Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read Free

well because it comes so easily to them. In the years that I have shared my hopes and dreams with my Beloved, however, I may have mentioned my desire to draw a time or two too many because she began leaving around conspicuous little sticky notes with the whens and wheres of drawing classes. This fall I missed the registration deadline for all of the drawing classes, but I did sign up for and actually appear for a watercolor class put on by our local art museum.
    I showed up for class with an empty bag. I could have brought along my two sets of colored pencils, the watercolor paint set I got for Christmas when I was seven, my artist’s eraser, and my impressive paper and blank book collections because I own all of that. I love art supplies. I love art stores and always have. I am the only childless fifty-year-old lesbian on the block who owns three complete sets of the 64-color crayons (both the old colors and the new). My Beloved finally convinced me to take the class by saying, “Think of all of the new supplies you’ll need to buy!” I didn’t take my preexisting supplies to class with me, however, because for an additional fee . . . I could buy more.
    I haven’t drawn, painted, quilted, colored, or stained very much in my life because I am extremely vague on the concept of how colors interact. I have colored enough Easter eggs to know that blue and yellow make green. Beyond that, I am a photographer, not an artist—all of the colors I need in photography are already there. Our instructor murmured for a while about “swoozling” and drawing from the right side of the brain, and then she said to the class, “You need to be painting!” Someone handed me a child’s miniature plastic muffin pan, and they gave me—and I am serious here—three shades of blue, two shades of red, and one yellow and they said, “Paint.”
    I thought about all of the things that are blue, red, or yellow.
    Everyone else in the class began madly swoozling. Recklessly and completely without regard for the integrity of their paint they dipped their brushes in this color and then another, then into a glass of dirty water, and they made little piles of colors—pinks, oranges, magentas that they seemed to make up on the spot.
    “What would you like to paint?” the instructor prompted me, and I sat there, staring at three blues, two reds, and a yellow in the bottom of a minature plastic muffin tin. I thought to myself,
What the hell am I doing here? I have no skills in art. I have to go home now.
It was only a matter of time before Louisa McFarland would show up and explain why she should have custody of all of my unused art supplies.
    “You really thought you could walk into the class and just
know
everything they were going to teach?” my Beloved inquired when we discussed it later.
    “But I didn’t know
anything
,” I wailed. “They kept saying things like ‘blue is the coldest color’—what is so ‘cold’ about blue? I
like
blue.”
    “Have you ever taken an art class before?”
    “Of course not,” I dismissed. “I don’t have any artistic skills.”
    “Maybe that’s what art classes are for.”
    I scowled.
    “I never realized life was this hard for you,” she marveled.
    We were teetering now on the edge of dangerous terrain. I was the kid who ate paste in art class in the fifth grade. I have worked, scrubbed, and polished my public self for nearly a lifetime since then, until, to the untrained eye, I might appear confident, relaxed, and even comfortable in social settings. I have a droll but amusing sense of humor. I have learned how to make friends. But buried deep inside is still a ten-year-old paste eater with one ear always cocked for those subtle remarks that imply I somehow overlooked another rule, that there’s something about all that social interaction stuff that I still don’t get.
    “I can do this class,” I said sullenly.
    “It’s a
class
,” my Beloved said. “It’s supposed to be
fun
.” And I