The Secret Society of Demolition Writers Read Online Free

water. “Good job,” they said. I sipped. I moved off the table, and where I lay, just a little dab of bright red paint, my body’s color.
    ALL IN ALL, a very trustworthy operation. One week later, a check for five K in the mail. I took my mother and said “c’mon,” and we went downtown. I bought accessories. I bought glass door-knobs and ribbons. We went to the makeup counter at the mall. My mother said, “Cynthia, I’m tired.” I pushed her forward. I had just the slightest soreness in my side. I said, “Can you give her some foundation, some sparkle eye shadow?” I went through one procedure, she now through another. Five thousand, four thousand four hundred and fifty.
    The makeup lady, who looked like a doctor herself in a white coat, poured a promising mixture onto a cotton ball, wiped at my mother’s face. Somewhere, Janice was taking my egg, they were inserting it into her; it was petaling open, a little leg cracking its fragile shell. Here we go. I felt giddy, rich, full. I felt pregnant myself, my egg there in the lining, there in the lavender-scented sprinklers, the blond lacquered crib,
shushhh
a woman says, and she holds me against a body that does not break. “I’m tired,” my mother said, and the makeup doctor swabbed her and waxed her with pink lipstick and then, it was all of a sudden, my mother swiped her hand sideways so bottles went scurrying like people in a sniper attack, rattling sideways, falling onto the floor, seeking shelter under the counters.
    The whole store got quiet, looking. “Leave-me-alone,” my mother said into the silence. The makeup lady froze, a cotton swab in mid-descent. “You,” my mother turned to me, “you are entirely without empathy.” And I felt myself flush with shame, for it was true, my sin was flounce and flourish, and had it ever been any different? Once, a long time ago, I had liked to draw simple things, a star, an elephant without tusks. Return me there. “And you,” my mother said now to the Lancôme lady; my mother struggled to stand up, she backed away. “And you,” she said to that lady, who was holding her healing cottons and her pressed powders that in the end would do no good. That’s what my mother said next: “No good.”
    CERTAIN THINGS BECOME compulsions. Some people drink. Some people smoke. Some people donate their eggs. Another cycle. Another five K, another chance at another woman’s womb. Ike said sure. My mother got weaker. Summer finally passed, and when the fall arrived it was a godsend, cooler air from Canada, birds in a V. I went back to school, hauling myself up off my mother’s porch swing, out of our smoke-stained house where the wallpaper curled, and into the classroom, where I’m straight A. Because I was a junior now, I took almost all interior design courses, to prepare me for the world. I took a course in perspective, where we studied vanishing points, and a course in textiles, where we compared cotton to twill, and I took a course in color management, where we learned what went together and what didn’t. I was bad at color management. I put things together I should not have; I collided separate spheres and thought it looked wonderful. I took pale orange and put it next to a wash of violet in a virtual room; I made one wall hunter green, the floor wine red, and I thought—I still do—that this was lovely. The instructor said, “All your homes look nervous,” but I couldn’t tell. Color, I think, is God’s way of laughing. I envision places inside me where the spectrum spreads out so every hue and tone meshes in a subtle burst of light. I picture a terra-cotta sill, a pot of pressed sea glass. Give me my floors in deep blues, my ceilings in marbleized pink. The instructor said, “Less is more, Cynthia.” My instructor said, “Neutrals like coffee work well,” but I couldn’t see that, couldn’t stand that, and so I found my flaw; it had to do with color. I got my first bad grade ever in that course. B.