"What do you think?"
Lori was terrified. She was not sure what she was supposed to do once
she got to New York. That had always been the vaguest part of our
escape plan. Back in the fall, I'd had no doubt that she could get a
scholarship to one of the city's universities. She'd been a finalist for a
National Merit Scholarship, but she'd had to hitchhike into Bluefield to
take the test, and she got rattled when the trucker who picked her up put
the moves on her; she arrived nearly an hour late and botched the test.
Mom, who supported Lori's New York plans and kept saying she wished
she were going to the big city herself, suggested that Lori apply to the
Cooper Union art school. Lori put together a portfolio of her drawings
and paintings, but just before the submissions deadline, she spilled a pot
of coffee on them, which made Mom wonder aloud if Lori had a fear of
success.
Then Lori heard about a scholarship sponsored by a literary society for
the student who created the best work of art inspired by one of the
geniuses of the English language. She decided to make a clay bust of
Shakespeare. She worked on it for a week, using a sharpened Popsicle
stick to shape the slightly bulging eyes and the goatee and earring and
longish hair. When it was finished, it looked exactly like Shakespeare.
That night we were all sitting at the drafting table watching Lori put the
final touches on Shakespeare's hair when Dad came home drunk. "That
does indeed resemble old Billy," Dad said. "Only thing is, as I been
telling you, he was a goddamn fake."
For years, every time Mom brought out Shakespeare's plays, Dad would
carry on about how they'd been written not by William Shakespeare of
Avon but by a bunch of people, including someone named the Earl of
Oxford, because no single person in Elizabethan England could have had
Shakespeare's thirty-thousand-word vocabulary. All this bunk about little