Donald got home too late to help his father. It was already time for supper. He was very hungry. There was soup, and chicken in soy sauce, vegetables, hot tea, and lotus root cakes for dessert. Donald ate three cakes.
“In China,” his father said, “those used to taste even better.”
“I thought so,” Donald said.
Donald had some Little Lulu comics that he kept to trade with. That night he made a deal with his sister. She got the Little Lulus, and Donald got her box of crayons.
When his sister and brother had gone to sleep, Donald began to draw in a Big Chief pencil tablet. He wanted to make a picture of everything he had seen in China. He began a picture of fields and hills, and worked on it until he was sleepy. He put the crayons and the tablet under his mattress, where no one would find them. He put Wingman’s feather there too.
During the night it snowed and rained and froze. In the morning the street was slick with ice. Cars and buses were slowly skidding sideways, and people were walking with tiny baby steps to keep from slipping. When Donald got to the little park, every tree was covered with ice. Even the tiniest twigs had a shining clear skin. The bridge was covered with ice too. Donald saw that there was no way he could climb it. He looked for Wingman and the eagle, but he could not see them.
The rest of the vacation was icy. When it wasn’t icy, it was raining and snowing. There wasn’t one day when it would have been possible for Donald to climb the bridge. He helped his father, spent time getting his comic book collection in order, and worked on the pictures of China in the Big Chief pencil tablet. One day Donald and some other kids slid down St. Nicholas Avenue on sleds made out of cardboard boxes. On Christmas Eve the family had a special supper. The best part was hot dumplings filled with minced pork, and dipped in plum sauce. Donald got a sweater from his father.
On Christmas Day the children stayed home, and their father took the train to visit their mother. Children were not allowed in the hospital. Donald had to take care of his brother and sister and fix their lunch. They were very quiet. It was raining outside. Donald read a lot of comics. There was Christmas music playing on the radio.
All of a sudden it was time for school to start again. It took Donald by surprise. The vacation had not worked out the way he had planned. He had hoped every day that he would be able to climb the bridge again. His notebook was almost full of pictures, and he wanted to fly with Wingman. He wanted to go to China, and now he would have to go to Public School 132.
He knew there was no way to get out of it. He had promised his father not to cut school again. When he woke up in the morning he hoped he was sick. He kept his eyes shut for at least five minutes and tried to make himself have a fever. It didn’t work; he didn’t feel sick; he just felt miserable.
He went to school. He didn’t expect things to be different from the way they had been. He was wrong. When he got to his classroom, Miss Spinrad was not there! At Miss Spinrad’s desk was a little woman with red hair and eyeglasses. She was younger than Miss Spinrad, and there was something strange about her face. Donald couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Maybe it was because she was a little person; she almost seemed like one of the kids. Maybe it was because she looked human; Miss Spinrad looked like Frankenstein. Whatever it was, the other kids had noticed it too, because they were sitting quietly at their desks. That wasn’t the way they usually acted with a substitute teacher.
“My name is Mrs. Miller,” she said. “Miss Spinrad is sick, and will not be back this term. I will be your teacher.”
“Yaaay,” the kids shouted.
Mrs. Miller acted as though she thought school was supposed to be fun. None of the teachers Donald had ever had, and certainly not Miss Spinrad, had ever acted that way. At first it was confusing for Donald and the other kids. Mrs. Miller would do weird things, like asking the class what they felt like studying. And smiling at them.
She wanted to hear people read all the time. When Miss Spinrad had the kids read out loud, she would hold a little notebook in her hand. If someone made a mistake or got confused, she would smile to herself and write something in the notebook. She seemed to like it when kids got mixed up. She would always say, “You are the worst readers in the worst school in New York.”
It was true that most of the kids in the class couldn’t read very well, but they found that it was a lot easier to read for Mrs. Miller. She really wanted to hear them read, and she never left a kid choking on a word he couldn’t figure out. She always helped.
It turned out that Donald was the best reader in the class. Mrs. Miller asked him what he liked to read.
“Comics,” he told her.
Mrs. Miller asked him if he owned a lot of comics.
“About two thousand,” Donald said.
“Would you like to bring some to school?” Mrs. Miller asked.
Donald couldn’t believe it. Every time he had been caught with a comic book in school, it had meant a visit to Mr. Frieda, who always tore them up.
For part of every day, when the other kids worked on reading, Donald was allowed to sit at the back of the room, reading comics. As some of the other kids got better at reading, they were allowed to join Donald and read comics with him, and Donald was supposed to help them. Every day he brought twenty or thirty comics to school with him. All the kids wanted to join the group that got time off to read comics, so they all tried to get better at reading. At lunch, the kids who got to read the comics would sit together and talk about the stories.
Donald knew more about comics than anybody, and he was always in the center of the group. A couple of the other kids started collecting. Donald gave away some doubles, and sometimes he and the other kids would trade comics after school.
Wingman wasn’t around any more. Donald had looked for him on the bridge, but he was never there. After a while, Donald stopped looking for him. On weekends he would hang out with some kids from his class, going to bookstores that sold secondhand comics, or just fooling around. One day he paid a nickel for a perfect copy of Action Comics Number 1, which had the first Superman story ever. He felt good about that because now he had every number.
Donald’s whole class got to read comics, and after a while Mrs. Miller said that since they could read comics at home, it might be a good idea to quit reading them in school. Some of the kids complained, but Mrs. Miller said she would get them some good books to read instead. Donald had already decided that he liked comics better outside of school. Reading comics in class was fun at first, but in some way reading them there made it sort of official, and took some of the fun away.
Mrs. Miller had thought of something to take the place of the comics. On the same day she told the class that she had arranged for them to take some trips. That was really special. None of the kids had ever heard of a class taking a trip, certainly not a class from P.S. 132.
Mrs. Miller spoke to the kids about how she wanted them to behave on the trip, and told them to bring subway fare and their lunches, and to meet her outside of the school on the following Wednesday because they were going to spend the whole day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were going on a trip! They were going on the subway! They weren’t even going inside the school! Everybody wished it was Wednesday.
For the next few days Mrs. Miller talked to the class about the museum, and the things they would see. None of the kids had ever been to a museum, and she wanted to prepare them for it.
None of them was prepared for how big it was. It was ten times as big as the school! The class stood lined up in twos outside the museum, at the bottom of the biggest, widest steps in the world.
“Follow me, class,” Mrs. Miller said, and the children toiled up the steps after her.
The class passed through a huge door into the biggest room anyone had ever seen. Their feet made clicking noises on the smooth floor, and there was an echo. Everybody tried out the echo by whistling and shouting, until Mrs. Miller reminded them that they were guests, and the museum people liked things quiet.
Donald had read stories in comics about museums; Batman was always catching crooks who were trying to steal a famous diamond or a gold statue from one. But this was real! There were real suits of armor, and old axes, swords, and spears. This was in a room hung with beautiful flags, and in the middle there was a dummy knight in real armor on a dummy horse. The horse had armor too. Mrs. Miller talked about the armor, and the people who had used it. The kids could almost hear the crashing and banging as soldiers fought with swords and shields.
Mrs. Miller led the class through a dark stone passage into a room that was arranged to look like an Egyptian tomb. There were mummies, and big stone statues of cats and birds. It was scary. Mrs. Miller talked about how old the things in that room were, thousands and thousands of years! She told them about life in ancient Egypt and about the tombs and mummies. The class was very quiet. Most of them had seen a movie about a mummy in a museum who comes to life. The boys whispered dares to each other to come back to the mummy room alone.
The museum was so full of wonderful things that it was hard to take. By the time the class went down to the basement to eat their lunches in a special room there, a lot of kids had blown their tops. It was just too much to see. It was too exciting. In their minds the kids were knights on horseback and mummies come to life. They were thrilled by pictures full of sunlight; they were full of sunlight too. They needed a chance to let off steam. It was a loud lunch.
After lunch the class went upstairs to look at the Chinese paintings. Donald was waiting for that. He had never heard about Chinese paintings until Mrs. Miller began telling her class about the things they would see in the museum. Donald had a special reason for wanting to see pictures of China.
The room was small, and the pictures, hung side by side, were painted on silk. They were not filled with sunlight like some of the paintings they had seen earlier; they were filled with mist and empty spaces. The class was quiet looking at the pictures, not because they were scary like the Egyptian things, but because there was something about these pictures that was like a little bird perched on your finger. If you were to make a sudden move, or even breathe, the bird might get frightened and fly away.
“These are not paintings of light; they are pictures of moments in time,” Mrs. Miller was saying. The class was hardly listening to her; they could see that for themselves.
Donald was searching for something in the paintings. He had seen mountains like this, and the same kind of little houses before. He was looking for a landmark, for something he had seen for sure that day he had flown over China. He found it. In a picture of trees and mountains and swirling fog, there were three tiny figures, two men and a boy. They were leading a horse. One of the men looked a lot like his uncle, Li-Noon.
Donald felt a rushing in his ears. He could hear the traffic on the George Washington Bridge. He could smell the trees in the misty mountain forest. He felt suspended in the air, as though Wingman were carrying him. He must have looked funny, because Mrs. Miller put her hand on his shoulder as she talked to the class about the picture. He felt her hand and the rushing went away. “Perhaps some ancestor of Donald Chen painted this picture, or maybe one of the people in the picture is Donald as he would have been in China nine hundred years ago.”
She had made an awfully good guess. Donald wanted to say something to Mrs. Miller, but he was too confused and excited to speak. The class was about to move on to another room, when Donald found his voice. “I want to stay here.”
Mrs. Miller told Donald he could stay with the Chinese paintings if he would promise not to leave the room; then she could find him when it was time to go home. Donald promised and the class filed out.
Donald was alone with the picture. There was something more he wanted to see in it. He studied the picture inch by inch. He looked at the leafy trees; he looked at the curious shapes of mountains. He looked at the three figures leading the horse. The horse was white. It had a beautiful silk cloth covering its back. Donald wondered why none of them rode the horse. He looked into the mist, the empty spaces. There was something else he wanted the picture to show him.
Then the mist began to move. It stopped being flat. It stopped being a picture. The painting was turning into a window. The people were real. Donald felt a cool breeze. He could also feel the heat of the horse’s body. Then it was flat again, a picture again. There was a little bench in the room, in front of the painting, and Donald went and sat down on it. He tried to make the painting turn into a window again. It stayed flat. Donald got tired of trying and just sat, gazing in the direction of the picture, thinking about nothing. The mist started swirling. “Hey! It’s real again!” he thought. The picture went flat that moment.
Donald discovered that he could play a game with the painting. As long as he looked at it, just looked without thinking or paying attention to anything in particular, the picture was real. It was alive. It moved. But, if he thought about any one thing, a part of the picture, Donald Chen, the bench, the room, anything, the picture went flat, was just a picture again. It was like watching something out of the corner of his eye, only he was looking right at it.
Donald played the game; soon he was getting better at it. At first he could only make the picture real for maybe a second at a time. After practicing, he was able to make it real for as long as he wanted. Then he discovered that he could think about separate things in the picture, but if he thought about himself thinking, it would all go flat again and he would have to start over.
Donald had known from the first that what he wanted was to make Wingman appear in the picture. Now he thought that maybe Wingman would only appear if he did not think about him. Donald discovered that it was very hard to keep from thinking of something once he knew what the something was. He kept trying.
He made some progress. He knew just where in the empty space Wingman would appear, but each time he tried, just before he would have been able to see him, he couldn’t help thinking, “I can almost see him!” and the painting would go flat.
“Donald, the class is ready to leave.” Mrs. Miller had come to get him. As they left the room, Donald glanced back at the painting. Wingman was flying over the mountains.
Donald wanted to tell Mrs. Miller what had happened, what he had seen in the picture. He wanted to know if other people saw things in pictures that way. He wanted to tell her about Wingman, and flying to China. In his mind he practiced different ways to tell her. None of the ways seemed right. He rode the subway and went home without saying anything. That night he couldn’t get to sleep. All the things that happened kept popping up in his mind. It was bothering him. He had to think of a way to let somebody else know. He wanted it to be Mrs. Miller. She had been the one to take him to the museum. She knew about pictures.
At the same time, Donald knew that he couldn’t just tell her that someone who was like a hero in a comic book had appeared to him eight stories up in the steel girders of the George Washington Bridge, had a pet eagle, took Donald flying, not just to China, but to China a thousand years ago. You can’t tell anybody things like that. Donald knew that it would be a bad mistake even to tell anyone that he had climbed the bridge.
He had to think of a way of telling her without letting her know that she had been told. He thought of a way to do it, just as he fell asleep. He dreamed the sort of dreams he always did, dreams in the shape of comic book stories, brightly colored panels one after another. In the morning, he didn’t know if he had dreamed it, or thought of it, or planned to do it all along. He took his notebook, the one with all his drawings, from under his mattress and put it in his schoolbag.
At the end of the day, Donald handed the notebook to Mrs. Miller and went home. He felt good; now someone else knew. When he got home his father was ironing sheets, and Donald thought about how much he liked the sweet, steamy, laundry smells. He was learning to cook. His father had left bok choy and onions and mushrooms for Donald to cut up. Later they cooked some chicken in the big bowl-shaped frying pan, poured in th
e vegetables Donald had cut, and served supper to the little kids.
At school the next day, Mrs. Miller asked Donald to stay after school. His friends thought he was going to be punished for something. They said they would wait for him outside, but Donald knew that she was going to say something about his pictures. He liked her for not talking about them in front of the class. Mrs. Miller never embarrassed people.
“Thank you, Donald, for letting me see these fine pictures,” she said. “Have you been drawing for a long time?”
Donald mumbled something. He was a little embarrassed after all.
“You know, most schools have Art as a regular subject, but this school . . . well, this school doesn’t. However, I went to the supply room and found these.” Mrs. Miller went to the cabinet. She took out a roll of big sheets of paper, yellowish and rough, and nearly as big as Donald himself when she unrolled them. She rolled them up again and handed them to Donald. She also gave him a box containing little jars of color and a brush.
“Since no one uses these things, I don’t see why you shouldn’t have them,” Mrs. Miller said. Donald was really embarrassed now. He was mumbling again.
“There is something you can do for me,” Mrs. Miller said. “Will you do a very good picture on one of these sheets of paper, and bring it to me? I will give it back to you after a while.”
“Sure,” Donald said. “That’s okay.” He was talking like a dumb jerk; he wanted to kick himself. He felt like crying or hugging Mrs. Miller. He took the paper and the box of paints and left, running.
Donald had to get his father’s help. The paper was too big to keep under the mattress. They arranged that Donald would cover the ironing table with newspaper in the evening, and do his painting there. His brother and sister were ordered to keep their hands off the painting stuff.
Four Different Stories Page 4