It still shocks her sometimes to see how fully Henry forges on. It feels embarrassing. She remembers it, though: getting up early and still bleary, the need, the feeling that it was the only place where she had control, the idea that she could make material, real, and whole what had before felt and been only abstract. Just before she stopped, she was working with dark oils on big canvases. She did dark, broad strokes and then spent hours reshaping, shading and upending, making smaller, sharper lines she’d linger over for weeks or months. She’d felt close to something, manic in the way work made her manic, circling a small, calm, quiet space amidst the chaos and then order and then chaos and then order of the work. She had a show in a big gallery, a good gallery, a gallery in Chelsea about which all her friends were proud and probably also jealous. She got a review in the New York Times that called her work “important,” “riveting.” If she had told twenty-three-year-old her that any of this would happen, she would have felt ecstatic, breathless; what else was there to want but that? Not much of the work sold, though, and the review was, predictably, about Alice’s Blackness, though she was half Black, though she’d grown up mostly raised by her white mother. Though her mother’s only engagement with her Blackness had been to help her learn to straighten and relax her hair, to compliment, each time she saw her, the beauty and the smoothness of her skin. Of course, Alice knocked up every day in different ways with her not-whiteness, with all the ways that she felt separate, looked at but not seen or understood, without the language or the resources, without the people, to help her make sense of this large part of who she was. The reviewer seemed transfixed by the pain he saw in the work, the rawness of it. Alice had never thought much about her work in relation to that word; she’d been thinking mostly about technique and form.

“Fuck rawness,” Alice said to Henry when he read the review to her over coffee at the place close to their apartment. “‘Raw’ is code for their thinking I didn’t do the work. For solipsism that they’ll let slide because I’m Black.”