“Maybe it Was”
by Erin Schalk
I can’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with Willa Curran.
Maybe it was the summer after 4th grade, when our neighbor Ms. Merveille turned 90 and decided to chase her every long-deferred dream before time ran out. Determined to become a masterful Impressionist painter––a Claude Monet for the coming 21st century––she painted en plein air from her 3rd-floor retirement apartment balcony. The muggy Midwestern summer wore on, flies embedding themselves in her cake-frosting applications of oil paint.
Late July, a thunderstorm ripped her coffee table-sized canvas from its easel. It careened through the air like a rogue parasail and lodged in a nearby oak. Never one to be denied, Ms. Merveille ordered Willa and me to shimmy up and fetch her painted dahlias-in-progress. We came down scraped, breathless, and streaked in fluorescent pink.
Maybe it was the first time Willa came over—my only friend who didn’t scrunch her nose at the smells of pork kimchi stew simmering in the kitchen. When Mom set down a bowl of spicy dakgalbi, Willa didn’t give me the am I going to die? look, didn’t flinch at the heat. She inhaled everything in five minutes flat, then asked politely for seconds.
We spent the afternoon paging through Mom’s books: ginkgo, bamboo, red pine, peonies, lotus. Willa traced the hangul with her fingertips, fascinated by the shapes, and I showed her how to write her name. Stroke by stroke, we practiced as the sunlight faded across the table.
Maybe it was 7th grade, when 9/11 happened. While everyone else glued themselves to the news, Willa was reading about Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and how artists responded to the chaos of World Wars with absurdity and explosive color.
Next Saturday at Worthington Park, she wandered to the crumbling brick bathroom building, marked for demolition. Armed with her brother’s paintball gun, she hammered the wall with lime green splatters, then switched to a paintbrush and, in blackletter script, wrote: Imagine Whirled Peas.
Since next to nothing ever happened in Fremont Hills, Missouri, a bored cop––probably desperate to meet quota or to not lose his mind––nabbed her mid-stroke. She called my house from the station because she knew her dad wouldn’t come.
Maybe it was the end of April 2007. One Friday night, drunk teens tagged our fence with words I won’t repeat. Trust me, it was much worse than whatever you’re imagining right now.
At sunrise, Willa rolled up with a wagon full of enamel paint cans. These rejects came from Rex’s Hardware, and Rex was more than happy to offload his shelf clutter onto her. She painted all day, burying the slurs under a riot of flora from Mom’s Korean gardening books: ginkgo, bamboo, red pine, peonies, lotus. At the bottom, she signed, To the Park family, and her name in hangul.
She knew the HOA would return it to its requisite grey beige by Tuesday, but for a few days, our fence was a masterpiece, and the hatred didn’t stand a chance.
Maybe it was then. I know it was her.
What she left behind was enough.
Erin Schalk is a writer and visual artist with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work appears in Wordgathering, Stirring, Willawaw Journal, and others. She recently received multiple Writer’s Digest awards, a Best of the Net nomination, and an Armed Services Arts Partnership scholarship.