Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger

Author:Lilly Dancyger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Shortly after the night when I read my father’s notebooks and realized that his artwork was where he’d left himself behind for me, I had a vivid nightmare. I was in a Salvation Army-like thrift store, and I wandered over to the dishware-and-knick-knacks section. I saw a bunch of my father’s smaller sculptures on a tall shelf amid mismatched plates and stopped clocks, for sale for a few dollars each. I panicked in the dream, screaming to everyone and to no one in particular, “These are mine!” When I woke up with that same desperate feeling of These are mine! sitting in my chest, I realized it had always been there.

My father was transient during the last few years of his life, crashing with one friend or another for a few weeks or a few months before moving on and leaving the pile of new work he’d created behind “for safe keeping,” though he never went back for any of it. Whenever he needed money, which was all the time between the child support he was always behind on and the heroin habit that needed constant maintenance, he would call up old friends and see if anyone wanted to buy one of the pieces he’d managed to hold onto.

Whenever I thought of my father’s work scattered across the country, sold, given away, or abandoned during hasty moves with no clear destination, I felt the same tightness in my chest as I did in the Salvation Army dream. I still do. Even about the pieces I know are cherished by his closest friends. It’s an anxiety that goes beyond logical concern for the preservation of his art and becomes a frantic, pressing need to claim and hoard every scrap of what’s left of him.

I started fantasizing about driving around the country with a U-Haul to collect the work he left “for safe keeping.” I wanted to surround myself with it, dog masks and deer peeping out from every corner, prints piled everywhere like a hoarder’s old newspapers. And I started trying to think of the least morbid way to ask everyone who has any of his work that they don’t want to part with now to please stipulate in their wills that it go to me when they die. I was filled with terror at the possibility that, when his friends die, whoever is tasked with cleaning out their homes might not understand that the slightly dilapidated and mildly creepy art on the walls is my birthright. They might put these precious artifacts in storage to rot, throw them away, or donate them and bring my nightmare to life.

Becoming increasingly desperate as I thought about the urgency of this need to collect, I mentioned something to my mother over the phone about my plan to start attempting to consolidate my father’s work, or at the very least photograph it for my book project and an archive. She agreed, “We should definitely do that.” I balked. I had never said anything about “we.

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