Still Life with Tornado(9)

Ten-year-old Sarah wipes her eyes dry with her fists and shakes her head. “Even I can paint a bunch of dots.”

The security guard says, “You’re not the first person who’s said that, for sure.”

I’m not sure what she means, but I like that she said it. It is just dots. And forty-five million dollars could have bought a lot of people food somewhere or bought women’s shelters or orphan’s homes. What’s so great about buying a bunch of dots?

? ? ?

I want to visit the Twombly room, but ten-year-old Sarah says she hates the Twombly room. “It’s all scribbling,” she says. I try to disagree, but I know where she’s headed, and I follow her. We go to the armor collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has the coolest armor. There is no need to think about originality in there. Armor isn’t original. Even some animals have armor—they’re born with it.

Ten-year-old-Sarah is happy now. No crossed arms, no tears, no trying to tell me how much of a downer I am. We’re by the Saxon suit of armor called Armor for Use in the Tilt with the weird spike coming out the front of the breastplate. This is my favorite piece of armor since before I was ten-year-old Sarah. I didn’t understand it at first. I looked it up on the Internet when we got home and learned what tilt meant. It’s a term for jousting—the armor was used during jousts—games where two horsemen would race toward each other with lances and try to knock the other one off his horse. The spike on the breastplate is there to adjust the shield on the jouster’s weak side. We stand and stare at the armor for a few minutes. I read the description as I have a hundred times before. Geography: Made in Saxony, Germany, Europe. Date: c. 1575. Medium: Steel; leather (replaced); textiles.

Ten-year-old Sarah turns to me and says, “Do you remember the big fight in Mexico?”

“Maybe.”

“Remember what Bruce told me? In the restaurant?”

“Not really.”

“He really hasn’t come back yet?” she asks.

We’re having this conversation while staring at a suit of armor. I realize that my life feels like this. Armor for Use in the Tilt.

Life is a joust. Recently, I’ve been unhorsed. And yet I don’t feel a thing.

“Doesn’t call. Doesn’t send letters.” I hold back on telling her I have his phone number.

“It was my fault,” she says.

“I doubt that. I don’t think it was my fault.”

“You probably blocked it out. It was bad.”

“What are you? Some sort of amateur psychologist?”

“I’m ten. I’m not stupid,” she says.

Here’s what I think. I think we’re really smart when we’re young. Ten-year-old Sarah is smarter than I am because I’m six years older. Twenty-three-year-old Sarah is dumber than me because I’m sixteen. Someone somewhere was way older and richer and dumber than all of us and paid forty-five million dollars for a bunch of dots. I think this kind of smart isn’t something they can measure with tests. I think it’s like being psychic or being holy. If I could be anyone for the rest of my life, I would be a little kid.





Breakfast



When I get home from the art museum, Mom is awake and eating breakfast. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.

“You’re going to get expelled,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. Expulsion is a buzz when she says it. My heart races and I taste adrenaline. I used to feel that way when I drew something cool. Excited for the next stroke of the pencil and simultaneously terrified that the next stroke could ruin what I’d already done.

“Did something happen?” she asks. “At school?”

“Nothing ever really happens.”

“You can’t go to college if you don’t have a diploma.”

“Picasso didn’t have a diploma.”

“Good for him,” she says. “You can’t drop out of high school at sixteen.”

She looks tired. She always looks tired. Being an ER vampire-shift nurse does this to a person. Some days she looks more than tired. That usually means something gruesome happened.

“Did you have a hard night?”

“Accident on the expressway,” she says. “It was ugly.”

“Did anyone die?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t ever drive like an *, Sarah. Ninety percent of accidents are because someone was being an *.”

“I promise I won’t drive like an *.”

“Good.”

We’re Center City people. We don’t even have a car.

Mom goes to pour another cup of coffee. I stand there trying to remember the ten-year-old me who watched her do this four or five nights a week. Always over the weekend. I try to figure out why she chose weekends when it was the only time I was home all day.

“Do you remember when I was ten?”

She stirs in three sugars. “I remember some things.”

“Remember Mexico?”

She stops stirring her coffee and stares at the countertop and lets the question float above us for a second too long. “You got such a sunburn on the last day,” she says.

“I forgot to put lotion on,” I say.