Canvas

1| The Recycled Year

The year of 1931 felt recycled. Like it was the molding leftovers wrapped up several days ago from a fancy dinner party and left, forgotten, in the refrigerator. It was a year of remembering, a year where nothing felt new.

The glamour of the 20’s was a memory just out of reach, but there were still reminders everywhere. It was as if the decade had bled into the next like a well of ink upturned, its thick black stain spilling over fresh parchment. The stain slipped through page after page of a book that was not yet written and dirtied the foreseeable future.

People were so poor that everything was salvaged from the past - furniture, clothes, even dreams. The American dream still buzzed in the ear of every man, woman and child, but the promise of a brighter and better future seemed stale, hollow. The light at the end of the tunnel looked false. It was a chance no one could afford to bet on anymore.

Alice Winters felt like backwash in the last dregs at the bottom of a bottle of bad gin. She was overlooked, thrown out with the garbage and poured into the gutter. Only the sewers accepted her now. She wasn’t always like this. People used to notice her. Her presence was so bright and loud it gave people headaches, like the pounding of a hangover the morning after a particularly rowdy party. But she was the type of headache no aspirin could cure.

Her family was once wealthy. Their apartment was stylish and her wardrobe the envy of every girl she knew. Painted stockings with fancy gems spilled from her wardrobe; shimmering dresses in every shade and color filled her closet to capacity; bright capes and full coats were folded on the fainting couch next to her bedroom, leaving no room for any fainting; and strings of pearls hung from her bedpost like ivy draping from grand mansions. Boys would beg to dance with her, girls would ask her to recount her wild stories of long nights spent dancing into hazy mornings. She was never bored in a city as awake and wealthy as D.C. Her dreams were big and her future looked perfect. 

When she turned eighteen, she would move to New York or Chicago, somewhere really bustling and posh, and become a dancer. Then, after she made a name for herself, she would go to California to be in films. She could sing, she could dance and she was a swell actress. But her dreams came crashing down with the stock market.

Her father lost their fortune on Wall Street and ran away with his floozy secretary who was rumored to be in the family way. Alice and her mother were thrown into scandal and poverty, neither of which sat well with her tightly-wound mother who was all-too accustomed to the notoriety of high society. She fell hard and fast, and the gossip only fueled the fire. She was kerosine and her father threw the match when he walked. She was positively lit, her life would be nothing but ash.

Alice saw her drinking the last of her booze from her hidden flask one night and heard her cry when it was empty. Her makeup ran, her clothes tore and she became addicted to the vices that used to grip her father’s wallet before he straightened out. Her mother gambled, she bet what few pennies they had left and leaned heavily on drugs until she finally ended her life and left Alice utterly alone and broken.

What was once a shiny, flawless and easy life shattered into a million tiny slivers, never to be pieced together again. Alice hadn’t realized how delicately her life was balanced. Just a simple tip of the scale sent everything falling and crashing to the ground. What was left of her life lived in the mud. 

Her father was gone. Her mother was dead. Never again would she know the same comfort that came with wealth. All she had left to remember her life from before was her dreams, which clawed at her in the middle of the night until she was shaking so heard she felt sick. The nightmares of her family’s plush apartment; the food she’d been too full to eat that she instead fed to the trashcan; the wasteful parties of booze that spilled from glasses like water spitting from a fountain; the muggy nights with friends and boys she danced close to at jazz clubs filled with dark musicians - each scene came scratching back to her, pulling itself from the shadows like a monster reminding her of all she had lost.

Warmth. Security. Love.

The world that had been tentatively built around her since the crash was full of phantoms from a different time. She was haunted by the past.

Now she only owned three dresses, which she wore on rotation, that were just slightly too old to be in-fashion. Everyday, she wore the same pair of satin shoes with a now tarnished silver clasp and delicately painted heel that was fading faster than memories of her old, beautiful life. The only thing she had left from her mother was the dark brown coat that was only just too small. The fur collar was once soft and fashionable, but the fur has long since become stiff and sad. Even though the wool fabric was worn so thin in some places that she worried it would rip, it at least provided her some semblance of warmth. Her mother’s wedding ring was recently kept strung on a necklace that rested next to Alice’s heart, but she pawned it the other week so she could eat. The money only lasted her a handful of days. It broke her heart to sell it, but she was so hungry she couldn’t see straight. She was worried that if she passed out from the hunger, she might never wake up again.

The one item that Alice would never pawn, no matter how hungry she became, was her hat. It was a fashionable cloche, a dark scarlet the color of blood that hugged the waves of the jaw-length bob she had first cut when she had dreams of being famous. It was given to her on her seventeenth birthday and she would never part with it. It’s sentimental value was more than any money she’d ever get at a pawn shop. The ribbon that kept the hat close to her head was still tied in a neat bow, it’s edges not yet fraying from age. No matter what, she would keep her hat clean, safe and beautiful. It was all she had left to hold on to since her dreams had been stolen from her.

Stolen. Everything was stolen and it made her furious. The promise of America’s future soured on the tongue of Uncle Sam like a lie. Wall Street had robbed Americans of their future and like stubborn, bratty children, refused to apologize. 

Alice was tired of being robbed. She’d had enough of it. 

Now it was her time to be a thief.