Avocado Green Door

Avocado green door, brass #40 behind which lay matching shag carpet with flecks of goldenrod throughout. Like teal and mauve in the late eighties, a color combo that by 1975 had made its mark and left most civilized corners of the world but still stained my childhood home with its attempt at outdated hip-ness. Furnished with a mix of great-grandma’s brittle Victorian pieces, and curb finds reincarnated in our living as “pole lamp,” “side table,” and “armchair,” as well as the cool 70’s bookshelf: wood plank and bricks, it could have been cool, artistic, eclectic, if not for the shag that highlighted the beaten-down aspects of it all rather than a purposeful shabby-chic ness. Mom found home furnishings and men in the discard pile of other people’s lives. With her highly attuned ability to make something out of nothing, the veritable “silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” (one of her favorite expressions), she was cruelly blessed with deceitful optimism that a new coat of paint could render clean and new what was unrepairable.

Sometimes my chore would be to rake the shag rugs and make them fluffy, though one trip across the living room to flip a record over and the effect was ruined. The shag rake also doubled as a comb for the fringe on the Isfahan rug. When mom was up, meaning anal retentive and controlling as hell, every damned creamy fringe on that rug had to be straight. When she was down, meaning in a deep depression, entombed in her bed for days, there would be a straight-ish off-white line across the floor as well, but this one composed of maggots inching their way towards what?, and away from a week’s worth of piled garbage barricading the sliding door to the patio. Ah, to be able to open that door and get some relief from the smell a Stockton summer can summon up from brown bags full of gunk.

Mom dreamed “Sunset Home and Garden,” but didn’t get beyond an apartment cement patio filled with hundreds of potted plants and mac and cheese with hot dogs and frozen peas.

I knew early on she needed help, and I tried my best. At six I was the one getting up and making us breakfast, wanting to help sustain the dream of happy home and full tummies, and in the hope that this would be an “up” day and she would be out of bed before noon, before dinner time, and I could have a day not filled with deep fears (maybe she is dead in there, maybe I am alone now), and deep loneliness. I became a pro at raising the dead. The heavy anti-depressants and, according to her, her extreme low blood sugar, made her sleep so deeply, it took hours of coaching to get her to swallow a sip of orange juice or take a bite of toast with peanut butter. I would crouch by her bed, begging, “Mommie, just take a sip and swallow, swallow it! Now take a bite and chew. Chew Mommie, chew! Now swallow!!” Pinching her check to get her conscious enough to realize she had food in her mouth helped, but sometimes, I would get impatient and leave her with a bite in her mouth, the plate of toast on her bed. Coming back during a commercial break, walking down the hall, I would pray I would find her sitting up in bed, eating and cheerful, I would visualize it, get excited if I heard a noise from her room. Most often, I would find the glummy bite still in her cheek, peanut butter ooze on the corner of her mouth, deep deep away from me still. One day I found her face plastered in the toast, the peanut butter sticking the bread to her face, it was funny to a seven year old, would have been funnier if my tummy hadn’t been rumbling and it was 2 in the afternoon.