Redecorating

At first she was overwhelmed. You want a new bathroom? Fix it yourself, he’d said.  You’re home all day anyhow. 

She’d glared at him, hands on hips.  But I don’t know what I’m doing.  

He shrugged. Not my problem. Then he left for work. 

So here she was with gallons of paints, brushes, spackle, tape, pans, pails, detergents, sponges, and a wallpaper scraper that looked like a lady bug on one side and had sharp metal teeth on the other.

She sipped her coffee and studied the walls. They weren’t in bad shape, faded in some spots, stained in others, the paper only a decade old,  peeling at the corners. Laura Ashley pink pinstripes on white with a pretty border near the ceiling of pink tulips with sage leaves. She’d spent hours working with a decorator to flesh out the colors in this room and all the others. The wallpaper hanger had been there for weeks.  

In this room, the paper matched the pink tub perfectly. Matching towels too.  And a matching bath curtain and balloon shades she’d had specially made from some Laura Ashley sheets she got at TJ Maxx. That was before the kids, when she worked full time, instead of the part time job she held now, and before he started going from job to job, each layoff longer than the next. 

It was the economy, he said, even when she noted that the want ads were thicker than ever and his old companies were hiring.  

She looked at the pile of painting supplies and took some deep breaths. With the scraper and lots of detergent, the paper peeled easily in satisfyingly long, languid strips as she stepped from the bathtub edge to the toilet seat – bloodstains still near the base from that second miscarriage, to the countertop. The border came off in one entire piece. I win! She thought. 

The walls beneath were white, small gouges here and there which she filled with spackle then smoothed.  Then she applied tape at the ceiling and at the baseboards where she had some trouble behind the toilet. More old blood than I thought, she noted.

With a wide brush, she tentatively dipped into the first paint can. Nantucket Rose. Just a dab to start, a sketch of a line on the wall above the toilet. Then a longer line, then a longer, wider line, a pathway really. Then dots and x’s and A, B, Cs, and trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, neighborhoods of houses.   Finally, the can was mostly empty and she stood back and looked. Rouge walls dripping in places, spots on the pebbled linoleum and even on the ceiling. Color closing in, warming, drenching, wild. 

In the mirror she studied her paint- speckled visage –  worn cheeks, indifferent chin, hair gray in sections too,  torn T-shirt.  She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Rose nose now. What remained in the can she dabbed again on the blood stains violent vile behind the toilet until the color there dripped onto the floor and dribbled toward the hallway, a pathetic, lonely stream.  

She opened another can, carnation this time. Ripping an old diaper she dipped again and again and in between slapped at the walls, the splashes forming arcs, clouds, plains, waves, ferns, flowers, cliffs, dunes, mountains. Sprays landed on ceiling, floor, tub, sink, and these she rubbed and polished into Van Gogh swirls, thinking starry starry bathroom.  

The green can was next, meadow and light, dabbed in places that still seemed plain and needy. The corners, the closet door, her arms, the ceiling light, and towel bar, her cheeks, knees, neck, belly again and once more.  

And so it went through the day. Even as the children returned from school and yelled for snacks and dinner she worked mightily on landscapes, seascapes, galaxies, constellations, and other miasmas of emptiness and light. 

That night at dark when  her husband returned home he followed the river now of green, pink, rose from the floor in the kitchen where the children ate cookies and played on their phones and into the bathroom where the stream ended in convergent oceans of color and though he called and called heard nothing but the soft still sound of drying paint on paint on paint on paint.