Denise rolled her eyes but stayed quiet.
“Here’s what I want you to do: Start by choosing one item at home that feels like a work of art to you. It can be anything. Don’t ask anyone for advice — this has to be your own thinking. Describe this object for us without saying what it is. And this time, I won’t let you off the hook.” She grinned. “We’ll read some of your ideas aloud.”
Calder wondered what Picasso had meant. Was it that art wasn’t exactly the real world, but it said something real?
He began thinking up other combinations of art, a lie, and the truth that made sense. It worked almost like the logical arrangements of five squares that made up each piece of his set of pentominoes. How about: Art is the truth that tells a lie? Maybe all of life was about rearranging a few simple ideas. Calder, smiling at the chalkboard, now squirmed in his chair with excitement at the thought. If he could just get to those simple ideas, with a little practice, he’d be a cross between Einstein and the mathematician Ramanujan — or maybe Ben Franklin —
“Calder?”
He was twisted sideways in his chair, his arm resting on his head. His pentominoes had somehow gotten onto his desk. He scooped them hurriedly into his pocket, but one fell to the floor.
“Calder, did you want to say something? It looked like your hand was up,” Ms. Hussey said.
“I was just thinking. You know, about what Picasso said. But I’m still thinking,” he finished. There was a ripple of unfriendly laughter from the class around him, and Calder could feel the back of his neck getting hot. If only Tommy had been there, he would’ve elbowed Calder earlier and gotten him back on target.
The bell rang. Denise stepped on Calder’s pentomino piece just as he reached down to get it. Her knee hit him on the ear.
“Ooooops! Sor-ree I stepped on your toy!” She laughed and gave the plastic piece under her foot an extra scuff. It shot under Ms. Hussey’s desk.
“Sor-ree your feet are so big,” Calder heard Petra muttering behind him. Not sure he’d heard right, he turned to look for Petra, but she was gone.
Calder groped around for his pentomino as his teacher erased the board. He wanted to tell Ms. Hussey that he’d been thinking about important stuff, but he didn’t know how to say it.
Ms. Hussey turned toward him and smiled. “I know, Calder. I get caught up in my own ideas, too. Maybe one day I’ll try having us all write down daydreams for a week and see what we come up with. Maybe we’ll decide they’re a lot more important than what I thought we were supposed to be working on.”
Calder nodded gratefully. Ms. Hussey was the best.
As he wiped off his pentomino piece, he looked at the T shape. T for what? Trouble … but why trouble?
There was nothing at home that felt like a piece of art.
Petra considered an embroidered pillow, but it had a big tear in it; she found a silk caterpillar kite, but it had lost one eye; she thought of the stick her mom used to make a bun for her hair, the one with amber on it, but it had been missing for days.
What was art, anyway? The more she thought about it, the stranger it seemed. What made an invented object special? Why were some manmade things pleasing and others not? Why wasn’t a regular mixing bowl or a spoon or a lightbulb a piece of art? What made certain objects land in museums and others in the trash?
She guessed that most people who went to museums didn’t ask that question. They just believed that they were looking at something valuable or beautiful or interesting. They didn’t do any hard thinking about it.
She wasn’t going to be that kind of a person — ever.
She thought about pictures at the Art Institute that made her feel as if she could leave everything predictable behind. She always felt that way when she stood in front of Caillebotte’s Rainy Day painting — the wet cobblestones underfoot, the people going places in their long skirts and top hats, the inviting turn of the street. This was art that was an adventure. It let her into another world. It made familiar stuff seem mysterious. It sent her back to her life feeling a little different, at least for a few minutes.
She was still thinking about Caillebotte’s Paris street on her way to the grocery store. If he had painted Harper Avenue, would it have looked just as intriguing? As she approached the corner, she noticed the man with suspenders, the one who had talked to Ms. Hussey, step out the front door of Powell’s, look around, and drop a book into the giveaway box outside. She sped up.
The book had a cloth cover with several dark stains, and the paper was thick and creamy, soft at the edges. The title jumped out at her: Lo! The illustrations were done in black and white — distorted, rubbery figures clutched each other or screamed.
She read a few paragraphs:
TERRIFIED HORSES, UP ON THEIR HIND LEGS, HOOFING A STORM OF FROGS.
FRENZIED SPRINGBOKS, CAPERING THEIR EXASPERATIONS AGAINST FROGS THAT WERE TICKLING THEM.
STOREKEEPERS, IN LONDON, GAPING AT FROGS THAT WERE TAPPING ON THEIR WINDOW PANES.
WE SHALL PICK UP AN EXISTENCE BY ITS FROGS.
WISE MEN HAVE TRIED OTHER WAYS. THEY HAVE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND OUR STATE OF BEING, BY GRASPING AT ITS STARS, OR ITS ARTS, OR ITS ECONOMICS. BUT, IF THERE IS AN UNDERLYING ONENESS OF ALL THINGS, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHERE WE BEGIN, WHETHER WITH STARS, OR LAWS OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND, OR FROGS, OR NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. ONE MEASURES A CIRCLE, BEGINNING ANYWHERE.
I HAVE COLLECTED 294 RECORDS OF SHOWERS OF LIVING THINGS.
What? Petra flipped back to the front and saw that the book had been written in 1931 by a man named Charles Fort.
She tucked it under her arm.
That night, flipping around in Lo!, Petra was more and more amazed. She had never seen a book like this. It was, first of all, peppered with quotes from journals and newspapers around the world — there was the London Times, the Quebec Daily Mercury, the New Zealand Times, the Wood bury Daily Times, the New York American, The Gentleman’s Magazine, the Ceylon Observer … the list went on and on.
There were hundreds of stories of bizarre happenings, many of them similar. Venomous snakes dropped into backyards in Oxfordshire, England; red and brown worms fell with snowflakes in Sweden; bushels of periwinkles fell from the sky on Cromer Gardens Road, outside Worcester, England; luminous, floating lights traveled slowly over open land in North Carolina and in Norfolk, England. Wild animals turned up where they shouldn’t have. People disappeared and then were found far away, disoriented and confused. There were crashes and explosions that no one could explain.
Fort had apparently spent twenty-seven years going through old newspapers in libraries. He had copied out thousands of articles about unexplained goings-on.
IT IS THE PROFOUND CONVICTION OF MOST OF US THAT THERE NEVER HAS BEEN A SHOWER OF LIVING THINGS. BUT SOME OF US HAVE … BEEN EDUCATED BY SURPRISES OUT OF MUCH THAT WE WERE ‘ABSOLUTELY SURE’ OF….
Petra read this twice and turned a few pages.
I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF ANY STANDARD, IN ANY RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, OR COMPLICATION OF HOUSEHOLD AFFAIRS THAT COULD NOT BE MADE TO FIT ANY REQUIREMENT. WE FIT STANDARDS TO JUDGMENTS, OR BREAK ANY LAW THAT IT PLEASES US TO BREAK…. WE HAVE CONCLUSIONS, WHICH ARE THE PRODUCTS OF SENILITY OR INCOMPETENCE OR CREDULITY, AND THEN ARGUE FROM THEM TO PREMISES. WE FORGET THIS PROCESS, AND THEN ARGUE FROM THE PREMISES, THINKING WE BEGAN THERE.
Petra struggled with this language and had to look up the words “credulity” and “premises.” Rereading each sentence in pieces, she began to get a grip on what Fort was saying: Depending on how you looked at things, your world could change completely. His thought was that most people bent over backward to fit everything that happened to them into something they could understand. In other words, people sometimes twisted what was actually in front of them to fit what they thought should be there, never even realizing they were doing it. People liked to see what they were supposed to see, and find what they were supposed to find. It was quite an idea.
And then:
SEE LONDON NEWSPAPER
S, AUGUST 18TH AND 19TH, 1921 — INNUMERABLE LITTLE FROGS THAT APPEARED, DURING A THUNDERSTORM, UPON THE 17TH, IN THE STREETS OF THE NORTHERN PART OF LONDON.
Farther down:
THERE HAVE BEEN REPETITIONS OF THESE ARRIVALS…. THERE IS AN ACCOUNT, IN THE LONDON DAILY NEWS, SEPT. 5, 1922, OF LITTLE TOADS, WHICH FOR TWO DAYS HAD BEEN DROPPING FROM THE SKY, AT CHALONS-SUR-SAÔNE, FRANCE.
Could this be true?
Why wasn’t more time in school spent studying things that were unknown or not understood instead of things that had already been discovered and explained? Ms. Hussey always asked for their ideas. Wouldn’t it be great to go digging for weird facts like Charles Fort did? To try to piece together a meaning behind events that didn’t seem to fit?
And why wasn’t this book a piece of art? She grabbed her notebook and began to write:
This object is hard on the outside and bendable on the inside. It is the color of an unripe raspberry, and it weighs about as much as a pair of blue jeans. It smells like a closet in an old house, and it is an ancient shape. It holds things that are hard to believe. There are living creatures falling like rain and objects that float by themselves. People vanish and reappear.
It is made of substances that once grew, that once bent in the wind and felt the night air. It is older than trips to the moon or computers or stereo systems or television. Our grandparents might have seen it new when they were young.
There was a woman’s name in faded brown ink inside the cover. Petra wondered who else had loved this book and why it had ended up outside Powell’s. Why had it been thrown away?
She would never lose it. Not ever.
Before closing the book, she looked again for that one terrific sentence: WE SHALL PICK UP AN EXISTENCE BY ITS FROGS.
Hours later, under a sliver of moon, Petra was almost asleep. As she rolled over, squashing her pillow into position on top of her arm, a strange thing happened: Although her eyes were closed, she seemed to be looking at a young woman.
This person was old-fashioned. She was dressed in a yellow jacket that had dappled fur on the edges, and her hair was pulled back tightly with shiny ribbons. Dangly earrings, perhaps pearls, caught the light. She had been sitting at a table and writing; something had interrupted her. Quill pen in hand, she had paused to look up.
The woman was gazing directly into Petra’s eyes. Her expression was knowing, filled with kindness and interest, and she had the look of someone who understood without being told.
Petra found herself soaking up every detail of the image. Although the room was dark, light touched the metal fastenings on a wooden box, a fold of blue cloth on the table, the curve of the woman’s forehead, the creamy lemon of her jacket. This was a calm, deliberate world, a world where dreams were real and each syllable held the light like a pearl. It was a writer’s world — and Petra was inside it.
And then, as suddenly as she had appeared, the woman began to fade from Petra’s mind. As this happened, Petra felt recognized, as if this person knew who she, Petra Andalee, was. It was a shocking feeling — exhilarating, shivery, true. And somehow inevitable, as if things had always been this way.
Wide awake now, Petra thought of Charles Fort. Was he responsible for the woman’s visit? Had he brought them together? Educated by surprises … Fort understood what Petra had often felt: There is much more to be uncovered about the world than most people think.
If she’d had any idea how much more, Petra wouldn’t have slept at all that night.
On the day Ms. Hussey had given the art assignment, Calder went straight up to his room after school.
He sat down at his desk and pulled out his pentominoes. The W fit with the Y and the U, and the I slid in agreeably next to the L … the X was difficult to work into the rectangle, but it might fit here between the P and the U…. Pentominoes always helped him think.
He wrote down the word ART. He followed it quickly with:
RTA
RAT
ATR
TRA
It wasn’t what he’d meant to put on his list, but his pencil kind of took charge. He read what he’d written aloud. It was a tongue twister, he noticed with delight, aside from being almost every combination of A, R, and T.
Calder shook himself back toward the assignment. Was his weird list a piece of art? How about the old-fashioned kind of art, the kind in museums that turned up on postcards and posters in people’s kitchens, the kind that they’d been talking about in school today? Ms. Hussey was always saying, “Listen to your own thinking.” Well, what if he, and not those museum people, was the one to decide what was wonderful to look at? What would he choose? The same stuff that was now famous? Probably not the French lady with the too-small dress.
Art, for him, was — something puzzling. Yes. Something that gave his mind a new idea to spin around. Something that gave him a fresh way of seeing things each time he looked at it. What was he remembering?
He crawled under his bed and dragged out a dusty crate filled with green army men. He dug down into the corner and pulled out a small box.
Calder held the box carefully in both hands. It was made of a dark wood, and the corners were covered with inlaid silver vines. The painting on the top showed a man with ponytail-length hair leaning over a table. He was dressed in a fancy bathrobe, and his face was turned thoughtfully toward a window. A tool that resembled a compass was held lightly in his right hand. A large roll of paper lay under his right arm. There was a wrinkled Oriental rug bunched up on the corner of the table in front of him, and his left hand rested on what appeared to be a book. A globe sat high on the cupboard behind him. His expression looked as though he’d been thinking important thoughts, and something had, just in that moment, interrupted him. Calder felt a sense of understanding, of sympathy for this man. This was what he felt like when he suddenly had to pay attention in school.
Calder had always loved this picture. Reaching for his magnifying glass, he held it over the top of the box. He saw light sparkle from the old glass in the window, and the rug came alive with blues and warm golden tones. On the tall cupboard was written the word “Meer.” Meer, Meer … he rolled the word around in his mind. He wished Grandma Ranjana had told him more.
He tried to remember exactly when she had given him the box. He had been small enough to sit on her lap and play with her reading glasses — he might have been four or five. He could remember her blue velvet rocker, the cracks on her knuckles, her gentle cheeks the color of dark chocolate.
Grandma Ranjana had loved puzzles and mysteries and would have approved of Ms. Hussey. Calder grabbed the box and rushed downstairs — he would take a “rainbow bath,” as Grandma Ranjana used to call it.
On late afternoons in the fall, the sun came through the leaded glass window in the Pillays’ living room and threw rainbows and wavery rhombi and polygons on the floor, the walls, the backs of chairs and sofas. This parade of soft color traveled slowly up one side of the room and vanished in the corner of the ceiling. Grandma Ranjana always swore that sitting in geometry helped the brain.
Calder began to write.
The man in my hand looks toward the window, and the light lands on one arm and one cheek and the paper on his table. You know the way paper gets blinding in a bright light? Well, this paper almost makes you squint. The colors around him are blue and red and light brown. A scrunched-up rug is on the edge of the table between him and me, as if someone tossed it up there when they were cleaning the floor and forgot to put it back.
And now for weight and size. This thing is about as heavy as a bag of chocolate chip cookies, or maybe an empty spaghetti sauce jar, or a large T-shirt. It is about as thick as a dictionary, and as long as a medium tube of toothpaste.
Calder paused, the box in his right hand, and looked at the rainbows floating on the far wall. He realized with a shiver of pleasure that the afternoon light was landing on his body in a way that was similar to the fall of light in the picture, and he wondered if he also looked like he was thi
nking Great Thoughts….
He was interrupted by loud voices outside the front window. When he peered out, he saw Ms. Hussey and Mr. Watch, his boss from Powell’s. What on earth were they doing? And then Calder noticed an old lady sitting on the ground between them.
When he opened his front door, Ms. Hussey shouted, “Water! Get some water!”
By the time he was back with a glass, the old lady was standing. Calder didn’t recognize her.
Ms. Hussey said, “Thanks, Calder. I didn’t know you lived right here.” She explained what Mr. Watch had just told her: He usually walked Mrs. Sharpe to Powell’s once a week to pick out some books. Ms. Hussey had happened to be just behind them. She’d seen Mrs. Sharpe stumble and sink to the curb.
Mr. Watch looked embarrassed. Mrs. Sharpe looked irritated. “What would I need water for?” she snapped. “Stupid! These new shoes! A grasshopper couldn’t walk in them!” Was she calling Ms. Hussey stupid?
If so, Ms. Hussey didn’t seem to notice. She offered Mrs. Sharpe her arm.
Calder went back inside and watched from his front window until he couldn’t see the three of them anymore.
That evening, Calder got a letter.
Ripping it open, he grinned. Who else?
L:1 F:1 Z:1 N:1 P:1 T:2, -
I:2 F:1 F:2 P:1 - L:2 T:1 - Y:1 W:1 N:1 -
I:2 P:1 Z:2 V:2 - N:1 L:2 L:2 T:2 - W:1 U:2 -
T:1 T:2 L:2 U:1. - X:2 F:1 I:2 W:1 U:2 V:1 P:1 N:1 -
Z:1 F:1 U:2 V:2 - Y:2 P:1 P:1 Y:1. - W:1 -
V:2 V:1 W:1 I:2 Y:1 - Y:1 W:1 N:1 I:2 F:1 N:2 N:2 P:1 N:1. -
Chasing Vermeer Page 3