Sisterchicks Down Under (17 page)

We slowed our pace to a walk and joined in a burst of nervous laughter.

“That was too creepy,” I said with a shiver. “I’m going to have nightmares about bats chasing me.”

Jill playfully reached over and fluttered the back of my hair with her hand, as if imitating the sensation of a bat hiding in my tresses.

“Not funny! Not funny! Not funny!” I spouted, pulling away.

“You’re not fond of bats, I take it.”

“You’re quick!” I teased her back.

Jill chuckled and pointed to where we exited the botanical gardens to connect with the art museum. “How did you handle Batman while you were growing up?”

“Never watched it. Never went to see the Batman movies. Wouldn’t let my daughter keep any Batman-related miniature action figures that came with her kid’s meal. Bats are awful. Bats are evil. Bats should never be made into toys for children to play with or appreciated in any way, shape, or form!”

Jill laughed.

“Why are you laughing? Bats are not funny. They are wicked.”

“Okay! Well, it’s unfortunate you don’t feel the freedom to express your
true
opinion on the topic.”

We walked another few yards before I turned the tables. “So, what are you afraid of?”

“Nothing,” Jill said with an all-too-cocky kick in her step, as we entered the stately art museum. While we rode the escalator to the lower level to view the Yiribana Gallery, I told Jill she couldn’t get off that easily. There had to be something she was afraid of.

“Hobbits.” She winked.

“That joke doesn’t work here. We’re done with the hobbit jokes. I’ll find out what you’re frightened of one of these days, and then I’ll demonstrate how an understanding friend should treat another friend’s phobias.”

Jill took off a few steps ahead of me with a carefree flip of her hand, as if she didn’t have a fright in the world. I knew it was only a matter of time.

Taking one look at the art in front of us, I thought we were in the wrong wing. Jill, however, offered low, appreciative humming sounds and drew closer to the pictures.

“These are exceptional,” she murmured, gazing at one of the many walls lined with large canvases. Each of the paintings was made up of thousands and thousands of perfectly round dots all placed so as to form a pattern. The colors were earth colors: sand, green, blue, black.

“Don’t you love this? It’s like a bird’s eye view on an ancient world but with so much energy that it seems to move.”

I had to do a double take to make sure Jill wasn’t joking. Trying to sound as polite as possible, I said, “I don’t think I’m seeing what you’re seeing.”

Jill did a double take on me to make sure I wasn’t joking. “It’s all about the balance. That’s the beauty of how the Aborigines view the world. Look at this one.”

Jill explained the way the dots lined up to form shapes and impressions of shape. She gave me a crash course on how
Aboriginal art compared with the European Impressionists, including a side note on how Monet captured light and time of day with his many water lily paintings. Jill saw much more in these paintings than I did and kept talking about the balance.

When she finally used the word
geometry
, I confessed that I didn’t like math. I’d never liked math.

Jill lifted an eyebrow in disbelief. “Without math, how would we have art?”

She lost me on that one. I saw art as a free expression of color and shape, and as something I definitely wasn’t gifted in. Words came easier to me. Tony used to say that one-liners were my art form.

It wasn’t as if having sassy one-liners on the tip of my tongue was necessarily a gift, but for some reason as we strolled past another row of Aboriginal art, I felt compelled to think about how to make use of my own strange art.

“What does this art say to you?” Jill asked.

“I don’t know if it says anything specific. It reminds me of pottery.”

“Pottery,” Jill repeated. Obviously the comparison had never entered her mind. “What kind of pottery?”

“Navajo.”

We rounded a corner and came into a room with an umbrella-style clothesline set up against the back wall. Jill burst out laughing, but I didn’t.

From the clothesline hung a hundred papier-mâché bats, all linked to the clothesline wire with their toes, and all of them cocooned by their wings. The wings were delicately painted the same way the pictures had been with various rows of colorful dots. Each bat was different.

Or so Jill said.

I stayed far away from the clothesline bats, even though I knew they were too colorful to be real. They still spooked me. I already was fighting with my sense of being watched every time I hung our clothes outside on the line. I didn’t want to entertain even the slightest thought that a bat, decorative or real, might appear one day, hanging from the clothesline when I walked outside with a basket of laundry.

“Come on.” Jill cheerfully tugged on my sleeve. “You might enjoy some of the paintings upstairs a little more.”

We wandered through the high-ceilinged rooms, admiring what I referred to as masterpieces. Many of the huge, detailed paintings that lined the walls were originals by artists whose names I recognized like Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Victorian women these artists painted were round and fair skinned with diaphanous gowns and flowers in their flowing blond hair. They represented the idealized, romanticized woman and were everything I had grown up wishing I could be.

We strolled through more rooms where I saw a picture of a landscape with creamy-colored sheep. Jill saw a harmony of sky and earth in a sixty-forty ratio. I saw a picture of a woman darning socks. Jill saw a median line that intersected at the woman’s eyes and not her hands.

Somewhere between a dark and mystical oil of St. Francis of Assisi and a colorful rendition of the Parable of the Ten Virgins, I started to glimpse what Jill saw. What made the art beautiful wasn’t so much the subject of the painting but rather the balance of lines and color used to present the subject.

“It’s not so much what happens inside the frame,” Jill said in a final explanation of how math defines art. “But how balanced the subject is. That’s what makes the scene beautiful to our way of viewing it.”

I was enjoying the tour with my own personal art appreciation instructor, but I was slow to let Jill know how cool I thought she and her insights were. After all, she kept using math terms to make her point.

One scene of a Victorian woman bending to pick up a seashell caught our attention and caused both of us to stop and appreciate it for our own separate reasons. The image inside the round center of the gold frame was dressed in a creamy, loose-fitting dress that was accented with blue embroidery around the hem and flouncy sleeves. Her feet were covered with delicate sandals. In the distance all that could be seen was a faint peninsula that shaped the boundary of the calm bay.

“What do you see?” Jill asked.

“An elegant woman standing on a deserted beach. I love her dress and the serenity of her posture. She gives the appearance of having all the time in the world to stroll along the beach and examine shells.”

“It’s definitely a beach from this side of the world,” Jill said. “You can tell by the color of the sand, the water, and the cliffs in the background. Those are down under shades. That woman belongs there. That’s her beach. She’s not just visiting. She walks that sand daily looking for treasures.”

Apparently Jill was getting a personal message from the painting. I sat down on the wide bench in the middle of the gallery for those wanting to contemplate a painting. I chose, instead, to contemplate Jill.

“What do you see in this picture?” I asked.

Jill tilted her head.

“All the lines in the picture direct us to whatever she’s holding in her hand. And that treasure is kept hidden from our view because she hasn’t opened her hand all the way.”

Turning to face me, Jill said in clear, precise words, “I hold a treasure in my hand. But I don’t know what it is.”

“A talent, maybe? A gift? A passion for something?” I wasn’t sure I knew her well enough to guess what that hidden passion might be. However, I knew whatever it was, she was closer to discovering it now than she had been for many months. Perhaps many years. She had changed so much in the few weeks I’d known her.

We continued to gaze at the picture. I was beginning to see the lines, the symmetry, and the median angles. Those lines didn’t ruin my appreciation for the subject but rather made me aware of how right Jill was about the necessity of geometry.

Jill had said something earlier about how art is most beautiful when it’s balanced. Dark and light. Intense and subtle. I wondered if she saw the same balance in life. The heaviness she had carried the past two years was now giving way to a lightness in her spirit.

“Do you mind if we stop by the gift shop?” Jill asked, when we started to leave the museum a short time later.

I never objected to shopping. I bought a poster-sized copy of the Victorian woman on the beach while Jill bought a postcard of the same print along with a dozen postcards of the Aboriginal art.

“Do you think you might frame that?” Jill asked.

“Yes, I was thinking of hanging it over our bed. You’ve seen the picture Mr. Barry has there now. It’s a big bunch of tropical flowers. Ever since I took the obnoxious bedspread off the bed, the picture feels out of place.”

What I didn’t tell Jill and knew I would never tell Tony was that in a peculiar way I missed the old bedspread. The one I had bought on a shopping trip with Jill was similar to the one I
had at home. The muted tones of the new, pale yellow bedspread would go nicely with the colors in the picture. But once I’d gotten the quieter colors on our bed, the garage seemed smaller. Duller. The bright bedspread had been the inescapable focal point of the room, but at least it gave the room a focal point. I knew that after Jill’s art lesson, I’d be sizing up our apartment with a new eye for balance and looking for “intersections of repeated colors.” I doubted that any of my decorating attempts from here on out would be easy unless I gave consideration to the importance of geometry.

“Remind me to give you a lesson in something later,” I said, as we left the gift shop.

“Okay. A lesson in what?”

“I don’t know yet. Something that will make you feel more informed yet leave you with the feeling that your life was less complex before you learned that lesson.”

“Okay,” Jill said hesitantly. “And before you decide what torturous lesson you’re going to teach me, are you in the mood for more shopping?”

“Sure. Shopping I can do painlessly.”

“Or are you hungry? Because if you want to eat, according to this map, I think we could walk to a place called Woolloomooloo and go to a place that serves
pie floaters.
”

“And exactly what is a pie floater?”

“It says here it’s a meat pie swimming in a bowl of pea soup.”

Jill and I exchanged grimaces.

She looked back at the tour book and added, “Served with a kangaroo tail as a spoon.”

I
was only kidding
about the kangaroo tail spoons.” Jill laughed at the shocked expression on my face. “But the rest of the description is what it says right here.”

I grabbed the book out of her hand. “Do they have any recommendations for one of those cafés by the water we passed earlier? Not that I’m against meat pies swimming in pea soup or anything, but the Vegemite was enough of a stretch for my taste buds this morning.”

“Let’s walk back to the harbor and see what strikes our fancy.” Jill snatched the map back from me. “I think it’s shorter if we go this way.”

As we walked, I playfully asked, “Should I be questioning your sense of direction after the way we drove around in the rental car?”

“No. I’m much better on foot than I am behind the wheel. And before you say anything, Miss Kathy Girl, I happen to know how safe you are behind the wheel as well!”

We only made it two blocks before seeing a store with outback gear in the window.

“Wait, Jill. Skyler wanted a hat. An outback hat. Do you mind if we stop in here?”

Jill didn’t seem to mind stopping to shop anytime, anywhere.

When we first entered the store, I was distracted from looking for a hat because the first thing I saw was a case of Australian opals in a variety of jewelry settings. A pair of light blue opal earrings in a silver setting looked like something Skyler might like, even if it wasn’t something she had asked me to buy for her. I tried to figure out the price in U.S. dollars while Jill shopped for hats.

“What do you think of this one?” Jill tried on a khaki green hat that flipped up on the side and had a tie that hung far below her chin.

“It’s a little manly, don’t you think? Maybe something smaller.”

“Actually, this one is the Manly hat.” The clerk stepped closer and handed Jill a wide-brimmed hat made from neutral canvas.

“It looks like a beach hat,” I said, wondering what the joke was since my husband wouldn’t consider anything “manly” about such a hat.

“Exactly,” the clerk agreed. “A Manly Beach hat.”

We looked around at a few other items and then exited without buying anything, feeling a bit worn down from the confusing exchange.