The Animators(79)

I think fleetingly of Teddy. I feel a final slice of guilt, oozing red, in my middle. “Sometimes I wonder if we maybe shouldn’t take out the photo scene,” I say. “Maybe it’s too much. You know?”

Mel pauses for a moment, searching my face. She takes off her glasses and rubs at her eyes before looking back up. Without glasses, her face looks smaller somehow, her eyes lighter, vulnerable. “Do you ever think about the kind of person you would have become if you hadn’t seen those pictures?”

“Let’s not go down this road.”

She puts her glasses on the drafting table. “Look. That story you told me is brutal. You saw pictures—real pictures—of little girls knocked out and tied up before you even knew what you were seeing. You were what, ten? You knew nothing then. You wouldn’t even have had your first period yet. Once you see something like that, you can’t unsee it. You were unwittingly exposed to the possibility of pain. Of violation. And I think a big part of you spent a lot of your life trying to feel something else.” She leans in. Her eyes are wider. She’s angry, I realize. She’s furious. This has been curdling inside her. “Anything that makes you in that way, anything that makes you hurt and hungry in that way, is worth investigating. No matter how disgusting the source.”

And there it is, in the middle of the room: a crystalline Mel Vaught reading of a life, fearfully, morbidly accurate. We both know she’s right. She’s right about the story, she’s right about the shape. She’s right about me. It’s only two steps from drawing the Phillips-Stamper Cemetery to drawing Honus Caudill. My fingers are thinking on their own now. I bury my head in my arms and smell the wool on my sweater, seeing blackness running through it all.

I raise up. “Okay. Let’s see what kind of story it makes,” I say. “Try it out.”

Mel has her way with the project, like she always does. I come in one morning, and she stops me, holds up one finger, waiting for my attention, then brandishes what she’s made—a flipbook, thick but the size of an old address log. She used to make more of these, back in college. My favorite was the one of our old sketch prof McIntosh fellating a horse, then the horse kicking him in the face and braying, “SHAZAM!” For Fart’s birthday one year, she made a flipbook adventure of a 1980s Ozzy Osbourne: taking blotter acid, then pulling on a sundress and snorting ants. At the end, Ozzy refuses to speak to anyone else on the tour bus except a blow-up doll with whom he spends a week conspiring against his bandmates. The flipbook’s last page is a picture of Ozzy staring at the blow-up doll with what can only be called adoration. It is strangely beautiful. Fart teared up a little when she gave it to him. When people visit his apartment, he hustles them over, saying, “Look at this. My friend Mel made this for me.”

The flipbook is me. It is a Sharon flipbook. It starts with Sharon the toddler, a scene from a Polaroid that Mel has stolen from my mother’s house—me in bib overalls, holding a giant stuffed chicken I’d been given for Christmas. I start growing with the movement. Fat, then thin, then fat again. Breasts out of nowhere. Arms longer, nose longer, eyes sharper. Hair goes up, down, short, long. My entire life moving, my face growing, aging. Clear-eyed adulthood. The stroke is in the flick of three pages, so fast I start—I go from long-haired and top-heavy to thin, bald, lopsided. Mel did not hold back with the stroke face; it is there in twisted, distorted relief. Then the uphill climb. The face straightens, left side catching up with the right. The body fills out a little. But the eyes remain the same after the change. Smaller. A little warier, lacking in the quality that could have been mistaken for dumbness before when it was really the quality of one unburdened, a door that has not yet been shut.

“Do you see now what I want to do?” Mel says. “It’s you. The whole story. The pictures. The stroke. Everything in between.” She sends her hand on an arc through the air. “Your flight back up.”

I sit down and flip through it, again, again, again. My throat starts to ache. It’s a flipbook of someone losing something important to them, to who they are, and it is beautiful. Made with total care; total faith in the recovery of what is lost.

We begin making a storyboard on an old cork expanse Mel finds in the house’s storage shed, posting sketches with summaries underneath: a little girl in front of a TV, cradling a bag of circus peanuts, reads Friday night 4th grade. TGIF on ABC. Monday afternoon, school bus. Big girls steal backpack. Family dinner: Red comes home drunk, pukes in the bushes, Dad tells Mom to go fuck herself, Shauna rips up Sharon’s drawing. The plot turn: Dirty gray van creeps up mountain. Front grill should look like a face (screaming/laughing). Mel makes some oil-pencil sketches of the room: the spoiled carpeting, the drippy yellow walls. She sketches Honus Caudill’s shoes, dark with insteps like open mouths, parked beside a porch door. The best is of me and Teddy, together, backs turned, facing a long, closed trunk that seems to stretch into infinity.

Mel’s discouraged. I work more slowly than I did. My lines aren’t as clean as they once were. My hands still shake some when holding a pencil. “All you need is practice,” she says, brows coming low over her eyes. “Focus.”

“I’m trying.”

“I know you are.”

“You don’t act like you do. You act like I’m slacking off.”

“I’m sorry. My intention is not to make you feel like a slacker. Just—treat it like a job, you know? When you clock in, clock in.”