by Laura Tucker
“What about your show? Aren’t you excited?”
I could feel her shake her head no.
“Why not?” Her new dealer had told her that there was a lot of demand for her new work. I thought that meant that my parents wouldn’t have to fight about money anymore.
I closed my eyes quickly against the thought of money and my dad and everything he might have done for some. My mom’s hair smelled dirty.
“What about that new piece you started? With the teabag that looks like a wedding veil?”
She interrupted me, almost mad. “It’s just not the art I’m supposed to be making right now.”
She was so tired, I wanted to leave her alone, but I needed to know.
“What do you mean?”
She rolled back over to look at me. Even moving that little bit seemed to take a lot out of her.
“Do you remember when Ms. Nora got the caterpillars?”
Of course I remembered. When I was in preschool, we had a fish tank filled with caterpillars. They didn’t do anything but eat; Ms. Nora said it was like having teenagers. We basically forgot they were there after they turned into cocoons. Then one day after nap, Sam Weathers noticed a butterfly drying its wings on the metal mesh top of the cage, and Joseph Scarlato saw another one pushing its way out of a cocoon. After that, there was absolutely no point in trying to get the class to sit still for story time.
By the next morning, all of the butterflies had come out, and we took the tank to the park to release them. We ran into my mom on the street on the way there, and Ms. Nora said she could come with us to set them free, even though it wasn’t a parent activity.
It was a brilliant, sunny, early spring day. The birds were out, and the trees were filled with new buds, and my chest felt like it would burst because I was the only one who got to hold the hand of my funny, beautiful mom.
When we got to the park, we sat in a circle on the grass, and Ms. Nora took the top off the terrarium. We’d thought the butterflies would fly right out, happy to be free, but that wasn’t what happened. Most of them stayed right where they were, in the cage, so my mom taught us a song about shipwrecks and feathers and kitchen chairs while we waited. Then one butterfly flew out, and another, and another—but still, they didn’t fly away.
Instead, one by one, they settled into my mom’s curly red hair.
The whole class lay down on our backs in the grass, even Ms. Nora. My mom sat in the center, singing folk songs to us about shipwrecks and feathers and kitchen chairs—a queen, crowned by a cloud of contented butterflies, their orange and black wings moving lazily in her wild, beautiful hair.
It was impossible to believe that the person in her bed was the same person.
“Mom,” I said. Her eyes were closed again. “What about the butterflies?”
She shook her head and sighed, impatient with me. “I’m about to change into something different, that’s all. Like the caterpillars did.”
That frightened me. “Why? Why do you need to change into something different?”
“It’s part of growing up, I guess.” Then she put her head back down on her arm and closed her eyes. When I put my arm around her, she pushed it away—not mad, exactly, but like I’d hurt her. So I lay quietly next to her with my hands by my sides, looking at the patch on the ceiling that I could never line up.
I didn’t want to stay there in bed with her. I didn’t want to leave, either, but eventually I did.
FREE FALLING
The only thing you can see from the windows in my house is the building right across the street. It looks like ours, six stories tall and dark with city dirt, wearing its own fire escape like the hard jewelry on the girls outside the bars on St. Mark’s Place.
You have to go outside if you want to see the sky. So I put one leg up onto the sill for leverage, grabbed both of the brass handles, and rolled up the big windows so I could crawl out.
The rain had stopped, but the sky was grey. Not the shiny grey it turns before a storm, reflective like the inside of an oyster shell, but flat, like an ashtray, like it was stealing the light from everything around it.
Everything I could see was grey. Apollo talks about finding all the colors in a color; he’s always showing me the brown and blue in a pink, the green in a deep blue. It was true that the band around the neck of the pigeon on a windowsill across the street had some iridescent purple and green in it, and the gum stains on the patched concrete sidewalk were really battleship blue. But if I’d been drawing my block on that chilly Sunday afternoon, I wouldn’t have needed anything but my Blackwing.
I leaned forward so I could see the paste-up of the egg through the bars. The colors had faded, so that it blurred into the wall behind it. One edge had come loose, tattered by the wind. I remembered how happy that artist had been when he’d seen how it looked on the wall, like it was hanging at Joyce Walker’s or one of the big-deal galleries on West Broadway. He’d wanted his work to be seen. He’d cared enough to wear a suit and climb that fence. Now it was just more clutter on the street, ugly like the weeds and litter choking the bottom of the barbed wire.
It was time to face facts. My dad probably wasn’t coming back. He might even be going to jail. I had a hard time imagining him as a forger; it just didn’t seem like something he’d do. But if you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would have told you I couldn’t imagine him leaving, either.
Not to mention that my mom wasn’t getting better. In fact, with every day, she seemed to be getting worse.
If I turned around, I could see the outlines of her sculpture on the workbench by the window. What had she meant, that she was making the wrong art? My dad would sometimes tell Joyce that he didn’t think a young artist had found the right way to say what they had to say. But Joyce always said that the only way forward for those artists was to do the work—to keep making the wrong art, saying even a little piece of what they had to say, getting better and closer all the time.
But my mom wasn’t making anything at all. It didn’t seem like she could. And I knew what she’d said about growing up was wrong. Plenty of people grew up without going to bed.
A truck, the body covered with graffiti, rumbled down the street and ground to a halt at the loading dock for the textile factory next door. The cab door creaked open and slammed, and then the metal door to the factory. I didn’t move. A smashed bottle trapped between the cobblestones glinted up at me like a pirate’s gold tooth, the only spot of brightness on the block.
A thick twist of cigarette smoke curled up through the grating, the dirty smell hanging around me like an uninvited guest. I sat out there without moving until I heard the door bang closed again.
It’s like I said: Nobody ever looks up.
* * *
When it got too cold on the fire escape, I went inside to find something to eat.
But as the heavy window rolled down behind me and I started to walk across the big room toward the kitchen, the whole world started to spin.
It felt as if the floor was falling out from underneath me, as if I was walking on a tightrope instead of on the floor.
I stopped in my tracks, but that only made it worse. Standing still, I couldn’t seem to get my balance at all.
Hunched over and shuffling, I made my way painfully toward the couch, each little step feeling like the next one would pitch me through to the center of the earth. Even though I was looking at the weathered wood floor, feeling it solid and ordinary beneath my feet, I could not convince my brain I wasn’t going to fall through.
I have no idea how long it took me to walk the fifteen feet from the window. When I got to the couch, I closed my eyes, grabbed fistfuls of the white cotton sheet covering it to stop my hands from shaking, and breathed in and out as deeply as I could.
“Get it together, Olympia,” I told myself sternly. But for a while, there wasn’t much I could do except hold
on.
When the spinning stopped and I could finally open my eyes again, the world seemed normal. There was the scarred brick wall, painted white, the big nail in it next to the door where I always hung my keys. There was the jam jar on the plywood counter, the one I’d had orange juice from that morning, pulp still sticking to its side. In the far corner, there was my mom’s workbench, propped up on two sawhorses. Her sculpture was there, front and center, like it was asking me, What happens to a person who has to make things, when they don’t want to make things anymore?
My hands finally stopped shaking. I lay there for a while, trying to figure out what had happened to me. Whatever it was, it seemed to have passed.
“See?” the stern part of me said. But the rest of me wasn’t so sure.
SAVING LAMBIE
The next day after school, the boys walked back to Greene Street with me. We were all going to the studio, to do our project on Ancient Egypt.
We always do our art projects at the studio. Dr. and Mr. Charles are supportive of the arts, but Richard’s apartment is too small for us to leave a big project out. Alex’s house is a loft like mine, except Linda has a hissy fit if you drink a glass of water in there. I can’t imagine what she’d do if you got glue on one of her leather sofas, or paint on her refinished floors.
The studio, on the other hand, is already covered in paint and glue and solvent and worse, and my dad and Apollo don’t care if it takes you more than one day to finish as long as you’re set up somewhere that won’t interfere with their work. Plus, the studio comes with everything you could ever need to make something. My dad says that Michelangelo could have made a masterpiece on newspaper he found in the trash, but Apollo says that the proper tools and materials make a good artist better.
First, though, we had to stop at Alex’s house. He was going to make a mummy, only because his original idea hadn’t worked out. He’d really wanted to make a canopic jar, which is the jar they put your organs in after they’ve taken them out to mummify you. He’d emptied out the pickle jar he uses at home for loose change, and was going to buy some real livers and kidneys from the meat section at C-Town to put in there, but Ms. Colantonio overheard him telling me about it and cut him off at the pass.
Alex’s house is only two blocks away from mine, but his whole block is much cleaner. There’s even a store on his block, even though we can’t tell what it sells besides lamps and pillows; everything in there is white. Linda is always saying that SoHo real estate is some of the most undervalued property in the city. She calls herself a pioneer. (Say it like she does, without moving your jaw.) But my dad says plenty of people live and work here already; they’re just not rich people.
Alex’s building has a new coat of dark blue paint, and he has a doorbell and a buzzer system instead of a key you throw down in a tube sock. Alex’s dad probably doesn’t even own any tube socks, since you can’t wear them with a suit.
Richard and I made ourselves comfortable on the loading dock, our legs dangling off the edge, while Alex went up to his house. Neither one of us felt up to dealing with Linda, and we had a lot of work to do on the Transformation section of the Taxonomy.
“I’ve divided the Transformation section into two parts,” Richard explained. “Shapeshifters can go back and forth. After a Metamorphosis, you’re stuck.” Then he told me a story about a guy turning into a roach, but I didn’t want to hear about it, so he gave me some torn-out pictures to copy instead.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when boom! Alex landed next to me. He likes to jump the whole last flight of stairs from the landing. Sometimes he props the door open at the bottom and lands in a roll.
With a flourish, he popped up and pulled a stuffed animal out from under his shirt, waving it at me and Richard.
“Ta-da,” he said. “Meet my mummy.”
I don’t usually like to give Alex the satisfaction of a reaction, but I couldn’t get ahead of the look of shock that crept across my face.
“Holy cow, Alex,” I said, my lips thick with horror. “You can’t mummify Lambie.”
Lambie is Maggie’s favorite stuffed animal, the one she’s slept with every single night since she was born. Losing Lambie is right up there next to Getting Enough Protein in Linda’s Personal List of Things to Worry About. She’d been so freaked that something would happen to Lambie that she went back to the store where they’d got her and bought a spare, but Maggie took one look at the imposter and pushed it out the window of the Fourteenth Street crosstown bus.
“Not Lambie,” she’d said, before putting her thumb back in her mouth.
That had been a couple of years ago, and Maggie was nine now, but Lambie was still her most important toy. If Alex mummified Lambie, Maggie was going to lose her mind. And I didn’t even want to think about what Linda would do.
I tried to communicate this to Alex. “If you mummify Maggie’s lamb,” I told him, “it’s gonna be your organs in a jar.” Frankly, I was worried about my own organs, too. Linda is always on the lookout for bad influences.
Alex held Lambie tighter and stuck out his chin. A bad sign.
I stole a look at Richard. I was hoping that he understood the gravity of the situation, but you can’t always tell what Richard is thinking. I watched as he reached out with great deliberation and took Lambie out of Alex’s hands. He tilted his head and turned her around slowly, looking at her carefully from every angle. Her fur was matted and sparse, and the stuffing was long gone from her ears and legs, leaving them floppy and chunking up the center of her. She was well loved, that was for sure.
When Richard spoke, it was with great authority. “The real problem is that this won’t make a good mummy, Alex.” He shook his head, and then shook poor bedraggled Lambie, gently and with regret. “It’s going to look like a mummified dog. If your mummy is going to be convincing, you need to start out with a stuffed animal that’s shaped more like a person.”
I knew from Apollo and the story of Egyptian brown that the Egyptians had mummified their animals, too, but I kept my mouth shut, holding my breath. There was a long, terrible pause, the three of us looking at Lambie, limp and defenseless in Richard’s hands. Then I guess Alex saw Richard’s logic, because he grabbed the scruffy toy and stormed back upstairs.
A couple of minutes later, he appeared, defiant, with another stuffed animal from Maggie’s stash. This one was a stiff, demented-looking pink bunny with buck teeth made out of scratchy felt and oversized plastic eyes that had been glued on crooked. It was horrible, the kind of stuffed animal you win at a street fair at the shooting game after you’ve had zeppole and then throw in the garbage an hour later because you’re tired of carrying it around and want to get cotton candy.
I hoped it wasn’t another one of Maggie’s favorites. Frankly, I didn’t see how it could be.
“This is a much better choice,” Richard said, examining it closely before nodding his satisfaction.
I exhaled: He’d saved Lambie.
Alex grunted and set off down Mercer toward my house, tucking the bunny backward under his arm so that its horrible, violent-criminal bug eyes leered back at me the whole way.
FIELD OF REEDS
With Lambie safe from mummification, I was free to go back to thinking about my own project.
The week before, Ms. Colantonio had taken our whole class to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the mummies. On the way up there, I’d sat next to Alex on the bus. Field trips are good for Alex, what with the moving around and all.
“What’s this?” I asked, opening the paper bag he’d brought for lunch and sniffing suspiciously at a log of something wrapped in brown waxed paper.
“A granola bar? With spelt? And maybe carob?” he said unhappily as I took a cautious bite, then leaned back against the ripped vinyl seat to look out the window.
“Remember that playground your dad used to take us to up here?” he asked me.
But I could only nod because there was no talking around the horrible ball of toenails and sawdust in my mouth. I don’t see what Linda could possibly get out of making such a hurtful snack.
I did remember, though. My dad used to take Alex and me to the Met every Saturday. In the morning, we’d look at art, my dad keeping up with Alex so I could stop to sketch whatever I wanted to. (I was into the Dutch Masters then.) For lunch, we’d get a hot dog from the cart outside—two, sometimes three for Alex, and a pretzel with mustard for me if they looked soft and not stale. Then we’d spend the whole afternoon in the enormous new Egyptian-themed playground next to the museum. My dad used to say cheerfully it was so big that if we ever got kidnapped, it would take him an hour to notice we were gone.
Thinking about those Saturdays made my dad seem so close that I took a deep breath, as if I might catch a whiff of soap and leather. But the bus smelled like dirty metal and old gum, the way every school bus smells.
For years, Alex and I had played the same game every week at that playground next to the Met. I don’t remember whose idea it was originally, or how we came up with the rules. There was no way to win or lose: The only goal of the game was to avoid all contact with other human beings. It was like hide-and-seek, except we were a team, and the people we were trying to hide from didn’t know they were playing.
We’d spend hours in that playground on Saturday afternoons, ducking around corners, disappearing through the sprinklers, laying ourselves flat against the sun-warmed walls of the concrete pyramids. At the beginning, we used gestures to signal to each other, crashing back into the cement tunnels whenever we saw someone, our hearts in our mouths as if we were being chased. Eventually, though, the slightest lean was enough to tell the other person it was time to melt back against the stone.
The bus carrying our class pulled up outside the school tour entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is much less impressive than the real entrance with all the stairs. As the teachers herded the class off the bus, Alex and I both looked over toward the playground, but the whole museum was between it and us.