Colors Insulting to Nature

“Say goodbye to the nice judges, Liza,” she mewed.

“Goodbye to the nice judges, Liza,” the girl cracked, with a wink.

“Go outside and amuse yourself while Mommy talks grown-up-talk.”

Liza pouted theatrically, then waved bye-bye to the group of middle-aged men as she wobbled on her heels out of the conference room. Seconds later Liza was visible through the one-way windows on the lawn of the industrial park, trying to swing on one of the large, nautically themed boat chains that roped off the parking lot. As she yanked one of the nagging rhinestone straps back up onto her porcelain doll-shoulder, the judges were petrified with worry that the miniature disco Lolita would be spotted from the freeway by a predator on a quest for this particular banquet of perversion, who would swoop down the on-ramp and yank the spangled child into a dirty van. The girl seemed blithely unaware of such dangers and, as evidenced by the trembling of her lower lip, was apparently singing again at top volume as she jerked back and forth on the heavy chain.

Peppy Normal took a spread-eagled stand in front of the judge’s fold-out table with her hands on her hips. Her mouth unfolded into a glossed, yellow alligator-smile.

“She nailed it, didn’t she. You know she nailed it.”

“We have a lot of kids to see before we decide anything, Mrs. Normal.”

“Boys, for Chrissake, it’s a TV commercial, not a goddamn Nobel Prize. Just cut to the chase and tell me: did she nail it, or what?”

The colorless klatch of balding men looked at each other helplessly and squirmed in their orange plastic seats. The bravest among them spoke candidly.

“The spokes-child that the Otter World Fun Park is looking for… how can I say this… we were maybe thinking of a kid who is a little less sophisticated.”

“You wanted Shirley Temple schtick? I thought you were looking for talent.”

Liza had given up trying to swing on the sunbaked chain and was now pressing her nose and forehead against the tinted window. Peering in, she could make out her mother violently gesticulating at the cringing group of men. Two of the judges glanced miserably out the window at her; her Nude Beige pancake makeup had made a small figure-8-shaped smear on the smoked glass. Liza saw her mother grab her oversize, gold-buckled handbag and storm out of the room. Knowing her cue, Liza smiled and waved goodbye through the window again and tottered through the grass toward the car.

Peppy drove angrily, her long brown cigarette pointing out of a crack in the window.

“You were great. They were shoe salesmen. They didn’t get it.”

“I ate a plate of dicks again, Mom.”

“No you didn’t. And don’t say that, say you ‘ate the midget.’ You’re too young to use nightclub slang, it makes people uncomfortable.”

“You make people uncomfortable.”

“They were uncomfortable in their own asses. They exploit otters, for Chrissake.”

Liza’s brother was already visible at the bus stop in front of the shopping center, because his silver ersatz car-racing jacket (selected by Peppy because of the word LANCIA written down one sleeve) made his chunky, fourteen-year-old upper torso look like a Mylar balloon. Ned stood alone with his heavy bag from the hardware store, outcast from the summer cliques of wealthy, mall-wandering Marin County teens, who dazzled the eye in erotically tight designer jeans, sun-bed-tans, gold anklets, frosted hair, and top-dollar orthodontics… all the pro-creative bounty of sustained wealth-eugenics; the attractive rich exclusively breeding with the attractive rich for at least five generations.

“Where are your sunglasses?” Peppy screeched as the guano-battered Honda Civic jerked to a stop against the curb. Ned, releasing a sigh of infinite pathos, produced the mirrorized aviator frames and wrapped them slowly onto his wide, flat face. It was sadly amusing to Ned that his mother would want him to wear the glasses in order to disguise the fact that he had a lazy eye, but she felt no compunction about picking him up in a birdshit-encrusted economy hatchback while the glamorous kids were slinking into the leathery backseats of gleaming BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes.

“You nail it?” Ned asked Liza.

Liza shook her head.

“You eat a plate of dicks?”

Liza nodded. It wasn’t painful anymore, she was used to rejection. In the last three months, Liza had botched commercial auditions for Tender Vittles, Silly Sand, and The Colorforms Barbie Sun n’ Fun Gazebo and failed to impress the casting agent for a horror movie entitled Suffer the Children, yet another in the long line of Omen and Rosemary’s Baby knockoffs wherein innocent youngsters parented by the Dark Lord telekinetically cause the head-exploding death of nannies, bus drivers, and priests. It barely occurred to Liza, at this point, that she was auditioning for anything; the evening gown, fishnets, and sky blue eyeshadow had become her uniform, inasmuch as any soccer girl donned shin guards and cleated shoes.

“What’s in the bag?” Liza asked her brother.

“Science,” Ned whispered cryptically, squeezing the bag more firmly shut.

(A note to the Reader:

In the beginning was the word, and the word was written according to certain unimpeachable rules and formats.

Flashbacks are to be avoided if it is at all possible. Exposition is painful enough all by itself; but to then be enshrouded in the horrible spectacle of the same actors playing heavily filtered, pressed-powdered, and pigtailed versions of themselves is just too disturbing—it threatens the suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, you are being asked to plummet uncomfortably backward in time. Prepare yourself for the ugly g-force as we slam on the retro-jets.)

BACKSTORY:

Penelope “Peppy” Normal, née Pinkney, had been married to Ned and Liza’s father, Hal Normal. Hal had been dazzled by Peppy’s topless juggling act (“Best Juggles in the Business”— Reno Nitewatcher) at the Lady Luck casino in Reno, NV, in May 1965. It was a low point in the life of Peppy, who at twenty-two had been living with her mother following a daring period of LSD experimentation, which culminated with her boyfriend, Chet Borden (who had Seen the Light and changed his name to Blessed Ram Baku), fatally swan-diving off the roof of their Oakland apartment building in a rapturous hallucinogenic brain-rage. A month later Peppy found herself grieving and half-naked before the Reno multitudes. Her act culminated in juggling four pins with tasseled pasties to “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. She was a “good-looking chick,” five foot two, freckled and curvy, who was partial to wigs, because she had suffered the charring effects of a bad perm after cutting off her waist-long, ironed hippie locks. Even though her hair (light brown, a noncolor) had grown back, the wigs were easier to put on for work, and they made her feel as if she was in costume or disguise; eventually she wore them all the time.

The “Dentist from Duluth,” as Hal Normal signed the cards on the single red roses he sent backstage (“cheap,” she thought, “romantic,” he thought), seemed to Peppy as good an escape route from her mother as any. He was a good height, anyway, and had most of his hair, and she had always wanted capped teeth. Sharon, a topless, redheaded magician’s assistant whom Peppy had befriended at work, said he looked like a younger version of Karl Maiden. After dinner dates at various Denny’s-esque restaurants every night of his National Dental Workers conference, Hal proposed, and Peppy, figuring she must either escape her current situation or risk murdering her mother with a serrated steak knife in a Southern Comfort-induced tussle, agreed to marry him the next day in the “Little House of Love” twenty-four-hour chapel, a tiny, shingled building built to look like a gingerbread house, replete with footstool-size concrete “gumdrops” studding the Astroturf lawn. It was all over in fifteen minutes. Sharon, who had only known Peppy for four months, had the dual job of being the wedding’s only witness and covering Peppy’s mother’s Ford Country Squire station wagon with shaving cream and novelty condoms. Peppy regretted the marriage with a stomach-dropping certainty immediately afterward, especially during dinner at her mother’s house later that evening, when Hal pontificated at length about the nauseating new developments in hydraulic flossing.

Peppy had insisted that Hal move from Duluth to Reno; he realized the wisdom of this decision, knowing that his Minnesota Methodist crowd would not warm to a new female who looked like the cartoon lady in the champagne glass from Playboy. They moved into a new, three-bedroom tract home in southwest Reno with a chimney pressed together out of concrete and large flat rocks.

The stressful demands of baby rearing while trying to establish a newlywed life were enough to keep the poorly matched couple distracted from the fact that they loathed each other until late 1972.

Edward Norbert Normal had been born on February 17 in 1966 and Elizabeth Lynn on October 25 in 1967 (Scorpios have hot pants, said Grandma Noreen, Peppy’s mother). The photos from the hospital bed of Peppy, smiling her modeling-school smile and holding a pruny red newborn-wad in a light blue or light pink blanket, suggest that she had been in full Cleopatra cat-eye makeup during her entire labor and delivery process, and that her tall dome of red (or ash-blonde) hair also remained unmussed by the primitive bringing forth of life. Other photos showed the new mother (brunette) smiling bustily at the photographer whilst her long brown cigarette hung perilously close to baby’s eye.

By the time Ned was six and Liza almost five, Hal had been permanently barred from the nuptial bed with the white headboard, on which two carved swans kissed in a heart-shaped symbol of lifelong monogamy. Peppy had a new, Osmond-size set of blue-white upper teeth and an impressive aptitude for painkiller consumption. Hal had a string of dental assistants named Kim, Wendy, and Lois, each of whom was persuaded to inhale balloons full of nitrous oxide after office hours and let him have sex with them in the reclining dentistry chair, in exchange for his looking the other way on their moderate embezzlements.

It all came to a head when Peppy was roused from her pill slur at the sight of one of Lois’s hickeys on Hal’s abdomen when he stepped out of the shower. It was the moment Peppy had been waiting for: a True Crime on which to hang the demise of the loveless marriage, which, due to the presence of toddlers, she would have felt too guilty to leave otherwise. Hal lied with loud indignation about the mouth bruise, but it was all over, and both were relieved.

After a hi-speed divorce (forty-eight hours to Nevada residents with children and property, 192 times the length of the marriage ceremony), Peppy was legally free, Hal having expressed virtually no interest in custody of the children, and having agreed with surprising ease to sign over the new family car and the equity on the house in exchange for Peppy releasing all future claims to alimony or child support. The divorce cost $270. Hal paid; Lois was waiting for him in the parking lot with a bottle of pink champagne. “Woo woo, lucky you,” Peppy cracked at Lois, packing the children into the conservative new 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado. Afterward, the children only saw Hal for their annual checkups. They dreaded his guilty nervousness far more than the tooth cleaning, but he always gave them $50 each to compensate for the birthdays and Christmases that he routinely ignored.

The three-bedroom Reno house was rented out; after paying the mortgage, this provided Peppy with a moderate monthly income. Peppy and the kids moved back in with her mother. Grandma Noreen babysat while Peppy played the field, the field being Bil’s Red Turkey Tavern, where Beer Nuts were sold, beneath a mirror covered with Bil’s favorite bumper stickers:

Free Mustache Rides

No Laugh-a, My Car, Eh?

You’re Goin’ To Hurt Its Feelings

HEY PAL, Watch My Tail….Not HERS!

Peppy was often the only woman in the bar, which made her virtually irresistible to the pockmarked clientele.

Noreen couldn’t understand where the daughter had gotten “the Look-At-Me bug,” as she called it. Peppy eventually called it “artistic flair” and claimed it came from the father she’d never known. Noreen had known WWII veteran Clemont Pinkney less than a month when they were married in 1946, and wasn’t prepared to say whether he was inclined toward fits of exhibitionistic dancing and loud show-tune medleys or not, since he was found dead a mere five days into their honeymoon, wearing her store-bought wedding dress and hanging by the neck from a coat hook by a pair of ruined nylons she’d thrown away earlier that day.

Naturally uncomplicated, hardworking, and less vain than her female counterparts of the time, Noreen went back to wearing her wartime combat boots during her pregnancy. She would never wear dresses or girdles or marry again, choosing instead to live modestly off of Clem’s navy pension, and repress the unwanted remains of her sexual energy through vigorous, tight-mouthed housecleaning.

From the moment she could voice her wants, Peppy had always craved tap-shoes, ballet classes, tutus, mirrors, cosmetics, and pink tinselly things. She lit up at the prospect of being photographed and went into swooning deliriums at the movies, moving her lips to the dialogue with her eyes locked on the lead actress, genuflecting weirdly in the dark. Strangers pointed at her, laughing. She didn’t notice. She was a girl who would buy anything advertised with a kiss, and who never questioned the benevolence of Hollywood Magic. The movies were the home of her heart, where she relaxed, opened like a flower, and let any suggestion float into her unchecked. (In short, she was doomed to lifelong consumer slavery.)

In 1955, after weeks of hysterical pleading, Noreen reluctantly allowed her daughter to enroll in Miss Marquette’s School of Photographic Modeling and Acrobatic Dancing for Young Ladies, where Peppy learned the elements of tumbling, baton twirling, and how to smile with her lips slightly parted, her eyes open wide, and her upper teeth freshly glossed with saliva. Noreen had imagined that Peppy would learn how to be charismatically adorable, like Shirley Temple, or perhaps adorably wisecracking, like Jackie Coogan. What emerged instead was a pocket-size version of Gypsy Rose Lee. Like many fatherless young girls, Peppy was man-crazy and through osmosis somehow picked up her mother’s abandoned sex drive from its cold storage locker and sashayed around in that sublimated man-fever like a lynx G-string. Her mother found Peppy’s dance numbers disturbingly burlesque. “Throw a man in the room, any man,” Noreen lamented, “and that child will put on a bathing suit and do exotic backbends.” Confused insurance agents or dishwasher repairmen shuffled nervously as the preening child wantonly grabbed their attention by doing the splits on the area rug; they often gave her a dollar to go away, creating in Peppy a Pavlovian template for her future employment.

Grandma Noreen’s stoic road through single motherhood made her largely unsympathetic to Peppy’s freewheeling, drunk style of child rearing, but she took Peppy’s evening absences at the Red Turkey as an opportunity to carve Proper Moral Understandings and A Respectable Work Ethic into the little kids, who, she secretly vowed, would never want for respectable, nontopless employment. She taught Ned to stuff and lick envelopes, she taught little Liza how to bag groceries, beer cans first, bananas last. The children slept in Noreen’s small sewing room beneath a framed copy of a silent film poster, the 1917 melodrama Babes in the Woods; Noreen had picked it up at a rummage sale to spruce up the bare wall. It was a rather chilling illustration of a pudgy boy and girl, pinkly angelic and barely past the toddler stage, clutching each other at the foot of a large, threatening black tree. The boy is trying to be brave as his little sister weeps tears of terror; the tangled and sinister woods behind them seem to be conspiring to eat the innocent tots like succulent capons. The poster gave Liza nightmares. She did not want to be abandoned in the woods with Ned, who would think it futile to intervene and probably just watch with scientific curiosity as badgers dragged her by the hair into a dark, wet hole.

In 1976, during this period of Noreen’s regular babysitting, the Montreal Olympic Games were on television; the children, now eleven and nine, were mad for them. They tried to reenact various gymnastic events on Noreen’s living room settee; knees were pressed through the cheap pink cloth of nightgowns; rug burns bearded little chins. Liza was especially affected, particularly in her vivid mental moments before sleep, during which she had a rich and ego-gratifying fantasy life. Liza, at an age when every glory in life seemed possible, would beat out Nadia Comaneci, in slow motion, for a gold medal in the floor routine, to the haunting strains of Nadia’s Theme (Theme from The Young and the Restless) every night. The fantasy expanded during the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, with Liza taking to the ice and beating Dorothy Hamill for more gold medals in figure skating. Everyone would be watching—Peppy, Noreen, Ned, her kindergarten classmates, her teachers, the president. Everyone would clap and cry as she swirled beautifully, her legs in the splits over her head in any direction, her arms swanning upward. As adoring fans wrapped her in an American flag, she would drift into a giddy, love-filled, and triumphant slumber. That is what it will be like, when I am fourteen.