Clear is the coolest color
How I’ve always wanted to be let in
A quick note before our story—late summer I put out a small Disco Diaries book, containing some of my favorite older and newer essays from the series. They are quite lovely and I’m proud of them. If you’d like to support my work and enrich your bookshelf by purchasing one, please reply directly to this email. Thank you!
Clear is the coolest color
She wore overalls over a white baby tee, and to me that was high fashion. The eldest of three, with a name that evoked her favorite color: Crystal.
All of her siblings had names that felt strange in my mouth. Crystal. Maria. Joel. They were round as marbles, so unlike the familiar syllables of my family. I watched them move through the halls of our church, the younger one hiding in the bundle of coats hanging on a wall-mounted coat rack, Crystal standing beside her parents who were in conversation with another adult.
Too young to be alone, I had a rotating roster of babysitters stacked with girls in early high school, each recruited from the church’s congregation. All regular or occasional members of TNT—Tuesday Night Teens—where kids like Crystal donned their overalls and threw dodge balls at gymnasium walls in between check-ins with Pastor Todd.
The girls felt elusive to me, the majority of their lives unfolding somewhere else way out of my orbit. I had no inkling of their school, no concept of their neighborhood. Sometimes I’d get dropped off at their house without understanding where it was or how far I was from where we lived. Just a different life, completely impenetrable.
Such was the case with Crystal and their big house in the country. We spent our time in the front yard. She sat on a tire swing, her long overalls dragging at her heels, and let me ask her questions.
“What’s your favorite color?”
She thought a minute. “Clear,” she said, not sarcastically. This was the coolest answer possible.
Back home that evening, having left Crystal and her large front yard behind without knowing whether or not I’d see her or or the tire swing again, I opened my Rolykit filled with pony beads for lizard making and counted out the clear ones. I put them in a small dish by my bed for further contemplation.
Crystal was fleeting, and after her came Liz. Liz was nice, but disengaged, not invested in my questions and boring as a result. She took the kitchen phone to the top of my parent’s bed, legs tucked to the side and a free hand patting her long brown hair. I walked barefoot back and forth across the kitchen linoleum pretending to need things from the refrigerator, trying to get her attention through the adjacent doorway or listen to her words under the hum of the window AC. The bed looked unfamiliar with her on it, turned it into a set from a sitcom I’d never seen.
Hard to be taken seriously by a 15-year-old when you’re 10. What little they knew about the life I already lived, the feelings I’d already had, the ambitions I’d already started to form. God, how I’ve always wanted to be let in.
My sister walked around the house in her black platform sandals and black capris pants, sluggish and bored. I watched her sandals go snap-snap-snap with her steps and prayed for the day she’d outgrow them and leave them to me. I wondered about the magazine guys taped up on her walls, contemplated where I might get a snake bracelet like hers, spent my birthday money on clearance beaded curtains from Claire’s, glow-in-the-dark dolphins that hung in declaration: I, too, am a woman of the 90s.
It took time. I went to her bedroom, knocked on her closed door, waited. She opened it and said nothing. Opened it and told me to leave. Opened it and said, “I asked for the news, not the weather.”
I remained calm, humble, procuring signs of maturity as they became available. Lip glosses, and small purses to carry them.
One day out of the blue my sister came to me. She stood in my doorway, framed by the strings of dolphins, asking what I was up to. I kept the giddiness at bay, cautious not to startle her with sudden movements as though were were a rabbit I was watching in a field. She was holding her diary, black with a red dragon on the front cover. She wanted to read it to me.
We climbed to the top bunk in my bedroom, a double-decker kingdom that had been all mine since she got her own room years ago. With our heads just inches below the white sealing we sat cross-legged, knee to knee, and she read. All about a boy, all about kissing, all about girls in her class and worrying what they thought, about liking some people and hoping they liked you too.
Aside from the Frenching, it was relatable. Her words painted a vignette of a microcosm parallel to mine—misfitting, calculating, trying very hard to know exactly how to be seen the way you mean to. Fascinated and comforted, I sat on the floral sheets and gave her all of the attention she had never wanted before, forgiving her for the times she shut me out. I was her equal when she needed it. I was her confidant, and I guarded her vulnerabilities with pride.
That night, I slept on the top bunk, staring at the ceiling and wondering how things would change. I was ready for the next part of life to begin, the era where I belonged even if it was to those that didn’t.