Mauve
My mom named me after the color of the room I was born in. It’s not a pretty color at all if you ask me. It’s too pale, dull, and faint. I like my colors to be intense, bright, and vivid. But I guess Momma didn’t really care.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care about me because I think she did. It was just that she didn’t care what she named me at that point because she was in so much pain. It was probably the last thing on earth she thought she would call me. It still pains me to think it was the last thing on earth she ever saw.
After Momma died, I was raised by my grandpa until I was nine. He and I never spoke much. I don’t know why he took me. I would think my aunt would have just taken me from the start, but she didn’t want me until I was nine, for whatever reason.
Not long after she took me in, I began pestering her about my name since Grandpa never said anything. She had no way of knowing why Momma named me what she did, so I made her take me to the house where Momma had me. We couldn’t go inside the house because some other family had bought it after Momma died, but my aunt said she remembered the room I was born in having walls of that color. “I’m sure they painted over the walls already,” was all she said when we pulled up to the house.
It wasn’t much to look at. It was just a house after all. But what struck me most about it was that this was the place where I took my first breath and the place where Momma took her last. That’s what stayed with me long after we left.
I became far less interested in my name after that. I began to realize that it was just my name, and it was just a word. Where it came from and how it became my name stopped mattering.
Until one day when it did again.
I was at the hardware store with my aunt searching for light bulbs. I took a stroll down the paint aisle as she went off and searched. I always loved this particular part of the hardware store because of the paint samples spread over the wall. It was like a rainbow I could touch, every shade of every color imaginable, all of them on little strips of paper that my aunt said were free, though I never actually got up the nerve to take one.
On this trip, though, one strip caught my eye. I’d done this same thing dozens of times before, this browsing and being in awe of the rainbow wall of colors, so I had no idea why I was so mesmerized by that one color in front of me. I studied it. I felt it without touching it. I connected to that color, and I couldn’t explain why or how.
As I studied that card more, I reached out and pulled it off the rack. Then I realized why it had caught my eye: my name was on it.
Everything froze for me. I found myself transported into the room where I was born. Only, I wasn’t me. I was in agony on the bed, clinging to the bedsheets, writhing from the pain of the child inside me aching to get out. I felt my whole body convulse as the pain engulfed me from head to foot. That pain suddenly centralized itself and exploded viciously between my legs. Then a calm came over me. The pain was gone. A baby lay on my lap. As I stared at that tiny face gasping for air, I felt life draining out of me, flooding down my legs. Yet, through the misery, through the life draining away, I somehow felt at peace. I looked away at the walls and mumbled the only thing that my mind let me say. I took one last look at the baby on my lap as someone grabbed her from me, and the pale walls instantly turned black.
As quickly as I had landed in that bed, I was back as a little girl in the hardware store. I stumbled back into the shelf behind me, knocking down several paint cans. I was shaking all over. My sudden, unexplainable, vicarious trip back into Momma jolted me in a way I’d never felt before. I struggled to compose myself, not sure of what had just happened.
As if by reflex, I grabbed the purple strips in front of me. I screamed as I tore them to pieces in the middle of the aisle.
My aunt eventually came over to stop me from making more of a scene than I already had. As she tried to calm me, I had this strange feeling that I couldn't let anyone choose that dreadful color for themselves, or worse, for their kids, because that color was mine. So I picked up and stuffed the torn pieces and few remaining whole strips into my pockets as the clerk stared at me in a stupor, not quite sure what to make of the screaming girl terrorizing his paint strips. I walked out with tears rolling down my face.
We drove home in relative silence; my soft sobs were the only sound. I figured my aunt was trying to piece together exactly what had happened and couldn’t quite find the right words to say or the right question to ask, so she just stayed quiet. I’m not sure I would have known what to say or answer if she had said anything anyway.
She didn’t know where to begin once we got home, so she sent me to my room. She never once brought that day up to me again. She never took me back to the hardware store, which I guess was for the better anyway. My aunt never said so, but I knew I had embarrassed and scared her that day.
I remember taking the shreds of paper and tossing them out of my window into the wind. I tore the remaining strips into the tiniest pieces possible and cast them outside as well. The pieces just fluttered away in the breeze, almost like the fluffy seeds of a dandelion off to start a new life when they landed.
Only one strip remained whole. I held it in my hand as I watched the last of the tattered others float away. For whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to tear this last one up. Looking at it in my hands, I felt that it was whole in a way I had never been and probably never would be.
That was the last thing I remember about that day. Those memories were locked away, blocked out of my mind until I was sifting through a box of stuff from childhood after my aunt passed away. It was an old wooden cigar box that must have been my grandpa’s or my uncle’s. I had forgotten entirely about that box where I kept treasures from my younger days. I opened it up and found that it had coins of all sorts, ticket stubs from places my aunt took me to visit, hair bands, stickers, buttons, a few LEGO pieces; I even found a picture of a boy I liked in middle school, complete with the Sharpie heart I’d scrawled around his face one night while dreaming about being his wife, if I remember correctly. There were several cheap rings and bracelets that I remember saving money to buy, along with a few bookmarks and a box of colored pencils I used to draw pictures of rainbows with. I’d always thrown the purple ones out, so I wasn’t surprised to find only nine out of the ten in there.
The purple paint sample from that day at the hardware store was at the bottom of the cigar box, buried under all of my forgotten childhood treasures. I didn’t remember putting it in the box, but as soon as I caught sight of it, almost all of the feelings and memories of that day rushed back into me. Almost.
The anger I suddenly remembered from then wouldn’t come back for some reason. All I felt was peace.
I gently pulled the paper strip from the box, and without even thinking, I knew immediately why I had kept it and what I had to do with it.
“I need some help with your paint.”
“I think we can work something out.” I could see the clerk eyeing my expanding waistline when he asked, “Boy or girl?”
“A girl.”
“First one?” he smiled.
“Yes.”
“You’re in for a treat. The wife and I are on our fourth girl. We keep shooting for a boy, but no luck yet,” he quipped with a chuckle. “Are you painting her room?”
“That’s the plan,” I replied, not meaning to sound as sarcastic as I did.
“Got it. Let’s head over to the paint samples and find you the right shade.”
“No, that’s not necessary. I have what I want here.”
I handed him the paint strip.
“Whoa,” he snorted, I’m sure not meaning to sound as snarky as he did. “Well, we don’t get much call for this color. Can’t say I’ve ever really mixed one like this. This is an old sample, too. All of ours now have codes on them to tell us how to make the color.” He eyed the card closely, scratching his head lightly. “Let me see what I can do. Maybe there’s a new one here that’s like it.”
He motioned me to follow him to the paint samples, so I did. He thumbed his way through several shades of purple before he pulled out the closest one he could find from his rainbow.
“Not exact, but I think it’s pretty close.”
I held it next to mine and studied the two side by side.
I shook my head. “Not quite. Could you find one a little, maybe, paler than that?”
He took both strips back to his computer and typed in the code from the back of his. He scrolled through the results and shook his head.
“I might be able to reduce the purple and make it paler. I think, anyway,” he said, not too assuredly of himself. “No guarantees though. You sure you don’t just want this one? I think it’s better than this old one, personally,” he said with a smile.
“No, the old one is what I want.”
“Well, I guess the old one it is, then. Give me a few minutes and let me see if I can get the formula right.”
As he began peeling the lid off of the fresh can of white he’d grabbed from the shelf, I went back to the rainbow wall and browsed the colors in front of me. They were all so strong, so bright, so vivid, much more so than I remember them being as a kid. It had been several years since I had last browsed the paint samples, so change was inevitable.
“I think I’ve got it,” the clerk announced after a few minutes, breaking me from my browsing. I watched as he dipped a stick into the can and tapped it onto the lid.
“Well, what do you think? Is that close enough for you?”
I looked carefully at the lid to see if the shade was right. I held up the sample next to the dot. I could feel the tears already welling in my eyes. I know he saw them, too.
“Hey, if it’s not right, I’ll mix you another one, don’t worry,” he said empathetically. “I can make it right if you don’t like it.”
“No,” I said softly. “It’s perfect.”