Color speaks, delineates or makes infinite. Down to a spider’s eyelash, big as you feel with a fever. A brown bear is not the same brown on its belly as it is on its back. A white rose isn’t white like a nurse’s shoe.
Everything has a color. ‘I’m sorry’, I think, is white.
A home has a color. Some are a shy yellow. Others, a gregarious blue. Mine was a deep-hued red.
You know that scene in “Mommie Dearest”, where Joan Crawford looks at her daughter and says, I don’t know what to do with you. And her daughter, Christina, looks at her, and screams, WHY NOT.
That’s how it was in my home. A turbulent place, and scarlet. The color of love gone wrong. I left when I was sixteen. I was not sorry then.
I was married for five years. My husband, Rick, was a musician. He became very ill one night after a gig. I called Rick’s mother, Millie, and told her to come to the hospital.
By the time she got there, Rick was throwing up blood. I was scared to death, and it showed. Millie pulled me aside. Wipe that look off your face, she said. Don’t you dare let him see you that way.
Meckel’s diverticulitis was the diagnosis. Congenital, a sort of gastrointestinal abnormality that affects slightly less than two per cent of the male population in this country.
I left the girl I was in a room that said, I’m sorry; I’m sorry, I think, is white. A hospital white. I did not cause my husband’s illness. Not ‘sorry’ in that sense.
Not lilywhite, either. Not wiped clean or absolved. Color speaks, disguises or enriches. White as a lie. Dark as what a sigh portends.
They are elderly now, my parents. I left home at sixteen, I swore I’d never come back. And here I am, after my forty years in the wilderness. We don’t know what to do with you, they said back then. I’m supposed to take care of them now.
A brown eye isn’t brown like a tree trunk. But cherries, somehow, taste red. I did not cause my husband’s pain. The troubles in my family did not begin with me.
I am not blameless. I am not alabaster. I am a mottled sort of gray. An equal mix of black and white, not smooth, like a seal, but flecked.
They are elderly now, my parents. Soon I will stand in a hospital room and I will be sorry then, as I am now, for their pain. Sorry I did not cause it.
Then, I could wipe it away. Clean and white as a wing.