We were not on the bus route, and it was a bit of a hike to school, but none of us minded the walk. Emerson was in a fancy neighborhood with streets canopied by eucalyptus trees, and the school building looked like a Spanish hacienda, with a red terra-cotta roof. It was surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, and, when the bananas ripened, the students all got free bananas at lunch. The playground at Emerson was covered with lush green grass watered by a sprinkler system, and it had more equipment than I’d ever seen: seesaws, swings, a merry-go-round, a jungle gym, tether balls, and a running track.
Miss Shaw, the teacher in the third-grade class I was assigned to, had steely gray hair and pointy-rimmed glasses and a stern mouth. When I told her I’d read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, she raised her eyebrows skeptically, but after I read aloud from one of them, she moved me into a reading group for gifted children.
Lori’s and Brian’s teachers also put them in gifted reading groups. Brian hated it, because the other kids were older and he was the littlest guy in the class, but Lori and I were secretly thrilled to be called special. Instead of letting on that we felt that way, however, we made light of it. When we told Mom and Dad about our reading groups, we paused before the word. “gifted,” clasping our hands beneath our chins, fluttering our eyelids, and pretending to look angelic.
“Don’t make a mockery of it,” Dad said. “’Course you’re special. Haven’t I always told you that?”
Brian gave Dad a sideways look. “If we’re so special,” he said slowly, “why don’t you…” His words petered out.
“What?” Dad asked. “What?”
Brian shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. Emerson had its very own nurse who gave the three of us ear and eye exams, our first ever. I aced the tests. “Eagle eyes and elephant ears,” the nurse said — but Lori struggled trying to read the eye chart. The nurse declared her severely shortsighted and sent Mom a note saying she needed glasses.
“Nosiree,” Mom said. She didn’t approve of glasses. If you had weak eyes, Mom believed, they needed exercise to get strong. The way she saw it, glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from learning to see the world on their own. She said people had been trying to get her to wear glasses for years, and she had refused. But the nurse sent another note saying Lori couldn’t attend Emerson unless she wore glasses, and the school would pay for them, so Mom gave in.
When the glasses were ready, we all went down to the optometrist. The lenses were so thick they made Lori’s eyes look big and bugged out, like fish eyes. She kept swiveling her head around and up and down.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. Instead of answering, Lori ran outside. I followed her. She was standing in the parking lot, gazing in awe at the trees, the houses, and the office buildings behind them.
“You see that tree over there?” she said, pointing at a sycamore about a hundred feet away. I nodded.
“I can not only see that tree, I can see the individual leaves on it.” She looked at me triumphantly. “Can you see them?”
I nodded.
She didn’t seem to believe me. “The individual leaves? I mean, not just the branches but each little leaf?”
I nodded. Lori looked at me and then burst into tears.
On the way home, she kept seeing for the first time all these things that most everyone else had stopped noticing because they’d seen them every day. She read street signs and billboards aloud. She pointed out starlings perched on the telephone wires. We went into a bank and she stared up at the vaulted ceiling and described the octagonal patterns.
At home, Lori insisted that I try on her glasses. They would blur my vision as much as they corrected hers, she said, so I’d be able to see things as she always had. I put on the glasses, and the world dissolved into fuzzy, blotchy shapes. I took a few steps and banged my shin on the coffee table, and then I realized why Lori didn’t like to go exploring as much as Brian and I did. She couldn’t see.
Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori.
“Did you see better?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say better,” Mom answered. “I’d say different.”
“Maybe you should get a pair, Mom.”
“I like the world just fine the way I see it,” she said.
But Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson’s roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple.
Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom. As soon as we’d settled into the house, Mom threw herself into her art career. She erected a big white sign in the front yard on which she had carefully painted, in black letters with gold outlines, R. M. WALLS ART STUDIO. She turned the two front rooms of the house into a studio and gallery, and she used two bedrooms in the back to warehouse her collected works. An art supplies store was three blocks away, on North First Street, and thanks to Mom’s inheritance, we were able to make regular shopping expeditions to the store, bringing home rolls of canvas that Dad stretched and stapled onto wooden frames. We also brought back oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, gesso, a silk-screening frame, india ink, paintbrushes and pen nibs, charcoal pencils, pastels, fancy rag paper for pastel drawings, and even a wooden mannequin with movable joints whom we named Edward and who, Mom said, would pose for her when we kids were off at school.
Mom decided that before she could get down to any serious painting, she needed to compile a thorough art reference library. She bought dozens of big loose-leaf binders and lots of packs of lined paper. Every subject was given its own binder: dogs, cats, horses, farm animals, woodland animals, flowers, fruits and vegetables, rural landscapes, urban landscapes, men’s faces, women’s faces, men’s bodies, women’s bodies, and hands-feet-bottoms-and-other-miscellaneous body parts. We spent hours and hours going through old magazines, looking for interesting pictures, and when we spotted one we thought might be a worthy subject of a painting, we held it up to Mom for approval. She studied it for a second and okayed or nixed it. If the photo made the grade, we cut it out, glued it on a piece of lined paper, and reinforced the holes in the paper with adhesive Os so the page wouldn’t tear out. Then we got out the appropriate three-ringed binder, added the new photograph, and snapped the rings shut. In exchange for our help on her reference library, Mom gave us all art lessons.
Mom was also hard at work on her writing. She bought several typewriters — manuals and electrics — so she’d have backups should her favorite break down. She kept them in her studio. She never sold anything she wrote, but from time to time she received an encouraging rejection letter, and she thumbtacked those to the wall. When we kids came home from school, she’d usually be in her studio working. If it was quiet, she was painting or contemplating potential subjects. If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of pithy sayings — one was. “Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in” — which she’d titled. “R. M. Walls’s Philosophy of Life.”
Dad joined the local electricians’ union. Phoenix was booming, and he landed a job pretty quickly. He left the house in the morning wearing a yellow hard hat and big steel-toed boots, which I thought made him look extra handsome. Because of the union, he was making steadier money than we’d ever seen. On his first payday, he came home and called us all into the living room. We kids had left our toys out in the yard, he declared.