A Fatal Stain (34 page)

But I’d looked inside the drawers, which no one had bothered to finish, and knew they were a pale poplar, with virtually no figure. Which meant they were a virgin canvas. And the trunk itself was just square, with a deepset “cut” line running around the top in a rectangle.

When I tried to unscrew the medallions, I discovered they were plaster and very easy to chisel off. I used commercial paint remover to remove the horrible green paint, then sanded it lightly. Onto the clean canvas went a mix of black-walnut and mahogany stain, which came closer to a “walnut” color than straight out of the can. The inlaid line across the top I outlined with gold, then wiped it off, to give the impression of a line of gold inset and corroded by time.

When it was all dry, I gave it several coats of oil finish. With lion-mouth (with rings through them) door pulls through the holes that used to have the medallions, it makes a somber nineteenth-century-feel piece, which has done honorable duty as a piano roll holder next to our player piano for the last fifteen years. Those door pulls were bought from a furniture-restoring store, but they can now be found on the Internet, together with other suitably “old”-looking fittings.

My other great success as an impostor was buying a very cheap table with a “bubbled up” plastic-type top. Something most people don’t know is that even in non-real-wood furniture, the legs are usually real wood because it’s cheaper to do them that way. This table had
column-like legs that twisted upward in a spiral. I stripped the legs of their plastic-looking veneer to reveal decent-enough pine, which I stained dark to suggest aged pine. The top I painted in successive coats as blue-green marble. It took forever, and I used not just a model but a friend who was a geologist as a consultant. But the result was convincing enough that the moving company wanted to charge me extra for the “heavy marble table.”

If you’re itching to replicate this type of success, or if you simply don’t have access to good furniture (the table was done because I couldn’t find anything up to my standards for the very large dining room we had at the time), buy a good book on faux painting, a set of student’s oil paints, a set of brushes, and head out to your favorite thrift shop or flea market. Pick something small and easy to transform to begin with, and don’t be discouraged by early failures.

Of course, no matter how good you become, you should never use your skills to fool others into buying a cheap piece as something more valuable. Fooling guests into thinking you have very expensive furniture, on the other hand, is a noncriminal and thoroughly fun hobby.

Just remember to tell the movers what is not real marble. Trust me; you don’t want to pay marble rates.

I didn’t know I would have to explain this until my agent
read the book and told me E sounded more like he was five or six than three and a half.

Since E is modeled on both my boys (who hate it like poison, of course), I was simply relaying things that they did at around three, three and a half. I didn’t think it would seem impossible to other people until my agent mentioned it.

And now, it will seem like I’m bragging about my children. I am not. Let me explain gifted children, very briefly.

Giftedness, not as it’s interpreted in the schools (where they tend to consider the top 25 percent of children gifted, and that top is often determined by which kids obey best or perform tasks most satisfactorily), is as much a blessing as a curse.

Again and again, I’ve run up against schools that have either no or inadequate gifted programs, because “gifted children already have an advantage,” something that could only be believed by someone who never raised one of them.

Truly gifted children are a joy and a challenge in equal measure. Working with them consists partly of running to keep up and partly of being really frustrated when they don’t pick up on simple things as easily as their “normal” counterparts.

You see, “gifted” is marked by “saltational development.” What this means is that a gifted child might draw like Leonardo da Vinci but be totally unable to sound out the word
cat
. Or he might read a history of Rome written for adults but be unable to color within the lines. And then one or the other ability that has been lacking will suddenly leap ahead. It is also characterized by a multitude of interests, some of them odd or counterproductive at best (it’s very hard to teach a kid to read when all he wants to talk about for six months is, say, the peculiar behavior of an anthill in the yard).

Gifted children are often classed as learning disabled or defective or both because giftedness is very hard to understand, even one-on-one and with more time than schools have. As a mother, I had to consult experts and learn to cope with my sons’ idiosyncrasies.

Yes, giftedness, properly handled, can give people a leg up in life. Or it can turn into a curse that blights friendships and destroys careers. Education of the gifted child is where it should start being turned into an asset, not a handicap. It helps to remember it’s not a quantitative thing—not that they’re “smarter” or “better” than
others—but a qualitative thing. Their minds work differently, and you’ll have to learn how to help them cope with that and still become balanced and well-integrated adults.

If your child resembles E at all, I suggest you contact American Mensa, which in turn can give you local contacts to help with your gifted child. And good luck. Raising that child will be both the most exhilarating and scariest thing you’ve ever done.