Beyond the Pale
When my life was upended, my walls followed suit.
by Lisa Gabriele
July 28, 2008
When I was a kid, my eyes were inexorably drawn to the gaudy: shiny baubles hanging off ears, anything pink, strings of pearls roped with gold chains, red hair, beads, feathers, ribbons, flashing neon and purple paisley. I loved looking at pictures of hookers and pimps and Prince; the panoramas of Times Square made me long to live there.
I was lucky to have come of age in the '80s; I suited the bigness, the loudness of that era. My hair was streaked and spiral permed, laced with neon ribbons. My wrists and ankles were strangled with jewelry, bells at my waist, rings on my toes — I made noise when I walked. My Romanian nana told me we were half gypsy, so I came honestly by my style sense, which was less Madonna than hippie whore, nothing left unadorned.
By university, my fashion sense was dying to transfer to the walls of the rooms I inhabited. But in my dorm, we weren't allowed to paint or change the dˇcor or furnishings, so I began to cover them up as best I could. The closet doors were festooned with Indian shawls and wrap skirts. I draped the utilitarian mirror with diaphanous scarves and necklaces, threw down rugs on the scratchy carpet — anything to cover up the white, white walls. A Queen poster and a classic Klimt did the trick, as did a shimmery orange tapestry blanket that I suspended over my bed.
Things got worse after I finally moved out on my own. My first stop after renting my first solo apartment in Washington D.C. was the paint store. It was the beginning of Clinton's second term. Nirvana was still huge, but I couldn't glom onto the grunge aesthetic. Too brown, too plaid, too depressing. My stint in D.C. represented the height of my Circus Period; yellow-on-yellow striping for the foyer, two kinds of orange in the kitchen, canary dining room, dark-blue bathroom, and a Kelly-green living room. Anything white, bland, or plain was covered in color. Even the refrigerator. I loved watching people react when they walked into the place. They would take their coats off in slow motion, necks craning to take in the scene.
Kinder guests would keep it vague. "Boy. You've been busy." Or, "It's . . . amazing?"
The less-kind would be more direct.
"Jesus Christ." Or, "Why do I have a powerful urge to lie down?" Or just plain, "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck."
Despite the bald optimism of the palette, I can't think about this style era without feeling sad. My rooms screamed for attention louder than I did. There was no mystery to them, no subtlety. I suppose it's what we do when we're young: we splatter ourselves, our politics and preferences all over our clothes and walls as though to announce, "This is me! I like this music! This artist! These colors! Vases! Clocks! Paintings and prints! Do you like them too? Do you like me?" I never trusted the slow unveiling process of intimacy, leaving small crumbs of myself under the assumption that the curious would stick out the journey. I was the type who upended her entire toy box at the feet of the new kid I wanted to be friends with. My apartments were painted for maximum distraction, minimum intimacy. White walls signified a kind of vulnerability, like silent spaces in conversations, another thing I had a hard time tolerating.
When I moved back to Toronto I threw up a similar circus vibe in my new apartment: yellow-striped foyer, this time a red-on-green kitchen and a dark-brown living room, washed with beige overlay to look like a cave. Then I painted the bedroom baby blue, with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" written out in white across the four walls. I don't know much about feng shui, but I imagine lining the chamber in which you're supposed to find rest with a depressing poem written in shaky handwriting is like hiring someone to slap you awake every four hours until you cry.
Around this time, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Maybe it was all the time spent sitting very still in plainly painted waiting rooms, but I began to notice my walls, to see and feel them when I'd come home from a wrenching medical visit. I started with my bedroom, which was baby blue and a place in which I spent much of my time lying on my side blinking back tears. I had abandoned my D.C. apartments fully painted, so I had no idea how difficult it was to cover bright colors with white again. But rolling on the white was a revelation. I couldn't cover the yellow foyer fast enough, and by the time I got to the kitchen, something like a decades-long storm cloud had begun to lift and disappear. The paintings, photos and posters I had removed to get to the walls were never put back up again. I sold most of the vases and lamps and ashtrays and throws.
My mother was dying by the time I got to the living room. I had a few days to pack a bag to help her cope with her last few weeks at home before she was moved to palliative care. Grief is a tricky thing. It can take you down with it, or it can push your reset button. Around that time, I was told by a therapist that my irresistible need for white walls was a need for a tabula rasa; it was a primal way to prepare to grieve. Whatever it was, it marked the beginning of the end of the Circus Era. I left a white apartment to go to a white hospital to say goodbye to a woman whose color was draining from her body by the day. Just to push the metaphor a little bit further, it was in the dead of the coldest Canadian winter in decades. I drove to the hospital surrounded by white, and white was everywhere in the wing where people died. Not so in the childrens' wing. There, the walls were festooned with goofy colors, everything designed to be luridly distracting and falsely festive.
My mother died. The funeral was sad. I came home, grateful to enter a spare white space, pared down to bare essentials. A toaster on the white counter. Towels (white) hanging in the bathroom (white). A mirror leaning on the wall (white) outside my bedroom. Six years later, I've allowed one wall in my new loft to be painted a pale robin's-egg blue. But other than that, the walls are white. The circus has left town. n°
©2008 Lisa Gabriele and hooksexup.com
