold what she had done with her week of laboring on that canvas. What we found was not a detailed illustration
of her life or a portrait of her closest friends and family. Nor was there some trite maxim scrawled out
in big bold letters. None of the scenes
from the childhood stories she had so long ago sketched out made it on. There were no epic battles, loving embraces,
abstract allegories, or beautiful landscapes.
No, what we discovered was eighty square feet of white
canvas. It was blank… or almost
blank. After closer inspection I
discovered, way down in the bottom right corner where the author’s signature
would be, an inscription. It read: Try
Harder.
My family argued
for a while about exactly what this meant and about what we should do with this
giant canvas, our grandma’s artistic legacy, which was taking up an entire wall
of our guest room. I don’t really
remember what all they talked about as I was still fairly young and a lot of it
went right over my head. But back when I
was picking grandma’s sketches off the floor for her, I actually hid one when
she wasn’t looking, and I still have it to this day. It’s quite good.
