by Laura Ruby
“I don’t think your mom will be angry. She’ll be concerned.”
“Anger, concern, it’s all the same to her.”
The psychologist takes off her glasses. Her hands are shaking. This does not inspire confidence.
“Are you having problems at home, Tola? With your mom, maybe?”
“You’ve never had problems with your mom?”
“Maybe a few.”
“Okay, then.”
“A long time ago.”
“When you were my age?”
She purses her lips. “Yes.”
“See? Even people who eventually become professional educators have problems with their parents.”
She takes a tissue from her pocket and vigorously rubs lint into her glasses. “What about your dad?”
“I haven’t seen him in a couple of months. He just got married.”
“And are you upset about that?”
“Not particularly. I don’t like his wife.”
“That must be hard.”
“Not as hard as living with one kidney.”
“Oh! When did you lose your kidney?”
“I didn’t.”
She blinks as if she’s just run into a cloud of gnats and wipes the lenses that much harder. “The reason why I asked about your parents is because sometimes, when we’re unhappy, we do things that we think will make us feel better. Like, say, paddling John Jarmen. Though I have to admit you wouldn’t be the first student to want to hit him.”
“John Jarmen put his hand over my face and pushed me to the floor. He deserved to be paddled. I don’t feel bad about it. I feel good. Even though he punched me afterward. I can take a punch.”
“I know. You’ve been taking a lot of them.” She pauses. It is a Significant Pause. I think they teach those in therapy school. “You were close to Mr. Mymer.”
“Yes, but not in the way everyone thinks.”
“Why don’t you set me straight?”
“You won’t believe me,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Nobody does.”
“The school board does. The police do. Tell me about Mr. Mymer.”
“He’s a good teacher.”
“What makes him good?”
“He thinks art is important.”
“And other people don’t.”
“If other people thought art was important, then it would be required to graduate. But no, I don’t have to take art. I do have to take math, which is just a waste of time because the numbers get all switched up in my brain, plus, calculators exist for a reason. I do have to take history, which is basically memorizing tariff acts till your brain bleeds. I do have to take four years of gym class with a bunch of jerks who punch me if they don’t like what I say. But art? Optional. Even though art and music and literature and all that are what make us human. Algebra doesn’t make us human. Games don’t make us human.”
She smiles. “Well. You’re certainly passionate about all this.”
I sit up. “Is passionate another word for crazy?”
“Of course not,” she says.
For a brief second, I’m hopeful. Then she ruins it. “But it might help you to start talking to people.” I start to protest, but she puts up her hand. “I mean really talking. No snarky comments. No snide remarks. No kidnapping pigs. No fairy tales.” She puts her glasses back on. “We care about you. We’d love to hear what you want to say, whenever you want to say it. We’d like to know what the real story is. Your story.”
The psychologist is still nervous and sort of fragile, like if I cried, she’d cry, too. And she’s wearing one of those cheap suits that looks both itchy and flammable. I feel bad for her. So I tell her about my cat. My grandpa Joe. The little houses my dad used to make for us. Weird stories from Grimm’s like the one about a poor fisherman who gets a bunch of wishes granted by an enchanted flounder. My painting. She asks me to sketch something for her, so I do.
But the whole time I’m sketching, I’m thinking about Mr. Mymer, how easy he was to talk to, how you didn’t have to feel bad for him to want to tell him things. I’m imagining the art room at lunchtime, how good it smelled, how safe it felt. How he asked me about my name and I told him it could have been anything. Christina. Ashley. Katie. But no, in a fit of generosity that she would never again repeat, my mother let my father name me, and he chose Cenerentola. CHE-NER-EN-TOLA. Dad said he got the name from his favorite opera, La Cenerentola, but I don’t buy it. He liked Cenerentola because it’s another name for Cinderella, but he didn’t want to admit it. And he never really had a favorite opera; the opera thing was just a phase he was going through around the time I was born, something to take his mind off the fact that he wasn’t making any money. A month later, my mom said, he’d taken up tai chi and forgotten about it.
In the Grimm’s version of “Cinderella,” I told Mr. Mymer, the girl’s name is Aschenputtel. I suppose I should be glad that I’m not walking around with that on my report card.
And then, the other times, I told Mr. Mymer how my dad left my mom for the Hound from Hell and my mom turned into one of those helicopter parents almost overnight, hovering noisily overhead as if me and Madge might spontaneously combust and die if she wasn’t around to hose us off. Though, I said, in Madge’s case that might be true. I remember him asking what my family was like before the divorce, and I told him that I remember my mom working a lot, her tendency to be sarcastic at the most inconvenient times—as in all the time—and my dad sculpting all night and getting gloomy and impossible when he couldn’t sell anything. I remember months of fighting, years of it, and then a glacial silence that was somehow worse, a silence that muffled us all, so that the simple act of asking for the salt at dinner became painful and misunderstood.
But then I told him that memories are Madge’s department, that my own memories are usually too fuzzy to be of much use, and I could be making up the fighting and the glacial silences. (I read lots of teen novels, mostly before I became an actual teen, and maybe my brain’s been infiltrated with ideas not my own. Really, I said, why else would I use the word glacial?) But Madge, well, Madge is the elephant of the family. I told Mr. Mymer that Madge liked to whip out some horrible thing she insisted you said or did in the car on the way to see the Statue of Liberty, and though you know you couldn’t possibly be the kind of person to have said or have done such a terrible thing, you can’t argue with her because you don’t even remember going to the Statue of Liberty, not ever in your whole life, and even if you had, you must have been six years old at the most, and what six-year-old hasn’t said something horrible to her older sister? I told him that she does it to Mom, too, and it drove Mom crazy because she couldn’t remember, either.
And I remember Mr. Mymer saying this: “Maybe Madge’s memories aren’t as accurate as you all believe.”
“Why wouldn’t they be?” I said.
“Well, you said she seemed depressed; kind of gloomy like your dad. Sometimes depressed people see the world differently.”
“Maybe they see it for what it really is.”
“What is it?”
“Crap.”
The bell rings and I’m still sitting with the fragile, flammable psychologist. She tells me how happy she is that I’ve opened up to her. That she feels we can work together and make progress. She thanks me for the sketch—the enchanted flounder—which she likes enough to keep for her office.
She means well, so I don’t tell her that it’s easy to sound like you’re being personal when you’re not. That a professional should be able to tell the difference. And that if I really wanted to open up, I’d confess that I really am the liar everyone believes I am.
( comments )
“I wasn’t too confident how our meetings would go after that disastrous conference about the pignapping. And I’d heard from others how guarded she was. I was happy to be wrong. We discussed her feelings for Mr. Mymer, her feelings about her parents. I got a lot of good background. I think she’s a very co
nfused young girl, but I have a hard time believing that anything untoward happened with her art teacher. I think her behavior has a lot more to do with her family of origin. In future sessions, I’d like to explore her relationship with her father.”
—Diane Word, psychologist
“What kills me is that she called me that day. She wanted to have lunch.”
—Richard Riley, father
SILENCE IS GOLDEN, DUCT TAPE IS SILVER
Once upon a time, there was a girl. Though she was not a particularly bad girl—nor a particularly good one—most people found her a little strange. Often this made her sad, but not always. She liked to be alone (or so she told herself).
One day, her favorite teacher gives her a task. Not impossible—no separating lentils from piles of ashes, spinning straw into gold. All she’s supposed to do is visit a museum and write a journal entry about it. The teacher hands out lists of local galleries and places in New York City to choose from. “No showing is too big or small,” he says.
The girl picks a museum in New York City. This is the city where her father lives with his new wife. The father’s new wife doesn’t like the girl. When the girl calls her father’s apartment and asks if he would meet her for lunch, the stepmother claims he’s far too busy and that he’d have to see the girl another time. If it were up to the stepmother, the girl thinks, she would never see her own father again. The girl wonders about women like her stepmother. How they can look themselves in the mirror. Then she remembers that women like her stepmother enjoy looking in mirrors.
Still, even without the prospect of seeing her father, the girl is excited. It is late September, and the city is enjoying one last gasp of summer. When she arrives on the bus, the trees are just turning red and yellow, and the people are walking around in thin scarves and gauzy skirts whipped up by warm breezes and burnished by the golden sunlight. The city itself looks like a magnificent painting.
She gets to the museum and goes directly to the Georges-Pierre Seurat exhibit. She examines not his paintings but his drawings, made of lots of tiny dots. She likes dots. She reaches out to touch one of the drawings, and a guard yells at her.
After she views the drawings, she decides to go to the cafeteria for a snack. She finds a table in a deserted corner, half hidden by a large sandwich-board menu. She sits alone, scribbling notes in her journal, adding little sketches here and there. Her stomach rumbles, so she goes to the counter to order some food and is told a waitress will bring it. When she returns to her table, she thinks about the artist and the wonders he created. But mostly she’s thinking about how all the other tables in the café are filled with two or more people. She ponders the wonder of that, of two people finding each other and going to a museum to admire the art. The girl had tried to get a friend to come with her and couldn’t. She’d tried to get her sister to come and couldn’t. Her father was busy. Always busy.
The girl imagines what the people are talking about. Some of the people are laughing. A man and a woman lean in toward each other, sharing a piece of pie.
Someone clears his throat. She looks up to see her favorite teacher standing above her, a study in browns and oranges, his pumpkin-colored hair sticking up in every direction. His T-shirt says: SILENCE IS GOLDEN, DUCT TAPE IS SILVER.
“Hello, Ms. Riley,” he says. “Fancy meeting you here.” His voice is surprisingly low for someone so skinny.
“Hey, Mr. Mymer.” She has never seen this teacher outside a school setting before, and it makes her confused and nervous. She forgets that teachers are actually people and not avatars that come preloaded with the classrooms, the way she sometimes imagines them to be. She wonders how she’s supposed to act.
The teacher smiles widely.
Another thing the girl ponders: whitening strips.
But she remembers how much she loves this teacher. And, even more than that, how alone she’s been feeling. “How are you?” she says.
“Great, great,” Mr. Mymer says. “Which exhibit did you catch?”
“Georges Seurat.”
“That’s what I came to see,” he says. “Incredible, wasn’t it? I think I prefer his drawings to his paintings.”
“Me too.”
A waitress brings the girl’s food: a plate of desserts and a hot chocolate. The teacher points at the plate.
“That’s a lot of food for one person.”
People are often surprised at how much the girl eats. They don’t understand how hungry she is.
“This is all for me,” she says, and pops a cookie into her mouth. “But I’ll share.”
“No, thank you.” The teacher hesitates a minute, then says, “I’ll sit for a sec if you don’t mind.” He drops his man-purse to the floor and slumps in the chair across from the girl. He places a book, The World of Gustav Klimt, on the table. The girl knows the painting on the cover. It is a famous painting called The Kiss.
“I don’t know why I’m so tired,” the teacher says.
“All this art sucks the brains right out of you.”
“Probably.”
“I meant that in a good way.”
“I know. Have you started Friday’s sketch assignment?”
“Yeah,” she says. “At first, I was just going to do a self-portrait, but then I had this really cool dream. I was in this castle, I think. All stone and stained glass and tapestries. And there was a beautiful queen on the throne. She had the long hair, the blue velvet dress, the birds singing happy songs overhead, all that. The only weird thing was her feet. She didn’t have human feet. She had bird’s feet. And they were orange.”
“Cool.”
“If you think about it, the bird’s feet make total sense. In the original ‘Cinderella,’ there were no fairy godmothers or pumpkins or mice. It was a pair of magical birds that gave her the gown and the shoes. They also pecked out the eyes of the wicked stepsisters, but I think I’ll spare everyone that part.”
“I like it. Though I have to say I’m not surprised.” He taps the paperback collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that’s sitting on the table. It had once belonged to the girl’s father. She carries it everywhere with her.
“People forget how grim fairy tales are. I like to remind them,” she says.
“I know.”
“I worry sometimes that people won’t think that it’s art, though. That my subjects belong in cartoons or illustrations.”
“Dalí painted melting clocks. I suppose if he’d asked around first, quizzed people if they wanted to see a picture of a melting clock, the answer might have been something obvious, like ‘Clocks don’t melt!’ But, lucky for us, Salvador didn’t care what anyone else thought. You use what moves you.” The man has said this before. The girl has to wonder if he got it from a T-shirt.
“Still,” she says. “It’s not like people are wowed by what I do. A lot of times, nobody seems to get it.”
“Don’t fish for compliments,” the teacher replies.
The girl is stung, but she tries not to show it. “How else would I ever get any?”
“Some people understand what you’re trying to say with your art. And the rest, well, they’ll come around. Or they won’t. And maybe you shouldn’t care so much.” He flips through his book. “I was reading about Gustav Klimt—he was influenced by Seurat and Van Gogh, you know—and I found this. It’s called Nuda Veritas. The woman is holding up the mirror of truth while the snake of falsehood is dead at her feet. The quote above the figure is this: ‘If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.’”
The girl looks at the picture. The woman in it is naked. She has red hair with flowers entwined and the kind of thick, white thighs that would be considered fat now. If she were an actress, the studio executives would make her get liposuction.
The girl wonders if her teacher likes girls with red hair and thick thighs, and then chides herself for thinking such stupid things, things only a baby would think.
In her teacher’s clas
sroom, she feels old. Outside of it, she feels young. She wants this to be the other way around—she wants to feel older all the time—but she doesn’t know how to change it.
“Here,” he says. “You can borrow the book if you want. You’ll like Klimt’s colors at least, even if you don’t like his work.”
She takes the book, though she doesn’t know how it will help. He seems like he’s trying to comfort her, to get her to not worry about what people think. But she doesn’t know how you stop worrying about what other people think. Especially about her art. Even though she paints scenes from fairy tales, it’s the only time she says anything real.
“You said yourself that art is communication,” she says. “I don’t want to feel like I’m talking to myself.”
“So you’re unappreciated in your own lifetime. So was Modigliani.”
“Modigliani died of meningitis and drug abuse.”
“You forgot the misery and the poverty,” he says, grinning his yellow grin.
“Always looking on the bright side,” she tells him. Her stomach growls, and she slaps an arm over it as if to silence herself.
“You should eat,” he says.
“I am.” She takes another cookie. It is small, and she devours it whole. As she does this, he pulls the menu from behind the napkin holder and reads it. His hands, she decides, are his best feature. Even better than his eyes, which are big and blue, movie-star eyes. But they are set in an ordinary face, a face with thin lips and a strange black mole that does not look healthy. The hands, though, are something. The year before, they had studied sculpture, spending a long time on Michelangelo’s David. David was perfectly proportioned except for his hands. They were huge. You could see every detail down to the fingernails. But they were beautiful. Large and veined and strong. The imperfection made David more perfect.
The teacher has hands like that. Too big for his skinny arms. The girl isn’t so good at hands—they’re so hard to get right, the reason, she suspects, that even Michelangelo had a tough time—but she wants to paint the teacher’s. She wants to touch them.