Art Girls Together

By M. B. Goffstein

Two sensitive and funny portraits of young women determined to be artists and coming of age in the late 1950s, M. B. Goffstein’s novels for young adults are available again—published together for the first time in one volume.

The Underside of the Leaf
“Funny in a bittersweet way.” —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (recommended)

“Playing with paper dolls one moment and imagining vague sexual encounters the next—a memorable portrait.” —Book World

Daisy Summerfield’s Style
“[Daisy Summerfield is] determined to become an honest artist, and the detailing of her life, culminating in a sweet surprise, makes the book a real page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly

“For someone whose idea of style even in 1959 is to change her first name and stick matching cardboard daisies on her luggage, Daisy Summerfield comes a long way in short time. You’ll like her from the start though, this wide-eyed Midwesterner . . . It’s a proper fairy-tale ending, confirming for the skeptical that Daisy is an artist indeed—but by then it couldn’t be clearer that the real joy is all in getting there.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. B. Goffstein
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781949310016

M. B. Goffstein

M. B. Goffstein was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1940. After graduating from Bennington College in 1962, she moved to New York City and began writing and illustrating books for children and adults, beginning with The Gats! (1966) and ending with A House, a Home (1989). She died in 2017, having spent her last decades painting, photographing, and writing.

Book preview

The Underside of the Leaf

Part One

When Paula Nathanson was twelve years old, her parents brought her with them on a trip to New York City. They went to see the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, the Bowery, the stores on Fifth Avenue, Central Park in an old-fashioned horse-drawn cab, with a driver who winked at her and said he liked to take the pretty girls, and the Metropolitan Museum.

In a bookstore somewhere with her mother, feeling that the salesmen’s eyes were on her, Paula stood by one of the counters and looked at a small, thick, oblong book of watercolors by Maurice Prendergast. She registered tiny, bright pictures made up of happy-looking, transparent daubs.

And when she left New York, her souvenir present, which they bought in an art store and she carried right with her on the train, was a miniature box of Winsor & Newton watercolors that came with a water bottle inside it and a brush in two pieces. Also, a large pink-paper-covered block of French watercolor paper.

She sat in their drawing room on the train, examining the paint box and contemplating the clean top sheet of watercolor paper, thinking about what she would paint, and praying that none of the men who saw her with her parents in the corridors, dining car, or club car would embarrass her by asking for her hand in marriage.

Sitting at the top of the rough green garage roof in back of her grandparents’ lake home in Minnesota that summer, wearing lilac-colored corduroy shorts, a white sleeveless blouse trimmed in the exact same shade of lilac, and flat white sandals with fat crisscross straps, she was painting the lake, the yellow boathouse, and the wooden dock where her grandmother sat fishing, although she couldn’t see them from where she sat.

The house was on a hill and the garage was below it, but the garage stood two stories high, and the back edge of its roof came out over the cement walk by the back door. Paula had climbed on there, walked like an ape up to the peak, and sat down, right above the wooden table where her grandmother cleaned the fish she caught and peeled corn they bought from the neighbor. Even though the whole house was in the way of her view of their part of the lake with the boats, the dock, the buoys, and the yellow boathouse, they were what she had planned to do, and she felt rough and adventuresome sitting on the roof trying to paint in tiny, bright daubs like Prendergast.

She could watch the road from where she sat and see the little lake behind it, and the way she sat, she faced their other neighbor’s blue house, where Cathy Manton, the older daughter, in a gray sweatshirt and cutoff jeans, was coming and going with her new boyfriend, a jazz flutist from New York.

He played in a nightclub in town where Cathy was working as a waitress for the summer.

Their front door opened, and they started walking down the grass to the lake, wearing bathing suits and carrying towels. Paula clutched her painting book and started to get up. She thought she might go down on the dock and see her grandmother.

Just then her own back screen door opened, and her grandmother came out in a big round straw hat tied under her chin, rimless glasses, faded red-and-gray sweater, short wide blue jeans, and little plum-colored high-heeled suede shoes decorated with tiny gold studs.

What are you doing? she asked Paula. Why didn’t you come down to the lake?

Paula walked off the roof. Okay, I will now.

Now we’ve got to have lunch.

Her grandmother stepped back into the kitchen and began to take wax-paper-wrapped packages out of the refrigerator and put them on the white tabletop. Cold fried fish, cold corn on the cob, cold beet borscht, sour cream.

Oh-h-h, Paula groaned. She went through the house to put her paints and paper on a table on the long front porch and stood behind it, gazing down at the lake. Trees were in the way of her seeing the Mantons’ part, but she could hear them laughing and splashing.

It was funny. The lake was always green, either pea-soupy and smelly or just dark with tiny, delicate green things floating in it, and the Nathansons never swam in it unless they had guests who brought bathing suits. They fished off the end of their dock, just a few feet away from where the Mantons had a white swimming raft anchored; took the rowboat and rowed farther out into the lake or through the channel to the little lake across the road if they thought the fish were biting there; put the motor on and rode to the ends of their own bay or, when her father came, cut bouncing through the whole lake—all the bays—in the big mahogany speedboat that was tied up in its slip under the arched canvas roof on the other side of the dock.

Cathy Manton’s boyfriend suddenly ran into view and came up on their dock and looked at the big boat. He curved his right arm and waved to Cathy. Come on. Come on.

"Tom Kay-dree, said Cathy’s voice, and she appeared on their property in her ugly tan bathing suit. She put her hands on her hips. Come on, she said, and glanced quickly back over her shoulder. They can see you from there."

Paula, called her grandmother.

She turned and went back inside, around half of the porch, through the den, where fishing tackle was kept in the old slant-top desk, and into the kitchen. That Cathy Manton and her boyfriend are on our dock.

Her grandmother was cutting up tomato and cucumber with her freshly washed, dirty-looking, fishy-smelling hands. Maybe I got a bite, and they went to pull him in.

No, said Paula. They were looking at the boat.

Sure, that’s okay. Go and wash your hands now.

Paula went into the bathroom, turned on the water, paused, turned it off, turned toward where the towels hung behind the door; then she went to the table.

Sit down and eat.

I’m not too hungry.

You’ll have a little beet borscht with sour cream . . .

No. Paula put her hand over the glass bowl on her plate.

Then take a little fishie—

Okay. She took off the glass bowl, and her grandmother put cucumbers, tomatoes, and half a cold corn down on her plate beside the fish.

They sat and ate in silence, Mrs. Nathanson’s false teeth clicking every so often. Maybe you’ll go out on the boat with me this afternoon? she asked Paula, over her corn on the cob.

Oh-h-h, said Paula. I’ll go down on the dock with you and paint.

First we’ll take a nap after we clean up, and then we’ll see how the fish are biting. Maybe Grandpa is going to bring your mother and dad back from the city tonight and surprise us.

I don’t think so, said Paula. I know my dad’s pretty busy.

If your father would only know how the fish are biting, he’d come.

Are they biting?

Ay-y! her grandmother sighed. Have they been biting! You should see what a netful I’ve got down there by the dock. Sunfish, crappies. I’ll take them and clean them and make them for dinner with noodles with cheese and butter . . .

Mm-m.

But I’ll bet you the big ones are biting out by the Pike Hole.

Paula helped dry the dishes. Then her grandmother wiped up the sink and went into her room to lie down, and Paula went out on the porch, walked down to the end closest to the Mantons’, and sat there on the big, cracked leather couch right next to her grandparents’ room.

Paula, honey, why don’t you come and lie down here with Grandma?

Oh, no, Grandma, Paula said, getting to her feet, I was just going to go upstairs. And she went through the living room, past her grandparents’ door, and climbed the stairs to her own room.

One window looked out toward the lake; the other looked down at the Mantons’. Paula was just in time to see Cathy and Tom walk up the slippery, soft grass, climb the steps to the dark front porch, and go inside.

She stood by her window for a long time, half watching the tops of the oak trees tossing, but they didn’t come out again.

Her room had pink plasterboard walls with a dark wood door and moldings, and dark green linoleum on the floor. A narrow beige curtain hung on a rod in front of the closet, and heavy wooden shutters for the two screened windows stood open against the walls.

The headboard of Paula’s double bed touched the ceiling, and the footboard came up to her chin. It had a light green bedspread with a design of white wreaths on it.

In the corner near the window that looked down to the lake, there was a table; under the window that looked out at the Mantons’ was a rocking chair. Paula passed between the footboard of her bed and her low bureau with its high, freckled mirror, took a faded old magazine from the table, and went back and sat down with it in the rocking chair.

She wished she had brought her painting things upstairs with her. She wanted to see again the great result of having mixed some Ivory Black with Alizarin Crimson to get the dark red of the yellow boathouse’s roof. When you first made a little puddle of color on your paper—blue, say—it looked so deep and vibrant. Then it dried faded and with a hard, dark edge all around it. The trick, Paula felt she was beginning to understand, was in getting just the right amount of water on your brush. Not too wet and not too dry.

She sat in the rocking chair under her window, hearing the leaves rustle and sometimes feeling the breeze, and smelling the damp old smell that came from her closet, thinking that she now knew just the look her sable brush should have with the right amount of water in its silky hairs.

After a while she heard her grandmother get up and move around the room downstairs. Then she heard a car crunch the gravel up the hill and park beside the house. She got up, starting her rocking chair rocking, and the back of one of the rockers hit her in the calf as she looked out. It was her grandfather.

Why so early? she heard her grandmother say to him. Why didn’t you bring Milton and Edith?

Milton has too much work at the office.

So maybe—

By this time Paula was downstairs on the landing between the living room and the kitchen. She waited. No, her grandfather wasn’t in the house yet. She went out the back screen door to meet him.

He had just finished unloading groceries from the car.

How come so many melons? Mrs. Nathanson was saying, looking in the bags.

Hi, Grandpa.

Hello, sweetheart!

Her grandfather was a distinguished-looking, bald-headed man with clear-rimmed glasses, a big nose, big ears, and a big blue-black car. He put his hand around the back of her neck. Did you catch any big ones today?

I was painting.

Did I catch the fish, said Mrs. Nathanson, shutting her eyes and nodding. Just wait until you see. If Paula would have helped me, there wouldn’t be any more fish left in the lake.

Were you out in the boat?

No, from the dock! Milton should only know how they were biting. Now I want to go out by the Pike Hole.

They all carried in the groceries. Her grandmother put them away, said, Now I’ll make some sandwiches, one, two, three, wrapped them in wax paper and stuffed them into a paper bag with cookies, peaches, and plums on top of them, rolled down the rest of the bag, and handed it to Paula. You take this, and I’m going to make some lemonade and put it in the thermos—

By the time Mr. Nathanson came in from the bedroom, wearing an old army shirt of his son’s and a hard safari hat, they were ready. He took the thermos, and they went through the porch, out the front door, and down the wooden steps, then single file down the steep cement stairs, through lilac bushes high on either side, to the lawn.

Paula thought that the lawn was a mile long and half a mile wide.

As they got near the water, Mr. Nathanson started heading for the boathouse. I want to fix Paula up with a drop line, he said.

Why a drop line? She should fish with a pole, like Grandma.

Oh, I’d love a drop line, Paula said, following him onto the cement floor of the damp, cobwebby little room.

She stood looking down into his tackle box while he took out a small paper bag and from it produced a flat green wooden spool wound with black line. Then he picked up his tackle box and put it up on the table near the window. He chose a hook and tied it on. Then he put on a sinker, tightened it with his pliers, and added a red-and-white plastic bobber.

Oh, Grandpa, thank you, said Paula.

They went out on the dock, and she felt like a great fisherwoman. I don’t know why, I just only like to use my little drop line, she heard herself tell reporters.

Her grandfather put the motor on the boat, and they got in and unfastened the rope holding them to the dock. One try. Two tries, and they were off, pointed toward the Pike Hole. Paula sat in the front of the boat, her face to the wind.

She loved her new line. When they came near the Pike Hole and shut off the motor and started drifting, she hated to have to put it in the water.

Any luck? her grandmother called to two men sitting in a boat near them, and Paula looked at them keenly, waiting for their answer.

Yeah! said one of them. The other man lifted their net a little out of the water to show it off.

You see? Paula’s grandmother said to her husband. What did I tell you?

He was already busy baiting his hook.

They stayed out on the water until the sun went down and the mosquitoes came out and started biting. Paula sat on her hard board seat with one foot on either side of a can of worms and a pail of minnows, trying not to touch two crappies that had flopped out of the pail and were lying on the ribbed bottom of the boat, defecating and dying.

Oh, boy! said her grandmother as she swung another one in. That’s a big one.

Paula tried not to watch her taking the fish off the hook. Her grandmother grabbed it around the middle, wound the line around her hand, and gave it a yank. Sometimes, when a fish completely swallowed the hook, she would pull all his guts out with it. She had a bloody jackknife among the wax papers and bits of tackle in her faded straw handbag.

Once, when she was looking in it, she found a piece of cake wrapped in wax paper and offered it to Paula.

No-o, whined Paula, ready to cry.