METAMERISM
The swing set that was in our backyard is put out on the curb. It’s worn and rusted, peeling the way that old things do, a metamorphosis of at-lasts. It’s not on sale for twenty dollars or five or a penny you would find on the street and call lucky. It’s for free, meaning there’s nothing being exchanged, just being let go.
It sounds like Mississippi, one-and-two-and-three all the way up until thirty. Mama’s inside with lemonade. You’re sitting on the rubber seat and kicking your legs up and down. I grab the metal chains, and I push on your fragile frame and watch you fly. The swing set is still in the backyard, our backyard, and the house is painted a fragile shade of almost-green. The air smells like home.
Do you remember the house, my little sister? How it was nestled between an orange tree and a lemon one, the oranges always too sour and the lemons too small for anything. “It’s small, but it’s ours,” is what you said, copying from Mama, who said stuff like that about the TV or the car or the house with one-bath and two-beds, so we had to share, although I didn’t really mind. Back then, we liked the same color and the same animals, the things that really mattered, when you’re seven and nine and the best things in the world are Saturday cartoons. I remember you had always liked Looney Tunes, liked the way Bugs Bunny spoke. I liked how my eyes could glaze over and not remember a single thing. If I missed Road Runner escaping from Wile E. Coyote, I could watch it again the next day and not feel any gaps at all.
I suppose our childhood was like that: days on days where you could forget. But now, the only memories I have don’t come in duplicates of Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays like Mississippis on a swing, disposable and mass-produced. I can only remember one sun, one lazy morning, and one green house that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s painted grey now, can you believe? It matches the color of the curb perfectly, like you could scrape your tender knees on it, with cold sunlight as Neosporin.
There are little things that I can recall in our youth. Simple, undated things that don’t break easily because of their dumbness, soft and malleable. Do you remember fighting over cups? Plastic ones from IKEA, the microwaveable sort, although you could always taste the heat of the polypropylene mixed in with the water. They were yellow and purple and orange and pretty much all of the colors of the rainbow, at least the important ones, you know, the ones that are in the colored pencil packs of six. We fought over the orange one, even though purple was our favorite color, because Mama said she liked the way the orange looked best.
What about the first time we sat at the kitchen table, home alone? And the pizza that took too long to arrive, long enough for us to forget over talk about boys and crushes and who could run faster if they really tried, like getting-chased-by-ten-tigers-and-two-elephants-tried, until the doorbell finally rang. The pizza was cold, although I think it might have just arrived like that, because it was the middle of winter, almost Christmas. I remember that because, as you picked off your pepperoni slices and gave them to me, you talked about which Harry Potter book you wanted the most this year, circling an imaginary catalog in sausage grease. I don’t remember which volume.
There were few chances in the past for the three of us to eat dinner together. Huddled under a fluorescent hanging light, where shadows would draw unappetizing shadows on the food, shining matte on plastic cutlery that bent too easily. Mama would ask about school and we would tell her. We’d smile and she’d laugh. There was always a lot of talk of lost loves, because it was always ending up somewhere it shouldn’t be - Mama’s Valentine’s Day flowers from a somewhere-boyfriend ending up in the trash, the stems not properly cut and shredding the shiny elastic as you pulled it out. The boy you spent days crying over because he’d never like you back. Mama, again, coming home late, after that boy and after blown-out birthday candles and after dinner and after sports games and recitals, and telling you, telling us,
“I’ll try better, baby. I really will.”
She’d stroke our hair and look at us intently, for a moment, as if trying to catch up on all the growth we’d had when she was gone. For a moment, her eyes looked like the dark plastic of the garbage bag. But I’m sure you don’t remember that. That day, Looney Tunes was playing, and Bugs Bunny was doing something stupid. That’s easier to remember, because he always was. But come to think of it, Mama always said those things too.
When we were older, you shot up three inches the summer Mama broke up with her next boyfriend. Tony or Steve or something like that. The skin stretched tighter over your growing knees, but Mama was never there, so I doubt she could tell. You would crawl into her splayed arms, trying to make space in a place you didn’t belong, one arm screaming gentle static and the other resting pin-straight so as not to wake her. She always smelt deeply of cheap perfume, sweet and cracking and expired. It was an easy smell, hard to associate solely with her, and perhaps that’s why I am familiar with thinking of her absence.
I imagine Mama as a free spirit, because it is the only explanation that lets her love us the way she did. She didn’t leave us, she just didn’t stay – and it was a Monday when she did so, a sole Monday, and the sun had that bitter look about it, tainted by winter air that stung slightly in the lungs. Mama was gone then, really gone, like the kind of fluorescent lights in a movie theater, all anticipation and hush until the credits rolled. In my mind, it was playing Jumanji, and Star Wars in yours. I liked to think that she wouldn’t stay; you liked to think she couldn’t. I don’t think either of us cried. Instead, Chinese takeout from one of the flyers that they slid under the door even when it said “No Loitering” drew its tears for us, and the grease and sauce of hilariously bad Kung Pao Chicken wept through the white oyster pails. I think you said something like “This is really bad,” and I said “Yeah.” Maybe I should have said something more, but there was nothing more to say.
Sometimes I thought about sliding flyers under your door too, those enamel sheets that bent too well, so that you could see all the creases and folds under Thursday-afternoon window light. But I never did.
Soon after, we stopped counting life in Mississippis. There was a better line between childhood and now.
You went to college five states away, and you lived under a different sun. I stayed behind, bagging groceries and counting bills. The little green house was sold and painted grey. The grey doesn’t bend in the light the same way the green did, a careful pigment that died and lived with the seasons. Green was never a permanent color, but I think we all believed it was.
I imagine there to be an archive somewhere, deleted duplicates of Saturday mornings where I could smell Mama’s perfume, we didn’t fight over orange cups, Looney Tunes was playing, and the sunlight was pitched perfectly onto our little green house, our “it’s small but it’s ours” house, the one with the swing set that we count Mississippis on. But every time I think about it, I’m sure the sunlight is wrong. I can’t seem to remember why.