Free My Beautiful Failure by Janet Ruth Young Page B

antidepressants.”

36.
apprentice
    I n the studio, Linda primed Dad’s canvases for a new group of sunset paintings. She covered each canvas with a layer of tinted gesso so that the paint would stand out better and the backgrounds would have depth. A puddle of newsprint protected the floor. The assembly-line process was interesting, and I felt furtively comfortable watching Linda in this room rather than watching Dad.
    “So Linda’s been abandoned,” I said, leaning in the doorway. “How will she get anything done without someone to discuss it with every nanosecond?”
    “Dad’s at the beach with his camera while the light is still good.” She wore an old dress shirt of Dad’s, black-and-white-striped socks, some stretchy red pants that had belonged to our grandmother, Mom’s holey Keds, and a beret. Paint spots flecked her whole outfit, even the hat, which made me believe she had put them there intentionally. I could picture her in her room with those clothes spread on the bed, talking to her stuffedGarfield and flecking furiously like Jackson Pollock.
    “That’s not what I meant. I meant, where is Jodie? I can’t believe she’s making you do this by yourself.”
    Linda frowned at the canvas. Nothing could distract her from this important and potentially profitable work.
    “How will you cope?” I needled.
    She evened out the coat of paint with a rag. “That’s the first time you’ve missed having Jodie around. I’ll have to tell her your feelings about her have changed.”
    “Really, where is she? I hope she hasn’t found another family to glom on to like a barnacle.” I laughed a wicked laugh that I’ve used to torture Linda since she was four and I was seven. This made her look up.
    “If you don’t like her, why are you even asking?”
    “I thought maybe she was smarter than I gave her credit for. That she realized what a disaster this was going to be.”
    “She’ll be here later. We’re a team.”
    “Of courth,” I said, imitating Jodie’s noodlelike lisp.
    That did it. She shot me a cold and withering look. “Why are you still here? Don’t you have a class to fail?”
    “That’s not funny.”
    “You’re supposed to be getting your grades up. I don’t have to improve my grades, so I can do whatever I want.”
    “What an honor. What a big whoop.”
    “All right, if you have no real reason to be here, just stay where you are, be quiet, and watch the master.”
    Linda placed the first canvas near an open window to dry. She took a second canvas from the stack against the wall. Dad had already titled each canvas on the back. Anote on the front said which tint he wanted for the background. She placed the next canvas on the easel, shook a jar of blue-green gesso, and spread it in one corner with a sponge brush.
    “That’s actually a nice color,” I said.
    “Of course it is.”
    “But getting back to the reason I’m here.”
    Using a clean rag, Linda wiped a clump from the brush tip.
    “Notice my concentration,” she said, working into the middle of the canvas.
    “What Dad really needs is to be normal. Go to work, come home. Watch TV while eating Fiddle Faddle. Take a walk. Do normal things.” What bothered me most about this painting craze was that I had lost my father a second time. After last winter I thought I was getting him back. But when Dr. Fritz suggested painting, Dad slipped away again. I could count on one hand the number of days since then that I considered him normal.
    “Dad’s a very strong person. You have to be to go through what he did.”
    “I know that, but this seems so extreme. Can’t he be average, even for a little while?”
    Linda nodded toward the jar, and without thinking I held it up for her. The apprentice’s apprentice. “Nobody wants to be average,” she told me.
    “But someone has to be. In fact, most people have to. Statistically.”
    “Only one-third have to be. The others are above average and—cloth, please.”
    Cloth. “Okay. But