Meredith Quartermain: I, Bartleby

say an e , in orange, then m in blue, r wearing red, d wearing brown, t dressed green, h sporting purple, i in sleek black. Words of colour. Hold on to the world of our first histories. Like purple Vasco, blue da Gama sailing his ships around lion-coloured Africa for spices from cinnamon Orient. The new world of green Lief Erikson in his square-sailed ships. Greenland claimed by orange Erik the Red. Hold on to the world.

Hold on, it’s coming. The yellow world in the hold of a pink whaler. The brown world in a white galleon. The spotted world in the hold of red, white, and blue. Rolling seas of horses going to World War I’s coronets and golden eagles. Will the rope hold to their dungy stalls? Hold on to a job invisible as window glass. His decision holds for all cases and capitals, countries, and provinces. Which one is the biggest — Russia the rusty or Canada the white; Ontario the rose or British Columbia the peach? Which one holds your breath? In blue states or red. Gold-star tested. You find yourself outside, sailing schooners of grudges, not holding water. Just a puddle on the pavement leaked from your limp flags and washcloths. You are tired of this tendency of words to become toy merchantmen. You wish they’d absorb you in cotton balls. Then you wish you could rub them like lamps — genie away on her carpet. To a sunrise crossing paths in the forum. Of what? Still you don’t know. Of room-for-everyone-ness. Speech beside itself. For and against. Speech on the carpet.

Yellow of a windbreaker found in Mom’s closet after she died. Needing this, now that my hold on the world is less certain, I put it beside her binoculars, her orange statuette of Buddha meditating, and her radio. Forsythia yellow, her favourite colour. She wasn’t supposed to know colours because she wasn’t an artist like Dad, her art restricted to choosing print blouses to pick out the green in hand-me-down trousers, while he wore plaid shirts with checked jackets.

Sunny yellow, the colour of her 1940s short wool coat with big wooden buttons, which lived in the pine chest waiting to be made into something else. Yellow taffeta, the dress she made me when I was ten, trimmed with dotted voile. I wore it, with crinoline, white gloves, and a little white purse, down the rows of papered tabletops in her home-ec class demo. Dad photographed me in black and white and I saved the blue plastic off the flashbulb. Years later, after they divorced, she sewed some light summer robes — a maroon one for my sister, a blue one for me, somehow lost, and a peach one for herself, which I saved from her closet. Along with a rag I’d used in the final cleaning of her apartment — a frayed and faded salmon towel I used to wonder why they kept in their bed.

I like the red of a deep-scarlet valentine. Red words, too: vermilion, rose madder, oxblood, henna. What about a knock-around word like ruddiness . Like blush . Hot cheeked. Age seventeen with a crush on my father’s friend — his European accent, his suits, his MG convertible. Some joke made and my face the colour of raspberries. It was best not to like. Not to show it. Not to proclaim your loves. Put them away. Let them smoulder. Horrible to be laughed at. To feel others knowingly poking fun and your body giving in to their jibes — your cheeks a billboard for all to see. That the teasers were under your skin shooting bows and arrows and batting ping-pong balls. Infuriating that they had this been-aroundness that let them make you drop your gaze.

Then you try it, too — hey, let’s make him blush (this is how to be knowing and smarter than). Ho ho, lookit Ken wearing Sally’s cherry lipstick. Roses are red, violets are blue, Ken and Sally, doodley-doo. Piss off. Ha-ha, check out the kiss marks. But it didn’t make you smarter. It just made you somebody who could bug people. Make them blush. You’ve got too much blush on — let me fix it. It’s not blush; it’s real. Teacher powdering my cheeks in white foundation: my stage debut as lead in The Ugly Duckling in my homemade white cotton muumuu. Princess for a night, in the plywood community hall with its benches and loggers and shake makers watching a drama put on by the Quaker kids across the river. Watching the prince who would transform the duckling, after the play was over. By poking his fingers into her vagina and talking dreamily and importantly about the hymen.

Don’t wear blue with green, or brown with blue. My first suit was beige polyester. Mom chose it, and the suede pumps that didn’t quite match. No longer would I be a forestry worker in steel-toed boots. Pantyhose in camel, taupe, and sand would turn my legs to shivering targets of male gaze. A brown leather purse, school oxford colour, would be my constant companion.

Padded walls of hemp sacking divided my vinyl wood-grain desk from other brown vinyl desks. Co-worker Dan wore polyester suits the colour of coffee grounds, and we carried our brown Samsonite briefcases to other offices of brown vinyl desks and beige dividers, where we sat at vinyl wood-grain tables with chrome legs and taught payroll clerks to fill in data-entry forms.

We drew flow charts with mechanical pencils, our flow lines crossing completely logically, linking our arrowheads to merge-triangles, decision-diamonds, input/output parallelograms. Dan’s hair, baker’s chocolate, fell over his pimples, his fingers flew over the keys writing lines of code. His ancestors had come from China, and at lunch in the vacant desks, we built walls with black and white Go stones, while our pinstriped navy bosses spoke of touching base at this point in time in terms of the bottom line for the state of the art. They won’t keep me, he said, jaw set, eyes intent on Go-board grid lines, I want to be associate, then partner. They want too much money to buy in. He’d sail off to a better company.

Our bosses let me go instead, and a dank emptiness, a tossed-out greyness, seeped in till I was nothing but a clouded rainy sea. Nothing but a sickening feeling that I’d failed a test though all my answers were correct; that before I could live I’d have to beg someone for the right to food and shelter; and who would ever choose me — I was too university, too tree hugger, too tongue-tied. I pressed hard on my flow charts, clicked the button for new leads. Didn’t want Dan to know. Didn’t want him to think I wasn’t just as destined as he was for partnership. You’re breaking a lot of pencil leads today, he said, through the divider.

In the sixties and seventies, Dad had a studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown. He lived there, contrary to city regulations, cooking on a hot plate, sleeping in his office, and cadging showers from friends. I remember the toilet brown with dirt, and the wash basin, used for everything from shaving to dishwashing to brush cleaning, splattered with paint and grime. But among the jumble of magazines, LPs, and food wrappers on the office table, I would find white boxes containing almond cakes big as dinner plates.

Years later I searched for the white wall and the grey door open only at certain times to the windowless almond-cake shop where he got them. He took me there only once — the room bare except for a single glass case, where two or three clerks boxed and sold these giant golden cookies at least an inch thick and six inches across, their tops decorated with bronzed almonds, the cracks in their edges as they rose and spread during baking bursting with sugar, shortening, and almond paste. I never found that almond-cake shop. I tried every bakery I could find, but the almond cakes they sold were small and thin, like regular cookies. They were too shiny on top or they tasted too much like the mashed red beans of moon cakes.