The Color Master: Stories Read Free Page A

since he’d just gotten home and just this morning in the shower and he needed some food and couldn’t they watch TV tonight?
    She laughed with big red smudge-free lips and fed him and let him watch four sitcoms in a row, but before he fell asleep she was on him again and said he didn’t have to do anything at all but just be still and sleepy and she would complete all the movement.
    At the end of the week, on Sunday afternoon, she presented him with a tidy bill, typewritten, accounting for each time, and labeling where/when it had happened, with a dottedline and a $25 at the end. The total for that first week was $250. A small amount compared with the easy near-thousand of the previous week, but a clear exchange nonetheless. Daniel paid it into her palm, in cash, counting backwards.
    “Sunday’s my day off,” he said when she started to undo her bra. “Go do something else, honey, please.” He plopped in front of the TV with a bowl of rice cereal to watch some football, and Janet gathered herself into the pale-blue bathtub and attended to her body quietly in there, moaning softly under the whir of the bathroom fan; afterward, she paid herself fifty dollars by transferring funds from her savings to her checking account. That made three hundred dollars for the week.
    November 8 shot around the corner in a blink; it was probably the quickest two weeks of her life. And it was not enough. That much was clear instantly. She had started, by now, to see the entire world in terms of currencies. She considered charging her few friends for their lunches based on who demanded more time and attention during the lunch itself, charging strangers a quarter in the supermarket aisle when they did not move their cart in time. Charging for each meal she cooked, including tip. One afternoon, when her father sailed off into one of his long monologues on the phone, she actually tape-recorded their conversation and then took four hours and typed it out as a script, with his endless speech on the right side of the page and her responses on the left: yes, uh-huh, of course. It was amazing, to see the contrast. How long were those pageful reports. How little she spoke. How wealthy she would be if she just charged him a dollar a word.
    I am twenty-four-hour resentment, said Janet, in her bustier, to the glinting mirror. I am every-cell resentment.I am one hell of a big resentment, she said. The mirror and wall did not answer. They knew very well what she was like by now. But when had it shifted? In high school, she’d walked tall in her own deprivation and had volunteered at the homeless shelter in her free time. She bought her dad charming birthday gifts, and the homeless shelter made her a mobile saying she was wonderful, with each paper letter brightly colored, hanging from the stick. The “N” and “R” fell off in a week, so over her bed, for years, the stick slowly turned, announcing “WODEFUL.” I am grateful, she’d said every day in high school, grateful for the food on my plate and the roof over my head. Grateful for my dad. Grateful I live in a country where we have options. For our beautiful environment, she said on Saturdays, sorting through the sticky plastic bottles at the recycling center.
    Now, years later, even washing a single dish irritated her. I do everything around here, she grumbled to herself while moving the sponge over the circle. Even though she knew it wasn’t true. She hadn’t done the dishes in weeks. Daniel changed all the lightbulbs and paid the bills. He rubbed her feet and listened to her complaints. The truth was, she just didn’t want to do anything at all. She did not want to have a job or have children or clean the bathroom or say hello. She only did a dish with happiness just after Daniel had done a dish. She only bought Daniel a present after he’d just bought a present for her, and even then she made sure her present wasn’t quite as good as his.
    It disgusted her as she did it, but it was