e u TrColors on
ine Venz
y Christ fiction b
16
briomag.com d december 2008
W
“
A salad and a box of crayons taught me a lesson about how God sees me.
ant to do something fun over lunch, Monica?” Coming from any other intern at Central Publishing, that might have been an invitation to power walk to the new coffee bar downtown. But this was Adele. Adele, who decorated her cubicle with pages from her inspirational page-a-day calendar (“A merry heart makes a cheerful countenance”) and a picture of her family at a cheese festival, pretending to take a bite from a giant wedge of cheddar. Adele, who left pamphlets from her dentist on the importance of flossing in the lunchroom. Adele. I looked up from the marked-up pages scattered across my desk. That was one of my jobs at Millennium: reviewing novels from hopeful authors, making notes to help the editor decide whether to read the book or return it with the standard “Thank you, but your manuscript doesn’t meet our needs at this time” rejection letter. Other interns were squeamish about picking apart someone’s masterpiece. I was good at it. I sipped my double-caffeinated cola. “What did you have in mind?” She held up a two-page spread with a color-coded chart. “The Food Guide Pyramid?” I guessed. “No, silly! It’s a color analysis, from a fashion magazine. You know—you find your eye, skin and hair color, then see whether you’re a winter, spring, summer or autumn. Then it tells you what colors look best on you. Let’s you and me do our colors.” I looked for a polite excuse. As usual, I didn’t look long. “No, thanks, Adele. I’ve been dressing myself since first grade.” “Oh, it’s not just clothes. It’s makeup, too,” she enthused. “Maybe you could pick up a few pointers.” Coming from anyone else, that would have been a dig. My beauty routine consisted of washing my face and plucking my eyebrows. That was intentional. That was a statement. “I’d rather sleep 20 minutes later in the morning. I hear it’s good for your skin.” The bright eyes clouded. The corners of the mouth fell. Adele had perfected the stray-puppy look. I glanced back at my desk and the pages framed with red ink scribbles. My comment on a syrupy love scene jumped at me: “Gimme a break!” A break—I needed one. And Adele needed a friend. “Ah, why not? It’ll be like being back in junior high.” One of us would enjoy that. Rose Brown and Olive Drab We went to the lunchroom where, fortunately, almost no one ate lunch. At Millennium, eating precooked objects from a togo box at your desk was a point of pride.
Adele opened the chart on the table between us and uncapped a marker. “Let’s start with you. First, skin tone. Would you describe yourself as ivory, brown, beige, rosy beige, olive, ivory or translucent?” “Translucent? What am I—sushi?” “It’s a summer shade,” Adele insisted. “You said ivory twice.” “It’s under both winter and spring.” I peered at the chart. “What kind of
shell game is this?” Adele gave a little pout. I looked at my arms. Late June, and I didn’t have a trace of a tan—and wouldn’t unless Millennium started a night shift and put me on it. “Color me beige.” Appeased, she marked the chart with a little star. “Right. Now, hair color.” She studied my self-sheared mop, then consulted the chart. “I’d narrow you down to smoky brown with gold highlights or walnut brown with red highlights.” “Smoky brown,” I declared. “No highlights that I ever noticed.” She starred the chart. “Eye color. Soft brown, rose brown or dark brown with gray rims around the iris?” “Rose brown? Since when is brown a shade of roses? Unless they’re dead.” Adele’s cheeks puffed like a rabbit’s. “Dark brown,” I said. She squinted at my face. “I don’t see gray rims around the iris.” “Good. I’ve seen those around the yolks of hard-boiled eggs.” Adele laid the marker on the table and stared. I remembered that look from junior high, the cross teacher glare that preceded a lecture on poor attitude. She strode to the refrigerator and returned with a tower of plastic containers. She snapped the lids and assembled the contents: Bibb lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, croutons, a sprinkle of seasoning and a drizzle of a fruity-looking vinaigrette. She bowed her head, murmuring grace. I gave myself the lecture: Would it kill you to be nice to her? Maybe she’s a little . . . much. But can’t you stop being a critic for half an hour? I wandered toward the vending machine, bought a bag of mini cheese-and-crackers and slunk into a chair beside Adele. “I’m sorry, Adele. It’s just, all these experts telling us what to eat and what to wear and . . . Don’t we trust ourselves anymore?” She spoke to her salad. “Is it so terrible to want a little affirmation now and then? Not all of us are daring enough to ignore what people think of us, like you.” Daring? Is that how it looked to Adele? Funny—to my
december 2008 d briomag.com
17
“I’m not l a u g h i n g .” How could I? I didn’t get it. “I might have been pink, but I only had an eight-pack of crayons. How I had the nerve to be red . . .” Crayons? “Well, you were . . . young.” She nodded. “Seven. My dad was blue. My mom was orange. My brothers were brown and black.” Things were clearing up. “How did you figure that?” Adele shrugged. “It just fit. Blue was serious, reliable. So was Dad. Orange reminded me of pumpkins. Pretty fall decorations. Or warm, sweet pumpkin pie. My brothers were dark colors, like the basement where they used to hide and scare me.” It was clever, and kind of touching: a little girl who carried her family in a box of Crayolas. “But you weren’t red?” Adele snorted. “Do I look like a red? Red is a warm color, an exciting color. Color psychologists have proved it. Red stands out. It makes you sit up and notice, like when you see blood and fire. That’s not me. My little brother—he was red. As in flashing red lights, ‘danger ahead.’ “Greens and blues are cool colors. They make you think of serene places, like a lake with shady trees. That was my older brother. Blue, like still water. And green like an alligator, quiet on the surface but sneaky underneath.” Her voice trailed off. “I should have been brown. Olive-drab, if I’d had one.” “Believe me, Adele, you are not drab. What about yellow? You know, bright, cheerful—” Adele gasped. “Oh, no! Yellow was God!” At my speechless stare, she softened. “I know what you’re thinking: How can you put a color on God? But I had to include Him, and yellow reminded me of the sun—warm, life-giving, just like God. Later I learned that light waves from the sun contain all the colors. It sounded like Ephesians: ‘One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.’ ”
n u s e h t , w o “N is pure light.
It shows things as they really are.”
parents and teachers it looked like something else. Stubborn. Strong-willed. “A mind of her own,” they all said. Like something was wrong with that? Funny, too, because I’d never figured Adele for one who needed affirmation. In fact, it dawned on me that I’d never met anyone who acted less concerned with winning approval, who never did or said anything just to go along—or to get ahead. Adele was so honestly, unapologetically . . . Adele. She didn’t see that? “Speaking of colors, if you had to pick a color to describe yourself, what color would you be?” Adele badgered her salad with her fork. “Don’t laugh, but . . . I once thought I was red.”
18
briomag.com d december 2008
ILL U ST R ATION
BY
LO R R AINE
T U SON
/ /
S C OTT
H U LL
ASSO C IATES
“Uh-huh.” I tore open the bag of crackers. Adele had one thing right: God is the last person I would have included in a box of crayons, even a 64-pack. God had never been a color to me. More like a kaleidoscope—always changing, one pattern shifting into another. Or a prism, splintered and fractured in a dozen diverging rays: merciful and vengeful, forgiving and punishing, a loving Father who was unknowable. After a while I got fed up with all the contradictions. If God wanted me to believe in Him, He’d have to do a better job of telling me who He was. Apparently, He had told Adele. At least in one childlike insight, she had made some sense of Him. So of course I tried to tear it apart, even as I twisted apart crackers and scraped filling with my front teeth. But the image held together better than the crackers—even better than Adele realized, it seemed. Otherwise, she’d have seen what I was seeing now.
We exchanged a long look, until Adele dropped her gaze. “Even the tomato doesn’t know it’s red.” I sighed. Then I ate the visual aids and shrugged. “But, I’m no expert.” Adele stirred her salad a while. She cleared her throat. “You’re right, though. Pure light is the only light worth looking at ourselves in.” I smirked. “If you can find it.” “Oh, it’s hard to find,” she agreed. “But it’s worth looking for. If you really want to see how things are. You might even see . . . gold highlights you Tomato Red and Gold Highlights never noticed.” “Did you know,” I mused, “that light is acI arched my tually what gives things their color? Things brow. I hadn’t figabsorb some light waves in the color specured Adele to be so trum and reflect others. Like this alleged sharp—piercing, in cheese. It looks orange because it reflects fact. I countered: the wavelengths that we see as orange.” “It would have to be I set the round golden cracker on the an awfully powerful table between us. “Now, the sun is pure light.” light. It shows things as they really are.” “Oh, you’d be I plucked a crouton from her salad and amazed!” Adele’s eyes set it about 6 inches from the cracker. “If were merry. “Of this chunk of bread looks white with a course, it takes a cerbrown crust in the sun, then that’s what tain amount of . . . it is.” daring.” She glanced uncertainly between me She’s nailed it. and her pilfered crouton. “I . . . guess Maybe God wasn’t so.” so hard to figure “Our problem is, we don’t get pure sunout. Maybe I was light.” I grabbed the shaker of seasoning and just afraid to see rained parsley flakes onto the table. “There’s “We don’t what He’d show me. all this dust and pollution and . . . all kinds of always see About myself and everystuff between us and the sun. So we don’t always colors as they one else. see colors as they really are.” really are.” I’d painted myself into a cor“I . . . never thought of that.” ner. Rather, I’d handed Adele the paint“And artificial lighting can fool you,” I pressed. brush and the paint. Or in this case, the “Like, the fluorescent lighting in produce departments is spebox of crayons. cially designed to play up greens. That’s fine if you’re that lettuce I felt a growing, grudging smile. Adele. I was starting to see leaf there—” her in a new light. And to me, she looked like a red. m Adele raised her fork defensively. “—but if you’re this bright red wedge of tomato, you look . . . drab. You might even say, olive drab.” Christine Venzon shines her true colors in her hometown of Peoria, Ill.
december 2008 d briomag.com
19