The Animators

by Kayla Rae Whitaker

I want to see Mel work again. The way she looks at a sketch when it’s done—raking her hands through her hair, cracking her knuckles, muttering, “All right. Next.” I live for that moment. Live for the way seeing her work makes me want to work, and work more, work better, work more deeply.

In thanks, I draw, at his request, a naked Homer and Marge performing a sweaty, strenuous doggy-style. “Make that ass tight, you know what I’m saying?” Carl says. “I mean, get them titties to swaying.

A project always begins like a pimple on the back of the neck. You can’t see it, but you can feel it, rising just under the surface. And it drives you crazy. It swells, gains definition, becomes visible. The bigger it gets, the more it presses into the back of your spine. The more it presses, the less you can focus on anything else. Working on it every day is just a way of scratching the itch until you’ve finished its business and it slowly starts to shrink back down.

Allen said, “I always heered that art was for ugly girls and queers.” “Well, thank God for that, huh,” I said, and walked away.

A new car sits in the driveway, large and humped, gleaming in the sun like the severed head of Snoopy.

It occurs to me before I can stop it: We’re head people, Teddy and me. We spend a substantial amount of our lives scratching around up there, realizing joyful, private milestones we’ll never admit to on the ground. But there are the corresponding dark territories we’ll never leave, tangled forests no one else can ever enter, where we will spend most of our lives alone. We may be lured out, once in a while, but we won’t remain outside for very long.

My mother is allergic to New York. She is particularly allergic to Brooklyn. The fact that flannel and high-waisted jeans are hot trends with the kids strikes her as both ridiculous and suspect. When homeless people yell at her, she is inclined to yell back. When I explain that there’s a service that will deliver your groceries, and another that delivers cleaning supplies, and another that delivers pet supplies, she says, “I don’t understand how people up here are so skinny but so lazy. I ain’t wastin money on that shit.