Growing up a girl is like only ever watching the parts of Jeopardy when the contestants answer. What is the nervous system, Alex? Who is the president of the United States? What is a diaphragm?
We are told all of the wrong things as girls. All of the things.
Lavender Delaware doesn’t grow up any different and as she gets older, she can’t help thinking that that’s incredibly unfair. She starts to keep a list of her own when she realizes the one her gym teachers and Sunday school teachers and her best friend from the first day of second grade, Olive Hummel and - worst of all - her mother had equipped her with was about as much use to her as a sink full of spaghetti, if you’ll pardon the expression. Lavender’s list was menacing red Sharpie and block-letter numbers across the notebook lines of her brain. Lavender’s list did not mess around.
Lavender’s favorite place in the whole wide world is McCrory’s Feed & Farm on route 176 and 13, 2 jogs down the road from her church. From the outside it looks like Lincoln Logs, except blowed up cartoon-big and at the corner, where Maureen Delaware has to turn the minivan into the parking lot, is a cowboy boot bigger than a moose or a house or a tree. On the inside, McCrory’s hums yellow in this big, jolly kind of way that comforts little Lavender; the fluorescent lights making her blonde hair glow worm-white. It smells of cedar chips and stale Twizzlers and leather and certainly better than any stupid baby ever would.
The floors are cold and concrete and the aisles are corralled in by yellow paint on the ground. There is an aisle that is just sacks of horse feed and shiny bridle tack, and one that is just penny candy in pastel pinks and oranges. There are bird feeders and stacks of tires and the smell of motor oil on almost everything. But Lavender’s very favorite thing, a place she will return to in her head long after these Sunday afternoon excursions at 5 and 6, is the very middle of the men’s overall rack, just in front of the dressing rooms and the leaky water fountain towards the back.
She will slip away from Maureen, cleverly keeping her eyes on her feet on the yellow paint on the ground on the look out for hot lava (it could appear at any moment!) and then she will have to hop across an aisle and out of sight to keep her toes from touching a stained spot on the concrete and then she finds herself with her hand inside the pocket of a size 40 waist jean overall and then in a flash, little Lavender has disappeared.
At the end of her life, approximately 25 years later (give or take a few lost months), Lavender will spend one afternoon tallying up the most important and cherished places she had ever visited up until right then (it is a list in her journal, from the time she thought things like that might mean much) and McCrory’s Feed & Farm was somewhere at the very top of the list, between the old coyote den back behind the border’s barn in Greensod, and the end of her driveway right around high school, late at night when the sky was full of stars and the patches of tar were soft enough to press into with your fingernails; a hundred thousand letters worth of initials and hearts and eyeballs for Doug Delaware to cluelessly back over the next morning on his way to work.
When it gets hard for Lavender, then harder still, she tries to remember the feeling of her face slicing through curtains of denim fabric and the sudden chill of a zipper against her mouth. Her little, dirty hands whacking at the empty pant legs until she reached out in front of her and finally felt nothing, just 6 inches worth of closed, dark air.
Lavender remembers squatting down right there, in the deep dark center of the McCrory’s Feed & Farm men’s overall clothing rack and looking up at a silver ring of buzzing warehouse light and feeling 100% OK with her place in the world. It is one of the few times Lavender remembers feeling perfectly alright.
When Lavender Delaware turns 29 years old she will realize a simple truth about herself that makes her stomach turn. She will sit in her cold bedroom 6 days into January and spend that whole afternoon trying to convince herself otherwise over 3 bowls of Cocoa Puffs. But it’s no use.
Lavender cannot paint one decent thing unless her finger is on the trigger of something potentially disastrous. Unless she is on the precipice of something shark-filled and treacherous and chilly and black, Lavender is an inert, useless lump. Lavender is the chimp in front of the easel. Lavender is fast asleep.
There is only “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” or there is her melting into the living room couch, that was that. And it had been AGES since she had peeled herself from the grimy insides of her pajamas and three solid years since she had worked up the gall to go do something dumb.
What Lavender realized one year before 30 was that she was a son of a bitch. She needed to break things and kick them and drop them from very high places in order to just get down the things that were otherwise madly swimming in her head. The bright fires she set and the blood she drew were only bait. Her thoughts surfaced, attracted to the heat and the light, and she thrust her fingertips around the paintbrush and smashed the bristles against the canvas, trapping them above the dark water of her brain.
What Lavender Delaware needed was to head blindly into the world again with her arms outstretched.
