coloring book
At one time or another, everyone believed the following: that black and white movies and television shows were black and white not because of the film but because the entire world—in the twentieth century—was actually black and white. If you wanted to know what color something was, you couldn’t find out.
Something else everyone thought: that collecting enough aluminum cans would make you a millionaire.
One more: that laundry chutes led to another country. That all you had to do was position your body inside the slim cylinder and, soon enough, your feet, waist, shoulders, and head would pass through the center of the earth and end up in a faraway metropolis.
The collective unconscious of childhood is really rather dull.
So many have hair the color of dishwater. So many Raggedy-Anns and Raggedy Andies have hair made of yarn. So many talking machines that simulate friendship, teach mathematics, and inoculate the ears against the sounds from actual emergency vehicles. These days, no one buys their child an actual xylophone, but practically everyone had a fake one at one time or another.
The reason children are cruel is because they have too much time on their hands. And they don’t know anything. When they dance, they do so because their bodies are so low to the ground. When they sleep, it’s because they must.
My partner and her now-dead ex-husband were going to name their child Elvis Impersonator.
Grass the color of butter, the sky like the bottom of a boat. A black and white dog naps in the corner. What color are his dreams? He has none.
A kaleidoscope, a wind spinner, a tree frog, the newspaper dropped in the driveway; how long did it take you to notice? The finches at the feeder know your schedule, and they know you’re always late.
Like you, I liked to keep lists. Of friends, favorite colors, books I’d read, insect species, wishes and deeds. I had more wishes than deeds. I had some idea of myself as in possession of secret wisdom, the slow movement of time. I felt every second pass as if it were history’s own black and white promise.
I don’t want to return to my pale yellow childhood, the white smoke detector going off in the hallway, the orange bag of carrots on the porch.
When you have children of your own, you have no choice but to read boring books and watch boring shows, all the while pretending they’re not boring at all.
My father had black hair until it was white. My mother had black hair until it was white.
We romanticize the indigo desires of our present and future children. We make them seem like heroes. What’s sad about childhood is that every day the child becomes someone scarred by experience, every day another disaster, every night another wish to lie down and drown.
The worst part—for them—is that they cannot get away. Whatever you do, they have to do it, too.
They’re short until they grow taller. Their faces are narrow until they grow fatter.
Every year you give them a birthday cake, every summer a garden hose on full blast. It’s not your fault they don’t like it, but it’s not theirs, either.
Because I am forty-nine-years-old and have no children, people often expect me to be the kind of person who has “children in her life.” I have none. If I bought a pair of overalls for the neighbor boy, what color would they be? I would not buy a pair of overalls for the neighbor boy. I would not buy him anything at all.
Obviously, people love their children, but what choice do they have? If they choose poorly, their children suffer. If they choose wisely, their children suffer.
In fact, I mythologize my own childhood: the neighborhood hillsides and trash can lids, the twilight, the canyon full of snakes. If I had children of my own, perhaps I could forget about myself more often. The problem, of course, is that I’d probably forget about myself entirely. People—women—don’t like to admit their children take over their lives. Instead, they lament the impossible choices, the absence of flex-time, the parties where children aren’t welcome, but only rarely and in private do they blame their husbands. If they blamed them as often as they deserved to be blamed, the husbands would leave them, and then they’d really be in trouble.
At school, we kept our books in lockers the color of gunmetal. We did not yet worry about actual guns.
The children of my old friends are going to college. My old friends are footing the bill. What choice do they have?
Christians have given up on rainbows, rewritten Noah’s Ark so that God makes a charcoal grill instead. You think I’m lying? Check the world wide web.
People—women—imagine they will be able to choose the colors of their children’s clothing, but such a controlling pleasure lasts three years, max. After that, they wear what they want and you have to wash it.
I’d always hoped that not having children would allow my life to expand beyond the confines of Oklahoma, but so far such adventure has transpired only in limited bursts. My future is the color of Arizona, but hopefully not actually in Arizona.
I was better with words than I was with numbers, better with pencil than pen. In art class, my teacher said my self-portrait looked like a drunk comedian. He was on to something.
Nostalgia, the water colored last note of a memorized song, returns again and again, and I’ve decided to allow it, as long as I remain clear-eyed about threats from the jackboots. I live in the town where I was born, so I’m able to compare the jackboots of yesteryear with the jackboots of today. The current ones are worse.
The past was not black and white, but the jackboots want you to believe otherwise. It’s simple, they say, everything you knew about the world once upon a time is still true today. Everything else is a lie.
Sometimes I wonder if they’re coming after me: death by a thousand service-denials, exclusion, isolation, disease and ultimately death. Will they call me a witch? Not if I bake them in the oven, they won’t.
Children: the color of buttery pancakes, vines growing from their fingernails, gravel embedded in the bottoms of their feet. I can be polite. Issue an invitation first. Make their parents feel welcome in the parlor. No one knows what to make of me these days. A spinster, a sinner, unrecognizable as any type but increasingly common, our own demographic. Draw a circle on the driveway, and I’ll stand in it. Go on. I don’t have all day.