It was amazing to her how this fearsome object, a pole holding bags of fluid, had become so familiar, how with a single gesture she could conjure it not only for herself but for anyone. She’d done the sketch with a fresh Rapidograph pen on good cotton paper—everything she did was archival quality now—and sent it, along with a few others, to the cartoon department at the New Yorker. To her surprise—she’d sent drawings meant for the magazine’s margins and white spaces for years without a single reply—she received an encouraging note in two weeks, which mentioned not the IV pole but three other drawings: a pair of gardening gloves, a vase, a lady’s slipper. The editor said he liked the way Theresa’s illustrations evoked the carefree quality of summer—it was the summer fiction issue he imagined for her work, a magazine people read on vacation, or thinking of vacation. The iris was especially good—could she do some more summer flowers, maybe in vases?

The lady’s slipper was a spring flower, too fragile to pick. It grew in the deep shade of pine forests near her home, its bulbous translucent-pink flower and fat dark leaves close to the sandy, acidic soil. But she could do tall Hamptons-garden irises too. “Look,” she showed her afternoon class, gliding her pen across one of the lady’s slipper drawings to lengthen its stem. Marianne, who would soon inherit all of the drawings, the fidgety Rapidographs, the letters back and forth with the editor at the New Yorker, watched with a deep archival understanding. How a simple line could not only form a recognizable image, it could also transform that thing into something else.