Sinéad Tuttle-Lerner

First Place: Fiction

“Resurfacing” 
by Sinéad Tuttle-Lerner
9th grade, Morristown Beard School

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Joni Mitchell was singing “Circle Game” again on the record player in Gayla’s living room. An open book was upside down on the couch, and she closed her eyes, a smiling tear falling. She remembered her childhood, spent in rural Massachusetts, the pond she used to swim in and the day she went home from a summer afternoon spent there, listening to Joni’s new album. She opened her eyes, and in front of her was her father in an old rocking chair, her sitting on his lap with a lemon popsicle in her mouth, eleven years old and talking about frogs she held on their outing. The same music was playing, but it felt newer, and the colors in the room were brighter. Sunlight on the wooden table she still had in the other room looked fresher, a more beautiful shade of gold. Her first house was there again, though from her memory a few years ago a new house had been built in its place, boasting obnoxious colors in the lawn and cardboard walls.

She was sitting on an old chair, one that should’ve been at the dining table. She smiled, setting into memory the words she heard and the look of her childhood home. A polaroid on the table tempted her, and she took a photo, making sure to leave it in sight. After some time, younger her and her father went upstairs. She closed her eyes, and the light dimmed, the air got colder and sharper, and the couch, though it was soft, felt like a rock compared to the deep, perfectly worn seat of the chair. She looked around her room, to her old dining table. She walked over to it, pulling up an easel and canvas, a bag of paint supplies tied to the easel’s old wood. A sketch began to form from her hand, the shape of her and her father being revealed. Something was off, and she went to her box of old photos for a reference. On the top was the polaroid she’d taken, dusty, slightly cracked and faded in tans that brought out light filtering through dust. Gayla’s face crinkled into a smile and she let out a small laugh. She clipped it to the edge of the easel, just above the corner of the canvas, erasing her father’s knees and drawing them in a more natural shape. The table began to form, the copy of The Little Prince she’d read as a child stacked on top of her mother’s Emily Dickinson books.

A day passed, then the weekend. In her opinion, paintings needed breaks between stages. Monday morning, Gayla put on the first stroke of off white, the ceiling. Lines of paint filled in, light shapes and differences defining each time the brush was just filled, as she liked to leave a thickness to the paint. The floor was painted, thin streaks defining the grain of wood. By midafternoon, the base colors of the acrylic were filled out and ready to be left to dry. 

The following morning, she went downstairs, put Simon and Garfunkel on the CD player, and sat down, ready to finish. But as the album first went on, the colors of the painting began to shift, the song fading into the chatter of children talking. Slowly, a schoolroom was revealed, a light sky outside. A teacher with a curled bob was standing at her desk, watching a class of children read. Younger Gayla passes a note, laughing, and her friend gives her a side eye, then gives in to laughter too. The teacher walks over and looks down expectantly. Gayla still watches through the frame of the canvas, from an elevated angle, the classroom spread out as if seen from above the roof. Gayla and her friend swallow their laughter, rip the note, and the teacher’s faux-strict face turns to a smile, saying without speaking, You’re not in trouble, but still, cut it out. Older Gayla smiled, and the scene faded. “Scarborough Fair” started to play. On the canvas, the shape of the wooden ceiling fan began to form, the broken necklace they used as a makeshift pull chain dangling.

As the painting gets to the detail phase, her father’s face begins to soften, revealing the way she remembered him, speaking more to him than photos. Tomorrow evening the painting would be ready for coating. More details float onto the canvas, amber glass beer bottles in the window casting brown light across the room, an alarm clock missing its face and hands sitting upon a shelf, revealing its gear-filled innards. Piece by piece by piece the house began to breathe. 

The next evening she went to coat on the gloss, the final step. The shapes in paint melded together to create the most natural, alive scene. This was a painting the world did not have to see, one of a type she keeps to herself.

Over the next days and weeks, moments of her life over time unfolded, a memory often from every four years or so. War protests threatening her expulsion from college, graduations, marriage and divorce, deaths of family members. Her first exhibition of paintings, the statue she designed for the state. Artworks and singing and performance, awards and recognition of her work to preserve folk culture. The highest and lowest points of her life replayed. As memories passed, she began to further appreciate herself, as much as the most knowing person from the outside ever could. Dust in the house faded, light growing more loving. When flashbacks pulled closer to the present, she worried that there would be some ending. Instead, she only saw a version of herself in the present, looking down at her from above like a mirror she never placed there. Old wood and incense and oils, light dust and memories, souvenirs and heirlooms, all filled her mind in that moment, the importance of her life and how she had spent it all processed, all at once.