It was once a convent. In its heyday, it must have been imposing. Nuns in their black habits looking up to the wrought iron crucifix mounted to the roof as they came and went. Now it was just a three-story, rectangular red brick building with empty lots on both sides. The grass grew high in the summer and collected the trash that blew in from other parts of the neighborhood. That’s the thing about MollyOlga. It was the anchor of the neighborhood. The only building on a street of boarded up houses that had any life and it pulled everything toward it.
Four wide stone steps led to the front locked door. It was always a few degrees cooler at the top of the stairs. The doorbell made a shrill sound that hurt my ears, and usually summoned Duncan. He would let me in and then return silently to whatever it was he was doing.
You would think I’d most remember the paintings. It was an art school after all. But even more, I remember the smells. I learned to smell alizarin red, cobalt and ochre. The smell of ivory soap and the rusty tap water at the sink where you cleaned your brushes. The pungent fix solution from the darkroom. The smell of Bridget Robinson’s seldom-washed hair.
Bridget was a fixture on the second floor. She’d have already been there for an hour or two by the time I would arrive. She sat almost the whole day at a small table in between two floor-to-ceiling windows, only getting up to go the bathroom, I imagine, although I can’t really remember ever seeing her move.
Bridget would carefully choose one pastel and then another, working them into the thick cotton paper, stroke upon stroke, making tapestries of bright chalky color. She once drew seagulls resting on the shore. For anyone else a sedate subject, but her birds were giants, and she had them presiding over a raucous mosaic sea of red, violet and green. At noon, she’d pull out a crumpled paper lunch bag and without washing her hands, eat a bologna sandwich, dressed in the pigment residue from her fingers. It took me a long time to realize she was twice my age.
She was always the first person Molly would check on.
“Alright, Bridget?” Molly would stand and look over her shoulder.
“Yeaahh.”
“Nice. Very pretty.”
Molly loved Bridget. You could tell. They both saw the world the same way, I think. Even though Molly would never let me see her paintings, I could tell she saw things the world as big and magical.
The seed of the school sprouted sometime in the 60s when a group of neighborhood children knocked on Molly Bethel’s back door and asked her to teach them to paint. They kept coming. She used her own money to buy supplies and never asked for payment. Twenty-one years later, she and her friend Olga Lownie bought the former St. Boniface nunnery for $2,500 and called their new art school “MollyOlga.”
I loved the drive there. I’d leave my quiet white-bread town safely tucked 30 minutes away from Buffalo and head in on the 400, hitting the Thruway, then through the 190 toll booth requiring fifty cents to pass, and finally down to Locust Street where MollyOlga was located. I’d come off the ramp into the part of town called the “fruit belt” and you’d expect with a name like that the streets would be lined with the trees they were named for: locust, mulberry, peach, grape. Now I think of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “A Locust Tree in Flower”
Among
of
green
stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again
But then I thought of Biblical plagues and it seemed appropriate because the street was stripped bare. But I didn’t care too much because it stripped me bare too and I was glad for it. I was a young white girl in her mother’s cast-off Nissan Sentra but I felt like maybe I could be anyone.
Molly tried to shape me. She tried to stop me from holding my paintbrush like a pencil and instead hold it with my forefinger and thumb so I could use my whole arm, and not just my wrist to paint.
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