“What are you working on, Girl?” Mr. Bailey asked cautiously.
“A Chinese man. This is his peasant hat, and these are his legs,” she explained as she attached the testicle “legs” of the penis sculpture to the shaft that she was pretending was the man’s body, pressing the clay firmly so it wouldn’t fall over.
“Aren’t you going to give him arms?”
“He doesn’t need arms,” Girl scowled.
“What about shoes?” he tried.
“He’s too poor to afford shoes,” she answered, and he had no comeback for that. Girl knew enough about art to know it didn’t have to be realistic. Her “man” had a head, a body, and the suggestion of legs. It was interpretive art, or modern art, or something. Picasso’s people didn’t always look real, either.
Mr. Bailey dared not question her. Unfortunately, she could find no justification for making a pee hole at the top of the “hat,” so she had to omit it.
When the class’s projects returned from the kiln, it was time to glaze their creations. Girl looked through the white plastic bottles for something flesh-colored.
“Do you have any peach?” she asked Mr. Bailey.
“Everything we have is out,” he said, moving on to help someone else. Girl rummaged through the bottles, but there was no peach, or even tan. How could that be? What if Girl had made a deer statue, or a person, or a peach tulip? Had he hidden the flesh tones? She rummaged through the glazes, and finally settled on a greenish-brown with flecks of black. Not her vision, but it would have to do. It was somewhat skin-colored if you let your eyes blur to slightly out of focus.
Mr. Bailey was back again, looking over her shoulder.
“How about you use blue for the pants, red for the shirt, and yellow for the hat? You know you can use several colors of glaze. They won’t bleed into each other. Then it will be more obvious that it is a Chinese man.”
Girl just stared him down. She wanted peach. There was no peach. She suspected there might have been peach, but Mr. Bailey hid it when she was in the art room, so she ignored him entirely as if he had never spoken.
When Girl brought her sculpture home and explained once again that it was a Chinese man, her parents graciously put it on the mantel for a while, until it magically disappeared one day. Naked women were great art, but penises were just embarrassing.
fourth of july
Brother tiptoed into Girl’s pink bedroom and tugged at her shoulder to wake her. Brother and Girl shared a box fan at the end of the hallway and slept with their bedroom doors open to catch the hot moving air. Mostly, they just got the buzz of the motor. Mother and Stepmother had a window AC unit that came with the house. All summer their door was closed tightly so as not to let any air out. Girl loved waking up in the hot summer air that did not feel different from the temperature of her skin.
In front of their house was a busy street—a double-yellow-line street, not just a white-dashed-line street. It was the Fourth of July, and the road in front of their house was closed, but the parade hadn’t started yet. Brother and Girl padded down the hallway in bare feet, stepping around the squeaky places on the hardwood floor and placing their feet carefully on the stairs so that no one woke up and told them “no.” They walked outside through the prickly gravel at the edge of the road. Girl looked left and right even though there were no cars because she didn’t know how to not look both ways. The pavement held the warmth from a month of sun and radiated up through her calloused feet. The siblings crossed the oncoming lane as quickly as they could without scraping their toes. They had a destination: the double yellow line. It was ugly gold and grayed out on the edges, and it, too, had retained heat. When Girl prodded the line with a toe it squished just a little under her toenail—not as hard as the concrete, and not quite as soft as when she had stuck her thumbnail into a glob of old green paint on the bench at the playground. Girl had been waiting all year to see what it felt like. Brother and Girl stood with their feet on the dividing lines and there were no cars anywhere, just people starting to walk with lawn chairs down to the parade route on Titus Avenue, the main road with traffic lights and small stores. Hawkers were already selling red balloons to tie around children’s wrists. Girl always untied hers and released it with a wish, and she always cried with regret when it went up so fast into the sky and got lost in the clouds. Mother knew she did this every year, and before buying a red balloon at the parade she made Girl promise that this time she would not let it go and she would not cry and they both knew this was going to happen regardless, but Mother bought one for Girl anyway, tying a shoestring bow around her summer-brown wrist.
Brother and Girl had to hurry now, because the sidewalk on Titus was filling up and the good spots were already taken. The siblings ran back into the kitchen to urge their parents, “faster, come on, hurry up, we are going to miss it, we don’t want to miss it, hurry up.” They never brought lawn
