On the way home, she kept seeing for the first time all these things that most everyone else had stopped noticing because they'd seen them every day. She read street signs and billboards aloud. She pointed out starlings perched on the telephone wires. We went into a bank and she stared up at the vaulted ceiling and described the octagonal patterns.
At home, Lori insisted that I try on her glasses. They would blur my vision as much as they corrected hers, she said, so I'd be able to see things as she always had. I put on the glasses, and the world dissolved into fuzzy, blotchy shapes. I took a few steps and banged my shin on the coffee table, and then I realized why Lori didn't like to go exploring as much as Brian and I did. She couldn't see.
Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori.
"Did you see better?" I asked.
"I wouldn't say better," Mom answered. "I'd say different."
"Maybe you should get a pair, Mom."
"I like the world just fine the way I see it," she said.
But Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson's roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple.
Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom.
*
As soon as we'd settled into the house, Mom threw herself into her art career. She erected a big white sign in the front yard on which she had carefully painted, in black letters with gold outlines, R. M. WALLS ART STUDIO. She turned the two front rooms of the house into a studio and gallery, and she used two bedrooms in the back to warehouse her collected works. An art supplies store was three blocks away, on North First Street, and thanks to Mom's inheritance, we were able to make regular shopping expeditions to the store, bringing home rolls of canvas that Dad stretched and stapled onto wooden frames. We also brought back oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, gesso, a silk-screening frame, india ink, paintbrushes and pen nibs, charcoal pencils, pastels, fancy rag paper for pastel drawings, and even a wooden mannequin with movable joints whom we named Edward and who, Mom said, would pose for her when we kids were off at school.
Mom decided that before she could get down to any serious painting, she needed to compile a thorough art reference library. She bought dozens of big loose-leaf binders and lots of packs of lined paper. Every subject was given its own binder: dogs, cats, horses, farm animals, woodland animals, flowers, fruits and vegetables, rural landscapes, urban landscapes, men's faces, women's faces, men's bodies, women's bodies, and hands-feet-bottoms-and-other-miscellaneous body parts. We spent hours and hours going through old magazines, looking for interesting pictures, and when we spotted one we thought might be a worthy subject of a painting, we held it up to Mom for approval. She studied it for a second and okayed or nixed it. If the photo made the grade, we cut it out, glued it on a piece of lined paper, and reinforced the holes in the paper with adhesive Os so the page wouldn't tear out. Then we got out the appropriate three-ringed binder, added the new photograph, and snapped the rings shut. In exchange for our help on her reference library, Mom gave us all art lessons.
Mom was also hard at work on her writing. She bought several typewritersmanuals and electricsso she'd have backups should her favorite break down. She kept them in her studio. She never sold anything she wrote, but from time to time she received an encouraging rejection letter, and she thumbtacked those to the wall. When we kids came home from school, she'd usually be in her studio working. If it was quiet, she was painting or contemplating potential subjects. If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of pithy sayingsone was. "Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in"which she'd titled. "R. M. Walls's Philosophy of Life."
*
Dad joined the local electricians' union. Phoenix was booming, and he landed a job pretty quickly. He left the house in the morning wearing a yellow hard hat and big steel-toed boots, which I thought made him look extra handsome. Because of the union, he was making steadier money than we'd ever seen. On his first payday, he came home and called us all into the living room. We kids had left our toys out in the yard, he declared.
"No, sir, we didn't," I said.
"I think you did," he said. "Go out and take a look."
We ran to the front door. Outside in the yard, parked in a row, were three brand-new bicyclesa big red one and two smaller ones, a blue boy's bike and a purple girl's bike.
I thought at first that some other kids must have left them there. When Lori pointed out that Dad had obviously bought them for us, I didn't believe her. We had never had bicycleswe had learned to ride on other kids' bikesand it had never occurred to me that one day I might actually own one myself. Especially a new one.
I turned around. Dad was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and a sly grin on his face. "Those bikes aren't for us, are they?" I asked.
"Well, they're too damn small for your mother and me," he said.
Lori and Brian had climbed on their bikes and were riding up and down the sidewalk. I stared at mine. It was shiny purple and had a white banana seat, wire baskets on the side, chrome handlebars that swept out like steer horns, and white plastic handles with purple-and-silver tassels. Dad knelt beside me. "Like it?" he asked.
I nodded.
"You know, Mountain Goat, I still feel bad about making you leave your rock collection back in Battle Mountain," he said. "But we had to travel light."
"I know," I said. "It was more than one thing, anyway."