Miss Julia to the Rescue (28 page)

As the streetlights began to glow, I gathered myself to go inside, then decided that I couldn’t leave the subject without adding a moral.

If I should ever be so full of myself as to declare a teachable moment, this would have been the perfect time for it. But I don’t see myself as a puffed-up teacher strewing pearls of wisdom before the less astute. Lloyd, however, was still young and needed guidance, so I preferred to call these times
learnable
moments, especially since nine times out of ten I learned something as well. Someone, long ago, said that he didn’t know what he thought until he wrote it. That’s the way I am, except I’m never sure what I think until I say it.

Now, I certainly don’t mind saying what I
think
I think, even though I might change my mind as I’m saying it. I could never, however, set myself above anyone in order to pronounce from on high something they needed to be taught.

Well, actually, I guess I have done a little of that in the past, but not knowingly and not without being sure I knew what I was talking about.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t let this teachable or learnable opportunity pass without subtly making my views known, so I did.

“I hope, Lloyd, that you will steer clear of snakes wherever they are, and I hope you will never come home with holes punched in your ears or nose or tongue. And I hope and pray that you’ll never go to one of those parlors where they jab ink under your skin that will be with you for the rest of your life.”

Lloyd stood and stretched himself, yawning as he did so. “No’m, I’m not about to get mixed up with snakes. And you don’t have to worry about me sticking pins and such in my face, either.” Then with a glint in his eyes and a sideways glance at me, he said, “But what about a girl with a belly button ring? Can I come home with one of them?”

“Oh, you,” I said, standing and opening the screen door. “Let’s go in and see what those tacky
Housewives
are up to.”

“Okay, but I think a soccer match is on. Maybe in Portugal or somewhere.”

After a restful night, morning came but Adam didn’t. When breakfast was over and Lloyd had left to run errands for his mother, I walked upstairs to the sunroom and surveyed the chaos, determined to hold myself in check. There was no use whining and stomping around because work wasn’t progressing on my timetable. The situation was what it was, and I had to put up with it.

I took one look around the sawdust-covered room and walked out. It was a mess, not even half done and so full of building material that I could barely get in the door. So instead of wasting my time fretting over Adam’s disloyalty, I put my mind on the full day ahead of me, meeting with my new decorator and making selections to transform Hazel Marie’s dream room into an appropriate setting for Sam and me.

As I surveyed her room, I was somewhat mollified. It wasn’t so bad—the pink wallpaper had been stripped off, the walls had been primed and the carpet was gone. It was ready for a new decorative scheme, except, I suddenly realized, for her bathroom.

What had I been thinking? There could be no new decorative scheme with a pink soaking tub, pink basin with gold trim and a pink commode that Hazel Marie had had to special order because pink had gone out of style a few decades ago. Thank goodness her decorator had drawn the line and talked her into using ivory-colored travertine tiles on the floor. The tiles on the shower and tub surrounds were another matter—less than pink but not quite ivory.

“Lillian,” I said as I went back to the kitchen, “I don’t know where my mind has been. I completely overlooked Hazel Marie’s bathroom—it’s as feminine as her bedroom was, and something will have to be done. There’s no way that Sam will be satisfied much longer with a pink tub and commode.”

She leaned down and slid a skillet into a cabinet. Straightening up, she said, “I ’spect Mr. Sam be satisfied with whatever he get.”

“Well, yes, I guess he would. But I can’t very well decorate the bedroom in blue or green or whatever and leave all that pink in the bathroom.” I sat down at the table. “Maybe I should’ve left everything the way it was, even without any masculine touches. It’s all getting to be too much, especially since I’ve lost my carpenter.”

“No use cryin’ over spilt milk, so why don’t you go on an’ do what you got to do an’ first thing you know, he be up there sawin’ an’ hammerin’ again.” She wiped off the counter with a sponge, then went on. “You s’posed to go see that decoratin’ lady today?”

“Yes, and I better get ready. She’s over in Asheville.”

“Then why don’t you jus’ go on an’ see the plumbin’ people while you at it, an’ see can they order you whatever Miss Hazel Marie got upstairs, only in a different color.”

“White, and that’s a good idea. They can look up their records and order the same model numbers. Then the fixtures will fit perfectly without tearing up the walls or the floor.” I sat back in the chair, relieved. “Shoo, Lillian, you ought to go into the construction business. That’s the most practical and easiest suggestion I’ve heard yet.”

Then, as I visualized a sparkling white bathroom, my relief spurted away. “Oh, my word, I wasn’t thinking of the tile on the shower wall and around the tub. To take that off and replace it will be a major undertaking. There’ll be tile dust all over the house and the way Adam is going—or
not
going—it’ll be Christmas before it’s done.”

“Miss Julia,” Lillian said, somewhat sternly as she came over to the table and put her hands on her hips. “You jus’ thinkin’ up
things to worry about, an’ they’s no need for it. You jus’ pick out something to go with them tiles an’ let ’em stay on the wall.”

“Well, I guess I could. I mean, maybe the decorator could work with them. They have just the barest tinge of pink to them, what I’d call blush, maybe. Maybe we could find a fabric for the bedroom with that color in them.” I sat up in my chair with a renewed interest in decorating. “Brown! Shades of brown from very light to maybe a deep chocolate. That would be masculine enough for anybody, and it’s as far from pink as you can get. Lillian, you ought to be in the decorating business, too. I declare, you come to my rescue every time.”

“No’m, not ev’ry time, but I figure when you can’t climb over something, you have to go ’round it. And while you gettin’ ready, I think they’s some leftover tiles out in the garage. I’ll find you one to take so you can match it up to whatever yard goods you find.”

So that’s what I did, and it all worked out beautifully. I drove home from Asheville some four hours later, having spent most of the time with a lovely young decorator who not only listened to me, but also mainly agreed with me. It was a most refreshing experience after dealing with an architect and a carpenter with minds of their own.

Ms. Allie Parker had immediately understood my concern about blush-colored bathroom tiles in a master bedroom suite for both a master and a mistress, but she wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d been about brown.

“It’s a very
in
color right now,” she’d said, pushing back her long strawberry-blond hair, “but I don’t think it’s going to last long—too dark and depressing. I wouldn’t want to get up in the mornings.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” I said. “But I do so want a room that my husband will like. He’s put up with pink for so long, and a brown room would be the exact opposite.”

“Well, of course we can work with brown, but I don’t think you want to go
too
masculine. You’ll be living in it, too.” She opened a
wallpaper book and began to flip through it. “Let me suggest something else. If we use blush as a neutral, there’s a wide range of colors that will complement it. Green, for instance, although you have to be careful with shades of green and pink—they can get Palm Beachy real quick.”

As she talked, she got up and started sliding hanger after hanger of fabric swatches that hung from racks along the walls of her place of business.

“Here’s a possibility,” she said, laying a swatch before me on the long table where I was sitting. “And here’s another.”

Before long there were so many choices—all with blush somewhere in the plaid, striped or floral designs—that I was about to be overwhelmed. Who knew blush was such a popular color? I’d certainly never considered it and here I was basing the entire decor of a bedroom and bathroom that Sam and I would use every day of our lives on that one color—condemned, one might say, by Hazel Marie’s choice.

But at least it wasn’t pink, so I drove home with my spirits high. Ms. Parker—Allie, as she insisted—helped me decide on a lovely faded floral design on a background of the lightest shade of blush for the curtains and bedspread—a copy, Allie said, of a fabric in one of the great houses of England. And from what it cost per yard, the house might well have belonged to the queen herself.

We decided that the curtains would hang from fairly simple cornices instead of the swagged and fringed valances that Hazel Marie had chosen. Then we selected a striped fabric for the chairs that blended beautifully with the curtain material and balanced the floral with a hint of masculinity. When Allie found a gorgeous linenlike wallpaper with just enough blush in it to keep it from being ivory, I quickly discarded the thought of paint and decided on it.

After going to a showroom and ordering new bathroom fixtures, I was highly pleased with the morning’s decisions, although I’d had to call Allie and ask her opinion about a new shade of white they were offering. Who knew that what they were calling
biscuit would be the
in
thing in fixtures? And when I saw that the color was nowhere near that of the beautiful brown tops of Lillian’s biscuits, which was what had come to mind, I knew it would be perfect. And to top it off, Allie assured me that biscuit fixtures would blend with the tiles much better than pure white and would also pick up the ivory tint of the wallpaper.

Much relieved to have all that behind me, I came to the conclusion that decorating was a mind-boggling process that involved second-guessing one’s choices until it was simply too late to change anything.

Now to get Adam Waites back on the job,
I said to myself as I took the Abbotsville exit and headed home.

“Look at this, Lillian,” I said as I excitedly spread out swatches and samples on the kitchen table. “Just look how everything goes together. I am so pleased. It’ll be a beautiful room.”

“Yes’m,” she said as she surveyed the display and fingered the fabric swatches. “It’ll be pretty all right. But I thought you was fixin’ up a brown room for Mr. Sam.”

“Well, not completely, because I live in it, too. But see, it has some masculine touches. All the background color is neutral and look at these flowers—the stems are brown. That’s masculine enough. And the bathroom fixtures, Lillian—look at this little sample—would you believe they call that biscuit?”

Lillian laughed. “If my biscuits come out that color, I put ’em back in the oven.”

The telephone rang then and when I answered it, Pastor Poppy Peterson said, “It’s called the Church of Body Modification, Miss Julia. I looked it up on the Internet and, apparently, it qualifies as a real church, although who or what they worship I can’t figure out. But they do have ministers and you can apply to be one online. All you have to do is answer about four pages of questions about yourself and send them in.” Poppy paused, then said, “Sure beats three years of seminary if you just want to call yourself a minister.”