another unmarketable skill discovered

I'm taking a drawing class, and it's not easy. The catalogue makes the class sound simple: "Everyone can draw! Get in touch with your natural ability!", but at the first class, the instructor solemnly instructed us to look around, because a lot of us were going to drop out and few would struggle through the whole course. (I've heard that is often said to first year law students, but not at my alma mater. There was an epidemic of suicides during my time there, but no one just dropped out. If you didn't kill yourself, you graduated).

Last Friday at drawing class, first we had to draw a mangy old trumpet for an hour (I drew it twice, and then took out a New Yorker and silently read. The woman next to me gamely sketched that trumpet for a solid hour, and even then she wasn't done). Then we had a difficult exercise that we were told would drive us all crazy: we had to turn our bodies away from our paper, angling our arm behind us to touch the paper, and we had to stare at our left hands and draw it, with a Sharpie, without looking once at our paper. We were supposed to do this slowly, but most people ripped through it in a minute or less. I took a bit over two minutes. Then we looked at our pictures. Most were unrecognizable, a cacophony of lines which resembled nothing. Mine was a hand. A big, jerky hand, but a hand nevertheless, with fingernails, rings and scars.

We did something we often do: we had to display our drawing and walk around the room, looking at everyone's picture. Mine was freakishly better, hugely better, than all the rest. "Carole must have done this exercise before," our instructor said. "Many times before."

"She looked!" accused another student. "She was looking!"

"I did not, and I've never done this before," I said firmly.

We went back to our seats and did the exercise again. This time the instructor took up a new position, straight across the room from me, and I think she was trying to see if I were cheating. Once again my hand was a hand, with proportionate fingers and fingernails and thumb and knuckles, even better than the first hand, and once again everyone else's was jumbled and crazy.

However, we went on to draw kitchen utensils this way, and I lost my mojo altogether. My spatula was a mangled mess, unrecognizable. But for a shining five minutes there, I was an art prodigy, envied by some and attacked by others who could not imagine my gift was real. The hand drawings have gone into the recycling, and the glory has passed.