The House of Eve (8)
“Triflin’ as shit. Inez over here talking about she done finally found a good man to settle down with. Ain’t nothing good about a man who got eyes for a girl ’bout to turn fifteen.” She pushed herself to stand and reached out her jiggly arms to me.
Aunt Marie was tall and stout like a tree, and I sank into her strong girth.
“Stay as long as you need, hear?”
“Thank you.” Relief made me burrow deeper into her embrace.
“Everything going to be all right.” She lifted my chin. “You eat?”
“Not much. Just a few bites of toast for breakfast.”
Aunt Marie started walking to her bedroom in the back of the apartment. “Some tuna in the fridge. Eat as much as you want.”
From the living room, I only had to walk two steps and I was in what passed as her kitchen, though it was really all one big room. I pulled down a plate from the shelf and smeared the mixture of tuna with cubed boiled eggs and diced onions on two slices of white bread. I took a big bite, and then carried the rest of it back to her bedroom. Aunt Marie dropped the needle on her record player, and out crooned Dinah Washington. From her vanity, she talked to me through the mirror while I sat on the edge of her bed.
“Gotta perform at Kiki’s tonight. Promised I’d get there early and help set up. You be okay here by yourself?”
“I reckon I’ll manage.”
“Your paint supplies still over in the corner under the bay window. Just don’t mess up my floors.”
Aunt Marie’s eggplant-colored bedroom always made me feel like we were backstage at a theater. She had wigs and mustaches, makeup and lashes, feathers and boas, top hats, ties and tails. I chomped down on my sandwich while she applied blush to her umber-colored cheeks and bright red lipstick to her wide mouth. She cocked her head, while I told her about Fatty being late and me not being able to go on the field trip next week.
“Do I need to ride down there and talk to someone about this?”
“No, I got it.” My jaw tightened.
I knew she meant well, but Mrs. Thomas wouldn’t take kindly to me siccing my aunt on her. Besides, Aunt Marie wasn’t the type of person Mrs. Thomas would understand. She’d probably faint at the sight of my big-boned, gun-toting, numbers-running aunt. People like Aunt Marie and Mrs. Thomas didn’t mix. Her showing up to fight my battle would only push me farther from Mrs. Thomas’s favor, and I was already barking up a thin tree. I just had to accept my punishment and move on.
Humming along with Dinah Washington, Aunt Marie slipped on a stark white men’s dress shirt that hung from her closet door, then handed me a pair of gold cuff links to fasten for her. After stepping into men’s trousers and a checkered sports jacket, she finished the look with clip-on chandelier earrings.
“How do I look?”
“Like you the big money McGillicuddy.”
She chuckled. “Only way to be my little money McGillicuddy is to keep your head in those books. I’ll straighten out Fatty. You just do what those people tell you and get that scholarship.”
I wiped the mayo from the corner of my mouth.
“Oh, and Shimmy coming by here to look up underneath the sink.”
“Who’s Shimmy?”
I followed her back down the hall, taking in a whiff of the spicy cologne she sprayed on her neck and wrists.
“My landlord’s son. Too cheap to hire a real plumber. Always sending that boy to do the work round here. And don’t nothing ever get done.”
* * *
I slid the metal chain across the doorframe after she went out, and left Dinah Washington playing to keep me company. Inez wouldn’t let me store my paint supplies at our house. Said seeing my stuff all over made her nerves bad, but all things concerning me put Inez on edge. At Aunt Marie’s, I kept all my art in a metal wash bin. My beige apron had splatters of dry paint down the front, and I slipped it over my neck, then clipped my bangs back off my forehead with bobby pins so that I could see.
The sun had traveled to the other side of the street, making the room dim. I yanked on the rusted string of the brass floor lamp, then spread the worn sheet I used as a drop cloth underneath my feet. My easel wasn’t more than a few scraps of wood that Aunt Marie had found and nailed together for me. Paint was expensive, so I had only the three primary colors: yellow, blue and red, but I was a master at mixing the right combination to create almost any color I wanted.
As I stared at the blank canvas trying to figure out where to begin, I could feel my shoulders slip down my back. It was always like that. To paint was to breathe easy. When I picked up my brush, all my problems magically washed away. I had started painting about two years ago, after my We Rise teacher took us on a field trip to the Philadelphia College of the Arts for a class on oil painting. Louise Clement, a young art student, was our teacher. I had never met a Negro artist before and found myself intrigued by the way her face lit up as she talked about her work. While Louise explained color theory and brush techniques, most of my classmates’ eyes had glazed over with boredom, but I listened with intensity. After the three-hour workshop, I produced my first piece of art. It was a pastel painting of tall willowy branches reaching for the light of the moon. Louise stared at my painting for so long I had begun to sweat, worrying that I had done it all wrong.
Then she touched my shoulder and said, “Art is the friend that you can always return to. It will always be there to heighten your feeling of aliveness. Keep going.”