The Color Master: Stories (11 page)

“Now you can get into the bar,” said Nature to Sylvia, holding up her imprinted hand.

“What bar?” I said.

“The Nature Bar,” said Nature, and everyone but me laughed. Then she looked back up at me, with her snappy brown eyes.

“Will you leave us alone for half an hour, Louanne?”

“Alone at the Bev?” I said.

Sylvia laughed.

“The Bev?” said Nature.

I blushed. “The mall?”

“Just for a half hour,” Nature said. “I need to talk to Sylvia and Jack about something important. I’ll tell you another time, I just have to talk to them alone right now.”

I checked my watch. Four-thirty.

“Five?” I said.

“Great,” said Nature, and her hair fell into her face like a
curtain saying, Go home, Louanne, the corn is growing, the show is done.

I went into a fancy dress store where I could stand at the window and watch because were they all going to make out? But Nature just sat there holding Sylvia’s hand and Jack at one point kissed Sylvia’s neck and it was all so great for Sylvia. At one point, Barb came back with a big Gap bag and pulled out a purple zipper sweater to show them, and then left. She left? And then they all laughed on the bench for a while and after about ten minutes they got up to go. I knew they were going before they even got up. I’m not stupid. Nature was walking off with her hand in Sylvia’s butt pocket and Jack was by himself but he had a car.

I was Sylvia’s ride but she had two more rides now except Nature doesn’t drive a car because she got her license revoked because the story goes that she was driving on Franklin and she hit a raccoon and that would be okay except she got so freaked out she ran to the nearest house crying and sobbing and said she’d hit a person and they ran out to look, all scared and calling 911, but then it was a much smaller shape on the road and one with circles around its eyes and fur and paws and a snout. And then everyone thought it meant she should take a break from driving because she was clearly high on something, to think a raccoon was a person. They are really different. The saleslady at the store asked me if I wanted to try on that jacket, the one I was next to that I’d been petting for almost twenty minutes. It was a mink maybe? But faux fur. It was sort of a golden color, like a golden retriever. I said okay. She had to undo the cord which meant it’s expensive but I tried it on like it was the animal I killed while driving high and now I couldn’t drive either. So how would I get home? I’d have to wear my road kill home through the sparkly streets of
Los Angeles. But it didn’t look good on me because my face is splotchy sometimes and it made me extra splotchy to have fur around it. Nature said she’s happy not driving because it’s so nice to get driven, like she’s a movie star in a limo, but everyone in school talked about the raccoon story for at least a week, and for a while people held up animals in the hall for her and said, Nature, is this a person? and it’d be a stuffed Snoopy. Or: Nature, is this a person? and it’d be an address book.

I went back and sat at the bench for ten minutes. They weren’t coming back. I knew that. I wanted to do my part anyway. I smiled at people walking by. An old man with overalls walked by; I don’t think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers. But I smiled at him anyway. Most teenage girls don’t give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago. After a minute, he came and circled back and he was wearing overalls and that little Jewish disc hat, and sat down. He smelled like cashews.

“Are you here alone?” he asked.

“I’m a quarter Jewish,” I told him. “I attend Yom Kippur services.”

“Good for you,” he said.

“My dad’s mom,” I said.

I smiled at him again, but the truth is, the smile is best when you’re walking, not sitting. Sitting, I wasn’t sure how long I could hold it.

“I’m meeting friends,” I said.

“Are you lost?” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. “I am extremely found.”

“That’s good,” he said. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he kept folding it and unfolding it.

“Are you lost?” I asked, because maybe he had Alzheimer’s. “Sometimes,” he said.

“You’re on the first floor of the Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles, California,” I said.

“That part I do know,” he said. “But thank you.”

My ten minutes of waiting was up, so I said bye and walked away from the Gap and went to the MAC store. I found the pink lipstick that looked close to what Nature was wearing and I wiped it off with a tissue because people who have herpes or chapped lips try on lipstick too, there’s no ethical standard. It wasn’t any good on me. It made me look even splotchier because the lipstick matched my splotch tone so it highlighted the splotches. But the saleslady wanted my money so she kept quiet and when I told her I’d buy it, she said “Great!” She said it was one of the most popular colors. It was named Electric Seashell. Which I thought was a bad name because if you put together a seashell and electricity, you could get electrocuted, depending on the location. She put it in a little MAC bag, and when I stepped out of the store, there they all were. All three of them, boom. Sculpture upright.

“Hey, Louanne,” said Sylvia.

“Nice lipstick,” Nature said, and I sort of blushed a little, and looked in the bag, at the lipstick case and the name, like I forgot it was there.

“Electric Seashell,” I said, and I didn’t know why I felt like they had caught me somehow. They were the ones that left the bench.

Nature fiddled in her pocket and pulled out a lipstick and read hers. “Electric Seashell,” she said. “What do you know?” Behind her, Jack stuck his hand down Sylvia’s shirt.

“Hey,” said Nature, spinning hers up. It was almost flat. “I’m low on mine.”

“Your what?”

“My lipstick,” she said. She stepped up to me and I had this feeling like she was going to hit me, right here at the Beverly Center, with no windows, by the new café area with the indoor hedges. I never took Tae Kwon Do. But she stepped closer than a hitter would, and then she kissed me. Right in front of the MAC store. My third kiss in my life so far. She pushed her lips against mine, sort of hard, smearing them around. She smelled like tea, not cashews. Then she let go of my shoulders and stepped back, and Electric Seashell was all over her mouth and it’s so perfect on her, it’s raspberry jam on her stalky hair and her skin is all butter and I know cannibals are disgusting but still. Her face was a scone. “Thanks,” she said. And Sylvia was laughing and laughing behind her, saying, “Louanne, you should see your face!” but I can’t ever see my face, I’m in my face, and then Nature said, “Thanks, Louanne, now I’m all dressed and ready to go,” and they all turned around and walked off together and Jack started telling a story because he was making his arms out like an airplane. Her lips were gentle, Nature, even though she pushed them really hard. Way gentler than you would think her lips would be, being that she is Nature.

The old overalls man walked by, walking slow.

It got me thinking, for a second, about what would happen if Nature did hit a person in the road. She’d run to the neighbors and say she’d hit a telephone pole, or a rat. And no one would think it was a big deal and everyone would have a cup of tea and make the call to Triple A and stroll out to look at the damage to the car, and then there’d be a person, dead in the road, bloody, no pole at all, but a person who might’ve lived if only Nature had known it was a person ten minutes before.

I felt a little wave of downness then, for a second, like I might just fall on the floor of the Bev and not be able to do anything for a long time, so I walked as fast as I could and got a lemonade from the hot-dog/lemonade stand and I smiled at the balding Arab man who makes the lemonade and told him it was delicious, before I’d tasted it, actually, and he said thanks, bobbing his shiny head, and I could see him thinking what a nice thoughtful teenage girl, who takes the time to compliment lemonade and doesn’t assume he’s a terrorist when most teenage American girls are just busy thinking only of themselves.

“Enjoy,” he said, handing over the straw.

It was okay lemonade. Not delicious, but not bad. Still, meeting him and drinking it gave me enough of a lift that I could get myself to the elevator in front of Victoria’s Secret which was having a big sale on pink bras that said
PRETTY
over the boobs,
PRE
on one boob,
TTY
on the other.

When I was out of eyeshot, I tossed the lemonade.

I took the elevator to P3, which was the right level, and then my car was in G2, which was green, and which I had remembered by thinking GIRL, I am a GIRL, and the 2 was for TWO GIRLS: Louanne and Sylvia, going to the mall.

“G2,” I’d told Sylvia, pointing it out, explaining, as we got out of the car. “You and me,” I said.

She’d shaken her head and laughed. “You are so weird, Louanne,” she said, but she didn’t shake me off when I linked my arm with hers.

G1, going home.

At the bottom, I paid my parking dollar and said gracias to the Mexican lady who worked the booth and I told her I liked her red earrings. She sort of stared past me with eyes
that said there are more cars waiting, so I moved on ahead and made a right turn, out of the mall.

The people were all busy in their cars, listening to the radio, so there was no one to smile at, so I just sent my love to the traffic lights. No one ever appreciates them, all day long, working so hard to turn red and yellow and green, right in time with us to make sure we don’t crash into each other. If there was any tiny chance, even the tiniest chance, that they happened to be alive, I bet I was the first person ever to tell them they were special. You are special, I said out loud in my car, but in case they couldn’t hear, I cracked my window open. “You are special,” I said, to the night air.

And just like that, a green light.

And then it’s me and La Cienega, all the way home.

I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house at the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio. We both had moved from opposite coasts with the desire for a personalized liberal-arts college experience and had become friends due to proximity and availability more than compatibility. For example, we had nothing in common. She: Blue Ridge Mountain town. Me: central California suburbs. She: declared international-relations major with three eclectic minors. Me: not yet totally decided. The men she liked were brutish jocks; I had located within two weeks every single soulful gentleman on campus who wrote poetry. I found them by the length of their hair or the wear of their jeans. She liked big-budget romantic movies; I saw every documentary I could find at the library, and if I’d had any retention ability, I would’ve stored a great deal of knowledge about the world. She had a perpetual perm, because she felt it added volume to the thinness of her hair and gave her a look of energy; I was hard-pressed to use a brush because I preferred a ponytail, and part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some
farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half–girl Mowgli, half–woman Thoreau.

Unfortunately for me, she seemed to get a lot more sex than I did. The brutish jocks were hell-bent on getting her into bed, perm and all, and half of the poets—who were not really poets but just had volumes of very nice leather-bound, nearly blank poetry books given to them by parents who were trying to be supportive, books partially filled with the same poem, over and over, called “Life” and/or “Life II” and/or “Why Love Is an Illusion”—these men didn’t always want to touch a woman, or a man, but, rather, mostly themselves. It took me until senior year to find a poet who actually wrote poetry, and he took off my clothes very gently and spent nearly an hour on my neck and back, and when we were done and I felt all my waiting had been worth it, he explained that part of his education as a poet was to meet as many women as possible, and so this was now to be goodbye. He suggested I pretend he was going off to war on a boat. “What boat?” I said, clutching the blanket. “We live in Ohio.” He left a leaflet on my bed torn from a three-ring binder.
Your breasts are fortune cookies, full of small wisdoms
, he wrote. I read it multiple times. I almost notified the English Department. I was very tempted to show Arlene, but she was busily documenting her outings and weekends in a photo album labeled
College, Senior Year
, and although she had never been anything but sympathetic about my history with men, I couldn’t bear the thought that she might laugh at me and not him.

One afternoon in late March of our senior year, just about two months before graduation, I wandered into the apartment I then shared with Arlene and found her standing at
the fridge looking upset. She was rummaging around in the vegetable drawer, and her mascara was smudged. Mascara, like the perm, was part of her daily wear.