Happens Like This: When I'm four or five I stay overnight often at Nana's. This is at her three-family before she moves to the elderly highrise. She lives on the ground floor and I play on the swingset that belongs to the kids upstairs. Their dad is a fireman and when he lifts me from the top of the slide where I am frozen in fear he smells of crazy wood smoke and his arms are as big as my body. My dad is on a road construction crew and smells of marlboroughs and schlitz. He brings us Arthur Treachers Fish and Chips for dinner sometimes and I hope it means he cares about us.
One afternoon at Nana's I accidentally lock myself in the bathroom. I don't understand that it locks from the inside. I am inconsolable. I think I am going to have to stay there forever and if that means till morning it's much too long.
It goes from bad to worse when I see two long legs easing through the window and into the tub. They seem to go on forever and I fear they are not attached to a head, or to anyone I know. I begin to scream so loudly that I can't hear Nana on the other side of the door, lips pressed to the crack, yelling to me to calm down, that it's the neighbor-the fireman-the hero-come to help me out. My screaming startles him and he crashes into the tub with a shout that travels through my feet and up my legs.
I think I might pee my pants and want to use the toilet, but I can't with a stranger in the bathroom. I stop screaming and stare at him. Nana's voice penetrates the buzzing in my head "That's Mr. so-and-so from upstairs- let him unlock the door!"
When he reaches that endless arm across me and turns the switch for the lock, I am amazed that he could do this. I think doors only lock from the side I am NOT on.
At Nana's I am the center of her universe and her love orbits me with consistency and strength. She makes chicken soup and lets me have ice cream. I sit on the floor in the dining room on a worn pile rug. I play with the books of paper dolls she stores in the bottom drawer of the breakfront. I am the first great-grandchild. She has many grandchildren and my mother is one of them. Nana tells me my mother is still just a girl herself.
Nana grows African violets in little pots all over her house. I wonder why the leaves are so fat and furry. I touch them with my fingertips and lips.
When I'm 13, my aunt moves into an apartment when she divorces my uncle. He hit her. She paints the wood floor in the kitchen red and wallpapers with strawberry print on a crisp white background in the bathroom. She fills a dish with strawberry soaps that look like candy. The place has the exact same layout as Nana's old apartment.
She invites me to stay a weekend and help redecorate. I spray the old walls with water and cider vinegar, scraping the layers of paste and paper away in dark, wet curls. The new apartment is in a bad neighborhood and I can't go out by myself. I see the county fairgrounds across the busy street, watch older kids hanging out in their cars, drinking beer from those huge brown bottles in brown bags with the openings twisted tight around the spit-glistened necks. I know they smell like my father. Their rough voices carry across the parking lot. We turn up the radio, Cat Stevens-"I'm being followed by a moonshadow" and we sing along together. We sound good.
She transforms the drab, slope-floored place into a color-washed jungle. A sanctuary. I feel my heart beat fast for her, watching her furiously paint and scrape and spray and scrub-even though I don't yet know about the beatings. I can smell the freedom and the fear on her. It smells like vinegar and strawberry soap.
When I leave my husband, I fill my apartment with color-a tomato red rag rug on a caribbean blue wood floor. Purple watercolor wash on the walls, and a room painted to look like the sky to make up for its having no windows. My fear and freedom smell familiar. I grow african violets. I touch them with my fingertips and lips.
