One afternoon shortly after she turned ten, Annamae was the sole Art Explorer. Renu was traveling to Pittsburgh to visit her aunt and uncle, Carla had gone to get a cavity filled, and the other kids signed up for that session were, for some reason, absent, too. So Annamae wound up having Leslie all to herself.
It was the third week of a session called Math Muse. The first week they’d made Möbius strips and then cut them in such a way that they fell apart into interlocked circles. The second week they’d made bilateral-symmetry and radial-symmetry drawings. This week was tessellations.
Being the only kid there put Annamae in a weird mood. It meant having the spotlight to herself: a chance to show Leslie how clever she was, especially now that she’d reached double digits. The way she’d do this was every time Leslie said anything, Annamae would respond by asking if that’s what she really wanted. One of the older girls at school had been doing this the other day to the new young gym teacher, asking so innocently, he didn’t catch on at first. When finally he said, “All right, sassy. Drop and give me fifty,” he was joking, and the girl and all her friends fell out laughing, and the new young gym teacher had let out a chuckle, too. Annamae was eager to give it a try.
Leslie: “Draw a line in any shape you want—it doesn’t have to be straight; it can be a squiggle, whatever—across the card, going from one side to the other.”
Annamae: “Do you really want me to?”
Leslie: “Yeah. Go ahead.”
Annamae smiled with her tongue pressed hard against her cheek.
Leslie: “Now draw another random line going from the top to the bottom.”
Annamae: “You sure that’s what you want me to do?”
This time, Leslie must have thought Annamae was confused, because she demonstrated. “Like this.”
Each subsequent instruction—“Okay, take your scissors and cut the quadrants apart”; “Now rearrange them like this and tape them back together”—Annamae met with some version of “Is that really what you want?” and each time the bottled-fizz feeling increased inside her as she anticipated the moment when Leslie would catch on and crack up like the new young gym teacher had done, impressed with how witty she was. Finally, Leslie went over to the speaker and said, “We need some tunes. Elizabeth Cotten or Bessie Smith?” and Annamae responded, “Do you really want to know?” and Leslie said mildly, “I see somebody’s being a wiseacre today,” and Annamae exploded with laughter. But her face was very hot. It wasn’t the lovely feeling she’d been expecting.
For the rest of the afternoon, Annamae didn’t ask Leslie if she really meant what she said. She mostly didn’t talk at all. Just followed instructions and traced the shape she’d made over and over on a large piece of drawing paper. They nestled into each other perfectly. Annamae didn’t so much take pleasure in her own neatness as she did in the fact that the shapes behaved this way at all. She glimpsed the wonder of it, the way in which the phenomenon existed independent of her. Like a math thing. Like seven times thirteen. She didn’t make it equal to ninety-one. It just was.
Leslie didn’t say much the rest of that afternoon, either. After a while she pulled up a stool beside Annamae’s and traced her own tessellations on a separate piece of paper. At one point she unwrapped a butterscotch candy and put it in her mouth and offered one to Annamae, and they worked side by side then in silence, the only dialogue being the click of hard candy against teeth. And Elizabeth Cotten going, “Thought I heard a whistle blow / honeybabe Lord / Thought I heard a whistle blow.” It seemed to Annamae that Leslie knew she was a little ashamed of how she’d acted, which was both a comfort and a confirmation of her shame.
When she had filled her whole sheet of paper, Annamae began to color in the shapes. She used a mixture of oil pastels and colored pencils, and as she went along she was amazed by how different the personality of each unit was—even though it was the exact same size and shape as all the others!—just by virtue of the way she colored it and its placement on the page.
Coloring, the thought came to her: If Carla had been the one acting like a wiseacre, it would have been completely different. Carla could have done the exact same thing and it would have been dumb and charming and no big deal. And yet in Annamae, the same behavior was a disappointment, ugly and irregular. She knew this was true, but she didn’t know why. It made her feel lonely in the same way that Danny’s saying, “Lighten up, Annamae” made her feel lonely.
Strangely, it also made her feel the opposite of lonely. The unlonely feeling of recognizing herself.
Annamae and Leslie both finished their drawings fifteen minutes before it was time for Annamae to get picked up. That was unusual—usually the kids were still working when their grown-ups came to get them—so what Leslie did then was also out of the ordinary. She went to the closet behind the desk and took out a big art book, and together they sat on the floppy couch by the entrance where the mothers and fathers and babysitters and nannies sometime waited when they were early.
There, with the book spread across both their laps, Leslie let Annamae be the one to turn the pages. The book was called The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher. Some of the pages had just words, and some had math-type stuff, which was annoying in an art book, but some had drawings—tessellations, like what Annamae and Leslie had just made, only more complicated. There were flat geometric shapes that turned into ducks and fish. There were interlocking men on horseback, and winged cats. Some figures stepped through mirrors or crept up from the flat plane of the page. There were castles with impossible staircases, water that flowed up as well as down. There were ants and snakes and an eyeball with a dead person’s skull reflected in the pupil. The pictures were grown-up in a way that seemed connected to Annamae’s shame. Paging through them, she heard Danny’s voice saying, “Lighten up, Escher.”
There was one drawing that Annamae instantly loved. Or it wasn’t that she loved it; it was that she recognized it. The instant she saw it, it made sense. She felt, oddly, that it belonged to her.
It was a hand in the process of drawing another hand, itself in the process of drawing the first hand.
“I know this picture,” whispered Annamae.
“It’s famous,” Leslie told her.
But Annamae did not mean she had seen it before. She meant she knew it in her bones.