Good Bones

Years after she died, Mother told me which house to buy.

After an hour of receiving mystical wisdom, I wondered how I’d been so silly as to believe in such nonsense as gravity or arithmetic. While I sat in her living room, enthralled, Wendy read Tarot cards, threw the I Ching, and channeled the voices of my guides. The guides laughed a deep-throated laugh that made me feel like a little girl they loved to indulge. Of course they would indulge me––one of them was Mother Kim, who had died ten years earlier. As my session with Wendy ended, she issued a final instruction. “Buy her purple irises for Mother’s Day.”

Dad married Kim Carol Reed when I was twelve. In my stoic and despondent eyes, she looked like a movie star: lips stained crimson, fingernails pink. She dressed in lilac, violet, and amethyst. My clothes were unwashed gray, my hair uncombed. I avoided mirrors. And people too, preferring the comfort of loneliness to the company of playmates.

Mother Kim and Dad bought a house, and before moving the family in, they painted the dining room red. The house they’d moved us out of hadn’t been painted anything, its dust-covered interior a faded shade of poverty. The new dining room was as warm and hypnotic as a fireplace. I’d sit alone at the table, pretending to read, the room’s incandescence a beacon. The year we lived in that house, Mother Kim nudged me out of isolation. She enrolled me in ballet. I went roller-skating with my Sunday school class and joined the mixed chorus at junior high.

In high school, she introduced me to Vogue, which occupied a spot on her nightstand beside a bottle of Chanel No. 5. She pointed out bold patterns on bright fabrics, but I wanted to hide from the colors she admired.

When I was sixteen, she handed me a Robinson’s Department Store shopping bag. Under the tissue paper, I found a hot-pink party dress, a slender column of knife pleats, lined in satin. A pleated lampshade with spaghetti straps. I held it up—pinkies extended, eyebrow lifted, lips pooched.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, just try it on.”

I pulled the dress on over my shorts.

Mother Kim’s expression softened as she pushed me in front of a mirror. “Very pretty. See for yourself.”

She made me wear it for a cocktail party she and Dad were giving. I squirmed through the evening, but years later I would surprise myself, remembering the softness in her eyes and the slide of a satin lining against my skin.

Mother Kim was also clairvoyant, reporting that lost souls were fluttering down the hall, or some far-flung relative was in trouble. As a teenager, I found it annoying. She knew when I’d sneaked off to school in a too-short skirt. She berated me for attracting unwanted attention, but mini-skirts were the uniform of 1969, the camouflage that allowed me to disappear. As an adult preoccupied with marriage and career, I found her ESP guilt-inducing. More often than not, my phone rang just as it crossed my mind to call her, and I imagined reproach in her hello. But her clairvoyance worked under my awareness, cracking reality, calling me eventually to Wendy’s mystical counsel.

I paused before pulling out of Wendy’s driveway. Why had she suggested purple irises? She didn’t know my stepmom’s favorite color had been purple. And I couldn’t recall Mother Kim mentioning a fondness for irises.

Oh, well. There were other things to think about. At fifty-something I was on my own, newly divorced, and in the market for a house.

My realtor, Sue, was waiting for me in the parking lot of her office. We climbed into her sedan. I’d seen so many houses, they’d blurred in my memory by the time she pulled into the driveway of a brick split-level with white shutters. The brick felt homey, the shutters welcoming. Sue led the way up the stairs to the stoop. She stopped for a second, as though listening. “I have a good feeling about this.” Something Mother Kim often said.

I peeked in the front door. “Oh, my.”

At the end of an entry hall, the kitchen glowed orange as a clown’s wig. Ceiling and walls. The orange was intensified by sunlight streaming in through the windows. I was aghast. It was a color that mocked good taste and broke rules. Such a color would only lead to mischief. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The orange sprang to life. I couldn’t help laughing, like the first time cranking a jack-in-the-box, until “Pop! Goes the weasel.”

Sue pointed out the sink and countertops needed replacing, and the subflooring was visible through holes in the linoleum.

Throughout the house, we encountered design inspired by a 64-pack of crayons. Banana in the family room. Powder blue in the nursery. In a second bedroom, color divided the walls horizontally, raspberry from windowsill to ceiling (across the ceiling, too), blueberry from midline to floor (inside the closet, too). How could a sane person think those colors were compatible? Who could sleep in here? Who would do this to a room? Bunk beds. Children slept in here. A mother indulging her daughters would do this to a room, that’s who.

Sue scowled and strode into the hallway. “Awful colors. Beige sells.”

I lingered in the bedroom. Attached to one wall was a munchkin’s full-length mirror, the top of it level with my waist. I knelt in front of it. The walls, reflected behind me, said yes. Of course you can have pink. Blue too, if you want. Said yes to a twelve-year-old. A red dining room will keep you safe. Spoke to a teenager who avoided mirrors. Yes, you are pretty. See for yourself.

I caught up with Sue downstairs as she opened the back door. The patio bore the hallmarks of a place well played-in, where children had just been whisked away by parents in a hurry. A turquoise three-wheeler had crashed head-on into the retaining wall that surrounded the terrace. A red wagon was parked nearby. On its side lay a bicycle with a hot pink basket between the handlebars, the shade reminiscent of my long-ago party dress.

A playhouse stood in the middle of the yard. The girls must have sat beneath the red roof, fussing at their dolls. Had I ever fussed at dolls? Sue was kicking the earth near the fence line. “Looks like they used to have a vegetable garden.” Flowers, too. In beds that bordered the yard on three sides, the leaves of spring bulbs were just breaking ground.

I followed Sue through the banana family room on our way to the basement. In the cool of the cellar, she patted a steel beam. “The house has settled, but they’ve reinforced it well.” She nodded, more to herself than me. “It’s got good bones.” Construction, location, and price met with her approval. She’d negotiate for a kitchen remodel.

I grinned. My own house.

Sunday evening before escrow closed, I stole into the back yard. Weeds had overrun the lawn since the owners had moved out. Chives from the vegetable garden had invaded the grass, which looked awfully brown. The playhouse was gone, only its concrete slab remaining. What had I done? I couldn’t possibly afford to replace that cement with turf. Couldn’t afford to buy new countertops. New kitchen floor. Paint over all those garish colors. Me, Ms. Levelheaded, enchanted by a child’s bedroom. The house I was moving from hadn’t sold yet, not even a nibble. On top of everything else, I had two house payments. The arithmetic defied my checkbook. Sue said she’d had a good feeling about this place, but maybe she’d simply taken advantage of a naïve buyer.

This was the only mortgage I’d signed alone.

The decision mine.

The failure mine.

I sat down hard on a stone bench. As I rubbed my temples to conjure up reassurance, something rustled at the rear of the yard, a flash of color.

The bulbs had bloomed. Purple irises were swaying in the breeze along the back fence … and in the bed beside the patio … and down the length of the property line.

Buy her purple irises.

I leaned back, disbelieving and believing all at once. The irises towered over the lawn. Crabgrass shriveled, and my spine straightened. Mother Kim’s favorite color coaxed me out of my doubts, as she had done for a young girl. Even though I was sitting on a concrete bench in the back yard of my new house, my house, the slide of a satin lining brushed my skin, and I realized it was Mother’s Day.