Free Before My Life Began by Jay Neugeboren Page A

with three light parallel lines where the mouth and eye and nose lines were. I worked best when I worked feature by feature, making each one as real as I could before going on to the next. What I loved most, the way I did now when I saw that I was getting the line of Abe’s hair and his forehead right—the gentle way it sloped down toward the little rise above his eyebrows—was the feeling that I was making something where there had been nothing.
    I loved seeing the different parts of a person’s face come into being slowly, one at a time—the hair and then the forehead and then the right eye and then the left eye and then the nose and then the mouth—each appearing by itself on the white space and making the parts already done seem even more real than they’d been by themselves. To see a single eye staring out from a white space, all shaded in under the eyebrow so that you could feel the way the bone went in backwards, made me happy. When I’d stop and look at the person and then back at my drawing it seemed like a miracle to me that my own hands had been able to imitate reality while at the same time—though I never told this to anyone—it was as if my drawing was somehow more real than the person himself. I would get excited too, not just because I was able to draw things so they looked real, but because I’d be a little bit frightened all the time that I was going to mess up—that once I got the left eye I wouldn’t get the right eye to look as if it belonged with the left. Still, I liked the way being frightened got me worked up inside, into a kind of trance, yet let me concentrate on doing my best, on getting the reality of the face I could see inside my head, the face that stared up at me from the depth of the white paper.
    That seemed magical to me too—how deep the white of a plain piece of paper could be. Before I started drawing, the paper would be flat and blank and ordinary, but the minute I put a single line on it, the way I was doing now—starting to sketch the curls of my uncle’s hair lightly with a number 3 pencil—the flat white space would suddenly seem to me to be the deepest thing in the world. It would seem to go down forever and ever, so that to sketch in lines first the way the books said, crisscrossing them across an egg shape like tick-tack-toe boxes, wiped away the depth the paper could hold and made it flat and ordinary again.
    It also seemed like cheating—as if anyone could draw faces correctly if only they could learn to follow rules—and I liked it when people admired my drawings at school, or at work with my father, and remarked on how incredible it was that a boy my age could draw the way I did, without sketching in an outline of the whole head first. Drawing portraits was something I could do that nobody else my age could do as well.
    Abe’s hairline was starting to recede at either side of his forehead, and I noticed the faint indentations there, where I imagined hair had been when he was younger. The hairline curved down gracefully from both sides of his head in what my mother said was a perfect widow’s peak—though I couldn’t figure out then why they used the word “widow” to describe a man’s hair. Abe’s hair was a deep brown, almost black, with a few wisps of gray at the temples, moving backwards over his head in thick curly waves, a little bit the way you’d see the waves in oceans drawn sometimes, one following the other in a nice easy way, and I left white spaces here and there near the tops of the curls to show the reflections. It made me feel good to see the effect you could get by leaving a bit of white just below the top of the gently rolling crests. Without the white it would look as if you’d traced a two-dimensional outline, like those in coloring books, but with the white highlights, which I added in a few places by blackening the hair first with a number 2B