In order to be a fully-functioning female member of society, Grammy Faye believed that one absolutely had to have one crucial thing: lipstick. The only exception to this stringent rule was if you were either in diapers or a nursing home. Whenever she had visitors in the hospital, she would make sure she had lipstick on hand. Though perhaps unwashed, tousled, connected to multiple monitors or I.V.s, Grammy would not permit you to enter the room unless she was fully dressed. It was always bright red, the color of a cherry gumball, and would smear just as readily on your cheek. Her lips were puckered, always, when I knew her. Smoking etched lines around her mouth, and her skin was always yellow and tan. That was because of the Hepatitis C, but that is another story for another day.
Her lips were the color of a newly skinned knee, and about as wet. Kisses were surreptitiously wiped off once we were set free to play. It wasn’t meant as a disrespect, of course. But the squeaky wet kiss-mark dried slow and crusty. There was almost always a maroon trash can half-full of red-smudged tissues in her bathroom. Sometimes it was blood. Actually, a lot of the time, it was blood. Grammy had this cat you see- Pollyanna was her name- and she would stretch her oversharp claws into Grammy’s arms and dig deep. But the band-aids were never cartoons and never had sparkles, so we were seldom interested in stealing them to wear like badges on our overalls.
There was a bright red glass bull on the bookshelf that stood above the little blackface figurines of happy grinning slaves feeding tiny chickens. The bull was Grandpa’s, but I never knew him. He died of a heart attack when I was two. But the bull watched us while we played. Because of him, we had to walk slowly through the house and keep our voices down. But below the little happy slaves were the rows of romance novels. As a young and awkward girl with few friends that were not leatherbound and slightly musty, I was drawn instantly to the books. Oh look, thought I, a book about the Grand Canyon. But it was so much more than that. There was the Grand Canyon that was cut by the Colorado River, but also the grand canyon that divided the swell of Anna-Leigh’s breasts, and the grander canyon that Christopher discovered as he slid her skirt off over her hips and trembling thighs.
Red was also the color of the ceramic chickens she kept around the tops of the cabinets in her kitchen. She had shotglasses in those cabinets- they were really for her medicine, but we used to pour Mello Yello and sling it back and act tipsy while wobbling around in overlarge quilt-togas. Red was the color of her favorite grown-up drink. She had a refrigerator in the garage, behind her red sedan and beside the red ride-on lawnmower, which was always full of wine bottles. But sometimes, there were cherry popsicles out in the fridge, and they would stain our fingers and drip down to scuffed-up summer elbows.
The ants were red. They climbed up and down the trunk of the tree that stood next to the garage, shading the gravel and the smudge of a flowerbed that ran alongside the trashcans. There were black ants, too, and I used to imagine the two different sorts were rivals questing for the same territory: a sort of entomological checkers match. We spent hours in that tree. One branch jutted out from the others, straight out and up like an elephant’s trunk, or a giant, un-tethered swing.
Grammy made bright red spaghetti at my house one night, long after she moved in with us to more easily go to and from therapy. The sauce was supposed to be thick- veggie lovers’, or something- and it was her rehabilitation homework to follow a logical pattern, such as a recipe. This time, therapy was easy for her. She moved through the process with much consideration but general ease. Not like the night when she wanted to know if the noodles were cooked and reached her naked hand into the boiling pot. She had held her hand in there for a full fifteen seconds before her mind registered pain. (They were cooked and squashy then, by the way. The noodles, not her fingers, which were shiny, boiled and burned.) But we knew she was bouncing back, Nerf Grammy that she was, when she made a joke about the lack of actual vegetables in our supposedly legume-laden sauce.
And, for years, she was doing just fine.
At the visitation the night before Grammy’s funeral, we were a bit taken aback to see that her lips (a weird, twisted, wry and hermetically sealed smirk) were a pastel shade of pink. Some misguided mortician decided pink was more youthful. But who was he/she kidding? The immediate consensus was that Grammy would be so, so pissed if she knew that people would soon be seeing her, laid out and stately, with pale pink and chalky lips. Back at home, the half-used tube, with lip-cracks pressed upon it, still sat on her vanity table. A quick swipe and careful blotting restored Grammy’s mouth to something that was close but not quite her.
I left my room this morning, knowing I was somewhat naked because of my lackluster lips. I hope she understands red simply isn’t my color. How can it be, when it was so wholly hers?
The Chronicles of Alberta 