“No. There is no pineapple there. And this pear isn’t there, either.” She pointed at one of the pears I had drawn.
“Wait a minute,” I said, still confused but getting defensive. “There are pears there. There are four pears there on the table.”
“Yes,” Susan Boone said. “There are four pears on the table. But none of them is this pear. This is a pear from your imagination. It is what you know to be a pear—a perfect pear—but it is not any of the pears you actually saw.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but Gertie and Lynn and John and Jeffrey and David knew, apparently. They were all nodding.
“Don’t you see, Sam?” Susan Boone picked up my drawing pad and walked over to me. She pointed at the grapes I had drawn. “You’ve drawn some beautiful grapes. But they aren’t the grapes on the table. The grapes on the table aren’t so perfectly oblong, and they aren’t all the same size, either. What you’ve drawn here is your idea of how grapes should look, not the grapes that are actually in front of us.”
I blinked down at the drawing pad. I didn’t get it. I really didn’t. I mean, I guess I sort of understood what she was saying, but I didn’t see what the big deal was. My grapes looked a lot better than anybody else’s grapes. Wasn’t that a good thing?
The worst part of it was, I could feel everybody looking at me sympathetically. My face started getting hot. That is the thing about being a redhead, of course. You go around blushing something like ninety-seven percent of the time. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to hide it.
“Draw what you see, ” Susan Boone said, not in an unkind way. “Not what you know, Sam.”
And then Theresa, panting from her climb up the stairs, came in, causing Joe to start shrieking “Hello Joe! Hello Joe!” all over again.
And it was time to go. I thought I would collapse with relief.
“I’ll see you on Thursday,” Susan Boone called cheerfully to me as I put on my coat.
I smiled back at her, but of course I was thinking, Over my dead body will you see me on Thursday.
I didn’t know then, of course, how right I was. Well, in a way.
When I told Jack about it—what had happened at the Susan Boone Art Studio, I mean—he just laughed.
Laughed! Like it was funny!
I was kind of hurt by this, but I guess it was kind of funny. In away.
“Sam,” he said, shaking his head so that the long silver ankh he wears in one ear swayed softly. “You can’t let the establishment win. You’ve got to fight against the system.”
Which is easy for Jack to say. Jack is six foot four and weighs over two hundred pounds. He was assiduously courted by our school football coach after the team’s best linebacker moved to Dubai.
But Jack wouldn’t have any part of Coach Donnelly’s scheme to dominate our school district’s sectionals. Jack doesn’t believe in organized sports, but not because, like me, he is resentful of their draining valuable funds away from the arts. No, Jack is convinced that sports, like the Lottery, only serve to lull the proletariat into a false sense of hope that he might one day rise above his Bud-swilling, pickup-truck-driving peers.
It is very easy for a guy like Jack to fight against the system.
I, on the other hand, am only five foot two and do not know what I weigh, since Mom threw out the scale after seeing a news story on the prevalence of anorexia in today’s teenage girls, but it surely isn’t more than one ten or so. Plus I have never been able to climb the rope in PE, having inherited my father’s complete lack of upper-body strength.
When I mentioned this, however, Jack started laughing even harder, which I thought was, you know, kind of rude. For a guy who is supposed to be my soulmate, and all. Even if he maybe doesn’t know it yet.
“Sam,” he said, “I’m not talking about physically fighting the system. You’ve got to be more subtle than that.”
He was sitting at the kitchen table, polishing off a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts Theresa had put out for us as an after-school snack. Entenmann’s is not what we normally get as after-school snack fare. My mom only wants us to have apples and Graham Crackers and milk and stuff. But Theresa, unlike my parents, doesn’t care about Jack’s grades or the political statements he likes to make with his BB gun, so when he comes over when she’s around, it’s always like a big party. Sometimes she even bakes. Once she made fudge. I am telling you, Lucy’s getting the one guy who will inspire Theresa to make fudge proves there is seriously no justice in the world.
“Susan Boone is stifling me creatively,” I said, indignantly. “She’s trying to make me into some kind of art clone . . .”
“Of course she is.”Jack looked amused as he bit into another doughnut. “That’s what teachers do. You tried to get a little creative, added a pineapple and POW! The fist of conformity came crashing down on you.”
When Jack gets excited, he talks with his mouth open. He did that now. Bits of doughnut went flying across the table and hit the back of the magazine Lucy was reading. She lowered her copy of Cosmo, looked at the bits of doughnut stuck to the back, looked at Jack, and went, “Dude, say it, don’t spray it.”
Then she went back to reading about orgasms.
See? See what I mean about her being oblivious to Jack’s genius?
I took a bite of my own doughnut. Our kitchen table, at which we generally only eat for breakfast and snacks, is located in this kind of glass atrium that juts out from the rest of the kitchen, into the backyard. Our house is old—more than a hundred years old, like most of the houses in Cleveland Park, which are all these Victorians with a lot of stained-glass windows and widow’s walks, painted bright colours. For instance, our house is turquoise, yellow and white.
The glass atrium the kitchen table is in was added on to our house last year. The ceiling is glass, three walls are made of glass, and the kitchen table, actually, is made out of this huge piece of glass. Everywhere I looked, I could see my reflection, since it was getting dark outside. And I didn’t much like what I saw:
A medium-sized girl with too pale skin and freckles, dressed all in black, with a bunch of bright red curly hair sticking straight out of the top of her head.
What I saw sitting on either side of my reflection I liked even less:
A delicately featured girl with no freckles in a purple-and-white cheerleader uniform, her own bright-red hair completely under control and only curling softly where it tumbled down from a barrette.
And:
A gorgeous, big-shouldered hunk with piercing blue eyes and long brown hair in torn-up jeans and an Army Navy surplus trenchcoat, eating doughnuts as if there were no tomorrow.
And there was me, in the middle. In between. Where I always am.
I saw a documentary on birth order on the Health Network, and guess what it said:
First born (aka Lucy): Bossy. Always gets what she wants. Kid most likely to be CEO of a major corporation, dictator of a small country, supermodel, you name it.
Last born (aka Rebecca): Baby. Always gets what she wants. Kid most likely to end up discovering a cure for cancer, hosting her own talk show, stepping up to the alien mother ship when it lands and being all, “Hey, welcome to Earth,” etc.
Middle child (aka me): Lost in the shuffle. Never gets what she wants. Kid most likely to end up a teen runaway, living on leftover Big Macs scrounged from Dumpsters behind the local McDonald’s for weeks before anyone even notices she is gone.
Story of my life.
Although if you think about it, the fact that I am left-handed indicates that I was probably, at one time, a twin. According to this article I read in the dentist’s office, anyway. There’s this theory that most lefties actually started out as one in a pair of a twins. One out of every ten pregnancies starts out as twins. One of out every ten people is left-handed.