Whitney turned another corner in the museum. There was a detonation on the surface of one of the Mirós. She approached it slowly and mouthed the word “Pow!” She’d seen this one before—maybe in a textbook. Maybe in one of the many courses she’d taken near the end of college. Her mother’s insistence that she not study liberal arts hadn’t guaranteed that Whitney would do so, but it hadn’t exactly had the effect her mother intended, either. Literature and classics and art history and film. There were things that could happen to you with art, she knew. Things it could do to your body.
It started for Whitney with the sparse illustrations in the Bibles in the backs of the pews. As much as they moved house in the sprawl, the airport and the church were the sole fixed axles around which their life revolved. At DFW, her father was unburdened. At St. Luke’s, her mother was able to sit still. From the illustrations, it progressed for Whitney to the stained glass that stretched from the altar to the narthex. And then, of course, to the sculpture of Saint Teresa that rooted itself beneath the bleeding Christ on the cross. Teresa in ecstasy. Teresa in religious elevation, the sort all boys and girls at Sunday school were instructed to aspire to—through study, through practice, through prayer. After taking the wafer and the wine, Whitney would, for years, steer wide on the way back to her seat to extend her glimpse of the face of the woman whose heart was pierced by the news of the angel, his sharp little golden spear.
At first, there was fear. It looked as though Teresa was in pain—scared, even. When Whitney had asked her mother about it, her mother showed her the photo they bought from the top of Splash Mountain on a family trip to Disney World. Whitney looked terrified, but her mother reminded her how she’d felt at the bottom, the fit of giggles. Whitney lived for that feeling. If that feeling was findable again by focus, by willing it through prayer, that was something worth pursuing. That was something she could think really really hard on before bed each night.
For a time, she’d convinced herself that she’d found glimmers of that ecstasy in MTV, her oasis, her own little golden spear to the heart. And then, for years, she thought she felt flickers on the soccer field—rapture in a boomeranging cross from the wing, in a blistering strike from outside the box. But the shards of light that the older women had promised were gradually lost on her, as many of them later confessed they had been lost on them. Her effort faded. It had been a silly pursuit anyway. It wasn’t until a stopover in New York on their way to a club tournament one spring in high school that Whitney’s faith in the promise was restored.
It was her first trip to New York. She was intimidated by the assault of stimuli, suffering a blizzard of sound and light. She liked the pizza and the pretzels and the dogs that looked like their owners. She liked the hotel and the room service and the bellhops in the lobby. But after just the first day, she was eager to escape. Which was when her mother took her on a walk through the park and up to the museum that was claimed as her namesake, depositing Whitney inside all alone for an hour while she met a friend Whitney had never heard of before. All alone, Whitney wandered the concrete floors, as chilly on the inside as outside, until she came upon a room containing a series of paintings by two American women that did to her body the thing she’d long abandoned hope for. Her blood beat in her wrists and her ankles. Her throat flushed. She felt her pores open and a scrim of slickness on her skin. She loved whatever these things were, loved them absolutely. She wanted to cover the walls of her room with those paintings as soon as she got home. She knew they were made by women the instant she’d spotted them.
After that trip, she started searching for those surges of reverie in more accessible places—like the back seats of Pathfinders and basements with Cowboys pennants. She pursued them at sleepaway soccer camps and parties after school plays, in the hot tub at Jake Devine’s and in leaf piles behind Nick Harris’s grandma’s. And still, it was never all the way what she was looking for. She’d steadily, incrementally, mapped a transition away from Sunday school to occasional encounters with boys, but she couldn’t quite find the feelings in her body that she craved most intensely.
It wasn’t until she went to Paris her junior fall that she rediscovered art, rediscovered museums, rediscovered what it could do—led back into it all by a beautiful new friend. After landing awkwardly on campus, after leaving the soccer team unceremoniously, after making a mess of her second spring and summer, she’d just never fully locked in. But the experiences abroad elevated her into the milieu she’d been searching for all along on campus—this castle of sorts she’d known had existed, but hadn’t known where the door was. She moved from painting and sculpture to literature and film, schooling herself in classic narratives and then contemporary, in emotional beats, in beginnings middles and ends, in the craft of tension and satisfying payoffs. These works of art, these stories, were the places, it turned out, where she finally found the reveries she’d been searching for since she was old enough to take communion. She could have a hand in creating for others those sorts of emotional and physical responses, an alumna told her at the arts-and-media fair senior year. And so it was in the long afternoons of reading at the
