The Nest(38)

LOUISA HAD BEEN SITTING on the linoleum floor in the museum with her sketch pad for almost an hour, and the leg bent beneath her had started to go numb. She stood awkwardly and tried to stomp the feeling back into her thigh and butt, which were tingling uncomfortably. She limped back and forth under the sign for the entrance to the small corridor where she’d been drawing: The Leonard C. Sanford Hall of North American Birds. She liked that part of the museum for a bunch of reasons. First, it was named after a Leonard and so was she, after the grandfather she’d never met (Nora was named after their father’s father, Norman). She liked that the hall wasn’t nearly as crowded as the more popular exhibits, the dinosaurs or the blue whale—on a weekend those rooms were nearly impossible to navigate, never mind finding a spot to sit in peace with her sketch pad. North American Birds was a dated, musty exhibit of field specimens tacked onto walls behind glass. It was more a corridor to pass through than a destination.

And she loved the bird specimens, even if they were old-fashioned and a little creepy. Her favorite case was the one displaying “Swallows, Flycatchers, and Larks” because the birds were in flight and almost looked alive. Her least favorite: “Herons, Ibises, and Swans,” because the large birds looked awkward and uncomfortable. Purely for vernacular, she loved the case she was sitting in front of now: “Wrens, Nuthatches, Creepers, Titmice, Mimic Thrushes, Jays, and Crows.” She wished she knew what a mimic thrush mimicked and whether titmice ate mice. She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.

But even in the relatively sparsely populated corridor, she was rarely left alone. People still constantly looked over her shoulder and asked questions about what she was drawing or why or, even worse, just stood watching in awkward silence. And the kids! Pestering her nonstop and asking if they could draw, too. Their parents were just as bad.

“Maybe if you ask nicely,” one mother had said to her son while Louisa was trying to sketch the larks in flight, right before her leg went numb, “this nice lady will share her paper and show you how to draw.”

“These aren’t for kids,” Louisa said, sharply, picking up her charcoal pencils and pastels from the floor.

“How come she won’t share?” the little boy whined.

“I don’t know, honey,” his mother said. “Not everyone is a good sharer like you.”

“Jesus,” Louisa said, slamming her pad shut. The mother threw her a dirty look and walked away. Louisa started to gather the sheets of paper on the floor around her. One wasn’t terrible. It was of a little boy who’d thrown a tantrum after his father wouldn’t buy him a stuffed seal in the gift shop. He’d flung himself to the ground and buried his head in his arms, shoulders heaving. Louisa had sketched him quickly and she’d managed to capture the bereft set of his shoulders, his legs swinging in frustration, how one of his hands reached out, fingers splayed, toward the door of the toy shop where his object of desire was cruelly out of reach.

“Seal-y! Seal-y!” the boy had wailed, his father finally having to carry him kicking and screaming into a nearby restroom.

The other drawings of people, quickly sketched as she watched visitors moving through the long halls, weren’t exactly embarrassing, but they weren’t great. She never got the proportion of features-to-face exactly right. The reason the little boy came out better, she knew, was because his face was concealed. She didn’t want to think about what it meant that she couldn’t draw eyes, the windows to the soul, the most important thing an artist had to master. It was not lost on her that all the birds in the Leonard C. Sanford Hall were eyeless, tiny bits of cotton inserted in their eye sockets.

“So are you going to art school?” Simone had asked once after Louisa let her look at some of her sketches.

“No,” Louisa said. She’d mentioned art school once and her mother had blanched. Art school, to Melody, was not really school.

“Why not?” Simone said.

“Because I want to get a good general education,” Louisa said, mimicking Melody’s words. “Art school is more like trade school.”

“What’s wrong with trade school?”

Louisa laughed nervously. She wasn’t sure if Simone was being serious or sarcastic.

“I mean it,” Simone said, still paging through Louisa’s drawings. “Medical school is trade school, so is law school.”

“But that’s graduate school, it’s different,” Nora said. Sometimes she thought Simone picked on Louisa a little.

“True,” Simone said, agreeably. “But if you love art and you want to draw or paint, why wouldn’t you go to a place where you can get better doing the thing you love?”

“Some of the schools we’ve looked at have excellent art programs,” Louisa said.

“How many have you looked at?”

“Fourteen,” Nora said.

Simone burst out laughing. “You’ve looked at fourteen colleges already?”

“It’s fun. We like it,” Louisa said. She knew she sounded defensive, and in truth she’d be happy to never look at another college again. “It’s good to be able to compare, so we know which ones are the right fit.”

Simone shook her head and snorted a little. “Wow. You all are seriously drinking the admissions Kool-Aid.” She plucked one of the drawings from the pile and handed it to Louisa; it was one of her favorites, a soft pastel of the front of the museum at dusk. She’d done it quickly and kept the rendering loose; the museum looked more like a mountain than a building, and the street beneath with its streaming cars resembled a rushing river of movement and color. “This is really beautiful,” Simone said, sounding more sincere than Louisa had ever heard her. “I know exactly what it is, it’s realistic in that way, but it’s also kind of abstract.” She turned the page vertically. “Look, it even works from this angle—the perspective, I mean.” Louisa was surprised and pleased to see she was right. Simone handed the drawing back to Louisa. “This is tight. Frame it. You should do more like that one. And you should really look at Pratt and Parsons. RISD, too. I’ll think of some more places for your list.”