Dad stood on the ladder.
He'd painted all the edges first,
near the ceiling and floors and windows and corners,
and then he'd taken out the roller
and started in on wide swaths of Prussian Wildflower.
"A bit dark isn't it?"
"Well, it's what your mother wants.
It'll lighten up as it dries too, Allie Oop."
This cheerfulness was disconcerting.
He'd been duped into thinking he could please my mother.
"It looks different from the little card."
"Goddammit, " Dad said.
A slop of paint had fallen to the floor.
The fact of the matter is, both my parents were fish
out of water in Weston.
Mom with her dreams of being a painter and Dad with his day
job and his poetry books, including the award winning
one, all lined up on the mantel.
They were attempting to piece together
a life with art at its center, and also--
not that I was fully aware of this at the time--
making choices based on what might be good for me,
their daughter.
Art geeks, adversaries, people who drove old cars--
they weren't part of the PTA crowd,
and they weren't swingers, either.
Mainly they were simply my parents
and it was extraordinarily embarrassing
but seemed pretty natural that they were so weird.
"Look, you can't tell anything from the card," he said.
"Take a rag to that spot, would you, please?"
"Why do they have the cards then?"
"To beguile the willing, Alison."
"Why would they do that?
They would never do that."
"You don't think so?
Think about the visceral and dark depths
of the workingman's resentment, darling,
and you might have another idea."
The son of Irish immigrants and bardic descendant
of many a workingman, my father looked
like he was a half second away from falling off
the rickety old ladder--
either him or the tray of Prussian Wildflower.
"Do we have any more 7-Up?"
Dad concentrated on his next swab of the roller.
His somewhat long and unkempt beard, a poet's beard,
bobbed precariously close to the wall.
"Dad?"
He grunted.
He smoothed the roller down, then over,
making a reverse blue cloud in a white sky.
"Try the garage."
I sat at the kitchen table, drinking 7-Up
and reading the Weston Forum.
It featured golf and tennis tournaments,
with a handful of asides about "happenings"
at the Norfield Grange.
I didn't know for sure what a "grange" was,
though I thought perhaps it was a place where
they stored wheat, or made pantaloons in yesteryear.
I studied the picture of the winners and doubles
at the Aspetuck Country Club Summer's End Mixer,
two women in ruffled culottes and their partners, men
with thinning hair.
Another photo was of four men who'd
won the Muscular Dystrophy Benefit Golf Tournament--
plaid all around.
I didn't notice the article at first,
probably because the accompanying
photo was so obscure--
a hazy image of boulders, pine trees and perhaps, a bit
of a stream or river.
"Teen Dies in Fall," read the headline.
At first I thought it meant, you know,
September, which seemed to bode ill for me, specifically,
as I contemplated my upcoming entree into public school life,
starting with eighth grade.
A 16-year-old youth died Saturday night,
apparently after a daredevil dive
off the rocks at Devil's Glen.
The youth, whose name has not been
released because of his age, was from out of town.
"A tragic act like this, it didn't need to happen.
Kids will be kids but parents need to take action,"
said Police Chief Riley at the Town Forum
on Monday, urging parents to warn kids away from this area,
long a hot spot for teenage congregation and tomfoolery.
Tomfoolery?
That was an annoying word.
Mom appeared on the stairs, carrying groceries.
She was wearing purple sunglasses, the frames big
and round as apples.
"I found the best store," she said breathlessly.
"Zillions of healthy things to eat."
"Oh, no," I said.
My mother was mounting a campaign
against the tried-and-true food of my youth.
It had been a sad day when she swept through our cabinets,
throwing away yummy things and replacing them
with less yummy things.
Skippy peanut butter was tossed, for instance,
and replaced by an unsalted almond-peanut blend.
"How's the studio coming?
Been down there recently?"
She extricated herself from her sunglasses,
pulled the yellow and purple scarf from her hair.
"He's working on it," I said, peering into a bag.
Bulk items-- the worst.
"Didn't you get any Oreos?
Or anything to eat?"
"What do you mean?
Look at all this!"
She began to pull things out-- dried fruit, unsalted almonds,
oatmeal, some other cereal with black flecks,
a huge bag of brown rice.
Her long blonde hair whoosed as she moved.
She was wearing straight pants and red pointy shoes
from Afghanistan.
Even in this hippie garb, she stood straight
and skinny, betraying years of childhood ballet.
"What about regular food?"
I asked.
"What is 'regular,' Alison?"
Mom said.
"Regular food is for regular people, my darling."
I sat back down and began drawing psychotic spirals
on a pad of paper.
"I couldn't find anything for lunch."
"Oh, Allie, we've got soup, tuna.
Look here-- good twelve-grain bread.
And loads of cheese."
"Fritos?"
"No.
I got some bean sprouts.
And kale," she said.
"You mean to say you don't like kale?"
"I don't even know what kale is, Mom."
"The soul is what's at stake, Allie,"
she said then, pouring rice into the largest
of the plastic canisters with mushroom tops.
She gave me a meaningful look.
"And your back most of all."
"I just want a nice snack," I said in a monotone.
"Bingo!
Carob instead of chocolate!
Honey instead of white sugar!"
She tossed me a Tiger's Milk bar and trotted down
the orange stairs.
Did I mention that the entire house was carpeted in orange--
orange as a spilled soda, an emergency flag,
a lone life jacket floating on the surface of a lake?
In a minute I heard what seemed like a cry from below,
a bird hitting a window, and then silence
and then some other rumblings of what seemed like anger.
Then silence again.
Next, my mother's Afghan slippers dragged back upstairs,
to the living room landing, and then up still farther,
toward the bedrooms.
Her head was bowed, her shoulders hunched--
not at all like a ballerina.
Soon my father appeared.
Now he had blue paint on his beard,
as if a robin's egg had broken there.
"What's happening?"
"She doesn't like the color," he said,
reaching into the refrigerator for a beer.
I went downstairs myself to check out the studio.
The walls were two-thirds done in velvety blue, the remaining
white a jagged rectangle of the past.
I walked up to the wall, right up
to the edge between white and blue.
If I squinted, here, where the roller had gone over once,
lightly, maybe I could make it the right color.
I could settle her down, get her back
to the kitchen to eat a plate full of organic apricots.
It was only paint, but for Mom the wrongness of the blue
was a sign, a constellation that bode ill.
The New Age movement was in full swing--
hippies and suburban wastrels and visionaries and lost souls
were making the transition, copping
an allegiance to new foodstuffs and unguents
and all manner of alchemy, and some of it was almost divine
and some of it was dangerous, far more dangerous
than the wrong blue, and we, at the time,
couldn't tell one from the other.
And that's where I'm going to leave off on the novel.