Young Writers Society

 When my sister invited me over to her apartment to help her clean, I did not hesitate to tell her that I could as I had not seen in well over four years. She was an artist who, in her success, was able to travel all over the world and see things that I could only imagine using the occasional small trinket or sketch by an obscure street artist that she sent me once and awhile. I had my own speculations as to why she had invited me though. She had divorced her second husband in three years and I believed that she longed for company though she had isolated herself from her family after the initial break and stayed abroad much longer then she would have normally. Suffice to say, due to the underuse of her small house, when I arrived I could hardly find a way to her front door. The grass had grown to a height that brushed my knees and wild thistles were so thick that they created ghastly waves that seemed filled with open jaws. In fact, once I had waded to her front door and rang the doorbell a couple of times, I was afraid that she wasn’t home. The curtains were drawn and the little house seemed to look upon me with such cold emptiness that I longed to fill it with sunlight and warmth. Discouraged, I turned to leave when my sister flung open the door and beckoned me inside. This frightened me not only because of the loud noise that the sturdy wooden door made as it smacked the side of the house, but because my sister’s disheveled appearance rendered her almost unrecognizable.

“Lian! Are you okay?” I cried out to her, forgetting to use her English name ‘Katie’ as she preferred. I was thoroughly distracted by the mascara stains that had dried on her cheeks, the raw red glow of rubbed eyes, and the paint-stained t-shirt that had been thrown on inside out. I remembered her as being a young, vibrant woman who always wore a wry smile in her eyes and fashionable clothing.

“Come in, you can see that we have a lot of work to do,” she sighed

I walked in and was struck by the contrasting nature of the house’s interior. Though she took no care to maintain her furniture, dust her shelves that were straining with large volumes of books on artistic theory, or clean her floors that were caked with paint and dirt, it appeared as if she always washed her dishes, did her laundry, and kept her bed made. In fact, it could have been an image taken from a good housekeeper’s magazine that had been stuffed in an attic covered with dust and yellowed with age.

“I didn’t really call you here to help me clean,” she admitted to me after closing the door behind me. 

“I’m really quite capable of doing that myself,” she continued, not meeting my eyes when I gave her an unconvinced glance. “I just need your help with a problem that I have. I thought if I told you the truth you wouldn’t want to come, but I need a fresh eye and you’re the first person who came to mind,” she said quickly, tripping over her words in her haste to explain herself. It was hard to hear her as she seemed to be holding back tears that had been waiting to be released for a long while.

She led me to a sun room, attached to her living room, which was given a similar treatment of grime and dust that cast the entire space in a dank yellow light. Everything had been cleared from it except an easel with a fresh canvas, paints and what looked like a work of art obscured by a sheet. When she lifted the sheet off of the painting I audibly gasped.

In my shock I could not say a word; I could only gaze at her wide-eyed and a bit accusatory. Before me I immediately recognized "The Bend in the Road", a painting by the eminent Paul Cezanne. My sister burst into tears and leaned against the wall, turning the dirt on the glass walls into mud that she spread on her face as she wiped away her tears.

“It’s awful, I know,” she said between forlorn sobs, “I couldn’t remember the colors and the shapes are all wrong. I messed up, I should have taken a picture while I was in Washington, but I got so caught up in it that I forgot.”

“You did this?” I replied, realizing that she must have created a replica to improve her technique. She nodded and I knew she was right in her criticism. As I looked closer upon the painting, I could see that the colors were dull and in no way expressed the harmony, vitality and spirit that Cezanne’s original work could.

“You know what is wrong, don’t you?” I said as I walked into her kitchen and began filling a bucket of water. I took it into the sunroom and threw the water onto the grimy glass walls as if bailing out a sinking ship. Immediately, from the cleansed area, the sun rained in. It danced around the room, caused her paints to glitter and gave the clean canvas an inviting glow.

“I’ll get more,” she said, running into her kitchen with clumsy determination, knocking over a lamp and sending cobwebs and dust into the air.

In the end I could have said with all honesty that our campaign was successful and our ship was saved. After the final square inch of the sunroom had been washed, and the room had finally earned its name, we sat together in the puddles on the floor and looked up at the painting. It had been transformed and the replica shone like a seashell sitting underwater lending color to the light that reflected off the surface. However, it was clear that a different artist had painted the beautiful and tempting Bend in the Road as it lacked the confidence that Cezanne demonstrated in his original. Cezanne painted as if he knew where the road lead, but my sister had painted it as if were a road, leading away from a house buried in dust and unhappy memories, which could go anywhere if only the viewer had the courage and strength to leave what they knew behind and turn the bend.