Shades of Green
When Katherine Marie was born in July of 1993 in a small Virginia hospital, her parents knew that she'd be different from her siblings. Her father, James Alan, and her mother, Kathleen Suzanne, were the typical southern couple. They held barbecues with family and had a quaint pink-themed Baby Shower a month before Katherine was due. Kathleen went into labor and was stuck for days in an olive hospital room with her husband lying by her side in a roll-away cot. Katherine entered the world and had her fifteen minutes of fame with everyone cooing at her, letting her gently grasp their outstretched fingers. But when Jacqueline Suzanne saw her new baby sister and decided to show the baby a dance she'd made up all by herself, Katherine lost everyone's attention but her father's, who held her tightly to his chest. Katherine listened intently to the strong beat while her dad looked fondly down at her. Meanwhile, her mother, Kathleen, asked for a glass of juice, and an encore performance of Jacqueline's dance.Katherine's new brother, Daniel Alexander, seemed to show much more interest in her than her sister had. When everyone else walked to the cafeteria for lunch, Daniel stayed with his father and his little sister and played with her ears. He poked her nose and whispered, "Hi baby, I'm Daniel. Not Dan, baby. Daniel. Can you say Daniel?" He blinked his eyes three times and stuck out his tongue when the baby didn't reply. He was only four years old then, and thought of himself as the baby's guardian. He ran his thumb along her chin and smiled, "It's okay. I'll teach you when you're older." Katherine just stared absentmindedly up at his brown eyes. It would take three months for Katherine's crystal clear blue eyes, which matched her mothers, to turn green. Her father, brother, sister, and grandparents all had silky brown eyes. They all had chestnut hair to match their eyes, while Katherine had curly blond locks. Years after, her part as the family's black sheep would become even more apparent.
When Katherine began to talk, her siblings would get her to say anything ranging from their names to their favorite condiments. In a home movie Katherine was seen sitting at a table covered in hazelnut chocolate spread while her sister said, "Nutella. Come on, Katie, say it. Ready? New-tell-uh. Okay? Nutella." When Katherine still couldn't pronounce it correctly, Jacqueline got bored and walked away, leaving Katherine confused and lonely. Her sister would desert her much more later in life, but not just because she couldn't pronounce something.
At the age of seven, Katherine befriended a blonde girl named Erin Elizabeth who lived down the street. Erin asked her if she'd attend church with her family that coming Sunday.
"Church? What is that?" Katherine asked as she applied her mother's emerald eye shadow to one lid.
"You don't go to Church?" Erin turned away from the cobalt blue vanity mirror and stared at her thin friend. Katherine was all skin and bones beneath her floral hand-me-down dress.
"No, what is it?" She asked again, picking up a tissue to wipe a rouge smudge off her cheek.
"It's where we go to listen to a man talk about God. Don't you believe in God?"
"Who?"
"God. The man in the sky who answers prayers and stuff. He sees everything." Erin said matter-of-factly.
"Like Santa Claus? Mommy said that Santa Claus sees everything, that's how he knows kids are bad," Katherine placed a fallen strap back on her shoulder and puckered her lips in the mirror. She brushed her blond hair out of her face with her fingers and secured it with a green plastic clip.
"No, well, kind of. But God is much more important than Santa Claus."
"I don't believe you. How can there be a man in the sky? Wouldn't he fall?" she asked, giggling. Erin wasn't amused and walked away saying,
"You're going to hell."
Thinking nothing of it, Katherine continued to make faces in the vanity, before standing up and walking to the living room to find her mother feeding wood into the fireplace. "Mommy, do you believe in God?" In response to her mother's quizzical look, Katherine said, "because I don't, and Erin said I'm going to hell for it."
***
Within the next year Katherine was admitted into the hospital she'd be born in at various times for Henoch-Schonlein Purpura, a complex disease that had her jabbed with intravenous needles daily. She was fed medicines that she couldn't swallow in pill-form as her already fragile body weakened. The delicate girl was confined to her own olive room split in half by a dark blue curtain. She could not move for days, and the parts of her body that made contact with the bed became bruised. Her joints swelled and she moaned as she ached. She met the girl on the other side of the room, a girl one year her elder named Jade who was suffering from leukemia, and they would talk from their opposite sides until they fell asleep. Katherine's father slept in a roll-away cot not dissimilar from the one he laid on the day of her birth. Within one week Katherine had met all the nurses in the ward, who loved her tender voice and left stuffed toys on her bed while she slept. Each of her days in the hospital she averaged only six hours awake, and all the other time her father spent beside her reading magazines and watching her thin chartreuse hospital gown rise and fall with her breaths.
She was prescribed steroids for months after she was discharged, and gained weight quickly. Her cheeks were rosier, but her voice became hushed. The visible bruises faded, but her heart and mind would always be impacted from those days in solitude with no one but her father and the little girl across the room, who died a week after Katherine left the hospital. The little girl was the only person in Katherine's life to pass away until the death of her favorite grandfather seven years later.
***
When Katherine reached the age of eleven, she became more outgoing and started spending more time with friends. This new personality was short-lived because soon afterwards her parents broke the news that after almost twenty years of passionate marriage, they had decided to split. Her father would be moving to an apartment half an hour away, while all three kids stayed with their mother in their light blue house. Katherine would spend days in her room crying, missing her father. She got to see him one night per week, but her heart was never satisfied with this small bit of paternal visitation.
At the age of fourteen Katherine found a best friend in another blond with blue eyes, named Samantha Elizabeth. They grew close while Katherine and Erin grew apart. They shared the same thoughts, ideas, aches, pains, height and texture of hair. They would spend hours turning each other's frizzy curls into silky straight locks with a black flat iron. Both girls dyed their hair, but different colors. Katherine put streaks of Electric Green semi-permanent dye in her hair, while Samantha made hers a bright shade of blue. Samantha was the first person Katherine ever confided her dark emotions in without holding back. They both ended up attending therapy with the same therapist who always dressed in what Katherine's dad called 'black vampire capes'. Katherine quit therapy after a few short months, however, because she couldn't bear to tell her secrets to this unfamiliar woman. Samantha quit not long after Katherine did, but for a different reason: She was moving to Georgia in a few months.
With Samantha gone, Katherine had no one to vent to. She spent hours in her sapphire room writing poetry about rejection from her family, society, and even from the Devil himself. She tried to believe in God, and asked for his help. But when no response came, she began harming herself with razor blades she stole from the kitchen junk drawer. She neither talked about nor revealed her wounds to anyone but Samantha, and even that was only words in a letter. They lost contact within a few months, and Katherine searched for another confidant, and finally found one in her father.
She moved in with him not long after her fifteenth birthday. He helped her paint her new bedroom with 'Lawn Green' paint, and bought her a sheet and comforter set to match. He allowed her to decorate the room with whatever she liked so she taped up hundreds of photographs she'd taken the previous year. Her favorite was one of her father hugging a tree like it was the love of his life.
Katherine became deeply fond of spending time in her room not only when she was depressed, but when she sought comfort. Her father let her cry in his arms when his father, her grandfather, passed away. Her widowed grandmother wore an incredible harlequin green dress with a floral embroidered hem to the memorial service while everyone else was wearing their elegant black clothes. As she sat in the first pew with her all family, Katherine's father stood in front of the large crowd of mourners in the First Presbyterian Church and held his breath before reading aloud a poem Katherine had written. The stanza had been found by Katherine's grandmother scrawled on a piece of scrap paper in her basement. It was printed in the yellow memorial service program.
"Frail bones and a tiny voice
(He's on his way to a man on a golden stool).
The pain will end thanks to a delicate choice
(He's on his way to a place where no one rules)."
His voice cracked on the last line, and he stepped down to join the others on the pew. Sobs and sniffs could be heard coming from all over the large room, and Katherine sat patiently with wet eyes until they were dismissed to the reception. Each of the guests stood in line to introduce themselves to Katherine, her siblings, father, mother, and widowed grandmother. Most of them told Katherine how beautiful and touching her poem was, and they hoped she'd pursue a career as a writer. She repeatedly looked down at her green and black pinstriped shoes modestly, and whispered her thanks.
Poetry by Katherinee x
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Written on 2009-02-23 at 01:50
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