Laurie Boris

When Yulia draws, she feels no pain. Nothing exists but medium against paper, the link between subject and art. She is not a seventy-year-old woman with arthritic knees and an unreliable back from her time in the army. She is not bedeviled by regrets. She is not hounded by grief, by years lost, by connections broken. She is energy moving from mind to hand to paper, and it could be hours before she knows any differently.

Today’s subject, though, is a leaking sink faucet, and try as she might, it’s not something she can dissect and solve on her drawing pad. As a frequent occupant of dwellings with absentee landlords, she’s learned to do a number of things herself. Plumbing is not one of them. However, she has developed the skill of not only knowing who to call to get such things fixed, but bargaining to get such things fixed when money was tight or nonexistent. She makes excellent apple dumplings. She makes things happen for other people. She makes friends. These things have value.

But the usual person she has been calling on to fix things in her apartment has retired and moved to Florida, and she stares at the drip-drip-drip like it’s high noon at the OK Corral.

“It’s just me and you now,” she says to it, hands on hips. But she’s not completely unarmed. She has a phone, and an endless array of videos showing how to fix things. In the army, she had learned how to dismantle and reassemble a rifle faster than most in her outfit, surely this could also become part of her repertoire. How hard can a little faucet be?

Not so much, she discovers. A new washer, a retightening of the pipes and a crick in her neck later, there is no more drip-drip-drip. And later that evening, while she’s relaxing with a heating pad, a cup of tea, and fresh apple dumplings, her mind dissects the anatomy of the plumbing equipment, pleased to have learned how to do something new. But the learning is enough. She then calls a friend to get the name of someone she can hire the next time. Let them twist their bodies beneath her kitchen sink. She’d rather draw.