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.
HELEN’S CHARADES