Tatum, that ingenious kid, has purchased himself a lightboard and has volunteered it for our use. It is moved into the studio and we get going, inbetweening on what we have posted to the storyboard.
To my horror, I find that I can’t do it anymore—the rapid-fire production of images on onionskin, each shifted a fraction of a hair’s difference from its predecessor, hundreds of pages granting an object its movement. It’s close, fast work, the bare-bones first step of animation, period. Screw it up by a tenth of a centimeter and the whole illusion of movement is busted to pieces. When I try to get a rhythm going, my hands shoot with tremors, cramps. The pencil’s a bucking bronco. All my subtlety is lost.
I let Mel take over the inbetweening, feeling a little guilty. But she doesn’t mind—Mel was always our woman for this driving, hunched-over work. To watch Mel inbetween is to watch a sort of ghost birth in which a figure is born, light and quick and precise, in seconds, and then born again, the miracle finally evident only at fifty or a hundred pages, when it scratches its nose, or rolls its eyes, or blinks. What is tedious and overinvolved for me is just another day at badass school for Mel; her wrist arched and still like a pianist’s, her hand twitching over the sheet, then turning for a fresh page: flip, scratch, done. Flip, scratch, done.
“It’s blood-and-guts work,” she said once. “Makes me feel like an animal. Like in a really good way. I get to turn my brain off.”
She starts in earnest, sometimes breaking from an hour of cramped, close sketching to run high knees by the lightboard, sprinting in place, breaking out the squat-thrusts to keep from going batshit. Her color’s high, her posture strong. She has Ryan and Tatum over for mini-lessons; they cluster near while she draws, points, exclaims. “It’s called the principles of squash and stretch,” she tells them. “It’s sort of like reverb. Like bouncing a rubber ball—when it hits the ground, it flattens for a millisecond, right? Like goes oblong? And then it self-corrects.” She demonstrates, then clears for the boys to take over, letting them stack onionskin to track their progress through the pages. She watches them scoot their arms to the left, tilt their heads, get kissing-close to the surface.
“You know,” she says one day after they leave, “I don’t think I’d mind teaching someday. Maybe I’d like it.” She squints an eye at me. “Think I’m nuts?”
I am struck. “No,” I say. “I think you’d be a great teacher.”
She ducks her head and grins. I’ve hit her bashful bone. “Well,” she says, turning toward the storyboard, pretending to rearrange something. “I’d be better than that fuckpants McIntosh, anyway.”
In my absence, Mel has taken to texting ideas and findings, a steady stream of beeps for every time she used to lean over our desks and say, “Hey, check this out.” A lot are links to videos. An early 1960s stop-motion cartoon ad for a regional ham product featuring pigs in a marching band. A series of Soviet cartoons from the seventies in an unsettlingly florid, psychedelic style. Some old NEA-funded Vincent Collins shorts, the trippy Bicentennial cartoon she’s always adored. We want a feel like THIS for the stroke scenes, she texts. Like spottier and more disconnected than Nash. Combat. Creepier. More confounding.
Cool. Let’s try a draft, I text back.
Teddy has taken me to see Paris, Texas in an old theater downtown. Neither of us has spoken about the other night; in silent apology, he brings me a large, soft cookie from the concession stand. He glances at the phone, then at me.
I put the phone back in my pocket. “Sorry,” I say. “Just Mel texting about work stuff.”
“It’s okay,” he says.
Thirty seconds later, my phone dings. A cartoon short from a website entirely in Swedish. I hesitate, finger over the play button.
Teddy sighs and rubs his face. “Jesus Christ, honey, will you turn your phone off?”
“Okay, okay. Relax. I’m turning it off.”
“I don’t mean to get upset, but my God, it’s like every two minutes with her. Don’t you want to take a break from work when you get home?”
“I am taking a break.” I put my hand on his knee, trying to tamp the fight down before it starts. “I don’t draw at home. I want to be with you.”
“You’re not really taking a break if Mel is pestering you with work stuff at all hours,” he says. “Your phone is never quiet. It goes off when we’re trying to sleep.”
It also went off once in the middle of sex. I started to move for it, him on top of me, then made the save and wrapped my arms around his waist. But he saw that I had to stop myself. And he saw that I saw.