While I was thus polluting the blank pads of paper intended for Art, the art teacher in grade school continued to have hopes for me, in the dogged belief that, being my mother's child, I just couldn't be that bad. Once a week, on Wednesdays, she came to the Fourteenth Street School, and we had a whirl at Art. While the other children were drawing houses with doors and chimneys and neat spirals of smoke coming out, the most I could manage was a lean-to. No smoke, no symmetry. I was equally wobbly on Halloween pumpkins, spring flowers tastefully arranged in a vase (which the teacher called a vawhse) and Christmas trees with a star on top. Stars, with all those points, drove me crazy. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I was the only child in class who became an artist's model.

The exotic role came to me at the age of eleven, when the Saturday morning art class ran out of subjects. The class had been organized by Mr. Ward, a small, gray-haired man who looked as though he'd break if you bent him in the middle. He had lived abroad for many years, but now he'd come back to Franklin, to squeeze out his last years, like dried up paint from a nearly empty tube, in doing portraits of citizens whose forbears had struck oil. On the side, he'd started the art class for twelve ladies, including Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck, all of whom paid two dollars a week for the privilege of studying under Mr. Ward.

They must have been terribly hard up for models, to choose me, and I must admit they tried my pretty sister first, but she squirmed too much. I had always had a talent for sitting static as a corpse, but it had been considered a rather unfortunate, negative talent until the art class got ahold of me.

-- from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)

I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what is symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if  my one impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.

-- from "Look, I'm Framed!" (1949)

In this spirit, she had phoned and invited her neighbor over for drinks: "Bring your houseguest. Are you going to marry him?" She was old enough to say whatever she wanted to, although age had very little to do with it. She had usually said what she wanted to, from the age of eleven months on.

Men seldom objected to Lucy's frankness. She had been a beauty, and now, in her sixties, she still had the finely whittled bones, the flash and fire-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of an indestructible belle. But not a Southern belle; Lucy was much too direct. Women were more put off by this then men. Grace Dillworth had shied away from the head-on frankness of "Are you going to marry him?" And she had gone on to commit the unforgivable (to Lucy) stupidity of refusing the invitation with top-of-the-tongue phrases like "take a rain check." One did N O T take a rain check for a command performance. Lucy, a solipsist, took a dim view of this."

-- from A Dying Fall (1973)

Mother always hoped that at least one of her children would be an artist. and since I was the oldest, she hoped hardest for me. Her method of encouraging this was to leave plenty of scratch pads and pencils and crayons around the house, but it soon became apparent that I am one of those who can draw a straight line-- and nothing more. Instead, I used the pencils and paper for my literary output. One day after I'd heard Mother reading the Jungle Book to Sally and Jimmy, I went up to my room with a new ambition. Soon my wails of agony reached through the house, and Mother came running upstairs frightened nearly silly. "What happened? What is it?" I pointed to an almost blank sheet of paper and wept anew. Mother stared at it anxiously, but she still couldn't make out what ghastly thing has befallen me. "I c-c-can't write like Kipling," I sobbed.

-from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)

As Lucy Ramsdale said when the news reached her, "If Grace's papa could hear this, he wouldn't just turn over in his grave-- he'd levitate."

Grace Dilworth's papa was buried under the largest marble edifice in Wingate's cemetary, but anybody who had tangled with Sam Dilworth wouldn't quite put it past him to crack through a marble tombstone and commandeer a passing hearse. He had been a very forcible man. And he had kept his daughter in loving thralldom from the time she'd teethed on his platinum cuff links. Grace had been thirty-nine when he died, and the betting was that, when she went off on a long cruise afterward, she was still, as Lucy put it, "untouched by human hands."

If Grace had come home from her trip with an ocelot or a two-foot pygmy, it wouldn't have caused much talk. The people of Wingate, Connecticut (population seven thousand, not counting masochistic summer commuters), took oddities in stride. But Grace Dilworth did not come home with an ocelot or a pygmy; she had brought home a six-foot man and was keeping him right on the premises. According to the best reckoning-- and Wingate ladies were very shrewd at this sort of higher mathematics-- he was at least six years younger than his hostess.

--from A Dying Fall (1973)

On the rare occasions when Mother had time to paint, her favorite accomplice was an indomitable old lady of over seventy, Mrs. Ramspeck. Mrs. Ramspeck had the only electric carriage left in town, one of those genteel, high-bodied affairs that should have moved at a snail's pace, but somehow the old lady managed to drive it in the spirit of a Stutz bear-cat, with a hey nonny nonny. Once when she was driving Mother to the outskirts of town, so that they might spend the afternoon painting a nice clump of pines, the electric stalled on the railroad tracks. According to the account we heard later, Mrs. Ramspeck was fiddling with the steering bar when Mother heard the screech of an oncoming train, and begged her friend to abandon the carriage. "Now don't be rattled, Kitty," Mrs. Ramspeck said briskly. "We'll just push it off the tracks."

They got out and pushed, while the train swung around a curve and started down the track straight at them. The electric refused to budge, and so did Mrs. Ramspeck. Just as Mother, in desperation, was about to knock the old lady over the head, in order to drag her unconscious form to safety, the electric gave an apologetic hiccough, yielded to their shoves and lurched off the tracks. With the hot breath of the engine on their backsides, Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck leaped for it as the train pounded by. Mother was so shaken that she told her friend she couldn't possibly paint that afternoon, but Mrs. Ramspeck gave a sturdy slap at the dust on her long black skirts and said, "Oh, fiddlesticks, Kitty. The light will be just right on those pines."

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

When winter came to the already dank basement, I developed a cough as loud as Camille's, and it was this that finally proved my undoing, or my doing. The director and the calisthenics instructor decided I was run down; I was too thin and round-shouldered, and I didn't sit up straight. They knew I spent my mornings off writing, and they said that was bad for Posture. They very nicely agreed I could go on writing, but I'd have to do exercises to combat it. I could take part of my lunch hour, or come in early and use the gym. Several times they even got me into the billowing bloomers, but I weighed ninety pounds, and on me the bloomers came down like harem trousers, only thick serge, which is a fabric no sultan would stand for. In desperation, I enrolled in a one-night-a-week copywriting course at New York University, and the professor there got me a job in advertising. It was five dollars less a week than Anne Morgan paid, but the atmosphere was full of pipe tobacco, and I found that infinitely healthier than Physical Education without men.

-- from "Unmixed Company"