Pinking of You
Kansas City is incremental and wide. We spent the afternoon driving around because Sarah needed to go to FedEx and also pick up a bunch of new socks, work socks and gym socks, so necessarily there were multiple stops for socks. At the last minute we decided to visit the Nelson-Atkins Museum, but it was closed so we walked around the outdoor sculpture garden instead, winding along the perimeter of a huge lawn where some sports activity had broken out involving frisbees and about a dozen teens. There were a ton of Henry Moore sculptures, an overrepresentation that seemed weird until Sarah looked it up and reported that the whole thing had been a Henry Moore park until work by other artists was added in the mid-nineties. “Well that’s fucking depressing,” said Sarah. I didn’t ask why but felt like I mostly agreed. They were these massive, reclining bronzes, too heavy to lift themselves up. We took pictures of each other in front of Claes Oldenburg’s 20-foot-tall badminton shuttlecocks. Sarah brought me around to the back of the museum to see the big Walter de Maria installation, which was a large, shallow pool containing circular skylights down to a parking garage below. I looked at it for a long while and felt almost nothing.
We wandered back around to the sloping lawn and lay down in the sun. The frisbee game had mostly died out and everybody was sprawled out on the grass. Sarah chewed her nails and I thumbed through the pictures we’d taken and posted a few online. She was still gnawing on her fingers when I looked up so I batted her hand away from her mouth. She swatted me back with a damp paw.
“Gross,” I said.
“You’re gross,” she said. She held her hand out at arm’s length and examined it as if trying on a ring.
“My grandmother always had perfect nails,” she said. A frisbee soared into our airspace, then dramatically swerved away at the last moment.
“When she died all I wanted was her nail polish.” She laughed. “It was this crazy shade of pink. But my uncle got to it first. I mean he went to the nursing home and started sorting through her stuff, throwing junk away. So by the time we got there, the nail polish was gone.” She rolled over onto her back and looked up at some point between us and the sky, as if trying to remember how to tell this story, or maybe any story. “I was so crushed, just crying and crying. My uncle felt really bad, but what could he do? We checked drugstores where she might have shopped, looked all over for this stupid nail polish but we didn’t know the brand or anything. Then we were flying home, me and my mom. I just remember being so tired, we were like zombies. I remember I was in the window seat and my mom was next to me. The flight attendant came by and she kind of reached across to set a drink down on my tray. And my mom just grabbed me. The fucking flight attendant was wearing my grandmother’s nail polish, we couldn’t believe it. My mom said something about liking the color and did she happen to know the name. She went and checked in her stuff.”
“So you got it?” I said.
“We got the name, yeah,” said Sarah. “Then we looked it up when we got home. They don’t make it anymore, but we found two bottles online. So I have one and my mom has one.”
“That’s a great anecdote,” I said. Sarah laughed and said that it was the kind of compliment a psychopath might pay.
“So what was the color called?” I said. She thought for a second.
“You know, I totally forget. Something cutesy. We’ll check later.”
We lay on the grass a while longer then ordered food from an Indian place that Sarah had in her phone. We picked it up at a pale-yellow strip mall. At home we found they’d given us enough cutlery for a child’s birthday party. Outside the moon swooped softly through the sky.
Graeme Bezanson's writing has appeared in HAD, BOMB, GlitterMOB, The Puritan, and elsewhere. He lives in a tiny village in southwestern France.