In the Company of Crazies

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  For our self-portraits.

  We had this class out in the barn where Sam usually worked, but today his stuff had been cleared away. One long table set on two sawhorses was pushed against the wall. All kinds of blades and electric power tools hung on the wall. Cords and hammers and drills.

  Angel must have had his own corner in Sam’s workshop, and he wasn’t about to give it up today. He had a small table and chair. He had a coffee cup and a book.

  And he was sitting there, watching everyone invade his space.

  “Finding the right medium is what this exercise is all about,” Ms. Dee was saying. “I want everyone to walk around the room, which I’ve set up with different paints, markers, watercolors, and clay.”

  On the word clay Tommy and Carl, who up to this point had been flicking wood chips at each other, perked up.

  Ms. Dee was apparently unaware that giving teenage boys unrestricted use of modeling clay was not an entirely terrific idea. So what happened was almost inevitable. I think there are just certain boys who revert to their caveman instincts when supplied with certain earth substances, like dirt and water.

  In any case, when Tommy and Carl got a lump of moldable clay in their hands and a little loosely supervised time, it seemed they were capable of rendering only one phallic idol.

  And then falling apart with laughter.

  I didn’t even have to see what they were making out of their clay.

  I thought their idea of a self-portrait was perfectly fitting.

  I wondered what the art teacher was going to do when she caught them. For the time being she was trying to get Drew to choose a medium for his self-portrait. Actually she was first attempting to get him to come out from under the table where Billy and I were sitting. We had chosen some good old pencils and crayons.

  “Pastels?” she suggested to Drew. Ms. Dee was young, but she had totally white hair. And she was very tall. She wore a long dress. I thought she looked pretty and different. She had a big beaded necklace on. But I shook my head. She was trying too hard, and it wasn’t going to go over very well here. Maybe at my old school. Maybe she would have looked interesting. Or artsy.

  But here she looked weak. The perfect target.

  I could imagine back home, which kids would have tried to talk to her and ask her who her favorite artist was, what was her favorite museum in which European counties. Maybe I would have been one of them.

  Ms. Dee’s big earrings moved back and forth every time she moved her head, even the slightest bit.

  “You can just draw. I have charcoals. Colored pencils? Or just use a regular pencil. Don’t you want to draw? Do you want this mirror?” she said, bending down under the table. When Ms. Dee stood up again, I noticed her earring had gotten caught sideways in her hair and stayed like that.

  Drew wouldn’t come out.

  “Well, when you’re ready then,” she said, as if hiding under a table was all part of the creative process, and she wandered away.

  “Oh my God.” I heard Ms. Dee from across the room and I knew she had made her way over to the clay table and seen what Carl and Tommy were creating. I must have been at Mountain Laurel too long. Unfazed,

  I continued to work on my picture.

  “You’re good,” Billy said to me.

  “No, I’m not. I can’t draw faces.”

  “Well, it doesn’t look that much like you, but it’s good,” Billy said, looking closely at my paper.

  “Billy, it’s not me. I can’t draw people. I’m not going to. I’m just doodling.”

  “Oh, that explains why you look like a bird,” Billy said.

  I almost laughed, but he wasn’t joking.

  “Thanks,” I said. I wanted to say something nice about Billy’s but it was hard.

  “Well, they will hate mine,” Billy said.

  “No, they won’t,” I said. “It’s not bad.”

  Billy looked at me.

  “I have that floating head thing. They hate the floating head thing,” he said. “See my head-floating thing? They hate that.”

  Billy’s drawing looked more like a five-year-old had done it than a twelve-year-old. It was messy and very plain. Two dots for eyes. An L for a nose. And sure enough, his head wasn’t connected to the neck and shoulders he had drawn.

  “They say it means something really bad when your head floats like that,” Billy said. “But it’s worse when you don’t have a head at all.”

  “Why would you draw yourself without a head?” Carl and Tommy were still trying very hard to justify their “self-portraits” to the teacher.

  “No, no,” Billy explained. “You have a face, but no head. Like eyes and a mouth but no circle around it. They think that’s really crazy.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I had to ask.

  Billy was trying to be very patient with me. He had taken to wearing short-sleeved army surplus shirts to better reveal his scar, which was now flat and dully red.

  “You know, them,” he said. “The ones who write all that stuff about you that gets put in your permanent record.”

  “Your what?” I asked.

  “Your permanent record that gets put in Gretchen’s file cabinet. You know?” Billy told me flatly.

  “Her what?”

  I didn’t notice right away, but Drew had come out from under the table to stand next to us, listening and watching. He tried to help with the explanation. “The filing cabinet. In the office. Next to the kitchen.”

  Drew sat down and picked up a pencil.

  “They hide money in there too. But that room is always locked,” Billy said. “And candy.”

  I didn’t really want to know how he knew that.

  “I broke in there once,” Billy said anyway.

  “Well then, why don’t you just connect the neck. Here.” I pointed to the space on Billy’s picture between his floating head and the two lumps that I thought were supposed to be shoulders. “Like just two longer lines or add a little shirt collar or something.”

  Billy just grinned.

  * * *

  Ms. Dee said art was “the act” of creating, not the “result” of creating.

  “We are too product oriented,” she said. Her hoop earring had broken free as if to accentuate her words; it bounced against her cheek when she talked.

  “You should enjoy the process and not worry if other people think your work is good or not,” Ms. Dee went on. She wandered around the room encouraging us.

  However, Ms. Dee did tell Carl and Tommy to put their “art” back into the clay bin even though they protested.

  “I thought you said it didn’t matter what other people thought,” Carl tried. He wanted to keep his.

  “But I was really enjoying the process,” Tommy told her.

  “Yeah, we all know you enjoy the process, about three times a day,” Carl added, which was when Ms. Dee decided to forcefully take their creations away from them.

  I watched as she made sure all the clay was totally smushed down before she closed the top of the bin. She took a moment to sort of compose herself. She ran her hands down the front of her smock and then, with a smile, began to circle around the room. I heard her kind of suck in her breath when she came around to Drew.

  “Is this you?” she asked.

  Drew shrugged.

  “Wow,” Billy said, leaning over. “You’re really good.”

  “God, he’s good,” Carl said.

  There was a little crowd around our table.

  “It looks like a girl. Look at the hair,” Tommy said over the tops of our heads. “I thought this was supposed to be a self-portrait.”

  “Drew is a girl,” Carl added.

  Even back at my school, being called a girl is apparently the utmost of insults.

  “It isn’t him,” Ms. Dee said. She was studying the picture. Drew wasn’t listening anymore. All of a sudden he was all alone. He had that look on his face. He was drawing quickly but very deliberately, very carefully.

  I knew Ms. Dee w
anted to tell him how good it was. How talented he was. But that would go against everything she had just lectured us about. She just watched.

  I had to sit up in my seat and kind of lift myself up a little to see Drew’s picture. It was beautiful. It was sad and simple, and every line moved together to create a face. At first you couldn’t see it, but then you could. You had to look at it the right way; you had to not be looking for it. And then there it was.

  “Jeez, she’s right. It’s not Drew,” Billy said suddenly.

  Everyone turned and looked.

  It was my face. It was me.

  * * *

  Drew had offered it to me before I realized how much I wanted it. Like the perfume at the mall. Only this time it was a gift.

  “You want it?” Drew asked me.

  That’s when everyone assumed it was a picture of me. As if that was proof.

  “See,” Billy said proudly. “I told you. It’s Mia. It’s a picture of Mia.”

  “It looks like she’s a ghost,” Carl said, standing toward the back of the crowd.

  “She looks like a freakazoid.”

  “Shut up, faggot.”

  I don’t know who was talking. Or to whom. But suddenly I was embarrassed by all the attention.

  “No thanks, Drew. You keep it. It’s fantastic. It’s so great. You are really talented. You keep it. So you can remember me.”

  Drew sort of smiled and said, “Well, if you ever change your mind, it’s yours.”

  He folded up the paper and put it in his back pocket. But he never said it was a picture of me. He never actually said that.

  * * *

  Karen asked me this morning if I would help out in the nursery school because one of the aides was sick and couldn’t come in.

  “For the whole day?” I asked. That came out before I realized how it sounded.

  But, in fact, I had had the chance to see the nursery-school kids in action. They usually got to Mountain Laurel around 9:00 a.m. We were already in the School House building, gardening or reading. But I knew the kids came in those special school buses. A lot of the kids came down out of the bus in a mechanical lift. There was always an aide to meet them. A couple needed wheelchairs.

  I had seen two little girls, twins, I supposed, who clung to each other and walked into the nursery school like they were attached. They had oddly large heads and skinny little bodies.

  All the nursery-school kids left around 3:00, before I went back up to my room. By then the nursery school was clean and quiet again.

  “No,” Karen answered. “I have a sub coming, but she can’t get here until ten-thirty, eleven.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Sure.”

  Mary Belle was the head nursery-school teacher. I had seen her before too. She was usually there and setting up the nursery school, just after I had showered and was coming down from my room. She was one of those really, really friendly teachers who always smiles. She wore big, colorful dresses. She was kind of large. She had short, tight curly hair that always looked wet and shiny. She was pretty and always happy, it seemed.

  She’d always be humming to herself as she put out puzzles and Play-Doh.

  “Today we’ll do water table,” Mary Belle told me. “Thank you so much for helping. Can you get out those water toys and put them in there.”

  She pointed.

  So far so good. No one had shown up yet. I helped get the room ready. I was familiar with some of the books and the little toys around the room. I used to love Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?

  I had a really clear memory of coloring in little animals to go with that story in kindergarten and then reading the book with the teacher. This might not be so bad.

  Then the kids came.

  There was one aide for every two or three kids. So by the time everyone got off the bus and came into the room, there were about thirteen kids and five teachers. Including me.

  Just getting everyone out of their coats and hats took a really long time. The kids with a lot of physical problems and the two in the wheelchairs had someone help them. Mary Belle told me to just wander around and help whoever needed it.

  I turned to the cubbies. For a second I didn’t move at all. I just stood there frozen. Everyone needed help. Except the two little twins. They were helping each other. That’s right where I went first.

  “Do you need any help?” I asked one of them.

  “No,” she answered. She was pulling her sister’s arm out of her coat. The sleeve had turned inside out and gotten too tight. But that didn’t stop her.

  “Maybe if you slip it back on and take it off from the bottom,” I tried. “Like this.” I began to take the coat and pull it back up, but the girl immediately pulled away.

  “I’ve got it,” her sister said. “We don’t need any help.”

  “We don’t need any help,” the sister with the stuck arm said.

  I stepped back. There was a little boy behind me who was just standing there. He hadn’t even taken his hat and gloves off. He was wearing snow pants and a jacket.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at me.

  I wondered if I should just start. Or would he get mad? Maybe I should ask him first.

  “Hello,” I said. I was sitting on the floor until I felt the cold and wetness from everyone’s boots seeping into my pants. I quickly switched to kneeling.

  “My name is Mia. Can I take off your coat for you?” He still didn’t answer.

  I heard a big impatient huff from behind me. It was one of the sisters. The one who had snapped at me a second ago. She was definitely the leader of her twin set. Her sister stood nearby, but behind, just a tiny bit. They both had their coats, hats, and boots off and hung up.

  I could see how really skinny they were. And there was an odd look to their faces, sort of like extra skin around their eyes. And they had big eyes.

  “You’re not doing it right,” the leader said.

  “Doing what right?”

  She had her hands on her hips. “Damian won’t talk to you unless you touch him,” she told me.

  “Touch him?”

  She let out a big breath of air. She was totally exasperated. “You have to grab his face. But gently. Like this.” She demonstrated on her sister, who burst out giggling, but I got the idea.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, thank you. So what’s your name?”

  “My name is Ruth and my sister is Naomi,” she told me. “It’s from a Bible story. Now do you think you can handle this?”

  I nodded and Ruth took her sister’s hand.

  “Oh, by the way, I’m Mia,” I said before they turned and headed for the water table.

  Ruth stopped and looked at me.

  “We know that,” she said. “You live upstairs.”

  * * *

  Cecily had this freak thing wrong with her when she was a baby, not even a year old. One day she kept lifting up her left leg, like she didn’t want to put weight on it or like it hurt. So my mom took her to the doctor, who didn’t know what it was, so he sent us to another doctor and then another and another all the way up to an oncologist, which, I found out at six years old, is a cancer doctor.

  If Cecily had been able to talk, it certainly would have helped. But while her twenty-plus-word vocabulary did (naturally) place her in a very high percentile for intelligence (actually measured), it didn’t allow her to tell us what was wrong with her leg.

  Nothing.

  It turned out to be nothing. After a bunch of X-rays, bone scans and blood tests, they found that nothing was wrong with her leg. It must have been some tiny fracture that elevated some tiny blood protein. Whatever.

  It was nothing.

  She was fine. But for a while, for about a month or so, things were awful. Just the thought of what might have been, what could have been. It stayed with our family for a long time.

  That’s what my morning in the nursery school was. It was the might have been and the could h
ave been. Not that any of these kids had cancer, but almost all of them had medical problems. They had brain defects and physical handicaps, learning disabilities and alcoholic mothers who drank themselves into oblivion all through their pregnancies.

  That’s what the twins had, fetal alcohol syndrome. Mary Belle told me.

  * * *

  “Do you ever worry that there are only so many words in the world?” Drew asked me. We were walking from the School House to the House for lunch. It was only a couple of days until Thanksgiving break, a couple of days and I would have been at Mountain Laurel for one month. I would get to go home this weekend.

  It was so cold, my cheeks were pinched. My scalp was cold. Everyone else was way ahead. They were probably inside already. Warm. Warmer. I stayed back with Drew.

  “What do ya mean?” I asked. I was trying to hurry, but Drew was slow.

  “Well, just technically speaking, there are only a finite number of words in any language, right?” Drew asked me. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “So then one day,” Drew said, “everything that can ever be said will be said. And every book that could ever be written will be.”

  “Hmmm.”

  I suppose I wasn’t really listening. I was too cold, and besides, half the things Drew (or anybody here) said were crazy. And sometimes with Drew, if you didn’t agree with him, he took it the wrong way. Like you didn’t like him, or like he had said something wrong, and he’d get upset. Or he’d just slip away and forget he had been talking to you at all. So sometimes it was better to just listen and pretend to agree.

  “And it’s the same with music, isn’t it?” Drew talked as we walked.

  “With music?”

  “Yeah,” Drew went on. “If there are only a certain number of musical notes, then, someday, no matter how far in the future that is, someday, every possible combination of musical notes will have been put together. And there will be no new songs.”

  “But there are so many combinations.” I wanted to reassure him.

  “But there is no such thing as infinite,” Drew was saying. “There has to be a finish to everything. An end.”

  I blew my warm breath into my hands. “Maybe, but it’s more than your brain could ever even imagine. That will never happen in your lifetime.”