Miss Waters worked with her back to the class. She had her own copy of the Mona Lisa stuck to the board with magnets next to a print of the original. They lined up behind her back or raised their hands and waited; she drew a few of the lines of the hand, erased a few lines, drew a few more, and looked around at her students.
“Oh, Rob. Yes?”
Rob crossed the index and middle fingers of his raised hand.
“You may go.”
Angelica stepped up. Miss Waters inspected the drawing in her hand.
“Should the nose be lower?” Angelica asked. “It looks funny.”
“Well maybe. But before you look at that, check the line of the cheek here. In Da Vinci’s version, it’s a gradual line out to the right. Remember to draw what’s really there, the line itself, not what your brain tells you a cheek should look like. Your brain lies to you, sometimes.”
“Thanks, Miss Waters.”
Miss Waters looked back at her own copy, and turned her pencil on end to erase her unsatisfactory hand. She had never understood what people found so compelling about this woman. She glanced over her shoulder. Drew’s hand was raised. She went to look at his work, in which he had managed to change all the curves to angles.
She smiled. “It looks like a Picasso.”
“A what?”
She went to the shelf for a Picasso book, and showed him.
“Cool. Can I do that one instead?”
“Nope. Here, try turning her upside down. See? Just lines. Don’t think of her as a person. She’s just a bunch of lines. They’re all soft, curving lines, though. You’ll need to smooth out some of the angles. This way, you can concentrate just on what you see instead of the whole person.”
“Okay.”
She went back to the board and looked at the painting again. Miss Waters distrusted people with fat hands. Martin appeared at her side, and Asher at his heels. Martin thrust his paper into her hand.
“This is very challenging for me, Miss Waters.”
She looked. Martin habitually exaggerated what human features he included in his artwork. Martin reminded her of someone she had known in grad school—Matthew. Matthew hadn’t realized he was a man in a roomful of women. Each morning, Matthew had taken a napkin-wrapped Danish out of his bag and eaten it, covering his un-trimmed beard with crumbs. Matthew wore suspenders and made intelligent-but-insensitive comments that outed him as a political and probably religious conservative, and didn’t seem to notice that he should be embarrassed. Matthew looked as bored as she felt. He drew detailed, grotesque caricatures of their professors in the margins of the articles they discussed. The Women liked having him there because he represented Everything That Was Wrong. Miss Waters liked having him there because he broke through the curves of their well-chosen words. Matthew looked away from people when he talked with them. So did Martin, now, as he said, “I can’t do it. I don’t know how.”
The eyes in his copy were enormous and slanted as if enraged, staring up at Miss Waters and demanding better of her. She felt found out, uncovered.
“Well—“ she began.
Asher, impatient for his turn, leaned over the paper. “Wow, that’s not very good, Martin.”
“Oh,” said Martin, looking at the wall, “okay.”
“You need to fix her eyes,” said Asher.
“Asher,” said Miss Waters, “We should only make encouraging comments about other people’s work.”
“Sorry, Martin.”
“It’s alright,” said Martin to the wall.
“Here, Martin,” said Miss Waters. “You’re doing great. If you like, you can take a look, for a second, at how I’m doing mine.”