Skinny Legs and All Read Online Free PDF Page A

created my body,” said Patsy. “I’m not ashamed of its nekkidness.”
    “Fine,” Verlin said. “Why don’t you get undressed, and I’ll call up all my friends to come paint pictures of you.”
    “Your friends couldn’t paint a shithouse wall.”
    Patsy charged that she might have become a dancer if it hadn’t been for Verlin. Verlin countered that she ought to fall on her knees and thank him for saving her from disgrace.
    At one point Ellen Cherry overheard Verlin say, “She’s been shut up in her room for damn near a week. When’s she gonna come downstairs?”
    “Oh, probably when her face heals,” answered Patsy.
    “Her face is not that bad. We cleaned it, for God’s sake! It’s not like we flayed her.”
    “In any case,” Patsy said, “she can come down whenever she’s good and ready to. She’s free, white, and eighteen.”
    So I am , thought Ellen Cherry. She bolted upright in the tear-smeared bedclothes, propelled by the surprise of the obvious. “So I am!”
    When she was certain that Johnny Carson had signed off for the night, she slipped downstairs—Verlin imitated alligators in the bedroom, Patsy tossed and turned on the sofa—and cooked a four-egg omelet, washing it down with the brandy Patsy used to flavor fruitcakes, the only alcohol allowed in the house.
    Morning found her in the welding shop, where she somehow persuaded Boomer to loan her five hundred dollars. Maybe she threatened to tell his drinking buddies that he took tango lessons on the sly. Maybe she twisted her tongue in his ear.
    That midnight she once again crept downstairs. Patsy had moved to the bedroom, Verlin snored on the sofa. For a while, she stood over her father. Floating upon a pond of sleep, his pink face reminded her of a Monet water lily. She thought him an honorable man damaged by dogma. Patsy and Uncle Buddy were vying for his uncertain soul. Buddy had the lead, but Ellen Cherry would bet Boomer’s five hundred on Patsy. Bending to kiss his cheek, she smelled the mildew and changed her mind.
    Ellen Cherry boarded the next Greyhound to pass through Colonial Pines. That was at four in the morning. It carried her to Cincinnati. From there, she set out hitchhiking, heading for New Mexico to do something girlish and romantic, such as setting up her easel beside Georgia O’Keeffe’s grave. She hadn’t counted on the vagrancies of the road, however, and she landed in Seattle, where she was forced to modify her eye game to accommodate hissing curtains of rain.
    Working nights as a waitress, Ellen Cherry earned a degree in three years from the Cornish College of the Arts. In only one way did graduation alter her fortunes: she was now eligible for membership in the Daughters of the Daily Special, a local organization of waitresses with college degrees. Paying relatively stiff weekly dues and raising additional funds with bikini car washes and bake sales (most of the bakery goods were pilfered from restaurants in which the women worked), the Daughters established a fund that awarded grants to deserving members so that they might lay down their trays and devote some time to their true calling. When Ellen Cherry won hers, she painted for six months without interruption. The work she completed was hung in a restaurant. “I escaped, my paintings didn’t,” she told the girls. It may have been the happiest period in her life.
    For several years, Seattle’s art scene, like New York’s, had been dominated by the Big Dumb Ugly Head School of painting. Dealers and collectors too insecure to buck fashion were obliged to cover their walls with clumsy portraits of the aggressive victims of urban angst: those angry, tormented sourpusses for whom the next plutonium enema apparently was right around the corner. In the background was the compulsory burning building, skull-and-crossbones, or rabid dog with a hard-on. The world of art is seldom slow to rotate on its gelt-greased axis, however, and—wham!—overnight,