Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [64]
There was also in the cellar an old wooden dresser, on which sat several tins of mostly dried-up paint and varnish, an assortment of stiffened paintbrushes, stirring sticks, and boards on which colors had been tried or brushes wiped. A few tins had their lids still on tight, and these we pried open with some difficulty and discovered paint that could be stirred to an active thickness. Then we spent time trying to loosen up the brushes by pushing them down into the paint and then hitting them against the boards of the dresser, making a mess but not getting much of a result. One of the tins, however, proved to contain turpentine, which worked much better. Now we began to paint with those bristles that had become usable. I could read and spell to some extent, thanks to my mother, and Nancy could too, because she had finished the second grade.
“Don’t look till I’m finished,” I said to her, and pushed her slightly out of the way. I had thought of something to paint. She was busy anyway, smashing her own brush around in a can of red paint.
I wrote NAZI WAS IN THIS SELLER.
“Now look,” I said.
She had turned her back on me but was wielding the paintbrush on herself.
She said, “I’m busy.”
When she turned her face to me it was generously smeared all over with red paint.
“Now I look like you,” she said, drawing the brush down on her neck. “Now I look like you.” She sounded very excited and I thought she was taunting me, but in fact her voice was bursting with satisfaction, as if this was what she had been aiming for her whole life.
Now I must try to explain what happened in the next several minutes.
In the first place, I thought she looked horrible.
I did not believe that any part of my face was red. And in fact it wasn’t. The half of it that was colored was the usual mulberry birthmark color, which, as I believe I have said, has faded somewhat as I have aged.
But this was not how I saw it in my mind. I believed my birthmark to be a soft brown color, like the fur of a mouse.
My mother had not done anything so foolish, so dramatic, as to ban mirrors from our house. But mirrors can be hung too high for a young child to see himself in them. That was certainly so in the bathroom. The only one in which I saw my reflection readily hung in the front hall, which was dim in the daytime and weakly lit at night. That must have been where I got the idea that half my face was this dull mild sort of color, a furry shadow.
This was the idea I had got used to, and that made Nancy’s paint such an insult, a leering joke. I pushed her against the dresser as hard as I could and ran away from her, up the stairs. I think I was running to find a mirror, or even a person who could tell me that she was in the wrong. And once that was confirmed I could sink my teeth into pure hatred of her. I would punish her. I had no time at the moment to think how.
I ran through the cottage—Nancy’s mother was not anywhere to be seen, though it was Saturday—and I slammed its screened door. I ran on the gravel, then on the flagstone path between stalwart rows of gladioli. I saw my mother rise from the wicker chair where she sat reading, on our back verandah.
“Not red,” I shouted with gulps of angry tears. “I’m not red.” She came down the steps with a shocked face but so far no understanding. Then Nancy ran out of the cottage behind me all amazed, with her garish face.
My mother understood.
“You nasty little beast,” she cried at Nancy, in a voice that I had never heard. A loud, wild, shaking voice.
“Don’t you come near us. Don’t you dare. You are a bad bad girl. You have no decent human kindness in you, do you? You never have been taught—”
Nancy’s mother came out of the cottage, with streaming wet hair in her eyes. She was holding a towel.
“Jeez can’t I even wash my hair around here—”
My mother screamed at her too.
“Don’t you dare use that language in front of my son and me—”
“Oh blah blah,” said Nancy’s mother immediately. “Just listen to you yelling your head