She got engaged to a man named Winstanley, who had a job with the State Department she wanted to marry him because he was about to be posted to Berlin. It was 1949: the war was over the world was wide. After college-a Catholic school in New Rochelle-she’d wanted to go places. She’d grown up in a small town in Massachusetts, a devout Catholic. She papered the rooms with scraps of wallpaper and lit them with strings of colored Christmas-tree lights as brightly as she lit my childhood with her trapped passion. She once built me a doll house out of a stack of shoeboxes. She had one dresser drawer filled with buttons and another with crayons.
“I was just so sick of that green,” she said, washing up, briskly, at the kitchen sink. One day, I came home from kindergarten to find that my mother had painted every cabinet sunflower yellow. The cabinets in our kitchen used to be a murky green. “Fingers nimble, brush or thimble,” my mother’s college yearbook said about her. I never knew anyone better prepared to meet with beauty. She’d be out running errands, see something wonderful, pull over, and pop the trunk. In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father’s old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock. There was one book my mother wanted me to write: a life of Ben Franklin’s sister.
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