Covet

Choosing Pink

67 Choosing Pink Every summer pink. My bedroom walls washed in petal, rose, carnation, shell, even cotton candy but no matter what my mother called it, all I saw was pink. As soon as school was loosed, and June arrived with days of pacing in the kitchen, filling wading pools, wiping faces, waiting for my father to fall exhausted from the hayfield into bed, she’d splay the color wheel of pinkish choice across the table, tell me choose: I wanted purple (you won’t like it once it’s on). I wanted green (that’s too dark; this room needs light). So pink rolled across the smudge of handprints, childhood grime, erased the scuffs I’d made kicking at the door, shut up in my room for lying to my brother, laughing at the table. Pink covered up the corner where I’d learned to write my name. Everywhere, the blush of shy and clean, service to the girlish. She painted as the radio hummed; sang along to songs she couldn’t let the high school students play where she taught. She had proposed a dance 68 that spring—records, punch, paper tatters streaming from gymnasium lights. The Baptists did not approve. That summer scaffolding and trucks arrived, two old men, commanded by my grandfather to paint our house: frame, white; roof, red. His house, his paint, his men. It took the summer to scrape away the blistered layers, sand the rotted eaves, slick the boards with a glistening skin. I liked these men in our employ, our house their only job those months. They took long lunches in the shade, teased that in their paper sacks there was a cat, come close and I could see. Then the sudden clap of air expelled, their laugh at my surprise: cat out of the bag, they said, go and ask my grandpa what it meant. But I could breathe it in, the sharp and stinging scent at night, the twilight pink to purple, black descending on the sturdy barns, distillery stacks along the river, Main Street with its three stoplights, and through my window, pink, thin curtains blowing in a newly painted room. ...