by Chip Kidd
I thought it rude to be early for anything, but I decided to take Vermont's advice and get there at five to. As I approached, I took in the group of people gathered in front, waiting for the doors to open.
There were, I'd say, just over a thousand of them.
A block away (as close as the crowd would allow) loomed Burser's—a monolith and something of an oddity on campus because, as one of the school's original buildings, it was actually old. At nine sharp its three pairs of doors parted and we began our influx into its depths. By nine twenty-five I ascended the steps. A second pair of doors opened and I went . . . onto the set of a DeMille-esque epic about Ellis Island at the turn of the century. But the director had fled because things were entirely out of hand. The din—an agitated, sonorous chorale—lit on every slick surface and recoiled, filling the cavernous room like a tank of warm, cloudy water.
A short, annoyed blond girl in an RA costume popped into view and bellowed an invisible question at me.
“What?!” I screamed.
“—taking? What's your MAJOR?!”
“Art?! ART!!” I sounded like Lassie. I made a frenzied scribbling motion with my hand. She looked at her clipboard and flipped a few pages.
“Line FOUR!!” she screeched, and pointed to the teeming horde.
“Where's THA—” Gone.
I was a lurching hobo of despair. The windows, our destinations, were numbered, and I tried to visually follow back from the queue at the fourth one, but in the middle of the room it shot off to the left around a structural pillar and fused into the throng. I headed to where it turned and started yelling its name—I was its frantic mother in a mobbed department store.
After five minutes of this I started imagining someone was answering me—a girl's voice with a southern lilt, and then I wasn't imagining it. A milk-white arm clutching a handkerchief rose a foot or so above the masses yards away and shook in my direction. “Over hee-yah!” I could just make it out, the words verbally embossed on the clamor. I navigated myself through the crowd and thought DeMille would have loved this scene had he stuck around to shoot it. I reached her and asked if she was the end of line four.
“This is it!” she chimed.
I took my place in back of her and pulled out my course catalog, to study for the long haul.
“I mean I hope so . . .” she added, less certain. I kept pretending to read and bobbed my head, eager to avoid a conversation. If we started talking now, we'd have to think up things to say for what looked to be hours.
“I'm pretty sure, at least.” And she seemed equipped for that. She was chipping merrily away at the precious, fragile barrier that kept us Strangers. “Don't you think?” Small talk is small in every way except when you try to get around it. Then it's enormous. Defeated, I closed my catalog and really looked at her for the first time. She seemed completely out of place. Not just in this room, but perhaps in the entire state. She was dressed for, well, not for this, anyway. You don't wear ankle-length white linen at this hour to jockey for position in a viper pit. Nor for such an occasion does one “do” one's hair, though the only thing you could call her hair was Done. Her eyes gleamed bright with the fear that you Might Not Like Her, and her eyebrows met occasionally with the suspicion of the abandoned—maybe she thought she'd been left at the wrong school. She stood relatively still, but her spirit was dog paddling.
“I heard this was going to be out of hand,” I offered, “but . . .” I let it trail off, and allowed the facts to finish it for me.
“Isn't it for the birds?” she asked, using a phrase my mother would say when there weren't any parking places at the Food Clown. “I mean really.” Hers was the manner of someone who, as an impressionable youngster, saw Gone With the Wind a dozen times, scrutinized Vivien Leigh's every move and put a generous dab of Attar of Scarlett behind each ear.
But for naught: Her ample hips, underlying uncertainty, generous cheeks, and a forehead that launched a thousand anxieties all ran contrary to her aspirations. She was easily recognized for what she was and always would be—pure Melanie.
I was her captive in line for the duration and I learned a good deal about her, as one would from a misplaced child in a police station while awaiting the arrival of her parents. Her name was, cross my heart, Maybelle Lee. She was born outside of Augusta, Georgia, and moved up North when she was twelve (Daddy's company was expanding. She made it sound as if he owned it, which surely meant he did not). She'd always had that creative “itch,” and she decided to scratch it by pursuing the Visual Arts, with the hope that someday she could “apply her acquired knowledge and amassed skill in a conventionally useful and lucrative way.”
Exactly why I found her so irritating escaped me at first, but then I decided it must have been her sincerity—another trait that would bar her forever from O'Hara status.
Finally, it was Maybelle's turn to register. I listened with focused intensity while affecting a veneer of thorough ambivalence. After a short exchange that I couldn't make out, she turned to me with a start, her eyes frantic with desperation.
“We're—we're in the wrong place.”
“What? Where—?”
“This is the Liberal Arts line.”
Oh, for Christ's sake.
“I thought they were all for the College of Liberal Arts.”
“Well, yes, but this is the line if you're majoring in Liberal Arts. I didn't know—”
Jesus. No no no. I motioned her aside and approached the window. I tried to assume the look of someone who is worthy of tremendous pity, yet also knows exactly where he is supposed to be.
“Ma'am?” The woman on the other side of the inch-thick sheet of glass (clouded with a greasy mosaic of hand and fingerprints) looked brighteyed and eager to help, but also bore the scars of having heard it all when it came to these matters. This wasn't going to be easy.
“Yes, dear?”
“Hi. We're both Art majors and would like to register. We've been waiting an awfully long time . . . ”
“Yes I know, honey, but this is the line for Liberal Arts majors only.” She gazed benignly out at the surrounding hysteria and said, “I suppose the Arts line is one of the others.”
“But we were instructed, specifically, to come here.” This amused her.
“Oh, I don't think so, honey.”
Undaunted, I went on. “But it's true. They said you'd know all about it—that the Arts and Architecture and the Liberal Arts curriculums were remarkably similar, especially for freshmen. They said any line would do, actually.” Then inspiration hit: “It's a new policy.”
This switched a channel in her. Suspicious, conspiratorial, she leaned toward me and with a newly assumed gravity asked, slowly, “Did McGurk tell you that?”
I took on an air of confessional victimhood. I didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he—”
“That horse's HEINIE!” she yelped, then recovered her composure. “Sorry, dear, but he's been telling you kids all sorts of things this morning. He really ought to know better by now. Whillikers!” Her eyes narrowed then, just a bit. “Did he mention me by name?” The tag on her blouse read “Bert.”
“Yes, I'm afraid so. He said, ‘Bert in line four would understand. At least she should, by now. . . ’ ” I said regretfully, and slid my registration form through the slot. Bert heaved a great sigh and began to process the papers. I mopped my brow and turned to Maybelle—the thought of flight from this hellhole was making me giddy.
“What happened?”
“I think it's okay. I talked her into it. But if she yammers on about someone named McGurk, just roll your eyes and shrug your shoulders.”
“Okay.” She winked. There was a rap on the glass behind me. Bert was waving my form. Maybelle and I both went forward this time.
“The drawing class you wanted—Art 101—is filled at that time. In fact,” she shuffled through sheaves of forms, “they all are, except for one—it meets on Mondays and Wednesdays, at nine.�
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“Okay—” Before I had a chance to add anything else, Maybelle bolted to life and mouthed through the glass:
“Yes! We'll both take it!!”
• • •
Later that afternoon, I walked through the gallery in the Visual Arts building. The day before, while strolling past, I saw something especially peculiar in it, but I was on my way to the Dean's office to pick up some forms and didn't have time to follow up. Now I went in and it was still there—in the middle of the room still showing last spring's Sophomore and Junior Sculpture exhibit. Amid the pint-sized mutant Rodins and accidentally abstract figure studies stood a large plaster column—or pedestal, rather. This would not have been strange had there been something resting on top of it. There wasn't. I thought at first they were still putting up the show or tearing it down, but no, neither was the case. I went in for a closer look and read the label at its base:
i i .
A R T 1 0 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N
T O D R A W I N G .
INSTR . : DOROTHY SPANG , MFA
Mon & Wed., 9:00 a.m.
RO O M 2 1 0 , VI S U A L AR T S BL D G .
D E S C R : Using a variety of media (charcoal, conte crayon, pencils and the like) students explore translating onto the two-dimensional surface a range of traditional subject matter; including still life, the great masters, the human form, &c..
CR E D I T S :3
On the first day of class, the Visual Arts building reclined before me like an old brick whore, egging me on to show her one, last, good time. I doubted I was up to the task, but regardless, I entered it from the rear, just to give myself the slightest mental edge. As I moved through the hallways, the works tacked to the corkboard lining the walls (mostly drawings on paper, from classes past and present) were at first very intimidating as a group—like the crowd at Yankee Stadium in game four of the World Series. But when you focused on them one at time you realized that divided they fell—all beer bellies and sweaty baseball caps.
Once inside, 210 looked like a high school stage set of an “art studio.” The ceiling was two stories above us, an entire wall of windows allowed a generous light from the north, and everything smelled like petroleum. Nothing was clean or new. Several dozen paint-encrusted easels, each paired with a small worktable, were arranged in a semicircular arena around a central platform towards the front. I was trying to figure out whether or not we had assigned seats when someone grabbed my left arm.
“Well, here we are!” Maybelle was wearing a navy cotton shirtdress and a white cashmere sweater with mother-of-pearl buttons. She had brought enough art supplies to produce the Sistine ceiling. My relief at seeing her surprised me, but then it was probably due to what Uncle Joey referred to as the “Chinaman on the Moon” scenario. He coined the term when he was in the army, after a few too many transfers. “If you're in England,” he'd say, “you're glad to see a Yank. If you're in China, you're happy to see a Brit. And if you're on the moon, you're happy to see a Chinaman!” In room 210 of the Visual Arts building, I was happy to see Maybelle.
“Think I brought enough?” Hmm—self-mockery or an earnest question? “If you need anything, let me know. I went a little crazy at Uncle Erbie's,” which was the only art supply store in town. Outrageous prices. Erbie, an overgrown beatnik in his midforties, acted as if someone had just let him out of jail and he was getting even by charging two dollars for a piece of charcoal that wouldn't grill a guinea pig.
We took our places directly in front of the gray, coffin-sized pedestal, to get the best view.
At nine a woman came through the door with a giant Boscov's white sale bag in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, announcing, “Hello everybody, just call me Dottie!”
Referring to a teacher by her first name was odd enough. A nickname seemed like nudity.
Were you to attend an opening for a Dorothy Spang show (with no previous knowledge of her or her work), you'd likely enter an otherwise empty room, notice her, and think, “Oh how sweet—at least the artist's mother showed up.” Then you'd look at the drawings and change your mind to “Whoops! That is the artist . . . ” She was the head of the Drawing Department, a mystery to the few who cared to ponder it. I imagined that her closest relatives felt she had great promise, urged her on like a gimpy racehorse, and had closets, TV rooms, breakfast nooks, basements, carports, and attics tiled with Spang originals. She was, as they say, Of a Certain Age, and favored dresses just below the knee made of fabrics left over from the pin-wale corduroy reupholstering of her living room sofa. Her scalp emitted a semicircular spoof of ivory hair—Bozo's grandma gone gray. Her nostrils were on a mad dash to either side of her face and her spectacles, bottle-thick lenses and frames of giltedged plastic, were perpetually refereeing the outcome. Behind them, her olive eyes shone brightly. They rarely pointed in the same direction, but at least they sparkled.
Dottie Spang didn't really teach Introduction to Drawing so much as she let it happen all around her. She also looked and behaved as if she just might know your parents.
The sole piece of information of any worth I retained from Dottie was something that I overheard her say in the middle of the semester to Rodney Hewitt, a particularly excitable member of the class who had just thrown his pastels out the window when it suddenly dawned on him that he wasn't Cézanne: “Remember, Robby,” she said—her hearing wasn't the greatest—“no matter who you are, your first thousand drawings are always your worst.” This was offered as encouragement.
Critiques for Dottie's class were every other Wednesday. We'd tack our papers up outside the room in the hallway, sit, stand, and slouch against the facing wall and were encouraged to speak up. Dottie's crits weren't exactly pointed—she liked everything. Or, at least, made the best of everything. I remember a drawing of a lion by Maybelle late in the term that looked as if she'd done it wearing a blindfold. Dottie soaked it in, slapped her hands together, tilted her head, and said,
“Oh, how brave! A placenta with a face! How did you ever think of that, dear? I never would have.”
“But Dottie,” I thought, “you just did.”
For our first session, we started with still life. Dottie waddled up to the platform and set her burden on it with a thump. Then she removed from the paper sack an enormous wedge of Stilton cheese, a transparent medical model of a human kidney, a men's size 12 EEE cordovan wing-tipped shoe (no laces), a pomegranate, and a large stuffed, dusty, flightless bird (like a small flamingo or a kiwi, only blackish brown) missing its head. The creature was mounted, left leg in midstep, onto a pockmarked oval piece of peagreen wood that was pasted on the front with a bright red slab of label tape reading “RENALDO.” A thick piece of coiled wire sprouted from its ropy neck—the scars of a taxodermic disaster long since passed. Dottie arranged these objects with the intensity of a chess champion.
“We want just the right amount of drama.” Balancing the tip of the shoe on the pomegranate, she tilted it up towards Renaldo—whose adjustable neck she gently curved downward, so he and the footwear appeared to be having a conversation. The cheese stood demurely off to the left in the background, supporting the plastic kidney, which seemed poised to spring onto Renaldo's back and gallop away. Dottie stepped away from the scene and squeezed her eyelids together.
“It's just . . . not . . . enough.” She rummaged through her bag and pulled out a crumpled velvet scarf the color of wilted dandelions and aswirl with Revolutionary War paraphernalia. She carefully draped a coat of arms over the kidney's edge, trained a Tory musket around Renaldo's left flank, and let a Minuteman march down past the shoe and over the side of the platform.
“There now . . .” she said, pleased. “. . . I think this is worth our attention.” With that, she produced a thick, dog-eared paperback mystery, plopped herself in a chair, and started to read. It would be three classes before I got it: this was our cue to draw.
Maybelle was already hard at work, transferring the quixotic tableau onto paper. I reluctantly followed
suit, wondering—wondering!— if Michelangelo started this way.
“I've never drawn an ostrich before,” she said to me, “especially out of its natural environment. It's all so new, isn't it?”
“Spanking.”
At the end of the class, Madame Spang roped off the display with tape and string, from which hung a sign that read “101 Still Life. Do not touch!”
I would have added “Or torch!”
• • •
My rooming situation, meanwhile, became less tolerable with each week, day, and minute. The first day's initial wave of despair, staved off since the move-in farce, began to seep back into the cellar of my well-being. And it was steadily rising, drowning delusions I only now awoke to—flimsy hopes that this would all be over in a few days and I could go back home.
No, not for four years.
Holding out for relief gave way to interior panic and tremors. Thankfully, Vermont started to rush the Ag Sci fraternity Alpha Gamma Rho (the Aggros), which kept him away till all hours, but it was always jarring when he'd finally stumble in, covered with grass stains, exhausted and reeking of fertilizer and cheap beer. Thenson, who must have left his personality in storage with everything else, studied in the room morning to morning, and when he wasn't doing that he was looking for me so he could latch on like a barnacle and ride me somewhere (to lunch, to the library, into town). I just longed for a place to be by myself . . .
During the second drawing class Dottie went to get a cloth to mop up after the hemorrhaging pomegranate, when my hungry eyes landed on a recessed loft, off to the upper back of the studio's rear. I stayed after the session until everyone had gone, and for a lark climbed the ladder leading up to it. Interesting: a mattress, a pillow, and group of thick votive candles. But it wasn't as if someone was using them, as far as I could tell—they were in storage—our next Dottie still life? Adventurous relief overtook me.