The difference between Lizzie and all the Seminars people—the male students who are keeping score, the female students in various accoutrements bespeaking liberal-arts educations in the time of free trade: vintage T-shirts promoting now-inoperative airlines, ethical sandals, MP3 players loaded with Rufus Wainwright and Manu Chao—aside from the fact that Lizzie is biologically related to her parents, the fully mature adult poets, is that Lizzie knows that her parents, the adult poets, are just human beings, mere mortals. They don’t have supernatural capabilities, nor do they have some sort of grand scheme they’re slowly and deliberately unfurling. They’re living day to day. They’re not even all that great at writing.

What no one knows is that the only person with any sort of a grand scheme and/or supernatural flair is Lizzie. And part of the reason they do not get this about her is they do not realize that Lizzie is an artist.

Of course, as her mother constantly reminds Lizzie, it’s going to be a lot better in the long run if Lizzie understands that making art is something you do on the weekends, in your barricaded sound-proof garage with painted windows, while during the week you pursue a real job, raking in a respectable salary. Sure, Marta may have lucked into something in her day, but that’s also because Marta has a calling and once looked like a young Aphrodite minus half shell and Reagan had only just been elected, and, oh, by the way, does Lizzie understand that she is definitely not going to art school?

Even her mother’s latest “friend,” a cozy Swiss-American neurologist with whom Marta has allegedly been conducting some cutting-edge interdisciplinary research into facial mimicry and poetic address, toes the line. He insists on calling Lizzie by her full name, with pretentious inflection, “Eh-LEEZ-a.” He brings her tins of aquarelle pencils, with which Eh-LEEZ-a is evidently meant to generate neoclassical studies of birds’ heads, fallen leaves, and cornfields—and which her mother will quietly consign to the recycling bin once Lizzie reaches the age of majority.

This is why Lizzie has needed to have a plan. Because she needs to make some really big art now, so that she can use it to get some really big scholarship, so that she can get the right education, so that she can get, she doesn’t know exactly what, but so she can get out there and out of here and start becoming a visual artist pronto, at which point she will be living in New York.