Still Life with Tornado Read Online Free PDF Page A

times already. I remember her loving the suits of armor and the big Picasso—
Three Musicians
. Ten-year-old Sarah wanted to be an artist. Mom and Dad encouraged this. Now sixteen-year-old Sarah can’t understand why they’d encourage something so impossible.
    I ask her, “You want to go in?”
    She rolls her eyes like I’ve asked a stupid question and walks up the famous
Rocky
steps without talking to me. From behind, I can see me in her. The skinny matchstick legs. The no-hips build that makes it impossible for me to buy jeans that fit. When she gets to the top of the steps she waits for me. She says, “One day we’re going to be in this museum. One day, we’re going to be famous.”
    I want to tell her to stop saying
we.
I want to tell her that presently
we
can’t even draw a single pear or
our
own fucking hand.
    We go to the front desk and even though I still wonder if I’m hallucinating, I know ten-year-old Sarah is really here because the lady behind the counter asks how old ten-year-old Sarah is, and when ten-year-old Sarah says “ten,” the lady gives her a wristband for free. I have to pay fourteen bucks for being sixteen.
    We don’t say anything as we walk to the Picasso. We both know where it is by now. When we get there, we both stand and stare as we have done every time before. Dad says art is a way of standing still and finding the quiet inside yourself. That’s what I do. Ten-year-old Sarah does it, too, like a trained dog, but I can see her little hands twitching to touch it. I see her look around for the security guard. I remember being her and thinking
just one touch
as if touching the same thing Picasso touched would give her the talent to become him. It was always some sort of scam—begging the sea god, touching the Picasso—a desire for genius the way the desire for money makes people buy lottery tickets.
    Ten-year-old Sarah says, “Picasso had original ideas.”
    I say, “Maybe.”
    She says, “Not maybe. This is original. No one did it before him.”
    â€œI guess.”
    As we wander around the area, there are similar paintings. Braque, Gris, all of Picasso’s contemporaries. I see the style in those, too. It was a movement. Picasso wasn’t the only cubist. (Nobody was the only anything-ist.)
    â€œI mean, somebody
had
to be the first cubist, right?” she asks.
    â€œSomebody did. Yes. But maybe it wasn’t Picasso.”
    She shrugs. “You’re a fucking downer.”
    â€œI’m a realist.”
    She shrugs again and crosses her arms in front of her chest.
    â€œJust think about it. How do we know that Picasso wasn’t walking down the street one day and saw some guy drawing this on a piece of wood? How do we know that he invented this without other people’s ideas? We don’t. We don’t know anything.”
    â€œI don’t know about art history much,” ten-year-old Sarah says.
    â€œNothing new ever really happens,” I say.
    â€œYou really are a downer.”
    â€œRealist.” I refuse to explain to her that you can’t trust history books anyway because history books were usually written by people who wanted to sound like they knew something.
    We wander away from the cubists. Ten-year-old Sarah doesn’t stay with me or talk about any of the paintings. She keeps her arms crossed like she’s fed up with me. She’s a little like twenty-three-year-old Sarah. Aloof—like she’s better. At the end of the long hall—the one that leads to the contemporary section—is a Lichtenstein. I’ve never seen this one in person before so it must be on loan or something. Frankly, I don’t think reproductions of old comic strips are all that original, but this one has something to it. It’s the look on the subject’s face. Ten-year-old Sarah stops in front of it and squints at the dots. She backs up three big