Still Life with Tornado Read Online Free PDF

steps—animated little-kid steps—and squints again. I walk over to the right and read the description.
    Roy Lichtenstein, American, Born 1923. Sleeping Girl, 1964, oil and Magna on canvas.
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    Ten-year-old Sarah stands square to the canvas with her arms loosely at her sides. Unlike her crossed arms in the cubism room, she is letting Lichtenstein
into
her. She is
feeling
the sleeping girl. I stand next to her the same way. Legs slightly apart, arms by my sides, breathing, like some sort of art museum Tai Chi. I try to let the sleeping girl
into
me, too. I look at her furrowed brow while she sleeps and I feel pain inside of her sleep. I feel like something is unfinished in her life. I feel she is unhappy.
    I look over after a quiet minute and see that ten-year-old Sarah is crying. This was Mom’s art museum habit. Every time we went and did what Dad told us to do—stood still and found the quiet—Mom would find one painting that would make her cry quietly. It was a sacred act. Tears would fall slowly while she stared at a piece and then we’d move on and look at other paintings. Dad never cried, but I think he wanted to.
    I look back at the sleeping girl. I see the beauty of all the dots and the simplicity of the colors and I want to cry but all I feel is numb. Ten-year-old Sarah takes a step forward so she is nearly nose to nose with Lichtenstein’s girl and the security guard slowly makes her way toward us. I stop trying to cry and look up and smile. We both tell ten-year-old Sarah to step back from the painting. She steps back.
    The security guard says, “Forty-five million dollars.”
    â€œFor this?” ten-year-old Sarah asks.
    â€œYep.”
    â€œIt’s just dots,” she answers. I don’t say anything.
    â€œLichtenstein’s dots,” the security guard says. “Forty-five million dollars.”
    I think about that. Forty-five million dollars. That’s like a lottery ticket.
    Ten-year-old Sarah wipes her eyes dry with her fists and shakes her head. “Even I can paint a bunch of dots.”
    The security guard says, “You’re not the first person who’s said that, for sure.”
    I’m not sure what she means, but I like that she said it. It
is
just dots. And forty-five million dollars could have bought a lot of people food somewhere or bought women’s shelters or orphan’s homes. What’s so great about buying a bunch of dots?
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    I want to visit the Twombly room, but ten-year-old Sarah says she hates the Twombly room. “It’s all scribbling,” she says. I try to disagree, but I know where she’s headed, and I follow her. We go to the armor collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has the coolest armor. There is no need to think about originality in there. Armor isn’t original. Even some animals have armor—they’re born with it.
    Ten-year-old-Sarah is happy now. No crossed arms, no tears, no trying to tell me how much of a downer I am. We’re by the Saxon suit of armor called
Armor for Use in the Tilt
with the weird spike coming out the front of the breastplate. This is my favorite piece of armor since before I was ten-year-old Sarah. I didn’t understand it at first. I looked it up on the Internet when we got home and learned what
tilt
meant. It’s a term for jousting—the armor was used during jousts—games where two horsemen would race toward each other with lances and try to knock the other one off his horse. The spike on the breastplate is there to adjust the shield on the jouster’s weak side. We stand and stare at the armor for a few minutes. I read the description as I have a hundred times before.
Geography: Made in Saxony, Germany, Europe. Date: c. 1575. Medium: Steel; leather (replaced); textiles
.
    Ten-year-old Sarah turns to me and says, “Do you remember the big fight in