Uptown Downtown Artown

Jess Reinholt was fifteen and bored and had come downtown mostly to get out of the house, and she found the festival by accident, following the sound of a band across the bridge to the island in the river where somebody had strung lights in the cottonwoods.

Her father had told her about it, sort of, the way he told her about everything, sideways, over the counter of the record store. There was an arts thing going on in July, he had said, some new civic push, they were calling it Artown, or something clunkier than that, one of those names that sounds like it was decided in a meeting. Dennis had a low opinion of anything decided in a meeting. He had been selling records on this street for going on thirty years, since before Jess was born, and he had watched the street go from busy to thin to nearly dead, the mall pulling the shoppers south, the casinos shrinking, the downtown emptying out block by block until his store sat in a row where half the windows were papered over. He was not against a festival. He just did not believe a festival could fix what the mall had broken, and he said so, and Jess had heard him say it enough that she had come tonight half expecting to find nothing, some card tables and a folk singer and a lot of empty park.

Instead the park was full. Wingfield Park, the little island in the Truckee where the river split around it, the one with the old amphitheater and the big sloping lawn, and it was packed with people on blankets in the July evening, families and college kids and old couples in lawn chairs, and there was a band on the amphitheater stage playing something with horns, and past the music, along the paths under the trees, there were painters and potters and a woman doing something with molten glass and a booth where kids were making prints. Jess drifted through it. She had not known there were this many people left downtown at night. She had not known they would come out for this.

She stopped at the glass. A woman in a leather apron was gathering a glob of it, orange and alive, off the end of a rod, turning it constantly so it would not sag, and Jess stood at the rope and watched her shape the thing out of nothing, breath and heat and a steady hand, and did not move for a long time. It was not that she had never seen art. Her family was full of the edges of it, in a way, though nobody would have called it that. Her great-grandmother Clara had come to Reno to end a marriage and stayed to open a dress shop, had built a whole life on knowing how a seam should fall and what a color did next to another color. Her father sold the best three minutes other people had ever made, over and over, all day, and could tell you why a record was great in a way that made you hear it. There was making in the family, Jess thought, watching the glass. It just had never had this name put on it, or these lights in the trees, or this many strangers standing around in the dark to watch it happen. It had always been a trade, a way to keep a shop open on a hard street, a thing you did with your hands because it paid or because it had to be done. Nobody had ever set it on a stage in a park and called it a reason for a whole town to come outside at night. She had not known you were allowed to do that with it, and the not-knowing embarrassed her a little, standing there, the way it embarrasses you to learn late a thing everyone else seems to have been told.

The town was in trouble. Jess knew that the way a fifteen-year-old knows the large facts of her place, in the background, from the grown-ups. The casinos were laying people off. The downtown her father worked in was the punch line of jokes on television. There had been a flood a couple of winters back that put half these streets underwater, and there were empty buildings everywhere, the big dead hotel by the river with its windows dark, the papered storefronts, the sense the adults gave off that the good years had been before and the question now was only how far down it went. And into all of that somebody had decided to string lights in the cottonwoods and invite the town to come look at painters. It should have been small against everything that was wrong. Standing in it, it did not feel small.

The glassblower finished the piece, a small heavy vase with a lip that curled, and set it into an oven to cool slowly so it would not shatter from its own memory of the heat, and she caught Jess watching and said, you have to let it come down slow or it cracks, and Jess nodded like she had known that, and did not, and filed it away. It came down slow or it cracked. She would think about that later without knowing why.

She walked back toward the music with the whole park moving around her, the river loud under the bridge, the light going violet over the mountains the way it did in July, late, past nine and still not dark. She thought about her father in the store, closed now, gone home, sure in his gentle way that this would not last, that the meeting-people would run out of money or interest and the lights would come down and the street would go back to dying. Maybe he was right. He usually was, about the town. But he was standing outside the thing and she was standing inside it, and from inside it did not feel like a last gasp. It felt like a door somebody had propped open in a building everyone had agreed was closed.

She did not have the words for what she wanted yet. She was fifteen. But she stood on the lawn of the island in the river in the failing light with the horns going and the strangers all around her turned toward one lit stage, and something in her that had been idle and bored an hour ago had come awake and would not go back to sleep, and she knew, without being able to say it, that she was going to make things, that she wanted whatever it was these people had, the apron and the rod and the steady hand and the crowd in the dark leaning in.

She stayed until the band finished. Then she crossed the bridge back into the emptied-out town, past her father’s dark store, already planning, without a plan, how to come back.

---