Red
Barbara Litkowski
Funny, it’s the red fruits I miss the most: heart-shaped strawberries, raspberries swimming in cream, cherries. Nothing compares to the first crisp bite of a Jonathan apple. Nothing. But then, you wouldn’t know that, would you? They were all gone long before you were born.
Bailey asks, “Mom, will you watch the kids while I run into town?”
A double hug and then Tess and Evan race away to play. When they grow tired of battling evil aliens with cheese graters and wooden spoons, they drift into the living room and climb into the big chair beside me. I lay down my book.
“Tell us a story, Gran.” Tess nuzzles me.
“Uh-huh,” Evan is bouncing up and down, “Tell us the one about Granddaddy and the hippos!”
I tell this story often, but never the way it really happened.
“Your granddaddy was a brilliant painter. . .”
That was stretching things. I was a sophomore in college when I first saw Kurt bending over a utility cart piled high with paint brushes and rollers.
It had been a bad day. I had wanted to play tennis, but had gone to class like a good girl, only to watch helplessly as fat black clouds gathered outside the windows. It was pouring when I got out, and I didn’t have an umbrella, and I had had to run across the quad, which is a mud pit even on the best of days. By the time I reached my dorm, I was filthy and soaked. There was nothing for it but to slip on my last pair of sweats, sling my dirty laundry bag over my shoulder, and head for the basement. I was unpleasantly surprised to find a painter in possession of the laundry room. A pristine drop cloth covered all the washers and driers.
I swept in leaving a trail of muddy footprints. When I reached my favorite washer—the only one that didn’t eat quarters—I whipped off the tarpaulin, threw open the lid, and tossed in the soap. “Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t. Clothes had a way of “disappearing” from the laundry room, so I slid down against the washing machine and wrapped my arms around my knees to wait.
The painter didn’t even look up. From where I was sitting, he wasn’t half-bad looking. Like everybody else in those days, he was thin, but he had good bones. He was dressed all in white, and between his shaggy hair and hollow cheeks, he looked more like a guru than a blue-collar Joe. He had dipped a flat paddle into the paint and was stirring in smooth looping strokes, around and around and around.
“How long have you been working here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Couple of months.”
He had a beard, which made him look at least thirty, but he was probably about my age.
“And before that?”
“Whoa, I’ve been vetted already, OK?” He gestured toward a plastic ID badge on his shirt.
“Sorry.”
A few more strokes and I had my answer.
“I had my own studio downtown, only in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not much of a market for mixed media these days, or art, for that matter. After it tanked, I took this job.”
“You gave up your own studio for this?”
Maybe I was getting too personal, because he didn’t say anything for a long time, just kept stirring. Finally, he shrugged again. “This job’s as good as another. I don’t plan on staying forever.”
“What color are you going to paint it—the laundry room I mean?”
“Ivory.”
“That’s not a color!”
“So, what would madam prefer?”
“What have you got?”
“OK.” He squatted down and began rummaging through the cans, calling out the labels. “Eggshell, Bisque, Soapstone, Slate, Sage, and something called Mohave.”
I sniffed. “Nothing with a little more pizzazz?”
More rummaging and then he held up a can caked with dry, yellow paint. “How about Sunny Side Up?”
“Perfect.”
A stroke of his brush. “Is that yellow enough for you?”
I stood up and made a show of looking down my nose at the wall like a connoisseur in a tony gallery. “Evocative! Bold without being brash . . . surprisingly optimistic. Good, but not perfect.” I giggled. “What about some blue?”
“Let me see if I can find any.” Several cans later, “Nope, no blue . . . but I’ve got red.”
“I hate red!”
“How can you hate red?”
I lifted a tangle of curls. “Wouldn’t you hate it, if you were stuck with this?” On good days I liked to think that my hair was as coppery as an Irish Setter’s coat. That day, because of the rain, it was more like a Barnum & Bailey clown.
He reached out and wrapped a strand of my hair around his middle finger. “This is the most beautiful color I’ve ever seen,” he said. “But I guess it’s your call,” he released it.
The next thing I knew something wet and sticky was trickling down my neck.
I was at a disadvantage, because I didn’t have a brush, but that didn’t stop me. I plunged my hand into the open can, scooped up a fistful of color, and smeared it across his chest.
“Ah-hah.” He was laughing. “So you want it like that?” He was opening the red and thrusting in his hands and then they were around my shoulders.
Half an hour later we surveyed the mess.
“I’m going to get expelled.”
“No, you’re not. Bring your wet stuff and let’s get out of here. I’ve got a washer you can use. Come on.”
The rain did most of the clean-up as we splashed our way back to his place. He gave me a dry shirt and jeans, and while my own clothes were drying, he showed me his growing room, which was little more than a converted closet with the requisite panel of halide lights and a raised table spilling over with foliage. I saw broccoli and peppers and a couple of flat, fleshy leaves that I recognized as manna, only in those days we called it Monsanto Breadfruit 454.
“Look here.” Kurt slipped his hand into the jungle and parted the leaves.
I’ve always been a big fan of fairy tales, so maybe I was hoping for a priceless diadem or a miniature princess; instead, there was only an uncouth plant with familiar palmate leaves.
“Marijuana.” I said, disappointed.
“Not just any marijuana. High-grade stuff. I smuggled it in from Amsterdam.”
“Isn’t that risky?”
I could see the sharp edges of his collarbone under his shirt when he shrugged. “Man does not live by carbohydrates alone.”
“What if you get busted?”
“Then I guess I’ll spend the rest of my life on one of the Farms. At least I’ll get three meals a day.”
His apathy was beginning to grate. “It hardly seems worth it for this,” I said, sniffing. “My socks smell better.”
“Hey—!”
“You should grow something that matters. Something with color—something like . . . ,” I stopped. What could possibly satisfy my hunger for beauty? “A rose,” I said finally. “If it were me, I’d want a rose.”
He must have found my undergraduate earnestness amusing, because he grinned, “Well, I prefer pot.”
I stormed out.
After that I looked for him whenever I saw a work crew, but rumor had it that the university had fired him. A new semester came and went. I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment, but I still came back to my old dorm to do laundry. That’s where I found the invitation taped over the coin slot on my favorite washer. “Red, come to my place this Friday after your last class. I have a peace offering.”
Evan is plucking at my sleeve. “When are you going to get to the hippos, Gran? I want to hear about the hippos.”
“Yes, dear, I’m coming to them.”
“When your grandfather discovered I wanted a flower, he set out to create one. Unfortunately, in those days evil hippos roamed the country. Huge hulking beasts with foul breath and piggy snouts that hunted in packs and sniffed out beauty and destroyed it.”
I couldn’t tell whether I was sweating because of the lights, the humidity, or something else entirely. Kurt’s growing room looked just as I remembered: the same panel of lights, the same rubber tubing, the same sprinklers and growing table covered with vines and succulents and tubers. Only this time when he slid his hand into the welter of vegetation, he pulled out flower.
At first I didn’t recognize it, it was so small and colorless.
“What’s that?”
“A rose. You said you wanted a rose.”
“How’d you do it?”
He shrugged. “Over-the-counter chemicals, a blender, pressed petals from my folk’s wedding album . . . voilà—DNA.”
He tucked the rose behind my ear where it tickled. “Hey, it suits you.”
We made love under the growing table like Adam and Eve in paradise with no thoughts of tomorrow. And in our Garden of Eden there were honeybees.
They parked their gray vans on the street for everyone to read the letters: USDA Horticultural Inspection & Protection Program and came up the stairs, three steps at a time, bursting through the door, a faceless trio in hospital scrubs and surgical masks. They had canisters on their backs and clipboards in their hands. The largest HIPPO yanked Kurt up and threw him against the growing table. Like a French maid in a bad farce, I rolled out of the way and gathered my clothing.
Kurt stood his ground. “Get out. This is a private residence. You can’t just force your way in . . .”
The first punch winded him. “I have a warrant to search these premises given probable cause that you have committed a crime under Title 7 of the U.S. Code . . .” The second punch nearly doubled him over, “. . . which prohibits germination, cultivation, or propagation of unauthorized photosynthetic organisms . . .” The third blow cracked his jaw. “Moreover, I am also authorized to take any action necessary to confiscate aforesaid suspicious organisms, to be presented as evidence in a court of law . . .”
“Give it up!” I screamed. “It’s not worth it!”
But he didn’t. I don’t know why. I watched from my place among the empty flats and spilled bags of potting soil and did nothing to save him.
A pair of HIPPOs lifted him—one under each armpit. One of Kurt’s eyes was swollen shut, and his nose was bleeding, and the gash on his cheek where a trowel had cut him was showing white bone underneath. They dragged him out the door. I never saw him again.
The remaining HIPPO plucked the flower from my hair, dropped it into a specimen bag, and began spraying the growing table. A long time later when the air was thick with poison, he removed a piece of paper from a plastic pouch, and dropped it into my lap.
“Ma’am, if you’ll just sign here, please, to acknowledge that you voluntarily relinquish . . . ”
I spit in his face.
“Hey, kiddos, time to go.” Bailey is back to pick up her children. “I hope they didn’t tire you out too much, Mom. You don’t look quite like yourself.”
“No, dear. They bring back old times.”
I cup Evan’s chin in my hand and gaze into a memory that lacks only a beard. He squirms away, but Tess snuggles in and kisses my cheek. She is a sensitive child. Bailey tells me that sometimes she cries at night like I do, when I’m by myself and I remember the taste of honey on my tongue.
Bailey asks, “Mom, will you watch the kids while I run into town?”
A double hug and then Tess and Evan race away to play. When they grow tired of battling evil aliens with cheese graters and wooden spoons, they drift into the living room and climb into the big chair beside me. I lay down my book.
“Tell us a story, Gran.” Tess nuzzles me.
“Uh-huh,” Evan is bouncing up and down, “Tell us the one about Granddaddy and the hippos!”
I tell this story often, but never the way it really happened.
“Your granddaddy was a brilliant painter. . .”
That was stretching things. I was a sophomore in college when I first saw Kurt bending over a utility cart piled high with paint brushes and rollers.
It had been a bad day. I had wanted to play tennis, but had gone to class like a good girl, only to watch helplessly as fat black clouds gathered outside the windows. It was pouring when I got out, and I didn’t have an umbrella, and I had had to run across the quad, which is a mud pit even on the best of days. By the time I reached my dorm, I was filthy and soaked. There was nothing for it but to slip on my last pair of sweats, sling my dirty laundry bag over my shoulder, and head for the basement. I was unpleasantly surprised to find a painter in possession of the laundry room. A pristine drop cloth covered all the washers and driers.
I swept in leaving a trail of muddy footprints. When I reached my favorite washer—the only one that didn’t eat quarters—I whipped off the tarpaulin, threw open the lid, and tossed in the soap. “Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t. Clothes had a way of “disappearing” from the laundry room, so I slid down against the washing machine and wrapped my arms around my knees to wait.
The painter didn’t even look up. From where I was sitting, he wasn’t half-bad looking. Like everybody else in those days, he was thin, but he had good bones. He was dressed all in white, and between his shaggy hair and hollow cheeks, he looked more like a guru than a blue-collar Joe. He had dipped a flat paddle into the paint and was stirring in smooth looping strokes, around and around and around.
“How long have you been working here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Couple of months.”
He had a beard, which made him look at least thirty, but he was probably about my age.
“And before that?”
“Whoa, I’ve been vetted already, OK?” He gestured toward a plastic ID badge on his shirt.
“Sorry.”
A few more strokes and I had my answer.
“I had my own studio downtown, only in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not much of a market for mixed media these days, or art, for that matter. After it tanked, I took this job.”
“You gave up your own studio for this?”
Maybe I was getting too personal, because he didn’t say anything for a long time, just kept stirring. Finally, he shrugged again. “This job’s as good as another. I don’t plan on staying forever.”
“What color are you going to paint it—the laundry room I mean?”
“Ivory.”
“That’s not a color!”
“So, what would madam prefer?”
“What have you got?”
“OK.” He squatted down and began rummaging through the cans, calling out the labels. “Eggshell, Bisque, Soapstone, Slate, Sage, and something called Mohave.”
I sniffed. “Nothing with a little more pizzazz?”
More rummaging and then he held up a can caked with dry, yellow paint. “How about Sunny Side Up?”
“Perfect.”
A stroke of his brush. “Is that yellow enough for you?”
I stood up and made a show of looking down my nose at the wall like a connoisseur in a tony gallery. “Evocative! Bold without being brash . . . surprisingly optimistic. Good, but not perfect.” I giggled. “What about some blue?”
“Let me see if I can find any.” Several cans later, “Nope, no blue . . . but I’ve got red.”
“I hate red!”
“How can you hate red?”
I lifted a tangle of curls. “Wouldn’t you hate it, if you were stuck with this?” On good days I liked to think that my hair was as coppery as an Irish Setter’s coat. That day, because of the rain, it was more like a Barnum & Bailey clown.
He reached out and wrapped a strand of my hair around his middle finger. “This is the most beautiful color I’ve ever seen,” he said. “But I guess it’s your call,” he released it.
The next thing I knew something wet and sticky was trickling down my neck.
I was at a disadvantage, because I didn’t have a brush, but that didn’t stop me. I plunged my hand into the open can, scooped up a fistful of color, and smeared it across his chest.
“Ah-hah.” He was laughing. “So you want it like that?” He was opening the red and thrusting in his hands and then they were around my shoulders.
Half an hour later we surveyed the mess.
“I’m going to get expelled.”
“No, you’re not. Bring your wet stuff and let’s get out of here. I’ve got a washer you can use. Come on.”
The rain did most of the clean-up as we splashed our way back to his place. He gave me a dry shirt and jeans, and while my own clothes were drying, he showed me his growing room, which was little more than a converted closet with the requisite panel of halide lights and a raised table spilling over with foliage. I saw broccoli and peppers and a couple of flat, fleshy leaves that I recognized as manna, only in those days we called it Monsanto Breadfruit 454.
“Look here.” Kurt slipped his hand into the jungle and parted the leaves.
I’ve always been a big fan of fairy tales, so maybe I was hoping for a priceless diadem or a miniature princess; instead, there was only an uncouth plant with familiar palmate leaves.
“Marijuana.” I said, disappointed.
“Not just any marijuana. High-grade stuff. I smuggled it in from Amsterdam.”
“Isn’t that risky?”
I could see the sharp edges of his collarbone under his shirt when he shrugged. “Man does not live by carbohydrates alone.”
“What if you get busted?”
“Then I guess I’ll spend the rest of my life on one of the Farms. At least I’ll get three meals a day.”
His apathy was beginning to grate. “It hardly seems worth it for this,” I said, sniffing. “My socks smell better.”
“Hey—!”
“You should grow something that matters. Something with color—something like . . . ,” I stopped. What could possibly satisfy my hunger for beauty? “A rose,” I said finally. “If it were me, I’d want a rose.”
He must have found my undergraduate earnestness amusing, because he grinned, “Well, I prefer pot.”
I stormed out.
After that I looked for him whenever I saw a work crew, but rumor had it that the university had fired him. A new semester came and went. I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment, but I still came back to my old dorm to do laundry. That’s where I found the invitation taped over the coin slot on my favorite washer. “Red, come to my place this Friday after your last class. I have a peace offering.”
Evan is plucking at my sleeve. “When are you going to get to the hippos, Gran? I want to hear about the hippos.”
“Yes, dear, I’m coming to them.”
“When your grandfather discovered I wanted a flower, he set out to create one. Unfortunately, in those days evil hippos roamed the country. Huge hulking beasts with foul breath and piggy snouts that hunted in packs and sniffed out beauty and destroyed it.”
I couldn’t tell whether I was sweating because of the lights, the humidity, or something else entirely. Kurt’s growing room looked just as I remembered: the same panel of lights, the same rubber tubing, the same sprinklers and growing table covered with vines and succulents and tubers. Only this time when he slid his hand into the welter of vegetation, he pulled out flower.
At first I didn’t recognize it, it was so small and colorless.
“What’s that?”
“A rose. You said you wanted a rose.”
“How’d you do it?”
He shrugged. “Over-the-counter chemicals, a blender, pressed petals from my folk’s wedding album . . . voilà—DNA.”
He tucked the rose behind my ear where it tickled. “Hey, it suits you.”
We made love under the growing table like Adam and Eve in paradise with no thoughts of tomorrow. And in our Garden of Eden there were honeybees.
They parked their gray vans on the street for everyone to read the letters: USDA Horticultural Inspection & Protection Program and came up the stairs, three steps at a time, bursting through the door, a faceless trio in hospital scrubs and surgical masks. They had canisters on their backs and clipboards in their hands. The largest HIPPO yanked Kurt up and threw him against the growing table. Like a French maid in a bad farce, I rolled out of the way and gathered my clothing.
Kurt stood his ground. “Get out. This is a private residence. You can’t just force your way in . . .”
The first punch winded him. “I have a warrant to search these premises given probable cause that you have committed a crime under Title 7 of the U.S. Code . . .” The second punch nearly doubled him over, “. . . which prohibits germination, cultivation, or propagation of unauthorized photosynthetic organisms . . .” The third blow cracked his jaw. “Moreover, I am also authorized to take any action necessary to confiscate aforesaid suspicious organisms, to be presented as evidence in a court of law . . .”
“Give it up!” I screamed. “It’s not worth it!”
But he didn’t. I don’t know why. I watched from my place among the empty flats and spilled bags of potting soil and did nothing to save him.
A pair of HIPPOs lifted him—one under each armpit. One of Kurt’s eyes was swollen shut, and his nose was bleeding, and the gash on his cheek where a trowel had cut him was showing white bone underneath. They dragged him out the door. I never saw him again.
The remaining HIPPO plucked the flower from my hair, dropped it into a specimen bag, and began spraying the growing table. A long time later when the air was thick with poison, he removed a piece of paper from a plastic pouch, and dropped it into my lap.
“Ma’am, if you’ll just sign here, please, to acknowledge that you voluntarily relinquish . . . ”
I spit in his face.
“Hey, kiddos, time to go.” Bailey is back to pick up her children. “I hope they didn’t tire you out too much, Mom. You don’t look quite like yourself.”
“No, dear. They bring back old times.”
I cup Evan’s chin in my hand and gaze into a memory that lacks only a beard. He squirms away, but Tess snuggles in and kisses my cheek. She is a sensitive child. Bailey tells me that sometimes she cries at night like I do, when I’m by myself and I remember the taste of honey on my tongue.
