THE COLOR OF ANGER AND LOVE
It’s not until after Dad’s death that I let Mom teach me to make her spaghetti sauce. I’m surprised at the simplicity of it: just olive oil, garlic, and canned whole tomatoes. As I crush the crimson orbs, I remember Dad mixing paints on his palette: shades of cinnabar, rose, and vermillion. I recall Mom’s screaming face above the stove. I craved the calm of the attic studio as a child, avoiding the tumult of the kitchen below. I didn’t notice that Dad always fled to his canvas as soon as Mom got home, never once asking if he could help her with anything first. Later, in my own doomed marriage, I’d learn the scald of wants and needs swallowed. As I lid the pot, I think of the moment when Dad’s flawed, beautiful, cadmium-red heart exploded, and how Mom, decades after leaving him, wept for days. Mom was an artist, too, when they met. Once she got pregnant, they agreed he’d stay home with me while she returned to work. Only Dad kept painting, and Mom didn’t, her genius leaching into the mundane as she sewed my clothes, cut my hair, and cooked all her evenings and weekends away. Dad cleaned, tended the garden, prepared the odd meal. But his methods were swift and easy, hers difficult and slow. It wasn’t Mom’s fault, as I thought then, but her nature. Her way of loving, in a language neither Dad nor I could understand. At the end, I sprinkle in basil and say, I can’t believe it was always this simple, to which Mom replies, It wasn’t—I used to do it the hard way. Like Nonna. I remember Dad’s silence during late-night fights when Mom yelled and banged on the locked attic door until she gave up, and I fell asleep to the sound of her tears. I consider the imbalance of effort—real or perceived—that kills tenderness and makes villains. The way all love eventually scorches bitter if you walk away from it, thinking it’ll just wait for you there, forever simmering.
Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer and artist originally from Western Montana. In another life, she earned her Master’s degree in Modern Japanese Literature from the Ohio State University in 2006. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Five South, J Journal, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, HAD, Stanchion, Literary Mama, Bending Genres, Drunk Monkeys, Door Is a Jar, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 