We were about an hour into
our call when I asked, “Did I tell you I got a new car last spring?” We already
had talked about the challenges of backyard garden irrigation, hers in Michigan
and mine in Oregon, and exhausted a back-and-forth about the Nation’s health
care challenges, me decrying the immorality of the Republican efforts, and she
abhorring any move to “socialized medicine.” I think we both were anxious to
change the subject to anything but politics.
I told her it was my first
new car in twelve years. She seemed taken aback. Her husband, Van, insists on
buying a new car about every other year. “And he’s very particular,” she noted,
and we both laughed. Van is “particular” about his cars the way a lioness is
“particular” about her cubs. For example, “But it would get grass in my truck,”
was how he had objected to a recent chore his wife had suggested. Plus, it
might scratch the pickup’s bed liner. I started to say, Isn’t that what bed liners…, but stopped myself before I actually
said it out loud. Each to his own.
“Do you remember the metal
storage cabinet that Mom used to have,” Karen asked me, seemingly out of the
blue. I figured the connection between the cabinet and Van’s “particularness” would
become apparent soon enough. As it did.
Karen described the ancient, cream-colored
cabinet – tall with chrome door handles – in considerable detail: “Oh, you
remember.” I forced myself to believe her, in order to move her story along. It
seems that she and Van had been remodeling their vacation cottage and agreed
that it needed more storage, which is why she had decided to repurpose the old
cabinet. She would repaint it. Bright turquoise. Rust-Oleum® gloss Seaside
spray paint, to be exact.
Early the morning of her
paint day, she dragged the cabinet from her basement to the driveway outside of
the garage. “I moved the cars far down the street,” she stressed, hinting of the
coming unfortunate turn of events. “When I started to spray the primer on, I
discovered the can was bad. I had to go and buy more, and when I got back, I’d
lost all that time and now the wind had come up. So I moved everything inside
the garage. I laid down tarps underneath and wore goggles and a face mask.”
I pictured her, accurately as
it turned out, wearing one of those cheap dust masks that do little to block the
dangerous chemicals in spray-paint mist and fumes. And I pictured Van’s garage
– spotless, everything in its place, his special black, roll-out matt covering
the cement floor, a perfect nest for his perfect cars. I sensed this was a
story that would not end well.
Karen described her
handiwork: “I start painting and the two cans of turquoise paint hardly did
anything. I sprayed and I sprayed and I sprayed. Do you know I ended up using
seven cans?! After I let the cabinet dry enough to be moved, I started picking
up the tarps. That’s when I noticed a blue mist covering everything. Everything
the tarps hadn’t covered was coated in blue. Turquoise blue.
“Oh, Karen, I said to myself. You
are in deep doo-doo.
“I tried everything I could
think of. Finally, Comet! So I was scrubbing and scrubbing, trying to get it all
cleaned off before Van got home. But it was everywhere! Covering the counters,
this little chair, and all over Van’s floor matt except where I’d had the tarps.
“That’s when the neighbor
stopped by. He watched me for a while and then asked if I’d tried this one
thing, and I said, no, I hadn’t thought of that, but had some similar stuff
that didn’t stink as bad. So we went and tried that and it seemed to work. He
had a big wide broom and he went at scrubbing the paint off Van’s black floor
matt. Only it’s not really black anymore, since we realized too late that the
stuff stained, so now the floor isn’t black but more of a…” – she seemed to be
searching for words befitting Van’s now-ugly floor cover – “…blotchy gray.”
Neither of us said anything
for a few moments. She continued, “What’s really weird…” My brain went on
momentary pause as I tried to imagine anything weirder than my sister and her
neighbor scrubbing frantically to recapture that cloud of turquoise paint she
had unleashed in Van’s meticulously tidy garage. She continued, “…is that I had
a manicure at 4:30.
“Wayne, I was blue. My arms
were blue. My clothes were blue. My hair.” She groaned. I imagined her
lovely blond hair clotted with streaks of Rust-Oleum® gloss Seaside. “I had two
blue rings around my nose. I had to use Q-Tips to get the paint out of my nose.”
At this point in Karen’s
story, Van walked in and the got on the phone with us. He asked, only half
joking, what we found so funny about his garage getting coated in blue.
“Everything,” I laughed. “Everything about this story.”
He conceded that the sight of
blue rings around his wife’s nostrils was pretty funny.
After Van got off the phone,
Karen and I talked some more. Her voice lowered just a bit when she confessed
that this hadn’t been her first experience with spray-paint drift. Once before,
she had used their backyard shed, “Van’s man cave,” as she called it, for
another one of her projects involving spray paint. “That one wasn’t so bad
because it wasn’t turquoise, it was more kind of silver.”
I asked if it was the same
color as the ruined matt in their garage.
“No, it was sparkly.
Now Van has a sparkly man cave.”
Karen’s not sure that the
turquoise cabinet is going to work out in their cottage: “It’ll be pretty
dominant, that’s what Van is worried about. And then the color will always
remind him…” She didn’t have to finish the thought.
Before Van had got off our call, he
asked me if Karen told me what color she had her nails done that afternoon at
her manicure. I said she hadn't.
“She came back and they were blue!” he grumbled. “They
match the cabinet. Same color as in the garage. I don’t know if I can look at
them.”
“Why, Karen, why did you pick
that color?” I managed to gasp.
The phone line was quiet
while she pondered my question. Finally, she admitted, “I don’t know.”
Our mother’s old cabinet now
has a new life, a piece of junk turned into a thing of beauty. Surely, it will
survive another generation or two in Karen’s family. Perhaps along with the
story of my turquoise-colored sister.
###
