Free Before My Life Began by Jay Neugeboren

closet. I stared at him hard so that he’d notice me. He looked my way for a few seconds, nodded his head once.
    â€œYes,” he said. He came back into the living room, set the coats down on the couch. “Yes.” He smiled. “Can I see your drawings, Davey?”
    â€œBut I thought we were going!” Sheila said.
    â€œThis one here is worse than his father sometimes, the way he won’t speak up for himself,” my mother said. “If I’m not for myself, who then? That’s what Poppa always used to say to us, didn’t he, Abe?”
    â€œCan I see your drawings?” Abe repeated, as if he hadn’t heard my mother.
    â€œSo get your drawings already,” my mother said. “Didn’t you hear your Uncle Abe? Why do you always gotta be asked twice?”
    â€œIf you want to wait until we can have more time, alone, that’s all right too,” Abe said to me. “It’s late and you must be very tired.”
    â€œIt’s okay. I can show them to you now.”
    â€œLook,” my father said, taking me by the arm and stopping me from going into my room. “We’ll do even better than that. Listen. I got an idea. Everybody sit down.” He took Abe by the arm. “I mean, my son got a talent—a real gift like you won’t believe, Abe. So you sit down here and watch something you’ll remember for the rest of your life. Everybody sit.”
    My father pulled his desk chair out from next to the breakfront—the top drawer of the breakfront opened down on hinges and my father worked there at night sometimes, paying bills and writing letters—and he made Abe sit.
    â€œYou go get your paper and pencils, Davey, and then you draw Abe’s picture for him the way you know how, okay? I mean you won’t believe it, Abe, the way this kid can copy people’s faces so it looks just like them. It’s a gift from God is what I think, a boy his age.”
    â€œDon’t go showing him off so much,” my mother said. “Maybe Davey don’t feel like it. You shouldn’t force the boy.”
    â€œWho’s forcing? The way he worships Abe, you think I gotta force him? He don’t want to do it, all he’s gotta do is say so.”
    I took my drawing pad and a few different-number pencils from my room, and the old cutting board from the kitchen that I used for leaning on—I’d sandpapered it down so that the nicks and scratches were gone—and I brought a wooden chair in from my bedroom. I liked to sit on something hard when I drew. I set myself up about five feet from Abe so that I’d be able to see all the details in his face. Lillian and my mother and Sheila went to the kitchen to make more coffee. My father pulled a chair up behind me so he could watch, and he started talking about what a great drawer I was and how he figured that with a gift like mine I could be practically anything—I could go into advertising or commercial art or make comic books or do pictures for medical books or engineering companies. Or maybe I would be an architect, he said, and design new kinds of buildings for the future, like the ones at the World’s Fair. Did I remember when he took me to the World’s Fair before the war, he asked, and carried me around on his shoulders?
    I started near the top of the paper, sketching in my uncle’s hairline. It always felt easier for me to start at the top, with the forehead and hair and eyes, because that way I could be sure not to run out of space. When I first started doing portraits I sometimes began with the person’s shoulders and neck and lower part of the face but got so lost in the details that by the time I was ready to do the hair I found I’d run out of room on the paper. I didn’t like to do what they told you to do in books—to sketch in an outline of the entire head in an oval shape first, and then to section off the bottom, lengthwise,