I DIDN’T KEEP MY PROMISE to my Grandmother. I stopped painting altogether.
Only in church was I still an author, an artist. Every Sunday morning, wedged between my grandparents on a wooden pew, my mind craved entertainment. I stole the visitors’ pamphlets tucked behind the seats in front of me, and I turned their comments card into a canvas.
I’d been admonished for this in Sunday School, before graduating to the “Adult Service” on the church’s main floor. “You should listen,” the youth pastor had said, “or read the Bible.”
So I learned to hide my transgressions. I sat with a Bible propped open and sketched on the church’s comment cards, wrote sentence fragments, composed malformed poems. Religion found its way into my writing, weighing my words down with metaphors and spiritual sounding phrases that meant nothing at all. My sketches remained abstract—lines through the snow.
Eventually my writing solidified into something more substantive. I wove fantasy stories on the loose leaf meant for the guilt-laden to confess their sins. My heroes blasphemously outperformed Jesus.
My sketches also took on new life. Geometric shapes solidified into skyscrapers. Streets began flowing between them like rivers. I drew impossible landscapes that ringed the paper on all sides, and married landmarks like Stonehenge with the Eiffel Tower. When the Twin Towers fell and our church service sat in sombre silence, I resurrected those monuments in immortal ink and paper.
I sketched texture into the stonework, traced cracks in the sidewalk, and then allowed trees to squeeze through the pavement. Forests sprang up. Vines crawled across my cities. The landscape morphed.
Once, after a service, the woman who’d sat behind me for two hours complimented me on my drawing. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re talented. You should add some people to your city.”
No. I couldn’t draw people—their faces could never rival my Grandmother’s portraits.
My failed creations all melted into grimacing visages with unnaturally extended smiles and dripping eyes. My presidents and celebrities were caricatures, Lovecraftian horrors, all bemoaning their existence from the page. I secreted my people away to spare myself from the judgment of their bulbous eyes and puddling jowls.
But, for some reason, my Grandmother loved my people, in a way she’d never loved my endless cities.
The first one she discovered, mid-service on a Sunday morning, was the pastor—with a beard that gobbled up his neck and a forehead three times as big as the rest of his face. My Grandmother let loose a bark of laughter that drowned out the sermon for a moment, loud enough to draw the stares and scowls of the entire room. My Grandmother waved them back to work and sat chuckling beside me.
The next week, she bought me a small sketchpad to smuggle into the sermon and snorted my concerns away when I asked if my drawings might not be heretical. “Do you think I can paint without God?” she said. “Who gives you that gift?”
But with my head bowed over my anguished figures, I never did answer.