would have a cheerful yellow house.
But neither Mom nor Dad nor Brian nor Lori nor Maureen was
impressed. "So part of the front of the house is yellow now," Lori said.
"That's really going to turn things around for us."
I was going to have to finish the job myself. I tried to make a ladder
from bits of scrap wood, but it kept collapsing whenever I put my weight
on it. I was still trying to build a sturdy ladder when, during a cold snap a
few days later, my can of paint froze solid. When it got warm enough for
the paint to thaw, I opened the can. During the freeze, the chemicals had
separated and the once-smooth liquid was as lumpy and runny as curdled
milk. I stirred it as hard as I could and kept stirring even after I knew the
paint was ruined, because I also knew that we'd never get more, and
instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we
now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job—one that announced to
the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked
the gumption to get the work done.
LITTLE HOBART STREET led up into one of those hollows so deep and
narrow that people joked you had to pipe in the sunlight. The
neighborhood did have lots of kids—Maureen had real friends for the
first time—and we all tended to hang out at the National Guard armory
at the foot of the hill. The boys played tackle football on the training
field. Most of the girls my age spent their afternoons sitting on the brick
wall surrounding the armory, combing their hair and touching up their
lip gloss and pretending to get all indignant but secretly loving it if a
crew-cut reservist wolf-whistled at them. One of the girls, Cindy
Thompson, made a special effort to befriend me, but it turned out that
what she really wanted was to recruit me for the junior Ku Klux Klan.
Neither putting on makeup nor wearing a sheet had much appeal for me,
so I played football with the boys, who would waive their guys-only rule