Katerina Vorontsov
October 22, 2018 3:21 PM
Trying to start something new (Art Club). by Katerina Vorontsov
Katerina had spent much of her holiday writing.Some of this had, of course, just been the convention of the holidays - cards for Rozhdestvo and New Year for all the family, polite notes (since all the cards she’d been able to find had had Russian on them somewhere and it seemed rude to give those to people who couldn’t properly read everything on them) to her school acquaintances. These last had taken a long time, as she had had to write in English, German, and French and had needed dictionaries and grammar books to make sure she was in fact wishing them happy Christmases and New Years in their proper languages. Some of the writing had also been journaling, as usual. The biggest part of it, however, had been goal-oriented.
At the beginning of the year, Katya had thought that the clubs Professor Xavier had mentioned had sounded interesting, but had assumed she’d have to wait some years to even think of trying to reestablish one. For one thing, there was her English, and for another thing, there was her status. She was a first year. Who was going to follow her lead anywhere?
Just before midterm, however, things had changed. That pig Julius Astley had started something and people had signed for it. To add insult to injury, it was even something Katya would have liked to have been part of, had it not been led by an utter pig whom she would not lower herself to grovel before. Clearly, there was only one thing to do: risk creating her own thing and throwing it into public, too.
So she had spent midterm - or at least as much as she could around obligations and avoiding Tatiana’s curiosity, or at one point ignoring Tatiana’s pounding on their bedroom door after Katya locked her out - preparing to do just that. She had written invitations to the first, second, and third years, signing those for people she knew personally, and then had created multiple signs, bold dark letters inked onto sheets where she had done very pale pencil sketches of various flowers, to put around the school advertising
Painting • Drawing • Sewing • Sculptors • Photograph • Other
A new club for artists is created. It will meet in the Art Room of MARS on [date]. Please come and learn about the new club
Back at school, she had figured out how to arrange a date, inked that in on her invitations and signs, dispersed the signs, sent her invitations, had a fight with her sister when Tatiana had recognized her handwriting and confronted her about being secretive, and hoped for the best.
Now it was the date she had reserved and she thought she might well be sick on her shoes at any moment. Her heart was pounding irregularly, her eyes felt blurred, and she was sure her face was a shade of pink far less flattering to her pale skin and blonde hair than that Mama liked to dress her in. She had dressed in pale blue and put in diamond earrings because she had been afraid of turning excessively pink and had not wanted her face to match her dress and jewelry, but at the moment she was not soothed by the thought of how clever it had been to prepare. All her preparations felt completely inadequate. She was going to fail. She was going to fail.
Ya ne mogu sdelat’ eto. Ya ne mogu sdelat’ eto. Ya ne -
Net. She would not think that. She looked around the room which had appeared when she opened the door, cataloging the details so her thoughts would have no room to spin through her head.
The room was nothing like her mother’s boudoir - the place where she had learned to paint and sew - but at the same time, she could see things she had clearly borrowed from that room: the length and width. The way paintings of painters from around the world were spaced, and the fact that each had a lamp directly beneath it, flames flickering inside crimson glass holders. The off-white walls and neoclassical pattern of the molding. Most noticeable of all, the velvet-covered corner sofa and colorful rug in the area for the initial meeting, aside from the neatly arranged art stations on the other side of the room. How many hours had Katya spent curled up on a similar sofa at home, reading in a corner, even napping? For herself she had an armchair - similar to Papa’s, but scaled to her size - but present too was a little ottoman, such as she might sit on to paint at home....
She could not fail. She couldn’t. She had done all of this. There was nothing she could do but move forward. Too late to look back now.
When the clock chimed, she put on an American smile and looked at people. She was surprised to see her sister there, but it strengthened her resolve not to throw up - at least not until later. She couldn’t let Tatiana see her blink.
“Hello,” she said, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. “I am Katerina - I made this.” Was that the right way to say it? No. She couldn’t think. She just needed to keep moving. “Welcome.
“I like arts - I paint watercolor, I sew,” she continued, reciting rehearsed words now. “My idea is, we can show each other how to do arts. We can go around now and say names, and what you like to do, or want to do?” she suggested.
Subthreads: Fake it til I make it by Jasmine
16
Katerina Vorontsov
Trying to start something new (Art Club).
1418
Katerina Vorontsov
1
5
Jasmine
October 30, 2018 2:55 PM
Fake it til I make it by Jasmine
Jasmine had been a bit surprised to receive a personal owl inviting her to join the new Art Club Tatiana’s little sister was starting. She wasn’t sure if she merited one due to her friendship with Tatiana or if she was merely a small part of a bigger advertising campaign, but the letter did its job. Jasmine showed up at the appointed location at the appointed time.She liked art and would have been inclined toward joining in any case, but since Katerina was the one running it Jasmine never even considered not joining. If Anya made a club, Jasmine would join it out of obligation, even if it was about something horrible like flying brooms. She would do no less for her friend’s sister. The fact that it was about something interesting removed any burden from the obligation.
Katerina’s English was no better than Tatiana’s as far as Jasmine’s native monolingual English ear could tell, but she’d had a couple years of practice now listening to struggling English, so she followed what Katerina was saying well enough. She felt nothing but respect for the Russian sisters. She couldn’t even converse with her own grandparents in their native tongue (of course, they were also perfectly fluent in English, and they had lived in California since Dad had been a boy, so there really wasn’t a lot of incentive for Jasmine to learn French) but Tatiana and Katerina were going to school in place where nobody else spoke Russian. That took bravery she wasn’t she she would have had in their place.
When it came to her turn in the circle, she said, “I am Jasmine Delachene. I like to draw and paint.” She also liked coloring with crayons and colored pencils, but she wasn’t sure if she was too old to admit to that now. And, in total honesty, most of her painting up until this point was primarily paint-with-water, but that was still painting, right? So it counted. How much harder could using actual paints be? “I’d be happy to learn more kinds of art, too. Sculpting sounds fun.” She loved play-doh, but she was already fudging on her paint experience, so she thought maybe she shouldn’t claim to be a sculptor based on her experience with Hasbro toy products.
1
Jasmine
Fake it til I make it
1397
Jasmine
0
5
Tatiana Vorontsova
November 30, 2018 9:15 PM
Likewise. by Tatiana Vorontsova
Tatiana had never thought of herself as particularly artistic, which meant it had taken a different kind of creativity to fabricate a reason for attending her sister’s attempt to start an art club at Sonora. In the end, it had been the sheer lack of specificity on Katya’s own recruitment poster which had given her what she hoped was a plausible idea.Finding Jasmine in attendance, she sat down beside her friend with a quick smile, looking around and noting details of the room that reminded her, unexpectedly and a little painfully, of home - specifically, of Mama’s room. The colors were all wrong, the details were all wrong, but the layout was so close to right that she assumed Katya had done it on purpose. Not a bad idea, she supposed - Mama was undeniably an impressive person, as Katya would need to be in order to manage all this - but it made her uncomfortable, this being almost at home, but not quite.
Did she just notice how awkward Katya’s English was tonight because of that, or because she knew Katya well and noticed that she was just a little bit flushed, as she often became when under pressure? Or was it that Tatiana herself was becoming more fluent in English, to notice other people’s mistakes in it?
I have been here three years. I have to be better, when I try.
“I am Tatiana,” she said after Jasmine explained that she could paint and would like to learn how to sculpt. Who would teach her that? Tatiana had always been envious of Katerina’s ability to pick up feminine accomplishments with an apparent ease which defied her sister’s comprehension, but sculpting was not a feminine accomplishment and so Katya didn’t, so far as Tatiana knew, know anything about it except that it existed. “I like to color pictures and photographs - put together colors and shapes together. Like putting together my jewelries.” It was fair. One could make art with fake jewelry, and therefore it counted. “And making groups of photographs together,” she added. It was not really collaging, pasting pictures into an album, and tinting some of them, but it was close enough.
16
Tatiana Vorontsova
Likewise.
1396
Tatiana Vorontsova
0
5