French Braid(56)

“Only because I was too little then to say it right,” Candle told her. “Now I’m changing it back.”

“Fine,” Alice said. And then she asked again what she would like for breakfast.

Candle did get her hair cut that Saturday, not exactly with wings but with kind of a swept-back look at the sides, stopping just above her collar. And she got her ears pierced immediately afterward at a jewelry store in the same mall. But nobody made the slightest effort to go along with her name change. “Nice haircut, Candle girl!” her father said when she got home. She gave him a flat-eyed stare, and he said, “What?”

“She wants to be called Kendall,” Alice reminded him. But then she herself, not two minutes later, addressed her as “Candle.”

Candle was the baby of the family, was why. The last one left at home. Nobody took her seriously.

Even her friends, at her birthday slumber party that night, kept slipping and calling her Candle. They did try to remember. They did say “Oops!” when she corrected them. But on Monday morning they were back to Candle this and Candle that, and her teachers didn’t even make an effort.

Eventually, she became Candle again even to herself. It was as if the change had never happened. When she wrote “Kendall” on her test papers—which she’d been doing all along; it was the name in her official school records—she would give it a wistful glance now, remembering that brief moment when she had imagined it was possible to become a whole new person. She had to admit, though, that the name had never really felt as if it were hers.

And her hair grew out again, because she led a crazy-busy life these days and there just wasn’t enough time for beauty-parlor appointments. And then softball season started and it was easiest just to yank her hair back in a rubber band before she fitted her catcher’s mask on.

The pierced ears, though, remained, and gradually she accumulated quite a collection of earrings—mostly studs, because dangly earrings of any kind were not allowed by her coach.

She figured that when she turned thirteen, she’d campaign for a whole row of piercings running up the outer rim of each ear. Then she’d fit a tiny hoop into each and every one, so that the edges of her ears would resemble the spine of a spiral notebook. She’d seen that style on a girl in McDonald’s, an extremely I-don’t-care-looking girl with raccoon-eye makeup and black lipstick. The kids at school would fall over! They would practically not know her; that was how different she would look.

That summer, she went to the sleepaway camp in Maine that she had attended every year since she was eight. Three of her school friends went too, and she already knew a number of the other campers from previous summers, so it wasn’t all that adventurous but she liked it well enough and it was better than staying home. This year, though, there was a new art counselor. Tomorrow, her name was. (Tomorrow!) She was younger than the previous art counselor, and hipper; had a bumblebee tattooed on her wrist. Right away she and Candle hit it off. For one thing, she said she really loved the name Candle, and when she learned how it had come about she confided that her name too had been adapted from the original. “It started out Tamar,” she said. “I changed it when I hit my teens. You were well ahead of me, changing yours when you were so young.” This made Candle feel glad, all at once, that her family had paid no attention when she’d tried to change it back again.

More important, though: Tomorrow thought Candle had talent. She showed the other girls the still life Candle painted—the same still life they’d all painted, a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of Kool-Aid set up on one of the picnic tables—and she said, “See how Candle has put her own special twist on things? She didn’t copy the pitcher; she exaggerated it. She narrowed the neck and she ballooned the base. That is what makes it art, folks.”

Candle hardly knew where to look. She had always “exaggerated” her pictures, if that was what it was called. Drawing a fairy-tale princess, as she liked to do when she was little, she had swooped the skirt of the ballgown out to the very edges of the paper; she had elongated the torso; she had made the princess’s arms as curvy as the scrolls on the front of a violin. But no one had said she had talent. The artist her friends at school admired was Melanie Brooks, in eighth grade. Melanie drew fashion models so polished-looking that they could have been in a magazine.

Eventually, the other campers moved on to pottery making, lanyard braiding, and basket weaving, but Candle was allowed to stick with painting. And when her parents came to pick her up, at the end of her six weeks, they were treated to an entire show of her paintings thumbtacked around the art cabin. “I’d love to see what she could do with oils,” Tomorrow told them. “The camp limits us to just watercolors for easier cleanup, but she might want to branch out into other mediums.”

“My mother works in acrylics, as it happens,” Alice said.

“Oh? Your mother’s an artist?”

“In a way,” Alice said.

“Maybe Candle could pick up some tips from her,” Tomorrow said.

Alice looked uncertain, but she said, “Well. Maybe.”



* * *



—

Candle’s paintings were forgotten once she was home again. Or forgotten by her parents, at least, because the house was all abuzz now with her sister’s wedding plans. Robby was marrying her longtime boyfriend in the fall. Carlton, his name was. He was a dental student with a receding hairline; so, big whoop. Candle couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about.