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Painting The Bedroom To Keep Yourself Original
By
Nick
Ostdick, Sept 9, 2006
1
You have to understand one thing about Grace Donnellson: she’s a modern
girl. She gets up at seven every morning and puts on her two piece suit,
the pinstripes on the pants and jacket perfectly aligned with each other,
running down to her black bargain bin pumps. She grabs her brown leather
brief case, the one all her colleagues have, that she bought because it
made her look professional but deep down it was because she loved the way
it smelled, picking up a protein drink on her way out the door, really
wishing she called in sick to go to the beach.
2
The elevator takes her down to the lobby from her thirty-seventh floor
apartment; her boss lives on the thirty-eighth and she thought it would be
a good career move to live in the same building—hoping the proximity would
result in some kind of special bond between the two of them, leading into
a move up the corporate ladder—even though she is terrified of heights;
Grace holds her breath and closes her eyes as the elevator slowly comes to
ground level, feeling that if she does in fact die up there she doesn’t
want to see it.
3
She reads girly magazines like Cosmo and Jane on the train
ride to work, not business ones like she knows she should. She takes the
quizzes in the back about finding true love, scared to death that this one
will say she is a natural lover and will find her heart’s match in an
unexpected place, fearing she might lose her independence and have to
share her life with someone else, but utterly tickled at the notion of
someone loving her in spite of all that. Her head swivels as she looks
around the bus, looking to see if any one is staring at her and if the
quiz is right.
4
She watches her weight, at the coffee machine pouring just a drop of cream
into her Styrofoam cup, thinking that if she adds more people will think
she is fat. At lunch she doesn’t eat—embarrassed to eat in public, which
incidentally she is also phobic about—instead using her hour to go to
dress shops on the West Side to try on gowns she knows she can’t afford
and won’t look good in anyway.
“I might find one,” she tells herself, trying to ground her hopes about
finding something that will make her feel good. The sales people follow
her around the store as she walks from mirror to mirror, looking at
herself in each one hoping she finds one angle she likes.
“I like that one,” one of the salesmen says, as Grace glides around like
she is on skates. “It looks very flattering on you.” She looks at him and
smiles, shaking her head in disbelief, knowing that he works on
commission, and there is no way his comment could be sincere. After
that, she goes and tries some bras and underwear. Pink ones, colorful
ones, not white or gray the ones like she has on all the time. She sits
something akin to seduction in the dressing room, her blonde and frizzy
hair hanging in her face and her eyes focused on her reflection, hoping to
trick herself into thinking she is sexy. And she is, sort of, but she
would never want to hear it. When no one is looking, and she is sure of
that, the pink underwear will disappear into her purse as she walks out
with them, contradicting herself, hoping she doesn’t get caught but
letting the pink underwear hang out of her handbag just enough to be seen.
5
And after work she sits in her apartment, the orange-Dreamsicle sun
slumping down in between the buildings from her skyline view, a plate of
lukewarm grilled chicken sitting on her lap and bowl of pudding next to
her. We all can feel her, right then, look around at her penthouse and
wonder how she got here, so far off from everything she hoped to be—so
independent and self-sufficient that she is honestly lonely. Most of all,
above anything else, Grace Donnellson is bored, horribly uninterested in
her life, each day seeming like a series of unconnected, random events,
that happen to fall together in the same square on the calendar. And all
she can do to keep from crying herself to sleep is to bury herself in that
same monotony, thinking about those annual reports she has to hand in and
what color to paint her bedroom.
Nick Ostdick is a fiction writer
from the Chicago area. His short novel Sunbeams and Cigarettes
was released in the fall of 2005. Ostdick's short fiction has appeared in
Word Riot, decomP, 63 Channels, Farmhouse Magazine, and Independent.
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