Mare of Blue Gables
As you walk in the door, you are greeted by the knowing smile of the little Paper Princess. Your mother made the mural for you a year ago, copying the figure of the cut-paper doll out of your favorite picture book and gently daubing the colors onto the wall. She knew that you had blue eyes—the only one in the family—and gave the Princess eyes like yours. When you saw the mural, you hated this blue-eyed figure because she wasn’t at all like the book. Your mother rolled up her brushes and didn’t say a word. In another two years, you will watch while your mother paints white back over this mural, with moving boxes gathering dust in the low corner under the gabled ceiling. You’ll steal her brush away, again and again, because you want the Princess to blow away instead of being smothered. In the next house, you will draw her onto the wall of your closet in pencil, and when you move, you won’t breathe a word about her hiding place.
To your left, there is the closet, with its white louvered doors, tall and intimidating. Your grandfather, the architect, drew up the plans and drove up one weekend. Behind those two doors sits a formidable menagerie of stuffed animals. Most of them are missing large chunks of their fur, coarsely lopped off at rakish angles. Other people might call them ruined, but you think they’re stylish. In another five years, you’ll start cutting your own hair—and you’ll keep cutting it yourself, even when you are in middle school, even when you are eighteen and too old to be doing such silly things to yourself.
On the window is a round silver sticker. When the sun shines in at ten-thirty in the morning, you can make out a fuzzy black outline of a man in a helmet. Your mother explained it to you. “If there is a fire, we want them to find you. This helps them know that you’re here.” You’ve never met anyone whose house caught on fire. You’ve never seen a fire. You don’t know where they come from. When you hear sirens in the night, you start to cry because they sound like monsters and crying children, and you want to make sure that those children aren’t all alone. In your books, they say that flames dance. You imagine that fire looks like your dance teacher in her pink tutu and turban and that it sounds like a siren.
Take your shoes off. Sit on the bed. It’s low, and a little too short for the sheets. You don’t mind. You chose the comforter yourself out of a catalog. One side is leafy green with intersecting lines of cream. You don’t like that side much though. The other side is much more interesting: an explosion in paisleys and dots and stripes, in shades of cool blue and yellow and red and peach. There is no discernable repetition to the pattern, no real sense. You don’t mind. You will paint your bedroom that exact same shade of peach in seven years’ time. You will do the same thing again, without meaning to, five years after that, and you will give up any pretense of having a peach-free bedroom.
The carpet under your feet is slightly prickly and a bright, vivid rose. You don’t care for it. Your mother tried to persuade you, because it was pink like a ballerina, but you miss your old carpet. It was bright yellow, like a rubber duck or the baby blanket that you will still snuggle into on your first night at college. Pink is for girls, you complain. Pink is for sissy girls, for dumb girls, for girly girls. You pick the book up off your nightstand—The Magic Schoolbus’ take on the digestive system—and toddle back to the door. You stop a moment, debating whether to leave the door open or closed. Open lets you look for the monsters before you go in. Closed will keep a fire from spreading. Open. Closed. You decide on open. After all, fire might be just another fairy tale.
