Still Life with Tornado(24)

“Don’t you miss him?”

“No.”

“Well, I miss him. He’s my brother.”

“ . . .”

The guy on the TV hits a single and Dad gets all excited and says, “Yes! What a hit!”

I look around the living room. Everything is normal here. There are framed pictures of me as a little kid on the mantel. My ceramic owl lives there, too. We have art on the walls—some prints of classics and a few oils Dad bought at student art sales over the years. A lot of still lifes.

I think about still lifes. Until I met ten-year-old Sarah, that’s what I had. A still life. The more I pay attention, the more I see I was wrong.

I look back at my comic and pencil a thick title at the top.

STILL LIFE WITH TORNADO.





Art Show



It’s Monday and Alleged Earl is curled in the alcove like he is every morning. I didn’t even get on the bus. I just ate breakfast, waited for Dad to leave, and walked here.

As I sit on the sidewalk near Alleged Earl, I think about school and what happened. Sometimes the whole thing just washes over me like a river gone over its banks. No matter what I do, I can’t stop thinking about it.

I had an original idea once.

Sculpture class, third quarter, sophomore year. Final project, two and a half months ago.

? ? ?

First, Miss Smith gave us materials: a few spools of wire; a big box of colorful Plexiglas; a bucket of broken-up tiles in case anyone wanted to do a 3-D mosaic; clay. We were all still friends then. Vicky-the-grand-prizewinner was extra nice to me because she knew what I’d seen. She’d sent me a private message on The Social the day it happened. It said, Let’s keep that between us, okay?

Everyone in art club chose the Plexiglas because we’d never worked with Plexiglas before. Miss Smith explained that she had special epoxy to bond pieces to other pieces. We took a day to sketch ideas and to figure out which colors we wanted to work with, which pieces. On the second day while some people still riffled through the box for the right piece, I cut my three pieces—primary colors—with the little band saw we had in the art room that no one ever used. I cut out shapes. Triangles and squares and rectangles. The saw spat plastic dust as I worked and it smelled awful, but there was something cathartic about cutting up a big thing into little things. Miss Smith ignored my doing this. She didn’t even tell me to put on safety goggles, which is probably against the law. Miss Smith didn’t care about laws. I knew that.

In the end, I had a pile of small random shapes in red, yellow, and blue. I planned on mounting the shapes on a larger piece of neutral-colored Plexiglas. I thought the idea was boring. The rest of the class was drawing on their Plexiglas and most of the art club was lining up behind me at the band saw to cut their pieces into curvier shapes than mine. I could see the curves drawn in Sharpie on their Plexiglas. It was always a competition, the art club. If I did something, they would do something-plus-one.

I took my pieces of Plexiglas home and showed them to Mom and complained that I thought my project was boring. She asked if I’d ever tried bending it and she showed me how to bend Plexiglas over the heat of the electric stove. She gave me a pair of silicone oven gloves to wear but I found them restricting so I took them off once she left the kitchen. I spent an hour bending the shapes I’d cut out—my squares were now wavy, my rectangles were cylinders, my triangles a mix of both. I burned my fingertips a little, nothing awful, and I turned on the exhaust fan so the whole house didn’t smell like burning plastic even though the house already smelled like burning plastic before I turned it on. When I was done bending, I laid my new pieces out on the countertop and they were less boring and I felt happy enough with the Plexiglas project.

When I got back to class the next day, the band saw was already on and Vicky-the-grand-prizewinner was cutting curves into her flat Plexiglas. Miss Smith stood behind her, smiling. Vicky-the-grand-prizewinner was wearing safety goggles.

I pulled out my flat piece of neutral-colored Plexiglas and then, one by one, I started to pull out my bent, curved shapes. Vivian asked, “How did you do that?” and I explained how I did it, which was probably a mistake. By the end of the day, Miss Smith produced an electric hot plate that she stored on the shelves behind her desk. By the end of the week, all the art clubbers had bent Plexiglas projects, too. They said they planned on painting theirs. Carmen twisted a tornado out of a large triangle and planned on drawing the things within. My project still seemed boring to me. There’s only so much an artist can do with Plexiglas. I had a week before the final project was due.

So I changed my project. This time, I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. I started to weave a basket out of thin wire. I had stainless steel wire, brass wire, and copper wire. My fingers were still a bit scarred from the Plexiglas bending, so when the wires bit into my fingers until I bled, I barely felt it. I went into the zone when I wove. It was far more interesting than working with plastic. The faster I wove, the more I went into the zone. The more I was in the zone, the more I wanted to make something other than a basket. I sat staring at what I’d done so far. I stopped weaving. I opened my sketchbook and started drawing. I knew what this project could become. I knew it could be great. And when Carmen said, “Are you weaving a basket?” I lied to her. I said, “Yes.”

But I wasn’t really weaving a basket. I was weaving a headpiece. I wove a curved rectangle about five by eight inches and wove in complicated designs and threaded in decorations like beads and other flotsam. Everyone was so busy bending Plexiglas and decorating it with pop art dots, Miss Smith didn’t even notice I’d changed mediums. I did most of the final touches at home so no one would steal my idea.