Tom Selleck in His Underwear
art by Geraldine Stevenson
by Mary Cate Stevenson
My grandmother was a painter. Even though we lived just a few streets over for most of my childhood, I didn’t know her well. When we visited her house, a one-story ranch in a modest Houston neighborhood, the grownups sat in the kitchen and I was told to run along. She was of the “children should be seen and not heard” generation but seemed to prefer to not see us, either. Her black eyes looked capable of casting curses. Her house even smelled inhospitable, like cigarette smoke and turpentine. It was the kind of place where you understood you were interrupting, that your host had something she’d rather be doing and was counting the minutes until you left.
The walls were covered in evidence of this: paintings in gold frames crammed together like bodies on a subway, occupying every inch from the floor to the ceiling, crooked and jostling for space. They spilled onto the floor, lining the dark hallway that opened to the back of the house, breadcrumbs that led to its heart, her tiny studio. I was a rascal child, but I was so terrified of my grandmother that I only stood in the doorway and stared. The room was dim as deep forest. Canvases dipped out from shelves, casting shadows like moss, and every conceivable space was dotted with her paints and brushes. In the center of the room, a white cloth hung over the work on her easel. To touch it, I imagined, would summon her. It was an enchanted place, that studio, faithfully haunted by a portrait of her dead teenaged daughter, the one I was named for, whose eyes I had. We caught each other’s mirrored gaze and communed in the quiet.
I learned, after my father took away her car, after the studio had been packed up and moved with my grandmother to a nursing home, after she died alone in her room, that my grandmother had been funny. I was standing in the antiseptic space that served as her new studio, so different from the old magic cave, holding a small maroon album of 4 x 6” photographs. Each photo was of a painting, and each painting was accompanied by an index card that told its story. Her handwriting was as stylized as her language, cutting along the line between precise and highfalutin. There, among formal likenesses of ancestors and neighbors, of American generals and Indigenous chiefs, were three watercolor portraits of actor Tom Selleck. Tom Selleck smiling. Tom Selleck gazing into the distance. Tom Selleck in his underwear.
In her handwritten card, my grandmother explained that when she’d gone to help her daughter Mary Jo move in to the University of Texas, she noticed that every other girl had a celebrity poster on her dorm room wall. So she went home and painted the actor. Her note quipped, “But not for her dorm mates. The best one for Mary.” It was the early 1980s.
I hid the album of photographs. I wish I had been able to save more. But my father worked quickly. He moved through her studio, her entire apartment, and as he picked up his mother’s things, her oil paints and notebooks and diaries, her clothes and books, her slippers, I saw a flash of her life, a burning star, so bright I’d never looked her in the eyes, a cold, warm, talented, secretive, child, mother, wife, grandmother, artist, before she collapsed like a black hole into the dark plastic trash bags my father filled up and tied and left on the linoleum floor of the kitchen, an entire world reduced, the painful silence like a kind of singing.
Mary Cate Stevenson is a queer writer from Texas. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review and LIT Magazine. She works with authors and an independent bookstore from her home in Austin, where she lives with her partner and their pets.
Geraldine Stevenson (1921-2013) was an American artist. She worked primarily with oil paints, and her subjects included Western landscapes, equestrian scenes, and portraits of her neighbors, family, and historical figures. The watercolor portrait of Tom Selleck is one of three, which Geraldine painted in the late 1980s as a gift for her youngest daughter, Mary Jo, when she moved into the University of Texas dormitories. Born in Breckenridge, Texas, Geraldine lived with her family in Nashville, Tennessee and Houston, Texas, where she died at the age of 91.
