Still Life with Tornado (5 page)

It's sunny this morning, so I don't want to take the bus and I don't want to go anywhere special, so I walk down Pine Street.

It's a weekend, so this doesn't count as another absence, but last time I checked I only need three more to be expelled. I didn't tell Mom and Dad I was going out, so they might be worried or they might never notice I'm gone. Mom will be sleeping off her night shift and Dad will be doing whatever he has to do at home on tiptoes. Not like it matters because living in a row house on a weekend is always noisier than weekdays. On one side, we have quiet neighbors who rarely come out of the house. On the other side, there are three families with nine hundred kids total. But Mom can sleep through anything.

The whole block between 16th and 15th is set up with a student art sale. I don't know what they teach in these art schools, but the prices are always too high. Carmen can draw better than these guys, even if she does draw a lot of tornadoes.

I take a left so I can escape the art sale and walk up 15th Street. That's where I see the homeless man in his tinfoil headpiece. He's got his back to the street and is drawing on the blank, windowless side of the corner grocery store. He's just started—a few lines and a few shapes from a chunk of burnt-wood charcoal. I cross to the other side of the street and find a stoop to sit on and I watch him.

From over here, he looks like a monster. Like Boo Radley or something. Children would run from him. Parents would point and say
Stay away from that man
. I can't imagine how many coats and blankets he has piled onto his back, but it looks like ten or more. Layered. It's almost seventy degrees out here and I can't figure why he doesn't take the coats off. I've seen him dressed the same way in mid-August.

He adds color to one shape and for a minute it looks like a pear. He uses a dark green and a pale yellow and uses his finger to blend them. He screams out, “What the FUCK is your problem? Don't fuck with me, man. Make it real!” He runs in place and looks at the sketch. Then he concentrates on the left side of the wall where he uses sharp, bold strokes to make some sort of horizon line. Miss Smith taught us about horizon lines. Horizon lines separate the background from the foreground. Even though there is no recognizable form in this drawing, I can see a foreground and background the minute he draws that line.

I look out to the street and the cars that go by and the people walking with their groceries or their kids and I see the world's horizon line separating foreground from background.

Ten-year-old Sarah is in the background. All my future Sarahs are behind me as I view the scene. They aren't in the picture yet.

I am the horizon line.

When I look back to the wall, he has started to scrawl some sort of blurry still life in the foreground. This is the second time in five minutes he's reminded me of the pear. I couldn't draw the pear. I don't know why I'm sitting here torturing myself over it by watching him. He's an artist. I'm Umbrella. We have nothing in common.

When people walk by him they aren't paying attention to what he is, what he's doing, or what he's making. They don't even look at him.

I was like that.

I must have walked by his building with the painted plywood windows a hundred times.

“His name is Earl,” ten-year-old Sarah says.

“You don't know his name,” I say.

She sits on the stoop next to me. “Yes I do. I asked him in the park last summer, remember? When he was painting the box?”

I try to remember when I was nine and asked the homeless man what his name was but I don't remember.

She says, “It was the day you bought water ice and tried watermelon because Dad always said watermelon was good but you hated it and he wouldn't let you buy another one.”

“I remember that,” I say. I still hate watermelon water ice. Dad said I was good at art, too, and now art hates me.

“Well, you walked through the park on the way home and that guy was painting an old box. You asked his name.”

I shake my head. “Earl, huh?”

“Earl.”

“Dad ate the rest of the watermelon ice,” I say.

“Yeah. Remember the fight?”

“No.”

“Did you start smoking weed or something? How can you not remember stuff anymore. You're, what? Sixteen?”

“I don't smoke weed.” Smoking weed is unoriginal. And Carmen smokes enough for both of us.

“Well his name is Earl and Mom and Dad had a huge fight that night,” she says.

“Over him eating my watermelon ice?”

“How do I know? They never stopped,” she says.

A woman stands in front of us and we look up at her. She says, “Would you girls mind moving so I can get into my house please?”

This is not an hallucination.

Last night I had a hallucinating pregnant teenager come into the ER. She was convinced she was going to—in this order—have the baby, die, come back as a bird, and then shit on me. That's what she said. “When I come back as a bird, I'm going to shit all over your ugly face.”

She wouldn't tell us what drugs she took. (They never do.) She wasn't even close to having the baby. Or dying. Or coming back to shit on my head. She was younger than Sarah. Just turned fourteen. She had a stuffed animal with her—a furry horse that used to be white but looked like it had taken a mud bath. When one of the techs tried to take it from her she fought him hard and then kneed him in the groin. We had to put her in restraints. That's never fun. Not with a drunk regular or a psych case or, in this case, a pregnant teenager. If she hadn't been pregnant or hallucinating, we could have done chemical restraints, but this time we had to go with old-style straps. Rules are rules. If you hit my staff, you go in restraints until you make a deal that you'll behave. If only those rules applied in the outside world.

•   •   •

Bruce told me once when he was in high school that if Chet and I didn't stop arguing that Sarah would be one of these damaged girls who gets pregnant at thirteen or gets addicted to heroin or something. I blew him off at the time, but he put it in my head and I couldn't stop thinking about my own parents and Chet's father and how fighting adults were normal for us both.

Not like Chet ever put a knife to my throat or abandoned me like his father did.

But we wrecked Bruce. I didn't want to wreck Sarah, too.

I called a truce. Chet shrugged. It's what he does best. Shrugging. Even when he's not shrugging, I see him shrugging. It's like a mirage for me now. He's got to have the most-toned trapezius of any man in Philadelphia. And I have the most-toned middle finger, which is saying a lot for Philly.

Every time he shrugs I just flip him off. A lifelong game of charades. Chet is always a person who doesn't know what to do and I am always a person who is flipping off people who don't know what to do.

I flip Chet off all the time and he doesn't know it. Under the table, through walls, in my pocket, behind the curtain next to the couch. I grew up in a house where cursing wasn't allowed and I wonder what my parents would think of me now, flipping Chet off all the time. I think they'd be fine with it.

My parents adopted me when they were quite old. Probably too old to be adopting a baby, but they loved me. They fought a lot as I got older because they'd just retired and were sick of seeing each other all the time. They weren't mean.

Sometimes I think of my father's stories about working on the big skyscrapers in Philadelphia—walking the iron girders fifty stories high and welding joists and climbing scaffolding—and I can't figure out how I married a man who works in a cubicle all day processing paperwork and making deals. On one hand, it's less dangerous and brings in more money. On the other hand, it causes a lifetime of shrugging.

Which has caused me a lifetime of flipping him off.

When we were still sleeping in the same bed back before Sarah was born, I used to sleep with one hand pointed at the back of his head, finger up. A truce is one thing. But I can't live a lie.

Except I
am
living a lie.

It's complicated.

Alleged Earl leaves the drawing on the grocery store wall unfinished. I get up and ten-year-old Sarah walks back up 15th Street. She says, “See you later!” She has her hair in braided pigtails. It was my favorite look. Maybe my mission should be to bring braided pigtails back into fashion. Maybe I can paint some pop art dots of braided pigtails and one day it will sell for forty-five million dollars. Not original, but at least it will be mine.

Alleged Earl puts his box of art supplies under his arm and it's devoured by his coats and blankets. He shuffles when he walks. He's not that old—maybe in his forties—so I wonder what's wrong with him that he walks this slowly. I think about the stories Mom brings home about ulcerated feet and stuff like that. It makes me want to help him carry something, but then he yells out, “I don't have to do what you tell me!” and I just walk a few yards behind him and stay in his shadow.

With Alleged Earl as my pace car, it might take me a half hour to round the corner and walk one block of Spruce Street. I wonder where he's headed next. I wonder if he's hungry, because I am.

It takes a whole minute to shuffle past the pizza place. It feels like an hour. My stomach growls. I want to ask him why he left the drawing unfinished. I imagine that I ask him and I decide his answer is
Because I wanted to. Because I can do what I want. Because who cares if I finish it? Because none of your business, girl, go back home to your parents.
Of course, I don't ask and he doesn't say any of these things. He just shuffles and occasionally stops to adjust his tinfoil headpiece or his box of art supplies.

When I see the people in the pizza place sitting at tables and eating, I picture Alleged Earl and me in there one day. Middle-class girl takes homeless man to pizza place = not at all original. I decide he'll say no if I ask him. I can see the viral video on The Social already.
She wanted to buy him a slice for lunch, but what he said will make you cry.

I decide he must know I'm following him, but he doesn't seem bothered by it so I keep with him all the way to 17th Street where he starts to walk south. Past South Street, 17th isn't safe. Once I see that's where he's going, I split off at Lombard Street and walk toward home. In my head I say good-bye and I decide he says
Good-bye, Sarah.
I decide he says
See you tomorrow.
It feels like the fish in Mexico. Fast friends. Someone to talk to. Except really it's not.

I think about ten-year-old Sarah and how she said that last thing she said about my parents on the stoop.
They never stopped.

I try to remember them fighting. They bicker over little things sometimes, like who should have called the principal, but I don't remember fighting. I barely ever see them in the same place at the same time. I'm sixteen and have some sort of parents-fighting amnesia. Bruce said it in Mexico—
You can always come stay with me, no matter where I am.
Now ten-year-old Sarah said they fought all the time.

They can't be lying.

Maybe I'm just pretending like I did with the fish in Mexico or with Alleged Earl today. Maybe I pretend my parents say “I love you” to each other when they pass each other between work shifts. Maybe I pretend that my family is normal when I know it's not normal to have a runaway brother. Maybe my whole life I've been living inside of an imaginary painting. I can't figure out how I feel about this. But I know I feel uncomfortable. All the time.