I thought of the portrait in Mira’s house, and the one I’d seen of Morgan and Isabel.
Norman was on the front stoop now, studying his lemons. He threw one up in the air and caught it.
“So,” she continued, pulling down another tray, “it finally got so bad that Norman moved out of his Dad’s house. This was, like, last year, when he was seventeen. He packed everything in his car and was just living back here, by the Dumpsters, until Mira told him to come stay with her. It was the same week that cat showed up near dead on her front step. So she took them both in.”
“Wow,” I said, looking out at Norman, who was still tossing and catching the lemons, studying their falling patterns. “That’s amazing. I mean, that his dad would be like that.”
“Well, he’d made up his mind about what he wanted Norman to be. He’d assumed too much.” She didn’t look at me as she said this, but I knew the lesson was there, and I was expected to take it. “And it’s so sad, that his dad just doesn’t get it,” she added. “He never has.”
“Get what?” I said, as Norman launched a lemon into the air, keeping it circling with one hand. After a moment he added another, using both hands now.
“Our Norman,” Morgan said, as the third lemon was tossed up, and Norman juggled them higher and higher until they blurred into a band of bright yellow. “He’s just . . .” And she glanced outside, seeing him, and smiled. “He’s special, Colie. That’s why you have to be careful. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. She nodded, like we were straight, and went back to work.
Later, when I was done, I went out and found him by the Dumpsters, rummaging through the backseat of his car.
“Hey,” I said.
He barely lifted his head. “Hey.”
I sat down on the stoop. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” he said into the back of the car. He picked up a canvas and leaned it against his bumper, then rested another against it.
“Are those new?” I asked him.
He shook his head. He still wasn’t looking at me. “Just some old stuff.”
“Look, Norman,” I said slowly, knowing this counted, “I’m hoping you’ll give me another chance. To get my portrait done.”
“I figured you weren’t interested.”
“I am,” I said. “I was stupid. I forgot.”
Now he did look up. “You don’t have to feel obligated,” he said. “I mean, I’m not desperate or anything.’
“I know,” I said. “I wanted—I want—to do it.”
He bent over to rearrange the canvases, shoulder blades moving beneath his shirt. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty busy these days.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t about to beg; I felt bad enough as it was. “Okay.” I stood up and started inside.
I was about to open the back door when he called after me. “I didn’t really think about that when I asked you.”
I just stood there half in, half out.
“I mean, a portrait is a big commitment,” he went on. “It’s not just a one-day kind of thing.”
“I’ve got time,” I said.
He turned back to the car. I didn’t know why this was so important to me, but winning Norman back was suddenly all I wanted. So I stood there, wishing he would turn around.
He didn’t. I started back inside, but just as I did I heard him say, very quietly, “Well, okay.” I had to strain to hear him. “I mean,” he said, sounding resigned, “I guess there’s still time.”
I felt my shoulders relax and I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. “Good,” I said. “Thanks, Norman.”
“But,” he told me in a firm voice, “you missed out on the hot chocolate. No second chances on that.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can take that. When do we start?”
“You still have those sunglasses?” he asked. “The ones I gave you?”
“Yeah.”
“Bring them down to my place tonight, around eight, so I can do a sketch. After that we’ll work on it there in the evenings, and here, during the day,” he said, going around and shutting the tailgate with a bang.
“Here?” I said. “You can do it here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right here, actually. Under that.” And he pointed over my head. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I turned and saw a sign I’d never noticed before. It was white, painted with red letters. DELIVERIES, it said. And then, underneath, LAST CHANCE ONLY.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
The first time I’d been in Norman’s room I’d thought it was a mess. What I discovered that night was that it was, actually, a carefully ordered universe.
Norman’s universe. And in it, everything had a place, from the huge collection of plastic cartoon and action figures on a bookshelf—arranged according to height, like a class picture—to the mannequins he’d had with him the first day we met, which were seated neatly against the walls as if waiting for appointments. There was a workbench lined with baby food jars, each full of something: washers, bolts, brightly colored thumb-tacks, rusty nails, marbles, seashells, tiny plastic doll heads. It looked like he could take anything and make it worthwhile.
The walls were painted white and covered with canvases—some I’d seen before, like the one of Morgan and Isabel, and some I hadn’t. Only one other, however, featured the sunglasses theme.
It was a portrait of a man who looked to be in his early twenties, leaning against an old-model car. He had a crewcut and wore a white shirt and a tie, black pants and sunglasses, with his arms folded across his chest. Behind him the sky was blue and broad and his head was thrown back with laughter, as if someone had just cracked the funniest joke in the world. I wondered who he was.
Norman sat me down in an old blue wing-back chair. It smelled like faded perfume, like roses, and I thought it must be strangely comforting for everything around you to have its own history.
“Okay,” he said. “Look right here.”
Behind my sunglasses, I wondered how he could tell where I was looking at all. He was sitting across the room on a milk crate, a sketchbook balanced on his lap. Next to him was a coffee can filled with pencils of various colors and sizes that he kept rummaging through, as if he couldn’t find exactly what he wanted.
I realized that I was the only thing he was going to be focused on. I was grateful to have something to hide behind.
“Hold your chin up,” he said, picking out a pencil and squinting at me. “Not that far. Okay, there. That’s good. Stay just like that.”
Already my neck was aching. But I didn’t budge. Instead, I looked at Norman, almost as if for the first time.
I couldn’t say exactly when it happened. Maybe when he bent over, looking up only occasionally, his dark brown eyes moving over and past me, taking me in glance by glance. Or when I watched his hands—which I’d seen flip burgers, capture cats, and cradle eggs, and even held, once—and how they seemed so different now, moving in slow, careful strokes, creating me. The sound of the pencil against paper was the only thing I could hear except for my own breathing. And I felt strange sitting there in front of him. As if he wasn’t just Norman Norman, another lazy hippie, but a boy with deep brown eyes, watching me and maybe, if Isabel had been right, thinking—
“Don’t mess with your lip ring,” he said quietly, his eyes still on the sketch pad, his thumb smudging a thick black line.
“I wasn’t,” I said automatically, embarrassed, as if he could read my mind.
It’s just Norman, for God’s sake.
He glanced up at me and for one panicked moment I thought I’d said it aloud. This time he didn’t look back down at the sketch.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, still watching me.
“What?” I said, too quickly. “What is it?”
He stood up, putting the sketch pad aside, and crossed the short bit of carpet between us. I felt my stomach jump.
“Hold still,” he said, leaning in, a
nd then reached with one hand to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear, his thumb brushing my cheek.
It was just one motion, one movement: it was, really, nothing. But as he went back to his sketch pad, I felt something rush in me, and, behind my sunglasses, closed my eyes. I could see him again in my head, leaning forward, eyes on me, one hand reaching out to touch my face.
“Chin up,” he said. “Look right here, Colie.”
I took a deep breath, settling myself. This was ridiculous. Mira would have said it was astrological, some crazy moon thing, the kind of celestial pull that drives women into labor and sets werewolves loose on the streets.
Yes, that was it. Just some crazy moon thing.
“Chin up,” he said, smudging another line.
“Sorry.”
About thirty minutes had passed when behind me, suddenly, the phone rang. And rang. Three times.
“Do you want me to get that?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Chin up, Colie.”
The phone rang again. It was the old kind, a rotary, and loud: normally, I could hear it two floors up. Another ring, and then Norman’s voice crackled over the answering machine.
He was still drawing, not even seeming to notice. There was a beep, and the machine was quiet. I thought whoever had called had hung up. Until I heard it: the sound of someone clearing his throat, as if he was about to say something.
Norman’s eyes were focused on the page. The person cleared his throat again, and I watched as Norman lifted the pencil, holding it above the paper, as if waiting for something.
Click. Then a dial tone. Norman went back to work.
We were silent for at least five minutes before I couldn’t stand it anymore and asked, “Who was that?”
“What?”
“On the phone. Was that a prank call or something?” We’d gotten tons when the Kiki infomercial hit it big. My mother, for some reason, was also very popular with prisoners. “Does it happen a lot?”
“Chin up,” he said, smudging another line. “Eyes right here.”
I readjusted my position, jutting out my chin. “Aren’t you even going to answer me?”
“No,” he said mildly.
“You know, if it’s a prank you can get something to trace it,” I said. It was hard to talk with my chin in the air. “It’s not that hard—”
“I know who it is,” he said quietly, tilting the sketchbook and pushing his hair out of his face.
“Really? Who?”
No answer.
“Norman.”
He put down the sketchbook, dropping his pencil into the coffee can. “Look, Colie,” he said, “don’t you have some things you’d rather not talk about?”
He didn’t say it in a mean way. But something in his tone made me feel like I was a lesser person for even asking.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I do.”
“Then you understand, right?” I nodded as he stood up and dropped the sketchbook on the futon. “Okay, we’re done here.”
“Oh, come on, Norman,” I said, knowing now that I had pushed too far. He was so touchy. “Don’t get mad over that and—”
“No,” he said, interrupting me. “I mean, we’re done. With the sketch.” He stretched his arms over his head, his fingers reaching towards the ceiling, a full-body stretch, like Cat Norman. “And we’ll start the portrait tomorrow, at work. Okay?”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. But I get to see the sketch, right?”
“Nope.”
“But Norman—”
“Good night, Colie.”
I knew by now not to push my luck. Instead, I took off my sunglasses and got up, making my way past the mannequins and a stack of stained glass, to the door.
When I glanced back, Norman was in the middle of his room, looking up at the protractor mobile. He stood there in the tiny amount of empty space, with all of his objects—bright and colorful—seeming to whirl around him. Now, I’d stepped inside too, and found to my surprise that I liked it there, in Norman’s universe, an eclectic solar system that pulled things in, turned them around, and gave them a new life all their own.
We worked together every day, at the Last Chance during the slow parts of the late afternoon, and in the evenings in his room. The portrait had been important to me, but increasingly, so was Norman.
This, of course, was crazy. But ever since that first night, when he’d brushed my hair out of my face, something was different. Maybe not for him. But for me.
It was little things. Like the routine we’d set up whenever we worked, falling into place automatically without even talking. And I’d carved out a space for myself in his room: beside the chair where I posed at night I kept my sunglasses, the water glass he’d given me the first time I said I was thirsty, and the remote for the TV that he swore he never watched except when I was there. There was something nice about having my things, and I wondered if he looked at them after I’d gone and thought of me.
I was getting used to his crowded room. He had hung the two sunglasses paintings—Morgan and Isabel, and the man leaning against the car—side by side. I’d sit in my chair, looking through my own lenses as they stared back at me, completed, hanging where my own image would be soon. When I passed through Mira’s back room I found myself examining her portrait, too, reaching out to touch the bumpy surface, wondering what I’d look like when he finished.
The first morning I saw Norman at the Last Chance with paint splattered across his arm I got this strange feeling, some sense of possessiveness, like we shared a secret. I almost wished the sitting would never end.
Sometimes he seemed to be looking at me just for form, as if I was a bowl of apples or a landscape. But there were moments when I’d catch him leaning his head to the side, the paintbrush not even on the canvas, those deep brown eyes really watching me and then—
“Hey, Picasso!” an irritated Isabel would yell from inside the restaurant. “I need some onion rings. Now!”
“All right,” Norman would say, putting down his brush. When it got busy he just stuck the canvas in the back of the car, folded up the easel, and went back to flipping burgers while I waited tables. When it slowed down we’d drift back outside and take up our places.
But he refused to show me the painting.
“Bad luck,” he said the first time I asked. “You’ll see it at the end.”
“I want to see it now,” I’d whine. This was one of our sticking points; like my mother, I had a hard time waiting for anything.
“Tough.” Norman could play hardball when it suited him. “It’s a mess now, anyway; it’s all still process. The finished product is what matters.”
Norman had his secrets. The phone rang almost every night when we were working, around the same time, 10:15. Norman never answered, and the man on the other end of the line never said a word. He just cleared his throat, as if waiting for someone else to make the first move.
I wanted to grab the phone, forcing the man—who I knew had to be Norman’s father—to speak. But I couldn’t. So I just sat there, night after night, gritting my teeth when it rang.
“Norman,” I finally said to him, “please answer the phone. Please? For me?”
He shook his head before answering the same way he always did. “Chin up.”
When we weren’t arguing about the phone, we listened to music. I was—to my horror—almost beginning to appreciate his hippie bands. Or I turned on the TV and flipped through channels, watching shows until Norman vetoed them. One night I came across the Kiki infomercial and introduced Norman to the Buttmaster, FlyKiki inspirational tapes, and Stuffin’ for Nothin’. I figured this was more than a fair trade for Phish and the Dead. Norman was intrigued. He even put down his brush to give his full attention to my mother’s Super Cal Burn.
“She’s really something,” he said, as she bent and toned, whipping the studio audience into a frenzy.
“I know,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t even belie
ve she’s my mom.”
“Oh, I can,” he said easily, his eyes still on the TV. “I see a lot of her in you.”
“No way.”
“Yep.” He picked up the brush, dipping it back into the paint.
This was new to me. “Like what?”
“Chin up,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. When I did, he continued. “Like your face: it’s just like hers, heart-shaped. And the way you hold your hands when you talk, right at the waist. And the way you smile.”
I looked at my mother, beaming on national TV. “I don’t smile like that,” I said.
“But you do,” he told me, dabbing at something on the canvas. “Look at her, Colie. That’s not fake. On a lot of people it would be, but you can tell she loves what she does. Loves it.”
I looked back at my mother, listening intently as some woman asked a question about how to get rid of saddlebags. He was right: with my mother, what you saw was what she felt.
“You know,” he went on, “I think I knew you for about three weeks before I ever really saw you smile. And then, one day, Morgan said something and you laughed, and I remember thinking it was really cool because it meant something. You’re not the kind of person who smiles for nothing, Colie. I have to earn every one.”
I wasn’t smiling now. In fact, I was pretty sure my mouth was hanging open and I was blushing. Norman ducked back behind the easel and I swallowed, trying to compose myself.
What was happening here? I wasn’t even sure it was just in my head anymore.
“Chin up,” he said, and I locked my eyes onto his, even as I imagined him leaning closer, tucking the hair behind my ear, again. I’d smile, then. No question. “Chin up.”
“It’s coming,” Mira said to me one morning a few weeks later as we sat eating cereal: me, Grape-Nuts, her, Count Chocula. My days had narrowed to just work and the portrait, and breakfasts were the one time we still had together.
“What is?”
She picked up a folded newspaper and slid it across the table.