Reconsidering the Sunflowers
The road is white, the color of no road anywhere. The white road becomes whiter and narrower as it recedes into a sunless, ochre-tinged sky. Everything is tinged with ochre, except one house, which is all white. The white house looks as if it's been drawn by a child: a triangle atop a square. Next to the white house is a larger unfinished house with one unfinished window, square atop a square. Its roof is a black trapezoid. There are only two houses on the street. There are no people or dogs or grass or trees. There is no horizon, just a vanishing point.
I watched my father paint this scene. He was thirty-one or thirty-two at the time; I was six or seven. We were upstairs, in a dark attic room with one small dormer window. The slant of light through that window was always thick with a stirring of dust, and my memory of that day takes place behind that scrim of floating, swirling, shimmering particles, as if we are two figures in a snow globe. The man is standing in front of an easel, holding a paintbrush in one hand and a palette smeared with paint in the other. He looks like a normal suburban dad in the late 1960s: average height and build, crew cut, horn-rimmed glasses. (I have to peer closely to see him like this, the way he looks in photographs from that era. His later self—bloated and disheveled, with flyaway Einstein hair—comes too readily, insistently, to mind.) There are several clues that this painting thing is new to him. The setup is makeshift. The easel is a foldable music stand borrowed from his wife. Instead of an art smock, he's wearing a white lab coat. There are just a few tubes of oil paint on a nearby rolltop desk: yellow, white, green. An open bottle of ink compensates for a lack of black.
The other figure, the girl, watching and still, is young and not yet critical. These are the years she follows him everywhere, holds his hammer, fetches his coffee and cigarettes, plucks hornworms from his tomato plants, laughs at the same Saturday morning cartoons. She watches him put brush to paper, the expression on her face adoring. He can do anything, her father, beautifully, effortlessly, zestfully. A trill of pride runs down her spine.
My father painted the same subject—houses—for forty years. This is what I told the neurologist when he asked about my father's art. It seemed an odd line of inquiry. I was there to talk about the drugs. My father was in his seventies. His feet hurt. His back hurt. His hips hurt. Lately he had been complaining that he was fuzzy headed and unsteady on his feet, unfortunate side effects of his antipsychotic medications. A few years prior, my parents had undergone a late-in-life divorce. Since then, my two sisters and I had moved my father in and out of multiple assisted-living facilities. With each move came a new set of doctors. Few of them familiarized themselves with his file, which, admittedly, was of encyclopedic size and breadth. His newest primary care physician, noting that his tardive dyskinesia increased his risk for falls, suggested he speak with a psychiatrist about eliminating or reducing his antipsychotics. His newest psychiatrist suggested a different antipsychotic, one that, I later read on the internet, might improve the symptoms of tardive dyskinesia but worsen the underlying behavior. It was alarming. While it was true that my father's legs shook noticeably even when he was seated, and he repetitively and incessantly smoothed one hand over the other arm, back and forth, this seemed a small price to pay for what had proved a different kind of side effect, a relative lack of chaos and catastrophe. I wanted the neurologist to evaluate the severity of my father's dyskinesia and agree with me: no medication changes. Instead, he wanted to talk about art.
This new doctor's manner was gentle and the tilt of his head quizzical. It was the first time we'd met, and I immediately liked him. He'd read my father's file, or at least most of it. He referred to an MRI. He examined my father's eyes, then leaned back to observe his expression. He watched him rock in his chair, hands always moving. He recorded, using a video camera, my father's shuffling walk. He asked him to write a sentence, anything that came to mind. My father wrote I AM LOST in shaky block letters. It was painful to witness.
The doctor made some brief notes, then turned to me. He asked questions I'd never been asked before. I was used to being called into offices to explain and discuss my father's behavior. He had a tendency to get kicked out of places: stores, restaurants, theaters, senior living facilities—even, and most tragically, my hometown. But this doctor seemed uninterested in his volatile nature. He wanted to know everything: profession, interests, behavior, habits, family history, diagnoses, substance use. He asked me to describe a typical day when I was growing up. And he kept circling back—curiously, I thought—to my father's paintings.