Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  First comes love, then comes marriage.

  Then comes baby in a baby carriage.

  In the note I asked her if she would go to the dance with me. She asked me if I was sure, because she had heard that Marilyn Nicolson wanted to go with me. Marilyn had passed me a note telling me I was the best looking boy in the school. I was not the first to receive this accolade. Marilyn had passed many of these notes, and several of her previous choices had been questionable at best. I had passed Marilyn a note explaining that I didn’t fancy her.

  She had taken it well and quickly moved on to the next best looking boy in school.

  We were fourteen years old.

  After the jigs and the reels came a few choice pop nuggets from the mid-seventies (I do still recall all the boys slumped against the gym walls in a collective huff as the girls melodramatically swayed and swooned to the flaccid-as-shite sounds of the Bay City Rollers).

  I tried to walk with my arm around Shona’s bony shoulders all the way down the road from the school gate to the chip shop after the dance ended. When we got there I bought her a pie supper and chips and she kissed me fiercely with her mouth clamped tightly shut the whole time.

  It was awkward as I walked her home. We were simply not used to each other’s height, to walking as a unit, and Shona was just as tall as I was. Her arm was around my waist and our hips kept on bumping together. I remembered her pale-pink dress had been much too delicate for the weather.

  We tried talking.

  “I liked it when they played Bowie.”

  “Me too. My sister likes Roxy Music. She fancies Bryan Ferry.”

  “They played the Sweet.”

  “Aye, I ken. “Action.” It was brilliant. I kent Marilyn widnae come. She kent she’d look right stupid after asking all thae laddies and gettin’ her slaggy self kicked intae touch every time.”

  We both laughed and our arms tightened around each other.

  We tried kissing again in the bus shelter at the corner of the road, with our mouths finally open, and our teeth scraping together. I could taste the brown sauce on the corner of her mouth. It started to rain after a while, and the raindrops drummed daintily on the corrugated iron roof.

  We didn’t have to talk then. It had been very pleasant.

  The next day in school Shona told me that her father had been watching us from behind a twitching living room curtain, and that she had got a serious bollocking when she got in.

  She giggled and told me she didnae care.

  The next day after school she showed up at the playing fields and asked if she could play football with us. There were several voices raised in protest. No other girls were playing. Grudgingly she was allowed to join in. She played very well. A few boys were better than she was, but not many, and I wasn’t one of them.

  We played for an hour and afterwards we held hands as we walked home. My house was closer to the school than hers. So she essentially walked me home.

  As we got to the front door my mother was standing at the front window with a smirk on her face.

  “Should I thank her for bringing you home safe and sound?” She asked me sweetly.

  “Very funny.”

  By Christmas of that same year Shona Nesbit and her family had moved to Forfar.

  I didn’t for a moment believe that it had anything to do with her father’s noticing our kissing, but I now had to walk all the way home by myself.

  * * *

  “Whatever are you thinking about now?” Catriona looked mildly peeved. She listened politely as I labored to explain. When I was finished with my tale of chips and heartbreak she laughed at me.

  I asked her how she came to be here in West Seattle.

  “We lived in a big house in Madison Park for a few years when we first came here. I was married then. To Jeff. We were sent here for his job. Jeff worked in transportation. There’s a hub here. We divorced quickly. He moved back. It wasn’t especially sad or dramatic. We were young when we met. We were married for a short time. He’s living near London. Madison Park is lovely. There’s a public beach and the Japanese gardens close to our house. That house has an indoor wave pool and a sauna and was much too large. I moved here to something smaller. I live simply. I worked as a bookkeeper before I met Jeff, as I do now. I have a few clients. They need my help but they don’t need a full-time employee or an actual accountant. I do their payroll and insurance. It works well. I have my little house.”

  “Do you like it here?” I asked her.

  Her response was predictable. “It’s brilliant.”

  The British use that word for anything that isn’t actually horrific.

  I must have looked unconvinced.

  “It feels right. The first part of my life ends. This is the second part. I had my long childhood, my short marriage, my fast divorce. Then I had myself two wanton years after I got divorced. Erotic times in exotic places. I went all around the coast of Florida. Gambled with a girlfriend in Biloxi.”

  “How did that go?”

  “We lost enough that the management generously offered a proposal to work off our losses.”

  “What kind of proposal?”

  The options were long-term cocktail waitressing or short-term prostitution.”

  “Which did you chose?”

  Her answer was evasive. “I chose not to stay there for long.”

  I didn’t get the chance for a follow-up question.

  “Spent time with some hippies in Apalachicola. They sold their artisanal beads and leather shit along the coast near Panama City. Later in the season we worked our way south down the Gulf coast to Clearwater, where we took hung-over tourists from Germany and England out on expensive fishing charters. My job was to mix the Bloody Marys and explain why the fish weren’t biting that day. The best part was renting a small beach house in Key West with the dosh from the charters. Single malts in the tourist bars on Duval. Posing as a colorful local, pretending to be reading Hemingway in public, rescuing a mean stray cat, swimming in the ocean before bed. A belated gap year times two on the hot sand, lathered in coconut suntan oil, smoking weed with boys who were way too young for me. It was...” She faltered.

  “Brilliant?” I offered.

  “Amazing.” She corrected me.

  “You’re happy now?”

  Her smile was determined. “I am. I’m mostly alone. I’m not so young. And I’m fine with that.”

  “Where will you go from here?” She asked suddenly.

  “I think back home.”

  “Boulder?” I had already told her where I lived.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know any British people there?”

  I thought for a second. “Not a single one.”

  “You sound pleased when you say that. Does it remind you of Scotland?”

  I considered the question. “No. There’s a lot of hills . . .”

  “But not much else.”

  “No. I think I chose it for that reason. Fewer trees. Less water. More sun.”

  “When you speak you sound almost like an American.”

  “It’s been a while. My mother thinks I sound like an American.”

  “Does she mind?”

  “She thinks it’s funny.”

  “You’ve lost your identity.”

  “That’s a harsh way of putting it.”

  “There are two kinds of immigrants. The brave and the cowardly.”

  “I assume I’m the latter.” I said.

  “You’re one of the brave.”

  “You surprise me.”

  “Did you know there are an awful lot of European transplants in this part of America?”

  I did know this. I chose to play along.

  “And you have a theory?” I gently inquired of her.

  This was her theory: “We settle with
the familiar. We want to feel safe and comfortable. If we can, we try to make it better. Perhaps it’s warmer, the summers here always feel longer, even though I miss the late sun in the extended evening. The sea and the winter are gentler and prettier than they were. The plants in my garden are the same ones my mum used to try and grow at home, but they grow much easier and taller. The growing season stretches out. It’s all just that much easier.”

  “So why is that brave?”

  “It’s not brave. It’s cowardly.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Immigrants mostly gravitate to the familiar. The Scots went to Appalachia because it looks like Scotland.”

  “They were misguided. They chose a place that was no better at supporting them than the place they came from.”

  “They felt at home.”

  “At home in more hardscrabble squalor.”

  “Portuguese fishermen found warm places to fish. Scandinavians headed up north into the cold.”

  “And the slimy English bagged all the best arable land as usual.”

  “How do you like my theory?”

  “It’s not complete shite.”

  “And you found yourself a place that doesn’t remind you of home.”

  “I’m a modern day frontiersman.”

  “I’m trying to pay you a compliment. You are one of the hardy.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say.

  So I considered her theory more carefully.

  Bullshit mostly. But not complete shite.

  Then Catriona abruptly changed the subject.

  “I was adopted when I was three.”

  But I already knew this.

  * * *

  She got no further. There was a tap on the window and we both looked up. She hesitated for a second, momentarily confused, then she smiled and waved. I looked questioningly.

  The matter of her past was tabled for the moment.

  The man at the window was a gangly construction of coarse wool and mismatched plaid. He smiled and waved, or rather he smiled and waved to Catriona. We both watched as he unloaded three wooden ladders and four metal buckets from the oldest extant piece-of-shit Datsun pickup truck in the world. With little fanfare he then commenced to wash the restaurant windows. It was a cloudy and overcast day, which I imagined was just right for window washing, the kind of day that the state of Washington generates habitually.

  His face came in and out of focus through the glass as it became wet then dry. The woman he clearly knew gazed at her wrist, played with the band of leather that now circled it, and talked to an older man he’d never met, and that she had never met, until now.

  Did he look a little nervous? Could he tell she was about to start talking about him?

  “I don’t know him.” She was being too defensive.

  “He’s still waving,” I countered cleverly.

  She considered this. “We did meet once,” she finally allowed.

  “Well he keeps on looking and waving,” I informed her. “So you must have made an impression.”

  Reluctantly she could recall her first encounter with this surely fine, certainly wooly, decidedly bohemian-looking gentleman. And then she proceeded to describe exactly that.

  It had been a largely wordless event at a record shop on nearby California Avenue where they had bought the same recording. They laughed briefly and easily at the coincidence as they made their matching purchases, standing awkwardly afterwards, aware that a bonding moment was in danger of departing, both helpless to prolong it.

  The record shop in question served a sensibly priced and sustaining breakfast all day, and offered Washington State organic red wines and craft beer from nearby Bend, Oregon, later in the afternoon. More traditionally, the store also carried a catholic selection of new and collectible vintage music on compact discs and vinyl.

  As she spoke I pondered the alluring combination of beer and food and music and found it difficult to imagine ever having cause to leave such a wondrous establishment.

  “I buy most of my music there,” she said.

  “I can’t say I blame you,” I replied with deep conviction.

  “I try to avoid the food and the beer.”

  “That seems ill advised.”

  “They’re both bad for you,” she admonished me with a laugh.

  “That’s certainly true,” I was forced to admit.

  Having won the point, her conversation abruptly changed direction. “Did you know that Johnny Marr once played guitar for The Smiths?”

  I surely did. And I told her so.

  It transpired that The Smiths were Catriona’s favorite band when she was younger and Johnny Marr was her favorite Smith.

  “He lives near Portland. Or perhaps he did. I’m not quite sure. I saw him on television. He was valet parking his blue bicycle on a comedy show. Actually he wasn’t parking it. He was trying to get it back. They couldn’t find it. He was getting annoyed. I wasn’t sure if it was him. They ran the credits. It really was him. It was funny.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about and told her so.

  “The record we were both buying. It was Johnny Marr.”

  Now I understood.

  Catriona and The Smiths apparently ran deep. She surrendered her virginity in her last year of grammar school to a pasty paramour who claimed to have played bass guitar in a postpunk garage band with Morrissey, before Moz turned all vegan and grumpy and famous, and met Mr. Marr.

  “This was the first pouty, glam boy to lie to me and let me down. We all have a type. Effete romantics were mine. What do you like?”

  “I like my women easily distracted.”

  “By you?”

  I shook my head. “By other things.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Quite.”

  Many of her pretty boys, she would add, would prove to be weak and undependable, but a sad few would become more violent; rendered boorishly contrary by the nature of their failings, and by their need to exploit the neediness they were convinced they saw in her.

  “Do I seem needy?” She asked me suddenly.

  She struck me as alone and self-centered, but I chose not to say this out loud. I told her she seemed smart and independent, and she seemed more than satisfied with my answer.

  The window cleaner had gone by now. He had done a fine job and finished just in time for the start of the late afternoon rain.

  Catriona said she began purchasing vinyl when her parents’ old turntable became a somber inheritance.

  She told me they died together.

  I waited for more details.

  “It was the first record I had bought since I was a girl. I listened to it in my living room. It sounded nothing like The Smiths. On the sleeve he had a raincoat and the same haircut. Why do rock stars always have rock-star haircuts? There was an old poster on my bedroom wall.”

  At that point in our conversation she took the bracelet off, placed it on the table, and then put it back on, all seemingly without thinking. She picked up the idiotic fish-shaped menu and stared at it blankly. There was no need to look at it as we had already ordered our food.

  And then our food arrived. Catriona’s came with a small pot of tea that she hadn’t asked for, and one small cup and saucer. The waitress quickly left and returned with a second cup, also unbidden, and we had our afternoon tea.

  Catriona looked down at her plate and smiled. “I always get the same thing. A small portion of the battered cod and too many chips. I never manage to finish. It’s half price until five. I’m cheap.”

  “You do know I’m Scottish?” I told her. “We own the patent on cheap.”

  By now I’d lost track of time. The clock on the wall was also shaped like a fish and, as a result, it was difficult to read, but I thought it must be close to three thirty in th
e afternoon. We still had plenty of time to talk, and to eat, and to be gone, before the place got loud and busy.

  We ate in silence. A Rolling Stones song played.

  “Angie,” she announced.

  “You’re too young.”

  “It was her favorite.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Do you know the song?” She asked.

  I told her I did.

  “She always begged them to play it at the end of the dance. It’s a slow song. She liked the words. Especially the parts when they sing about her being beautiful, how there’s not a woman that comes close to her. Shouted out the words. She really was vain.”

  “What ever happened to her?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know. I hope she has ten nasty kids, and an arse the size of a double-decker bus.”

  It was an uncharitable thought. I had to smile.

  “Did you see him leave?”

  Catriona had missed the departure of the window cleaner, his ladders, his buckets, his piece-of-shit truck. She looked momentarily sad.

  I was certain she had enjoyed the brief attention.

  * * *

  There was a distant moan, the ferry heading out towards one of the small commuter islands. As it came into view I could see that the boat was mostly empty in the middle of a wet working day, except for a handful of shivering, underdressed teenagers standing on the upper deck gazing miserably into the distance, perhaps hoping for the sun, or else a glimpse of the mythical volcanic mountain that exists only in cruel and taunting local legends.

  Our waitress returned with a fresh pot of tea. Her one bare shoulder was a seething tendril of inked foliage and nesting birds. She was a decade younger than Catriona, more than a generation removed from me—a young muscular woman with dark shiny hair in an angular cut that seemed designed to highlight that one lushly illustrated patch of skin. She frowned inexplicably as she filled our tiny cups quickly and silently, a welcome yet wholly unbidden act. I thanked her as Catriona asked for more milk, rather than using the tiny packets of flavored half-and-half sitting in the matching blue dish on the table.

  With some dismay I looked down at the acreage of fish still hanging off the side of my plate. I had ordered the full portion, reasoning that Catriona’s request for the smaller plate made perfect sense for her, but that I, who had to outweigh her by a metric ton or so, would clearly require far greater amounts of sustenance. I could plainly see now that her order would have done me perfectly well.