wondered if he might be allowed to turn her hula on its side and run it down Dean Street with a stick. But the girl with the hoop and the stick on the lonely street in De Chirico had flowing hair like the Solver girls, so never mind.
“That looks the same,” Dylan said, watching his father finish a frame, turn to the next.
“It changes very slightly.”
“I can’t see.”
“You will in time.”
Time, he’d been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn’t fly there, on the floor of his father’s studio, but they would. They’d fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he’d be in school, he was growing up so fast , that was the consensus he alone couldn’t consent to, mired as he felt himself to be, utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor, gazing into Brueghel, searching for the other children among the dogs under the banquet table at the feet of the millers and their wives. Retreating from his father’s studio he’d count the whining stairs.
Downstairs was another problem entirely. His mother’s spaces—the parlor full of her books and records, the kitchen where she cooked food and laughed and argued on the phone, her table full of newspapers and cigarettes and wineglasses—were for Dylan full of unpredictability and unrest, like his mother herself. Mornings she was gone to Schermerhorn Street where she worked. Then Dylan could dwell in the downstairs like a ghost, curling over his own books or in a sun-dazzled nap on the couch, eating leftovers from the fridge or spoonfuls of dry cocoa powder directly from the tin so that his mouth became thick with a clay of cocoa, examining the half-finished crossword on the table, running his Matchbox car, #11, through the ashtrays or around the rim of the pot that housed the gigantic jade plant, which with its thick, rubbery, treelike limbs was another world for Dylan’s specklike self to adventure in and be lost. Then, always before he could compose himself or decide what he wanted from her, Rachel Ebdus would be home, and Dylan would discover that he did not control his mother. Dylan’s solitude which his father left unbruised his mother burst like a grape. She might clutch him and with fingers kneading his skull through his hair say, “You’re so beautiful, so beautiful, you’re such a beautiful boy” or just as likely sit apart from him smoking a cigarette and say, “Where did you come from? Why are you here? Why am I here?” or “You know, precious child, that your father is insane.” Frequently she would show him a magazine with a picture labeled CAN YOU DRAW SPARKY? and say, “That would be easy for you, if you wanted you could win this contest.” When Rachel wanted to fry an egg she’d ask Dylan to stand beside her, then crack the egg on his head and hurry it into the frying pan before it spilled. He’d rub his head, half hurt, half in love. She played him Beatles records, Sergeant Pepper , Let It Be , then asked which was his favorite Beatle.
“Ringo.”
“Children like Ringo,” she told him. “Boys do. Girls like Paul. He’s sexy. You’ll understand.”
She might be crying or laughing or cleaning up a broken dish or clipping the nails of the cats who lived in the backyard, the two who’d stayed from the litter downstairs and had grown and now killed birds regularly among the bricks and vines. “See,” she’d say, squeezing the cat’s paw to extend its claws, “you can’t clip them too close, there’s a blood vessel there, they’ll bleed to death.” She was wild with information he couldn’t yet use: Nixon was a criminal, the Dodgers moved to California, Chinese food gives you a headache, Muhammad Ali resisted the war and went to jail, Hitchcock’s British films were better than his American ones, circumcision was unnecessary but women preferred it. She was too full for the house, had to vent herself constantly into the telephone, and too full for
R. K. Ryals, Melanie Bruce