Thank You for the Music by Jane Mccafferty Page B

ability. I didn’t have a very fine sense of rhythm, and I was really only interested in learning pop songs, sad songs like “Fire and Rain,” and finally Anne gave up on teaching me scales. But she was excited with me as someone to paint.
    The first time she painted me I had to wear an old red dress that smelled faintly of vinegar. It had a lace collar that had yellowed. I thought it was a terrible dress, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I sat there on a simple blue chair and watched her eyes peer and squint at me, watched her face take me in with concentration I’d never seen before. I felt such acute self-consciousness of my own body as an object in that red vinegar dress I almost got up and ran around the room in an attempt to shake myself back into myself. But something always shifted; I relaxed under her mysterious gaze. I was freed, perhaps because the world of conventional judgments felt far away in that place. I was made of shapes, and color.
    In that first small painting I was a cross between myself and an Edvard Munch girl with all kinds of furniture sliding toward me, a window behind my head where a tiny brass lamp floated in the pink, surrealist sky. “Now don’t look at this painting as if it’s a mirror,” Anne assured me. “I’m not a realist.” My knees were bony as an old woman’s, I thought, terrible looking, and my shoulders were full of tension, and my neck too long and pale. She had rendered the buds I had for breasts accurately, I thought, embarrassed. But she had given me such beautiful eyes. Much better than my real eyes. So luminous, with such depth, the more I looked at them the more I was able to see how insignificant the bony knees were.
    It took at least a month of sitting for this one painting, and near the end my mother knocked on Anne’s door, then stormed in before Anne could answer, my youngest brother asleep on her shoulder.
    â€œAt least show me the painting!” she said. I hadn’t noticed anything brewing in her; in fact, I hadn’t noticed her at all lately. I watched her now with shame; she was in a housecoat, her hair full of silver clips, her white calves fat, I suddenly saw with a pang. My brother’s undershirt looked gray.
    My mother stood and looked at the painting, while Anne, her concentration broken, went to the kitchen in her black smock, saying, “I’ll make us some tea,” her voice soft with defeat.
    â€œThat doesn’t look a thing like you!” my mother whispered, smiling, relieved, it seemed to me.
    â€œShe’s not even a realist!” I whispered back.
    â€œBut you look like a mental patient!” she said, her voice rising, lips compressed to hold in laughter.
    â€œYou don’t understand! Just be quiet!”
    Anne called us for tea; the orderly kitchen was like another painting we could step into. A smooth black rock sat on the sill over the sink. The sky pressing its blueness up against the screen like it wanted in. The grains of the wood in the table, swirling.
    â€œSo Gracie tells me you’re not a realist,” my mother said, smiling.
    â€œRight,” Anne said. She seemed a bit baffled, as if she’d just come away from a long, solitary swim.
    â€œWhy do you need Grace to sit for you then?” my mother said. Anne looked down into her tea and said she was using me as a starting place. That she worked with planes and angles and ideas. Combinations of things.
    We sat and drank our tea in uncomfortable silence that was broken by my brother waking up in tears. “What’s wrong, little boy? You got a fever? We’ll leave these two alone now,” my mother said, getting up.
    â€œDon’t forget where you live,” she added.
    She rushed out.
    â€œMaybe you’re spending too much time here,” Anne said.
    â€œNo, no, no,” I said. “I don’t think so. Really.”
    So we went back to work.
    Back to the shifting