The day my grandmother asked me to paint her easter egg walls white, I knew there was a problem. Or I should have known, at least. “Well, Savannah,” she said very matter-of-factly one afternoon, “I just can’t stand these walls anymore. It’s just suffocating. I hate this shade of blue.”
I happened to like the shade on the walls. It reminded me of a robin’s egg, and for whatever reason I always associated my grandmother with pastels. Maybe it was because she reminded me of Sophia from the Golden Girls and celery colored clothing was more common than episodes ending with cheesecake, or that she swore by lavender as a calming color and scent. At any rate, the fact that my grandma, Nezzie (as I like to call her), wanted to be rid of something with which I associated her bothered me. “So you want white?” I asked.
She shook her head at me. “No, pussy cat, I want crème. There’s a difference.”
I rolled my eyes. “Alright then, my apologies. Crème it is.”
After much maneuvering of her driver’s seat setting fit only for her and maybe a pygmy, we made our way to Home Depot where we carefully discerned among eggshell, warm vanilla, and dusty pearl.
After studying swatches for what seemed like a year, Nezzie decided on the latter. “It’s elegant, don’t you think?”
In truth, all I could think of was my grandfather’s hospital bed. Dusty pearl was the color of the always-waxed tiles, dusty pearl was the color of his starched and pressed bed sheets that never lost their creases, dusty pearl was the color of his mashed potatoes and the fluid the doctors sucked out of his lungs, and dusty pearl was the color of his cheeks right before he died. “…sure is, Nez,” I muttered. “I think it’s great.”
We purchased five gallons of it and made our way back home.
“What would you like for dinner, sug?” she asked in-between songs on her Waylon Jennings CD.
It was 2 o’ clock. “Um, I’m not too sure, Nezzie. I haven’t really thought about it yet.”
“Oh,” she said, stroking the pleat in her tapered pants, “well let me know. I’ve got all kinds of things at home. I got some good cube steak from Costco. We can have fried chicken, chicken piccata, spaghetti…”
Her voice trailed as Waylon’s “Good Hearted Woman” came on and then began to warble off to the music like an old hen. Out of the corner of my eyes I watched as her knobby fingers tapped along to the beat, off by half a hair. I smiled. “You know, Nez, I really do love you.”
She hit my arm slightly, lowering her Jackie-O prescription sunglasses to the tip of her nose and smiled. “Oh, Savannah, is this your way of trying to make me stop singing?”
I shook my ahead in amusement and continued driving.
When we got back to her house, I made several trips to the living room with paint buckets in tow like the broomsticks in Fantasia, listening to her respond to the latest dilemmas of the greasy-haired delinquents on Judge Judy. She always liked to watch afternoon court shows while she drank her iced tea and did crossword puzzles. In a few minutes, I heard the familiar crackling sounds of breading hit the frying pan in the distance and eyed the living room, pondering where I should begin.
Framed pictures adorned the wall like ornaments on a Christmas tree: some were from a terrible family reunion in Hot Springs, Arkansas, another was a portrait of her parents, and above the couch was an enlarged photograph of my grandfather in his military uniform, clean-shaven with a mischievous smile. Next to that was the triangulated flag that was given to my family on the day of his funeral.
They had been high school sweethearts. It was so perfectly American and cute that it made me want to puke up pearls and white-picket fences at times. He was a varsity basketball and football player who freed all of the animals from the pound in their small, West Virginian hometown; she was a petite cheerleader with a smart mouth and a twinkle in her eye that would make even the most haggard of people click their heels and want to dance. They married young, and five children, four moves, three fights and two wars later, they were still very much in love. Their most recent move from Florida to Kentucky was made when Bopper (my grandfather) was having severe heart problems, and the doctors here were willing to operate on him when others weren’t. They bought their new house together in cash and would spend many hours together in the pale blue room that I was about to erase. He would sit in his recliner, swirling his gin and tonic, alternating between reading the latest copy of Sports Illustrated and his most recent biography of a white man with a wig while Nezzie would play solitaire on the computer. It seemed so strange to me as I was standing there, picturing all of this so vividly, yet all that remained were the chairs, the desks, the picture frames and the now-yellowed magazines.
I heard the creaking of the floor behind me and turned to see Nezzie, holding a plate of fried catfish in her hands. “I’m makin’ hush puppies too,” she said. “You want a plate?”
It was now just five o’ clock. “Um, sure. I’m going to take down some of these pictures first though, if that’s OK.”
“Why yes, Miss Puss, it is. I’ll make your plate.”
Nezzie left and I began to lift the pictures off the wall until all that remained was a faint outline of the spaces they used to occupy. Bopper smiled back to me from his position atop a framed print of a nondescript 19th century British landscape. “I miss you more and more every day, Bopper,” I whispered as I made my way out of the room.
I made my way into the floral-wallpapered kitchen and found my plate of fried goods along with my own pitcher of iced tea. “This looks great, Nez,” I exclaimed, eyeing my reflection in the grease that now was pooling beneath my fish and hush puppies. “Can I have some ketchup?”
Nezzie walked over to the table in her house slippers, nearly tripping over her dog, Molly. She was a fat corgi whose bulging and lazy eyes screamed puppy farms and hyperthyroidism. Nevertheless, she was great company for Nezzie and for that I had to love the veritable tree trunk with legs. “Sure thing, sug.”
Midway through my second filet, Nezzie began to talk about her day. “Well, this morning for breakfast I made myself some lemon poppy seed muffins, and then I went to the doctor, then after that I ran over to Macy’s for a bit to get a pair of new Clarks. What did you do today, Savannah?”
“Oh, you know. Not much. How was your doctor’s appointment?”
“Well,” she said as she began buttering her hush puppy, “the doctor said I may not need a seeing eye dog for another year or so, so—“ her knife dropped to the floor as she was covering the last crevice of her hush puppy. “Say, Savannah, will you hand me your knife?”
“Well, sure,” I said, handing her my knife, “but a seeing eye dog? Nezzie, I didn’t know your eyes were bad to begin with.”
“I didn’t tell you?”
“I think I would have remembered something like that.”
“Oh. Well, it’s that damned macular degeneration in my left eye. It’s not getting any better. The doctors say so long as it doesn’t spread to my right eye, I’ll be able to keep driving, so that’s good.” She took a big bite of her hush puppy and then cleared her throat. “So do you want more food, Pussy Cat? How ‘bout some dessert?”
I couldn’t believe she was changing the subject so quickly. The woman was given what would be to some a death sentence, and here she was asking me if I wanted dessert. I was speechless. “I, um…I should probably start painting.”
Placing her thin arm on her hip, she shook her head at me. “Oh come on, now. The walls can wait, especially when you have lemon meringue pie.” She opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a freshly wrapped pie. I was half-expecting her to pull out an ostrich next. The walls can wait if you’re ostrich racing, too.
“Nezzie,” I exclaimed, realizing that discussion of her condition was out of the question, “you’re going to make me fat!”
“Well it’s about damned time,” she chimed. “Here,” she said, handing me a slice of pie, “now eat up. I made it for you.”
And I did eat, albeit begrudgingly. I returned to the living room, bloated and bulbous as a wet sponge, and began to put up the blue painting tape. Dipping my roller into the dusty pearl paint, I began the erasing.
I started in the corner of the room, where one time Bopper threw his newspaper after watching a State of the Union address given by President Bush. Doing so, I stepped on the couch where Nezzie had scratched my bony back and combed my thinning hair with her arthritic fingers so many times before without my even asking, whispering into my ears words of gentle reassurance as I fought a losing battle against food and myself. I approached the previous home of Bopper’s frame. I dropped the roller. Even though it was just an outline of a frame, I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t. He wasn’t leaving this room, regardless of the shade of white Nezzie wanted to replace him with.
Sitting on the sheet-covered couch with white paint crusting on my hands, I stewed, mulling over the facts. Since Bopper’s death a few years ago, she had moved from her side of the bed to his, even though the mattress sloped down a bit like the smile of a stroke victim. She still made his favorite cake, orange cream, every year on his birthday. She would always cut a single piece and then throw the rest away. She still kept his New Balance tennis shoes and his Aqua Velva aftershave next to her compact, and would watch Virginia Tech (his alma mater) games religiously, cheering loud enough for both of them. She even renewed his subscription to Sports Illustrated still. Why the need for bloodless walls, then? Why paint the house the same color as the ghost who inhabited it? Before I knew it, I was wiping tears from my eyes with my own frosted fingertips.
The floors creaked again, and I saw Nezzie’s snow-colored slippers peak in from the doorway. She came to my side. “My, my. Savannah, you’ve got paint all over your face. What’s wrong?”
“Nezzie,” I cried, “why are you doing this?”
She licked her thumb and began wiping away at my cheeks. “Doing what, Miss Puss?”
“This,” I motioned. “Painting the walls white, getting rid of everything yet living as if he’s still here. Not telling me about your eyes. What are you running from?”
She stroked my back and after a few moments coolly said, “I’m not running.”
From my hands, I looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Look,” Nezzie began, “I’m not running. I know what may or may not be headed my way. But there’s nothing I can do about it at this point. There’s no sense in making a big to-do of it. It’s life. You keep going.”
In a moment of indignation, I responded, “then what does it matter if the walls are white or blue or fire engine red? What does it matter if you sleep on the same side of the bed or not?”
She withdrew her hand from my back. “Jesus, can’t a woman just want to paint her walls white?”
“Not white, Nezzie,” I said snidely, “crème. And no, not all of them, either.”
She said nothing.
“Nezzie,” I said, “you can’t do this to yourself. You can’t think that paint is going to cover everything when you’re living a lie. How do you think you’re gonna see in a year when you can’t even see now?”
The palms of her hands were now covering her eyes as her cloudy head sunk into her chest. Her body began to quiver like china does during an earthquake. I placed my dirty hands onto her back. “It’s just so hard sometimes,” she cried, “living alone.”
“I know,” I cooed, “I know.”
“Sometimes I wish it would spread so I wouldn’t have to see at all. So I…so I wouldn’t have to see his face or the dust that collects on his shoes, or his expired prescriptions or any of that.”
She crumpled into me, and I held her tightly, hoping to prevent the many pieces from falling.
“But that doesn’t matter either. Because I can still smell him, I still know what he feels like. And I’ll be damned if there’s ever a day when I don’t remember him and that he’s gone. You just don’t understand, Savannah. I’m still living in a house with another person, but all he’s missin’ is a body. Wanting skin when all you have is a picture in a frame. It’s so hard. And sometimes, well sometimes I wish I were gone, too.”
I squeezed her birdlike bones with my own. “Don’t say that, Nezzie. That’s not true.”
“But it is,” she cried, “it just is.”
I held my own grandmother tight in my arms for the next few moments, rocking her back and forth as she did me when I was younger. Living in the walls of this house must have been like living in a skeleton, its ghostly remnants hanging about in the corners, its ribs and other bones scattered around the home in the form of old coffee mugs, bookmarked pages of dusty books, and tarnished class rings, all haunting her from day in until day out until she closed her eyes at night. She had all of the pieces, but they could never combine and bring back the man she loved, the part she needed so desperately. She just couldn’t see straight without him.
But after a few seconds more, she snapped up like a mousetrap and informed me that she was going to go take a bath. This sudden rigidity wasn’t uncharacteristic of her; I remember when she had to place Bopper in the hospital for the first time up here she wouldn’t let anyone touch her for days. I can’t say for certain why.
“OK,” I muttered, wiping the remaining paint from my hands. I remained seated in the living room, eyes cast toward the pile of frames. He was still staring at me, smiling bright-eyed and bushy tailed. “She loved you to pieces,” I said, “I hope you knew that.”
I heard the gentle click of the bathroom door close, and then the running of warm water into the porcelain tub. For a moment, a waterfall of resentment descended upon me, and I was outraged at all of the objects in the room, covered in sheets like cheap ghosts, at all of the pain they caused my grandmother for simply existing. And while neither of us was strong enough to lift them, I knew we were strong enough to remember them. The chairs, the desks, the newspapers and magazines, the people we’d loved and the people we’d lost. Without much more thought, I grabbed the roller once again and well, I just did what my grandmother asked of me, I kept going. This time I hummed along to the song she warbled away in the car:
“She's a good hearted woman in love with a good ole' man
She loves him in spite of his ways she don't understand
With teardrops and laughter they pass through this world hand in hand
A good hearted woman, lovin' a good ole' man”
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