The Green Door

“Every six months I fly to Dallas to get Botox, and I also get collagen injections.” —Janice Dickinson

I had been living in Dallas for six months when one of my old boyfriends, a bad boyfriend but someone who always made me laugh and had been in my life when my first novel was published, contacted me to meet for lunch since he was coming to Texas. He had been in Israel when I met Kevin, and by the time he returned to New York, I was engaged, pregnant, and soon to move to London. I wanted to see someone who knew me back in New York when I was thin, single, and possibly cool. Now, I was none of those things, living in suburbia with my wonderful, albeit demanding baby and my busy, mostly silent husband. I lived in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac with largely invisible neighbors, except the boy across the street who spent most of his time waving at anyone or anything (squirrels, cars, dogs) passing his porch.

The bad boyfriend had booked himself into a small hotel near Highland Park Village, a vintage shopping plaza built in the 1930s with ridiculously expensive stores dominated by fashion labels like Armani and Chanel. The restaurant catered to the wealthy and connected of Dallas society. There was a pack of Texas ladies who lunched after shopping who often drank so much they had to be folded into their limousines by the kitchen staff, their numerous shopping bags placed in the trunk, their drivers waiting. Their conversations centered upon plastic surgery, the difficulty of finding staff for their mansions, and sometimes who was dying, getting divorced, or had gotten fat. It seemed like this would afford the bad boyfriend the most accurate depiction of life in Dallas while making it clear I did not belong. Sadly, as usual, he failed to comprehend what I was talking about, the culture shock I was experiencing, and after Luke hit him in the head with an empty bottle of milk, he pronounced my baby beautiful and said, “Well, maybe you can write about this.”

“No, I said. I can’t. I can’t write about anything. Each time I start something, I get distracted or start thinking about Luke. How I feel is wrong.”
“How do you feel?”
“I want to kill myself.“
The bad boyfriend nodded. “Kind of reminds me of that song, Lucy Jordan,” he said. “In a white suburban bedroom, in a white suburban town, as she lay beneath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers- “
‘I didn’t have a thousand lovers,” I said. “It was just the seventies.”
“You had a few,” he said. “We miss you.”
I made a face.

Nothing worked anymore. Writer’s block had never been a thing for me. If I didn’t feel like writing, I did something else, something fun and healthy, like going to see art or running or watching television. But now, with the few hours allocated while Luke was in daycare, I suddenly had no words. Kevin had told me he didn’t think I’d ever get published again. “It’s not that you’re not good,” he said. “It’s just the numbers make it seem unlikely.” It was my fault for asking him. Asking him the question was like asking someone to tell you whether you looked fat.

And then my parents came. As soon as they got out of the car my mother looked at the house and pronounced it “dreadful.” The neighbor’s kid started waving, and my father said, “Look, it’s Boo Radley.” I burst into tears. Over dinner, I tried to think of things to do in Dallas that they would enjoy. I mentioned the art museum and the Fort Worth Rodeo.
“A cultural mecca,” my mother said, looking sideways at Kevin.
“Or there’s the book depository and the grassy knoll,” I added, forgetting that the Kennedy assassinations had broken my parent’s hearts.
She glared at Kevin. “Get her out of here,” she said. “How can she live in a place where nothing matters as much as football?  She deserves something better. She was brought up to expect culture.”
“Oh, like drunken arguments and insults about her writing?”
“He didn’t mean that. Daddy, he didn’t mean that.”

Kevin stood, picked up James, and left the room. The sound of someone quietly playing the guitar came from Luke’s room. I looked at my mother and father. “This is all I have left,” I thought, “all I have left of Catherine.”

“I’m teaching writing at SMU,” I said.
“A third-rate school,” my mother muttered.
“I’d like to visit the museum tomorrow.” Her father winked at her. “And maybe the rodeo. Ixnay on the grassy knoll.”            
“I’ll drive you back to the hotel.”

The silence in the car felt deafening. In the rear-view mirror, I saw my mother was asleep.
“How’s the writing going?” my father said. 
“I start teaching soon.”
“Will you have time to write?”
“Maybe. Kevin doesn’t think I’ll ever publish again.”
“He said that?”
“Pretty much.”
“Never mind. You do what you do. He doesn’t understand.”

I wanted to tell him how much I missed Catherine, how lonely I was, and how I almost drove into a brick wall, but my mother had woken up. I wanted to ask him whether he ever felt afraid he would never write again and if so, whether that felt like dying. The street was dark. None of our neighbors except the Down syndrome boy came to say hello when we moved in. The house was silent.

“Thank you for defending me,” I told Kevin the next morning.
“I was defending our marriage,” he said.

The rest of their visit passed without any mention of what had been said. We avoided the grassy knoll, visited the art museum, and passed on the rodeo. When I dropped them at the airport, my mother pulled me close and said, “Make him move.” She held me at arm’s length. “You’re so beautiful,” she said. “Don’t gain any more weight.”

After another few months, there was an offer to take over the news bureau in Los Angeles or Chicago. I did not feel prepared to live in another city where plastic surgery and low body fat were aspirational. So, I chose Chicago, another city where I knew no one.

The mail was forwarded from New York to London to Dallas. My English publisher forwarded several fan letters for my second novel. A postcard from one of my London students, Colin, showed a picture of Trafalgar Square with a brief note:

“Dear Teacher, Your replacement is a pillock. Best, Colin.”

There was also a forwarded letter from an arts foundation in New Mexico that had awarded me a writing residency in Taos. Because I was pregnant and moving, I had postponed the residency, but the letter said that it would no longer be available if I didn’t take the fellowship in that calendar year. The prospect of visiting New Mexico sober was a fantasy. Until I visited New Mexico, Ireland was the only landscape I considered transformational. But New Mexico, with its vast sky, jagged mountains, brilliant colors, and desert harshness, replaced my longing for unconsciousness with a feeling of bliss. I barely spoke, barely ate, didn’t drink or smoke for the first time in a decade. Now, I was sober, a married mother with a brain unclouded by drugs and alcohol. Leaving the harsh streets of Dallas for Taos seemed like a way to find my way back.

After we put Luke to bed, I showed Kevin the letter. “If I don’t take that fellowship in New Mexico this year, it’s going away.”
“When could you do that?”
“Between leaving Dallas and moving to Chicago. James can stay with your mom and brother, and sister-in-law in Missouri. We’ll sell the house, and I’ll spend a month in Taos.”
“A month?”
“Two weeks, one week. Anything. I’m sorry but I’m drowning here. I need to write.”
“Luke is in daycare every day. Isn’t that time to write?”
“It’s three hours and everything to do with the house, food, or doctor’s appointments happens during those three hours. I barely sit down, and it’s time to pick him up. Not to mention the fucking swimming pool.”
“I’m sorry your life is so hard.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No? Because it feels like it’s my fault. Everything’s my fault, the heat, the people, the pool, your failure to publish.”
“I haven’t failed to publish. I haven’t written anything that had a chance of publishing.”
“And that’s my fault, right?”
“No! I feel subsumed, Kevin. I was a single woman writer living in Manhattan, and six months later, I’m a married mother who turned down a tenure track job and lost a rent-stabilized apartment. I moved away from all my friends and my family.”
“You could have said no.”
“Really? Do you wish I had?”
He was silent.

Kevin decided we should sign with the real estate lady featured on all the billboards lining the Dallas highways, the one with the huge smile showing white teeth, big, blonde hair, and the catchphrase, “Everything’s Bigger in Texas!”

Donna Farley, for that was her name, walked around our house pointing at things and saying, “keep” or “trash.” When she walked into Luke’s room where he was napping, I expected to hear “trash,” but instead, there was a gasp, and she turned around, all her Texas snap gone, and whispered, “He’s so beautiful.”

Finally she said, “Get rid of the clutter and paint the front door.”
“Any particular color?”
“Green. A nice, deep green.”

I went to the hardware store and bought a can of paint, a roller and brush, painter’s tape, and a pan for the roller. Painting was mom’s favorite activity. When I was in high school, she hired me to paint the kitchen ceiling, and it was a disaster; everything was speckled with white paint. In college, my mom hired a painting company to paint the house my parents had purchased a block from campus. I smoked hash and sat in the garden while the Greek painters, two brothers, and a nephew were left alone to paint windows shut, use dirty brushes and generally do a terrible job until my mother arrived and fired them all. I kept this history to myself.

“It’s just a door,” I told Kevin. “I’ll be done by the time you get home.”

It started out well. Luke was in a onesie, shaded in his car seat, happy to watch. The paint was very, very green while the door was a faded, blood red. I rolled the roller in the pan and applied a coat to the door. The red came through, so I rolled another coat sideways this time. Since that created a sort of checkerboard effect, I rolled again and saw that the earlier coat had dried, but I could still see the red shade through the green.

photo by Amauri Mejía

The slow boy from across the street came over and lay in the driveway telling me about his fish or cat, I wasn’t sure which one. I put Luke down for a nap and grimly continued. For such a small amount of surface, the paint was going fast. And you could still see the red. I used the smaller brush to fill in the missing sections. It looked awful. Then, the door wouldn’t open. I pushed hard against the handle but had painted the door shut.

Next door was an elderly couple I had only seen once or twice when their daughter took them out for early bird dinners. I rang the doorbell, and after a long moment, the door opened. The man was standing there looking displeased at the interruption.
“What do you want?” he said. He was a crazy-looking old man with hair growing out of his ears and a wooden leg.
“I wondered if you had a ladder. We live next door.“
“I know who you are. What’s the ladder for?”
“To climb over the fence. I painted the front door shut. The baby’s asleep inside.”
He looked bewildered. “You painted the baby?”
I painted the front door and now I can’t get it open.”
“Come around the back, girlie.”
I walked behind the house, listening for the sound of Luke waking up but it was quiet.

The old man had an extension ladder under his arm, his balance surprisingly good for someone with one leg. He leaned it against the wall.
“Let me see this door you painted. Maybe I can get it open.”
We stared at the door.
“That’s a green door, all right. Why the hell did you paint it that lunatic color?”
“The real estate woman told me to.”
“Well, that’s not how you paint a door, girlie. You take it off the hinges and prep it. You take all the hardware off. And you don’t paint it closed. Push on my back.”
The door didn’t budge,
“Is there something on the other side of the wall you can climb down on?”
“A table.” I pushed the front door hard from the inside. The sound of the painted edges made a weird snapping noise. The door looked hideous.
“I can’t thank you enough,” I told the old man.
“You better get a carpenter over here to strip that door, plane and repaint it.” 
Luke pointed and said, “green.” It was his first word aside from “Mama.”

The carpenter charged five hundred dollars to remove the door from its hinges, strip off the multiple layers of green and red paint, paint the door a neutral green, and reattach the hardware. “Note to self,” Kevin said, “don’t ask Molly to paint anything.”

 — Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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