A nightmare, a memory. A thing can be both.
I stare up at the ceiling. White, white, white. The emptiness of it aches.
By the time the sun is winking midmorning, I’m on a ladder in the center of the room.
“What the hell is this?” My mom stands in the doorway with her arms crossed in a parental way that does not suit her.
“I found a fantastic inspiration image in a magazine. An accent wall, but the ceiling. Don’t worry. I called Richard.”
“You what? He left that number for emergencies.”
I know, I know. But this was a Code Blue, bring-the-paddles emergency. I told him I couldn’t sleep in this goddamn room. Too much blank space, like the walls are white noise, and it’s screaming at my eyes. I could hear snippets of Mandarin in the background—serious voices, probably talking about stocks or bonds or, as I like to call them, soul-sucking tokens of a life lived for the wrong reasons. But Rich hurriedly said those five magic words, even if his tone was, frankly, a little rude: “Do whatever you want, Vivi.”
So I did. When Thomas Hardware opened, I was right there, waiting on the bus bench with a to-go cup of coffee from Betty’s. I chose rollers, painter’s tape, a big container of Starry Night blue and a smaller one of Sterling. Then I found a ladder in Richard’s garage and started in the center of the ceiling, rolling out long strokes, and now it looks like a navy-blue hole in an infinitely white universe—totally worth the crick in my neck, the numbness in my arm, and the feeling that my spine is made of creaky metal instead of flexible muscle and bone.
“Vivian,” she says, prodding. “Are you kidding me?”
“I had an itch. Remember last winter, when you decided the bathroom needed sophisticated wallpaper immediately? Like that. Besides, Richard was glad for the free design advice and labor.” I mean, he probably was. He should be!
My mom is narrowing her eyes at me. “Are you not sleeping well?”
“I’m sleeping fine. Are you?” The passive aggression beneath my question is, Don’t symptomize my sleeplessness as part of a greater problem, because you have artist’s insomnia, too, and when you don’t, it’s usually because of an all-natural sedative called vino.
“Not wonderfully, no.” She sighs, resigning herself to my whims, as everyone eventually does. “Well, I’m walking to the farmers’ market. Just wanted to make sure you were up for work.”
“I’m leaving in a few minutes.”
When she’s gone, I climb down from the ladder and scrub off a few flecks of navy paint from the hardwood floors. I strewed newspapers all over the floor of the bedroom, but I didn’t have time to line them up perfectly—too eager to begin my ceiling’s “darkification.” I unbutton the extra-large men’s oxford I use as a painting smock to reveal a divine romper. Basically, it’s like my vintage-style bathing suit—halter-necked and tight, only the shorts are a little longer and it’s made of floral-patterned cotton. I slide my feet into sassy gold flats because I’m already an alchemist today, turning a blank-slate ceiling into a good night’s sleep, aka gold. Then I throw on a fedora and a cardigan with elbow patches, giving myself a little chuckle as I pass by the mirror. You simply have to laugh at yourself when you look like a grandpa on the top layer and a 1940s woman vacationing on the French Riviera underneath. That is to say, fabulous.
I make my usual cliff-side stop. Today, I stand right on the edge, so close that one step forward would be like the final move in walking the plank. I rest a pill on the pad of my thumb and then flick it with my middle finger. Thank you for your service, little pill, but you are no longer needed! With that, I run toward town, skipping through the moss and grass, howling a victory cry—“AYE-YI-YI!” The ocean echoes my sounds against its waters, I know it does, because even the ocean recognizes that I am a wild creature, a spirit child of a vast and star-drunk world. HURRAH!
They call these pills lithium, and I like the way the word feels against my mouth—soft, unassuming, even soothing. Lith-ee-um. When the doctor first prescribed lithium, I wondered how the drug companies named it, like if there’s a committee that tried to decide on pretty, calming words. I wondered how they picked “lith” like Lithuania, lithograph, monolith. It means “stone” in Greek; I looked it up. And lithium was the weighty stone that pulled me back down when a wild, thrashing windstorm tore me away. But lithium isn’t the brand name; it’s a chemical element abbreviated Li on the periodic table, but I think it should be Line because it collected my highs and lows into a nice, flat line.