Still Life with Tornado(8)

I ask her, “You want to go in?”

She rolls her eyes like I’ve asked a stupid question and walks up the famous Rocky steps without talking to me. From behind, I can see me in her. The skinny matchstick legs. The no-hips build that makes it impossible for me to buy jeans that fit. When she gets to the top of the steps she waits for me. She says, “One day we’re going to be in this museum. One day, we’re going to be famous.”

I want to tell her to stop saying we. I want to tell her that presently we can’t even draw a single pear or our own f*cking hand.

We go to the front desk and even though I still wonder if I’m hallucinating, I know ten-year-old Sarah is really here because the lady behind the counter asks how old ten-year-old Sarah is, and when ten-year-old Sarah says “ten,” the lady gives her a wristband for free. I have to pay fourteen bucks for being sixteen.

We don’t say anything as we walk to the Picasso. We both know where it is by now. When we get there, we both stand and stare as we have done every time before. Dad says art is a way of standing still and finding the quiet inside yourself. That’s what I do. Ten-year-old Sarah does it, too, like a trained dog, but I can see her little hands twitching to touch it. I see her look around for the security guard. I remember being her and thinking just one touch as if touching the same thing Picasso touched would give her the talent to become him. It was always some sort of scam—begging the sea god, touching the Picasso—a desire for genius the way the desire for money makes people buy lottery tickets.

Ten-year-old Sarah says, “Picasso had original ideas.”

I say, “Maybe.”

She says, “Not maybe. This is original. No one did it before him.”

“I guess.”

As we wander around the area, there are similar paintings. Braque, Gris, all of Picasso’s contemporaries. I see the style in those, too. It was a movement. Picasso wasn’t the only cubist. (Nobody was the only anything-ist.) “I mean, somebody had to be the first cubist, right?” she asks.

“Somebody did. Yes. But maybe it wasn’t Picasso.”

She shrugs. “You’re a f*cking downer.”

“I’m a realist.”

She shrugs again and crosses her arms in front of her chest.

“Just think about it. How do we know that Picasso wasn’t walking down the street one day and saw some guy drawing this on a piece of wood? How do we know that he invented this without other people’s ideas? We don’t. We don’t know anything.”

“I don’t know about art history much,” ten-year-old Sarah says.

“Nothing new ever really happens,” I say.

“You really are a downer.”

“Realist.” I refuse to explain to her that you can’t trust history books anyway because history books were usually written by people who wanted to sound like they knew something.

We wander away from the cubists. Ten-year-old Sarah doesn’t stay with me or talk about any of the paintings. She keeps her arms crossed like she’s fed up with me. She’s a little like twenty-three-year-old Sarah. Aloof—like she’s better. At the end of the long hall—the one that leads to the contemporary section—is a Lichtenstein. I’ve never seen this one in person before so it must be on loan or something. Frankly, I don’t think reproductions of old comic strips are all that original, but this one has something to it. It’s the look on the subject’s face. Ten-year-old Sarah stops in front of it and squints at the dots. She backs up three big steps—animated little-kid steps—and squints again. I walk over to the right and read the description.

Roy Lichtenstein, American, Born 1923. Sleeping Girl, 1964, oil and Magna on canvas.

? ? ?

Ten-year-old Sarah stands square to the canvas with her arms loosely at her sides. Unlike her crossed arms in the cubism room, she is letting Lichtenstein into her. She is feeling the sleeping girl. I stand next to her the same way. Legs slightly apart, arms by my sides, breathing, like some sort of art museum Tai Chi. I try to let the sleeping girl into me, too. I look at her furrowed brow while she sleeps and I feel pain inside of her sleep. I feel like something is unfinished in her life. I feel she is unhappy.

I look over after a quiet minute and see that ten-year-old Sarah is crying. This was Mom’s art museum habit. Every time we went and did what Dad told us to do—stood still and found the quiet—Mom would find one painting that would make her cry quietly. It was a sacred act. Tears would fall slowly while she stared at a piece and then we’d move on and look at other paintings. Dad never cried, but I think he wanted to.

I look back at the sleeping girl. I see the beauty of all the dots and the simplicity of the colors and I want to cry but all I feel is numb. Ten-year-old Sarah takes a step forward so she is nearly nose to nose with Lichtenstein’s girl and the security guard slowly makes her way toward us. I stop trying to cry and look up and smile. We both tell ten-year-old Sarah to step back from the painting. She steps back.

The security guard says, “Forty-five million dollars.”

“For this?” ten-year-old Sarah asks.

“Yep.”

“It’s just dots,” she answers. I don’t say anything.

“Lichtenstein’s dots,” the security guard says. “Forty-five million dollars.”

I think about that. Forty-five million dollars. That’s like a lottery ticket.