After Stargazing in Texas (1938)
There’s a painting I can’t stop thinking about. A woman stands tall and barefoot on a hilltop, farmland stretching behind her toward a treeless horizon. The woman gazes skyward, hands cupping the back of her head. To her left, two men, maybe boys, seem to have fallen. They flail on the grey ground, their faces hidden by an elbow crook or shoe. A dog, ink-black, stands to the woman’s right and stares directly at the viewer. The painting’s done in gloomy greys, blues, greens, browns. Foil and sticker stars dance across the top of a black frame. There’s more—a short stalk of corn or wheat, a tilted barn, some horses—but I’ll share the title and artist so you can search for the painting and see the rest for yourself. Star Gazing in Texas (1938), by Ida O’Keeffe.
There is a good chance you don’t know this painting or the artist. However, you probably know of her sister Georgia.
A hot take, perhaps: you know Georgia because she was married.
I have a second-row seat at a concert for an old Broadway star. I arrive a few minutes early, but the row is already full save for my single seat in the middle. The awkward excuse me dance ensues, and I shuffle past knees and through the sweet waft of perfume. I settle, sandwiched between an older couple and a woman and her preteen daughter. I came without company. I am an island in this row of couples, families, friends.
I wait. Eavesdrop. I thumb through the program. I take note of the rhinestone-pricked mic stand on stage, twinkling beneath soft pink light. I check my watch.
You must really love her to come alone, the woman with the daughter says to me after a few minutes. She turns dreamy and says, I went to a concert alone once. She tells me about an artist none of her friends wanted to see, the way she knew she couldn’t miss her. She purchased a single seat up close, too. It was so awesome, she says, to watch without the pressure to perform pleasure. To go alone, we agree, is to be left alone to be. I tell her, yes, I do love the artist, and then the woman and her daughter and I talk about musicals until the lights dim.
What the woman doesn’t know is that I’m not here alone because I have an intense love for the performer. I’m here alone because that’s just the way I do many things.
I found Ida O’Keeffe by way of Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter famous for her evocative flowers and skulls. After my visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe a month or so after my thirtieth birthday, I became obsessed with Georgia, drawn to her life as much as her art. I was especially enamored with images of Georgia at home with her dogs: a solitary, aged woman trekking through the desert with stately Chows Chows. I’m a sucker for old women and their dogs.
I tore through Wikipedia pages about Georgia and her work, flipped through biographies, listened to a handful of podcasts, and sifted through online archives of photos. Where Georgia lived, traces of Ida also appeared fleetingly: in a caption, in a smattering of photos, in a line in a letter. During the height of my obsession, I purchased the behemoth first edition of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life by Roxana Robinson for five bucks at a used bookstore. Ida lives on the back cover in a photo snapped by Georgia’s husband Alfred Steiglitz, leaning on her older sister’s shoulder. Georgia grins loosely in the photo, a stark contrast to the cover. Ida laughs. I loved the photo. A sister myself, I longed to know more about their relationship. From the photo, I expected tenderness. A closeness. But I learned this photo was taken before the sisters’ falling out. Here is what I gathered: Georgia once demanded Ida and another sister Catherine to stop painting and exhibiting their work, claiming there could only be one famous O’Keeffe. Ida refused her request. Instead, she taught art across the country, painting and showing her work all the while. The relationship was never fully salvaged.
In the end, Georgia got her way. Ida never became famous.
After my stepsister’s wedding, my father posted two videos to Facebook in celebration: one of his wedding dance with my stepsister and the other his wedding dance with my sister sister. The caption of the post read Two down, one to go. I am the “one” in this caption. My father doesn’t know I think I will never marry.
I use the phrase I think because I know that anything is possible, including a change of mind and heart. But the truth of my now-self is this: I never want to marry.And really: I never want to be partnered.It has been this way for a while. When I was a freshman in college wrestling with the urge to break up with my first and only boyfriend, I tearfully asked my mother: Would it be okay if I never married? She took me in her arms and assured me that it would, and I felt such relief to be absolved from what I felt was a required fate.
I have to stop myself from over explaining this all to you. The short of it: I fancy myself a spinster by choice. I’ve done the work to understand this about myself.I have questioned my sexuality. I have daydreamed partnered futures to test out alternate realities. I’ve come to my conclusions, at least for now. I don’t want to clutter my life with another person. I don’t want to compromise.
Maybe there’s other reasons. Perhaps I’m asexual, ace. I truly feel as though I don’t need romance or sex. Maybe my parent’s divorce scarred me. Perhaps, I admit, I am simply scared.
I also have to stop myself from over-acknowledging others’ reality. Sometimes singleness isn’t a choice at all. I know this. I know. And I empathize. But for me and my life, this is what I’ve chosen for now.
At tennis league, we talk small between games and sets. Jobs, weather, local happenings. To a chorus of teasing, I often stoop to examine the light-drunk moths that plop onto the courts come nightfall. I’ll scoop them in my palm to conduct show-and-tell and revel in the gentle poke of an Elm Sphinx’s tarsus. Other times, we talk pets. One night, I gush about my dog Ellie, a one-eyed Shih Tzu who resembles a little milk cow. I call her my baby. My child. I say this probably too pointedly, though I only half-realize it. There’s a fleeting glance between two men who are friends off the tennis court. I know they went to high school together. Their look reads This girl. I feel as if I’m the subject of an inside joke. I know I could be projecting.
Regardless, feelings of shame—how dare I call my dog a child— take root. My face feels hot. For the rest of the night, I don’t talk about myself. I only ask questions about the lives of others. I listen to small talk about girlfriends, wives, and kids. I play tennis. I muscle a serve to cut through the strong winds. I hope for the landing of a wayward moth.
In 2018, the Dallas Museum of Art presented Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow, a retrospective exhibition curated by Sue Canterbury. In most press for the show—even press appearing years before the show itself, in a call to art collectors and lay citizens to come forward with any work by Ida—Canterbury loosely quotes Ida to partially explain the O’Keeffe sister’s obscurity. Ida is said to have said, If I had a Stieglitz, I’d be famous too.
As I researched this exhibition, even dropping more money than I’d like to admit on an out-of-print exhibition catalogue to read the most comprehensive writing about Ida, I found myself immediately siding with her comment. If I had a Stieglitz, I’d be famous too. I nodded as I thumbed through the catalogue, hoping to gesture to Ida’s ghost. I wanted her to know that I believed her. She could have been famous, too.
Georgia was brilliant. I don’t want to diminish her genius or place the reason for her fame solely on the fact that she was married to Alfred Stieglitz. But the question persists: would Georgia have garnered such fame if it weren’t for her marriage to Stieglitz, a titan of the New York art scene? Would we know Georgia O’Keeffe if it weren’t for her passionate, complicated, sometimes volatile partnership?
Ida O’Keeffe never married. She was engaged once, but Stieglitz—who probably had a thing for Ida, too—thwarted the relationship. After her relationship troubles, Ida wrote to Georgia that she vowed to never have another love affair. She lived mostly alone. She painted and exhibited her work in between jobs as a nurse, an art teacher, and a draftswoman at an aircraft facility in Southern California. She lived the last nineteen years of her life in Whittier, California, before she died of a stroke at the age of seventy-one.
Researching Georgia’s life and work was rewarding. I found a tenacious icon.
But Ida. I could see myself in Ida.
My whole life, people have prophesied for me a husband and kids. In college, knowing I loved the Disney parks, someone on my volleyball team sent a photo of a Mickey Mouse themed nursery via Pinterest. This was fresh off my realization that I never had to get married, and I chafed at this image. First, the design was gaudy, with a large, silhouetted mouse framing a sturdy white crib. But I also bristled at its implications. I remember gently confronting the teammate on the bus to or from some rural university. I delivered my quip with an air of joke. You know, I might never get married. I might never have kids. The teammate, older by a couple of years, shook her head gravely, said something like: Oh, you’ll find someone.
Years later in grad school, a friend mused that I’d find someone somewhere else, after I graduated. He’s going to be smart. Maybe from a different department at your next university. But I’m sorry to say he’s not going to be athletic, my friend said, and I laughed but took this prediction more in stride because I’m not immune to doubting my own desires.
As a teen in Catholic school, I tried to guess my own future during giggly lunch table talk. I’d be married, duh, because everyone gets married. I wanted to coach volleyball and teach English, so maybe I’d marry another coach or another teacher, someone decidedly athletic, as the most perfect man was the tennis player Rafael Nadal and I just knew I could find someone similar. We’d have kids because duh, everyone has kids, and I never got farther in my predictions because all I really hoped for was a volleyball scholarship. The thought of centering my daydreams around anyone other than myself was no fun at all.
Now I understand these prophecies were never about me, at least not wholly. They were projections. My teammate wasn’t telling meI’d find someone; she was ensuring herself that she would find someone. The grad school friend wanted more than anything to be married with children, and to speculate about my future, equipped with at least a marriage, was to fantasize about their own.
As for my high school self: she didn’t yet know me. At the lunch table, she crafted a future for us that was expected of her, or at least what she felt was expected of her. She always did what was expected, almost painfully so. The ultimate rule-follower, she made sure she never transgressed. To casually plan a married-with-kids future for herself was to ensure she would always follow the unspoken rules. The implied script for life.
A few years ago, the Dallas Museum of Art posted a video on Youtube to showcase Ida’s Star Gazing in Texas. The video’s an exercise in looking closely. A woman’s voice and dreamy music, the kind a masseuse might play during sessions, accompanies the almost twelve-minute shot of the painting. I find myself sleepy as I watch. I am lulled by lecture, calmed by the voiceover’s soft cadence.
Toward the end of the video, the woman says:
On the back of this canvas, the artist wrote her name and the title “Spring Lethargy in Texas.” Additional research unearthed the title that we now use: “Star Gazing in Texas.” If we think about the title as a description for the painting, how does this shift from “star gazing” to “spring lethargy” change what’s going on in this scene? Which title do you think is the best fit for what you see?
Depends, I think. Depends.
When you move through life alone, single, one must contend with the fact of loneliness.
I feel most lonely when I have nothing to do. No drafts of essays to work on, no papers to grade, no sports leagues to compete in, no readings or dinners or performances to attend. Lonely: to feel isolated, disconnected. Lethargy: to feel tired, sluggish. When I am lonely, I am lethargic.
My dog Ellie saves me from the darkest depths of loneliness-spurred lethargy, but during the last year of my PhD, there was a stretch of time I was forced to learn to what extent. For weeks, she stayed with my mom while I took an exam and job hunted. I thought I needed the utmost focus, and I knew I would be traveling.
The days crept by without Ellie. I was alone. Truly alone. Not a soul stalked my space except myself. I’d see friends and colleagues but I was so wracked with exam and job anxiety that when I engaged in conversation, I felt like a puppet of myself, the puppeteer my last bit of composure. I felt too consumed withmyself to connect. Without Ellie, my attention turned inward and attached to my lack: lack of dog. Lack of job. Lack of security.
I moved through the world haphazardly. I sliced my thumb on a cheese grater. A crescent moon of flesh peeled at the knuckle. I rolled my ankle so badly that the joint swelled and bruised for days and painfully clicked for months. For a while, I had to stop playing in my beloved tennis league.
Each morning, I felt glued to the bed. Ellie was not there to stir the stillness, to fill the silence with the music of her snoring breaths, the squeak of her yawns, the scratch of her nails against the cool vinyl flooring. There was no one to whom I could coo Good morning, baby girl. In the evenings, the couch swallowed me. The screen of my laptop stung my eyes like a sunburned ache. Without Ellie, my body felt heavier and lighter, simultaneously and impossibly so. I had a body made dense. I had a body severed, what felt like limbs or heart or a core missing. I was a heavy self, hollowed.
Alone: physically without another’s company. Loneliness: to feel isolated. To feel. I felt horrible. Without Ellie, alone with my thoughts, I questioned my choice to remain unpartnered. Was my dog‘s companionship masking how I reallyfelt about being alone? Could only a human partner remedy this feeling?
You’ll find someone, my old teammate and grad school friend had said. What they meant: You are better than that horrible, tragic fate.
I reunited with Ellie after six weeks. I clutched her wriggling body to mine and savored the warm, sticky swipe of her tongue across my eyelids. I vowed I’d never leave her for so long again.
In some odd way, it is a wasted life, Georgia wrote to another sister Claudia in the months leading up to Ida’s death. I don’t know what made Georgia deem Ida’s life “wasted.” I don’t think it was Ida’s singleness. At this time, Georgia was fifteen years a widow, living a life of blessed solitude in her beloved New Mexico. But because I can’t help it, I project. I have put myself in relation to Ida through her spinsterhood, and when I read a wasted life, I read: a life, alone, like mine, wasted.
As she was settling Ida’s estate after she died, Claudia proved overwhelmed with the house and Ida’s things, and declared the life not wasted, but grim: There is so much of Ida in it, and I do not think she was too happy. A small part of the “so much” was oil paintings, prints, drawings, and an exhibition scrapbook. Meticulous records, I think, of self; of life. Of having done something.
But records of self extend beyond a home. They are accidental, circumstantial, unmeditated. On May 10, 1943, Ida’s full signature—Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe—appeared in the registry of the Whittier Art Association and Gallery. Beside the signature, a declaration in quick cursive: in charge. She was manning the desk, volunteering her time for a community in which she was an active part. Today, the Whittier Art Gallery keeps a meticulous record of Ida’s community involvement, inspired by Sue Canterbury’s 2014 New York Times article, “A Sister in the Shadow of Georgia O’Keeffe.” On their website, the Whittier Art Gallery wrote: This is the article that inspired us to focus on Ida O’Keeffe’s life in Whittier. [The article] ended with these words: “Ms. Canterbury said she was looking forward to more interviews and archive visits. Descendants of Ida O’Keeffe’s neighbors in Whittier, perhaps, remember anecdotes about a famous artist’s forgotten and neglected sister. ‘There has to be something out there.’
There were loads of something, evidence of Ida’s talks, exhibits, classes, memberships, leadership roles, volunteer work. You can find her in newspaper articles, photos, logbooks. She served refreshments, she worked the desk, she hosted classes at the Gallery and in her home. She was the star of shows. In Whittier, Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe was in charge of a committed self. Each newspaper clipping or signature or photo exists as a record of decision after decision to show up.
Unpartnered, untethered, I am free to float without the pull of another’s gravity. Sometimes, I drift into the orbit of my family—my mother, my sister, my niece. But they are a morning’s drive away. Most days, I am my own planet. Or: I am my own star.
My home is mine and Ellie’s alone. My stuff, I hope, stands in for a happy life. Come and see my clump of souvenir magnets from touring Broadway shows on the fridge; the cabinets stuffed with Disney parks mugs; the stacks of books about birds and octopuses and sports; the oil pastel my sister painted of the Doel Reed Center in Taos; the Kermit the Frog plush on the bed in the spare room; or the framed photo of my great grandmother cradling her rescue pup. This home’s a shrine to my many loves. But no lover.
Without a partner, there’s no need to consult another as I plan my days. I’m often drifty because of it. I like my time loose. I’m drifting now as I write the raw draft of this passage. I walk slowly around my neighborhood and speak this text into my phone. I’ve spent hours thinking of this essay. A Turkey Vulture circles above. I know she’s probably searching for her next meal, but I can’t help but think she’s simply killing time. It’s barely spring and I’m wearing bare sleeves for the first time in months and months. The sun is warm on my shoulders and the breeze is cool. Ellie waits at home. I guess she’s my tether, the creature with whom I’m in tandem orbit. I’ll return to her, feed her, and make myself a quick dinner. She’ll settle; I’ll settle. The house and self, quieted. Contented.
Or maybe I’ll get a text from a friend and we’ll chat for hours; or there’ll be an exhibition downtown for a regional artist who paints big, dreamy skies; or a reading by a colleague; or a trivia night at the local brewery; or my tennis league; or a performance of some musical or old Broadway star, where I’ll show up alone and leave acquainted with a woman and her preteen daughter. In the mood, I’ll extract myself from solitude, connect my star to others, constellate for a time. These others might understand me and my life—some are without another to orbit, too, or the families they knit are nonnormative. Others might not. But to be seen is the risk of showing up. To be misunderstood is the risk of living.
In a blog post for the Dallas Museum of Art, Rebecca Singerman writesof the relationship between Star Gazing in Texas and its frame, dotted with those charming sticker stars. These stars on the frame make it part of the composition…the star-gazing woman looks outside her painted environment, making the frame part of her world as well as part of ours.
A frame gives shape. Contains. Here, the frame bridges art and world; self and others. The stars act as agents to muddle the divide.
What’s an essay but a frame? And what’s the subject of an essay but a bridge, but a sticker star through which to connect self to self, self to others?
Invited in, I project myself onto Star Gazing in Texas. I place my own dog at the woman’s feet. I see the woman centered and the farmland stretched behind her and I see myself there, standing tall, centered. I see Ida centered. She centers herself, manning her own life like she manned the desk at the Whittier Art Gallery. In charge. I wish I could purchase a print of Star Gazing in Texas to hang above my desk alongside Georgia’s Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur, 1930. A reminder to exist as subject. See the woman stargazing, draped in moonlight. See me pace the perimeter of my apartment complex, gazing at butterflies and birds, time and self loose. There I am at tennis, beneath the buzzing court lights, cuddling moths after declaring my dog my baby. Behold the two men who scoff and shield their eyes with the crooks of elbows. But they’re not centered here. It’s me, lethargic in spring, sometimes lonely. It’s me, stargazing now in Texas, charged with the workings of my own life. Enraptured.
Kaila Lancaster’s work has appeared in Brevity, The Pinch, Third Coast, Blue Mesa Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others. She lives and writes in the Piney Woods of East Texas with her dog, Ellie.