The Rothko

My mother hung a large green painting above the piano in my childhood home after my grandmother passed away. It was shipped to our house in a large crate and my father had to unhinge the garage door so the painting would fit through. My mother was in the front leading him from room to room, bouncing on her toes, doubling as a conductor and dancer. Each time they hung the painting, she was unsatisfied and she had them take the painting down and start again. Our house wasn’t large, there were only four rooms, and the green painting stuck out wherever they placed it. But that wasn’t the problem, my mother wanted the painting to stick out. She wanted to feel its presence in every room even when it wasn’t there. Her feelings of frustration were settled on her face in between her brows. She turned over the empty box that the painting came in and took a seat to rest. “We don’t have to do this today,” My father told her. He lit a cigarette and sat beside her. She hated his smoking. She took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it out against the wood on the crate. “We can hang it in the piano room until you decide on a better place,” he said. My mother nodded and stood up like she had been sitting for days. Weight heavy on her thighs.

The piano room was added to our house after it was built, but the room wasn’t ever finished. My father had run out of floor tiling, and so there were missing patches underneath the piano. The light fixture wasn’t installed properly so you had to yank on the string hanging from the bulb rather than flipping the switch. Sometimes my mother would bring my fathers unfinished project up in an argument, and he would throw his hands up in the air and mutter something to himself as he walked away. “Always bringing up unrelated shit Coral, always bringing up unrelated shit,” he might say.

No one ever went into the piano room except my mother who would occasionally play a song on the piano. When she did, I would sit by the door and listen to her. She wasn’t the best player, but when she made music it sounded like she had to make noise. Her noise was always light to the touch and airy like her voice, but it still carried through the house and made her seem larger. She would hum the sounds when they weren’t coming out of the instrument the way she wanted, and laugh at herself when her voice cracked. Her fingers were not as poised and upright as the greats, even from my untrained eye I knew that. But I loved to listen to her play. I liked it when she hit the wrong notes and tried three and four times to strike the correct chord. I could close my eyes and see her fingers fumbling to find the right notes.

After the painting came to our house, she started going to the piano room once a week for an hour or so, but I didn’t hear any music coming from the room. I would sit outside the door with a snack and wait for her to play. Once I fell asleep waiting and my father woke me. “Let your mother be. This is a hard time for her,” he said. He picked me up and carried me to my bed even though at thirteen I was too tall to be carried around like a baby. Sometimes I would fall asleep all over the house on purpose just so my father would find me, like a shadowed figure hazy from my dream and take me to my bedroom. I liked to spy on my mother, watch her from behind windows and doors, but I liked to be wrapped up in my father. His limbs were so big as they draped around me. It was hard to imagine he was ever a boy.

After a few hours rest I was wide awake. I sat in my bed staring up at the glow stars on the ceiling and I thought I have to see what my mother is doing in that room. I hadn’t taken a good look at the painting, and by now my imagination was getting the best of me.

I cracked the door open and I could see my mothers legs stretched across the couch. She had fallen asleep and there was a pile of cookie crumbs resting on one of my grandmothers saucers. I stepped towards the painting and stood at its center scanning it up and down from the ceiling nearly 10 feet high. I think I was waiting for the painting to do something or speak to me somehow. Earlier I thought maybe the painting was evil, and it had possessed my mother, but looking up at, I saw it was just a big green painting. “What are you doing in here baby?” my mother asked. She was just waking up and her voice was raspier than it usually was. “Was this Grandma’s favorite painting?” I asked. My mother smiled and walked towards me shaking her head.

“Mama took me to a museum to see this painting one summer when we were visiting in New York. We road the subway there and she held my hand so tight, I thought it was going to fall off. When we finally got to the museum she brushed by everything else until we reached this painting,” My mother said looking up at the big green thing. “Ma had read about it. The paintings of an artistic genius. A cultural phenomenon for the elite,” she said. My mother’s voice had returned to its usual form and she was purring now, sweet and soft and curling her r’s.

“We looked up at that big painting, and she scoffed at it. “I had never been to a museum before, and Mama didn’t act like it, but I think it might have been the first museum she had ever been too as well,” My mother said. She looked around like she had come to that conclusion just then. A small revelation that almost no ones would notice except her and I. She was speaking fast and was out of breath rushing through the words like she would eventually run out of them.

“When we were leaving Mama even asked the museum attendant if that was the right painting. She told him that we came all the way to New York City to see a bunch of no talented artists paint a big square. Mama was furious,” she said. My mother started laughing loud from her gut and swung her head back the way my Grandma used to do it. In a trance of embodiment now, she had transfigured into a ghostly thing. “After your Grandma passed I couldn’t think about anything else but getting a copy of this painting. Pretty silly huh baby?” I didn’t say anything. But I was thinking that it didn’t seem silly at all. I wish I would have nodded my head or spit out a few words but I didn’t want her to stop speaking so I just kept looking at her. “But ya know the more I look up at it, the more I like it. In fact, it might be the most beautiful painting i’ve ever seen,” she told me.

I looked back up at the globular shades, now not just green but a spectrum of emeralds and gold while standing next to my mother, and this time it looked back. Maybe it was the enormity of it, and the fact that you couldn’t look in any one spot twice, but suddenly I saw my mother and my grandmother’s story in it. I saw space around the edges and movement in the strokes. I saw my grandma and mother speeding on the underground subway twenty years before I was born. And I knew why my mother had stopped playing the piano. It was because the painting was too loud. We sat and watched her memory move around that canvas over and over again, in between the dye that ran through the center and we were swallowed in it. We remembered my grandmother in the ocean, her hair braided around her head and cheeks that peaked at the corner of her face, icy at the tips. We saw all kinds of new shades in that painting, and strains of green we couldn’t name. I sat with my mother every day there for weeks and she told me more stories of my grandmother until we found a new place for the painting to hang in the upstairs dining room. And soon my mother didn’t visit the painting every week, or even every month or even every year. But it hung there until the day she died, and now it hangs in my study. When I visit, It isn’t color that I see, or even the gargantuan stretch of the thing up against my wall, it isn’t even a painting anymore, just a photo black and white. I sit and stare and I remember them both. I learned how to mourn gracefully from my mother. As if there were such a thing.