Rache

I walked about a hundred feet from the lobby door before I put the ring back in my eyebrow. I took it out the first time I came to the nursing home in eleventh grade, so I figured I better keep on taking it out. Fewer heart attacks that way. I was trying to write an article for the paper on nursing homes. Ritzy ones. When I stuck my head into Rache’s room, she was painting. Eighty-six years old, and she’s oil painting. It wasn’t a picture, or anything, just big swirls of greens and yellows. She said she was using those colors because they matched her dress, which was a full-length print sun dress. Bamboo trees, I think. She grinned this big cheesy grin at me and crossed her eyes.

I come to the bus stop at the end of the block and sit down on the sidewalk. There isn’t a bench, and I hate just standing there for who knows how long, waiting for a bus to come.

I had spent the next half an hour there joking about her painting and making half-hearted attempts at asking interview type questions. Newspaper writing was a stupid job for me anyway.

The bus pulls up for me, a white slug on wheels, with bug eyes and a flat face. I slide my dollar into the slot and sit down about half-way back.

The next day when I came, the painting was gone. I asked her where it went.

“Didn’t you see that thing?” she said. “It was horrible!” I grinned. Instead of an easel, she had a table, with a huge gray thing on it that could have been the next stage in evolution for the city bus I’m on now. It had hands.

“Now what’ve you got?” I asked.

“Oh this!” Rache said. “Henry absolutely refused to bring up a pottery wheel for me, so I’m having to do it by hand. The big baby. Why in my day…” she began, and then she winked at me. Her sculpture was worse than her painting, but she was wearing khaki pants and a gray shirt to match the art again.

I think I quit the paper after that. Or maybe I just stopped showing up. Something. It was a stupid project. Then I graduated. That was a stupid project too. College isn’t looking much better. The stupid ads they were always sending me kept making everything look so… perky. As I stepped off the bus, I could hear the people in the ads shouting at me. “Oh! Oh! We’re so glad to be here in college, especially now that we have our new monogrammed sweatshirts! They didn’t pay us anything at all to pose for these cheesy photos!”