In “The Father She Went to Find” a savant reveals an amazing skill

Author’s note: This excerpt is from early in Penny Bly’s journey to search for her father. One of Penny’s talents as a savant is the ability to draw in a photorealistic manner, but she doesn’t actually think while she draws, rather she visualizes a series of thousands of dots that she connects at lightning speed using her pen. This excerpt shows Penny at the mall (the year is 1987) drawing a stranger’s portrait for money. The stranger, Heather, has just had her portrait done by a caricaturist and was dissatisfied with the result, so Penny offered to draw a better portrait.

SEVENTEEN

Heather’s pen is medium point. I prefer fine, but this will work.

I take the crappy cartoon and flip it over. The blank white page staring up at me is delicious.

I close my eyes and think of her, this Heather, and I picture her as someone who doesn’t use that Super Bowl–smile as much as she should, maybe because someone once told her that’s the way women move forward, get promoted, get the same opportunities as men. Don’t smile because then they don’t take you seriously.

But that smile, or at least a version of it, is surely part of Heather’s essence. Not the big smile the shitty cartoonist drew. Something softer, like the haze of an early-morning sun.

I open my eyes and let the blank canvas suck me into another world.

The dots.

It’s all about the dots.

Sometimes I feel like a fraud about my artwork, because, really, I have nothing to do with it. At least not consciously.

When I draw someone, all I need to do is concentrate in just the right way, and when I do, little black imaginary dots start appearing on whatever canvas I’m using. It’s kind of like those dots you get when you rub your eyes too hard, but, in the case of my drawings, they appear one at a time.

And all I have to do? Just poke each dot with my pen before it disappears. And they come fast, so I need to really pay attention, but if I keep up, an image gradually forms. An image that is nearly photographic in detail. I still don’t get it.

Now.

Here they come.

I stop thinking of Heather altogether. My mind clears of all imagery, and I only focus on jabbing the tip of the pen on every dot I see before it disappears. Over and over, hundreds at first, then over a thousand.

I’m lost in my head as I sit on the cool and polished stone floor of the mall, crisscross applesauce outside a RadioShack, very nearly but not completely oblivious to the passersby.

I can vaguely sense them, and maybe there are even a few who’ve stopped to see what I’m doing.

I never really see the full picture until the end, and I know it’s done when the dots stop appearing. I always wait, but only a few seconds. Four seconds is the longest it’s ever taken for a dot to appear. If four seconds go by without a dot, I know my work is complete.

Time passes. I don’t know how long.

Finally, the dots stop. I ink the final one, lean back, and absorb for the first time what my brain and left hand have conjured.

I see Heather, exactly as my mind snapshotted her. And in my picture, Heather’s smile is not big and brash but restrained, really no more than what the Mona Lisa herself wore, a smile not of confidence but of complete vulnerability, as if Heather is allowing herself an occasion of something new, something exciting. Perhaps something a bit dangerous.

This is how I see her, this woman I met for all of a minute. On this page is Heather’s essence, her frequency.

I look up and realize I’ve attracted a crowd of seven, all leaning over.

“Who is that?” a teen asks. I remember seeing him from the arcade.

“Heather,” I reply, no more information to give. The small crowd makes me a little uneasy. Not so much that I don’t like crowds, but I really don’t like being the reason for one.

Heather walks up seconds later, finds me, stares down at the portrait. “Jesus Christ.”

I struggle to make eye contact. “Do you like it?”

And there, just in the inside corners of Heather’s eyes, tears, threatening to breach the lower lids, which they don’t. But it’s close. “I…I can’t believe you just drew this.”

She’s happy. That’s good.

“Would you consider it worth ten dollars?”

There’s no hesitation. “Yes. Yes, I would.” She digs into her purse, into her wallet. She hands me a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep it all.”

I take the cash, flush with pride. I should have left Willow Brook years ago to pursue a commercial side to my art.

I hand Heather the picture.

“Thank you,” she says. And it’s the kind of thank-you a person means. Then she walks away, her pace slower than before. I keep my gaze on her until Heather turns the corner, thinking about the portrait hanging in the office of Heather’s husband. I wonder if he sees the same essence in her as I do.

“Goddamn.”

The voice startles me a bit. I turn and see a man about my age. Maybe that makes him more of a boy than a man.

“You’re fucking good,” he says.

I don’t respond right away, taking him in instead. His dirty shoulder-length brown hair is fine—not stringy—and parted in the middle so it sweeps along the sides of his face, cutting off the outside edges of each eye. He’s got a whisper of a moustache that’s not quite gross and skin as smooth as any I’ve ever seen. And his denim jacket (ripped in places, sewed in others), sports a Smiths iron-on patch about five degrees off-center.

“Um…thanks,” I say.

He takes a step closer and is now firmly entrenched in my personal space.

I take a step back.

“I mean it,” he says. “That shit was amazing. I was watching you the whole time and…I don’t know. You were, like, in a trance or something.”

“Okay.”

“You in school for art?”

“No.”

“You graduated already?”

“No.”

He smiles.

And wow.

That smile.

“You’re not a big talker, are you?” he asks.

I’m not, but right now I kind of wish I were. “I was just answering your questions.”

“And I was just wondering where you took classes. I do some drawing myself, and I’m trying to get better.”

“I’ve never taken classes for drawing.”

“No shit? You’re self-taught? Because portraits are a pain in the ass. The symmetry kills me.”

“No shit,” I tell him.

“I’m Travis,” he says.

“I’m Penny.”

“You do any teaching? Classes on sketch art?”

“No.”

“You live around here?”

“I used to.”

That smile again. “You’re giving me nothing here. You must be a blast at a cocktail party.”

“I’ve never been to a cocktail party.”

“Big fucking surprise.”

I have the sudden and distinct sense of failing some kind of social experiment, and though it doesn’t matter with this person, not really, it matters in the wild. Out here I’m going to need to be an extrovert when it’s important, no matter how much against my nature it is.

I need to try harder.

“Nice to meet you, Travis.”

He thumbs the pocket edges of his jeans. “Yeah, you too. Look, seriously, I’m not hitting on you or anything. It’s just that…” He lifts a hand and squeezes the back of his neck, while shifting his gaze to the ground. “Man, I love drawing. I fucking love it. The idea of getting paid for drawing is, like, I don’t know.” He looks up. “That would be awesome.”

Awesome.

Is it awesome?

I consider it.

It is.

“That was the first time I’ve been paid for a drawing,” I tell him. Then I reconsider. “Actually, it’s the first time I’ve been paid for anything.”

Now he laughs, just a short chuckle, and I can tell from the tone that he’s not laughing at me.

“You want a corn dog?” he asks.

“More than anything.”

And as we walk to the food court, I sneak a glance at Travis and think about the warning from my father about dragons in the wild.

Well, hell, Pen Pen. They’re pretty much everywhere.

---

Type of Story: Review

An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.