Series 3, Post 1: Creative Writing- A Story About Jones

     Jones liked to paint on her walls. That’s what she did to relieve stress—she painted her walls a different color.

     “What are you doing Jones?” I’d call and ask her on a random day of the week at midnight or after.                     

     “Painting,” she’d say, almost lethargically. She always got a bit high from the paint fumes. 

     “What color today?” I’d ask. 

     “Peaches and cream.” 

     “Clint out with his friends again?” I knew which colors went with what life crisis. 

     “You know it.”

   Clint was Jones’ boyfriend of two years; they were theoretically engaged but not realistically engaged. He had mentioned it one night after drinking until four a.m. and then never spoke a word about it again. But when he did mention it that one time, she painted her walls white at 4:30 a.m. Like a wedding dress. The next day when he had no memory of their conversation, she painted it black. Like a funeral. Needless to say, Jones was a moody individual who read The Bell Jar more often than she didn’t.

     Peaches and cream meant Clint was out with his irresponsible friends, who also caused Clint to be irresponsible. She felt the shade of the peach calmed her down. But, it could’ve been the cigarette she smoked in between paint strokes. Or the adrenaline rush she got from not blowing herself up by painting in a non-ventilated room while smoking a Camel Light. 

     But, she hadn’t always painted. Growing up, her bedroom had been a quiet pink, the stereotypical color for a growing little girl. She had a mural of the Eiffel Tower painted on the East wall and a gorgeous white bed spread that her father had brought back from one of his many trips to France. For a seven year old, her bedroom was quite cultured, completely unlike my room filled with teddy bears and flowers. And then age eight hit and Jones’ room took on a more drastic appearance. 

      It was a Monday when her dad died. It was a Thursday when she first painted her walls black. As soon as the funeral was over she asked her grandmother to take her to the store where she bought her first can of paint. I watched from her My Little Pony bean bag chair as she spent nine hours covering her beautiful Eiffel Tower. And since then, her walls had been black more times than they have ever been any other color. That was Jones’ sordid little story, dead father, remarried mother, lifetime of pain and angst.

     And paint cans. So many paint cans. She didn’t keep track of how many times she had painted her walls in the last fifteen years, but I did. Each color was recorded in a log with the day of the month and year along with a reason for the paint change. I figured someday, perhaps when the painting stopped, that is, if it ever did, she would find it interesting to see her life in colors. The amount of paint coats was up to 2448, with 100 different shades. And counting.

• Deep orange meant she felt bohemian, one of her more common colors.
• Eggplant meant she was happy, which was a very rare color and usually got repainted over in a matter of hours.
• Tickle me pink meant Clint had made her feel special.
• Grassy Green meant Jones was feeling appreciated and noticed.
• Red meant she was in love, also a short lived color because...
• Peaches and cream would show up before you knew it. It was a color I never really understood, but it was common nonetheless.
• Dark blue meant her mom had pissed her off.
• Burnt yellow meant she was feeling feisty and you had better watch your back.
• One week, her walls were even poop brown. That was a bad week; we call that the ‘lost week.’

  
  

There was a myriad of other colors throughout the years, colors that were results of moods she couldn’t explain. It was amazing the colors she would discover, sometimes inventing her own.

“How’s about this color?” Jones asked one Wednesday afternoon at Sherwin Williams. Sometimes, when she had money to burn or thought she might have the paint on her walls for more than a week, Jones would buy fancy paint at a paint store. Other times, she went to Wal-Mart.

“It looks like squished peas,” I answered, distantly. 

 “Perfect, because I feel like vomiting after Clint hit on the waitress last night at the bar. This will be perfect.”

 She grabbed the can of paint and started walking to the counter. 

 “And then he’ll buy you flowers this afternoon and we’ll be back here buying deep red.” 

“Guess you’ll have to keep the afternoon open then, won’t you?” she sneered.

 I sighed. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Jones to relieve her stress; she was much more pleasant after she had finished painting. I was just worried about what the painting was doing to her life. Now that we were in our 20’s, it seemed like she should find some other way of dealing with life and its everyday stresses. She didn’t sleep. When she painted, she didn’t eat. She smoked like a chimney. But there was something else happening, something I never thought was physically possible. Her room was getting smaller and smaller, the paint becoming thicker and thicker until, I feared, there would be no room for her to paint in. And quite possibly, no her.

 “When you move out are you going to stop painting?” I asked, while watching the squished pea green painting over the bright red shade from Tuesday. 

 “Will life stop being a bitch every other day of the week?” she laughed a little when she said it, but I heard the seriousness in her voice. 

 She honestly had no idea how to live day to day without a different shade of paint. I didn’t know where to go from there. The truth is, I handled life with a pen and paper, which led to bookshelves full of journals, but the fumes from those weren’t as violent as the fumes from the coats and coats of paint. Not only that, but my method didn’t interrupt my life as much as hours and hours of painting interrupted hers. 

 “Have you talked to Clint today then?” I picked up a paint brush and began painting along the baseboard. 

 “He’s called about forty four times, but no.” She sighed softly. 

 The problem with Clint was, he was an absolute jackass 98.6 percent of the time and she still loved him. I tried to convince her to just get rid of him, to move on, but she couldn’t live without Clint just as much as she couldn’t live without paint. 

 “J, I hate to say this, but I really think he’s your problem.”

 I looked out of the corner of my eye to see her reaction, but her face was completely unrecognizable. She continued painting with long, soft strokes, speaking not a word.

 I continued on, “I mean, he’s the only thing keeping you here and he has become a pretty bad reason. He didn’t used to be, but we both know he isn’t the Clint who you fell in love with.” 

“He still is. He just isn’t right now. He’ll come around. He always does, always has.” 

 I shook my head, used to her saying those same exact words, always Clint’s defender. Despite the hopelessness that Jones seemed to possess, she was amazingly hopeful when it came to him—her biggest downfall. 

 “Do you realize how small your room has gotten in the past fifteen years, Jones?” 

 “Yea,” she laughed a little, “Mom told me the other night that I was going to have to move out soon because my twin bed wouldn’t fit in this hallway anymore.”

 “Ever think that might be a good reason to give up painting?” I tried to be passive aggressive when it came to Jones. It never worked. 

 “I don’t need a bed; I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Jones was my best friend, my only real friend and I stayed around in our Podunk town because I worried if I didn’t, no one would watch over her. No one would be worried about her obsessive painting or her mood swings. But at 23, I was ready to move on with my life so when I got a job at a magazine in California, I couldn’t pass it up. 

 “I’ll have my own office, not a cubicle, an office. And I’ll be on salary. And I can write. And I can get paid to write. Paid cash money, not in paid in ‘experience’.” I was telling Jones all this over the phone while pacing back and forth in my room. 

 “That’s great.” 

 “I still can’t believe I actually got the job. I just…ah, I can’t believe it.” I was smiling. Jones, I could tell, was not. 

 “Listen, I gotta go,” she said abruptly. 

 “Jones, are you ok? I’m sorry. I know that this means I’ll be thousands of miles away. You know I’ll miss you. In fact, I want you to come with me.” The truth is I wasn’t sure how to live without Jones either.

 “I can’t leave, you know that.” 

 “Clint isn’t worth it, Jones.” 

 “I know, but that doesn’t mean I can just pack up and move to California.” 

 “You could. You are 23 with nothing holding you back.”

 “Except myself, I know. Seriously, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.” She hung up. 

I knew I should feel worse than I did, but my dreams were coming true. I couldn’t always be worried about what Jones would do without me. I wondered what color she’d be changing her room to in light of this news. She had always told me my color was turquoise. But what was turquoise when it was moving to California and leaving her behind?

"She had always told me my color was turquoise."

I found out exactly what color I had become the next afternoon when I stopped by her house. She was supposed to be at work at three o’clock in the afternoon, not at home. But there she was, painting her room silver. Silver was a color I had only seen once. It was the day her mother told her she was getting remarried. I remember it looking like tin foil when she was done. Tin foil’s significance in a crisis, I was unsure of. 

 “Wow, this is a pretty metal room,” I snickered, “Get it? Silver, metal…” 

 She stared at me with a ‘wtf’ look. 

 “Ok, so, California. I’m moving to California, Jones.”

 “Really? I had no idea. Don’t get too many sun rays out there; I hear they are bad for the skin.”

I took a long hard look around the room that was decreasing in size before my very eyes. The silver hurt my eyes the more wall it covered. It was too harsh. It made my eyes squint. I thought about all the time I had spent in this room, watching my best friend try to make it through her daily life. Now, I wouldn’t be here to see it. She’d have to go it alone. And so would I.

“Seriously, just think about it. You could come with me. You have some money saved up. Just go, find a job when you get there,” I said, knowing she would never take my bait. I knew if I didn’t get her out of there now, she’d never leave. 

 “No. This is where I belong and all that bullshit.” 

 “Right. In a room that gets smaller with each paint coat and a town where a boyfriend that treats you like garbage spends his nights drinking, smoking and hitting on dirty whores. Ok Jones, I get it. You don’t want to go. But you will still be my best friend even if I can’t come over and watch you relieve your angst. You know that, right?” She dropped her paint brush on the plastic sheet covering the floor, walked over to me and hugged me.

“Of course I know that. I’ll be ok.”

“It’s not you that I’m worried about as much as I am your room. This color is horrific.” I pulled away from her hug slowly and smiled. She took a look around and shook her head up and down, “Yea, I was a little drunk when I bought this color. Wal-Mart run?” I put my arm around her shoulder and we left. I would catch glimpses of Jones, the way she used to be, before her dad’s death, and know that someday the painting would stop and she’d be whole again. Until then, I just had to be her friend and tell her when a color needed to be painted over.