Waxing Nostalgic
Every Monday morning, I passed out boxes of crayons to my first-graders, instructing them to choose a color that reflected their mood and create a picture. They’d spend the next twenty minutes tumbling over each other to grab theirs, then drawing with deep concentration, as I waited for my second cup of coffee to kick in.
In the evenings, I drew with my son, Timmy. He was four—curious, bright, and always creating. Crayons were like holding a piece of childhood, warm and waxy in my hand. I kept one in my shirt pocket, and whenever I needed to go back in time, I’d hold it under my nose and breathe it in. Every color had the same sharp potency; try it, and you’ll see.
I gave Timmy some printed-out photos from our family trips and had him color all around the borders—we’d planned to frame and hang them. One was from the Keys, where the three of us were swimming with dolphins, squinting grins into the sun. Timmy drew a yellow-orange sun, amorphous whales in azure and aquamarine, and magenta stars that matched my wife Jane’s lipstick—her favorite shade.
In another image, we’d just set up camp in Yellowstone, the three of us posing by our tent. Timmy used burnt sienna to draw dirt, and carbon black to draw a tick. The day we returned, Jane found one on her upper thigh while showering and ran around the house shrieking, “It’s alive, goddammit, it’s alive!” I dug it out with the pointy end of my hair comb—only a baby, really—and spent the next fifteen minutes checking every inch of her body at her insistence, making lewd jokes.
Months later, in Dr. Cohen’s waiting room, I sat with Timmy and explained, with premeditated calm, “This is the pancreas. This is the gallbladder.” I pulled a crayon from my shirt pocket, and we circled each tumor on her CT scan in bright red. I left him with the receptionist to see my wife, and when I came back out, Timmy had traced larger circles around the lumps until they resembled the eyes of angry, swirling hurricanes on a map.
Over the next month, I threw myself into impassioned, half-baked plans to make things better. Crayons, when microwaved, slumped like pillows and became malleable; I used them to smear motivational platitudes on Jane’s bathroom mirror in yellows, pinks, and greens. I told Timmy her will was scratch paper, and handed him crayons—he filled the margins with smiley faces and spirals. He boxed each section of the funeral arrangements in sky blue. I hid the darker colors in corners around the house, as if they were ticks waiting to burrow into our skin.
In those last two weeks, I began driving home early to make dinner. Jane thanked me for each meal, always finding something kind to say about my clumsy creations: overcooked trout, stringy asparagus, flaccid elbow pasta. I remembered our first date, when the eggplant in her parmesan was nearly raw, but she ate it anyway, refusing to bother the waiter.
I didn’t want Timmy’s last memories of his mother to be like this—barely conscious in our guest bedroom, tubes disappearing into her arms. Hovering at her bedside, I took a crayon from my shirt pocket, breathed in deeply, and looked to my son. He was at the beige wall with a yellow crayon, drawing three small stick figures holding hands. Jane was looking at it, and something like a smile caught the edge of her mouth.
I wasted no time. Bringing Timmy’s box into the guest bedroom, I told him we’d have another one of our evening drawing sessions—this time, with a much larger canvas. He smiled eagerly at me—his dream come true—and I forced one in response. Over the course of the evening, blues and purples unfurled into grand ocean waves; greens and neutrals rose into sweeping palm trees; pinks and yellows bloomed into azaleas and sunflowers. Every cheerful thing in the world we could think up spilled from our hands and into the room, as Jane drifted in and out of consciousness behind us. I recalled the time we caught Timmy coloring on our bedroom walls—two years old, balancing on chubby legs and giggling like he knew it was forbidden. First-time parents, we’d thought that if we tried hard enough, we could get everything right.
That last morning, her breaths were shallow and she could barely speak. Her hair kept sliding over her eyes no matter how many times I brushed it back. It occurred to me that a swipe of her favorite lipstick might make her feel more like herself—so I scoured the house, flinging open drawers and knocking over bottles—but it was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I melted the peony, cherry, and magenta crayons, mixing them until they were the right hue, and painted the mixture over her cracked lips. I wiped the edges with the corner of the bedsheet, then sat beside her—her eyes closed, her breaths shallow—and strained to recall the radiant woman she’d been just months ago.
On Sunday, she was dead. On Monday, I was back in my classroom, passing out boxes of crayons. At home, I sat in bed with addition and subtraction worksheets fanned out around me, and stared into Timmy’s crayon box. To fill the empty space where the bright colors had been—before we used them all up—I dropped back in the colors I’d been avoiding.
Slowly, I began grading. I ground dull red wax over incorrect answers, pressing hard enough to rip the page. Then I started drawing—spirals, whirlpools, slow explosions of burgundy, charcoal, navy—until they bled into each other and formed an ugly brown. Timmy came in, held up one of the pages, and asked, “Daddy, why are there only sad colors?”
After tucking him into bed that evening, I unwrapped the charcoal crayon in the dark like it was a chocolate bar. The first bite broke off in my mouth with a snap, and coated my tongue with a toxic, rubbery taste. There was a perverse joy in the punishment of it—it felt obscene to enjoy anything with Jane dead. I chewed faster, the thick paste sloshing around my mouth. In the bathroom, I bared my teeth at myself in the mirror like some kind of vampire. My skin was clammy, my teeth stained black—I looked and felt revolting.
Swallowing roughly, I reached in my pocket for another. This crayon was red, but I soon noted that the experience was no different. Each color had the same sharp potency, and tasted the same; try it, and you’ll see.
I rushed to the teachers’ lounge between lessons to regurgitate wax-scented bile in the sink, plagued by nausea and diarrhea. Somehow, this felt deserved. I waited for a coworker to place a hand on my shoulder—for someone to notice—but all I got were the same polite platitudes, foil-covered casseroles, and support group brochures.
The second day of the second week, Timmy’s teacher called from school to let me know that I had packed him only two beige crayons for lunch, and recommended a book called Mourning to Morning. Later, Timmy came home to find me pacing in the guest bedroom. He held up a drawing he’d made at school—more yellow stick figures—and I shrieked at him until he backed away, trembling, his eyes wide.
I stayed in the bedroom for a while, glancing around at the cheerful flowers and trees and animals, chastising myself for all the ways I was already failing my son. Taking a crayon from my breast pocket—this one was indigo—I breathed in deeply, trying to conjure any nostalgia that might lift me away from here. But by now, the scent of wax was nothing novel to me, and my eyes fell instead on the mural we had created, an entire room of desperate joy and forced color.
I started at the bottom, grinding the indigo crayon into the wall, over illustrations of hearts, stars, flowers. Once it was worn down to the nub, I grabbed an armful from Timmy’s box and kept going. The wax turned to pulp under my fingertips, colors bleeding together—indigos, navies, and crimsons—rising up the walls in a slow, suffocating tide. My fingers cramped, my hands ached, and sweat trickled a path down my arms. When the colors reached neck-height, I got the ladder. I climbed it, wobbling, and reached up to the ceiling.
When it was all done, the room was so dark I could hardly see my own hands, but I could feel them shaking. I slumped onto Jane’s deathbed and splayed them, throbbing, out across the comforter. I pressed my fingertips to my forehead—slowly—and smelled nothing but wax.
