Mel has her way with the project, like she always does. I come in one morning, and she stops me, holds up one finger, waiting for my attention, then brandishes what she’s made—a flipbook, thick but the size of an old address log. She used to make more of these, back in college. My favorite was the one of our old sketch prof McIntosh fellating a horse, then the horse kicking him in the face and braying, “SHAZAM!” For Fart’s birthday one year, she made a flipbook adventure of a 1980s Ozzy Osbourne: taking blotter acid, then pulling on a sundress and snorting ants. At the end, Ozzy refuses to speak to anyone else on the tour bus except a blow-up doll with whom he spends a week conspiring against his bandmates. The flipbook’s last page is a picture of Ozzy staring at the blow-up doll with what can only be called adoration. It is strangely beautiful. Fart teared up a little when she gave it to him. When people visit his apartment, he hustles them over, saying, “Look at this. My friend Mel made this for me.”
The flipbook is me. It is a Sharon flipbook. It starts with Sharon the toddler, a scene from a Polaroid that Mel has stolen from my mother’s house—me in bib overalls, holding a giant stuffed chicken I’d been given for Christmas. I start growing with the movement. Fat, then thin, then fat again. Breasts out of nowhere. Arms longer, nose longer, eyes sharper. Hair goes up, down, short, long. My entire life moving, my face growing, aging. Clear-eyed adulthood. The stroke is in the flick of three pages, so fast I start—I go from long-haired and top-heavy to thin, bald, lopsided. Mel did not hold back with the stroke face; it is there in twisted, distorted relief. Then the uphill climb. The face straightens, left side catching up with the right. The body fills out a little. But the eyes remain the same after the change. Smaller. A little warier, lacking in the quality that could have been mistaken for dumbness before when it was really the quality of one unburdened, a door that has not yet been shut.
“Do you see now what I want to do?” Mel says. “It’s you. The whole story. The pictures. The stroke. Everything in between.” She sends her hand on an arc through the air. “Your flight back up.”
I sit down and flip through it, again, again, again. My throat starts to ache. It’s a flipbook of someone losing something important to them, to who they are, and it is beautiful. Made with total care; total faith in the recovery of what is lost.
We begin making a storyboard on an old cork expanse Mel finds in the house’s storage shed, posting sketches with summaries underneath: a little girl in front of a TV, cradling a bag of circus peanuts, reads Friday night 4th grade. TGIF on ABC. Monday afternoon, school bus. Big girls steal backpack. Family dinner: Red comes home drunk, pukes in the bushes, Dad tells Mom to go fuck herself, Shauna rips up Sharon’s drawing. The plot turn: Dirty gray van creeps up mountain. Front grill should look like a face (screaming/laughing). Mel makes some oil-pencil sketches of the room: the spoiled carpeting, the drippy yellow walls. She sketches Honus Caudill’s shoes, dark with insteps like open mouths, parked beside a porch door. The best is of me and Teddy, together, backs turned, facing a long, closed trunk that seems to stretch into infinity.
Mel’s discouraged. I work more slowly than I did. My lines aren’t as clean as they once were. My hands still shake some when holding a pencil. “All you need is practice,” she says, brows coming low over her eyes. “Focus.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know you are.”
“You don’t act like you do. You act like I’m slacking off.”
“I’m sorry. My intention is not to make you feel like a slacker. Just—treat it like a job, you know? When you clock in, clock in.”
She doesn’t like it when I leave for the day. “This feels slow,” she says. “Does it feel slow to you? We can be patient with it, but that doesn’t mean don’t push a little.”
For the first time ever, leaving work is the best part of my day. I live for the long, slow walk back to Teddy’s, dawdling by the park he took me to our first night here, opening his apartment door using the key he made especially for me. Dropping the keys and massaging my hands, a pervasive ache from my palm to my thumb.
I run a bath and sink into the deep porcelain tub, letting my fingers prune up. I stare at them. There used to be something inside me that made drawing feel like a natural passage. I never knew this until I tried to draw without it.
Teddy walks through the door and makes me forget. Being happy makes work’s shitfest a lot easier to handle. Who cares if I never draw again? We occupy our own universe. He likes to bring me antique sodas he keeps in the fridge—Moxie, Cheerwine, Nehi—and apply himself to my neck while I let the cold run down my throat. He recounts his day and I trace my fingers up the planes of his face, the chin, the cleft above his lips, the strange, soft little whorl where his neck ends and his earlobe, wild and unattached, begins.
He stops talking and he says, “How goes the project?”
“Rough.”
“Oh, babe. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Mel’s all gung ho. I can barely keep up.”
“She’s a little hard on you, don’t you think?”
“I can handle it,” I say. I move my hands and find the bulge I know will be there, to cup it and hear the sound that comes from the back of his throat.