TLR Web

Paint

DAVID BOWEN

My mother asked me if the paint she had brushed on the deck was the right color. I told her it looked fine by me. She had painted a small area of the stairs that led into the backyard, but then she thought better of it and moved nearer to the house, to see how the color matched the siding. The paint was lighter than the siding, but I didn't think it needed to match. I told her that I didn't think it needed to match—there could be two tones involved in the color-scheme of a house.
     Meanwhile, my father was complaining that it was not dark enough. Just look at it, he said. It's practically white!
      My interest in the whole thing was practically zero, what color the house was going to be. Summer vacation always made me feel lonely and bored. I never had anywhere to go. My parents forbid that I get a job because they spent so much time working when they were kids—grew up too fast, they said. And I hated my friends. I liked them during the school year, when I saw them at tennis practice or if we all went to a basketball game together, but in the summer my friends only wanted to do boring stuff like go to the lake all the time and try to find girls. Or drive around with nowhere to go and try to find girls. There was never anything to distract me from how boring my friends were in the summer. For instance, we never found any girls. And even if we did find some girls to talk to, it would be boring because my friends would screw it up—and then they'd talk about it all night like they did this really amazing thing, screwing up talking to some girls.
     My mother looked at the splotch of paint on the railing and asked no one in particular if it was really such a bad match. She asked me again what I thought of the color and I repeated that I thought two colors on a house would probably look great, just fantastic.
     My mother stared at the paint, put a hand over it to check the color in the shade, took the hand away. More to herself than to anyone else, she said it was just she had gone to Sears twice already today. My interest level had picked up a little, but it was hot out, so my concentration was mostly distracted the entire time she did these things.
     The sky was Arizona-sky blue, the deepest cleanest-looking piece of sky I'd ever seen. In Wisconsin, the clouds stretch out thin until it feels like your whole world is wrapped up in gauze, especially in winter. Some days might be clear in the summer, but not like in Arizona. A desert place like Arizona might miss water so much it makes up the sky like its own personal ocean, I thought. Thinking like that always felt real original for about two seconds before I realized it would go away and nothing would be any different.
     My father was power-sanding the railing and sweating big bullets of perspiration. He winced through dirty sunglasses. I could tell he was pissed about the paint. My mother held a card of paint colors up against the house and then to the patches of paint she had slathered onto the railing. I had the kitchen door open when she said, Okay fine, I'll go back and get different paint. But you're driving, she said to me. When she said it I remembered that we were out of coffee. There was no more left.
     I looked at my father, watched him grit his teeth against the electric force of the power-sander. He was sweating so much I thought he might faint, except that I had seen him sweat many times before. He would break into an uncomfortable-looking sweat when he walked up and down the stairs, and not because he was not out of shape—he just sweated a lot. “I could sit in a snow bank and sweat,” he used to say.
     In that moment, while I watched his work glasses fog up from the heat and perspiration in his face, my father took on a quality so exotic and strange he could have been a talking gorilla. A man so absorbed in the discomfort of his work, work that was important even in the face of a day that was richer and bluer than it had ever been before, made the world seem unfamiliar and frightening. If this was what life expected of me, I thought for sure it was going to be disappointed.
     
     “Slow down, it's 25 here,” my mother said. I was doing maybe 40 down the hill near our home. Houses and mailboxes whizzed by. A woman watched us go by from her porch. I wondered what she had been watching before we came around to make the street interesting. She looked like she was about to bend down, but I didn't get a chance to see what she might have been doing.
     I asked my mother if she was getting nervous, but she didn't answer me. After a minute I said, “You make me drive you around and then you're going to tell me how to drive? How about that!” and I laughed. I told her my time was very valuable. My mother rubbed her face with the back of her hand. She asked me what else would I be doing and looked out the side window.
     “I don't know what I'd be doing,” I said.
     While I drove, I remembered the coffee again. Earlier that morning, I had gone into the kitchen to make some coffee but we were out. I stared into the empty canister before groping the bottom, where dark grounds stuck to the end of my fingers. I rubbed them together between my thumb and index finger like a detective investigating some unknown substance vital to unraveling a case. Outside, the power-sander buzzed and roared.
      The moment I walked into the grocery store, the racks of books and magazines caught my eye. I forgot about the coffee as I ran my hand along the smooth covers of the Rolling Stone magazines and the last copy they had of Field & Stream. Before I left, I bought a book with a muscular, half-naked man on the front. He held a woman in a torn white dress, but the face of another woman hovered over his shoulder. This second woman had dark hair, and blue eyes so blue they made me think of Arizona. And even though the man blocked her body from view, I knew she had on a very red dress.
      I looked at the picture a long time before I opened the book to read some of the words. The man's hair was long and golden and his skin looked like brushed suede. My hair clumped on my head like black straw, and my cold skin felt bloodless. I was always cold, right down to my bones, and this man looked like his body radiated waves of heat with every beat of his heart. The book was called The Mountain Has Two Names, and even though I told myself that I would find time to read it, I knew that I wouldn't, nor did I really want to.
      “We're out of coffee,” I said.
      “Are we?” my mother asked.
      I wanted to say something else but got distracted by all the cars swarming on the road and the fact that I had been maneuvering around them for the past ten minutes without giving it any conscious thought at all. I saw my hands on the wheel of the car and felt out of sorts to be driving a car towards Sears, my mother looking silently out the window and sighing. It made me sad that we were on a trip to get paint, given the color of the sky. I asked my mother what she was thinking.
      “What?” she said.
     “What are you thinking about while you look out the window?”
      “I just want to get the right color paint so your father will be happy,” she said. “I've been to Sears already today, two times.”
     I looked up in time to see the traffic lights turn red and stopped too fast. My mother made a sound and looked at me so I'd know I did something wrong. I said that I was sorry and looked out the window. And there was that perfect Arizona sky again. It makes you sick if you spend more than a week or two in Arizona, looking up into that same unblinking blue every day. It feels like nothing will ever change when you're standing underneath that endless pure blue, like night will never come and you're stuck with the lights on forever.
     My mother and father took me to Arizona once to see my cousins when I was eight or nine. They got shipped to Arizona after my aunt and uncle died in a car wreck that burned their bodies so bad the caskets had to be closed at the funeral. At the time I thought my cousins were maybe retarded, because they never talked and wouldn't even play with me, just stood around with their mouths half-open the whole time, but I sort of figured it out later when this girl Amy I knew from school told me something. Amy told me that her mom wished she'd never had any kids. She told it to me like it was no big deal, like she got a sort-of bad grade on some test or something. But when I told her I probably wouldn't care if my mom said that, Amy fell apart on me right there in the hall between classes. And when I tried to tell her I was sorry for saying whatever I said, it was like she couldn't even hear me. She just stared at the ugly green carpet while she heaved. The mascara exploded from her eyes and ran, her cheeks flush like someone had been cracking her with a flat palm over and over, and everyone watching me like the whole thing was my fault.
     While I looked out the window I thought about my father's paint. I imagined big wet patches of paint hanging where clouds should have been. I imagined running my fingers through the air and pulling them out again, the color of Arizona's hot desert sky.
     I wanted to get the right paint now, too. Before I didn't care about the paint but now the paint seemed important. I wanted to hold the can of paint and shake it and feel its guts plop from one side to the other. I wanted to stir the paint and feel the cool thickness resist while the stirring stick made folding curls in the latex, one moving over the other in succession, clockwise and then suddenly counter-clockwise. The paint would be the honest yellow of pencils and ripe bananas—a good, solid yellow. A color with some history. It occurred to me then that I might have to buy my own paint, since there was no chance my parents were going to paint our house yellow. How much does paint cost, I wondered. Drippy yellow hand prints hung in the air above the red traffic light while I thought about it. My mother yawned and turned on the radio and yawned again.
      “What are you thinking about?” she asked me.
      “Paint,” I said.
      “Your father will be glad when we have the right paint, finally.”
      “I know.”
     The light turned green and I stepped on the gas.
     
     At Sears my mother didn't seem too interested in what I wanted with a can of Canary Yellow paint. I couldn't afford the kind of good, honest yellow I wanted, so I went with Canary. Very striking, and almost a little green—definitely the color of a pet bird. When I put my can of paint up on the counter, my mother asked me why I was buying a can of paint, but after I told her I wanted to build a yellow table she didn't say anything more about it. If she had asked why so much paint for one little table, I had planned to say I was thinking about making some yellow chairs to go with the yellow table. But when we got back I didn't know what to do with my yellow paint. My mother went out back to present my father with what she hoped would be the right paint this time. The power-sander stopped, presumably so that my father could examine this new paint.
     I went into the basement and found a screwdriver to jimmy the top off my paint can. Before opening it, I shook the paint can a few times to feel its weight shift back and forth. Then I pulled the top off and put a stirring stick into the paint. I stirred it slowly one way and then the other way, to feel the latex fold and unfold around the stick. I looked around the room for something to paint. There was an old painting of a willow tree that had been in the storage room ever since I could remember. The cross-country ski equipment my parents used once a year was an idea, but not as promising as the willow tree picture. I took the picture into my lap and ran a dry brush over the branches of the tree, imagining what else might lurk in the silent landscape.
      I dipped the brush and outlined the shape of a yellow hand to one side of the tree, and then tried to form a sun on the other side. The sun looked okay, but the hand came out a lumpy yellow smear. I dropped my brush into the paint can and stared at my work. I squinted. Then I painted out everything but the tree. After considering it for a minute, I painted the tree out too. Then I put another coat over the whole thing, including the frame. After painting the back of the picture I set it down. The house was so quiet I could almost hear the paint run.
      I hadn't put down any kind of a drop cloth, so there were smatterings of yellow on the concrete floor. The smatterings were all in one place, so I painted them together into a star. The skis seemed like the next best thing to do, but I noticed that my arms were full of paint, so I painted my hands and my arms and took off my shirt to paint my shoulders and my chest. I took off my pants and socks and ran the brush over my feet and dipped the brush back into the can and lifted it still dripping onto my legs and laughed because it felt so good. I painted as much of my body as I could reach, Canary Yellow. I smeared paint onto my back and closed my eyes and ran the brush over my face, blinking when I opened my eyes, like Amy and her mascara. I grabbed hold of the cross-country skis and stood erect, a soldier bearing arms. After a minute I dropped them and searched the room for another object.
      My mother came in then and screamed. She was angry that I painted her willow tree picture, I realized. She said, “What are you doing!” and cringed like I was holding a weapon or might harm her, but I had already thrown down the skis. I leaned over and put the brush into the paint can and stood up.
      “People die like that!” she said. “Your skin can't breathe and you die!”
      I looked at my hands and rubbed the backs of my arms. I didn't feel anything but sticky. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up the stairs and outside, all the time screaming that I was making a mess everywhere and everything that I touched was ruined. She was crying and I felt horrible. Her fingers were trembling on my arm, digging in as if I might float away otherwise.
      She brought me out into the backyard. My father stopped painting as soon as he saw me—he was painting, so apparently the color worked out this time. He took his sunglasses off and yelled something I couldn't understand, made a pointed gesture. My mother went into the garage and came back with a canister of mineral spirits. She lifted it up and dumped it on me and started scrubbing with a cloth. The solvent ran down my arms and cut flesh-colored streaks in the paint. My mother was scrubbing on my back and crying.
      “What were you thinking?” she said. “What's the matter with you?”
     It was still warm outside but the sky wasn't the Arizona-blue it had been before. Now there were clouds and I could feel the evening coming on. The thinning paint dripped off my arms and legs, seeping into the grass and staining it Canary Yellow. My mother wiped at my face in quick, short strokes. The sound of the damp cloth bit into my cheek, made me think of my father's power-sander, the sound of massive, grinding friction. I imagined what it would be like later, when the stars came out and the house had fallen quiet and dark, when maybe everyone would be untroubled for at least the time it would take to know one perfect, unbroken dream.