The Calder Game

by Blue Balliett

  The museum was filled with movement, and with irregular, delicate clangs and swooping zings. Hidden ceiling and wall fans provided just enough moving air, and subtle lighting added shadow. Flurries of bright color floated, danced, dove, and dipped, their shapes slipping across walls, floors, fabric, skin, and questioning brains.

  Calder’s forms made Petra, Calder, and even Tommy think of other things: perhaps a stone, a leaf, a pear, a cookie with a bite out of it, a mask, a wing, a rudder. The pieces within each mobile moved unpredictably around one another, and, depending on where a person stood, everything could look different. Was there a pattern? Hard to say. With a little breeze, a disk could flatten into a line, a crescent moon could become a comma, a bird could vanish. Some of the sculptures rose from below, like elegant trees, and others hung overhead, changeable constellations that made it impossible not to stop and look up. Visitors of all ages moved quickly at first, and then more slowly, and then slower still. It became clear that a person could look forever and never discover everything there was to see.

  A chorus of whispers rose from Ms. Button’s class:

  “I see a ballet slipper!”

  “A boomerang!”

  “A carved pumpkin!”

  “A dog’s nose!”

  Tommy’s mouth fell open in those first few minutes, and he forgot how little he liked museums and how much he hated Ms. Button. With sudden clarity, he saw each mobile as a finder’s display, an amazing way to make a collection come alive. He pictured each of his own treasure piles — his bottle caps, his chopsticks and spoons, his stack of transit stubs — bobbing happily over his bed at home. An exhibit! Could he actually do it?

  Calder forgot that his pentominoes weren’t in his pocket, and tried to figure out how the artist had balanced all of the pieces and planned their movement when both the shapes and the weights were irregular. Each mobile was truly a complex puzzle: Had Alexander Calder experimented for hours, the way Calder Pillay did with his pentominoes?

  Petra forgot the frustration of not being allowed to write, and thought instead about pulling sentences apart and balancing words in three dimensions, as if they could float off a page. Words as things, not just meanings … words in space, words set free! Could it be done? Petra’s mind felt as if it were exploding with possibilities.

  The number of open mouths in the exhibit echoed the rounded shapes floating overhead and on all sides — an unexpected symmetry of forms that could only be caught if you happened to be watching the faces watching the art.

  One adult was watching both faces and art, and this person noticed when Tommy bellowed, “Look, Calder, it’s Goldman!”

  He was pointing to a large, hanging fish outlined in wire and filled with small pieces of artfully suspended trash, fragments of broken glass, pottery, and machine parts that twinkled as they moved. The wall label read FISH, 1945.

  Before this witness had time to wonder who Goldman was and why the boy was talking to Alexander Calder, a teacher hissed fiercely, “Is the word silence too difficult for you to understand?” as if the boy were the dumbest kid alive.

  The witness’s mouth fell open in yet another O-shape.

  Petra heard also, and glanced in Tommy’s direction. His eyes were now slits, a sure sign that he was under attack. They all were, Petra thought miserably, remembering Calder’s drooping shoulders. She hoped Tommy never gave back Ms. Button’s coat button. Never.

  Without her writing tools, Petra concentrated on absorbing everything around her. She’d outsmart Ms. Button by soaking it all up and then recording it on the bus, where she’d tucked her notebook under a sweatshirt.

  The mobiles felt like no other experience, Petra thought to herself, and seeing so many together was clearly — what? A gift. The Time magazine article in her pocket was right: This was generous art, and art that held everyone’s attention. As she surreptitiously pulled out the article, wanting to read it again, she heard a little girl scream, “A flying cow!” and “A frog walking!” She then overheard a woman nearby marveling, “This isn’t art, it’s alive. It has a mind of its own!”

  Petra turned to see a tall, red structure with three legs, a long neck, and a cascade of silvery leaves descending in a graceful arc from the tip of the neck — or was it a nose? The wall label read ALUMINUM LEAVES, RED POST, 1941. As Petra watched, one of the leaf shapes bobbed gently toward her, as if to say hello. She smiled at it, and gave a tiny, one-fingered wave.

  She then ducked her head, reading:

  An exhibit not to be missed, this show speaks to people of all income brackets, races, and ages. Shifting continuously, each of these mobiles weaves a spell, a long story that no one will ever witness again — not in exactly the same way. There are no rules here, no beginnings and no ends. Perhaps Calder’s secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate. This is art that will surprise again and again.

  Yes, Petra thought to herself just as she saw Ms. Button’s skirt swishing in her direction. She stuffed the article back in her pants pocket, but her teacher was already snapping her fingers.

  “It’s mine,” Petra said quietly, folding her hands in front of her. “And it’s an article about this exhibit.”

  As Ms. Button glared at Petra, trying to figure out what to say, dots of sweat popped out on her upper lip. Tommy, despite himself, watched with interest. He hoped with all his heart that Petra would win.

  Just then, Ms. Hussey flew around the corner with her new group of sixth graders. She was laughing, and everyone talked in excited voices, their faces bright with expectation. Each kid had his or her own clipboard and pencil, and suddenly Petra wanted to cry. Ms. Button turned stiffly away, as if she knew she’d gone too far.

  Petra wondered how her new teacher could be so unaffected by this artist’s feeling of joy, his here-it-is-take-what-you-want spirit.

  As Petra hoped and prayed that even a pinch of Alexander Calder’s magic would rub off on Ms. Bettina Button, the seventh graders were forced to walk, in unnatural silence, past one amazing sight after another. Unable to share with Calder or even Tommy, Petra stared. She noticed that young kids who had been led into the show looking bored — kids who had stood near them in the line — were now skipping ahead, dragging the adults who had brought them. She saw old people who had stumped into the museum in a grumpy way now looking complete, at peace, almost weightless themselves.

  What was going on? It was hard, logically, to understand. But then, so was Calder’s art. Simple? Only at first glance. Complex? Clearly, the answer should be yes. This is art that changes people, Petra thought to herself, people of all ages. But how?

  Perhaps Alexander Calder’s mobiles are working miracles, she thought. Miracles! It was a perfect word here, smooth and burbly and somehow floating. Thinking of her friend Calder and how he always shuffled things around, she let the letters in the word miracles drift and resettle in her mind. She found rise, then miles, then clear, then risc. Calder Pillay was never big on spelling — he’d think of risk.

  Risk … Where was Calder, anyway?

  Exhausted by trying to control her class, Ms. Button forgot to count them until they’d been inside the show for almost forty minutes.

  “WHO is missing?” she asked the group, too flustered to figure it out.

  At first there was no response, but the group looked perkier. Who had run away?

  “Maybe he’s in the bathroom,” Tommy said at last.

  “WHO?” Ms. Button said, now embarrassed but still clueless.

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Tommy added. Petra grinned. There was a ripple of giggles.

  The class, in unspoken agreement, didn’t tell: Ms. Button took a full five minutes to figure it out.

  A large room at the Museum of Contemporary Art had a sign outside the door:

  PLAY THE CALDER G
AME

  TAKE FIVE

  ALL ARE WELCOME

  Calder Pillay peered inside, curious about what the Calder Game might be.

  The walls and a series of floor-to-ceiling islands in the shape of irregular triangles, spheroids, and trapezoids were covered with red corkboard. In an alcove were round worktables surrounded by comfortable chairs, and in the middle of each table were stacks of thick drawing paper, a jar of mechanical pencils, and a basket of thumbtacks. The tables were blue, the chairs yellow. Calder, still not used to having to walk in a group, stepped into the room and read the directions, which were printed on a huge piece of posterboard:

  Come in.

  We invite you to imagine and then record a plan for a mobile made of anything you want to use: objects, symbols, or ideas. This mobile can exist only in thought, or it can be something that could be physically assembled. Design what you see, in your mind or in the world around you. As with any mobile, you are looking for balance, beauty, and surprise.

  We ask only that your mobile have five parts that move in relation to one another. This is our way of putting together a unified and powerful show of your works, a show of your ideas, a show of fives!

  Please share as many paper mobiles as you like. If you want to work on a design outside the museum and then return to post it on the walls, feel free to re-enter this room at any time.

  All ages are invited.

  Sponsored by the

  FREE ART: SHARE IT!

  Foundation

  Wow, Calder thought to himself. Petra would love this — and so would Tommy, with his collector’s eye. This was a way to make mobiles even if you didn’t actually build them!

  He’d just check it out, and then he’d catch up with the class. Maybe Ms. Button would let them all come back.

  The Take Five room was filled with people drawing and posting and reading and smiling and discussing. In order to make it easier for people to play the game, the museum had printed up possible designs for those who might want them and left them in piles on the tables next to the blank paper. They had filled in examples, placing an X on the spot where each of the five mobile ingredients could go. The sample mobiles looked like this:

  Calder ran his fingers over the designs, picturing pentominoes spinning in space. He noticed that people at the tables often started by using the MCA designs and then went on to organize their ideas in other ways.

  “This is like eating popcorn, making these things,” he heard one businessman exclaim as he sat at a table, his briefcase squashed under an elbow, busily adding to a pile of mobiles. “It’s hard to stop!”

  “It’s like eating jellybeans,” a nearby six-year-old added, then shrieked at an ear-splitting level, “Ma-mee! Come see what I made!”

  “It’s like someone turning you into an instant artist,” a young man with tattoos said. “I love how you can say stuff, and then the people who look at it see other stuff.”

  Still busy with his pencil, the businessman grunted.

  “I thought about it all day yesterday,” an elderly woman cooed. “I had a marvelous idea in the middle of the night. I had to come back!” Calder tried to see what she was making, but she covered it with her hand.

  Then he noticed someone from the museum taking down a number of the paper mobiles from a crowded wall and laying them carefully in a box. “We’ll do something wonderful with them later,” she assured Calder. “We save every one!”

  Suddenly realizing that a bit too much time had gone by, Calder hurried out. Perhaps this would be his heroic moment today: Ms. Button couldn’t help but say yes to this room. Who could say no to such a great game?

  But you’ll love it!” Calder sputtered.

  Ms. Button, her mouth pulled flat like a zipper, said only, “We’re already late for the gift shop. There’s no way we’re going to a game room, young man!”

  Petra reached over and tweaked Calder’s sleeve before he could say anything: Ms. Button was clearly hopeless. Calder, rarely angry, glowered and dug his hands deep into his pockets. The seventh graders trooped into the gift shop. A couple of kids bought postcards, but most stood in a depressed clump, waiting for the signal to leave. After so much real art, the cards looked flat. And a gift shop instead of a place where you could make your own mobile? What kind of a teacher was Ms. Button?

  Calder, Tommy, and Petra looked in silence at a striking, black T-shirt with images of five red Alexander Calder sculptures. Arranged like letters across the front, the pieces could almost be symbols in a strange language. Calder Pillay was good at inventing codes, and the other two liked using them; ordinarily, the kids would have said something to one another, but not today.

  The adult who had been watching earlier was now sitting on a bench inside the show, staring at a small mobile that had a handful of black wedge shapes and one red dot. Suddenly, as if swept away by a huge idea, this person clapped shut an overstuffed folder of papers, then jumped up and hurried in the direction of the Take Five room.

  A lone receipt drifted to the floor. On the back were three words, written in a loopy scrawl:

  Hunt for Creatures

  Under that was one word:

  Hang

  The tail on the “g” slashed downward, as if pulled by a dreadful weight.

  When school was over that day, Calder, Petra, and Tommy headed for their old sixthgrade classroom. Enough was enough: They needed Ms. Hussey’s help.

  The three stood silently in the familiar doorway. All of them had baggy clothes and black hair, but Petra was several inches taller than Calder and a head taller than Tommy, making an odd staircase if they stood in the right order. Tommy’s hair was shaggy and sat like a slippery shelf on the tops of his ears, Calder’s was tough and bunchy, like the bristles on a worn scrub brush, and Petra’s was long and puffy and forever trying to escape from a ponytail.

  Ms. Hussey had her back to them, and was whistling cheerfully to herself. She was waist-deep in a tangle of wires, packing materials, and what looked like leftover family stuff: cups, shoes, cooking utensils, plastic animals, and boxes of board games.

  On the wall facing the door were three different posters of Alexander Calder’s studio, showing what might have been the wildest work space of all time. Coils of wire, snippets and sheets of metal, tools, opened paint cans, and wooden crates covered every surface in a dense tumble of shapes and lines. It was impossible to tell where one object stopped and another began. In the middle was a head of scribbly, white hair bent over a shimmer of metal and a half-moon belly: Calder at work.

  Ms. Hussey looked up, waved, and grinned. “Don’t you love this photograph? Nothing can compare with the chaos in Calder’s studio! And what a fabulous fall to be here in Chicago! The city is glowing! Didn’t you adore the show today? What a thrill to see so many examples of what is probably the most original and profound art form of the twentieth century. I can hardly —” Ms. Hussey broke off, suddenly realizing how miserable the three kids looked.

  “Hmm,” she finished, putting down a giant pair of wire clippers. “Come in.” She walked over and closed the classroom door behind them.

  “So what’s up?” she asked, although they knew that she knew. She crossed her arms. “It’s hard for me, too, you know — I mean, to see my old sixth graders so unhappy. But that’s the way school works, and there’s not much any of us can do about it. There are highs and lows, and we’re all supposed to keep moving.”

  “The Button wouldn’t let us explore the show today, not on our own,” Tommy muttered. “And I got in trouble for telling Calder I’d seen Goldman’s tail.”

  “We weren’t allowed to talk or write, and we couldn’t stop for even a minute in the Take Five room,” Petra said. “She made us go to the gift shop instead.”

  “And she confiscated my pentominoes,” Calder reported in a flat tone. “She called them a toy.”

  A tiny, unhappy smile flickered across Ms. Hussey’s eyes. She sank down on the top of a desk. “Sit,” she ordered. They did
.

  She continued, “You can have a great year, I know it. You’ll each just have to get used to being your own best starter. After all, that’s kind of what grown-ups do.” Ms. Hussey had twisted a piece of glittery party wire around her braid, and it bobbed in a saggy spiral on one side. She didn’t look convinced. Suddenly, she shook her head.

  “No, I can’t say what I’m supposed to. Let’s face it, Ms. Button is a — well, a challenge, but I know you three can handle it. Maybe you can even teach her a thing or two. And the good news is, you have one another.” She looked at each of them, but no one nodded. “I’ll try to give her a few hints. But right now, you have Alexander Calder to inspire you. How bad can things be?”

  When there was still no answer but several swallowing sounds, Ms. Hussey hopped up. “Come on, I need some help here. We’re collecting materials for mobile-building, but I’ve got to sort it out a bit or we’ll be so crazy tomorrow that nobody will get anything done.”

  Tommy, Petra, and Calder each smiled at the thought, remembering happier times. Pretending not to notice, Ms. Hussey continued, “I thought it was important to try actually doing what Alexander Calder did, balancing objects, before playing the Calder Game on paper.”

  Ms. Hussey dove back into the pile of what looked suspiciously like trash, and Calder, Petra, and Tommy followed her.

  Soon the four were talking cheerfully about the Calder show.

  “Amazing that he was an engineer, but one who invented his own, new structures to build,” Calder mused. He had rescued a piece of garden trellis, and was now standing it on the toe of his sneaker.

  “Exactly, he was highly trained in balancing weights but did something unexpected with what he’d learned,” Petra said.