U: Nude sketches

Chapter: Kid, Sister's Nude Sketches

My sister has decided to sell her drawings of naked women. She wants me
to help her, which means I am to try and get other kids to buy them
while she does the actual drawings. If I'm good and stay out of her
room, she might let me trace some of the drawings. But she gets to fill
in the details.

Her plan is to put a note in a basket behind the wall attached to the
neighbor's house. This wall sticks out of the side of the house, and is
made out of brick that's been painted white. My sister fell of it once,
right onto her head. I was standing on the other side, and couldn't see
her fall, but I did hear a thump when she landed. She didn't even
cry.

I'm supposed to bring kids to the basket behind the wall, and pretend I
don't know how it got there but wouldn't it be fun to have a drawing of
naked woman? My sister took the basket out from under my mother's sink,
pouring the spongy pink curlers with pieces of my mother's hair stuck
to them onto the bottom of the cabinet. This worries me, because my
mother is sure to notice her basket is gone and come looking for my
sister and me. But I don't think she'll see the basket hidden behind
the neighbor's wall. She never goes over there.

The drawings will cost a dime, and for an extra five cents my sister
will color them in. I am to bring kids over to the basket only - not my
house and especially not my sister's room - where my sister will put a
note talking about the drawings, how much they cost, and the extras.
Below the words on the note, my sister has drawn a woman's head, the
neck disappearing at the bottom of the page. It's not her best drawing
but she told me she didn't want anyone to steal it. This is also why
the rest of the woman is invisible, to keep potential customers from
getting something for free. Plus it might rain, so she didn't want to
put a lot of work into it.

My sister has a stack of blank paper and her colored pencils all lined
up in a cardboard box. The paper is from my mother's work, who brings
it home sometimes along with pens and pencils and little packages of
coffee that my father makes and then says tastes awful. My sister
doesn't want me to tell customers that she is the one doing the
drawings, and she is not planning to sign her name on them. I think
this is too bad, because she has learned to write in what is called
cursive, her name a bunch of loops and wiggles that look nice at the
bottom of her pictures. I'm not sure why this writing is called
cursive, which sounds to me like it would be bad words, only written
down. But I haven't asked my sister about it because I don't want her
to make fun of me, or let her know that there is one more thing that
she can do that I can't.

So, a dime left one day gets a drawing of a naked lady the next day.
Or, if it's colored in, it may take two days. My sister has reminded me
twice to make sure the customers read that part of her sign, so they
won't complain about having to wait. I get two cents for each picture,
with an extra penny thrown in if we get an order for color. A penny is
enough for a piece of banana taffy at the U-Totem, which I have to eat
slowly because it makes my teeth loose.

I have seen my sister do her drawings. She traces the outline of a
naked woman from one of my father's dirty magazines, and then she fills
in the spaces. She's good at it, although the women don't always look
like the real thing. Instead they are fuzzy, with eyes that are looking
at nothing. They all have thin lips, unlike the women in the magazines,
whose lips are always bright red and look like those wax lips they sell
around Halloween time, the ones with or without vampire teeth.

My sister draws lightly, unlike me. My drawings sometimes go through
the paper. Whatever I'm doing looks like it's been dropped onto the
page and flattened out. But my sister can make her drawings look almost
like photographs, just not as dark. Also she ignores the way women in
the magazines wear their hair. She always changes it to a part in the
middle, with little bangs pushed back to look like bird wings. And the
hair gets pushed behind their ears. The women look more like little
girls under my sister's careful drawing. They never wear makeup.

Besides finding customers, I will also have to help my sister get the
magazines she uses for her outlines. We know exactly where they are -
behind the vent at the back of my parents' bedroom closet - but it
takes two of us to get them. Walking into the closet means climbing
over shoes, clothes, the vacuum cleaner, hangers, and other things my
mother and father throw in there when they are tidying up. The vent
fits into the back of the closet wall but it's not screwed in. It comes
right off, and behind it are my father's magazines, spider webs, and
some pipes that always look wet.

Getting trough the closet without making too much noise is hard, so one
of us has to stand guard in the hallway while the other goes in. Today
my sister will go while I pretend to read a book in the hallway. If my
father comes towards the bedroom, I am to bang my head on the wall,
pretending to laugh at something in the book. The my sister will acts
like she's looking for dress-up clothes, which I'm not sure my father
will believe. I think we should have practiced, but my sister has
decided any noise might bring my father.

I hear a loud crash, and then my sister is running by me, almost
tripping on my legs. She's holding the dirty magazines up against her
chest. Whatever fell in the closet doesn't worry me, because I know my
mother and father probably won't know the difference.

I follow my sister to her room, shut the door, and we both lay down on
our stomachs by the side of the bed. The bed blocks the view from the
doorway, but only for a second. It's easy to push things under the bed,
though, where my sister hides all but one magazine. She's hurrying,
because the magazines need to go back behind the vent as soon as
possible. I watch her quietly, making sure I don't bother her in case
she makes me leave.

The magazine pictures are mostly women on beds or couches, wearing
necklaces and big earrings, makeup and high-heeled shoes. But usually
nothing else. Sometimes they have on nightgowns that aren't really
nightgowns, their body parts and private parts sticking out. My mother
has one of those in her top drawer, but I've never seen her in one. The
nightgown she wears around the house looks more like a coat, with
buttons up the front and big flowers printed all over it.

The magazine pictures show everything, but I am used to them. My sister
breathes hard as she puts a piece of paper over one of the pictures and
begins to trace. She only picks pictures of the women from the waist
up, ignoring the hair and flaps down below that at first surprised me
and made me wonder if my mother was like that down below. I wondered if
she looked like that down there, too, which is very different from my
own parts.

My sister traces while I get up every once in a while and look out of
the window. My father is in the back yard, mowing the grass and
stopping to mess with the engine that sits on top of the mower.
Sometimes I hear him hitting the engine, a sharp metal sound that makes
me get up to make sure he's not headed back into the house.

My sister finally finishes, a stack of tracings next to her and the
last magazine she was using sitting open in front of her. She waves me
over with one hand and holds a finger against her lips, telling me to
be quiet. Then she points at an ad for a fake ding-a-ling like the one
in my mother and father's medicine cabinet. It costs a lot and I know
it's the same one my parents have because the ad is just like the one
on top of their box. My father bought the one we have at the drugstore,
though. He took me with him when he bought it. He wouldn't let me open
the box, even when we got out to the car. My sister and I found it soon
enough, on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet where it was hidden
behind a bottle of my mother's perfume. The ding-a-ling was spongy and
the same color as the peach crayon we have that's shorter than all the
other crayons.

We laugh at the ad quietly, until my sister starts getting ready to put
the magazines back behind the vent. I get up to check for my father one
more time. He's not there.

I feel like running out of the room, maybe hiding in my own closet. But
just before I tell my sister to hurry, I see my father making his way
back into the yard, towards the lawn mower that's tilted on its side in
the grass. He's carrying his toolbox. I think I can hear him whistling
through the window glass.

"You'd better hurry," I tell my sister. I feel sick, my stomach burning
from thinking we'd almost been caught. My sister hears it in my voice,
because she picks up all the dirty magazines at the same time, not
stacking them neatly or putting them back in order. Then she waits for
me to go first. We'll use the same plan we used before, although I
don't know where I left the book I was pretending to read in the
hallway.

"We'd better hurry," my sister says this time. And we do.