Only Child(28)

Frida Kahlo died a long time ago, and she wasn’t old when she died, but she was really sick. I didn’t know what type of sick, maybe cancer like Uncle Chip. She painted all the time because of her sickness and because she was lonely in her life. Painting helped her with her feelings. Our art teacher, Mrs. R, told us that. She said art is always about expressing your feelings and it’s a good way to deal with feelings. Thinking about what Mrs. R said made me decide to do that, too: make art to deal with my feelings.

I went upstairs and got out my big bag of paints. I got my painting paper, too, and laid it out in my room. Then I sat there for a while, and I didn’t know how you make art to deal with your feelings. Maybe paint a picture of myself, like Frida Kahlo. I got a cup of water from the kitchen, and Mimi made me promise I wasn’t going to make any messes painting, and I wondered if Frida Kahlo had to try not to make any messes when she was painting, too.

I dipped my paintbrush into red, which is my favorite color, and I moved the brush up and down on the paper, so it wasn’t going to be a picture of myself, but something else my hand decided to make, and I didn’t know yet what it was going to be. A line up and a line next to it down, and then up and down again, like a long zigzag snake. The red started out really red when I still had a lot of paint on the brush, and then it got like thinner when I used up all the paint, and in the end it looked like light pink. The way the snake-line looked on the paper made me think about the red juice spill on my face after I peed on the mattress.

So red looks like an embarrassed feeling. Maybe I could pick one color for all the opposite feelings that were inside me and paint a lot of pieces of paper with only one feeling-color, and then the feelings would be separate and not all mixed up together, and that would help.

Red—embarrassed. Put that paper over to the side.

I thought about what feeling was next. Sad. Sad was everywhere inside our house, especially where Mommy was. Mommy was so sad, and you could feel it when you got close to her. The closer you went to her, the more you could feel the sad feeling. Mommy cried and cried all the time, and mostly she lay in her bed, and she had big red circles around her eyes from all the crying. I looked at all my paint colors. Sad could be gray. Gray like the sky outside and like the rain clouds. I washed my paintbrush in my water glass, and no water splashed on the carpet, and I painted gray all over a new piece of paper.

Sad piece of paper, next to the embarrassed piece of paper.

Scared. I was having a lot of scared feelings now all the time. Definitely black. That’s how everything looked in the closet at school, black, almost no light to see the other colors. And everything is black at night when I wake up and think the gunman is coming back, except it’s always just a dream. I made a paper black, and all black really did look scary.

I had to find a color for mad, too. Mad/angry. That’s a feeling you have to use your words for, Mommy says, not your hands, like for hitting. “I’m mad at the gunman,” I said. I thought mad/angry had to be green. Green because of the Hulk. The Hulk starts out like a regular person with beige skin, but when he gets mad he turns green all over, even his face. When the Hulk gets mad, he gets really mad. And he gets bigger with muscles all over, and he gets super strong. And green all over for some reason. So the color green reminds me of mad/angry, and I made a green page and put it next to the other feelings pages.

OK, so far:

Red—Embarrassed

Gray—Sad

Black—Scared

Green—Mad/Angry

And what color is for lonely? I thought that lonely had to be like a see-through color, so no color at all, because when you’re lonely it’s like you’re invisible from other people, but not invisible in a good way like a superhero, but in a sad way. But the piece of paper is white, so how do you make a see-through color on a white paper? Then I had an idea for that. I got out my scissors and cut out the middle of the paper, so there was like a picture frame around a rectangle of see-through nothingness in the middle. Lonely—see-through.

I thought I was also feeling happy. I felt happy that I didn’t die from the gunman. And I was a little happy because Andy wasn’t here anymore to be mean to me, and I could have my secret hideout in Andy’s closet now, and he couldn’t tell me to get out. In the hideout I felt good/happy. Now it was a little happy feeling, it was just starting out, but when Mommy was going to feel better from the shock and her sadness, and the bad feelings were going to go away—mad, scared, and lonely—then it was going to be a bigger happy feeling. Me and Mommy and Daddy could be together with no fighting and we could have fun.

What color is for happy? Yellow. Yellow like the sun in the sky. A warm yellow sun in a pretty blue sky in the summertime, not the gray-sad sky we had right now.

Red—Embarrassed

Gray—Sad

Black—Scared

Green—Mad/Angry

Lonely—See-Through

Yellow—Happy



I waited for my feelings pages to dry, and then I went and got tape from the kitchen and hung them up on the wall inside my hideout. That was a good spot for them. I could lie down on Andy’s sleeping bag and look at the feelings. Now they were separated and that made it easier to think about them.





[ 18 ]


    Real-Life Bad Dream


THE GUNMAN CAME and real life went away, and now it was like we were in a new fake life. I was there, Daddy was there and Mommy, and Mimi was staying with us in the guest room so she could take care of Mommy, and Grandma and Aunt Mary came over every day, and that’s how you know it was different, because usually they’re not all at our house all the time.