A week later, everything changes.
It’s Saturday, and Mom, Jude, and I are in the city at the museum’s rooftop café because Mom won the argument and we’re both going to apply to CSA in a year.
Across the table, Jude’s talking to Mom and at the same time sending me secret silent death threats because she thinks my drawings came out better than hers and we’re having a contest. Mom’s the judge. And fine, maybe I shouldn’t have tried to fix Jude’s for her. She’s sure I was trying to ruin them. No comment.
She eye-rolls at me on the sly. It’s a 6.3 on the Richter scale. I think about giving her a dead leg under the table but resist. Instead, I drink some hot chocolate and covertly spy on a group of older guys to my left. As far as my eight-foot concrete dork goes, still no fallout except in my mind: (SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Gets Fed Piece by Piece to a Swarm of Fire Ants). But maybe Zephyr’s really not going to tell anyone.
The guys at the next table all have rubber plugs in their earlobes and studs in their eyebrows and are joking around with each other like otters. They probably go to CSA, I think, and the thought makes my whole body thrum. One of them has a moon face with blue saucer eyes and a bursting red mouth, the kind Renoir paints. I love those mouths. I’m doing a quick sketch of his face with my finger on my pants under the table when he catches me staring and instead of glaring at me so I’ll mind my beeswax, he winks at me, slowly, so there’s no mistaking it, then returns his attention to his friends as I go from solid to liquid mass.
He winked at me. Like he knows. But it doesn’t feel bad. Not at all. In fact, I wish I could stop smiling, and now, oh wow—he’s looking this way again and smiling too. My face is starting to boil.
I try to focus in on Mom and Jude. They’re talking about Grandma’s batshit bible. Again. How it’s like an encyclopedia of odd beliefs, Mom’s saying. How Grandma collected ideas from everywhere, everyone, even left the bible open on the counter next to the cash register in her dress shop so all her customers could write in their batshit hogwash too.
“On the very last page,” Mom tells Jude, “it says in case of her untimely death, it becomes yours.”
“Mine?” She throws me her smuggest look. “Just mine?” She’s all gift-wrapped now. Whatever. Like I even want some bible.
Mom says, “I quote, ‘This good book is bequeathed to my granddaughter, Jude Sweetwine, the last remaining bearer of The Sweetwine Gift.’”
I barf bright green barf all over the table.
Grandma Sweetwine decided Jude had The Sweetwine Gift of Intuition when she discovered Jude could do the flower tongue. We were four years old. After, Jude spent days with me in front of a mirror, pressing her finger into my tongue, again and again, trying to teach me so I could have The Sweetwine Gift too. But it was useless. My tongue could flip and curl, but it couldn’t blossom.
I look back over at the table of otters. They’re packing up to leave. Winking Moon Face swings a backpack over his shoulder and then mouths bye to me.
I swallow and look down and burst into flames.
Then start mind-drawing him from memory.
When I tune back in minutes later, Mom’s telling Jude that unlike Grandma Sweetwine, she’d haunt us flamboyantly and persistently, no quick visits in the car for her. “I’d be the kind of ghost that interferes with everything.” She’s laughing her rumbly laugh and her hands are twirling around in the air. “I’m too controlling. You’d never be rid of me! Never!” She bwah-ha-ha’s at us.
What’s weird is that she looks like she’s in a windstorm all of a sudden. Her hair’s blowing and her dress is slightly billowing. I check under the table to see if there’s a vent or something, but there isn’t. See? Other mothers don’t have their own private weather. She’s smiling at us so warmly, like we’re puppies, and something catches in my chest.
I shutter myself in while they talk more specifically about what kind of ghost Mom would make. If Mom died, the sun would go out. Period.
Instead, I think about today.
How I went around from painting to painting asking each to eat me and each did.
How my skin fit the whole time, didn’t once bunch up at my ankles or squeeze my head into a pin.
Mom’s drum roll on the table brings me back. “So, let’s see those sketchbooks,” she says, excited. I did four pastel drawings from the permanent collection—a Chagall, a Franz Marc, and two Picassos. I picked those because I could tell the paintings were looking at me as hard as I was looking at them. She’d said not to feel like we had to copy exactly. I didn’t copy at all. I shook up the originals in my head and let them out all covered in me.
“I’ll go first,” I say, shoving my book into Mom’s hands. Jude’s eye-roll is a 7.2 on the Richter this time, causing the whole building to sway. I don’t care, I can’t wait. Something happened when I was drawing today. I think my eyes got swapped for better ones. I want Mom to notice.
I watch her page through slowly, then put on the granny glasses that hang around her neck and go through the drawings again, and then again. At one point she looks up at me like I’ve turned into a star-nosed mole and then goes back to it.
All the café sounds: The voices, the whirring of the espresso machine, the clink and clatter of glasses and dishes go silent as I watch her index finger hover over each part of the page. I’m seeing through her eyes and what I’m seeing is this: They’re good. I start to get a rocket launch feeling. I’m totally going to get into CSA! And I still have a whole year to make sure of it. I already asked Mr. Grady, the art teacher, to teach me to mix oils after school and he said yes. When I think Mom’s finally done, she goes back to the beginning and starts again. She can’t stop! Her face is being swarmed by happiness. Oh, I’m reeling around in here.
Until I’m under siege. A psychic air raid discharging from Jude. (PORTRAIT: Green with Envy) Skin: lime. Hair: chartreuse. Eyes: forest. All of her: green, green, green. I watch her open a packet of sugar, spill some on the table, then press a fingerprint of the crystals into the cover of her sketchbook. Hogwash from Grandma’s bible for good luck. I feel a coiling in my stomach. I should grab my sketchbook out of Mom’s hands already, but I don’t. I can’t.
Every time Grandma S. read Jude’s and my palms, she’d tell us that we have enough jealousy in our lines to ruin our lives ten times over. I know she’s right about this. When I draw Jude and me with see-through skin, there are always rattlesnakes in our bellies. I only have a few. Jude had seventeen at last count.
Finally, Mom closes my book and hands it back to me. She says to us, “Contests are silly. Let’s spend our Saturdays for the next year appreciating art and learning craft. Sound good, guys?”
Before even opening Jude’s sketchbook, she says this.
Mom picks up her hot chocolate but doesn’t drink. “Unbelievable,” she says, shaking her head slowly. Has she forgotten Jude’s book altogether? “I see a Chagall sensibility with a Gauguin palette, but the point of view seems wholly your own at the same time. And you’re so young. It’s extraordinary, Noah. Just extraordinary.”
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Dives into a Lake of Light)
“Really?” I whisper.
“Really,” she says seriously. “I’m stunned.” Something in her face is different—it’s like a curtain’s been parted in the middle of it. I sneak a glance at Jude. I can tell she’s crumpled up in a corner of herself, just like I do in emergencies. There’s a crawlspace in me that no one can get to, no matter what. I had no idea she had one too.
Mom doesn’t notice. Usually she notices everything. But she’s sitting there not noticing anything, like she’s dreaming right in front of us.
Finally she snaps out of it, but it’s too late. “Jude, honey, let’s see that book, can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with.”
“That’s okay,” Jude says in the tinsely voice, her book already buried deep in her bag.
Jude and I play a lot of games. Her favorites are How Would You Rather Die? (Jude: freeze, me: burn) and The Drowning Game. The Drowning Game goes like this: If Mom and Dad were drowning, who would we save first? (Me: Mom, duh. Jude: depends on her mood.) And there’s the other variation: If we were drowning, who would Dad save first? (Jude.) For thirteen years, Mom’s stumped us. We had absolutely no idea who she’d dredge out of the water first.
Until now.
And without sharing a glance, we both know it.