and they had the armholes in the right places.
Mom also tried to make the house cheerful. She decorated the living
room walls with her oil paintings, and soon every square inch was
covered, except for the space above her typewriter reserved for index
cards. We had vivid desert sunsets, stampeding horses, sleeping cats,
snow-covered mountains, bowls of fruit, blooming flowers, and portraits
of us kids.
Since Mom had more paintings than we had wall space, Dad nailed long
shelf brackets to the wall, and she hung one picture in front of another
until they were three or four deep. Then she'd rotate the paintings. "Just a
little redecorating to perk the place up," she'd say. But I believed she
thought of her paintings as children and wanted them to feel that they
were all being treated equally.
Mom also built rows of shelves in the windows and arranged brightly
colored bottles to catch the light. "Now it looks like we have stained
glass," she announced. It did, sort of, but the house was still cold and
dank. Every night for the first few weeks, lying on my cardboard
mattress and listening to the sound of rainwater dripping in the kitchen, I
dreamed of the desert and the sun and the big house in Phoenix with the
palm tree in the front and the orange trees and oleanders in the back. We
had owned that house outright. Still owned it, I kept thinking. It was
ours, the one true home we'd ever had.
"Are we ever going home?" I asked Dad one day.
"Home?"
"Phoenix."
"This is home now."