Red
I’m eight watching my mother’s morning routine reflected in the square mirror above the bathroom sink. She pulls the outside corner of her eye so it becomes a straight line squinted shut and steadily follows the top edge of her lid from the inside corner to the outside with black liquid eyeliner, then a few swipes of black mascara on her upper lashes, culminating in a slow circling of her lips in frosted pink that she twists up from the tube. I like watching her. She teaches kindergarten during the day and goes to meetings at night. People who know her remind me of her importance. During dress-up, I wear her high heeled shoes around the house practicing for the day when I will be old enough to wear lipstick and be important. I won’t wear the same pink as she does though, I will wear red. I tie a red satin ribbon around my head so only my bangs touch my face. Red seems like a brave color.
I have a memory of a red velvet dress my grandma made me as a gift. She sewed it especially for me. It was perfect. Complicated stitches and pockets, smooth velvet with a red satin lining. It had a small rectangle of stitching at the back of the neck where mama pointed out that grandma removed the tag so we wouldn’t know it was store bought. Grandma lied? Grandma didn’t have a mother so maybe that’s why she never learned it’s bad to lie. Grandma liked to tell stories that seemed unreal, ones about her mother and father meeting through a matchmaker, and growing up in an orphanage after her mother died. Stories I read in books or had seen in plays but never believed actually happened. Maybe she meant to say she pretended to make the dress.
Oh well. Little lies. They don’t hurt. I wonder when I began to tell them myself? I don’t want to tell mom about wanting the red ribbon I found in her sewing box so I take it and put in my top drawer in a shoebox I decorated with pictures cut from magazines and smeared with white glue on top, it’s called decoupage. I made it in Girl Scouts. I recite the Promise and Law each week on Wednesday afternoons before we begin the after-school meeting. I hold my three fingers tall in the Girl Scout sign. I’m mostly honest so little lies don’t count. I don’t like Girl Scouts but I say I do because it makes mom happy.
Years later and I’m still peppering my truthful life with small lies. I woke this morning with words, as I often do. Not words of my own but words handed to me, waiting for me to wake up and see them in my mind and speak them to myself. This is how my muse meets me, early morning light, with coffee, still lulled by the sweet dreams of the night before, not registering the stresses of the day. He favors autumn, and warm whites in my hands, me folding while he speaks gently and tells me stories.
He frees me from time. My mind spinning like the arrow on a gameboard until I slow to a stop, my finger pointing his way and he steps into the middle, the circle where all the colors collide and we spin so fast we disappear into the blur where we can do anything. Every wish come true and some we never dreamt of. As long as the music plays and we keep spinning no one can touch us. I want to stay in this place for as long as it takes to write it out. Every want and desire dripping so I can feel them once more, maybe then I can move on and begin without being distracted by worded fantasies and the what if’s of daydreams and reality, before hope’s bright betrayal splashes the words with silence.
My muse joins hands to help me clarify while the Mr. pulls me out and scares me into silence. Tongue tied. My husband’s glaring eyes highlight the keyboard, a stage for my prancing hands. Their dance beams from my eyes and spills from my fingers, morse code secrets. The tapping silence heightens his need for control.
I feel the urge to explain it to him, yet when I’m most sure of what to say is when the words won’t sprout. They swallow themselves and run and hide. Taunting me to find them while his eyes wait for an answer.
Life doesn’t follow a clear timeline. There are decisions that require more than a yes or a no. There is a wide array of gray in between that sweeps the horizon like a low fog. The distance scattered with sagging clouds that curtain the future and lie thick in your lungs like smoke. An illusion of contrast. The chokehold of silence is easier to deal with than speaking the truth.
Throughout my life, I’ve tried to ignore the conflicting accounts of what was happening. Like grandpa coughing up phlegm into his wadded up handkerchief then telling grandma to shut up and grandma telling stories that seemed so far from reality. Stories that made sense in books or on stage but didn’t when the person next to you is supposed to be your dearest relation and you feel embarrassed for her dismal life. Pushing away words I didn’t understand all the while grandma feeding me what she needed most, love.
I’m eight years old. Grandma was eight when her mother died from septicemia. A blood infection after a back alley abortion. Grandma tells me the story while we sit at the rod iron table on our back porch painting with watercolors. Orange blossoms fill the air. Spring and grandma fly in at the same time for a visit.
Grandpa died last year. Lung cancer from smoking. I came home from school one day and daddy was crying. He flew to Wisconsin and came back wearing Grandpa’s watch. Now grandma visits often and grandpa can’t yell at her anymore so that is comforting. Except my mom is not a fan of grandma and grandma is in constant need of attention so it’s my job to keep grandma company.
Grandma grew up without. After her mother died she and her brothers went to live in the Cleveland Jewish Children’s Home. She tells me about the abortion, a word I’m not familiar with.
While she talks her eyes travel back to a place where she can see the topmost windows of the basement dormitory where the motherless girls sleep at night. It’s morning and she’s making beds, watching child size black patent shoes scoot by outside the smudged glass panes, gutted by the sight of a mother’s shoe and held hands that swing into view. She adds faces and dresses above the patent leather and calls them paper dolls, sells them for a penny to the other girls at the home earning her the name Paper Doll Ella. She tells me she’s the real Cinderella except the glass slipper, pumpkin coach, and handsome prince, never appear in her story.
Until a resurgence in popular culture, Ella was not a name I associated with anything desirable. Though grandma would do anything to make me love her and I did, I couldn’t seem to find a thing to like. Luckily I’m still a child so I keep on painting with watercolors, dipping my brush and dabbing it on the towel while she tells me stories. I look up to the trees and the sky searching for words to say to her when I sense her loneliness but can’t find any so I look down and dip the tip of my brush in the colors like she showed me, swirling greens and blues on the plain white paper and listening to grandma, her bright red lips sucking me under.
