An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [102]
DURING CLASSES ALL MORNING, I drew. Drawing deliberately, as I had learned to do, yielded complex, fresh drawings: the inevitable backs of my friends’ heads; their ankles limp at rest over their winter brown oxfords; the way their white shirts’ shoulders emerged from their uniform jumpers. I roused myself to these efforts only once or twice a day. I drew Man Walking, too. During the other six or seven hours, when I wasn’t fiddling with poetry, I drew at random.
Drawing at random, paying no attention, infuriated me, yet I never stopped. For years as a child I drew faces on the back of my left hand, on the tops of my knees, in my green assignment book, my blue canvas three-ring binder. Later I drew rigid faces on the Latin textbook’s mazy printed page, down and across the spaces between lines and words. I drew stretchable cartoons on the wiggly and problematic plane of a book’s page edges. Those page edges—pressed slats and slits—could catch and hold your pen the way streetcar tracks caught and held your bike’s wheel; they threw you off your curve. But if you overcame this hazard, you could play at stretching and squeezing the Hogarthy face. I drew inside a textbook’s illustrations, usually on the bare sky or on the side of a building or cheek. When I was very young, I sometimes drew on my fingernails, and hated myself for it.
I drew at home, too. My lines were hesitant. “You make everything out of hair,” Amy complained. It was always faces I drew, faces and bodies, men and women, old and young, mostly women, and many babies. The babies grew as my sister Molly did; they learned to walk.
At Ellis, Molly was in the second grade. The little kids didn’t wear uniforms; she wore pretty dresses. I was a forward on the basketball team. Standing around in front of the school, I used to dribble Molly. She bounced hopping under my hand; we both thought it was mighty funny. During class, I drew her hopping in a smocked dress.
If I didn’t draw I couldn’t bear to listen in class; drawing siphoned off some restlessness. One English teacher, Miss McBride, let me sit in the back of the classroom and paint.
I paid no attention to the drawings. They were manneristic, obsessive, careless grotesques my hand gibbered out like drool. When I did notice them, they repelled me. Mostly these people were monstrous, elongated or compressed. Some were cross-hatched to invisibility, cross-hatched till the paper dissolved into wet lint on the desk. They were swollen of eyelid or lip, megalocephalic, haughty, moribund, manic, and mostly contemplative—lips shut, full-lidded eyes downcast, as serene as I was excited. They wore their ballpoint-pen hair every which way; they wore ill-fitting hats or melting eyeglasses. They wore diapers and ruffled pants, striped ties, brassieres, eye patches, pearls. Some were equipped with hands on which they rested their weary heads or which they waved, shockingly, up at me.
Very often I connected these unwittingly formed people by a pen line leading from the contour of a neck or foot to a drawing of the pen that drew the line and thence to my carefully drawn right hand holding the pen, and my arm and sleeve. I loved bending my thoughts down that pen line and up, that weird trail connecting and separating the conscious and unconscious: the wiggly face half-fashioned, and the sly, full-fashioned, and fashioning hand.
More than once, on family visits far away, or on the streets where I walked to school, or at Forbes Field, I saw a stranger whom I recognized. How well I knew that face, its bee-stung lips, its compressed forehead, its clumsy jaw! And I realized then, with a draining jolt of superstitious dread, that I was seeing in the flesh someone I had once drawn. Someone I had once drawn with a ballpoint pen inside a matchbook, or on an overcrowded page, a scribbled face inside the lines of a photographed woman’s skirt. Now here was that face perfectly molded and fleshed in, as private as the drawing and as sad, walking around on a competent body, apparently experienced here,