How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo Read Free Book Online

bloom in the front yard, it’s stressful having only six weeks left to live. For this reason I’d booked the operation for the day before Thanksgiving, imagining the place would be empty, and thus less anxiety-producing, the nurses sitting around yawning and playing solitaire on their desktop computers, the doctors placing bets on the next day’s football games.
    Instead, the OR was so packed there was no room for me in recovery when I was out of surgery. They had to park me in the hallway near the pre-op staging area, which was also full. In the narrow slot between each set of illusion-of-­privacy-providing curtains there lay a woman, hooked up to an IV, entertaining friends and family members there to offer support. It was downright festive, all these women—yes, all women—who were preparing to go under the knife. Why, you may ask, were they all so giddy, aside from the Valium in their IV drips? Because their surgeries were giving them a free pass from mounting the annual eat-a-thon that is Thanksgiving. There was a woman two slots over who said, “Thank God I don’t have to make any gravy this year!” She was delirious with joy; she couldn’t be expected to be useful the next day, because she was going to be recuperating.
    Recuperating is a lost art. A hundred years ago people like Marcel Proust spent their entire lives recuperating. Now, we have TheraFlu. The next time you’re sick, stay in your bathrobe for two days longer than you feel you have any right to. Think of it as recuperation for the mind. Georgia recuperated. Then, a bit of luck: Her old art teacher at Chatham Episcopal, Miss Willis, hankered for a sabbatical and asked Georgia if she’d step in for her. The final piece of the lesson on taking time to recuperate is knowing when it’s time to get out of your bathrobe, and on with it.
    Drink someone else’s lemonade.
    Yes, the lemons again; if you were a young woman in the early part of the last century, these metaphorical lemons were part of life. This time they belonged to Georgia’s sisters, Ida and Anita. †
    In 1912 the University of Virginia admitted men only, except in the summer. Ida and Anita made the best of not being excluded for those few short months, and both enrolled. Anita signed up for a drawing class taught by a beloved weirdo named Alon Bement. Because Georgia was also a weirdo (see footnote), Anita suggested Georgia take the class, too.
    Georgia’s line of thinking was: Why the hell not? She had nothing else going on. Her alleged true love, George Dannenberg, the Man from the Far West—who’d written in a letter that he had half a mind to show up on her doorstep and take her away with him to Paris—had listened to the other half of his mind, which told him to leave her behind. He was now ensconced in the Latin Quarter, living la vie Bohème, and she was stuck in Charlottesville, back to dusting the living room.
    She was almost twenty-five and living at home. File under “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” When she was at the Art Students League, during what seemed like another lifetime, a fellow student named Eugene Edward Speicher, who would grow up to be a moderately celebrated and fogeyish portrait artist known for his perfect draftsmanship and methodical compositions—yawn—begged her to model for him. She had turned him down, saying she was too busy with her own work. He had responded by telling her she might as well pose for him, since one day he would be a celebrated artist and she would be teaching art at some girls’ school. But even that didn’t look like it was going to happen. After Georgia’s gig substituting for Miss Willis at Chatham, she applied to teach in the Williamsburg school system, thinking that teaching would save her from having to return to the hellhole sweatshop nightmare that was Chicago.
    Williamsburg turned her application down