After Kenojuak Ashevak’s “The Enchanted Owl,” 1960
A city girl for most of her adult life, Mary has never seen a live owl. She can’t imagine them winging through her DC neighborhood of stout brick houses crammed together with barely any room for trees, even spindly ones. Neither did they wing over her college’s quad in NYC. Not that she ever looked up at the sky, stars drowned out by city lights, in those days. She remembers only the pigeons that perched on the fire escape of the brownstone. Their cluck and coo sounded a lot like the throat singers whose songs play on a loop in this gallery at the Brooklyn Museum where she now stands.
She looks up from her phone where she is scrolling information about the artist Kenojuak Ashevak, an Inuit woman from Baffin Island whose work hangs in this museum. She is riveted by this print of an owl, as throat-singing buzzes and thumps around her. The owl is half faded sunlight, half stone shadow. It is not the round, compact owl familiar from ceramics she has placed in her kitchens, starting with the thrift-store cookie jar in the brownstone kitchen that was never really hers. Neither is it the owl in flight one sees in the countryside where rumor has it there are still stars.
But what does this owl mean with its corona of feathers, its heavy claws, its kind eyes like her husband’s? She wonders what their son Jimmy would make of it. For once, he is not here. He is too big for the stroller, too easily tired to join her for a trip to the museum, an hour spent walking and looking, an hour each way spent on the subway where kind people might let them sit. (It helps that Jimmy is four, and that Mary’s hair is completely gray.) She feels strange to be as alone as she was when she first came to the city, sneaking off to museums, studying Braque’s frenetic paintings when she should have been solving calculus equations or puzzling over economics and philosophy. All these years later, she is a prematurely gray-haired woman, with rimless glasses, her thin body swallowed up by black linen, buttoned up at last, the clothing her husband prefers due to his sensory processing disorder.
She wonders if Jimmy will join her on these excursions once his legs lengthen and his bursts of energy even out. Or will he move further and further away, attracted to other members of his family, doing math alongside his father or, once his legs are as long as his father’s, joining him on his walkabouts. Already, she misses having her son with her even though pushing him in the stroller strained her shoulders and back, even though now he might run through this gallery past the gulping of the throat-singers, past this owl that fascinates her, making her try futilely to find an exhibit that will rivet her son. Instead, let his grandma Katy take him to the little zoo in Central Park where he can run past the real owls in the fake trees. Let her run after him.
Alone, without her son, Mary is riveted by this print of an owl, a visitor from a place where she has never been, where she will never go. Sunlight from sixty-five years ago, long before her birth, saturates half of the owl. She wonders if the summer sun is that bright on Baffin Island, if it’s lighter than the heavy summer sun in NYC and DC. Or is this yellow how the artist imagined the sun further south in, say, Toronto and its suburbs?
With no place to be until the afternoon, she is riveted by this print made by a woman, a wife, a mother of eleven, who worked alongside her husband, something that Mary herself never could manage. She could not bear to relearn algebra, geometry, or calculus just to work alongside her husband. Even though David would gladly reteach her. If anything, she could help Jimmy with his numbers, with addition or subtraction. She wonders about the artist’s children. What were they doing while their parents made art? She imagines them playing beneath the midnight sun as a small, noisy plane landed on the village’s airstrip. She knows some of the children were buried in other villages’ cemeteries. Only a few of the artist’s children survived. One child was adopted away when she was recovering from tuberculosis. Mary thinks of her own children: her son that another family adopted over thirty years ago, her daughters whom her in-laws raised, and now her son who is not her son by birth, who was born to David’s first wife.
Mary reminds herself to enjoy being alone, to focus on the art that she likes best, to live with the throat-singing. On her way back to Katy’s, she will even eat something spicy for lunch: a taco, a Thai salad, or a bowl of ramen, something David can’t eat. She will imagine that the enchanted owl will follow her back to her real life where she is not alone.