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Show in every shade of purple, and an ermine stole that chased its tail around her neck. Before her suitcase was even set down in the house, my father had a drink ready for her, the ice causing beads of water to fall to the carpet like rain, even when her plane arrived in the morning. My grandmother made up for the lack of brightness in her life with watercolor . canvasses layered in streaks of electric color. Her paintings had texture and charge, even though her subjects-landscapes-were relatively mild and literal. Palm trees quivered in limes and chartreuses, their trunks bending toward the horizon. Mountains literally lifted from the canvas in painterly brush strokes that suggested layers of meaning. The twenty-year-old girl who yearned to dance professionally appeared in every bush and stump. Because of the noise and distractions in our house, she never painted in front of me but waited until she returned home. I only saw the pieces years later, long after she was dead, a diary in watercolor. Her paintings complicate her life, insist that I see the woman holding the brush differently, that I pay attention to the language of color. Her palette and stroke suggest an artist who felt imprisonment in everything she saw. As a child, though, I had trouble seeing past the grim expression and wrinkled skin, the costume jewelry, the wigs, the eyebrows tweezed into submission. Her love of music did little to change my opinion. When we visited my grandmother in Rapid City, she would play the organ for us, an instrument that produced, to my ears, the muddiest of sounds. The notes caked my arms and legs and would not come off. I hated to listen to her play, hated the way I couldn't tell where one sound ended and another began, hated the breathiness and constant swelling of notes. She 145 |
