Chapter 24: Paint It Badly

The twenty-seventh of April came with peach petals all over the lawn.

I stood at the garden gate in Brookline in a blue dress and looked at a banner the width of the gatepost.

Garden House Art School, it said, in Romy's hand-painted letters.

Underneath it said, Free classes. Everyone welcome.

She ran the front desk, and she had told the board she would do it for sandwiches.

Behind the gate, sixty girls had once stood at easels watching each other.

Now there were two hundred people with paint on their sleeves.

There were retired teachers and teenagers, a man in a chef's coat, and three small children sharing one tray of watercolors.

Nobody was watching anybody.

Everybody was painting the peach trees, and most of them were doing it badly.

"I love it here," I said.

"Say it into the microphone," Romy said, and handed me a pair of scissors.

A red ribbon stretched between two stakes across the gravel path.

Behind it stood the grandmother in her good navy coat, on a folding stool she had brought from home, holding a paper cup.

"There's lemonade," she told me. "I checked. It's a fine lemonade."

"You hate lemon."

"I hate Cornelia's," said the grandmother. "This one is honest."

The silver mustache gentleman, now the board chair, tapped the microphone.

"We're pleased," he said, "to open the Garden House Art School to the public on the anniversary of a very different morning."

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