Watercolor Moment

Mrs. Dalloway is sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the idea to come. When it doesn’t come, she unloads the washing machine.

Clarissa is drawing daffodils and daisies and some tulips, they are the easiest to draw after daisies, and roses, because mother loves yellow roses. Every Friday father brings mother a bouquet from the town where he works, and mother puts the roses in the fancy crystal vase Clarissa isn’t allowed to touch, and the vase is placed on the coffee table in the living room. Clarissa’s crayon is dull now, and it really isn’t the right shade, and suddenly she notices that there is too much yellow now, the daffodils AND the roses? The roses don’t come out pretty, Clarissa isn’t very good at drawing, but she will ask mother to write the names of the flowers next to the pictures, so it’s okay.

When the dentist is done, and Clarissa can hop off the horrible chair, she is so excited and crazy with the relief of the check-up being over with she has absolutely no recollection what kind of sticker she picked from the top drawer. She was so nervous to go to the dentist’s drawer she couldn’t even speak, and just picked one, crumpling it into her sweaty fist so that when mother asked to see what she had picked, she was almost in tears when she opened her hand and saw what she had done to it. “It’s alright, darling, let’s go to that paper shop you love and we’ll pick some stickers there! Don’t cry, Clarissa, come here.” Mother smells of comfort and flowers and absolute safety, and Clarissa presses her face into mother’s neck, knowing she is being a baby, and big girls needn’t cry like this, but no one understands her pain the way mother does. She takes her silky and warm hand, with nails beautifully, exquisitely, polished in fuchsia, and they walk out of the waiting room hand in hand. Clarissa is immersed in instant happiness, and the humiliation with the sticker drawer and sweaty palm is gone.

Mrs. Dalloway takes out her book and pours the last of the coffee for herself. The laundry, mostly his today, is drying, and with her coffee and reading she nurses the final moments of the morning before it turns into day and she must get up and do her face and go meet people for things. She is reading The Idiot. It is her favorite of all of Dostoyevsky’s stories, and she always gets extremely worked up and emotional as the story unravels, and feels a protectiveness for Prince Myshkin much in the same way she does for her friends. She thinks she should call mother today, she doesn’t call her enough. But they can never really speak on the phone. Mother is inquisitive and full of unwanted advice, and Mrs. Dalloway is strained and hostile. She becomes defensive and closed off, and ends up snapping at mother, and afterwards she feels terrible for days. She looks out the window for a long time, considering, and sees the firs first become blurred and then slowly disappear.

It is the day of her ear check-up, and Clarissa is very good at the doctor’s. She has never been one to throw tantrums anyway, even grandmother always says that she is the most calm and level-headed little girl. Clarissa is so feverishly excited after her ears are now fine and no more antibiotics, that she doesn’t remember what color the lollipop was, when the doctor said she had done well, and would she like to have one, and Clarissa cannot handle at all that kind of attention, she is horrified that she will now proceed to destroy the doctor’s good opinion of her if she says anything at all, and she feels her face go red, and she kind of sees a purple lollipop underneath the other ones, but she doesn’t want to loiter or appear as if she is snippy or picky, and she doesn’t rummage at all, but takes the first one and runs out to mother, who is waiting outside.

Mrs. Dalloway is walking through a vaguely familiar urban scenery. Around her, the day is withdrawing into twilight, but it is still exceedingly hot outside; women are wearing tiny dresses and flip flops and their long hair is tied messily into a pony tail and there are strands of sweaty hairs on their cheeks and necks, and it looks extremely sensual to her, the men have old-fashioned hats on with their cut jeans, and many are sporting fancy moustaches. The sidewalk is made of cobblestone, whitened with age, all smooth and silky, and Mrs. Dalloway spots some black dots in the cracks. She bends to look closer and notices that the spots are black beetles, crawling their way among feet. “But I can’t sleep here now with the insects, I have to come sleep with you”, she says, but her companions are way ahead of her and cannot hear her.

The grass is still wet, and bumblebees are buzzing in the flower bed, buzzing that funny buzzing that sounds like snoring, and Clarissa is sitting on the warming stone step, in her white cotton dungarees, the ones that have to be tied into knots on the shoulders to stay on.

A good girl waits patiently for the next season to arrive in her own time. She also remembers to pack her toothbrush as well as her Barbies and her books and many, many bangles to wear in both wrists. Her sunglasses are star-shaped, and she wears a rhinestone pin on her dungarees, it says Be Mine and it is purple, but Clarissa doesn’t really know what it says, only that it is sparkly and very pretty and mother said it was okay to pin it on her dungarees. From sister’s room she hears pop music, nice songs, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, although she doesn’t know what it is for many years. “You ready, darling?” mother asks. Clarissa looks up, and the sun makes mother’s hair into a halo, and Clarissa says of course.

Mrs. Dalloway is at the apartment, and she is wondering if the others brought her bicycle up. The lock is broken, so they have to bring it up. But everyone has gone grocery shopping, and they have the key, and she doesn’t have her own key so she has to stay behind. She walks the long hall way to a door and opens it. The door opens to the roof, but it seems to be under construction. The floor is black and oozing with some kind of dangerous looking substance, and she sees more beetles, only now they are larger and somehow more ominous. The light outside lingers still, but she is afraid to step onto the black substance, which looks like a massive organism, alive and waiting, and, remembering a short story she read as a young girl about a similar black mass in the lake, stalking a bunch of swimmers, she is suddenly terrified of the roof and backs away, closing the door firmly.

A man stands in the hall way, hands full of grocery bags. Mrs. Dalloway walks up to him, so relieved to have another person inside the apartment with her she doesn’t bother to ask his name. She takes one of the bags, and together they go into the kitchen to put everything away.

Mrs. Dalloway is walking behind her friends in the twilight, on the smooth cobblestone street. She looks around her, suddenly realizing without any difficulty that she is nearing Forum des Halles, in Paris, she knows the church and the park next to it, and very soon after she will be at the bridge, and she is suddenly so excited to finally know where she is, and so excited to see her beloved Pont Neuf, and as she realizes all this, she knows beyond any doubt that she is late for meeting her lover at the Square du Vert-Galant. She tries to tell her companions, who walk in all directions, very leisurely, and Mrs. Dalloway is very vexed now, and she is trying to tell them that she knows where they should go now, she finally has the hang of this, and she has to go now, but nobody is listening to her, they act as if they can’t even hear her when she tries telling them it is so beautiful there, one can spend her entire afternoon there, reading and eating her packed lunch and watching people around her and the tourist boats on the Seine with the guides speaking in the mic in various languages, explaining the history of the city, and kissing her lover, and that she is so late now, but no one stops, and for some reason she knows she cannot leave them alone, because she alone knows about the danger lurking just behind the veil of the light.

Suddenly she doesn’t see anyone she recognizes anymore, everyone is out of her sight, and Mrs. Dalloway has an eerie feeling that they are right at the edge of her side vision, but when she turns her head there are only strangers, wearing lovely small summer dresses and flip flops and moustaches and panama hats. She walks past the grand mall and the tee-shirt salesmen, and on top of a statue there is a young woman sitting cross-legged in cut blue jeans and a cotton shirt, playing the guitar. Mrs. Dalloway can just barely hear her playing, and the lyrics, sung clearly by the original performer, so maybe it is her sitting on top of the statue, come from all around her, muffled, but audible, the way sounds are sometimes distorted in dreams:

Sitting in a park in Paris, France

 Reading the news and it sure looks bad

They won’t give peace a chance

It was just a dream some of us had

The sound of the mail dropping wakes Mrs. Dalloway up from the dream. She closes her book and starts doing the dishes, thinking about how she should call mother.

It is Clarissa's birthday, and they are back from the town. Mother and father gave Clarissa an assortment of pencils and erasers and colored pencils and other home office supplies for little girls, and she especially loves the My Melody clips and scented pencils, and the bright red and white pencil sister gave her, a promotional pencil of the Coca-Cola company, it is so special she doesn’t have the heart to use it, she just keeps it in her pencil case and takes it out now and then to look at it. She cannot for the life of her grasp how mother can sharpen the pencils in such graceful manner: her hands are not at all stained like Clarissa’s are every time, and the sharp tip stays on and doesn’t break so that she has to start all over, ending up sharpening and sharpening until there is nothing but a stub left.