Child of a Rainless Year

Chapter One Just what colors our attitude toward color? Too much and we risk not being taken seriously; too little and we fear being dull. ---Patricia Lynne Duffy, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens Coloring Inside the Lines Color is the great magic. I learned that one day as I watched my mother preparing for the most recent of her lovers. She, intent on the mirror over her elegant, gilded vanity, did not see me as I watched her from a mirror set in the border of a picture frame, two reverses making the image right again. I was some years older than I had been in that rainless year when I had been born---five, maybe six years old. Mother had been very angry with me earlier that day. Then she had forgotten me, as she often did when she was so intensely displeased that even the "my" of her wrath could not ease her pain. Easier to forget. So, forgotten, I went where I was usually forbidden to go, into Mother's private suite, sneaking in while she was in her bath, hiding in the corner near a full-length framed picture of her, painted to commemorate some past triumph. I turned my back on the room, viewing the chamber only through the mirror set into the picture's frame. I hid well, for---although, now, from the distance of these many years, I can see that I wanted to be found, to have her make me real again even if through the fierce force of her anger---I also feared that anger. Better to be tentatively real in hope, to breathe in the mingled scents of her room, of the perfumes she wore, of the lavender in which the bed linens were packed, of the cedar that lined her closets and clothes chests. When Mother emerged from the bath she wore a scarlet Japanese kimono trimmed in gold, embroidered with patterns of tigers and phoenixes. Her glossy hair was wrapped in a towel that was a precisely matching shade of scarlet. Her first task upon entering the room was to bend at the waist and rub the excess water from her shining black hair. She slowly combed the tangles from her hair, never tugging lest one of the long, dark tresses break. Combed, that dark curtain hung past her waist, and because I knew she was proud of that shining dark fall, I felt proud of it as well. I watched with my breath held as she pulled her hair back and inserted it into a silver clasp, never breaking a single strand. Hair combed and clipped, Mother seated herself at her vanity and viewed herself in the mirror. She dropped her robe from her shoulders and sat naked to the waist, the breasts that had never nursed me almost as firm and round as those of a girl. She leaned forward, her gaze intent on her face, on the skin still slightly dewed from her bath. Her gaze was intent, studying those high-cheekboned features critically, looking for any lines, any trace of the sagging that comes with age. There were some, for she was past the first bloom of youth and this dry climate is not kind, even to those who live sheltered from the burning sun. Yet, although this was a critical review, I could sense Mother's pleasure in what she saw. It was her face, after all, and like so many who look at themselves too often in mirrors, she thought that this reverse image, seen rigidly straight on as we are so rarely seen by others, was her truest self. I was the one who was shocked. This was the first time that I can remember seeing my mother with her features unadorned by cosmetics. This was a different face entirely from the one I knew. Her brows were as pale as my own, her skin---if possible---more sallow. Even her eyes, usually deep blue where mine were hazed blue-grey, were not the eyes I knew, their color pale and less vibrant. I shrank back into my hiding place, watching in the least corner of the mirror as my mother worked the transforming magic of color upon her face; watched as tints from fat, round poLindskold, Jane is the author of 'Child of a Rainless Year' with ISBN 9780765309372 and ISBN 0765309378.