“No,” our father said, a little too emphatically.
“But you want to meet this artist?”
Our father shook his head. “No, he won’t be there. He’s dead.”
“Oh.” This made even less sense to Sally, because when you went to these art openings, didn’t you at least get to meet the artist? “So why would you want to go to this?”
“Well, you know, I’m always trying to learn something new.”
That wasn’t much of a why, but more to the point, it wasn’t an “I’m not going,” either. In a little less than three days, this museum was where our father intended to be, perhaps even with the woman Willa had seen getting out of the taxi.
Sally decided that she would be there, too.
The thing with the camp counselor might have been a classic lesbian childhood trope, but Sally was no Harriet the Spy. （She hadn’t even liked that book, and following folks around to discover things about them and write it all down in her notebook? It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, and also a little bit mean.） She viewed her upcoming mission not as a great adventure or some piece of an ongoing fact-finding mission, but as a likely unpleasant task that she just needed to perform, and not for anyone’s edification but her own. Pretty much the only pleasurable element of her plan was the fact that she would be withholding information about it from her brothers, and as a result she might conceivably know something they did not know when it was over. For that reason alone, she hoped the woman would be there, and that she’d be able to get a good look at her for subsequent analysis.
On the day in question she called her mother from a pay phone to say that she and a few friends were heading to Manhattan to see Clueless, after which one of the dads would be bringing them all home in a cab. Then she went straight to Lincoln Center and lurked, finding the American Folk Art Museum right beside the Latter-Day Saints visitors’ center. The museum was closed to set up for that night’s big event, so she couldn’t go inside to scout out a place not to be seen, but she did go into the gift shop where there were endless postcards of quilts and weathervanes and two apparently new and very expensive coffee table books all about Henry Darger, the “Outsider Artist” of the moment. Sally, seeing more of the man’s work, was thoroughly mystified by the weird simplicity of those cut-out girls and cartoony backgrounds, often featured in states of pain or degradation. Just looking at it gave her a funny feeling, and not a pleasant one, but she kept turning the pages: girls being throttled, girls being hung, girls being stabbed. At least the illustration on our father’s invitation had merely showed them tied together. She wondered if he knew about the rest of it.
When they closed the gift shop she went to get herself a falafel, and ate it across the street from the New York State Theater, watching the dancers duck-walk to the stage door. Then she went into the Library for the Performing Arts, back behind the opera house, and changed into a simple black dress and a pair of black boots with a bit of a heel. （Even at thirteen, Sally was a New York Woman. She knew how to wear black.） She also put her hair up in a bun, like those dancers going in the stage door. She wasn’t in disguise, exactly, but she knew she didn’t look like her usual self, the one who attended Walden with her brothers and （official version） hadn’t liked summer camp in Maine. The way she looked, it was entirely possible that, even if our father happened to see her, he might very well not recognize her. Not that she intended to be seen.
She’d been worrying about a guard or someone checking tickets, but there was nothing like that, only a woman who wanted to take her coat and a man offering wine and water. Sally darted deep into the galleries, searching for places where she could look at others without being looked at herself, but nobody seemed to be looking at anything but the pictures. They were huge and bright and on all of the walls, but also suspended in the middle of the rooms: long and uncoiled scrolls of paper, some of them painted on both sides; those little girls, naked or with butterfly wings, armed and dangerous against orange or seafoam skies, or spurting blood on the battlefields. She tried to avert her eyes from them as she moved, searching for Salo Oppenheimer’s tall and angular shape, but when she looked up it was into the face of an agonized girl being bayonetted by a grim, almost bored-looking man, or some other beautiful outrage. No one had spoken to her, not since the man with the tray of wine and water glasses. No one seemed to regard her with any interest, let alone suspicion. Perhaps the presence of so many tormented children detracted from one not-quite child making a creditable attempt to look even older than she was, or perhaps Sally really had succeeded in camouflaging herself at a New York art event in the year 1995. She nearly felt invisible as she completed her circuit of the rooms.