She said it slowly. She put a little curl on the word stupid, the same curl she used to put on things when she was fourteen and I was eleven and she wanted me out of her room. She even lifted one corner of her mouth. If you had walked in right then and seen her you would have said she was enjoying it. I said that, later. I said it to my mother and I said it to myself at three in the morning and I said it in my head on the drive to the gallery. She was enjoying it. She sat on the stairs with my paste under her nails and she enjoyed it.
That was not exactly true, it turned out, but it was what I saw, and I want to tell it the way I saw it first.
I need to tell you about the picture, because otherwise you will think it was a drawing, a thing you can do again in an afternoon, and it was not that.
It was called Everyone Home. It was thirty-six inches wide and forty-eight inches tall, on a cradled birch panel that Mr. Szczepanski let me buy at his cost from the frame shop, which was still sixty-two dollars and which I paid off out of my paycheck over three weeks. It was a torn-paper collage. No paint, except the ground and the varnish. Every color in it was a piece of paper that I had torn by hand and glued down with soft gel medium and burnished flat with the back of a spoon and then the putty knife. I did not use scissors on it, not once. Ms. Ledbetter, my art teacher, says that scissors make an edge that tells the eye where to stop, and a torn edge makes an edge that tells the eye to keep going, and I believe her, and I also just like the sound of it, the soft zipping sound that a piece of paper makes when you pull it apart slowly between your thumbs and you can feel the fibers letting go one by one.
The picture was our house. This house, the one I was standing in, seen from across the street at dusk in January, with snow on the ground and the streetlight on and the windows lit up yellow. It's a narrow house, a two-story frame house with a front porch and asbestos siding the color of weak tea, and a steep roof, steeper than it needs to be, so that from the street it looks like it's wearing a hat pulled down. I had made the siding out of the margins of old phone books, the thin yellowed pages, layered and layered until they had the exact sad tan of the real thing. The snow was made of coffee filters and tissue paper and the backs of envelopes, about eleven different whites, which is a thing you don't know until you try to make snow: that there are eleven different whites in it and some of them are blue. The sky was made of a hundred different blues, from magazines and paint-chip cards and the insides of security envelopes, the ones with the little pattern printed inside so nobody can read the check through the paper. Those patterns are beautiful if you look at them close. Nobody looks at them close.
And the windows were lit, and in every window was one of us.
Downstairs, in the kitchen window on the left, was my mother at the table with her shoes off and her feet in the dishpan, the way she sits at night after her route, still in her blue-gray uniform shirt, going through the bills with a pencil behind her ear. I made her out of the Sunday circulars, the skin tones from the faces in the ads, and the pencil was a sliver of real pencil shaving that I glued on with a toothpick. Upstairs, on the right, was Krista at her desk with her lamp on and her big organic chemistry book open, bent over it with her hair falling down. I'd made her sweatshirt out of a crimson envelope. Upstairs on the left was the stairwell window, the little one, and I was in it, sitting on the landing with a sketchbook on my knees, because that's where I always sit, because the light is good and you can hear everything in the house from there. And downstairs, on the right, was the front room window, and in it was the brown recliner that nobody sits in, which was my father's, which I made out of a paper grocery bag.
That was the whole idea. Everyone home. Ms. Ledbetter said it was the saddest happy picture she'd ever seen, and I didn't know what she meant, and then I did.
And the roof. The roof was the best part. The roof was what the judges had liked, I was pretty sure, when they looked at my in-progress photos in September and made me one of the five finalists for the Hessler Prize. A dark, wet-looking red, like old brick in the rain, a red that went almost black at the peak and lightened toward the gutters where the streetlight hit it. I had made every shingle separately. Hundreds of them. Little torn rectangles, each one about the size of a postage stamp, overlapped in rows the way real shingles overlap, so the roof had a texture you could feel if you closed your eyes and ran your hand over it. Ms. Ledbetter ran her hand over it and said, "Oh, Maren." Just that. Mr. Szczepanski, who is seventy-one and has framed every piece of art that has been hung in Erie since 1979 and does not say anything nice about anything, looked at it for a long time and then said, "Where'd you get that red?"