Midday
Yellow tumblers stood up to stretch and catch a glimpse of the sulphate heaven. Like the wooden spatulas and the crusting batter, hung beside the summer window and the loud nakedness of heat. Happier now, she waltzed between the kitchen cut-out and the wheatlike lawn, finding herself framed inside each moment – as the shapes of sky between the foliage began to melt, so the trees could copulate in peace.
She could hear someone unscrewing a rose from her rotund bush. By the grouchy gravel near the sandstone wall that ran around her house, the mysterious robber hidden inside the bush – agitating her flower dome like a beehive. She reclined. In her grilled veranda, in her light pink dress, as her big blue sofa held her like a glove, and she fell asleep with her cold chamomile beverage and the scent of sandalwood in hair.
A classic is that which stands the test of time, she argued. Like A Raisin in the Sun, her student replied, but she grew momentarily fatigued, before the breeze set in, and they watered their tongues so they could breathe. Yes, she said, though I suggest you take a walk and find something suitable to you. A bird squashed a mulberry and pasted it along the compound. A leaf fell on its babylike head, scaring it away forever. She spent the evening mixing her flaky white with her crimson lake, and her crimson lake with her flaky white. Before she rolled her canvas into a cylinder and slipped into an eloquent anguish. He returned with a pot of foaming river; clearly, he was mired inside his lettered head.
The night was sultry. She wandered in her insomniac outfit, searching for air in the stagnant bushland, down the suburban paths dotted with glaring cats. She reached the little cubic grocery store blinking by itself in a quiet lane. Blue and white like a boring train. The storekeeper was winding up for the day; he waited patiently for her to circle the aisles and inspect the instant noodles, and whisper to the oracle refrigerator. A bus tilted against the sidewalk and spilled a passenger. An apple spilled from the fruit shelf into the bread shelf. She sat against the fridge and shut her eyes, cooling her neck as memories danced before her in a war of lights. The dead keep coming back, she thought, even if they are still alive. The street was empty again; the storekeeper stood at the end of the aisle, telling her about the television in his neighbour’s car.
She melted her pastels and added an ounce of linseed oil. She felt like a witch when she experimented with pigments. The house was long and hollow like a harmonica, she laughed and imagined the music her voice would make through its many cavities, to the deaf and distant ears of the world. It sometimes took her days to stop drinking, and years to start again. She rolled about her rooms, and across the yard under the obtuse evening sun, like a pinball stuck inside its maze, with her mustard yellow sienna and Prussian blue green. A lot of people never saw the beach, she said to herself. She wasted her colours in her disillusion and dug her sweet potatoes with disdain. Her student talked about Nietzsche and Rothko and Expressionism, as she painted her fingernails, not bothering to share her lemonade.
She combed her grass and looked for snails and grasshoppers playing in the shade. The dogs gathered outside her gate and the breeze shook the trees over her roof, freeing them from one other and letting them walk down to the curdled lake. I want you to draw first and then paint, she said, her voice was harsh despite her milky eyes, she was tired of his swirling, aimless paintbrush. I just try to break the form, he said, and allow my colours to discover their voice. She scowled into her brass bowl, an idealist at eighteen, kids were smarter these days. You must make an outline first, she sighed, it will improve the quality of your figures. The day felt like a poorly baked bun, with no pores or colour; as the sun erased the earth’s skin, turning it into a quarry.
Her pigments were hazy and stuck to her sheets like an ancient ointment. It made her paintings ghastly as they climbed up her walls, she hated them but she painted all day till she was too hungry to cook and too tired to eat. Her money had turned into a dusty dream; the gasoline in her car didn’t take her beyond the book store, she moved her sofa indoors and lay on the cool white floor. Lunch was arduous and accompanied with ice. Dawn was cool enough for a stroll; there was a rich neighbour down the road who asked her for a painting when he saw her. It was midday again; bastard, she said, thinking about his lanterns that kept her awake at night. And her student came along with his arrogant outlines and asked her for a new ‘idea,’ despite her aversion to abstraction.
Her yellow tumblers crumbled as they observed the sun like watchmen. The cookie dough fermented under the kitchen window, waiting for her to eat and be happy again. She plaited her hair and painted with her knives, slashing her canvas gently with her angelic whites. A cinnamon brown filled her fields and drank the blue out of her sky, with stout yellow houses sitting like cheese in the hinterland. She made clumps of people in the roundabout town, and ran her brush along their fingers with care. Her student wouldn’t last beyond the summer, and something had to fall from the sky. She would litter her house with art and stand on top of it like a flag. It was still better than the city, she told herself. She cried about the roses and wrote a bad poem, then she went to bed.